#blazetv

Will Sommer at The Bulwark:

Can Right-Wing Media Concoct a New Nick Fuentes?

NICK FUENTES’S EFFORTS to co-opt the MAGA movement continue to roil right-wing media, with Donald Trump Jr. becoming the latest right-wing figure to go soft when asked about the infamous white nationalist podcaster. Given Fuentes’s popularity, it was probably only a matter of time before an outlet asked itself: Rather than tying ourselves into knots about this, what if we instead just got our own Nick Fuentes? That’s the logic at the Blaze, the right-wing media outlet founded by Glenn Beck, which has increasingly tilted towards groyperism in its programming. And given the momentum racist and antisemitic figures like Fuentes have in right-wing media right now, I don’t think this will be the last time we will see established conservative publications trying to synthesize their own Fuentes clones. If you can’t beat ’em, recreate ’em. Beck himself all but retired from the Blaze in October, announcing that he will be devoting himself instead to building an AI version of George Washington to offer guided tours of a digital library containing copies of the contents of several “tornado-proof” historical archives Beck has had constructed across the country. The archives’ purpose, among other things, is to prove that some Native American tribes were “bloodthirsty and slave owners.” Beck’s AI Washington will set America’s families straight on that and show that most of “what you were taught in school was . . . a half-truth, or most likely an out-and-out lie.”

And yet, somehow, the Blaze has gotten nuttier without Beck. Last month, it all but accused a former Capitol Police officer of being the January 6th pipe bomber, with the argument resting on a novel investigative method called “gait analysis.” That story looks even worse now: CBS News reported last week that the officer has video evidence proving her innocence and that the FBI has ruled her out as a suspect. But the Blaze wasn’t done there. The site paid far-right commentator Matt Forney—author of sex tourist guide Do the Philippines—to write about H-1B visas, only to can him two days later over his tweets (the Blaze countered that he’d been only a freelancer). It also launched a talk show featuring anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman (alias: “Lomez”), the publisher of Passage Press, which specializes in pre-World War II fascist literature.

But the most interesting figure in the newly groyperfied Blaze has to be John Doyle, a former Fuentes acolyte who has been reinvented by the site as a slightly more palatable take on the groyper king. Last month, the Blaze launched “The John Doyle Show,” wherein Doyle holds forth on important issues, like how Thanksgiving is a “Holiday of Christ and Conquest,” while sitting in front of a statuette of Donald Trump as Buddha.

If you squint, you might think the Blaze had hired Fuentes himself. Doyle is a self-described “white nationalist” who wears a tie, and he has little Fuentes-like quips. Talking about early American colonists shooting off guns on his most recent show, Doyle said, “God forbid white boys get a little goofy.” All of this has been a bit baffling for the Blaze’s traditional audience. “What the hell is happening at The Blaze?” conservative pundit Dave Reaboi posted on X after Doyle’s show launched. But if the Blaze was hoping Doyle would capture some of the Fuentes’s fans, they’ll be sorely disappointed. That’s because, although they appeared alongside each other at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Michigan in November 2020, Doyle and Fuentes are archenemies.

The Bulwark’s Will Sommer hit a home run with this column on how TheBlaze decided to have their own Nick Fuentes equivalent in John Doyle.

ЕЕЕЙ! СВЕЖИЙ ДИВАН С BOOKER(ом) И WARAB(ом). МНЕ КАЖЕТСЯ, Я СТАЛ ЯРЫМ ФАНАТОМ BLAZE’A И ЭТО ОЧЕНЬ ИНТЕРЕСНЫЙ ДИВАН, КАК И КАЖДЫЙ ДИВАН С ФЕДЕЙ.

Will Sommer at The Bulwark:

THE ONLINE RIGHT HAS BEEN SHAKEN this week by a recording that suggests far-right podcaster Elijah Schaffer—one of the biggest proponents of traditional or “trad” family values—may have had an affair. Even more scandalous: that the affair was with his employee Sarah Stock, an e-girl1 and influencer so ostensibly traditional that her marriage was blessed by the pope himself. One MAGA figure has dubbed it the “trad hoe scandal.” Others have said it’s proof you can never trust an “e-girl.” Many more are starting to suspect that their trad heroes may not be so trad after all. To understand how we got here, let’s go back a bit. For much of the past decade, Schaffer has been a regular presence on the far-right conservative media scene, as a podcaster, commentator, and, in his latest incarnation, as CEO of the outlet the RiftTV. Schaffer and various sidekicks would often discuss trad values, of which he—married in 2020 and now the father of two young children—was not just an outspoken supporter but presumably an exemplar. A few months ago, Schaffer took a mysterious month-long absence from his livestreamed show on Rumble, the right-wing video platform. And when he returned last week, on January 26, he looked rough. Schaffer admitted his face was unusually red—he blamed the lights in his new studio—and said he had developed a “permanent black eye” from crushing mental stress that, as he put it, would cause lesser men to commit suicide.

