A JOY'S HOUSE SERIES: The MAGA Chronicles – From El Rushbo to Charlie Kirk; red pilling the younguns
The broadcast continuum on the right is reaching its logical conclusion
Welcome to my new mini-series: Chronicles of MAGA, in which I’ll attempt to lay out the backstory of how the American right wound up in the hands of people like Nick Fuentes — the nazi-curious streamer who has become one of the most quoted and quotable figures in the America First movement — and how the MAGA schism over Israel is the likely precursor to a permanent Republican rift.
Part One: From the White Collar to the Golden Microphone
In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin hosted the most popular radio broadcast program in America. Leaning far from what might consider the role of a clergyman, he became the vehemently antisemitic salesman for Hitler-style autocracy, which he and his followers dreamed would be installed in place of American democracy and the New Deal. And he wrapped his message in a strident opposition to the existence of the Federal Reserve and angry critiques of both political parties.
Fifty years later, Coughlin’s act was picked up “the man with the golden microphone,” Rush Limbaugh.
'The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve.' (Rush Limbaugh.- 2003)
Limbaugh, whose show aired across the nation on small, mainly rural, AM stations, became THE voice of white working class America, despite Rush Hudson Limbaugh III himself being a Missouri patrician and Palm Beach resident, whose father had been ambassador to India under President Eisenhower, and whose uncle was a federal judge under Ronald Reagan. But Limbaugh’s fiery messages, denouncing feminism, multiculturalism and particularly on matters of race, resonated with the white working man (and even with Clarence Thomas) as he peaked during the Clinton years … making him one of the most powerful broadcasters in the U.S. since Coughlin. From Pew Research in 2009:
Since Rush Limbaugh launched his radio program in the late 1980s, the market for conservative-leaning talk shows, like the broader news and talk universe, has grown much more crowded. Today, Bill O’Reilly’s cable show attracts more conservatives on a regular basis than does Limbaugh’s radio show, while Sean Hannity’s program draws about as many conservatives as Limbaugh’s. Yet by one standard, Limbaugh’s conservative appeal continues to stand out. In Pew Research’s 2008 news media consumption survey, as in previous biennial news surveys, Limbaugh’s audience was the most conservative. That is, conservatives made up a greater share of his regular audience than of the regular audiences for the “O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity & Colmes” (now called “Hannity”), or any of the 39 programs or networks tested.
Fully 80% of those who said they regularly listened to Limbaugh’s show were self-identified conservatives, compared with 7% who were moderates and 10% who were liberals. The audiences for Hannity & Colmes and O’Reilly were solidly conservative, but not as conservative as Limbaugh’s: 68% of regular Hannity & Colmes viewers were conservatives, as were 66% of regular O’Reilly viewers.
It is important to note, however, that Limbaugh’s syndicated radio show does not have the reach of O’Reilly’s nightly cable program. Among the general public, 10% said they regularly watched O’Reilly, compared with 7% who regularly watched Hannity & Colmes and 5% who regularly listened to Limbaugh. Among conservatives, 19% said they regularly watched O’Reilly, compared with 12% for Hannity & Colmes and 10% for Limbaugh.
Limbaugh’s Show a Male Bastion
The news consumption survey also found that Limbaugh’s audience included a greater share of men than the audiences for any other news or opinion outlet included in the survey. Fully 72% of those who said they regularly listen to Limbaugh were men while just 28% were women. Again, this does not mean that more men tune into Limbaugh’s show than other news and talk programs; rather, men make up a greater share of his audience than the audiences for other programs.
The audience for Hannity & Colmes also was dominated by men, though to a slightly lesser extent than Limbaugh’s. Two-thirds of the regular viewers were men while just a third were women. O’Reilly’s audience was more balanced: 53% of those who say they regularly watch the O’Reilly Factor are men; 47% are women.
The news consumption survey found that women outnumbered men among those who regularly listen to religious radio; 69% of religious radio listeners were women, while just 31% were men. Network TV news outlets also drew in more women than men among their regular viewers. The disparity was particularly evident in the audience for morning news programs, such the Today show. Almost two-thirds of (65%) regular viewers of these programs were women while 35% were men.
