Republicans Are Realizing the Limits of Their Propaganda

America has always been a land of conspiracy theories, as they bleed into every corner of our partisan polity and are intrinsic to our culture, but no one has created a billion-dollar industry for it like Republicans have. The political legend is that in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s impeachment, future Fox News head honcho Roger Ailes and his conservative compatriots supposedly believed that with a conservative media, Nixon would never have been impeached, and so they set off to build a fictional counter-narrative for political purposes. The spirit of this story is directionally correct, but the timeline is off. A few years before Richard Nixon’s impeachment, Ailes wrote a memo titled “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News,” proving they were plotting this takeover long before The Washington Post ended the career of a conservative generation’s wildly corrupt Chosen One.

“People are lazy,” wrote Ailes in 1970. “With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.” This is effectively the mission statement of a generation of conservative propaganda ranging from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to Alex Jones to Tim Pool to Candace Owens to Charlie Kirk. Just substitute YouTube, Twitter and podcasts to update it for our modern era targeting America’s laziest thinkers like Joe Rogan. Like the apparatus that Ailes and his allies built from the 1970s onward, this modern bullshit distribution system captured our politics and helped the GOP win big electoral victories. Someone like Christopher Rufo, who in past, more TV-centric years, would just be another big dumb baby online, has now amassed immense power in the presidential palace thanks to being a big dumb baby online. His crusade against American universities manifested into a full-scale war by the Trump administration on all forms of knowledge in an attempt to realize the dreams of cynical Republican operatives like Rufo and Ailes, that disingenuous conservative propaganda be the only truth in this world.

But now Rufo and others on the right with ambitions beyond the next grift are starting to realize that when the whole world is teeming with bullshit, no one comes out of it smelling like a rose.

Rufo sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Rufo reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

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— Max Berger (@maxberger.bsky.social) December 10, 2025 at 6:46 PM

This plea was made in response to the MechaHitler site enabling location information for accounts, which revealed that practically all the MAGAPatriot17761488 posters with hot people’s avatars and tens or hundreds of thousands of followers are mostly based in countries like Nigeria, India and Bangladesh. The backdrop to what Rufo is concerned about is the Charlie Kirk assassination—not because these Republicans in power have demonstrated any care for a murdered man whose funeral they shot fireworks off at while giving Trump a WWE-style Goldberg entrance—but because the digital lie machine they built is doing what it is designed to do. And now that it has defeated the left, it is coming for them.

“For figures such as Candace Owens, however, the assassination was something much more elaborate: a conspiracy involving traitors within Kirk’s organization, the Israeli intelligence services, French special forces soldiers, Egyptian airplanes, and elements within federal law enforcement,” whined Rufo in a Substack post today. “While the Right has long had a conspiratorial streak, such narratives have usually been restricted to marginal newsletters or ham radio broadcasts. By contrast, on X, they generate enough controversy and spectacle to become the day’s top headline.”

Rufo is learning how capitalism dictates that the insatiable hunger of the content beast supersedes any kind of broadly coordinated partisan strategy, and operatives like him who have peddled their own baseless lies in the past, like Haitian Americans eating cats and dogs, are now realizing that the monster they created is beyond their control. They really thought they were the masters of the universe one year ago today.

As someone who has been in this game for years, I understand that there’s rules to this shit. A wise man even once wrote a manual—a step by step booklet for you to get your game on track, not your wig pushed back—and Republicans violated one of its most sacred commandments. I know Chris Rufo has heard this before: Never get high on your own supply.

One year ago, they thought Twitter was the tip of their spear to spread their propaganda far and wide, now Rufo is writing “Maybe they can reform or even eliminate monetization, which seems to have done more harm than good.” This is in reference to the perverse incentive structure created by apartheid South Africa’s preeminent ketamine enthusiast on the MechaHitler site. Musk’s vision to share ad revenue with his users has created an economy on Twitter where all you have to do is get views, and you get money. And as we all know, on the internet, truth is one of the worst ways to get views and make money. Rufo thought he could use this propaganda to force the American populace to believe that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio, but now it’s splitting the GOP in half with Candace Owens’ Charlie Kirk conspiracies intertwining with backlash to the Israel lobby that is aiding the rise of literal Nazi Nick Fuentes amidst collapsing poll numbers for Trump while job growth threatens to turn negative. The circular firing squad on the right is almost in place and Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is fleeing from it to be the first to rat on everyone to Vanity Fair. Great job folks!

The MechaHitler site is also realizing the limits of its “fuck you, outright lies are our business model now” strategy, as purveyors of knowledge like academics and journalists abandoning the site en masse has degraded its reputation among advertisers to the point where they are begging for us to come back.

Elon’s little serfs are quite literally begging journalists to come back because every publicly available source of data shows people have fled the platform and young people won’t use it.

They are literally begging regular people to come back. Don’t do it! It is a website by and for actual Nazis!

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— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) December 14, 2025 at 6:27 PM

No, fuck you. Die slowly. I am waiting to pop a bottle of champagne on the day the banks buy this “barely breaking even” nightmare from this deadbeat dad for a penny. All of you still working there and circling the drain are complicit and should go get a real job.

