To MAGA, With Love, The Disinformation Is Coming From The Right

In online spaces MAGA folks tell me there's an equal amount of disinformation coming from the left. Like most Americans, they have no idea what the billionare right has spent 60 years building.

Apr 01, 2025

The outcome of the 2024 election made my approach to media reform feel outdated. It exposed once and for all our growing national disregard for the importance of truth. And once a commitment to truth in discourse is discarded who is going to give a shit about the legistlative solutions to our local journalism crisis that my colleagues and I have been fighting for?

Many Americans have clearly replaced journalism…

…with incoherent memes like the one below. The Insurrection Barbie account has millions of followers on X despite regularly spreading blatant propaganda. Conflating vote totals with land mass without any accounting for the concentration of humans in those areas is a manipulation meant to trick MAGA voters. It serves two false narratives pushed by MAGA leadership—Trump has an overwhelming mandate (he doesn’t) and elections are insecure (a myth pushed by the right for decades). Those propaganda narratives manufacture support from American citizens for the erosion of their own rights—to due process, for example. Further, they serve to provide (false) justification for the passage of voter suppression laws across the country.

The election outcome revealed that the right-wing propaganda ecosystem dominates and can convince the public of anything. It convinced 79 million Americans that a notoriously corrupt, sexually abusive liar, who has already attempted a coup, was fit for re-election.

It feels weird to type that last sentence here in post-truth America. Even though my description of Trump is verifiably factual I’m haunted by the awareness that fellow citizens will question my integrity simply for using accurate language to describe a political figure. Experts say it was a coup attempt. Our eyes and ears tell us it was a coup attempt. But under the weight of right wing propaganda and mainstream normalization, American society is still 50/50 on the matter.

On January 6th we saw in real time how the pacifying mainstream media sausage is made in reports from Max Tani and Ben Smith.

Soft language from fact-based mainstream outlets left an opening for the right-wing propaganda complex to convince millions of Americans that January 6th was a “normal tourist visit” or an FBI conspiracy.

Is the takeaway from all of this that millions of Americans are unable to discern between fact-based sources of information and outright propaganda built to manipulate them? Or, maybe they can tell the difference and they just don’t care? Are we all bearing witness to the awesome power of confirmation bias?

The bottom line is that many of us have replaced flawed but essential mainstream journalism with an alternative reality, a purpose-built stream of propaganda-masquerading-as-news meant to erode our trust in everything. The crowd that cheers as propagandist Ben Shapiro tells his ideological opponents that “facts don’t care about your feelings” has lost the plot, having themselves replaced fact-based sources of information with memes, entertainers, and social media influencers who cater to their feelings while playing loose with, or completely ignoring, the facts.

I’m building Public Enlightenment to meet the reality of a post-truth America. I’ve begun livestreaming on TikTok every morning, taking to the battlefield in the Information War none of us wanted. I try to engage with MAGA folks and compassionately wean them off of the information feed that has them cheering along with the billionaire agenda. I try to build trust by listening and seeking agreement over verifiable facts where I can.

One thing I hear from both the MAGA and anti-Dems crowd is there is just as much disinformation coming from the left as is coming from the right. And, well, that’s just not true. It IS true that foreign adversaries populate the internet with left wing content farms and fake accounts meant to erode trust and spread disinformation. But these types of attacks are perpetrated across all ideological perspectives. It was revealed in 2024 that two Russian operatives paid American right wing influencers like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson millions of dollars to spread pro-Kremlin talking points. And, of course, all us regular folks haplessly spread misinformation back and forth to each other across the internet as easily as we breathe.