Schaffer certainly had plenty to be stressed about. FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend is suing him for suggesting she’s a Mossad agent. He claimed that people were trying to kill him. But unbeknownst to his listeners, something else was weighing on Schaffer. Despite being one of the digital right’s most vocal boosters of traditional families, he had filed for divorce from his wife four days earlier. Ditching his usual material aimed at whipping up hate toward Indian immigrants and Muslims, Schaffer instead used his return show to launch into a baffling rant straight out of family court. He vowed that he wouldn’t give up his sons “without a few shots fired.” He told his viewers that he wasn’t necessarily speaking metaphorically.

[...] WHY WOULDN’T HE? Schaffer was once a rising star on the right—not as a commentator on trad issues, but as an ad-libbing political loudmouth. His coverage of the 2020 riots in the wake of George Floyd’s murder propelled him into a job hosting a popular show for mentor Glenn Beck’s network, the Blaze. Schaffer’s boozy, racist frat-boy persona was a hit, and it seemed that not even asserting that Mormons like his boss Beck would burn in hell could stop him. He literally was in Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 6th—and saw his stature grow because of it. But in 2022, Schaffer was fired from the Blaze after allegedly groping a coworker. He also provoked another harassment lawsuit against the outlet from his female cohost. This was when he took his trad turn: Schaffer emerged from that initial disgrace by becoming a vocal family man, touting his wife and children frequently on social media, and shaming other influencers who didn’t have strong marriages and households. It worked for a time. But it apparently wasn’t enough to stave off financial trouble for the RiftTV, an online channel Schaffer launched last May. The platform has seen its public staff list dwindle in the last few months. “This job has destroyed me, and I’m not even very popular!” Schaffer said during a January 28 show.

[...] Schaffer’s downfall isn’t just a personal Shakespearean tragedy—a modern adaptation set in the most idiotic corner of our hyper-online world. It also adds fodder to the right’s ongoing civil war. Yiannopoulos, who plays a sort of mythic trickster role in MAGA media, hates white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes. In the hierarchy of the online right, Schaffer is a restless vassal of the far more successful Fuentes—meaning Yiannopoulos can undermine Fuentes by going after Schaffer. (No surprise, then, that in one of the recordings Yiannopoulos releases, there’s discussion about how Schaffer quietly “talks so much shit” about Fuentes out of envy.) But the biggest damage may have been inflicted on the online trad brand as a whole. Conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey complained that the affair demonstrated that women posing as tradwives had become a “fetish” for right-wing men.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon:

Thanks to Elon Musk, most Americans learned earlier this year that MAGA thinks empathy is evil. Cruelty isn’t the problem, the Tesla CEO claimed in an attempt to justify his turn toward authoritarian politics. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” he declared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.

[...]

But I’m not here to debate Musk and Saad’s self-serving delusions. More interesting is that while they have tried to frame this anti-empathy discourse in faux-scientific and masculinized rhetoric, the right’s modern war on empathy really began with a woman. Unlike Saad and Musk, fundamentalist Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey doesn’t see empathy as a failure of evolution. As a creationist who denies the scientific reality of prehistoric dinosaurs, she doesn’t even believe in evolution. And even though she believes the Bible forbids women from being pastors, Stuckey has made it her mission to rewrite the teachings of Jesus so that her savior is a harsh disciplinarian whose “love” has little to do with empathy. Stuckey’s book “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion” came out in late 2024, but the idea for it appears to have originated on a 2022 episode of her popular podcast “Relatable.” She hadn’t yet come up with the catchphrase “toxic empathy” — which, in true trolling style, appropriates the progressive use of the term “toxic” to describe unhealthy and cruel behavior — but her basic argument is right there.

