REAL AMERICA’S VOICE AND THE REAL COST OF FREE SPEECH:
Robert Sigg is a quiet man with a big voice.
His company, Real America’s Voice (RAV), is the platform for “The Charlie Kirk Show” and other populist voices leading the “dare not ignore” charts. I was introduced to Robert after a mutual friend shared a column I wrote for RealClearPolitics, “Prove Charlie Right.”
When we spoke, his son Parker – his right-hand man and a rising star in the industry who effectively manages all of RAV’s programming – was by his side. Parker is just four years younger than Charlie Kirk. He was working in the family business at 15 years of age, chasing hurricanes for another Sigg property, WeatherNation – a politics-free outlet. As Sigg described it, “a take-an-umbrella or wear-sunscreen business.”
I wanted to talk to Robert Sigg about the behind-the-scenes war against his business, a campaign that includes a pernicious form of censorship through shadow advertising bans and Big Tech algorithm manipulation that leads to traffic starvation. At RealClearPolitics, we’ve faced some of the same subversive tactics.
RAV seeks to bring a unique voice to the marketplace of ideas. It’s one of the sources RealClearMedia’s properties draws from when presenting our across-the-spectrum report each day. Charlie Kirk, in fact, was published on RealClearPolitics the day of his assassination.
My firsthand experience is that RAV’s approach is not welcomed by those who control access to advertising and traffic. RealClear’s advertising score, in turn, gets dinged for aggregating RAV content – irrespective of the fact that we usually pair its offerings with liberal counter-programming.
As Glenn noted a couple of years ago, “Some People Don’t Like the New Ads. Sorry, the problem is that InstaPundit has been demonetized by Google, for unspecified ‘dangerous’ content. Between the overall trend of ad revenue decline — which hits everyone — and the trend of cutting advertising to right-leaning sites, and now this, ad revenue is down about 90% from its high, I’d estimate, and it may get worse.”