Blazing Saturdays (1)

Being the first in a series of structural analyses about how American right-wing authoritarian propaganda works

The Blaze is not one of those hip and happening wingnut media platforms you learn about while reading news reports of meltdowns of some strange influencer-du-jour. It’s for the normies—and is thus more influential and dangerous. Inaugurated in 2012 by Glenn Beck, shortly after his exit from Fox News, it soon earned some 300,000 subscribers paying an average of $100 annually to access it, launching Beck onto the Hollywood Reporter’s Digital Power 50 list. Now, as a free site, it claims to reach 165 million a month—certainly an exaggeration, though the trade magazine Talkers reports his daily radio rants reach some 8.75 million listeners diaily, the fourth largest such audience in the nation.

The Blaze is the right-wing outlet I follow most closely to track what propaganda is currently poisoning the minds of the kind of people who might prefer to see you and me dead or in camps. One reason is its power within the Trump administration. Day-to-day operations are run by a former principle of the Claremont Institute, MAGA’s most influential think tank. (Claremont exists, as one of its fellows put it, to fight the “More than half” of Americans who “are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”) For an example of its influence, Blaze recently claimed to have identified the bomber of the Democratic and Republican National Committees on January 6, 20021, when law enforcement could not, via “gait analysis.” Promptly, “bomb sniffing dogs, agents in tact al gear, and even a helicopter” descended upon the home an entirely innocent person—a former Capitol place officer, naturally, and thereby someone obviously…wicked.

That is what the Blaze does: constructing an unfathomably wicked they to despise, and a perfectly innocent us to unquestioningly identify with, while inoculating MAGAites against any possible doubt that this is way the world works, the better to keep them all hating in the same direction—full stop. Here, every week, we will be studying how that infantilizing work is achieved. Today, we’ll lay out the half dozen or so basic narrative elements. In future installments, we’ll dig down deeper into them individually.

The first element—the ground-state underlying the rest—is a picture of the world as an unmitigated hellhole, in which normal people like you are incessantly beset by inconceivable cruelty, stupidity, cupidity, and preventable harm from the wicked.

From the small things—

(When miscreants are non-white, but only then, the Blaze always provides a helpful photo.)

—to things inconceivably vast.

(Just asking questions!!)

These are items that led three email blasts on the same day, April 12, 2026.

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A Blaze subgenere upholds the sacred principle that politics—all politics—is a pitiless war against all against all, to the death, brooking no comprise, but one where, every accusation being a progression, the Enemy, as institutionalized in the Democratic Party and the Deep State, always starts the fights, because they bottomlessly venal and conscience-less. They are also endlessly resourceful. The Blaze especially love exposing these devils’ most brazen trick: claiming to be enforcing the so-called “Law.”

Another subgrengre of Blaze post expresses gratitude at the Good Guys, stalwart, valorous, tireless, who are always on the case, against impossible odds.

Again, in ways both large—

—and small, armed vigilantism by homeowners against miscreant who picked “the wrong guy” to “mess around with,” sometimes including pictures of these heroes, if Caucasian, being among the most important Blaze subgenres.

Another subgenere tells stories about why Christianity is always the answer, because Christians, by definition, are never wrong:

…and so it is crucial to ever lift up those heroes with the courage to witness for the Lord even in spite of the terrible risks they face doing so, in this demon-haunted world. Especially when they are Black, the better for the Blazers to prove they are not, perish the thought, racist:

Another crucial genre scares people about the current bestiary of Enemies. Muslims, always….

(Don’t think sticking in a shot of her blonde interrogator is any kind of accident.).

…and, these days, often, China:

A more subtle vector of their propaganda performs what I call, in my forthcoming book, the right’s “epistemological narcissism.” In brief, this gengre treats any given “woke” outrage as inherently universally despised—by “normal” people, that is; which is an important way they teach readers how to recognize those outside their circle of human concern (including the majority of Americans who “are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term”).

This represents one of the most important cognitive patterns in authoritarian community formation: claims like, according to a complaint to the pollster George Gallup heard in the 1950s, "“If you took a true poll of the American people…you would find them over 95% for Senator McCarthy,” or, in the words of the MyPillow guy in 2023, “This country is 70% red, and it’s getting redder all the way” if “you remove all the garbage and all the corruption.”

Nnote the simplicity framing: all Disney fans. All of social media. (If you remove all the gargbage and the corruption.) Even Hollywood!

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Two final subgenres and I think I’ll have covered all the bases.

Enemies, in the authoritarian imagination, are ever framed as self-evidently Evil, friends as self-evidently Good. These designations are treated as if they go back to time immemorial and extend permanently into the future, as if chiseled to stone. Eurasia has always been at war with East Asia, as George Orwell had it in 1984—until, for reasons of the ordinary flux of reality, situations change. Sometimes, an authoritarian outlet like this, often responding to signals from on high, has to deal with the possibility that former friends must be jettisoned, or even cast as permanent enemies, if only to maintain credibility with even the most credulous observers in the face of un-ignorable changes on the ground.

So it is that, often, trial balloons are sent up. More and more, these have involved Israel, especially as evidence increasingly emerges of IDF soldiers desecrating Christian symbols and sites. The Blazers must be watching reaction to posts like this very carefully, to figure out whether a longtime bedrock of Christian conservative identity—idolatrous worship of the Jewish state—must be pitched over the side.

I’ll be on the lookout for these trial balloons. They can be the best early warnings of an Orwellian memory hole about to open up.

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The final category of Blaze item is the most fascinating: the didactic stuff. Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect has written about a principle articulated by heroic social-democratic prime minster of Sweden, Olef Palme. In Swedish, it is, “Politik är att tjata.” Kuttner noted, “The phrase can be literally rendered as ‘Politics is pestering,’ but with more positive connotations…. According to Palme’s former colleague Allan Larsson, you could loosely translate Palme’s dictum as Politics is teaching.”

I raise a negative connotation to politics as teaching. Our American authoritarians are so, so much better at an undemocratic version of it: tutoring their authoritarian followers how to process cognitive dissonance when authoritarianism fails. At denuding the dangerous doubts of acolytes in the face of information that threatens to collapse their whole rigid, rickety system of loyalty. Rush Limbaugh was particularly good at this: at taking care of callers who had a hard time making sense of something a liberal—the Enemy—said, because it sounded attractive to them. (To an anguished caller the day after Barack Obama’s announcement at his first speech to a joint session of Congress that the stimulus he had just signed into law would give 95% of wage-earners a significant tax cut: “Pay no attention to what Obama says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says in irrelevant.”) Con men consider that skill the most important part of their craft: “cooling the mark out”—managing their potentially dangerous rage in the face of the realization that they have been conned.

Here’s a recent textbook example from the Blaze, with many more to come.

Here's a link, if you care to delve into her “best Catholic response.” Meanwhile, see you next Saturday, same Blazing day, same Blazing channel.