Trump rally, Manchester, New Hampshire, January 2024. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The fuel that sustains MAGA is right-wing rage. When right-wing propaganda can’t deliver enough rage, Trump’s popularity and approval ratings drop. Fox News viewers in the age 25 to 54 bracket were down 61 percent in November 2025 versus November 2024.
The job of the right-wing media is to constantly fuel the rage and demonization that it directs at anyone who stands in the way of the right-wing agenda. No ugliness is too ugly, and no lie is too great, if it generates rage. The corrupt moral nature of right-wing rage is such that it now even teaches that empathy is morally dangerous. That is, empathy for friends and family is virtuous. But empathy toward the wider world, because it leads to concerns about equality, fairness, and equal justice, is the very moral snare that liberals fall into. And liberals, of course, are evil.
But liberals are now out of power. Generating right-wing rage was easy when there were liberals with power who could be demonized — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. But a movement built on manufactured partisan rage runs out of fuel when the enemy disappears from view.
Some blame “outrage fatigue.” I don’t think that’s it. MAGA types are energized by rage rather than tired by it. Rather, this is a serious propaganda problem. If Democrats are powerless, then whom is the movement fighting? If Republicans control government, then why is life not magically improving? If Trump is president again, then why aren’t we great again? Without Democrats to blame, the rage machine becomes an ouroboros — a snake eating its own tail in search of the emotional intensity that its propaganda can no longer produce. The movement is starting to fragment as leaders who are addicted to rage and the politics of rage inevitably turn on each other.
Trump’s decline in approval ratings is partly emotional. Trump no longer provides the catharsis that MAGA types felt during the fuck-your-feelings and liberal-tears days. Trump is yesterday’s rage, warmed over, feeble, and increasingly unappealing.
None of this bodes well for MAGA’s future. But Republicans continue to have an enormous amount of power, and they will not hesitate to use it. They have two kinds of options. They can try to stay in power illegally with most of the country against them. Or they can smash a lot of furniture in an attempt to generate new themes of hysteria, rage, and fear that they hope will help them. They probably will do both.
100%- Well said.
Hosts on a couple of the podcasts I listen to are often lamenting why there’s no left-wing equivalent to Fox News, and I believe this is why. Ugliness trumps empathy, and those of us on the left don’t appreciate the ugliness.
Hi Eric: As a podcast listener, do you think that liberal podcasts and liberals in outlets such as Substack are helping to fill the gap?
I’m sure they do, but I don’t see people as dedicated as their conservative counterparts. Keep in mind I’m in South Dakota, but it didn’t used to be uncommon to walk into a business and here Rush Limbaugh going behind the counter; some people bought into everything he said, whereas people aren’t as fervently dedicated to, say, The Bulwark. Fortunately, Limbaugh’s message was so hollow we never even hear about him anymore.
Hi David 🙂
It’s my understanding that the MAGA political leadership is fracturing over Epstein and the tarnish Trump’s unpopularity is now having on certain projected mid-term outcomes with liabilities that aren’t looking so hot.
Your metaphor of the ouroboros is apt as huge chunks of the MAGA media-sphere podcast space we know and hate are cannibalizing themselves ~ imploding as we speak in epic, disastrous fashion with an online civil war that frankly is the dramedy moment of 2025. Get out the schadenfreude popcorn, the candy, the pretzel. Not sure what you’ve seen happening, but this tsunami rupture is the quake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and TPUSA fumbling miserably to recover. Remarkably, the weight of Charlie’s audience has left them and his own show. (As someone who kept one wary eye on him for years of his grotesque rise, this seems crazy to me to witness.)
It looks like the outrage popularity that used to be solely Trump’s and MAGA’s has almost single-handedly shifted to Candace Owens and her endless grifting conspiracies over Charlie Kirk’s death. She’s acting like she’s the single-handed Warren Commission (fitting, actually) and it’s shocking how much of MAGA has adopted her as their new talking head leader. (Watch her run for POTUS one day, perish the thought.)
