WATCH: Liberals are completely losing their minds



BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales didn’t previously have high hopes for liberals like Don Lemon, Nancy Pelosi, or Leslie Jones — but recent comments the three have made have set her expectations even lower.

“The other thing that the internet is really good for are videos of liberal losers,” Gonzales says before playing a clip of Lemon “hinting at a potential run for president.”

“I think I could be president of the United States,” Lemon said. “I could definitely run this country better than Donald Trump.”

“As an independent, though, there would be a hard time for me to run for anything because, you know, the way the system is set up, I’d have to choose a side. And so, you know, I probably would have to become a Democrat,” Lemon concluded.


Gonzales is amused.

“He would have to become a Democrat. That is hilarious. ... This criminal, whose only accomplishment is terrorizing churchgoers, thinks for one second that he could be president,” she says.

And Pelosi’s comments weren’t much better.

“We always have concerns, but with this president and these Republicans who have no commitment to the rule of law and doing things the appropriate way, we’re ready. We have to be on guard as to what they may try to do to the technology,” Pelosi said in an interview on MS NOW.

“They may try to creep into the technology and create a false count,” she added.

“Oh, interesting, because back in my day, if you even mentioned that voting machines could be hacked, you would be sued into oblivion. So, it’s a very interesting turn of events to hear Nancy Pelosi admit that that was possible,” Gonzales comments, before turning her attention to former SNL cast member Leslie Jones.

“She, in all her brilliance, decided that marriage is slavery,” she says, playing a clip of Jones on Ziwe’s podcast.

“I think marriage is legalized slavery,” Jones stated.

“If he’s expecting you to be a trad wife, he might as well pull out a whip and a chain,” she continued.

Jones went on to advise the young audience not to get married.

“Obviously, trad wives, the trade-off is that their husbands are out working, and they get to stay home. It’s actually a total blessing. Women love that if they are in a position where they are able to do that,” Gonzales comments.

“But I’m not even convinced that Leslie Jones is a woman after hearing her speak. So, maybe that’s why she doesn’t quite get it,” she adds.

Why nationwide No Kings protests literally don't matter: ‘Extremely bleak for them’



No Kings protests have been popping up all over the country in protest of President Trump and the United States’ involvement in the Iran war, and of course, the mainstream media has covered these protesters as if they’re a real force to be reckoned with.

However, BlazeTV host John Doyle attended one of the protests in Dallas and explains that the reality on the ground tells a much different story.

“If you Google it, ‘No Kings 2026,’ there are all of these leftist outlets — be those local, national, even on CNN, MSNBC, all the usual suspects — trying to just put all of this out there, put the imagery out there, to let people know that this is definitely a thing that is very real and very threatening and certainly happening,” Doyle says on “The John Doyle Show.”


“The people who actually mobilize and show up to these Democrat quote-unquote ‘protests,’ these are the revolutionary class. This is an inherently sort of kinetic group of people, which is to say a people who are motivated almost chiefly by resentment against just normal American patriots,” he continues.

Doyle explains that these protesters also “always need to be out on the streets causing problems, feeling as though they are pushing back against some force.”

“It is this kind of 'Handmaid’s Tale' LARP for them. They really do enjoy the interaction with law enforcement, feeling as though they’re being freaking persecuted,” he says.

And the visuals Doyle caught at the protest in Dallas only prove his point.

“It’s extremely, extremely bleak for them,” he says, before showing a picture of one of the protesters.

“It was this extremely obese creature, and it was occupying a mobility scooter, like how you see at Walmart. And there was a sign mounted on the mobility scooter … that said ‘#FreakingNoKings,’” Doyle recalls.

“And then you have old people and then foreign people and then foreign old people, and everybody’s dying. It’s like, what? I’m not intimidated. I’m not even having fun. I just feel bad. I used to go in there and felt like I was in a lion’s den, you know? Do a little sparring with the people who want me killed,” he continues.

