The massive right-wing network you’ve never heard of

On Facebook, their pages have more combined followers than FOX News. On X, the company’s co-founder receives more views on his posts than Barack Obama and the Associated Press combined. Their main news website receives more regular traffic than Semafor, The Bulwark, and The Washington Free Beacon. And you’ve probably never heard of them. 

Making Web LLC is a pro-Trump media and e-commerce juggernaut that rivals the social media clout of major right-wing brands and personalities but has received shockingly little public scrutiny. That’s because the company, which was founded in 2011 and based in a small town in Minnesota, controls so many different brands, social media accounts, and websites (at least 20, according to one employee) that its reach and influence are hard to measure. 

Trending Politics

One of the company’s more visible brands, Trending Politics, is a straightforward right-wing news aggregator distributing viral content on the web and across social media platforms. The Trending Politics brand boasts a highly engaged follower base of 2.4 million across Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube, and has its own newsletter and mobile news app. The brand racks up engagement by regularly dunking on Democrats and cheering on MAGA-world figures. 

Two of Trending Politics’ publicly disclosed co-founders, Clayton Keirns and Collin Rugg, have used the company’s notoriety to build their own audiences and clout. 

For example, on X, Rugg has become one of the top 10 most-viewed political accounts in 2025. According to data from CAP Action, since January 1st, his posts on the platform have received over 3.1 billion views, far exceeding the reach of major media outlets like FOX News and the Associated Press and political figures like Barack Obama and Ben Shapiro. 

I Love My Freedom

Apart from Trending Politics, another major brand in the Making Web portfolio is MAGA merch juggernaut I Love My Freedom. This enormously successful right-wing e-commerce operation rakes in millions of dollars annually by selling t-shirts and other swag. It was reportedly started by a college student named Jack Murphy in his dorm room and went from “0 to $25 million” in revenue in just a few years. On LinkedIn, Murphy lists himself as Making Web LLC's co-founder and CEO.

Making Web has an interesting marketing strategy in its “I Love My Freedom” vertical. Since 2018, “I Love My Freedom” has been listed in the “Paid for by” disclaimer on dozens of different conservative Facebook pages which have spent over $13.7 million on Facebook and Instagram ads to sell right-wing merchandise.

A dizzying network

Those Facebook pages and many others demonstrate the actual scale of Making Web’s content operation. In addition to I Love My Freedom and Trending Politics, the company has owned, operated, or partnered with dozens of politically conservative social media brands and accounts to share partisan news content and use as marketing tools. Some of the largest include: The American Tribune, Freedom From The Press, and Donald Trump is My President. I can confidently estimate they have a distribution network with at least 35 million followers on Facebook, but the real number could be more than double that. Several years ago, I first identified many of these pages two years ago when I wrote about a bunch of “MAGA Mills” growing quickly on Meta’s platforms. 

Each of these Facebook pages publishes conservative news content to users’ feeds at least a half dozen times a day.

Connections to Trump-world

Despite being based in Minnesota and California, the Making Web team appears to be connected to the rest of the professional MAGA world in Florida and DC. During Trump’s inauguration, company leadership attended at least one black-tie event and during the 2024 campaign, they received “Special Guest” access to Trump campaign events. Last week, the company’s co-founders visited the Pentagon. 

In 2020, one news report found that major Republican party committees and campaigns - including the NRSC and NRCC - had been renting email lists from Making Web. 

So why hasn't the media covered them?

Throughout its decade-long existence, the company has avoided media scrutiny almost entirely. I could only find two news reports that examined the company’s operations or influence, one from April Glaser at Slate in 2018 and another by Jesslyn Cook at Huffington Post in 2020. I assume that’s because the scale of Making Web’s operation is not transparent—it relies on dozens of different brands instead of one large, public-facing brand. 

But, as Facebook has begun to phase political content back into users’ feeds, large scale networks like the one run by Making Web will continue to have an outsized impact on many Americans’ political views. It’s worth paying attention to.

Trump’s gift of distraction

As Congressional Republicans and the White House negotiate their “big, beautiful bill” to cut billions (or trillions?) of dollars in services Americans rely on, the royal family of Qatar handed them an enormous gift this week. On Sunday, ABC News reported that the wealthy Gulf nation was poised to give Donald Trump a $400 million luxury jumbo jet as a present/bribe. People in Washington clutched their pearls because the President’s plan to use the plane is likely illegal and a “counter-intelligence nightmare.” Senate Democrats even plan to target the gift with some kind of legislation. 

The ensuing media frenzy has taken over our political news cycle for nearly 72 hours, with no signs of stopping. Pundits on CNN and elsewhere are bending over backward to pretend like they care about this, working hard to fire up the outrage machine. Democrats and MAGA Republicans alike are sparring on X over what it all means, and whether or not Trump should accept it the plane. Even far-right figures like Laura Loomer are all in on Qatari Jet-Gate.

It just seems to me that this is all such a distraction. 

Americans already know Trump and other politicians are corrupt. They probably don’t care about the minutiae of government officials' ability to receive foreign gifts. What they do care about are social safety net programs like Medicaid that are about to be gutted by Congressional Republicans. If political media nowadays is about attention (like I’ve seen so many people write or say in recent months), then maybe Democrats and the press should step back and recognize what they’re driving attention to in this moment.

Jon Ossoff, big spender

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, one of the most vulnerable Senate incumbents facing re-election next year, is spending heavily on digital ads to build his campaign’s war chest. In the past 90 days, his campaign spent $2.5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads, and another $931,000 on Google advertising. That has made him the top-spending candidate from either party on digital ads in the past 90 days, according to the platforms’ transparency databases.

Heavy spending at this stage of the campaign is really for one thing - fundraising - and a report last month in POLITICO shows that Team Ossoff may be seeing a strong ROI. In Q1, the Ossoff campaign raised over $11 million - “the most ever raised by an incumbent in the first quarter of an off-year.”

More things you should read: 

• The Democratic National Committee has been going through it with some completely not-important but very insider procedural drama about who gets to be its Vice Chair. 

• HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went for a swim in a toxic wastewater overflow on Sunday.

• Max Tani at Semafor wrote about how elected Democrats are looking to podcasters, Substackers, and pundits seeking a path out of the political wilderness.

• Popular streamer Hasan Piker was detained and interrogated by Customs and Border Patrol after re-entry into the U.S.

• Online influencer Deja Foxx is running for Congress in Arizona, and COURIER is making a mini-docuseries about it. 

• Are we living through the “AI Slop Presidency?”

• JB Pritzker is winning the 2028 meme primary.

• Progressive media startup More Perfect Union has put up 300 billboards across the country highlighting Trump’s cuts to America’s National Parks. 

• According to The Democrats, Judge Jeanine Pirro will be the 23rd FOX employee hired into the Trump administration. 

One last thing: “The fat shot drug”

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