What these men of right wing media were selling was consistent: resentment against racial minorities, particularly Black people; anger against poor people; venomous rage against liberated women; anger against secular Americans and liberal Democrats; anger against immigrants; and a vigorous, almost religious defense of the rich and corporations.
Limbaugh’s success was soon replicated on cable news, in 1997, by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch’s toxic invention, Fox “News.”
But that only took care of the right wing aunties and uncles. Someone had to work on the kids. Especially after this happened:
Barack Obama became America’s first Black president in an election during which his very citizenship was questioned, by right wing provocateurs including Donald Trump, and one in which Limbaugh tried to meddle in the Democratic primary via his "operation chaos” gambit to get Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, while denouncing Obama as a “Halfrican.” Even after Obama was elected, Limbaugh could not stop whining, and predicting Obama would unleash bloody vengeance against the white man using his newfound powers:
As forthe American right: they frankly panicked. Obama not only won by 10 million votes despite his ethnicity and his name, he carried 18-29 year old voters by 34 points and 30-44 year olds by 6 points. Indeed, though he essentially split middle aged voters, the only group John McCain won outright in the 2008 election were voters over 65 — which also happened to be a core, if not the core — right wing talk radio demogrphic.
Meanwhile, the issues that drove Obama’s election victory were clear: anxiety about the economy and deep opposition to the Iraq war:
All bad news for Republicans, particularly as it became clear that with 60 Senate votes (including multiple Southern Democratic Senators) he would be able to deliver a healthcare reform act that even FDR and LBJ hadn’t managed to (which Republicans derisively labeled Obamacare.) With Obama’s re-election effort looming, they desperately needed to find a new, more youth driven vehicle to get their message out to younger voters, and to blunt Obama’s popularity with the rising demo. Sure, Citizens United and the Shelby lawsuit would help with voter suppression. But who could actually shift youth culture to the right???
A campus crusade
The right wing billionaires — who had bet their fortunes on McCain and the Republicans — but who couldn’t make the case to young people themselves, saw the efficacy of hiring younger versions of Rush to push their agenda. In 2012, talk radio was pulling a significantly older audience than, say, Stephen Colbert or The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, both of whom had the youngest audiences of any talkers. Check out this Pew Research data from September, 2012:
Limbaugh at that time, had an audience that included just 14 percent people aged 18 to 29, with 31 percent aged 30-49, and half aged 50 and older, with more than a quarter aged 65-plus. And Limbaugh’s niche was clear: conservative men. But who, if not Rush, could speak to — and red pill — them?
Turning Point, USA
The emergence of the Tea Party Movement in 2012, following a Chicago Mercantile rant-turned Tax Day national protest callout, was the right’s first real chance to counter President Obama’s popularity and drag him down to their level. The scattered protests, which often got racist and Islamophobic, corralled the very Limbaugh demographic that Republicans relied on in elections: working class white men and their wives…
And so when one of those older white men decided to try to reach out to the younger crowd, he at least had the self-awareness to realize he needed help. Enter: Charlie Kirk: a precocious teen with an odd head shape, a gummy, rather creepy smile, but the right combination of strong beliefs, endless self-confidence, and unending ambition.
Here’s what Britannica writes about his co-creation, Turning Point USA:
Kirk founded Turning Point USA when he was 18. During his last two years of high school, Kirk had been turned on to conservative politics by listening to conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Toward the end of his senior year, Kirk wrote an op-ed for Breitbart News in which he criticized the influence of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on his AP economics textbook. This led to an appearance on Fox News and a speaking engagement at Benedictine University in Illinois.
After Kirk’s speech at Benedictine, Bill Montgomery, a 71-year-old restaurateur and Tea Party activist, approached him and urged him to start spreading his conservative views on college campuses instead of attending college himself. Kirk’s father reportedly came up with the name Turning Point USA, and Montgomery registered the organization in July 2012.