“I had a smile on my face, a pep in my step. You’ve all seen it. I just felt bad,” he says.

Want more from John Doyle?

To enjoy more of the truth about America and join the fight to restore a country that has been betrayed by its own leaders, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

‘The level of mistrust runs too deep’: Auron MacIntyre’s warning to establishment conservatives



A growing identity crisis is shaking the conservative movement, as longtime tensions between grassroots audiences and establishment voices boil over in our increasingly digital age.

According to BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre, the chaos is driven by years of mistrust built first between the mainstream media and their own audiences, and now between conservative institutions and their audiences.

“To say that the conservative movement has come off the rails would comically understate the damage,” MacIntyre begins.

“Plenty of commentators blame podcasts for this new disorder, and the new ecosystem gives them no shortage of bad behavior to cite. But that diagnosis misses the deeper cause,” he says, pointing out that the “deeper cause” is, conservatives are now replicating the legacy media’s attitude toward their listeners.


“Establishment conservatives treated their audience the same way the legacy press did: as a resource to be managed, manipulated, and occasionally milked. A movement that spent decades being lied to will not be stitched back together by scolding the people who finally stopped listening,” MacIntyre says.

“Democrats screamed about disinformation, warned about the dangers of free speech, and then launched research projects designed to replicate what they claimed to hate. The right cheered the upheaval. Establishment conservatives, however, never fully grasped what the shift meant for them,” he continues.

“Trump didn’t rise only as a battering ram against progressive media. He rose as a middle finger to conservative establishment media as well. That plan worked and then kept working in ways that many people didn’t anticipate,” he adds.

Now, MacIntyre explains, “conservative gatekeepers” are mimicking the “panicked reflexes the left showed” as they accuse others of “dangerous rhetoric,” call for “deplatforming,” and ask for “responsible voices to regain control.”

“These instincts never belong to one ideology. They belong to institutions that sense their monopoly slipping away,” he says.

Now, MacIntyre is warning conservatives that they “can’t lecture podcast audiences about responsible broadcasting after years of manipulating their own viewers.”

“The level of mistrust runs too deep. Censorship will fail too. Shaming and platform policing didn’t rebuild credibility for Democrats, and it’s not going to rebuild credibility for Republicans, either,” he adds.

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist's commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

After Rush Limbaugh, conservatives stopped listening together



Last month marked five years since Rush Limbaugh’s death. Tributes still appear on schedule. Clips circulate. Familiar phrases — “talent on loan from God,” “doctor of democracy,” “half my brain tied behind my back” — resurface. Every so often his opening theme slides into a feed, and people pause longer than they expect.

That reaction says something.

Rush can’t be replaced because the habits that made him possible have largely disappeared.

When life felt unsteady, Rush stayed fixed.

For millions of Americans, his voice arrived at the same hour each afternoon as institutions shifted, headlines fractured, and the culture argued with itself. Agreement was never universal. But steadiness was.

The music still plays. Rush does not.

Five years later, the absence still feels different — in a way modern media can’t quite explain.

When talk show legend Johnny Carson retired in 1992, late-night TV didn’t disappear. It divided. Some viewers followed Jay Leno, who succeeded Carson at NBC. Others moved to CBS with David Letterman. Then the format split again, louder and more elaborate with each successor.

Late-night evolved. It never recovered the King of Late Night’s reach.

By today’s standards, Carson looks almost minimalist: a desk, a band, conversation allowed to breathe. Parents ended evenings there after the kids went to bed. The show closed the day not through spectacle but familiarity.

Rush occupied a different hour but understood his medium just as completely.

As broadcasting technology advanced and competitors added panels, simulcasts, and digital bells and whistles, Rush’s formula barely changed. Behind the golden EIB microphone sat one prepared voice, a “stack of stuff,” and three hours shaped not by focus groups but conviction.

Some days funny. Some days angry. Always patriotic. Sometimes wounded or reflective — even nostalgic.

