I used to think, “Hell, if you want to give away a million bucks for nothing, I’ll do nothing for $500,000. You can’t pass up that deal!” No takers, though.
Look, the rich guys who liked to spend money on conservative causes were indispensable to the movement, but they just needed to be as wise about the conservative groups they invested in as they were about their business decisions. They didn’t get rich in business pouring money into bottomless pits without a strategy nor any accountability, yet that’s what they did when they handed over huge stacks of cash to folks whose only demonstrated competence was in the fine art of failure.
There was this vast array of Republican—not necessarily conservative—consultants, institutes, publications, and other scams devoted to separating rich conservatives from their dough. Most of them fought real conservatives until they saw we were winning. Then they acted like they had been with us every step of the way. I remembered who had been there from the beginning, but some donors forgot. They got hosed; I got my payback.
I tried to tell people in my circles that they needed to think about what they were doing and how they were spending their money. The movement was about more than some huckster’s new Mercedes.
Using money effectively takes thought—it’s easy to write a big check but hard to write a bunch of little ones. We made the effort. When it came to giving, we started by thinking small. The Internet as we know it was less than 20 years old when Obama was reelected, and social media was still a new thing. We were just discovering how it could work, how it could be used to link and coordinate and motivate people for action.
But a lot of wealthy donors didn’t pay attention to it—you didn’t get rich blogging or tweeting or Facebooking or Tumblring. So they didn’t see them as important. But they were important to real people—you know, the kind who actually vote?
There were zillions of regular conservatives promoting conservatism with those tools, and none of them had any money. We wondered what the most talented ones could do with a few bucks, and that guided our microgiving.
Now, you could write some guy a $750,000 check after a flashy Holo-PowerPoint presentation—well, back then it was just 2D PowerPoint, but you know what I mean—about how his software was going to revolutionize get-out-the-vote efforts and get a big, fat goose egg. On the other hand, you could get one of your minions to parcel out 10 grand at a time, which was real money to starving Internet activists, to find would-be investigative journalists to go and get video of liberals messing up.
Remember ACORN? For a small investment in a pimp suit, a couple young conservatives took out a huge arm of the Democratic Party. That pimp suit is now on display in the Stringer Hall of Modern American Political History at the Smithsonian, by the way.
How about hiring a few young attorneys? The market was saturated and young ones with a lot of energy, but not much experience, were willing to work all night for nearly nothing just to get into a courtroom. Unleashing the ambulance chasers was the modern equivalent of releasing the hounds.
You would weigh costs versus benefits in your business life, but we did it in our conservative giving. Sure, most of these microgrants didn’t generate any value. As in all areas of human endeavor, most ideas were crap. But some weren’t, and the value to the movement far exceeded our relatively paltry investment. Plus we were training these folks, letting them get experience. As they got better, they could do more damage to progressivism down the road.
See, notice how I called it an “investment”? I expected a return on investment. For the price of one big failure, a single rich guy could energize scores of young, eager conservatives who wanted to use new media to carry the fight to the enemy. Keep in mind that, unlike the consultants, these were true believers. You gave them some seed money to buy a decent laptop or a working camera, and they would more than match your money with their own sweat equity.
With them, it was like lighting a fuse. With the consultants, it was filling up their gas tank, and when the tank ran dry the car got parked in the garage. We leveraged the dedication, creativity, and initiative of these conservative activists. That was a savvy play.
Second, after thinking smaller, we started thinking bigger. We asked ourselves why we should toss another chunk of change into some obscure magazine read only by a bunch of bow tie–wearing weenies? The National Review, Weekly Standard, and American Spectator are all useful and essential, and they needed money—which we gave—but how much use was some in-house compendium of think tank fellows’ scribbling? Sure, I know I loved to catch up on what some otherwise unemployable Georgetown political science grad thought about urban housing policy. Who didn’t? Well, pretty much everyone.
The conservative movement didn’t need more venues for pointless pontificating by sexless policy nerds—that’s what we called them then, nerds. Instead, the movement needed to communicate conservative values and conservative solutions to real people who actually voted, not people who loved to sit around and trade about DC bar gossip.
We decided to dive into general interest publications, the ones real people read—especially women, who were being fed this endless stream of liberal propaganda. We made offers to buy women’s magazines like Redbook and Cosmopolitan that you would see at the supermarket checkout stands back then. They would have these ridiculous articles like “Summer Beach Bikini Secrets for the Busy Mom” or “10 Super-Sexy Ways to Please Your Man . . . Including One That Requires a Vacuum Cleaner!” but in between was this default liberal fluff. We wanted to insert our own conservative fluff.
The big magazines wouldn’t sell out to us because we were conservative. They should have—they’re all bankrupt now, and their names live on as websites after being auctioned by their bankruptcy trustees.
We bought some of the smaller ones whose owners weren’t as lockstep liberal and who wanted to get a few bucks out ahead of the industry’s final death throes. Others we bought through front companies to hide our identities.
