What the Left Can Learn From A MAGA–Adjacent Christian Streaming Service
It's more democratic than you’d think! Really!
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Scott again. 👋 After my last piece about how MAGA-world is cashing in, I didn’t expect my next rabbit hole to start with our smart TV. But when I spotted an unfamiliar app called “Angel,” I started digging. Today’s piece showcases a new wrinkle in the conservative culture machine story and raises bigger questions about audience agency and alternative ways to fund our movement.
More on that below, but first…
Digital ad spending, by the numbers:
FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $13.1 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Jon Ossoff, Jasmine Crockett, and James Talarico cracked the top 10 last week. Ossoff is running a mix of persuasion and fundraising ads. Crockett’s ads discuss how the establishment and super PACs are working against her, and Talarico’s ads emphasize his electability and how contributions will be used to persuade voters.
Early voting in the Texas primaries opened this past Tuesday and the primary is on March 3rd. So you won’t be surprised to learn that Texas spenders also cracked Google’s top 10.
Political advertisers spent just over $5.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Re Texas: the Cornyn Lonestar Victory Fund and Conservative Texans PAC were among the top spenders this week. The former is supporting John Cornyn’s Senate re-election bid, and the latter is running attack ads against Cornyn’s primary opponent, Wesley Hunt, accusing him of being a RINO.
Also, this chart gave me the pleasure of looking up Rick Jackson. Turns out, he’s a billionaire health care founder and executive who plans to invest at least $50 million of his own money in a bid to become Georgia’s next governor. His ads promise to halve the state income tax, freeze property taxes, and ban DEI. He’s also apparently leading the Republican primary! Sound familiar?
On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $791,000 on ads in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:
In the top spot is @KeepNewsLocal, a page running ads that praise Trump and decry “fake news” in order to push through a merger between media companies Nexstar and Tegna. If completed, Nexstar would own television stations that reach more than 80% of US households, which violates an FCC rule that no station owner can reach more than 39%. But, to surprise no one, both Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr are supportive and in the process of changing the 39% rule.
…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $176,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:
What if you could raise more in 2026?
Groups like Common Cause, Earthjustice, and Amnesty International are setting themselves up to crush it in 2026 with Civic Shout, and you can too.
What the Left Can Learn From A MAGA–Adjacent Christian Streaming Service
At the beginning of 2025, it felt like American culture had shifted to the right. Professional athletes were doing the “Trump dance.” Pronouns disappeared from email signatures. Sydney Sweeney’s genes jeans. In previous FWIWs, I detailed how new MAGA-aligned organizations like Evie Magazine and the Rockbridge Network helped usher in that change, and then profited from it. So when I saw the Christian-focused streaming service ‘Angel’ app on our smart TV, I was intrigued.
Given the way that MAGA has co-opted Christianity, I assumed it might be yet another vehicle for conservative extremism. But the reality is more complicated. And in some ways, the streaming service is uniquely…democratic? Today, we’ll explore what Angel Studios is, its surprising new direction, and what the Left can learn from its participatory business model.
Let’s start at the beginning. Angel Studios began in 2013 as VidAngel Entertainment. Their original mission was simple: allow viewers to skip “unacceptable scenes,” involving sex, violence, or profanity. For example, if you wanted to skip moments like Ned Stark beheading a man on Game of Thrones, VidAngel had you covered.
Unsurprisingly, Hollywood took issue with this business model. Multiple studios sued, and in 2017, VidAngel filed for bankruptcy. But during its first few years, VidAngel cultivated something more valuable than censored films: a loyal audience.
In late 2016, VidAngel executives began experimenting with crowdfunding. First, they fundraised to help cover operation and legal expenses. When that worked, they tried funding a biblical show about Jesus’s life called The Chosen. They released the pilot on social media, and their fundraiser took off. VidAngel raised over $10 million from 16,000 donors, making it, at the time, the largest crowdfunded media project ever.