Day after day she’s been spinning up conspiracy upon conspiracy into a more massive, more byzantine web of nonsense with a psychotic kind of gusto. The more views she gets into the millions ~ her insanity seems to have no peak or pale it will not go beyond at this point and she’s making a mint (but you’re supposed to forget that part, on top of her marriage to a billionaire). She’s become the new Rogan/Alex Jones face of conspiracy-addled, vomit-hysteria podcasting. Due to the momentum of this, as counter, Erika Kirk has also made a record number of appearances this week and is somewhat trying to ‘stop’ it (meaning her nemesis, Candace) while hitting all the right tonal notes for her book and brand ~ as the Jackie-esque statuesque widow. (Who sells a book mere weeks after their husband’s very public, very brutal slaying ~ and especially if his legacy and friends are being smeared and blamed?? ~ it’s weird.) Especially since Candace’s latest is going hard in the paint that TPUSA were in league with the Israelis to kill Charlie and therefore by default the French secret police too because the Macrons are out to assassinate Candace and she has proof! (~ they sued her for her last smear campaign of ugly lies ~ harping on and on that Brigitte Macron is a man). It’s depressing the amount of people who are buying into this hysteria (MAGA and god knows who else). There’s also the appeal of Candace very publicly accusing a widow and the drama of spectacle. The more Candace’s popularity grows, the more she’s pulling from Trump and Vance because they’re firmly on Erika’s TPUSA side. And the weirder Erika Kirk appears everywhere on TV and at times puts on a kind of acting performance for the cameras, wiping dry tears at times, the more people are believing Candace and her Molotov cocktail stories based on nothing.
This all stems from Candace’s original jump scare right after the assassination that ~ gasp! Charlie was somehow going to turn on Israel (whilst being their #1 champion).
I can tell you why I know that theory to not be true and it involves the popular leftist commentator, Hasan Piker. He had a scheduled highly anticipated debate at Dartmouth against Charlie which was supposed to occur 15 days after Charlie was killed in September. (You were discussing above how the liberals were grasping for a left-side answer in podcasting to the right’s monolithic influence and why it’s not materialized . . . 1) the right has endless dark funds to throw at everything media which is why they own the space; 2) people who take right-wing payouts and patronage have zero scruples so that’s a no-brainer; and 3) no one with influence on the liberal corporate Democrat side is going to tolerate, let alone fund, a firebrand-leftist millennial democratic socialist leading their ranks like Hasan Piker, or Kyle Kulinski, or even Sam Seder, no matter how popular and name-recognizing any of them have become (and growing). It just isn’t happening for the obvious reasons.
But I bring up Hasan’s scheduled (was going to be the third one ~ previous two at Politicon) debate with Charlie because Hasan said that prior to the debate it was understood between them that Charlie would be debating the pro-Israel side of the Palestinian question (among other topics). Hasan has also said that in order to accept this line from Candace that Charlie was going to flip on Israel suddenly, and by extension, his massive Israeli donors, he’d have to be okay with betraying Trump (and his other massive MAGA donors, plus lose all his lucrative funding) so there’s simply no way in hell he was going to do that ~ ever. (Just in the weeks prior, we saw Charlie crumple so cowardly on the Epstein stuff and tell his disgruntled audience about it that he was ‘out’ and following Trump’s ask and not going to discuss it anymore. (Because how could he flip on Israel or Epstein and still be a loyalist?)
Candace thinks her smoking gun is that she released private text convos just 48 hrs prior to the killing showing that Charlie was bitching and unhappy with the pressures he was under supporting Israel and that he’d lost one big donor already for simply hosting Tucker Carlson. He didn’t like being ordered around by them to do their bidding and some other apocryphal stories that Candace regurgitates second or third hand to do with meetings and meltdowns. ~ Regardless of how irritated Charlie was with the Israelis and their methods, or censoring, he was going to have to continue to suck it up ~ or face losing Trump, all his big donors, being in the immediate Trump circle. Hasan is right that Charlie would never, never have jeopardized that.
But Candace managed to tap into her built-in anti-semitic audience who were already supporting her after her firing from the Daily Wire and nasty schism with Ben Shapiro over her growing anti-semitism and friendship with (‘I love Hitler’) Kanye West, &c. I think she even managed to pick up Nick Fuentes’s anti-semitic audience and Tucker’s and so now there’s this massive Israel-hating wave she’s riding from the nationalistic nazified side of the right-wing. (It’s imperative to note that these people pretend to care about the 75 year plight of Palestine but only because it’s momentarily convenient to their America First ideology and not empathy.)
