Our Mission On the Conservative Media Mothership Rush Built

BUCK: We’re going into 2022 here, and we’re six months, basically, on the air here on the Clay and Buck show. And we really mean it from the bottom of our hearts, thank you all for listening, for giving us a chance. We know what we were stepping into here.

We know how much respect and how much gravitas this position deserved because of what Rush turned it into over the course of decades. And I’ve been saying to people, and it sort of sticks, no one can fill Rush’s shoes so I just figured I’ll try to fill one and Clay will try to fill the other and we’ll do the best we can, and you’ve given us a shot and we really do appreciate the response you had because, you know, we’re here for the mission.

I’m here for the mission every day, right? Clay and I are going after it, trying to spread the truth, trying to defend freedom in this country and to speak for a lot of you, millions of you, literally millions of you across the country who don’t have a radio show but share our beliefs, share our principles and know how important these fights are. And to that end we have to understand this as a strategy. We are in a battle for the future of this country. And we need to do a lot more than just talk about what’s going wrong with the left.

People say, “What can we do? How do we change things?” And, sure, the communists want to ruin things, but how we make everything better? Well, one way is to build our own platforms and systems and support each other. Every time I listen to the show, every time you — and, by the way, I am a capitalist; so I say this unabashedly, every time you check out and support one of our sponsors, you’re voting in favor of what we talk about, the principles, views, and values of this show. Every day, every phone call, every person, every time you do. Every time you tell somebody about it.

But the right needs to do more than just what has existed in the past. And we view this, Clay and I, here on this show as, honestly, a sacred obligation to conservatism and to America to use this incredible — I say the Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier of Free Speech — to try and help others also in the fight, to build out.

You know, I’m somebody — one of knocks on me in the business is I don’t view other conservatives as competitors. I view them as allies and people along the way — so that’s why you don’t hear — I don’t trash other conservatives, I don’t go after them. And people along the way have given me tremendous help, none more so than Rush but also Glenn Beck was enormously helpful to me in the early days, always thankful to Glenn for that, giving me my first real shot and Rush giving me my first real break; so we want to build out more.

Rush understood this. Rush agreed with this. I want to play for you what he said. It’s gonna be a little bit of a segment here. I want you to hear what Rush said in June of 2020 about the creation what we could call a conservative media mothership here and expanding it out and how we could win the future with it. Here’s what he said

RUSH: Many of you might remember the former guest host on this program, Buck Sexton of the CIA. Buck now tweets a lot. Does he have his own show now? (interruption) Yeah, he does. And he ran for office — or am I confusing him with Jason Lewis? It was Jason Lewis that ran. Jason Lewis is not CIA. Buck was CIA. (interruption) Jason Lewis was CIA, too? So we’re not getting our guest hosts from the CIA, then? All right.

Well, anyway, Buck has been on a tweet storm and had to put it in one of those thread apps ’cause there’s so many tweets, and he’s ticked off at how conservative everything has just given up, has just ceded the country, ceded Hollywood, ceded music, ceded television, ceded the media, ceded everything. Doesn’t understand it.

“If one of the conservative billionaires out there has any stomach for saving their country from the mob, they should buy and flip a major media platform, or fund a new one, and make it an unsinkable aircraft carrier of true free speech.”

And I get this a lot. I’ve had this question, “Why doesn’t some wealthy conservative come along and buy CBS or ABC or anything else?” I don’t know. I have no idea. I happen to know that a bunch of people who have bought networks are not flaming leftists and they never do anything to change the news networks that are part of the corporations that they have purchased.

Buck Sexton continues. “We are completely outgunned in the platform wars, and it’s only getting worse. All the major social media and streaming content companies are part of the lib Death Star. Stop sending checks to think tanks that overpay 2nd tier scholars to churn out policy papers five people read.”

He’s thinking about people like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg and the Never Trump contingent who at one time or another have worked at think tanks, where they have sought your donation on the basis that they and they alone are carrying the conservative banner into battle, when in fact most people have never heard of ’em.

“It doesn’t even have to be –” he says, this new enterprise “– doesn’t even have to be ‘conservative’ in mission, it would soon become dominated by conservatives though if it adamantly refused to censor speech for the woke mob. The Left can no longer debate like sane people, but they don’t have to. They just point, scream, and cancel. Meanwhile, I know ultra-wealthy conservatives who are terrified of anyone finding out what their politics are, because to be accepted among the elites, you have to at least allow those around you to believe you’re woke and lib.”

