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rupert murdoch
Will Charlie Kirk Be the Next Rupert Murdoch?
As the original shapers of right-wing media fade into history, Kirk seemingly hopes to raise his own profile in the conservative movement by leaning into increasingly hardcore far-right positions.
Sep 24, 2023
Rupert Murdochannounced on September 21 that he will be stepping down as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. after a 70-year career poisoning global media with right-wing lies and hate. Fox is now in the hands of Lachlan Murdoch, whose track record at the company indicates he is even more grimly ideological than his father, serving as the main force backing Tucker Carlson’s on-air white supremacy and pushing the network to support Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies despite their financial consequences.
While Rupert Murdoch repeatedly made clear in his announcement that he does not intend to take his thumb entirely off the scale of his outlets, the question of who will now rise to prominence in the right-wing media ecosystem lingers. In just the last few years, the movement’s founding fathers, including Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Rush Limbaugh, have died or stepped away, leaving conservative media without a center of gravity. Lachlan Murdoch and other rising right-wing media figures are jockeying to lead the hate and misinformation machine into the next generation.
One of these figures is Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk.
Since first appearing on the scene in 2012, when he had just barely graduated from high school, Kirk has built TPUSA into a reported $80 million media empire. The organization hosts numerous shows and has millions of followers across multiple social media platforms. Kirk himself is a Salem Radio host whose nationally syndicated program is broadcast in Limbaugh’s old time slot.
Kirk has appeared at least 235 times on weekday Fox shows since 2018, though his last appearance was May 18, 2023, having since seemingly been blacklisted from the network.
TPUSA is purportedly an organization representing the next generation of conservative activists, with Kirk as their leading voice. But there is scant evidence that the group has a genuine connection with Gen Z, whose social and political attitudes are overwhelmingly liberal. An October 2021 internal presentation obtained by The Vergestated that only 15% of Turning Point’s Instagram audience is actually student-aged. As the organization’s own documentation states: “The content that is going out right now is completely missing our target audience.” (TPUSA told The Verge that “the presentations in question contain multiple inaccuracies and erroneous data.”)
As the original shapers of right-wing media fade into history, Kirk seemingly hopes to capture the attention of the next generation and raise his own profile in the conservative movement by leaning into increasingly hardcore far-right positions. On the very same day that Murdoch announced he was stepping down, Kirk took to his radio show and launched into a vile, racist attack on migrants on the southern border, declaring that a “foreign invasion” of “fighting-age young males who will end up raping many of your daughters.”
He also specifically invoked and validated the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
“Obviously the Democrat Party supports this because of power,” Kirk declared. “They smear us and slander us when we bring up the great replacement. The Castro brothers themselves have said that was the reason.”
“You should be at fever-pitch anger,” he concluded.
Kirk is only reflecting the lasting influence of Tucker Carlson, who brought the great replacement conspiracy theory to mainstream conservative audiences with the full backing of Lachlan Murdoch, who is now the sole chair of his family’s global media empire.
But the Charlie Kirk of today would be unrecognizable to who he was yesterday. In his comprehensive history of the first 10 years of TPUSA, University of North Georgia rhetoric professor Matthew Boedy notes that as the organization has grown, Kirk has expressed increasingly extreme views, including on the topic of immigration.
In 2019, Kirk came under attack by the white nationalist “groyper” movement after he stated that “highly educated immigrants should get ‘a green card’ stapled to their U.S. college diplomas.” This kicked off the so-called “groyper wars” in which followers of neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes repeatedly confronted Kirk with racist and antisemitic dog whistles while he was on a speaking tour. Kirk ultimately penned an apologia on American Greatness, the same far-right blog that had launched the initial criticism.
Just recently, Fuentes bragged that his followers had infiltrated Turning Point USA and his one-time target had now adopted his messaging.
“I think in 2023, Charlie Kirk, all these others, they sound way more like me, today, than they sound like themselves four years ago,” Fuentes said, before launching into an attack on Jewish people.
Kirk has also radicalized significantly against LGBTQ+ people.
