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The View from Mudsock Heights<br>The View from Mudsock Heights

Illustration Credit: Dennis E. Powell/Timothy R. Butler/Nano-Banana-Pro

Aug 05, 2026

Unsubscribe, If You Can

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 8:02 PM

It had been a while since I purchased access to Fox Trump Channel. Given how flagrantly the president has been displaying what in any other context would be criminal insanity, I was hankering to learn how far he would go before the sycophantic channel would notice. (Very far, as it turns out, but that’s not what we’re here to consider today.)

I had looked around for the cheapest way to watch the various Fox Trumpian channels — Fox "News," Fox "Business," and its often-decent weather channel and its "Live Now" channel, the latter two normally free, anyway. It turns out that Sling has a package, "Sling Select," that offers the Fox "News" channel and some throw-away channels for $20 per month. (If they offered, say, the Fox channel, plus CNN and NewsNation for that price, it would nearly be worth it.)

For the same price, Fox itself offers the "news" and "business" channels, plus the free weather and live event channels, some sports, and some other Foxian channels for viewers who do not want to be bothered to think. Not ideal, but better than the Sling thing. I decided to buy the Fox package for a month.

It took less than a week to realize that the only respectable programs in my opinion nowadays on Fox are Special Report (and this just barely — it remains highly Trump-tilted), Trey Gowdy’s Sunday night show (just because he’s a likable guy who ought to be running for Lindsey Graham’s seat in the Senate, which he’d win handily; government positions aren’t or oughtn’t be hereditary), and in my estimation the best show on television, the hour-long Wall Street Journal Editorial Report on Saturday afternoons. (But you can get that, in pieces, for free online.)

So, no, Fox Channels are still mostly Trumpaganda. A week into the month, I canceled. As expected, I’ll still have access for the remainder of the month I paid for, but unsubscribing was easy and trouble-free. Bad product, good business practices.

You may be, as I was some time ago, victim of what I think of as "Scamazon Crime." Amazon likes to "reward" Amazon customers with a free month’s subscription. Ah, but then try to unsubscribe! It will take you a long time and will make you tear your hair. the company’s hope being that before you’ve succeeded in being rid of the subscription you’ll say, "What the hell, it isn’t that expensive" and give up.

The Scamazon Crime issue was so blatant that the Federal Trade Commission took Amazon to court and managed to wring $2.5 billion out of them.

I expected to have trouble unsubscribing from Fox, but didn’t. I didn’t, years ago, expect trouble ridding myself of Amazon Prime, but did.

What I really, really didn’t expect was trouble with one of my favorite publications in the world, one for which I have written and whose founder was a good friend until his death years ago. But it turns out that National Review is a good product with very hinky business practices, if my unhappy experience is any indication. The company seems to have fallen in with a bad crowd. Perhaps "consultants." Perhaps even worse (if there is anything worse than consultants).

I’m not much of a subscriber to things, especially publications. I subscribe to Crunchyroll, which is an anime service that costs $100 per year. I used to subscribe to a similar service, Hidive, but halfway through the year for which I’d paid it decided it would not let me connect using the VPN I use for everything, so I did without it for a paid-up six months and when it expired I did not renew, nor do I recommended it to others.

Five years ago I subscribed to the online National Review. There was some sort of sale underway, and I bit. Within a minute or two I got a nice note, that said "You have been subscribed! . . . You may cancel at any time, and the value of the unused portion of your subscription will be refunded to you. Thank you for supporting NR!"

After a year I got busy with other things and let the subscription lapse. No problem.

Two years ago I subscribed for a year. I had no plan to resubscribe after that. Nor, it turned out, did I have a choice. I was automatically renewed, for $99. I hadn’t authorized it. That didn’t matter. I was stuck with a subscription that expires at the end of October 2026, months from now. I let it be known that I was done with their auto-renewal tricks and was assured my wishes would be observed.

(I also received nearly daily spam emails from "National Review Institute" and frequent emails asking for donations. I clicked to "unsubscribe" from that mailing list every day, to no effect. It hasn’t anything to do with my paid subscription, but demonstrates that the company does not recognize the...