After three successful seasons of The Chosen, the rebranded Angel Studios acquired the distribution rights to its next big hit – an indie film called Sound of Freedom. Sound familiar? In a year that most people remember for Barbenheimer, this film about a U.S. government agent who rescues children from international sex traffickers ranked third at the box office behind Barbie and Oppenheimer the weekend both films were released. The story capitalized on QAnon’s fervor, and unsurprisingly, Republican politicians loved it. Ted Cruz and Tim Scott praised the film, and Donald Trump (of Epstein Files fame) hosted a special screening at his Bedminster golf club.
Note: part Sound of Freedom’s financial success can be attributed to its controversial “Pay It Forward” program. At the end of the film, viewers are shown a QR code to buy an extra ticket for someone who can’t afford one. But were those extra screenings empty? The people have questions!!
Beyond Sound of Freedom, Angel’s network frequently intersects with the conservative establishment. Angel’s film Sound of Hope was co-released with the Daily Wire (to the great dismay of the film’s executive producer and star.) Angel executives have appeared on the Heritage Foundation-funded podcast The Daily Signal, and I found 60 articles & videos mentioning “Angel Studios” on Fox News’s website. Plus, Venture capital firm Gigafund (who has invested large sums in Elon Musk’s businesses) led a $47 million investment into Angel Studios.
Setting aside the MAGA and QAnon ties, Angels’ model gets even more interesting.
Angel Studios has continued crowdfunding many of their projects, but that’s not the only way their audience shapes the business. Unlike Netflix or Hulu, Angel lets paying subscribers vote on certain proposed projects before they move forward. The voting system doesn’t apply to every release (only externally-proposed projects that Angel would pay to produce). Still, it’s a surprisingly participatory model for a company who censored an actress in a bra. @HBO – I have ideas!!
Since not every project is voted on, a battle is playing out for where Angel Studios goes next.
Within the past two years, Angel has been experimenting with expanding beyond conservative biblical stories. Last year, the studio acquired distribution rights to Rule Breakers, a scripted film about an all-female Afghan robotics team who rejects gender norms to compete in an international competition. And this summer, Angel acquired the rights to release an animated adaption of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis and starring Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi, Jim Parsons, and Laverne Cox.
Unsurprisingly, some Angel fans are not happy with Animal Farm. On Twitter/X, they lamented that Serkis is “an avowed socialist” and the film features “a trans [woman] and a homosexual star.” Angel executives responded that the film is actually “anti-communist.” But time will tell whether Angel will go the way of the Kellogg Company (which started making bland food to minimize excitement and sexual arousal).
Stepping back, what can the Left learn from Angel Studios? Two lessons stand out.
First, as highlighted in our piece about Evie Magazine, the Left should remember that persuading voters doesn’t start with any one campaign or district. Instead, it starts with funders making investments in culture-first properties to change hearts and minds through the entertainment that people already seek out. After all, messages are better delivered when an audience wants to hear them.
Additionally, Angel Studios’ unique participatory model harkens back to a time when more civic organizations were funded by union dues and a strong membership base, instead of a few wealthy individuals. The Left talks about a politics of empowering working people and those without power, but too often our organizations operate in top-down ways. Voters sense this inauthenticity. Instead of centralizing power and funding, what would it look like to return to a more member-driven model of fundraising and policy-setting?
Angel Studios shows us one iteration of how to engage more deeply with an audience. And if the Left wants to bring in new voters, organizations would do well to give stakeholders more say in exactly what they’re being asked to support.
What if you could raise more in 2026?
Groups like Common Cause, Earthjustice, and Amnesty International are setting themselves up to crush it in 2026 with Civic Shout, and you can too.
Join us for the State of the Swamp
Join DEFIANCE.org and COURIER at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on February 24th for the State of the Swamp, a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union.
Opposition figures, current and former elected officials, celebrities, and other leaders will gather to tell the truth and to counter Donald Trump’s lies. Speakers include Robert DeNiro, Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and Senator Ron Wyden.
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Thank you for the article, yes I have the movie sound of freedom. It’s a good movie. I saw it at a movie theater, where there were lots of people. Actually, Flowers of the killer moon was a great movie! We can learn a great deal from MAGA if we could counter them such as Jasmine Crockett has! Trump and his GOP part has the government in debt to the tune of 56 trillion dollars! I heard that on the news. Ken Paxton is the resident boogeyman using Islamic phobia as campaign slogan! Please subscribe to FWIW!