In 2019, he posted a video of an exchange with an audience member labeled “CHARLIE KIRK TAKES DOWN ANTI-GAY EXTREMIST.” In the video, the audience member condemned Kirk for accepting gay people in the conservative movement. Kirk defended himself and gay conservatives, asking, “What does what they do in their private life concern you so much?” and adding that if you do not embrace and love all people as Jesus did, “then you, sir, are not a conservative.”
As Boedy points out, a TPUSA chapter guide from 2017 specifically instructs participants: “no talk about abortion, gay marriage, etc.”
Since then, Kirk has become one of the most extreme voices singling out LGBTQ+ people for violence across the right-wing media.
- In August, Kirk said that trans people who join fraternities and sororities should “be made fun of so much, bullied so much, crying so much, they would get themselves out.”
- Kirk has referred to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney with an anti-trans slur on multiple occasions.
- Kirk called LGBTQ+ identification a “social contagion.”
- During 2023’s Pride Month, Kirk vowed to remember “all the gay flag stuff” at Starbucks after several stores caved to right-wing pressure to take down Pride decorations.
- On the first day of Pride Month, Kirk tweeted, “Pride is a sin.”
- Kirk has argued that “monogamous heterosexual marriage should be a prerequisite to adoption.”
- In 2022, Kirk warned that gay people “are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”
But perhaps Kirk’s biggest transformation has been on the role of religion.
Boedy tracks this transformation masterfully. As TPUSA was getting off the ground, Kirk criticized the conservative movement of decades past for evangelizing too much, claimed to promote right-wing values “through a secular worldview,” and once told an audience that “he saw his job as the face of TPUSA as ‘no different than’ being a plumber or electrician, who likely don’t tell everyone they met about their religion.”
In 2021, Kirk launched the TPUSA Faith initiative, which he has used as a platform to increasingly lean into Christian nationalism. Since then, TPUSA Faith launched Freedom Life Church, a network of TPUSA-aligned congregations with the expressed goal “to change the trajectory of our nation by restoring America's biblical values.”
In 2022, he declared, “There is no separation of church and state.”
Kirk has also falsely claimed that the Founding Fathers based our system of government on the Book of Genesis, and speaks of the country as engaged in a “spiritual battle.”
The Murdochs and Fox News are also directly responsible for helping Kirk launch his career. As TPUSA was just getting off the ground, Kirk started becoming a semi-regular guest on Fox News as the youthful face of opposing the Obama presidency, often hosted by Neil Cavuto. Kirk has appeared at least 235 times on weekday Fox shows since 2018, though his last appearance was May 18, 2023, having since seemingly been blacklisted from the network.
Like the rest of us, Charlie Kirk is getting older, but high school and college students are staying the same age. Conservative media across the board face an uphill battle if they want to win over Gen Z. So far, Kirk’s strategic approach to inheriting the house that Rupert (and Rush) built has been to amplify the extremist fringes.
Jacina Hollins-Borges and Jack Wheatley contributed research to this piece.
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Not All Media Titans Were as Dastardly as Rupert Murdoch
Murdoch’s media properties have unrelentingly operated as bulwarks for elite wealth and privilege, but E.W. Scripps offered a different model.
Sep 23, 2023
The world’s mightiest press lord of the past half-century has just announced he’s stepping down.
The 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch, come this November, will no longer be lording over the corporate boards of his two media empires, the Fox news universe and the News Corporation, the publisher of media powerhouses that range from the New York Post to the Wall Street Journal.
These immensely profitable news-and-views machines have left Murdoch a billionaire eight times over. But this deepest of media deep pockets took special care, in his retirement announcement, to position himself as a pal to the people, an ever-appreciative admirer of “the truck drivers distributing our papers, the cleaners who toil when we have left the office, the assistants who support us or the skilled operators behind the cameras or the computer code.”
His entire career, Murdock’s exit statement declared, has been “a battle for the freedom of speech” against “elites” who have only “contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.”
“Most of the media,” Murdoch’s sayonara went on to claim, runs “in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” Their “self-serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose.”
In actual fact, of course, Murdoch’s media properties have unrelentingly operated as bulwarks for elite wealth and privilege. His tabloids have kept modest-income readers distracted with “salacious coverage” that feeds “fears of crime and immigration.” His “prestige” papers have helped elites forge consensus — across the English-speaking world — on tax cuts and assorted other policies that have concentrated wealth and power at levels that would have been unimaginable in the mid-20th century.
