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.

RealClear has been dealing with this attitude for a decade, but when Sigg launched RAV, he was surprised by the “You can’t do that” reception he received. “This,” he thought, “is not the American way.”

The commanding heights of government, advertising, and traffic went full Orwellian on RAV and did their best to starve it of vital ad dollars. How bad did it get for Sigg and RAV? Here’s how bad: The devious advertising boycotts were extended to the apolitical WeatherNation.

The political sins of RAV – as perceived by the media and political establishment that Matt Taibbi has dubbed “The Blob” – were carried over to WeatherNation. And so, the “do not buy” word went out, to be heeded by the smug self-appointed guardians of the status quo. So much for the purported objectivity of the media and advertising business minders. If you are doing your level best to impoverish one business and it just won’t die because it’s connected to another business that is thriving – then just destroy its access to revenue. That’s the treacherous game The Blob is playing.

Yet instead of discussing the reality of de facto censorship and other threats to free speech in America, the national conversation was derailed by Jimmy Kimmel’s boorishness and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s interloping. (As fate would have it, Carr’s problematic “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” comment happened on a RAV-sponsored show.)

Sigg’s response: “RAV has only known the hard way – and the hard way is still the norm for Real America’s Voice, and I would gather the same for RealClear.”

We both agreed that things are getting better, but slowly. Sen. Eric Schmitt and Rep. Jim Jordan are putting in the work to extirpate the censorship industrial complex from advertising and web traffic. Still, the roots and prejudices run deep, and RAV is still being blacklisted by advertisers.

But Robert and Parker Sigg don’t roll over for anyone. They run a never-surrender, blood, toil, tears, and sweat, prayerful, “we will prove you wrong” family business. They are an interesting blend of spirituality and spite. Sigg made it clear to me that “The Charlie Kirk Show” will go on.

“I came into the media space on the disruptor side,” he said, recalling the launch of Real America’s Voice. “Cable – the new disestablishment market actor – was taking mind and market share from the media trads. But it was clear … that their days too were numbered. Dish was built for a streaming world with no cords, where everything was floating in a cloud.”

In Sigg’s telling, the Internet was the greatest cord-cutting, cancel-your-subscription force in human history. “Everything RAV builds has a cordless future in mind. We are successful in the present and built for the future that is fast approaching, if not already here,” he said. “With RAV, I wanted to provide popular programming for underserved and hungry audiences. My insight was no different from Roger Ailes’ at Fox. Fox’s growing audience demonstrated that half of America was being underserved.”

His goal was not to compete with Fox but to rise up and to serve up talent that would make Fox – and others in the new ecosphere – better.

“Our attitude is that a rising tide lifts all boats, but it is up to the consumers, not the guardians of media to determine the winners and losers. Not the government and their regulators, the advertiser guardians, or the traffic controllers, but the American consumer, voting with their ears and eyeballs.”

As I said before, our approach at RealClear is viewpoint diversity. We offer a place for the pluribus of America’s voices – his included – to make their case and for readers to decide for themselves. Come to our site, and you’ll find a balanced pairing of rival perspectives, one after another. And we have suffered for the past 10 years for doing so.

Both of our boats ought to be rising, but we operate in a world that is trying to sink us both. RealClear’s sin is that we create a dialogue in a media scape that is more interested in monologues.

“The marketplace has not been friendly,” Sigg said. “But for the few who should be starting to put job above ideology and see the value of our audiences and their purchasing power – and move on an underpriced value with an upside return – they will lead the way to a better future.”

Let’s hope so – and let’s put in the needed work to make it so.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.