Well, it was fun while it lasted.
It seems like the PjMedia Complex — Townhall, Twitchy, and PJM itself are increasingly turning their websites into PPV.
So a link from PJM’s Godfather — Insty — on a big story such as this:
…has the embedded link:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2025/06/17/fbi-hands-congress-documents-with-alarming-allegations-about-the-2020-election-n2658948
When you follow the link, of course it takes you to the Townhall page. However, if like me you hate being bombarded with fucking Facebook links masquerading as ads, or ads that lead you to click-bait sites, ads hawking the books penned by hem hem PJM writers, and (my favorite) pop-up auto-start ads or links) you will have installed an ad-blocker like Adblock or Badger.
So when you get to the Townhall site via that link from Insty, you get a grayed-out screen with this set of options:
Okay, here’s the deal. I can’t afford to be a “VIP” subscriber because quite frankly, my subscription budget is pretty much zero. There’s a plethora of choices for my subscription pennies (note: pennies, not dollars — this is important, as you’ll see later), and PJM VIP is not, shall we say, a premium choice.
Fine, say I, and so I resort to using archive sites like https://archive.is/ to bypass the paywall. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
So, because I want to read all about the Kash Patel / 2020 election thing, I go to DuckDuckGo and type in “kash patel 2020 election”, and get a series of choices. Skipping the left-wing media (NBC, Daily Beast, Newsweek etc.) I find a link to the Washington Examiner, which finally gives me free access to the story I want to read:
FBI Director Kash Patel has turned over a batch of internal documents to Congress detailing allegations that Chinese operatives sought to interfere in the 2020 election by mass-producing fake U.S. driver’s licenses to facilitate fraudulent mail-in voting.
The intelligence, which Patel said on Monday night he had recently declassified, has been sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has led oversight efforts into foreign election interference and pressed the bureau to release details surrounding the alleged scheme.
And even worse:
“These include allegations of plans from the CCP to manufacture fake driver’s licenses and ship them into the United States for the purpose of facilitating fraudulent mail-in ballots — allegations which, while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public,” Patel said.
Let’s be honest, here: this is a really big fucking deal, and if it’s proven to be true, we have two major issues: 1) China was fucking with our election in 2020 — yeah, 81 million Biden votes, kiss my ass, and 2) the FBI knew about it and did sweet fuck-all about it. (And Just The News‘s followup article is even more damning.)
But back to my main point.
Everyone who works has to make a buck to keep the head above the water, individuals as much as organizations, and nothing comes free in this world. I know this, because I am one such person. So PJMedia has every right to require me to pay for their work, i.e. to read their articles.
My problem is that I can’t afford to pay their monthly sub fee because as I said, there are literally hundreds of such subs available. And to be brutally frank, while PJM’s content is quite good, it’s not that good (Stephen Green and only a couple of other writers excepted). Few of the conservative websites are that good, either.
Frankly, if I’m going to be brutally honest: if I can afford only one subscription, I think I may subscribe to the above-mentioned Just The News, because their coverage and editorial stance seems to be what I’m looking for. And the price seems to be about right, too:
OR: 
That’s about $0.12 (twelve cents) per day — about the cost of a newspaper print subscription back in 1960, which sounds about right, for digital content. (I recently got a small tax refund from the IRS, which funded this sub. [irony alert] )
Of course, I may be disappointed — one usually is, in matters of this nature, as I was with an earlier subscription to Epoch Times, quickly canceled — but what the hell, it’s only money and information, right?
So I’ll be linking to a lot of JTN articles in the future. Let me know if they start playing reindeer games with their pages (like PJM outlets do) and I’ll just post longer excerpts.