At first, TPUSA caught on only lightly. But Kirk’s persistence would pay off in spades. More from Britannica:
That August, at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, Kirk met Foster Friess, an investment banker and well-known donor to conservative causes. Kirk told Friess about TPUSA, describing it as a conservative counterpart to the liberal activist group MoveOn.org. A few days later, Kirk received a $10,000 check from Friess in his parents’ mailbox.
Over the next several years, Kirk’s profile rose steadily among conservative politicos and donors. In 2014, after Kirk spoke at an event in Palm Beach, Florida, TPUSA received a series of six-figure donations from major GOP backers. And in 2016 Kirk was the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention.
And as the Obama era came to a close and Hillary Clinton was poised to have her turn at bat, Kirk morphed his talking points from small government, low tax conservatism to something more sinister: aggressive Christian nationalism and all out, gut bucket racism. And the audiences — just as they had for Limbaugh — responded in droves.
After Rush Limbaugh died in February 2021, after having received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump for helping to galvanize the far right for the Republican Party’s benefit for a generation, Charlie Kirk in many ways became his successor, though in a newer, more updated medium — online podcasts and streaming. He even became a friend of Donald Trump’s — to the extent Trump has actual “friends” — and married one of Trump’s former Miss USA contestants, Erika Lane Frantzve, a former reality show contestant, model and Christian podcaster and religious entrepreneur.
The couple married in May of 2021 after meeting in or around 2018 or 2019 and getting engaged in in December 2020. They have two children, born in 2022 and 2024 and for all intents and purposes formed the idyllic white Christian couple — externally devout, and ardently Republican. And their business — TPUSA — as a registered non-profit, raked in the donations and the dough; attracting bigtime donors and seemingly endless funding, while getting credit for helping get Trump elected president, twice, by pulling young collegians to his side, using Kirk’s “prove me wrong” “debate” tours.
In the end, there was nothing particularly unique about what Kirk was doing. He was just Rush Limbaugh for a younger audience. His beefs and grievances were not materially different from El Rusubo’s: the “feminazis” and “welfare queens” — it was unmarried, childless women, Black people, Black pilots, Black collegians, affirmative action, anti-poverty programs, abortion and DEI … Kirk just repurposed the same shtick for a younger crowd and took the show on the road.
The formula was so successful, just as it had been for Limbaugh, Fox, Breitbart and other right wing outlets, that other rich right wingers decided to add more to the fray.
The Daily Wire
The Daily Wire was founded in 2015 by the then-31-year-old Breitbart editor, syndicated radio host, Harvard trained lawyer and right wing columnist Ben Shapiro — the munchkin-voiced talker whose parents are a Hollywood executive and a composer — and Jeremy Boreing, a veteran of the late Andrew Breitbart’s right wing Hollywood thirst website Big Hollywood … with initial funding from billionaire Farris Wilks.
The right wing media company’s apparent goal seems to be to achieve Breitbart’s dream of replacing traditional Hollywood and the film and TV industry with a right wing version … without all the inclusive casting and storylines, and to bring back the traditional, white version of Hollywood from the pre-1960s.
And to be clear they’ve been highly successful at finding a huge audience that like the audience that was attracted to Limbaugh and TPUSA; including a small claque of Black conservatives, soon to include the former Kanye West, who were brought to the table by Daily Wire gadfly and “white lives matter” activist Candace Owens.
Owens was hired in 2021 and captured the attention of Black hip-hop celebs and white conservatives who wanted to present as non-racist by listening to a Black woman’s podcast. And her presence at The Daily Wire created the veneer of racial and gender diversity in the right wing podcast-sphere. But she was fired by Borering in 2024 for expressing anti-Israeli views following the October 7 attacks and Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza. Live by the Kanye connection …
When it was announced last March that Borering himself was stepping down .. an Axios report described his departure this way:
Jeremy Boreing, co-founder of the Daily Wire, is stepping down from his role as co-CEO to focus on creative projects for the company, he told staff in a memo obtained by Axios on Tuesday.
