Hello everyone Tom Slater here editor of Spiked. We're going to get into this week's episode in the Spike podcast in just one moment but before that I just want to let you all know about our Christmas donation drive. Yes, it's that time of year again where the snow is falling and

the Christmas lights are twinkling and your favorite pro-freedom pro-democracy magazine

is hassling you to donate money. But as we ask our readers and our listeners and our YouTube viewers to dig deep for us this Christmas to keep us fighting the good fight into 2023 you can rest assured that your money is going to great use. It's been a hell of a year, the world's been turned upside down once again,

but Spites continued to make the case for freedom, for more democracy, for common sense and increasingly deranging age and there's a lot that I think we can really be proud of this year.

We've continued to grow our magazine, our stable of writers now spanning great new up and comers as well as some real journalistic

legends we also got into the book publishing game this year we published

Joanna Williams is brilliant how woke one and we've got another book slated for release next year which I'll be very excited to announce to you all soon

and we wouldn't have been able to do any of this without you guys without our generous readers, listeners and viewers who really do fund our work.

Contrary to media rumor, we are not lavishly funded by dark money,

although if you do know anyone, please send them my way. If it wasn't for your support and of course the

incredibly hard-working tiny team that we have here at Spiked who produce the

articles and the podcast and the videos day and day out, if it wasn't for all of that

then Spike wouldn't still be here 20 years on not just surviving but thriving I mean when I first joined

Spights about 10 years ago we were reaching hundreds of thousands of people a month. We're now

reaching millions of people each month and we really couldn't do that without you

and your support. If anything that support is more important to us than ever.

Because while Spikes is going from strength to strength

in so many ways, we're also coming up against obstacles

in this very censorious climate that we find ourselves in that we rail against,

just as an example you know even

as spikes readership and our traffic climbs we find that our ad revenue goes down

because more and more ad agencies are blacklisting dissenting voices like hours because they come under pressure

...