Listeners heard it when Rush entered rehab in 2003. They heard it again when he announced his cancer diagnosis in 2020. They followed professional triumphs and personal failures, marriages that ended, and later the unexpected joy when he met Kathryn Rogers and married her in 2010. They heard the frustration and adaptation that followed the loss of his hearing.

The humanity never weakened the authority. It reinforced it.

Rush spoke from belief, and listeners found him.

He often said he never set out to build a network of hundreds of stations or reach millions of listeners. His goal was simpler: Be the best broadcaster he could be. Not an alternative. Not a counterpoint. The best at articulating what made America exceptional — and at exposing ideas that threatened it.

The audience followed.

For many people, the show unfolded alongside responsibilities that never paused for politics. For years — through hospital visits, surgical waiting rooms, doctor’s appointments, and pharmacy runs with my wife — Rush kept me company more hours than almost anyone outside my family.

He didn’t interrupt my life. He traveled alongside it.

That relationship is difficult to recreate because modern media now works in reverse. Voices don’t wait to be found; they chase attention. Commentary arrives instantly, tailored to preference and consumed in fragments measured in seconds.

Everyone now broadcasts. No one gathers.

Earlier media required commitment. If you missed Carson, you missed him. When “Seinfeld” was new, millions tuned in at the same hour because there wasn’t an alternative. The next morning’s conversations assumed a shared experience. Rush worked the same way. If you tuned away, the broadcast kept going.

Today almost nothing is truly missed. Everything can be replayed, clipped, streamed, or summarized. Convenience replaced anticipation. Access replaced commitment.

We gained availability and lost presence.

After Rush, commentary didn’t decline. It multiplied. Humor migrated here, outrage there, analysis somewhere else — across podcasts, streaming platforms, and social media personalities.

But coherence thinned.

Audiences scattered into niches large enough to sustain influence but too fragmented to create shared trust. Rush succeeded during one of the last eras when millions practiced the discipline of listening together long enough for familiarity to become confidence.

RELATED: We don’t have to live this way

Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

For conservatives especially, that steadiness mattered. As cultural institutions treated them with ridicule or dismissal, Rush spoke directly to listeners who felt talked about rather than spoken to.

He didn’t echo what people wanted to hear. He anchored them in what needed to be said. He didn’t flatter them. He reasoned with them. He laughed with them. Sometimes he challenged them.

Recognition replaced alienation.

Five years later, the lingering absence shows what was actually lost.

We didn’t lose commentary, Lord knows. We lost a shared reference point.

Rush can’t be replaced because the habits that made him possible have largely disappeared. Shared listening gave way to individualized feeds. Discipline yielded to distraction. Voices rise quickly now, but few endure long enough to be tested.

The spinning never stopped. We just lost the fixed point.

The question five years later isn’t who replaces Rush Limbaugh. He’s irreplaceable. The question is whether a culture trained to scroll still possesses the discipline to listen long enough for trust to form again.

Because Rush was never simply something Americans heard. He was something they chose.

Disney’s ‘Gay Days’ are canceled. Don’t pop the champagne just yet.



After 35 years, the future of Disney’s “Gay Days” looks grim. The group that organizes the event announced that shifting hotel agreements and the loss of key sponsors forced it to cancel the celebration in 2026. Organizers still urge gay fans to visit the parks on the usual dates and wear themed attire, but the coordinated celebration appears headed for a quiet end.

Whatever happens next, one point matters: Evangelical Christians tried to cancel Gay Days with on-again, off-again boycotts for decades. What finally wounded the LGBTQ leviathan was not conservative activism, but cultural apathy.

Apathy does not mean Americans suddenly disapproved of Disney’s agenda. It means normal people stopped granting it the honor of a fight.

I remember the first wave of evangelical pushback as Disney began signaling support for homosexual lifestyles in the 1990s. Conservatives already watched pop culture coarsen through music, movies, and video games, yet they still treated Disney as a family-friendly institution aimed at children. That is why it shocked them to see the company behind “Snow White” and “Cinderella” host celebrations of homosexuality and extend benefits to same-sex partners long before the Supreme Court imposed gay marriage on the country.

