To all of our readers at HotAir,

With Christmas now nearly upon us and our attention turning to more joyful matters, this seems like the best moment to express our appreciation for your kindness, your support, and your enthusiastic engagement with us at HotAir. We have covered a lot of ground this year on all political and cultural fronts, and all of us have appreciated your interest in our ongoing work.

We would like to give our special thanks to our VIP and VIP Gold members. When we first revamped HotAir a couple of years ago and took new directions with our writers, we had a small but faithful band of members who engaged us in our comments sections, which have become truly one of the best open debate forums in comboxes on the Internet.

And as we have rapidly added new members to our VIP programs, the debates and the contributions in those conversations have only grown better and more fascinating! We have a good breadth of opinions among our members, and that diversity both keeps us inspired and acts as a good check on potential bubble-think. Everyone loves it when people tell you you’re right, but our members can stand up for themselves and offer all of us fresh perspectives when needed.

We are incredibly blessed by all of you for that!

Even more so, though, your financial support has helped us remain more and more independent from the whims of Big Tech platforms and activists that target advertisers. We hope our readers support those advertisers with the courage to support independent thought and debate, but that keeps getting more difficult, thanks to misleading “misinformation” activists. Some topics can’t get advertising at all thanks to those intimidation efforts, which means that the market has been perverted to disincentivize dissent and debate in what should be an open market of ideas.

That is what makes our VIP/VIP Gold members such a blessing. We can afford to keep pursuing dissent and debate because of their financial support. It also allows us to bring in fresh content from outside contributors as well as our own staff, both through syndicated columns and exclusive content. And we are about to announce two new contributors to HotAir with these resources – two well-known conservative voices who will add new perspectives and topics!

That is why our VIP and VIP Gold membership program has been crucial to our operations as an independent platform and the ability to debate all of the issues honestly. We also produce some great exclusive content for our members:

• The Amiable Skeptics featuring Adam Baldwin
• Off the Beaten Path with Larry O’Connor
• The Week in Review with Duane Patterson
• Exclusive columns from Tom Jackson, Duane “Generalissimo” Patterson, and more to come!
• Members-only content from our HotAir team – David Strom, Jazz Shaw, and myself
• Live chats and interactive engagement on all platforms with VIP Gold
• Exclusive access to the comments sections on each post, so that you can join the conversation at HotAir!

We talk about this more often now because we see the coming crisis in media more clearly than ever. We hope we can gather as many allies as possible to keep all of these issues in the public square – and indeed to preserve the public square at all.

Join us in the fight. Become a HotAir VIP member today and use promo code THANKYOU to receive a 60% discount on your membership.

Thank you all for your contributions to open discussion, conservative dissent from the progressive orthodoxy of the cultural elite, and true independence of thought. We couldn’t ask for a better Christmas present!

With gratitude,

Ed Morrissey
Managing Editor