Candace already despised Israel as an anti-semite prior to the events of the past two years so it’s only natural she would see these text conversations and just leap to her next delusional claims for ‘her dear dead friend’ (making fat stacks off his murder) that have *zero* credible evidence backing them.
There’s a lot of grenade-launching right now (and according to Tim Pool ~ shooting at his house ~ Candace’s fault, lol) and lots of right-wing commentator grifters who are gleefully cutting each other’s throats either over Charlie, Candace, TPUSA, Trump, or being ‘outed’ (Nick Fuentes is stabbing everyone, Tim Pool, Tucker, Milo, Benny Johnson, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, &c, &c ~ the list is long ~ too long).
The last thing I’ll say is that anyone who is Mormon or was raised Mormon like me (I left at 15) will tell you that the fact that Tyler Robinson’s family and his bishop turned him into the police is pretty affirming to me that he did it. No Mormon parent would turn their child over willy nilly for nothing and no Mormon parent would ever hide their child for a second who’d committed a crime (let alone an assassination). Mormons uphold honesty to a level that baffles other cultures. Also there’s been conspiracy talk that Tyler’s written commentary online looked somehow unnatural or like AI or the FBI had written it (or something along these lines) ~ and I’ll just say that these people don’t understand how Utah Mormons speak or sound.
Sorry Candace, I’m gonna need much sounder facts than the ‘maroon shirts cult’ Baader-Meinhof nonsense you’re peddling to ever believe Netanyahu ordered the hit on Charlie. Occam’s razor is sound enough for me at the moment. (And I say that as a person who’s done significant JFK research over many years and knows that Oswald was indeed the patsy he professed to be. Not because of wishing or shilling but because of evidence.) At the moment I don’t believe Tyler is a patsy. I believe the note he left was legit (~ despite the ineptitude of the Kash Patel FBI, the Mormons in Utah pride themselves on competence and busy hive bees above all ~ also why a number of them worked for the CIA and in government).
I, for one, will relish it ~ if or simply when ~ Candace ends up with egg on her face. (And let the right wing thieves and liars smash themselves to bits in envy of her sash.) But I suspect that even if she does ~ she’ll continue her new imitation InfoWars game and it won’t matter in the slightest to her cult.
ps) Forgive me for adding more ~ but I forgot to mention above that a lot of this feels surreal to me not just because I was following Charlie before he was well known (and he came and spoke at a church near my children’s school once, California has more conservatives than people realize or acknowledge and I know because I was surrounded by them in my community ~ needless to say, I did not attend, but grimaced at the sign advertising it every time I drove past) but I was born in Provo at Utah Valley Hospital and my younger brother attended Utah Valley University for his two year undergrad (right after serving a 2.5-year LDS mission in Portugal ~ but before transferring to BYU) at the same campus where Charlie was shot. My conservative (very Mormon) sister and I had a conversation recently about these strange facts and the surreal feeling that just like our family moved from Provo to Portland, Oregon much like the news cycle this late summer ~ she was born in Portland on the very day I turned two years old (a year later when I was three we moved to Orange County). Now she works almost daily in the city of Manti’s Mormon temple, and doesn’t much follow the news, so I had to explain to her that there was a movement of inflatable frogs and magical creatures holding a literal stand-off with the national guard in the city she was born, and like UVU, it also had the national attention ~ she had no idea.
Last thing 🙁 ~ right after I left my previous comment and clicked away, I just saw the sad, terrible news that Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered by their own son in L.A.. Since I was just referencing JFK ~ not only did I admire Reiner’s film work so, so much (who doesn’t??), but I also loved his very astute contributions to the well-received ‘Who Killed JFK?’ podcast with Soledad O’Brien which really helped to move the needle again, getting eyes back on solving this long overdue crime. It mattered so much to him and I loved that. I can’t believe this happened to him and his wife. So sad. 🙁 Thanks.
Hi Malinda: Wow. I am greatly impressed at your fortitude in following the right-wing swamp creatures. Have you considered starting a Substack for this kind of material? I don’t have the stomach to watch them. I see only excerpts when something in the mainstream or left-leaning news draws my attention to it.