Evangelical denominations answered with a strangely inconsistent boycott. One year, the Southern Baptist Convention urged members to avoid Disney; the next year, churches showed up for Night of Joy, Disney’s Christian music festival.

When Gay Days began in 1991, gay marriage remained deeply unpopular. “Will & Grace” had not worked its magic on the popular imagination, and politicians such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still felt compelled to posture as defenders of traditional marriage as late as 2008. If any moment favored a decisive cultural rebuke, that was it. Christians offered sloppy, intermittent resistance, while Disney only leaned harder.

From park to propaganda

Disney’s support for homosexuality moved from park celebrations and employee benefits into its entertainment. Progressive messaging crept into television shows and movies until the woke revolution turned it into a flood. “The Little Mermaid” became black, gay couples kissed in “Star Wars,” and diverse girlbosses dominated Marvel. As acceptance of gay marriage shifted from taboo to required corporate orthodoxy, Disney replaced entertainment with propaganda.

The company then collided with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) after Florida moved to restrict the mutilation of children and limit the amount of LGBTQ messaging pumped into public schools. Legislation that the press laughably branded “don’t say gay” sent leftists into a panic. Executives called emergency meetings. Rumors flew that Disney would pull up stakes and flee the Sunshine State.

BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo helped surface video of a corporate meeting where Disney executive Latoya Raveneau announced her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” to inject LGBTQ themes into kids’ shows. Disney embraced the agenda early, worked to make it dominant — especially among children — and refused to slow down once the woke revolution reached full speed.

Why Gay Days collapsed

So why did Gay Days suddenly fall apart now? Apathy.

Apathy does not mean Americans suddenly disapproved of Disney’s agenda. It means normal people stopped granting it the honor of a fight.

Many families quit watching new releases, not as part of a coordinated boycott, but because the product became preachy, weird, and dull. Others kept their subscriptions but tuned out the messaging and rolled their eyes. Either way, the ritualized drama lost its electricity.

Corporate sponsors follow attention, and attention followed the next outrage. A movement built on being shocking cannot survive once it becomes background noise. When every kids’ show feels like a lecture, even sympathetic viewers start craving something else.

Gay Days did not collapse because Christians perfected a strategy. It collapsed because the culture stopped caring enough to show up, even to cheer. Apathy is not victory, but it can starve a cause faster than protest.

Progressivism needs an enemy

Popular political movements need cultural momentum, and progressive movements feed on transgression. Leftists want to feel like they are fighting the stuffy pastor in “Footloose.” They want to feel cool, rebellious, and righteous. Without dialectical tension, progressivism loses velocity.

When activists fought the religious right, they enjoyed the perfect enemy: just enough moralizing to spark rebellion, but little chance of sustained, effective opposition.

Conservatives could work up outrage on television and even skip a holiday trip, but they rarely sustained a boycott. Republicans generally worship business and profits, so GOP politicians avoided pressure on true pain points such as corporate sponsors and boardrooms. Conservatives served as a political battery, supplying just enough resistance to keep LGBTQ activists energized while imposing few costs. Democrat operatives could not have engineered a better environment.

RELATED: The West’s forbidden truth: Ethnic cleansing is now official policy

Blaze Media Illustration

Machiavelli’s warning

In “The Prince,” Niccolo Machiavelli advises rulers to leave opponents alone or crush them entirely. A complacent enemy grumbles but avoids risk. A crushed enemy cannot retaliate. The most dangerous enemy suffers a minor bloodying: he gains the motivation to fight and keeps the means to harm. Conservatives gave the LGBTQ movement exactly that minor bloodying — outraged finger-wagging with no consequences.

No one lost a job for pushing a gay agenda in Disney parks, shows, or movies. Corporate sponsors rarely withdrew. Disney kept making money. Republicans played the role of cartoonish but harmless foe, delivering speeches about family values while imposing no penalties.

