Out of curiosity, I did an online search for “top conservative commentators,” and I didn’t get a ready-made, current list that was as clean as I thought it would be. So, I sliced and diced what I was able to find and confirmed something I had already sensed. In fact, it’s what prompted me to do the search in the first place.
The conservative commentariat is at a crossroads. This is something that I think PJ Media has pointed out in so many ways more than most conservative sites. Before talking about that crossroads, let’s go back to 2024, when President Donald Trump rode a wave of popular support back into the White House. These are the people whom the Internet and others credited for the victory. Notice that not all are actual conservatives, but because they were kind to Trump, the Internet has listed them as conservative:
- Tucker Carlson
- Ben Shapiro
- Joe Rogan
- Megyn Kelly
- Mark Levin
- Sean Hannity
- Glenn Beck
- Charlie Kirk
- Candace Owens
- Dan Bongino
- Matt Walsh
- Michael Knowles
- Jesse Watters
- Laura Ingraham
- Greg Gutfeld
- Victor Davis Hanson
- Mollie Hemingway
- Bari Weiss
- Andrew Klavan
- Allie Beth Stuckey
- Dave Rubin
- Byron York
- Benny Johnson
- Erick Erickson
I don’t need to tell you how flawed this list was at the time, and how seriously flawed it would be today if the criteria is that everyone on it must be conservative. It’s certainly not a complete list, and even in 2024, a few of them wouldn’t have been caught dead describing themselves as conservative. Joe Rogan and Bari Weiss come to mind.
What happened for some was that the left not only rejected them but tried to destroy them, and their response was to align with the right without ever actually claiming to be conservatives. That’s how Trump was able to attract people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to his camp, and how we ended up shoulder to shoulder with journalists like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.
Sadly, Charlie Kirk, who was a proud conservative and a force of nature, was murdered, which did damage to the future of the conservative movement in ways I don’t think we fully appreciate just yet. To be clear, I'm not saying the assassination marked the end of anything, but just that we really needed him for the future.
Let’s look at a few people who somehow ended up on our side but clearly are not full-blown conservatives. Dave Rubin was a liberal, and many of his personal cultural views still align more closely with liberalism. But he recognizes how extreme the left has become, and he’s built a brand that resonates with some conservatives for that reason. That still doesn’t make him a conservative.
Erick Erickson is different. As a fill-in for Rush Limbaugh when the great “El Rushbo” would occasionally take a day off, Erickson understood how to connect with Rush’s die-hard conservative audience. Still, if you’ve ever listened to or read his work, you can see that some of his positions diverge from Limbaugh’s brand of conservatism. Rush was fine with that. After Rush died, I remember Erickson retelling a story about him in which Rush advised him not to try to be someone else. “Be yourself,” Rush reportedly told Erickson, trusting that his audience would recognize and appreciate the core conservative values the two men shared.
I’m not going to comment on everyone on this list, other than to say that some of the most powerful and influential voices in the MAGA movement from 2024 have taken some strange twists and turns since then. In a few glaring cases, this can only mean that, whatever their reasons for the shift, these are folks who could not have been committed America First conservatives as they wanted you to believe back then. When you go so far as to endorse Trump in 2024, you’ve already heard and know every promise the guy made on the campaign trail. He told you what he was going to do. No presidential candidate in our lifetimes has been this transparent about his plans for the country.
And yet a few very street-smart pundits are now acting like this is not what they supported — people like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens. The sad thing is that, regardless of the reasons, the conservative movement has suffered some major losses when it lost what Kirk, Carlson, and Kelly brought to the table.
I don’t see Candace Owens as a loss. Even before her nasty public breakup with Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, I was hoping she’d go away before she branded the whole conservative movement as unserious. There should be a conservative quarantine grouping where we can lump people like Owens and Nick Fuentes, who clearly were never about any sort of principle other than the desire to inflame hostilities to draw attention to themselves.
Related: ‘You’ve Been Candaced': It’s Time to Make Candace Owens a Verb
The fallout from all of this is that the conservative movement is at a crossroads. When you throw in the loss of Rush Limbaugh in 2021, Scott Adams earlier this year, and the health problems that have sidelined Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson, the conservative movement is in dire need of some fresh blood and energy looking ahead to the 2026 midterms (if it’s not too late) and the 2028 presidential race.
The problem is, you don’t find the voices we need in central casting. Each genuinely powerful conservative voice that we’ve had up until now was years in the making, with plenty of battle scars to prove it.
Complicating this is a volatile media environment. While Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Dan Bongino, Buck Sexton, Clay Travis, and others still spread the conservative gospel through traditional commercial radio, the podcast ecosystem is now equally, if not more, critical to spreading the word. I can think of a few that are now my go-to podcasts, but they are not yet as established or far-reaching as the shows and podcasts that brought the conservative movement to where it is today.
So who’s next? Who will step up and stay true to core conservatism, while bringing casual political observers into our tent? This is not something that can be filled by the next Fox News hire, or the recycling of an already familiar name and face who just “discovered” he or she is a conservative.
The burden of finding the person or persons falls on all of us.
If you find someone you like who can break it down and win converts — while staying true to conservatism — read them, watch them, follow them, and, above all, share them.
Don’t compromise your tastes. It’s got to be people who believe to their core that illegal immigration cannot be rewarded with amnesty, abortion is still the murder of a child, there are only two sexes and genders, criminals need to be punished every time, corruption needs to be prosecuted, freedom of speech and the right to bear arms must be protected, and America’s enemies must fear the United States so that they will respect us, too.
Look for the fresh voices who can articulate these things, at the very least, and we may be able to rebuild our stable of conservative champions in time to keep making America great well beyond 2028.