The truth is that these foreign attacks pale in comparison to the Information War against all of us waged by home grown, right-wing billionaires for the last 60 years. These billionaires have built hundreds of think tanks and media organizations that pump out propaganda, dodgy studies, and extremist white papers in order to advance their agenda and manipulate voters. They are responsible for the Tea Party Movement, Moms For Liberty, “woke,” CRT, DEI, trans-panic and just about every piece of culture war bullshit that undermines our ability to come together across class lines and fight back against their obscene wealth hoarding. The right wing billionaires and their apparatchiks like Christopher Rufo and Steve Bannon know that it doesn’t matter if anyone knows what CRT is so long as they make Americans feel so threatened by it that it causes them to vote the way they want them to:

Below are essentially the notes I took to produce the first episode of my podcast, Tricked. I was lucky enough to score Rick Perlstein as my first guest. He’s an incredible historian who is an expert in the rise of the right wing movement in America since the 1950s. My notes barely scratch the surface. I mean, I don’t even touch on the Council for National Policy!

MAGA, if you have made is this far I am so grateful for your open energy. It is tough for anyone to hear that they’ve been manipulated. And truly, we’ve ALL been manipulated. We are all victims of these extremely wealthy people and their deep compulsion to divide us. These anti-democracy billionaires have co-opted the idea of America and its freedoms turned us against each other.

The American left has never stood up anything comparable to what I outline below.

The Billionaires Who Tricked Us (Gut Check: It’s Not Soros)

Have you arrived at your thoughts about US politics completely on your own?

Or are at least some of your beliefs about subjects like government regulation, abortion, public schools, DEI, or CRT actually the result of a decades-long effort to shift the culture of America?

Our national divide, the deep polarization that mainstream media likes to talk about, was never organic. Americans are contending with the results of a 60 year project funded by wealthy, extremist billionaires to trick us all into voting in their best interests.

For our entire lives, a multibillion dollar shit-posting industry has been at work to change our minds. The goal of this effort was to make racist and anti-worker political beliefs held by ultra-conservatives widely acceptable. And to attack anyone who thought differently. We are divided because a small group of angry, reactionary, wealthy people made us this way.

In the 2024 election, this project finally achieved total victory. With thousands of think tanks and media operatives working around the clock to pump culture war bullshit into the brains of Americans 24/7, billionaire families with names like the Koch, Scaife, Uihlein, Bradley, Coors, Mercer, Friess, and Wilks finally convinced the voting public to hand them the keys to everything.

(Wait, what about Harlan Crow and the PayPal Mafia? I’ve written about the new crop of billionaires who are equally determined to trick us here and here.)

Destroying American Consensus

The 1960s ended with 60% of the public saying they trust the government to do what is right just about always/most of the time. Only 10 years later, in 1980, that figure was down to 25%. At the time of the 2024 election, 35% of Democrats and only 11% of Republicans trusted the government to do what was right.

Much of the right wing billionaire effort focused on eroding trust in government and journalism. Wealthy white business leaders were aggrieved by what they believed was a federal government all too keen on regulating business. To them, protections for consumers and the environment felt like boots on the neck. Future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo expressing alarm that corporations were under attack–almost to the point of extinction. The press, which sought to hold the wealthy and powerful to account, was considered an enemy of business and the conservative project writ large.

Early Attacks On Media

By the early 1970s, conservative politicians were priming their followers to believe that the deep corruption of Watergate was in fact a coup orchestrated by the press against Richard Nixon. They sought to sow distrust in the media to stave off its ability to influence the public’s perception of acts of blatant corruption. They did not want public opinion to be influenced by fact-based journalism regarding government malfeasance. They rejected the notion that the press in a democracy is supposed to hold power accountable.

Indeed, Nixon and his cohort took to referring to the press as “the media” during his presidency as a way of undermining the lofty principles associated with the “press” label. Conservative attacks on the “liberal media,” the idea of ‘working the refs’ in order to induce favorable coverage, began decades earlier than most Americans today realize.

The Nixon White House made it a strategy to pressure the mainstream media into altering their journalism. Memos from White House officials outlined efforts to threaten the broadcast licenses of station owners whose political coverage wasn’t obedient enough.

1970s Republicans had plans for manipulating our information ecosystem on a mass scale. Roger Ailes, who co-created Fox News with Rupert Murdoch in the 90s, was working in the Nixon White House when he drew up a memo titled, “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.” In it he wrote, “People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.”