The movement did not lose because the right defeated it. It lost because it exhausted its cultural energy.

Even a strong boxer collapses after he punches himself out. Gay marriage won so quickly and so thoroughly that activists carried the momentum into harder causes such as the trans movement. Support, attention, and funding shifted to the new battlegrounds, and older, boring causes like Gay Days slid into irrelevance.

The lesson is simple. If the right fights, it must pick battles carefully and commit fully to winning them. Secure decisive victory in one arena instead of scattering resources across dozens of losses. Choose targets because they anchor your enemy’s strength, not because they offer an easy headline. If you fight, you must crush the enemy’s capacity to operate; otherwise, you invigorate his cause while draining your own.

Clumsy half measures feed your foe, and you end up hoping he defeats himself. That is not a plan for a protracted culture war.

DC Leftists Threaten Families As ‘Nazi Scum’ Simply For Attending Church

Families with young kids were subject to a bullhorn-wielding protestor screaming 'F-ck Jesus, Mary, and Joseph' in a demonic-sounding tone.

Conservatives can’t barbecue their way through national collapse



Conservatives want to be left alone. They have families, jobs, churches, hobbies. They love their country, but they stay busy and comfortable. Politics feels like something for other people — activists, ideologues, the perpetually aggrieved. The left may dream of tearing the system down in a fiery Marxist revolution, but one solid vote every couple of years or so should keep the crazies in check. Then it’s back to work, back to Little League, back to the barbecue.

That belief sustained many on the right for decades. It has become a liability.

A vote followed by retreat no longer suffices. Saving the country requires engagement, sacrifice, and the willingness to place political reality over personal comfort.

The sunshine conservative lives under the assumption that the American system more or less runs itself, that excesses can be corrected with minimal effort, and that power remains constrained by shared norms. Those assumptions no longer hold. The times that try men’s souls have returned, and the sunshine conservative is about to discover that comfort carries a cost.

For years, a bipartisan consensus reshaped the country through mass immigration. Call it conspiracy if you like, but incentives explain it better.

Democrats saw a reliable path to permanent power. Immigrants arrive without wealth, social capital, or political leverage. They gravitate toward the party that promises redistribution and protection. Every program — health care, housing, loans, benefits — tilts toward newcomers. Open borders grow government, entrench dependency, and expand the progressive patronage machine.

Republican incentives looked different but proved just as corrosive. Conservative voters opposed mass immigration, legal and illegal alike, but party leadership feared one thing above all else: being called racist.

Progressive programming successfully framed the idea of America as a homeland — run for the benefit of its people — as morally suspect. Any attempt to articulate national interest became “nativism.” Chamber of Commerce Republicans exploited that fear, importing millions of workers willing to accept suppressed wages while silencing critics through ritual denunciation.

While the country changed, conservatives largely stood aside. The transformation unsettled them, but lawn care got cheaper and food delivery faster. The sunshine conservative preferred comfort to confrontation. Political activism felt vulgar. Winners, after all, make money and buy boats.

Now the bill has come due.

Human trafficking. Drug flows. Violent crime. Overcrowded hospitals. Stagnant wages. Exploding housing costs. The social fabric frays under the weight of policies designed to benefit elites while disciplining everyone else.

RELATED: Aristotle’s ancient guide to tyranny reads like a modern manual

Blaze Media Illustration

The Trump administration’s effort to remove the worst offenders collides with a system addicted to inflow. Obvious solutions exist — employer enforcement, E-Verify, ending the H-1B visa scam, taxing remittances heavily — but those measures threaten donor interests. Instead, enforcement proceeds piecemeal, state by state, criminal by criminal.

Each attempt to exercise authority triggers panic among mainstream conservatives. They fret about optics. They warn about norms. They clutch abstractions while the left shoots at or runs over federal agents, storms churches, and treats public order as optional. Establishment voices agonize over power even as their opponents wield it without hesitation.