Why it matters: Boreing has been with the Daily Wire since its inception in 2015. He helped grow the outlet from a tiny news startup with $4.7 million in seed funding to a media giant valued north of $1 billion last year
So who is the Daily Wire funder, Farris Wilks? According to The Guardian:
Two billionaire Texas brothers whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking have pumped millions of dollars into rightwing media outfits that have promoted climate-crisis denialism and sent more big checks to back an array of evangelical projects and conservative Texas politicians.
The fracking billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks have each doled out millions of dollars through separate foundations over the last decade to a number of high-profile conservative and religious groups including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.
“Thanks to their incredible wealth and largesse, the country as well as the [Republican] party are now feeling the effects of their aggressive brand of religiously-charged political activism,” said Darren Dochuk, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of Anointed with Oil.
Farris Wilks and his wife control the Thirteen Foundation, while Dan Wilks and his wife lead the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, both of which have been funded with proceeds from the 2011 sale of their majority stake in Frac Tech Services for $3.2bn.
Since they created their foundations, six- and seven-figure checks from the Wilks brothers have bolstered numerous pro-fossil fuel and evangelical projects.
The Wilks brothers, for instance, have poured millions of dollars into PragerU and the Daily Wire, two rightwing media outlets that have promoted wide-ranging conservative agendas, including climate crisis denialism to school-age kids and adults via short videos, articles and other materials.
The two brothers have given at least $8m to PragerU, which is unaccredited, according to Texas financial records. In July, Florida approved the use of what PragerU has called its “edutainment” videos and other materials for use in its classrooms, and PragerU has said it is trying to get other states, including Texas, to do likewise.
In 2015, Farris Wilks gave $4.7m to help launch the Daily Wire and remains an owner of the media company, whose founding editor and co-owner Ben Shapiro has forged ties with Dennis Prager, the PragerU founder and talkshow host. Shapiro and Prager are slated to attend a PragerU “founders’ retreat” in September for donors who give at least $100,000 a year.
Historically, the two brothers have also backed a number of rightwing Texas Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz, whose abortive run for president in 2016 was bolstered by $15m they gave to a pro-Cruz Super Pac.
…
The evangelical ties of the Wilks brothers are deep and personal. Farris Wilks is a preacher in Cisco, Texas, a town of approximately 3,000 people, where he leads the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day church, which was founded by his father and interprets the Bible literally while embracing Old and New Testament teachings.
Farris Wilks has railed against homosexuality, which he deems a sin. According to recordings of his sermons, homosexuality is “a perversion tantamount to bestiality, pedophilia and incest”.
Farris Wilks also seems to equate the climate crisis with God’s will. “If [God] wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there,” he said to worshippers at a 2013 service.
To promote his evangelical views, Farris Wilks and his brother have donated millions of dollars to several conservative Christian groups including Liberty Counsel, Heartbeat International and Family Talk.
Scholars who have studied the influence of big oil and the US right credit the Wilks brothers with playing a growing role in funding and shaping the conservative and evangelical right in Texas and nationally.
“The Wilks brothers epitomize the new strain of religious-right culture-warring that has taken hold of the GOP. Blending fierce allegiance to free-market economics with equally fierce commitment to social conservatism [and] anti-statist rage with Christian nationalist sentiments, they seek to draw the church itself (not just church folk) into battle for control of the country,” said Dochuk.
And yet: Boerering attacked little old me, for calling out their oligarch funding. What to do!
But I digress.
The bottom line is that both TPUSA and The Daily Wire served the purpose of red pilling young, mainly white Christians, particularly on college campuses (Joe Rogan dominates the even larger non-college sphere.) And both entities attracted massive donations from the super rich, who saw the usefulness of teaching the young to care more about tax cuts for the rich than economic survival for themselves, by filling their minds with racial, gender, and religious resentment.
It was all very useful for Donald Trump, in 2016 and even more so in 2024. But all would not remain peaceful in MAGAworld.
The period after Trump’s 2024 re-election is where the Turning Point - Daily Wire breach broke out into the open. But even before Trump’s big comeback, there were hints that a bad moon was rising on the right…
Coming up in Part Two: The Groypers are Coming…
Related throwback: A Sunday Reid: 14 Words Conservatism is Back in the Trump Era