Another Conservative Media Casualty: Big League Politics Shutters Media Site, Killed by Government Censorship and Media Suppression

An alternative news outlet which was pro-Trump and fairly covered news relevant to millions of Americans, has closed its website this week and announced it is going to be a Substack-based publication, based in significant part to the government’s ongoing campaign of speech suppression against dissident outlets.

Big League Politics was founded in 2017 by former Breitbart.com staffers, and a year later it was acquired by Mustard Seed Media, which is owned by Riley O’Neal of North Carolina. O’Neal’s background includes the Ron Paul campaigns for President in 2008 and 2012.

The site was run by O’Neal and a long list of editors who would typically transition out after a year.

Other significant outlets such as VDare.com, closed last month after a multi-year legal harassment campaign by New York Attorney General Letitia James. VDare was never charged, but the legal costs in fighting an open-ended investigation bankrupted the immigration reform outlet.

Major left-wing billionaires have funded frivolous civil litigation against Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Alex Jones, OAN, Newsmax, and the Gateway Pundit. Spurious criminal prosecutions of Executives at the Epoch Times also suggests it is part of this pattern, with the clear intention to bankrupt these dissident outlets.

In Big League Politics’ seven years as a national media outlet, it broke several major stories and exposes, including:

• DetroitLeaks: Shane Trejo broke the story, with accompanied audio proving, that Detroit election workers were being trained to lie to Republicans and conceal voter fraud using COVID as a pretense for the 2020 elections – link
• Debunking the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ Ukraine war propaganda: Jordan Epperson broke the news that video footage purporting to be of a heroic Ukrainian fighter pilot was, in fact, re-used video game clips – link
• VA Gov. Ralph Northam “Blackface” Controversy: Patrick Howley reported that Virginia Democrat Governor Ralph Northam had prominently worn blackface in his medical school yearbook alongside a dressed member of the Ku Klux Klan. Northam originally denied the photo was real, and the mainstream media tried to suppress the story revealing the hypocritical casual racism of elected left-wing elites. – link

Conservative media outlets are rarely acknowledged or praised by any mainstream outlets, even when they are the original source for stories, but BLP had several publications acknowledge their role in breaking original news. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged BLP as the original source of the Gov. Ralph Northam controversy in 2019, here.

BLP was recognized for their important DetroitLeaks story when Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel threatened the publication for having published the audio files showing Detroit election workers were being trained to lie. Nessel demanded the story be deleted.

The Gateway Pundit was able to publish an interview with Trejo’s DetroitLeaks whistleblower who recorded the election workers, content that the government has suppressed from media outlets and search engines repeatedly. Most of that content and story has completely disappeared from the web.

The only location where the original audio can be found is on BitChute, here.

After far-left Nessel threatened to prosecute the publication, owner O’Neal removed the offending content including the audio recordings from the site and deleted the pages. The demand from the Michigan Attorney General resulted in the deletion of one of the site’s major news stories.

“The cost of litigating it just wasn’t worth it, so it got deleted,” said a former BLP writer. “You can’t find that story anywhere except one or two random mentions. It’s been nearly-completely memory holed.”

Big League Politics was subject to substantial censorship and suppression. It was shadow banned on Twitter and, its former writers say, could not be found in searches on Twitter except when its exact name was typed out. Even after free speech advocate Elon Musk bought Twitter, the suppression continued unchanged say BLP’s former writers.

The site’s Facebook traffic was anemic and not spread to its fans’ timelines. This matches the experience of many conservative media outlets which have reported rebuilding Facebook audiences only to have the site suddenly change its algorithms and stop any referrals to conservative media.

Big League had a decent following on Gab, but insiders say they lost the login for the free speech social media platform so no one could login and the site’s owner was very difficult to reach.

With no way to promote their content, and no way to get noticed in the attention economy, views were steadily declining. “The site’s traffic looked like it fell off a cliff, enabled mostly by left-wing deplatforming and suppression, but also from the mistakes of ownership,” one former writer said.

By the end, most of its web traffic was coming from email list rentals and sends, one of the last options for sites and political dissidents who have been otherwise deplatformed elsewhere.

“They weren’t netting new viewers and followers, they could just keep hitting their email lists, all the rest were shadow-banned and de-platformed. The future of dissident journalism in America is probably going to look a lot like what Big League Politics is going through right now.

Billionaires are bankrupting conservative media for sport, the government is attacking your existence and demanding your hot and spicy content is suppressed, far-left social media company owners are gloating about their commitment to free speech while your voice is cut off, and every service provider is being harassed to drop you,” said a former BLP insider.

The government’s ongoing illegal mass suppression of conservative media is being currently litigated in the Missouri v. Biden case, but suffered a setback this summer when Justice Amy Coney-Barrett refused to permit an injunction against the government from continuing to suppress conservative speech as the case works its way through the courts.

The legacy of Big League Politics is hard to assess, especially since of the rampant and illegal government censorship and collusion with Big Tech to attack dissident media on social media sites. 

The Big League Politics former writers argue that their content had major impact, however: “I think we were doing really good work, not just from a journalistic standpoint, but our human rights-based dissident journalism helped avert World War III by disproving falsehoods and war propaganda that were being pushed by the mainstream media and world government,” Jordan Epperson, former BLP Author, told the Gateway Pundit.

“I’m proud of the way we used our platform as a means of promoting peace with Russia at a time when every other major talking head was crying out for war,” he added.

Still, other writers were critical of the site and suggested that at least some of the blame includes how the site was managed and run. “It should be telling that no one from the original crew was still there.

This was a place started originally by Breitbart guys, but most bailed in the first year. There wasn’t a lot of continuity,” one former writer said.

You’d sometimes get paid 8 months late. If you got locked out of your account, you could be screwed for months. There wasn’t a big incentive to release scoops. The editors were getting frustrated, and you never knew how long it would take to get a story up on the site,” said one frustrated former writer.

The new iteration of the outlet is on Substack, and the site claims over 2,000 current subscribers. This is a substantial decline from its prior traffic, say insiders. On its worst days, the site was averaging 5,000 viewers they say, and on its best days was reaching half a million views. Now it will have to rebuild its audience one-by-one and hope that another Big Tech platform won’t destroy it for reporting something that company dislikes.

You can view the new Substack for Big League Politics here.

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