Despite all of this, in 1976 72% of the population trusted mass media a great deal or a fair amount.

Conservative Coalition

By the 1970s the liberals and moderates in the Republican Party were being forced out by its hard core conservative elements. In one of his books, historian of the right’s rise, Rick Perlstein, writes about a Newsweek correspondent startled to discover that “the right’s idea of broadening the party” was “purifying it.”

The foot soldiers of the New Right opposed abortion, homosexuality, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), affirmative action, and most forms of taxation. In essence, this New Right was a response to the perceived excess of strides towards equal opportunity afforded by the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and desegregation efforts like Brown v. Board of Education.

Racist, anti-government billionaires decided it was in their best interests to deeply fund the anti-government, anti-desegregation New Right. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

By 1986, Ronald Reagan was occupying the White House for his second term and spreading deeply anti-government messages from his position at the top of government, saying at a press conference, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Billionaire Blight

This web of billionaire donors and their covert operatives used limitless funds to gain influence by ginning up a permanent culture war. They built a professional shitposting enterprise consisting of think tanks and media outlets. They strategically worked the refs, infiltrated universities, and removed regulations like the Fairness Doctrine that had previously placed effective, if mostly nominal, limits on the use of public airwaves (especially radio) to deliver unadulterated partisan speech.

A 1997 report by the National Committee For Responsible Philanthropy outlines in great detail the conservative billionaire strategy to warp society to fit their needs. It chronicles their “concerted effort to undermine — and redirect — academia, Congress, the judiciary, executive branch agencies, major media, and even philanthropy.” The report details conservative think tanks “creating and cultivating public intellectuals and policy leaders” and building a “counter-establishment of research, advocacy, media, legal, philanthropic and religious sector organizations,” noting that the efforts “have paid off handsomely.”

Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and other grant-making organizations belonging to the State Policy Network provided culture altering fodder in the form of easy to read briefs and quickly produced studies–disseminated to mainstream news media who reported on them. In 1995 media references to far right think tanks outnumbered references to center or left of center research institutions by 7 to 1.

The scope was massive. The State Policy Network (SPN), a network of 167 conservative and libertarian think tanks, was formed from a conversation between Ronald Reagan and founder Thomas Roe, who asserted that he felt every state should have its own version of the Heritage Foundation. Reagan replied that Roe should “do something about it.” One member organization of the SPN is the Federalist Society, a group 60,000 strong led by Leonard Leo, that has successfully corrupted the Supreme Court of the United States.

Society Remade

A reminder that at the end of the 1960s, even with a draft for an unjust war, uprisings, civil rights battles, and assassinations, 60% of the public still trusted the government to do what was right most of the time.

At the time of the 2024 election, 35% of Democrats and only 11% of Republicans trusted the government to do what was right.

In a recent Gallup poll, 31% of Americans only 12% Republicans said they felt a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.

The collective distrust of news sources that these billionaires sowed means our media landscape is more vulnerable than ever to bad actors. Today’s media landscape looks quite different in terms of technology and the health and viability of a fact-based press. 1 in 5 Americans gets their news from social media influencers. Over 60% of influencers do not fact check any information before they share it with their followers. People are putting their faith in content creators who quite often say things on behalf of moneyed interests.

Is it safe to say that anything we see from a MAGA influencer is in some part funded by the ultra-conservative billionaires?

Below are just some of the right wing influencers and who provides their funding. This look into the right wing disinformation machine barely scratches the surface. It’s a network that has reshaped American society to the point that the working class just voted against their best interests and in favor of the interests of billionaires who will continue to pick their pockets.

Dark Money ATM Funds Propaganda, Manipulates Democracy

The dark money ATM of the conservative movement, Donor’s Trust, is a donor-advised fund. Wealthy people give money to this fund anonymously and advise where the money should go. They claim tax deductions and duck capital gains taxes. In 2021, Donors Trust took in $1 billion. Most of it came from two anonymous donors. Some of the things it funds:

Heritage Foundation
Federalist Society

Project Veritas
American Spectator
Metric Media - over 1300 pink slime sites that published over 2,000 stories related to the integrity of the 2020 election. Other Metric Media backers are Uhlein, Koch and Peter Thiel.

