Guy Benson, the Message Machine

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“The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy :-)”

Being on message may be “key,” as Guy once told me, but it is nevertheless a strange thing to be as an idealistic college sophomore. To be on message is to understand that no single person can change the world, but that thousands of people all relentlessly repeating the same arguments can.

This is a lesson Republicans have learned well. While Democrats are prone to a kind of ad hoc message improv, Republicans on the networks, airwaves, and Capitol Hill methodically hammer home the same points, using the same language, until, like a jingle you can’t get out of your head, their messages nestle deep in your psyche. Consider this: How many times had you heard the term “flip-flopper” in your life before last year? How many times did you hear it last year? That’s not an accident.

During the many hours I spent with Guy, whenever conversations turned to the substance of his politics, my blood would start to boil: he calls abortion “genocide,” finds unions “distasteful,” and thinks the government has no business providing retirement security for the elderly. There’s not much we agree on, politically speaking. But when Guy mocked the style of liberals and Democrats, taking shots at Al Gore’s ponderousness, or the hypocrisy of rich liberals, or perpetually aggrieved undergrads, I’d find myself agreeing, siding with him against my own people. The right has virtually perfected swatting at this kind of low-hanging fruit, and they’ve discovered that if you do it enough, pointing out those parts of the left that everyone finds grating, you almost never have to engage with the substance of what those people, or anyone associated with them, say. They’re dead on arrival.

Last year, when Air America, the left-wing talk radio network, was experiencing financial difficulties, the Daily Northwestern asked Guy for his take on the situation. “Air America’s problem,” he told the paper, “is that it is an artificially generated public-relations ploy. Prior to its inception, the open market clearly did not demand a high-profile, left-wing radio network, or else one would have evolved on its own. The fact that a small group of wealthy liberal elites decided that such a network was necessary means very little.”

Ignore for a moment the problems with his argument (all innovative products try to create their own market; you might as well argue that Microsoft was doomed to fail because there was no demand for a uniform personal-computer operating system). The sound bite is a virtuosic bit of right-wing framing. In just a few sentences Guy fuses two central conservative myths: the superior judgment of the “open market” to produce the best outcomes, and the efforts of the dreaded “wealthy liberal elite” to shove their ideas down the throats of the unsuspecting citizenry. The quote was so good it ended up being cited approvingly on a number of conservative websites.

Of course, anyone can parrot talking points; the real challenge is to be on message and entertaining at the same time. Guy and the people he looks up to – guys like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity – stand out because while they’re saying the same things every other conservative is saying, they make them sound original, either by being outrageous and obnoxious, like Rush and Hannity, or being funny, like Guy.

Guy is actually fun to argue with, because he loves doing it so much – it’s as though he’s always aware of the kind of rhetorical game he’s playing and, more than that, he’s aware that you’re aware of it, too. When I first started reporting on him I feared he’d discover my politics and be wary of my motives, so I e-mailed him to declare my leftism up front and reassure him that I wasn’t interested in making him look bad. He wrote back: “I am fully aware of your political persuasions…and that’s fine. I didn’t expect that you’d be trying to write a hit piece on me considering that I’m 19. If you did, of course, there would be consequences – as I would call on the entire vast, right wing conspiracy to ruin your career! :-) we’re very efficient and ruthless. hahaha…”

He might not have a vast conspiracy to call on, but he and his conservative friends, many of whom live in adjacent suites on the first floor of PARC, do stick together. They call themselves out-of-the-closet conservatives, in contrast to the wimpier, but to their mind more numerous, conservatives who are in the closet. These closeted types are cowed by the liberal consensus on campus, Guy says, but he knows they’re out there. “There’s people who aren’t particularly political, who would rather not go through the hassle of being one of the conservatives. They might quietly vote for the Republicans, but they’re, let’s say, less forthcoming conservatives. A lot of people don’t want to make waves. I’ve made conservative statements in class and been hissed. I’ve gotten a few e-mails after Feedback shows – a couple of people were unhappy with some of my views.” I asked if he ever responds to such critics. “Yes,” he said. “I thank them for listening.”

I spent a lot of my time with Guy trying to figure out how he got so good. He doesn’t go to a conservative school, his family is only moderately Republican (his mother is a straight-ticket Republican, but she doesn’t think about it much; his father, an executive at a multinational financial-services company, says he’s “much, much more politically moderate than Guy”), and, most important, he’s only 19 years old. Then it came to me: like others on the right, he’s better at messaging because he’s been forced to spend every second of his college career arguing with liberals. So he and his friends pool their resources and hone their arguments and become virtually unbeatable. The same thing doesn’t happen for liberals at elite schools. We get good at arguing about how classist the drug war is and how subversive porn is. Then we get out into the real political world and just don’t have the chops to win an argument – or an election.

I ran this theory by Rich Lowry, editor of the nation’s premier conservative magazine, the National Review. Lowry met Guy last summer during the Republican National Convention. Since then they’ve maintained an e-mail correspondence, and Lowry appeared as a guest on Feedback last fall. “If you’re a conservative, usually you kind of like going against the crowd a little bit, that’s sort of the appeal of it,” Lowry said. “It’s much harder to be a lazy conventional conservative, because you’re constantly going to be challenged. So you think: why is opposition to gun control correct? You go and look at articles, back issues of the National Review, and you pay attention to the arguments. You acquire this arsenal. Why is the Iraq war right? You better know if you’re a conservative on campus….All that helps produce something like Guy. That’s not to discount his natural talents, and just the way he is, which is very hard to invent.”

