Mainstream media is dying. It was reported in May that CNN’s average viewership among the key 25-to-54 age demographic plunged to its lowest since 1991. Also, an October 2023 Gallup poll found that only seven percent of Americans fully trust the media, with 27 percent saying they had a fair amount of trust in mass media. This means that only 34 percent of Americans believe anything the media say. Meanwhile, 28 percent of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence in newspapers, TV, and radio, while 38 percent have no confidence at all in these media platforms. Gallup notes this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with any trust. This is a massive plunge in overall media trust. In 1976, 72 percent of Americans had at least some trust in mainstream media.   

On June 6, TNA senior editor Paul Dragu interviewed Kate Dalley, a nationally syndicated radio host and one of the newest members of The New American team. With more than a decade in radio and a passion for the U.S. Constitution and Americanism, Dalley is a rising star in “alternative media.” She hosts a daily news and commentary show, which you can listen to here, as well as a weekend wrap-up called The New American Weekly, which you can listen to here.  

The following is an abridged and slightly edited version of the interview. You can watch the entire interview online here. 

The New American: How did we get to the point where the mainstream media is finally getting the disrespect it deserves?

Kate Dalley: If there’s anything that instills hope, it’s that we stop believing the media. I have a liner coming into my show: “If you ever feel sad and lonely, realize that they spend an awful lot of time and effort to brainwash you.” We have a media that was overtaken back in the late ’40s, early ’50s, an example being Project Mockingbird. We know they infiltrated the media; it was outed in the ’70s during congressional hearings. There are people in positions of government that are influencing media — editors, journalists, a lot of talk-show hosts.  

I think 2020 was a really great turning point for people. They put full faith and trust in the media and the government, which were only singing one tune, and that tune ended up being completely false.  

I think people are finally getting it, and I’m hoping that they’re not getting it too late. I often say on the show that we enrolled in an adult education class called the “Nightly News.” But we didn’t know we were enrolling in this class when we became adults. I don’t think we realized how much indoctrination and propaganda we were getting along with some spoonfuls of truth. 

TNA: That’s how propagandists get away with it — there’s always a kernel of truth to what they say. If you read The New York Times, which we do — we watch them — when they’re talking about an event that happened, that’s true. But the way that propaganda works is they spin it. 

You mentioned 2020. Before that, you mentioned the Mockingbird media. One of the things that I cite often is a CIA memo, I believe it was sent out in [January 1967]. It was basically an attempt to manipulate the media into convincing the public that JFK’s assassination was not a conspiracy. The memo instructed CIA agents to use their “friendly contacts” in the media to bring people over to the belief that the lone gunman, [Lee Harvey] Oswald, killed JFK. And that’s only one of many examples we know of when government influenced the media.  

Fast-forward to 2020. Would you say that what we saw in 2020 was the result of a buildup that started happening four years prior, after Trump came down that escalator? As Trump Derangement Syndrome kicked in, the veil started to be lifted?

Dalley: Absolutely. You saw them on display. You saw what they were capable of. You saw them ignore important stories, like ivermectin. You saw them trash those stories. You saw how vindictive and vengeful they could be. I remember just staring at the TV and scratching my head and thinking, “How do they do that? How do you just read a teleprompter? How does that work, ignoring the actual stories?” They’ve got nice hair, they’ve got nice teeth, all good to go, packaged up for our entertainment. And that’s what we don’t understand. It was for entertainment purposes. There’s a lot of theater going on, but they sanction the theater. The media could be such a great presence in this country, such a stopgap, such a promoter of truth.

TNA: A watchdog.  

Dalley: Yes, a watchdog! They could be that.

TNA: That is what they’re supposed to be. 

Dalley: Yes, that is what they’re supposed to be. And they are not, because the paycheck means a little too much. So honest journalism, we have about one percent left in this country. When I say that, I think it’s pretty shocking to my audience.  

TNA: You said one percent. Are you saying that one percent of journalists in mainstream media are still dedicated to reporting the truth, or at least what they genuinely believe that to be? 

Dalley: 100 percent. 

TNA: I guess if you’re a TV anchor, maybe that paycheck is too tempting to let go. Is that what’s happening? Is the comfort too much to let go? 

Dalley: I think there’s a mixture. I think the majority are naive. I think the majority can be guided, if you want to say that word, by their sponsors and their stations. I think there’s a small percentage that is more intentional about what they’re doing, they’re fully aware. But I do think that it comes down to their paycheck because we are a society that does not like to sacrifice for our liberty. We kind of look back at the Constitution and say, “Oh, it was a gift. Thank you for that.” And then we go about our daily life.  

