America’s New Media Minutemen

In the early days of the American Revolution, ragtag bands of local militias known as the Minutemen (famed for being ready “at a minute’s notice”) formed the backbone of the patriot cause. By taking full advantage of their decentralized command structure and ability to rapidly deploy wherever they were needed, the Minutemen kept the American experiment alive in the face of a far larger and better-equipped foe determined to crush it.

Today the United States is experiencing a new movement within its media ecosystem (which includes, of course, men and women) that embodies the ethos of the Minutemen from two and a half centuries ago. As the legacy corporate press, along with Big Tech social media companies, continue to unquestioningly parrot the approved narrative of the political establishment, including the censoring of news that they disapprove of politically, a new cast of figures that includes names like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Bari Weiss, Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, Matt Taibbi, Lee Smith, Megyn Kelly, Robert Malone, Dana Loesch, and others are rising to bring news and commentary unsanctioned by the ruling class to the whole country.

With each successive effort from the corporate media to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people, this new class of “New Media Minutemen” are there to fact-check and debunk the lies and misdirection. These voices were the first to break with the mainstream view on issues like pandemic lockdowns, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and rampant waste and fraud in U.S. aid to Ukraine. In each case, they have been completely vindicated.

The public hunger for alternatives to traditional media sources is obvious in polling data. Trust in the mass media remains near historic lows (just 34 percent of U.S. adults have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media, compared to 72 percent who said the same in 1976) and, astonishingly, nearly half of Americans believe national news outlets intentionally mislead them.

Given the explicit, politically motivated narrative engineering that defines the mainstream media’s coverage of important events – or their refusal to cover those events entirely – it’s easy to see why millions of people are turning elsewhere for their information.

On July 31, for instance, the day that Hunter Biden business associate Devon Archer testified before Congress in the probe into the Biden family’s business dealings, CNN and MSNBC mentioned former President Donald Trump 759 times, while mentioning Archer just 48 times. Over just the past few years, the media –in blatant collusion with Big Tech, the Democrat establishment, and career bureaucrats throughout the federal government, including White House officials – lied about the Russiagate hoax, Hunter Biden laptop scandal, COVID-19, the 2020 BLM riots, and a host of other major news stories.

This escalating series of falsehoods and deceptions has supercharged the popularity of voices calling the mainstream media to account and offering their own unvarnished, unfiltered take on what’s actually going on in the world.

One of the first and still most prominent voices in this space is Joe Rogan, a former UFC color commentator and TV host whose podcast The Joe Rogan Experience boasts more than 11 million viewers per episode – a number that more than quadruples the highest rated cable news shows.

Since starting the podcast in 2009, Rogan has hosted guests ranging from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to tech scion Elon Musk and rapper Post Malone. Although politics is not the focus of the show and Rogan himself can hardly be described as a conservative, he has been outspoken in his belief that President Joe Biden is suffering from dementia and has said there is “so much evidence” Biden is corrupt.

Following his ouster from Fox News, Tucker Carlson has taken his show to Twitter, where it has garnered more than double the views on average that his old Fox News spot did. In one episode last week, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund revealed shocking new details about what really happened during the January 6 riot – details that Carlson has said Fox News actively prevented from airing.

Another former Fox News host, Megyn Kelly, has also launched a successful independent show, The Megyn Kelly Show, with 1.39 million YouTube subscribers.

In other cases, independent-minded journalists have started their own outlets like The Blaze and The Daily Caller (which Carlson had a hand in founding) to challenge mainstream narratives.

Perhaps the greatest disrupter in the establishment media landscape is The Daily Wire, co-founded by political commentator Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing. Shapiro and Boreing were pioneers in utilizing social media to build their brand, and Daily Wire-affiliated content routinely dominates the top-10 most viewed posts on Facebook.

In addition to popular political podcasts like The Matt Walsh Show and The Michael Knowles Show, The Daily Wire has also released full-length feature films and is investing $100 million in kids’ tv. Because the company operates largely on a subscription-based model, they are far less beholden to advertisers and corporate interests, which has allowed for the production of provocative content like Walsh’s What is a Woman? which asks tough questions about the transgender movement that even most other conservative outlets won’t touch.

Along with the high-profile players, there are countless other individuals who make up the ranks of America’s New Media Minutemen. Take, for instance, the anonymous Twitter users who write and verify community notes fact-checking a media outlet’s lies on the platform – something only made possible by Elon Musk, who has also played a crucial role in exposing media dishonesty.

Evidence that the influence of the traditional media over the national conversation is waning while the power of new alternative media sources is on the rise is everywhere.

Perhaps the clearest example of this in politics is the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. phenomenon. Despite the fact that the mainstream media alternates between refusing to mention his name and intentionally misrepresenting his views, the 69-year-old has become a sensation on social media and is polling at 15 percent against Biden for the 2024 Democrat primary.

The fact that Donald Trump is dominating the Republican primary contest and now leads Joe Biden in many hypothetical 2024 matchup polls, notwithstanding four politically driven indictments against him in four legal jurisdictions, is undeniably more evidence that Americans are turning to new sources of information. Since 2016, the mainstream narrative has been that Trump is a racist authoritarian hell-bent on destroying American democracy. That Trump got 75 million votes in 2020 and might now be more popular than ever, even with indictments piling up, is a clear sign that voters simply don’t believe the legacy press, and understand that the Trump prosecutions are purely partisan in nature.

Meanwhile, in pop culture, phenomena like the recent stunning box-office success of Sound of Freedom and the new chart-busting popularity of populist anthems like “Rich Men North of Richmond” and “Try That in a Small Town” are more data points that suggest that the voices promoting such content – together with so many of their brethren in traditional talk radio like Mark Levin, Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, Mike Gallagher, Dana Loesch,  and many others – are more influential than perhaps they themselves even realize.

America’s New Media Minutemen have already proven that they can compete with the traditional media giants for the public’s attention. The question in the years ahead will be if they have the ability, like their forefathers so many generations ago, to sustain their revolution and help create a new media system that better serves the American people and is more likely to “effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @ShaneHarris513.