And make no mistake, Twitter is dying. People hopelessly addicted to it like Matt Yglesias will claim that it’s important to post your thoughts about overturning the 14th Amendment to an algorithm designed to hide every post to the left of Adolf Hitler because Twitter is the supposed American town square or something, but there are surely more real people arguing under AI shrimp Jesus photos on Facebook than Americans posting on the MechaHitler site these days. Twitter isn’t the town square—it’s never peaked above being used by about 1 in 5 people and now is a shrinking elite echo chamber run by a Nazi who’s trying to turn all of its users into Nazis, and young people are abandoning it. Twitter is so anathema to America’s youth that they are even willing to visit the Millennial and Gen X retirement home at Reddit before venturing out to the Nazi bar.

Teens turn to a variety of online platforms, but YouTube continues to stand out. Roughly nine-in-ten teens report ever using it. TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are the next most widely used platforms.

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— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch.org) December 16, 2025 at 10:30 AM

Even the conservatives like Bari Weiss and David Ellison trying to enact Ailes’ 1970 memo to the letter of the law on TV are broadcasting into the void. We have been told by the biggest mediocrities mankind has ever produced this past year that The Free Press is some supposed innovator in driving the national conversation forward and its model will be used to revive CBS, but when its creator and Editor-in-Chief of CBS News put on a Town Hall with Charlie’s wife Erika Kirk (side note: why is the EIC of CBS News on TV?), Bari Weiss encountered what conservative media has been met with time and time again when they take their whiny disingenuous babybrained bullshit to the masses. No one gives a fuck.

“During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data,” reported Variety on the kind of advertisers who showed up for Bari Weiss’ hour of self-flagellating failure this past weekend. “Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.”

“Based on Nielsen’s final ratings,” reported The Independent, “the Erika Kirk sitdown declined 11 percent in total viewership compared to the network’s standard programming in that time slot year to date – and was down 41 percent in the key demo.” Again, no one gives a fuck!

Conservatives thought the 2024 election was their great generational triumph over the culture—the moment they had hoped to realize as soon as the backlash to the sexual revolution and Civil Rights Movement mounted—but 2025 revealed that perhaps the biggest lesson of that election is how Rufo, Weiss and all the other brainstems on the right have violated Bigge’s fourth crack commandment. All that bullshit they were peddling to their followers about how they and their billionaire backers are the actual silent majority in America? Guess what folks, they actually believed it! Now conservatives are in power, and their followers want them to do something about all this bullshit they’ve sold them on. But they can’t, because it’s bullshit! It’s not real! They’re trapped by the tangible consequences of their own lust for power. This is yet another classic lesson in why you never get high on your own supply.

Putting aside how the party is primarily used as a tool of the capitalist class to steal from the rest of the country, modern American conservatism isn’t a governing ideology. At best it’s a capitalist smash and grab operation when in power, but it can only really become popular when it is outside the halls of power, because it is an insurgency predicated on soft keyboard warriors like Chris Rufo and tryhard shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh writing checks their asses can’t cash when they get called up to the big leagues. People are not eating cats and dogs, but it’s a lot easier to sell that fiction when you can whine that the all-powerful Brandon is stopping you from finding out The Real Truth (which you can get for only four easy payments of $19.99!). When you’re in the ultimate seat of power, there is no one left to blame, and while conservatives have been trained to be very very stupid by conservative media, Trump’s 180-degree reversal on the Epstein documents that fateful July 4th weekend proved that even Trump voters have their limits.

The conservative propaganda complex is crumbling under the weight of its own hubris and is now eating itself alive, and its architects ranging from Chris Rufo to everyone still loyal to the ketamine king at MechaHitler Inc. can see it. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week found Trump at 39% job approval among Americans. A Gallup poll from two weeks ago had it at 36%, while a recent AP-NORC poll found that just 31% of adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy, his all-time low for either term. This is a failed war for America’s hearts and minds, not even a year into its rule. And this is before the impact of Trump’s trade war really has hit to any widespread degree outside the farm economy it pushed into a recession. It’s only begun to show up in pockets in the economic figures since about the late summer, and they all trend towards stagflation.

The last three Republican presidents all left office with a trail of vast economic destruction in their wake. Americans have a fictional picture of what Republicans are like in their heads, in large part thanks to the success of the conservative propaganda complex built by Ailes and sustained by his shitposter successors, but every time in my life that we have elected a Republican, we subsequently turn hard towards a Democrat and wonder why we were ever so stupid. If not for Joe Biden going all Brandon on everyone, perhaps we would have elected three consecutive two-term Democratic presidencies in the wake of every Republican-led recession since 1991 (every recession save for one has taken place under a GOP president going back to the Eisenhower Recession).

The secret sauce to the conservative propaganda complex before the age of MechaHitler was that it positioned itself as a cultural minority—a so-called silent majority dog chasing a car and inviting others to join it. Chasing cars is fun! A lot more fun than driving one, that’s for sure. But Rufo’s generation is the dog that caught the car, and they appointed themselves demigods of America because an estimated 19 million 2020 Joe Biden voters didn’t show up in 2024. Less than a year after what they perceived as a mandate from heaven, their conservative project is failing, with its followers on their propaganda site doing the only thing that Republican operatives like Chris Rufo have trained them to do: be extremely skeptical of those in power.