“Feeling too much for someone can blind us to reality,” she argued. “It can cause us to ignore the truth, the objective truth, in favor of how a person feels.” What Stuckey asserts as “objective truth” is anything but: That being gay is wrong, that women are meant to submit to men, that immigrants are dangerous to Americans, that trans identities are illegitimate and that the only meaningful racism in America is “anti-white.” In a sense, she is simply reworking a longstanding argument from the Christian right that kindness and compassion are not what Jesus meant by “love.” To the contrary, true Christian love is what looks, to most people, like beating someone into submission. Denying someone equality or basic dignity, this argument goes, may be painful now, but it supposedly saves them from hell, so hatefulness is actually a deeper form of love.

This line of thought has always been the paper-thin rationale for bigotry and abuse. But Stuckey’s sinister genius was in using her gender to make these tired gambits seem fresh and modern. Everything about “Relatable,” including that try-hard name, is exquisitely designed to invoke a stereotypical feminine softness. The logo’s font is straight out of mid-century woman’s magazine. Stuckey has soft blonde hair and favors pastels in her clothing and decor. Like so many Phyllis Schlafly knock-offs before her, Stuckey has built a career on arguing that women can’t be equal to men. That way, she gets to relish being an ambitious career woman, while enjoying male support — she’s hosted by Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media — that she would never get insisting that women are equal. Stuckey’s ability to package her work as fluffy girl stuff worked well on the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, who presented her to his well-meaning but gullible liberal audience as a harmless church girl whose podcast is the equivalent of a Sunday afternoon ladies brunch. He gushed about her “strong parenting and motherhood and female life element,” portraying her as reaching “younger religious women” with content about “sunscreen and parenting styles and the secret to fixing your period.”

But that’s all nonsense. Stuckey’s “fixing your period” episode, for example, was actually about scaring women into stopping birth control by falsely portraying it as dangerous. Stuckey is just one of many far-right female commentators who have realized that they can use hyper-feminine aesthetics to conceal what would immediately register as dystopian, even fascistic sentiments if they came from a man. But what makes her especially dangerous is that she applies this strategy to the concept of empathy. Whether consciously or not, Stuckey grasps that “empathy” tends to be coded as a feminine virtue. When men attack empathy, it comes across as sexist and condescending. But a woman opposing empathy is counterintuitive. In our era of vibes over facts, that twist makes her message feel more persuasive, especially to those who already are sick of hearing that being mean to other people is bad.

Ed Mazza at HuffPost:

Conservative media personality Glenn Beck is calling on cities to name streets after Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was shot and killed in Utah last week. “We must stop calling Charlie anything other than a civil rights leader,” Beck said on his BlazeTV show. “We need to plant that stake deep.”

He said Kirk was not doing politics but standing up for civil rights. “Make no mistake: Charlie Kirk was a civil rights leader as much as Martin Luther King,” Beck declared. “I’m waiting to see the first city that will make a Charlie Kirk Blvd.” He specifically called on Phoenix, where Kirk’s Turning Point USA headquarters is located, to be the first. “There’s a Martin Luther King Blvd, there should be a Charlie Kirk Blvd,” he said. Beck also said that other “so-called civil rights leaders” of the past few decades are “jokes” and “money hustlers.”

Uh, Mr. Chalky Beck, Charlie Kirk spat on MLK Jr.’s legacy. Kirk should NOT be in the same category as MLK Jr., as one helped our nation (MLK Jr.) and the other divided our nation (Kirk).

I remember Beck fraudulently trying to claim the MLK Jr. mantle a long time ago.

See Also:

RWW: Glenn Beck Says Charlie Kirk Was A Civil Rights Leader, Just Like MLK

From the 09.12.2025 edition of BlazeTV's The Glenn Beck Program:

Ben Smith at Semafor:

A conservative American media company has fired one of the YouTubers implicated in an alleged Russian influence operation exposed by the US Department of Justice this week. “Lauren Chen was an independent contractor, whose contract has been terminated,” Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon said in an email to Semafor.

Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan, are the co-founders of Tenet Media, a previously obscure media company that paid eye-popping sums to right-wing influencers to produce videos that echoed Russian propaganda and other right-wing talking points, according to an indictment. She also contributed videos to BlazeTV, an arm of Blaze Media, which was founded by the former Fox News host and talk radio figure Glenn Beck, which was not mentioned in Wednesday’s indictment. The two Americans were also not named in the indictment, which instead charged two Russians associated with the state-owned Russia Today with money laundering and violating foreign influence laws.

Blaze Media issues pink-slip to Lauren Chen, who was named in a DOJ investigation on Russian propaganda.