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Welcome back to False Flag! The anger on the right over the Justice Department’s memo abruptly closing the Jeffrey Epstein case is hotter than ever after Donald Trump told people, essentially, to get over it.
In the latest stage of grief, conservative media figures are now claiming the end of the case was just handled too secretively—and perhaps, as Benny Johnson proposes, should have been announced in a televised press conference to the nation. Given how mad this has made Trump’s most rock-solid supporters, a national Epstein press conference doesn’t seem like an impossibility at this point. I promise to go live on YouTube with my reaction to it. Join the Bulwark+ community to get in on all this fun!
–Will
A(nother) Major Blow to Conservative Media
Plus: A missing-flag mystery at RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department.
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The conservative media money machine faces some headwinds
FOR TALK-RADIO HOST HUGH HEWITT, Georgia financier and state Republican power broker Brant Frost IV was like a cinematic hero from one of those classic Hollywood movies. Specifically, Hewitt saw Frost as a modern-day George Bailey, the warmhearted banker played by Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.
In December, Hewitt called Frost “Georgia’s George Bailey,” and urged his audience to seek out Frost’s lending company, First Liberty Building and Loan. “If your bank won’t help you,” he gushed, “Brant and his team are a great place to look for help.”
But First Liberty wasn’t pitched as a savior just for conservative business owners who needed a loan. It was advertised as a solid financial booster for the everyman conservative, too.
On Real America’s Voice, a sort of online-only version of Fox News, right-wing media personality John Fredericks hosted Frost’s son, Brant Frost V, to tout “First Liberty Notes.” These notes were a new kind of investment product from First Liberty, in which listeners who reached a certain income threshold could buy a minimum of $25,000 worth of the, let’s call them, financial instruments. First Liberty promised purchasers hefty returns of up to 13 percent annually.
All of this was presented as a way to build up the financial foundation to spread conservative causes themselves. In its relentless advertising campaign on talk radio and other conservative media formats, the Frost family promised to funnel the money it received into conservative businesses it billed as part of a Trumpian “patriot economy,” with additional money going to conservative religious and anti-transgender groups.
First Liberty sometimes sponsored conservative blogger Erick Erickson’s talk show in Georgia. And Erickson, for his part, praised Brant Frost IV and his adult children as “a good Christian family.”
“I have known them for years,” Erickson said in 2020. “They are wonderful people.”
It was all working out so well. And then, suddenly, it all went to hell. ...
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