A friend of mine returned from the Global War on Terror with what doctors labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. The diagnosis missed the point. His trauma didn’t come from violence alone. It came from clarity. He had lived in a world where stakes mattered, where power operated openly, where failure carried consequences. Returning to a culture submerged in therapeutic language, pronouns, and safe spaces proved disorienting. Everyone else lived inside a fantasy and demanded that he play along.

Eventually, he learned to stay quiet. He still regards much of what surrounds him as childish and unmoored from reality.

That reaction mirrors what many feel toward sunshine conservatives. They cling to a story about politics that bears no resemblance to how power functions. When confronted with evidence, they demand that reality conform to their narrative. It never does. That narrative existed to pacify them, to make them manageable. They defend it with the same fervor with which the left defends its own delusions.

Each crisis cracks the façade. An assassination. A church invasion. A city surrendered to disorder. Every time, a few more conservatives wake up — only to be swarmed by those demanding a return to small talk about tax rates and process. The problem never lay with those who saw the danger. It lay with those insisting everyone else look away.

RELATED: The left’s ‘fascism’ routine is a permission slip for violence

Blaze Media Illustration

The question no longer concerns policy tweaks. It concerns survival. One side believes the country deserves preservation and repair. The other treats it as illegitimate and disposable. That divide cannot be bridged by nostalgia or proceduralism.

The sunshine conservative era has ended. Saving the country requires engagement, sacrifice, and the willingness to place political reality over personal comfort. It requires choosing the future of one’s children over quarterly returns. It requires the disciplined use of power to defend the nation’s institutions, borders, and communities — even when that makes polite society uncomfortable.

A vote followed by retreat no longer suffices. The fantasy that it does belongs with other comforting lies. The right can either shed it or be ruled by those who never believed it in the first place.

How do you solve a problem like Wikipedia?



Wikipedia has recently come under the microscope. I take some credit for this, as a co-founder of Wikipedia and a longtime vocal critic of the knowledge platform.

In September, I nailed (virtually) “Nine Theses About Wikipedia” to the digital door of Wikipedia and started a round of interviews about it, beginning with Tucker Carlson. This prompted Elon Musk to announce Grokipedia’s impending launch the very next day. And a national conversation evolved from there, with left- and right-leaning voices complaining about the platform’s direction or my critique of it.

As long as Wikipedia remains open, it is entirely possible for those who think differently to get involved.

As its 25th anniversary approaches, Wikipedia clearly needs reform. Not only does the platform have a long history of left-wing bias, but the purveyors of that bias — administrators, everyday editors, and others — stubbornly cling to their warped worldview and vilify those who dare to contest it.

The “Nine Theses” are the project’s first-ever thoroughgoing reform proposal. Among the ideas:

  • Allow multiple, competing articles per topic.
  • Stop ideological blacklisting of sources.
  • Restore the original neutrality policy.
  • Reveal the identities of the most powerful managers.
  • End unfair, indefinite blocking.
  • Adopt a formal legislative process.

Such ideas were bound to be a hard sell on Wikipedia. It has become institutionally ossified.

Nevertheless, I was delighted that the discussion of the theses has been robust, without much further prodding from me. Following the launch, Jimmy Wales actually stepped into the fray on the so-called talk page of an article called “Gaza genocide,” chiding the participants for violating Wikipedia’s neutrality policy. I chimed in as well. But the criticism was thrown back in our faces.

This brings me to the deeper problem: Wikipedia is stuck in its ways. How can it possibly be reformed when so many of its contributors like the bias, the anonymous leadership, the ease of blocking ideological foes, and other aspects of dysfunction? Reform seems impossible.

Yet there is one realistic way that we can make progress toward reform.

Above all else, those who care should get involved in Wikipedia. The total number of people who are really active on Wikipedia is surprisingly small. The number editing 100 times in any given month is in the low thousands, and this does not amount to that much time — perhaps one or two hours per week. Those who treat it as a part-time or full-time job — and so have real day-to-day influence — number in the hundreds.