And Murdoch’s empires have, even worse, consistently undercut any broad public awareness of the price we pay for letting that wealth and power continue to concentrate.
“Nobody has done more harm to the understanding of climate change than Rupert Murdoch,” as the University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann has toldCNN.
What can we now expect from Rupert Murdoch’s successor, his son Lachlan? Don’t hold your breath waiting for Murdock 2.0 to take his family media colossus down a path any less plutocratic.
Murdoch, adds Mann, “has wielded his global media network as a weapon to sow doubt and confusion about the basic science and the case for action.”
Murdoch has been wreaking all this damage ever since he inherited — way back in 1952 — his first media property, a daily Australian newspaper his daddy had owned. Over the years, especially those years since his Fox News became America’s premiere news network in 2001, no single individual in the world has done more to make the world safe for grand fortunes.
Could we realistically have expected anything even a bit more socially redeeming from a media mogul as powerful as Murdoch? Well, actually, history does offer up some models for media moguls interested in something besides maximizing their mega millions. Take, for instance, E.W. Scripps, the famed newspaper publisher who passed away nearly a century ago in 1926.
The youngest of 13 children, Scripps borrowed $10,000 to launch his first newspaper in 1878. He would spend the next quarter-century building a chain of dailies and a national news service that would evolve into the United Press International. His papers, Scripps pledged, would “always be devoted to the service of the 95%, namely the working man and the poor and unfortunate.”
By 1917 and America’s entry into the first World War, Scripps and a handful of other socially conscious men of means had come to realize that the war in Europe had opened up an opportunity to cut our Gilded Age rich down to something approximating democratic size. To meet the cost of waging world war, the nation would either have to tax the rich at significant rates or borrow from the rich, by selling war bonds, a choice that would leave the United States even more plutocratic.
“The country will be the gainer by tapping and reducing the great fortunes,” Scripps wrote to a similarly minded man of means, “and once the people learn how easy it is, and how beneficial to all parties concerned it is to get several billions a year by an Income Tax, the country hereafter may be depended upon to raise most, if not all, of the revenues for the Nation, and the States, and the cities from this source.”
The Scripps-backed American Committee on War Finance would soon be demanding a cap on annual income, what the Committee would call “a conscription of wealth.” No American, the Committee’s tax plan for the war proposed, ought to be able to retain after taxes “an annual net income in excess of $100,000,” about $2.4 million in today’s dollars.
“All income of over one hundred thousand dollars a year should be conscripted,” Scripps telegraphed to President Woodrow Wilson. “Such legislation would cost me much more than half my present income.”
“Some of us have very large incomes,” Scripps would later explain to the House Ways and Means Committee. “We employ servants who produce nothing for the common good and only minister to our vices. We purchase costly and showy clothing, houses, food, furniture, automobiles, jewelry, etc., etc., the production of which has taken the labor of many hundreds of thousands of men and women, who if they were not so employed would be producing other commodities in such quantity as to cheapen them and make them more accessible to the poor.”
“An enormously high rate of Income Tax,” Scripps argued, “would have the effect of diverting all this labor, what is given to practically useless things, into other channels where production would be useful to the whole people.”
Most all of the nation’s fabulously wealthy—and their most avid advocates—would respond to the “conscription of wealth” campaign with predictable hysterics. But by mid-1917 the campaign had completely redefined the nation’s tax-the-rich frame of reference.
The result? By the war’s end in 1918, America’s rich faced a top-bracket tax rate of 77 percent, up from 15 percent in 1916.
By 1926, with Scripps passed away, the nation’s wealthy had regrouped enough to get that top rate trimmed all the way down to 25 percent. But the World War I “conscription of wealth” campaign had touched a nerve. In the months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt would renew the World War I-era call for a 100 percent top-bracket tax rate, and, by the end of World War II, America’s rich would be facing a 94 percent federal tax on income over $200,000.
That top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the United States give birth to the first mass middle class the world had ever seen.
Today, thanks in no small part to the media machinations of Rupert Murdoch, our richest now face—on paper—a top-bracket income tax rate less than half that high. In real life, ProPublicarevealed this past spring, our tax code’s incredibly ample and generous current loopholes have America’s 25 wealthiest taxpayers paying a “true tax rate” of less than 4 percent.