Some Other Right Wing Billionaires Who Play Puppeteer

Robert Mercer

Gave $10 million to help Steve Bannon turn Breitbart far right.
Funds the Media Research Group, a “watchdog on a mission to correct liberal media bias.”
$10 million dollar stake in Cambridge Analytica which collected Facebook user data to micro-target political ads in 2016.

Dick Uhlein

$82 million dollars to the 2022 midterm election cycle
Family foundation donates heavily to RealClearMedia, RealClearPolling, RealClearPolitics
Also funds the Daily Caller - creation was announced at a Heritage event in 2010

Bradley Foundation

Spent $500 million to conservative "public-policy experiments" since 2000.

A Tangled Web Of Influence Operations

Ben Shapiro got $5 million to launch Daily Wire from oil and fracking billionaires who are anti-LGBTQ and anti-climate solutions, Farris and Dan Wilks.

The Wilks’ also have given millions to Prager U, an unaccredited education program that makes videos to show students, including a cartoon of Frederick Douglass saying slavery wasn’t so bad.

Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA - stated mission is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom. TPUSA is a fake grassroots network on high school and college campuses across the country. It attacks the left and invites white nationalists to speak at their events. It is funded by the Bradley Foundation, Uihlein Family Foundation, Foster Friess, various Koch brothers-affiliated groups, and DonorsTrust.

Christopher Rufo - Rufo and his backers are responsible for you knowing anything about CRT. They placed that issue into culture with their think tank money and influence. Rufo also helped seed the attacks against DEI and trans people. Rufo is funded by Koch and Bradley through donor advised funds. Their golden boy, he is a fellow at Heritage, Claremont, and the Manhattan Institute.

Moms For Liberty - This anti-CRT, mask mandates, and anti-LGBTQ fake grassroots organization was started by a Republican operative and got dark money pumped into it right away. M4L was quickly featured on The Rush Limbaugh Show, Fox News and Steve Bannon's War Room. It’s national conference featured groups like Turning Point USA and Heritage.

Parents Defending Education - opposes the factual teaching of racism in K-12 schools, opposesteacher's unions, and is anti-LGBTQ. Funded in part by Donor’s Trust, Coors, and Bradley.

Daily Caller - Led by white supremacist Tucker Carlson, this organization was started with $3 million in seed money from billionaire Foster Friess.

Briefly on Racism

There is a throughline of racism from the origin of this ultra-conservative movement to today. GOP political operative Lee Atwater made remarks in 1981 about how Republicans won the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves, speaking on “how abstract you handle the race thing.” This concept extends to the modern day and was made evident along the way with events like the Willie Horton attack ads against Dukakis, Obama birtherism spread by the likes of Trump, and now to “eating the dogs and eating the cats.” Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo was interviewed (poorly) on NPR this past November and continued this abstraction, making appeals to racism by referring to the “Western cultural tradition.”

Below is the text of Atwater’s 1981 remarks.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

I spoke with Rick Perlstein about all of this for the first (and so far only!) episode of my podcast, Tricked. It’s a show about the powerful people warping our minds and how we can all fight for healthier information. I want to make so many more episodes, but, well, there’s only so much time in the day. I truly don’t know how some folks are capable of churning out so much content. Sigh. Rick is a historian of the conservative movement’s rise in America.

Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts:

Watch on Youtube:

Get a better feel for the podcast will be about by listening to the trailer here.

Public Enlightenment provides the context we need to understand the news. When you sign up as a subscriber or pledge a paid subscription, you're agreeing that we’re in this mess because of our toxic information ecosystem and you know that we must fight like hell to improve public understanding. Every single day.

Click below to help me keep up the fight for better outcomes for everyone!

Here’s to healthier information,
Brian

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