In interviews, I have been urging the outcasts to converge on Wikipedia. You might think this is code for saying that conservatives and libertarians should try to stage a coup, but that is not so. Hindus and Israelis, among others, have also complained of being left out in recent years. The problem is an entrenched ruling class. As long as Wikipedia remains open, it is entirely possible for those who think differently to get involved.

RELATED: Wikipedia editors are trying to scrub the record clean of Iryna Zarutska’s slaughter by violent thug

Photo by Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images

If you are a conservative or libertarian who is concerned about the slanted framing of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, get involved. If you are a classical liberal who is alarmed by the anti-Semitism within Wikipedia — like Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz — it is time to make your presence felt. Wherever you may fall on the ideological spectrum, I call on good-faith citizens to become engaged editors who take productive discourse seriously, rather than scapegoating “the other side.”

Even a dozen new editors could make a difference, let alone hundreds or thousands who might be reading this column. Given that Wikipedia attracts billions of readers, in addition to featuring prominently in Google Search, Google Gemini, and elsewhere, improving the platform will strengthen our collective access to high-quality information across the board. It will bring us closer to truth.

So how do we solve the Wikipedia problem? With you, me, and all of us — individual action at scale.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Debate: Can JD Vance become the right’s great unifier — or does his VP role stand in the way?



The young conservative movement is experiencing a notable leadership gap amid ongoing chaos in the online right-wing space. Sure, there are passionate influencers and rising political voices, but no one has fully stepped up to unify and guide the broader coalition with a commanding presence.

One person investigative journalist and BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo thinks might be able to step into the role, however, is Vice President JD Vance. But Rufo’s co-host Jonathan Keeperman isn’t sure Vance is up for the job either.

In this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” the hosts debate whether JD Vance can step up as the unifying leader the conservative movement needs amid escalating chaos.

“I've been so far a bit surprised that the vice president hasn't tried to step into this role,” says Rufo, arguing that Vance has both the “charisma” and the “authority” to effectively lead the movement.

“I’ve known JD over the years. ... It does feel like he has some hesitation or maybe even some fear,” he adds.

While Keeperman agrees that Vance “has all of the tools and charisma and ... the right talking points” to be an excellent leader, his role as the vice president would actually be a hindrance.

“I don't think JD Vance should actually do that in his vice presidential position. Not right now. I think it'd be a bit presumptuous. I think people might kind of see it as him stepping in to sort of correct a situation that I think needs to just happen organically,” he counters.

For one, Vance’s position prohibits him from “[speaking] candidly about the administration.”

“Whoever is going to step into this role has to feel credible to this audience, and part of that credibility is going to come from just speaking honestly about all of these different things happening in this ecosystem — whether it's the different personalities, the ideas, the sort of ideology that's animating Trump but also the specific actions that the Trump administration is taking,” Keeperman explains.

In other words, the kind of leader people will follow needs to be an outsider who can speak brutal truths about the current administration, and Vance, as Trump’s right-hand man, can’t be that person.

Secondly, President Trump is still the top dog, Keeperman explains. For his VP to assume the authority of this role as the leader of the conservative movement “might not sit well inside of this coalition.”

“Maybe you're right,” Rufo concedes. “We need some sort of native figure to step up in the same way that Charlie Kirk did, in the same way that Tucker had done.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Heritage Foundation Scholars Jump to Mike Pence’s Group in ‘Reorganization of the Conservative Movement’

Leaders of Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the nonprofit led by former vice president Mike Pence, said that their move to hire more than a dozen former Heritage Foundation employees represents a significant shift within the American right.

AAF president Tim Chapman described the organization’s addition of Heritage Foundation’s legal, data, and economics centers, a move that doubles its size, as a "reorganization of the conservative movement."

"People are voting with their feet as to where they feel they are best suited to be," Chapman said.

The post Heritage Foundation Scholars Jump to Mike Pence’s Group in ‘Reorganization of the Conservative Movement’ appeared first on .