What can we now expect from Rupert Murdoch’s successor, his son Lachlan? Don’t hold your breath waiting for Murdock 2.0 to take his family media colossus down a path any less plutocratic. Lachlan doesn’t have much E. W. Scripps in him. Back in 2019, he spent $150 million on an 11-acre estate in L.A. At that time, Lachlan’s new home rated as the second-most expensive U.S. mansion ever purchased.
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The Catastrophic Era of One the World's Very Worst People Is Over: Rupert Murdoch
The many billions of his ill-gotten fortune have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general.
Sep 22, 2023
Australian-American press lord Rupert Murdoch, 92, announced Thursday that he would step down as the CEO of both News Corp and Fox News as of November.
It would take a multi-volume book to detail all the horrible and catastrophic things Murdoch has done to the world. In Informed Comment, which is a sort of sprawling Great American Blog, Murdoch has appeared again and again as a villain, as Ernst Stavro Blofeld repeatedly showed up in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.
Observers have been puzzled over why climate denialism has been particularly virulent in English-speaking countries. Murdoch’s media organizations are a part of the answer. In Australia, where Murdoch has a virtual monopoly on the news industry, he has backed climate denialists for elective office and swayed voters to consider human-made climate change a hoax. Only from about 2021 have the Murdoch outlets backed off from complete denialism, choosing instead to encourage a “go-slow” approach (which can be just as bad as denialism). By influencing elites in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and New Zealand to combat efforts to reduce carbon pollution for the past three decades, Murdoch has helped spew nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is now coming back to haunt us in the form of megastorms, mega-floods, and mega-droughts that do billions of dollars of damage a year. In that regard alone Murdoch is one of the most significant mass murderers in human history.
Murdoch’s response to the dangers of sea level rise, which could amount to six feet in this century? “We should all move a little inland.” (Reported in Informed Comment 2014.) Some 240 million to 400 million people now living along sea coasts will be displaced over the next 80 years, and Murdoch made a little joke of it. You can almost hear him say, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”
Murdoch’s billions have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general. He backed the Iraq War and that backing may help explain why Tony Blair joined in Bush’s quixotic misadventure in Mesopotamia. Murdoch told an Australian outlet as the Iraq War was building, “‘Bush is acting very morally, very correctly… The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.” He observed at a business conference, like the sociopath he is, ”There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months.”
The war Bush launched against Iraq in 2003 was not really over until at least 2018, and it went on creating collateral damage all that time, i.e., hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed. As for petroleum prices, they were about $36 a barrel when Murdoch made his prediction and they went on up to $140 a barrel in 2008, fluctuating after that.
What brought oil prices down was the 2008 financial crash (to $40 a barrel) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they really did briefly hit $20 a barrel. Two years later, and despite Iraq’s production of 4.23 million barrels a day, prices were back up to $112 a barrel, and they’re hovering around $90 now.
Murdoch, despite his undeniable mastery of dirty tricks and sharp practices, whereby he has built semi-monopolies, seems actually to know very little about how the world works, being blind to the dangers of climate change and over-estimating the role one country like Iraq could play in a world that produces about 100 million barrels of oil a day globally and in which countries of the global south are increasingly adopting automobile transportation in the place of bicycles and donkey carts.
So maybe Iraq’s oil wasn’t worth all that collateral damage after all.
I pointed in 2011 to News Corp’s involvement in illegally tapping into people’s phone messages and wondered whether Rupert’s media conglomerate is a cult, working by blackmail and intimidation.
I don’t have space to go into Fox’s promotion of white grievance and its racism toward minorities, including Muslims, or its promotion of toxic masculinity and its backlash against gains in women’s rights. I once observed of Roger Ailes’s molestation of his bevy of blonde anchors that they appear to have been not such much hired as trafficked.
Nor can I treat at length here the way Murdoch held his nose and built up Trump, or how his organization is partly to blame for the big lie and the insurrection of January 6. I wish a special counsel would look into that.
The only sliver of good news is that Murdoch’s Fox News has largely discredited itself with anyone under about 70 years old, and its brand has become so toxic that one wonders if it can survive.
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