Inside The Secretive Network that Shaped the Right-Wing Media Machine
Also inside: Elon Musk’s PAC gets into the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ discourse with ads, a major MAGA merch shop is making $$ off of ICE puns, and more
This week, we’re peeling back the curtain on a little-known conservative funding group called the Rockbridge Network that placed early bets on trends, especially in media, that proved decisive in Trump’s 2024 win. We’re looking at who exactly they are and what they do – and what the Left could potentially learn from them.
One quick flag: no FWIW next week for the holiday! See you all on July 11th and hope you have a great long weekend!
More below, but first…
Digital ad spending, by the numbers:
FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $12.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
ICYMI, Newsmax has had an eventful year: in March, they went public on the NYSE, and their stock experienced a rollercoaster ride. At one point, their market cap briefly surpassed Fox’s. Now, fast forward to this past week, when they cracked this top 10 chart by spending over $182,000 on graphics to broadcast that President Trump posted about them going public. Their promoted link leads to an article about how Newsmax has “barely made a start on monetizing its subscribers.” (...looks like they could be trying to get some of that day 2 IPO magic back.)
Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $3.7 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
This past week, Elon Musk’s PAC Building America’s Future climbed into the top 10, spending nearly $78,000 to promote this video ad and this microsite. The ad details how “trial lawyers are bilking the system” and contributing to inflation, while also claiming Trump can “stop the scam.” It seems likely that this is part of Musk’s larger push to change the contents of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which Musk has not been shy of criticizing.
On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $4.4 million on ads in 2025. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:
The MAGA merch shop @EndTheWokeness_ dropped a bizarre ad promoting an ice cube tray that makes President Trump-shaped cubes (which is also, of course, paired with an ICE joke 🙃). Dare I say… remind you of anyone?
…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $952,800 on ads in 2025. Here are the top spenders year to date:
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Inside The Secretive Network that Shaped the Right-Wing Media Machine
Last year’s presidential election was wild. Nearly every demographic group swung away from Democrats (except Black women). Major Silicon Valley donors completed their rightward shift. And our new media ecosystem, driven by podcasts and social platforms, proved decisive in shaping people’s opinions and ultimately their votes. In a hotly contested election, the winds broke in the MAGA direction.
None of these seismic shifts happened by accident. As the saying goes, “follow the money.” What I found was that 6 years ago, JD Vance co-founded a conservative funding network that was early on working with digital creators and proved instrumental in pulling Silicon Valley donors to the right. You’ve probably heard of the Koch Network, but that’s for the old GOP. For the MAGA era, meet JD Vance’s Rockbridge Network.
Launched quietly in 2019, this funder network was founded by a small group of influential donors, including Vance and Jan. 6 apologist Chris Buskirk. As seen in a leaked pitch deck, they described themselves as a “political venture capital firm” with the goal of “replac[ing] the current Republican ecosystem…with better action-oriented, more effective people and institutions…focused on winning.”
The cost of membership? A mere $100k to $1 million. But for their ultra-rich donors like Peter Thiel, former Senate candidate Blake Masters, banker Omeed Malik, and conservative heiress Rebekah Mercer, that’s pocket change. Their budget in 2024 alone was $75 million. Since Rockbridge’s founding, a network of conservative organizations has sprung up with their support.
Take 1789 Capital, a $150m venture firm founded by Rockbridge co-founder, Chris Buskirk. The firm’s goal is to build a “parallel conservative economy” via media channels and conservative-aligned tools. Sound familiar? Their investments reportedly include the conservative video site Rumble, Tucker Carlson’s newest media company, and the increasingly popular Substack (AKA the site we’re all on right now 🫠).
The Rockbridge Network has also experimented with investing in smaller efforts:
Firebrand Action, a PAC and media company allegedly focused on “right-wing reporting”
Faithful in Action, a church-mobilization effort founded in 2023 with 160k members
Several state-based organizations focused on voter turnout, including in Virginia and Washington
I could go on about the Rockridge Network’s complex web of connected organizations and associated campaigns. The point is that this multi-million dollar effort was investing in the future of the Republican party years before everyone else. And that’s something that the Left – or anyone – could replicate.
So, what specific lessons stood out to me here?
First, you need an innovative, multi-pronged strategy with pieces that work together. It’s not enough for the movement to be great at a single component of campaigning (turning out voters, building tech tools, messaging, etc). A party needs its funders to take a comprehensive approach towards innovating everywhere, and not pulling investment when things don’t work right away.
Second, we need to bring new people into the tent. Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and others pulled Silicon Valley donors to the right brick by brick. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been losing the support of working-class voters without college degrees since Trump’s rise to power in 2015. And to make matters worse, blue states are losing people and are projected to lose electoral power in the next census. The Left’s coalition is shrinking. So to win, they’ll have to bring in new voters and donors for something like this to succeed.
Finally, people need to start skating to where the puck is going. (As you might have noticed, this has a major theme of all of my deep dives.) That means using cutting-edge AI tools. That means building strong progressive media streams to win the war against the camera. And that means marshalling donors to invest in new ideas, organizations, and tactics.
The path back to victory may not be recreating former winning coalitions. That’s not how MAGA won. They won by breaking ground on entirely new voting blocs, and the Left could do the same.
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More from around the internet:
The most online candidate of this cycle thus far, Zohran Mamdani, defeated Andrew Cuomo in NYC’s Dem mayoral primary on Tuesday. A lot of people are mad… but maybe they should be going on more podcasts & TikTok shows themselves!
President Trump’s new mobile service seems to be off to a rocky start… especially since his smartphones might not be made in the US as promised.
The AP is tracking all the veteran legacy media journalists who jumped ship to Substack + other sites.
As if this year weren’t weird enough, people are apparently worshipping ChatGPT and forming religions around AI. Cool, cool, cool.
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Excellent work! We have been watching these networks evolve in every arena since the Kochs in the nineteen eighties. Thank You!