I made no bones about “editorial independence”—we put solid conservatives at the wheel. Soon, you’d see things like a profile of a conservative woman politician that didn’t treat her like someone Hitler would tell to chill out.
We’d offer some practical personal safety hints for women—like how to buy the right handgun. Boy, that freaked people out, but regular women had never seen that side of things before—they came expecting recipes and celebrity gossip and got a fresh perspective, a conservative perspective, painlessly and without fanfare. Sure, the liberal political rags were in a tizzy at us usurping their dominance, but the women weren’t reading those liberal magazines!
We didn’t sell it as overt conservatism—why turn off our audience by being overt? Instead, we made huge gains off of “good government” exposés on how bureaucrats squandered the money the readers’ families paid in taxes. We’d even wedge in an occasional piece on a woman who didn’t like abortion. You’d never see that reading Woman’s Day.
We also bought men’s magazines, and we irritated some on our side by keeping the photos of sexy starlets cavorting in lingerie. Conservative men like hot women, and they’re proud of it. We just added some conservative content. Our men’s mags loved to profile hard-core studs—SEALs, football players, and that sort of thing. To that we’d add some explicit coverage of their largely conservative views—there are not a lot of progressive SEALs. Badassary and liberalism are, after all, mutually exclusive.
But why stop at magazines? We began to think even bigger. How about a video network?
Back in 2009, on the right, serving half of America’s 300-some odd million people was Fox News. That is all.
There was a huge opportunity there. Glenn Beck saw it and founded TheBlaze TV network from scratch, though that was an entirely different animal than buying a going concern. It was a risk. He became a zillionaire, but he could have easily found himself wearing a barrel.
We didn’t see this as purely charity; it was a way to potentially make a ton of dough wh
ile also helping to pop the political pimple that was progressivism. There was a huge opening that needed to be filled. Conservatives could turn on their old TV sets and have the choice of Fox News or a test pattern.
As awesome as Fox News was—and it was awesome, as anyone conscious and fighting liberalism in the dark times before Fox can attest—a lack of competition never makes the monopolist better. Monopolies will always get ossified, slower, and generally worse. That’s just how things are. The best thing that could happen to Fox was another voice on the right. We did that. We did well with NewsRight, but Fox reigns supreme.
I think our mistake at the beginning was using “right” in the name, but I was outvoted! We should have chosen a neutral name.
Next, we thought, why stop at news? Why not popular entertainment? If we wanted to change America, we had to change the culture. If we wanted to change the culture, we would have to participate in the culture, and popular entertainment was a huge part of it.
With the old model of centralized distribution dying in an age of digital movies and video on demand and all sorts of other venues, and with production costs dropping as the insatiable appetite for material grew, it was never easier or cheaper to get into the movie and TV business. And some of us conservatives invested. A few rich guys made a huge difference. And some of us made money too.
I would tell my rich guy friends, “Everyone wants your money. The movement needs your money. Stop just giving your money away. Demand results. Monitor the metrics. If your spending isn’t getting results, stop spending on the failure and start funding something else. It isn’t that hard. Remember how you got rich in the first place? Remember how you did it?”
Then I would tell them, “Do that again.”
* * *
Darren Dolby (Lawyer/Activist)
This well-known and flamboyant attorney represented some of the movement’s wealthy donors in lawsuits after government officials decided to try and intimidate them.
You know the old saying about not getting in a pissing contest with a guy who buys ink by the barrel? There’s a second part that gets less play: “Don’t screw with a guy who buys lawyers by the bushel.”
See that classic 2020 Corvette outside? I bought that new with part of the payoff after I hit the IRS and a bunch of its flunkies for $3,000,000 for auditing my client because he dared do what the Constitution allowed him to do and tell Hillary to go pound sand. I don’t like these damn modern electric cars, so I kept it—though it’s a bitch finding a gas station anymore!
Chapter Nine: The News
“It’s Our Media Now”
The conservative insurgency was never just about politics but about the entire culture, and the media was the voice and expression of that culture. Conservatives made a conscious effort to move into the news media. As more and more journalists chaffed under the politically correct constraints of the liberal establishment, and as technology allowed new entrants in the media to bypass the established gatekeepers, the media became more conservative. And the effects on society were pronounced.
* * *
David Chang (Conservative Media Host)
Chang’s snarling terrier interrupts our discussion to demand his master’s attention. In the other room, Chang’s husband, Luke, a high-end carpenter who makes expensive designer furniture, is fixing lunch. The enormous house—Chang has done incredibly well as a talk show host—is impeccably decorated. We are in what they call their “Gun Room.” The name is apt—the walls are covered with firearms of all makes and sizes.
“They’re all functional, of course,” Chang tells me. “Since we don’t have kids, some of them are loaded. When I was younger, every once in a while punks might try and beat up a gay couple, so I took my protection seriously. I still do. I never got why gays would back people who wanted to keep them vulnerable. Of course, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about that either and it just made them hate me more. I had to break through prejudice all right—about my conservatism. I knew I wanted to be in media, and it was pretty clear if I wanted to do that I needed to do it myself.”