And, by the way, I can confirm that. I have over the course of my career, I have met and been introduced to some of the wealthiest conservatives, I didn’t even know they existed, in real estate and high finance in California, in whatever business in New York. And the last thing they ever wanted anybody to know was their politics. Some of them didn’t want anybody to know that they supported George W. Bush.

And I remember scratching my head, I said, “Why?” (interruption) They said, “Well, you know, Bush is stupid, he’s an embarrassment. I have a tough time explaining him.” That wasn’t it. That was just a convenient excuse. They valued their social status more than their political portfolio.

He says, “All of this adds up to a massive cultural failing of the right. And where are the older leaders in conservative media building up the next generation? Folks on our side seem obsessed with their own brands, and protecting their turf, which is a small slice of the media landscape. We need more voices with serious platforms that we control.”

Here again I know exactly what he’s talking about. There was a seminal moment — now, you may not agree with this. There was a seminal moment with the passing of William F. Buckley Jr. Now, William F. Buckley Jr. had retired years before he passed away, but he was the, quote, unquote, father of the intellectual conservative movement. And the thing that Buckley had the ability to do was anoint and grant approval to newly arrived young conservatives, and he did, and he bestowed upon them credibility that resulted from him.

He had that kind of credibility. He had that kind of juice that if somebody new came along, he wasn’t threatened by their existence. His National Review empire, he didn’t think, “Oh, my God. I gotta protect — this guy could overtake.” He didn’t think that way. He was truly a movement guy. But when he passed away, all that ended. And what happened, what replaced Buckley was a battle that’s still raging over the smartest conservative in the room and who is it and who gets to decide it.

And there isn’t a conservative movement that has a force leader individual who is attempting to encourage younger members, and even the younger members don’t seem to have much of an ambition. The joke around Washington today among young conservatives is if they can get a Fox News gig and a book deal, they consider their careers to have been made. There’s enough money and enough prestige there to say they’ve made it. Well, what’s not included in a Fox News gig and a book deal is no persuasion, no expanding the universe, no expanding a movement. That’s what Buck Sexton, formally of the CIA, is talking about here.

Where are the older leaders in conservative media who are welcoming and building up the next generation? We have people more concerned with protecting their own brands and their own turf, which individually these conservatives we’re talking about are so tiny and small that nobody knows who they are anyway.

We need more voices. And we need more encouragement for those voices. But the same time the young arrivals are not completely immune from the problem, you know, a book deal and a Fox News gig and that’s the definition of making it. And the two do go together. But it is not the kind of stuff that a building, growing, planting deep roots kind of movement is based on.

He says “When I first got into media -” this is Buck Sexton here, formally of the CIA “–when I first got into media, I thought our side would be like pro sports, generally the veterans would want to bring up the rookies as part of the natural order, to help their team win. Conservative media is more like warring cartels. Many of the big names just want to stamp out the upstarts.”

And Buck Sexton, formally of the CIA, says, “I know you could say, ‘That’s just business,’ but this is supposed to be about more than that too. And in fact some big names out there pretend the fame and money don’t matter at all. It’s just ‘the cause.’ They build brands on that promise to their audience. They’re full of it.

“Our side is losing right now. We have the Left going on a mad cancel spree, nobody is safe from it, the Supreme Court is a lib super legislature, corporate America is in the radical left’s pocket… and we are hoping Trump pulls off a miracle this fall. What if he fails? Whoever wins this fall, we will still be living in a country where you will be tweeting, facebooking, Amazon priming, YouTubing, Instagram posting, Netflix watching, and Hulu streaming based on the curated tastes and activism of the left. We lose if this continues. Full stop.

“And honestly,” writes Buck Sexton formally of the CIA, “if we don’t do something about this, we deserve to lose. Who thought it was a sustainable plan to just cede 90% of media, all of Hollywood, academia, and now corporate America to the woke mob? We need to build conservative media motherships, right now.”

BUCK: This, my friends, is our Conservative Media Mothership. Rush is the one who built it, and we will continue to fly it, do the best we can, fight for those causes. And, of course, as Rush was talking about that older generation bringing up the young guns, mentoring, teaching, building, that was Rush. That’s what he did for me. That’s what he’s done for so many others. So know I thought you should hear that. What’s our mission? The Conservative Media Mothership in 2022 that builds up conservatives, that holds politicians to account, including on our side and tries to win the fight for this country. That is our mission. And we take it directly, as you heard there, from Rush himself.