“Just Pretend Like You Belong Here”

Guy grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City in one of the most affluent counties in the nation. When he was in eighth grade, students in his newspaper writing class went around the room and said what they wanted to be when they grew up. Guy said he wanted to be a sports broadcaster. When classmate Dan D’uva said the same, the two became best friends.

Their first day of high school, Guy and Dan presented the principal with a petition calling on the school to start a radio station. The principal pointed out that the school already had a TV studio and a channel on local public access; Dan and Guy dove right in. “We started out with football,” recalls D’uva. “It was recorded live to tape, and when we started we had a VHS camera and we bought a couple of microphones at Radio Shack. It was the simplest and most unprofessional thing you’ve ever seen.”

Nevertheless, people started watching the broadcast. Though amateurs, Guy and Dan were entertaining hosts, and their show was the only way to catch the games if you couldn’t make it to the stadium. Other teams from their high school started asking them to broadcast their seasons. The boys moved on to hockey and then lacrosse. The summer after freshman year, D’uva says, “reps from different teams came to us and said, you guys do a great job; we’d like to help you. Would you like money for better equipment? They gave us about $6,000. By the time we were seniors we had six cameras, sideline reporters, a Telestrator, instant replay. It was pretty advanced.”

Guy had had his first real conservative epiphany three years earlier, when his sixth grade class was asked to vote on the presidential candidates and he realized he supported Dole. True to form, he’d done his homework. “It was not because of his charisma,” he says. “The local paper did a paragraph on each of the candidates on the issues – you know, like three sentences on two positions. I looked at the issues and realized that I agreed with Dole more than I agreed with Clinton. Dole lost, by the way, in our middle school.”

In 2000 he discovered talk radio. “One day I turned on WABC in New York, which was the Yankees’ flagship station,” he says. “I thought there was a day game; there wasn’t. Sean Hannity was on, and I would always turn off talk radio immediately because I just always assumed they were liberal, I don’t know why – you always hear ‘liberal media, liberal media.’ But I started listening, and I was like, Whoa! I’m agreeing with this guy.” Hannity had been discussing the Bush-Gore election and “attacking Gore and Hillary.” (Guy hates Hillary Clinton passionately, and, like many of his brethren, hopes she runs for president on the grounds that she’ll be the final nail in the Democratic coffin.)

Guy started listening to Hannity’s radio show religiously and watching Hannity & Colmes, the TV show Hannity co-hosts with liberal Alan Colmes on Fox News. He started writing conservative op-eds for the school paper, and by senior year he’d become editor in chief. He volunteered on campaigns for several Republican candidates. “And then my junior year I started thinking I’d really like to get an internship and just get my foot in the door,” he says. “There was a girl in my high school and I just overheard her mention one day that her father worked at Fox News. Filed that one away.” Instead of talking to his classmate, he called her father one night. “So I called him at home, having no idea who he was. I just sort explained who I was. I think he had seen some of our high school broadcasts….He was very helpful.” Guy was hired as an intern for Hannity & Colmes that summer.

He was the only intern who wasn’t yet in college. “I didn’t want anyone to find out how old I was, so I wore a suit every day,” he says. At the end of the summer a few co-workers cornered him and asked his age. When he said 17, one guy turned to the other and said, “See, I told you. Pay up.”

Guy was responsible for pulling together packets of articles on the topics that the hosts would debate each night. He managed to get in a fair amount of face time with both hosts (who are, he says, “really, really good guys”) and Hannity, who took a little while to learn Guy’s name, eventually invited him to sit in on a few tapings of his radio show. “It was awesome,” gushes Guy. “I felt like I was out of place, going from someone who just listened each day to being there and having him know who I was. The rule I set for myself was just pretend like you belong here.”

Guy also managed to befriend the woman who ran the Fox News TelePrompTer, and every day in the lull before the show went on air, he’d go down to the studio, sit at the desk, and read through the entire Hannity & Colmes script off the machine. “Just to get practice,” he says, “using the TelePrompTer.”

Last summer Guy landed a gig as an intern for Fox at the Republican National Convention. He was originally assigned the morning shift, but when he found out the evening shift included a chance to watch the speeches, he volunteered to work a double every day. Part of Guy’s job was tending to the stable of commentators Fox would bring in every night to comment on the speeches, including Lowry, Geraldine Ferraro, and former Georgia Governor and U.S. Senator Zell Miller, the turncoat Democrat who gave a vitriolic anti-Kerry speech at the convention. (“Zell Miller rocks!” says Guy. “He’s a good Democrat. He’s a Democrat I would vote for.”)

Guy would meet the guests on the street with credentials and guide them through the long security line. It was to him what a backstage pass for a concert might be to another teenager. “The most exciting thing was the second night of the convention,” says Guy, his voice a little breathless. “I walked Rich Lowry back out to his limo, and he’s like, ‘How are you getting home?’ And I was like, ‘I’ll get the subway or a cab or something.’ And he was like, ‘No. I live downtown.’ So I shared a limo back with him. I guess we’re both Bruce Springsteen fans, so we talked about that. We talked about politics. He asked if I was serious about broadcast journalism or if I considered doing print. It was so exciting. I was pinching myself the whole time.”

Page 3: Let the Mighty Eagle Soar

Photo by Saverio Truglia