I was a traitor because I thought for myself. So I said, “The hell with it,” and started an Internet show. It was right during the 2016 election season. I was a Chris Christie guy, though soon I became one of his biggest critics. He had spent years telling the Tea Partiers “screw you,” and so no one should have been surprised when, on primary election night in Iowa, they returned the favor. Of course, then he got mad, quit the GOP when it was clear there was no place for him, and ran in 2020 as an independent spoiler and got Hillary reelected.
So, after Hillary was elected, there we were facing another four years of what they liked to call “fundamental transformation,” and what we called “screwing up the country.” I had never really thought about what I would do with my show after the election, so I just kept doing it even as I was halfheartedly being a lawyer. It took a while, but I built an audience and when the “pros” came to me it was with a pile of money because I had a built-in audience. Bye-bye legal career.
The mainstream media was dying, and we would laugh at its death throes, but it wasn’t dead quite yet. We needed to help it along.
What we needed to do, as conservatives, was fight the very concept of a “mainstream media.” The MSM [Mainstream Media] presupposed the gatekeeper function that it was desperately trying to preserve for itself. Gatekeepers have inordinate power; we conservatives needed to dissipate that power. To do that, we needed to get a wider variety of viewpoints out via the media.
In other words, we needed more conservative media targeted at everyday Americans—the ones for whom politics was not a 24/7 obsession.
There were three ways to do this. The first was actually the simplest: we would buy existing media platforms. Of course, unless you are trying to buy Newsweek—remember that from the doctor’s office as a kid? It got sold for about a dollar during the Obama years. Anyway, buying media took money. Obviously, the vast majority of us weren’t going to go buy a newspaper or a broadcast network, but a few rich guys could, and that was huge.
The second way was to infiltrate. Go in and be a part of the monster. Be like a virus—get in there and infest it and change it. That wasn’t for me. I never wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to sound off! I wanted people to pay attention to me!
[From the other room, Luke’s voice booms, “Some things never change!” Chang furrows his brow, pets the terrier, which growls, and then continues.]
The third way was the way most of us had to do it, and it was way, way tougher. We had to do it ourselves.
Technology made it possible. You could buy a mic, a video camera, and a laptop computer and you could have a show. There were these services that would transmit your shows over the Internet, and conservatives were suddenly up and making product. A lot was awful, but they kept at it. It was an incubator for conservative media talent. You would get these guys just making their Internet shows and pretty soon they would be on “real” radio. They would make their mistakes where no one saw them! Major players like Larry O’Connor, Derek Hunter, and Tony Katz got their start just like me, you know, just kind of putting on a show. Except it wasn’t out in a barn—it was on the net.
And sometimes no one watched. I remember shows where I would have two guys in the chat room and one would be some leftist spewing homophobic crap. Leftists were the biggest homophobes I ever encountered—conservatives might not have liked thinking about my lifestyle, but they were always respectful. The leftists were just vulgar and gross.
Anyway, I learned. I learned how to set up and pace a show, how to handle calls, how to talk. It took me a long time, but by the time I got my first terrestrial radio hosting gig—a guest host job at a New Hampshire station—I had lost my “ums” and “uhhs.” It was great training. When I got the call to come up to the big leagues, I was ready.
And I had a fan base. Conservatives were incredibly gracious and supportive. I guess we had to be, since the entire political esta
blishment and media were against us. I had fans who listened in every day. Then they would promote me on social media through their Facebook and Twitter accounts—you need to understand how important those were to our organizing and communicating within the movement in the teens and twenties.
Yeah, they tried to shut us down. The resurrected Fairness Doctrine rule was just a transparent attempt to shut us up by trying to make sure we were weighted down with unlistenable liberal crap.
They called it “balance.” I was conservative so I had to have “balance” to use the public airwaves. My stations freaked when Hillary’s minions imposed the regulation; they were pretty much planning to switch to easy listening music until I came up with Chet the Fairness Guy.
Chet became my partner on the show. His favorite phrase was, “Duh, work is hard. Give me free money!” I would talk for a long while and then ask Chet the Fairness Guy if he had any insights and he’d usually say, “Duh, work is hard. Give me free money.” This was our balance. It was a joke, and I treated it like that. Then the regulators came down on me and filed a complaint alleging that Chet the Fairness Guy was not “a legitimate representative of alternate political viewpoints.”
Now, Chet was played by this guy name Neal Cornish who had a masters in political philosophy from Cornell and really knew his stuff. So when we sued, Neal goes up on the stand and articulates the liberal viewpoint perfectly to show he can, though he adds he doesn’t believe a word of it because it’s absolute nonsense. So the government then has to argue that the balance guy has to really believe in the alternate viewpoint he’s expressing, and even the liberal judges start getting uncomfortable at the idea that the government can go in and validate the sincerity and efficacy of every radio host in America.
Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041 Page 16