Before I became a talk-show host, I was asked to come on [a] show. And I was asked, “Do you watch Fox News? Do you read the newspaper?” I’m not joking. That was the only thing I was asked.  

People need to understand that most talk-show hosts don’t know much. But they want you to stay that way. I was told early on to stay away from certain stories. I was told not to mention certain things. So this creates mass-media reporters who do what they need to do in order to provide for themselves and their families.  

TNA: I think at one point we were all fooled into believing something that wasn’t true. One of the most popular hosts we are hearing that kind of narrative from is, for instance, Tucker Carlson. He talks about his mistaken support for the Iraq War. He talks about all of these things he supported that he no longer supports. And now he’s kind of on this crusade to bring out what he thinks is the truth, or at least talk to people with narratives, ideas, notions, and information that are not necessarily allowed in mainstream media. But he seems to be part of a — we’re part of all that here as well — but he’s part of the top echelon. It’s him and others. Together, we seem to be bringing just as many, if not more, followers than the mainstream [media]. As we mentioned, there are more people now who don’t trust mass media than who have any trust whatsoever. Are we on the verge of becoming mainstream?  

Dalley: To be honest, there’s a lot of co-opting of people. I’ll put it this way because I’ve worked in a lot of different capacities over the last 13 years. It’s like an onion and layers are being peeled back; the “red pill” is not a one-shot deal, it’s layers of truth that you get to. So that’s one aspect of it. But there are people out there who are disinformation artists and they’re very good at telling 90 percent of the truth. Then people buy into that because they don’t believe they would say X, Y, Z if they were mainstream. There are a lot of people who are going to say 90 percent truth, but when it comes to protecting the hills to die on for the elite, the big things, the big-ticket items, they will protect those items.  

The one thing that I always appreciated about The New American was the fact that I could go and get really good reporting. To me, that speaks volumes. Because I can’t say that about a lot of outfits. So when the news pundits are doing this to us, all the way down to local news — I was on a Fox News affiliate — they’re all telling you how to feel about a story. But The New American didn’t do that. And that’s why I actually really like you guys. There’s an element there that says, “Okay, we want to tell you the story and you can go make up your mind.”  

Part of the disinformation is to tell you how to feel about a story. Part of it is protecting a section of the truth that the elites do not want exposed. It’s more complicated than people think it is. On the Right, we have a lot of disinformation artists; on the Left, we have disinformation artists. It’s all around.  

Broken trust: Fewer Americans than ever trust the mainstream media to be honest and accurate. This opens up a tremendous opportunity for alternative media to spread the truth and restore the American Republic. (Tero Vesalainen/Getty Images Plus)

TNA: Who are some of the disinformation artists on the Right?  

Dalley: It gets complicated because I don’t know intention. To accuse somebody of being a disinformation artist is hard to do. You can look at their background. You can say, “Hey, they have a background that kind of screams CIA, or screams government, so is this switch something that is very sincere, or is it something that they have been tasked with?”  

I look at a lot of factors. It’s very, very difficult to know who is intentionally sowing disinformation. I’m not being evasive — it’s just hard to answer because I don’t know intention. 

TNA: Let’s talk about your journey. You said you’ve been on it 13 years. Talk about where you started, where you are now, and what it is that The Kate Dalley Show does. What do you talk about that is different?  

Dalley: I’ve tried to just tell the truth, and that has not been easy because I’ve faced a lot of censorship. I’m actually facing it now in my own state [Utah]. I used to do a local hour; I’m not allowed to do that hour anymore. I was talking a little too much about the governor and a little too much about election fraud, and that doesn’t get you any brownie points. I have what I call “Truth Tourette’s.” I can’t not say it, so I am going to say it. And maybe that’s been a gift in some ways because I actually own my show, which is different. Most people don’t have that option. I’ve been fired a few times. I’ve been rehired. And when I was rehired, I said, “No, I just want to be on my own. I want to own myself.”  

In this journey, I came into it as a neocon. I identified as an informed person. But I wasn’t informed at all. But I look back on that time and it was a set of steps to get me to understand where I could find truth. I remember Don Fotheringham wrote a wonderful book called The President Makers. That book really changed my outlook. Now I had a lot more evidence as to why and how things had changed over the last 100 years. I started looking at the big picture. I started doing a lot more deep dives into issues. And what makes the show different is I did a deep dive on Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg being frontmen for their companies, not really doing what we think they did. I tried to prove that case, and I think I came pretty close.  

The other thing that makes us probably different is that I have co-hosts with different ideologies. They all weigh in on things and I think that’s kind of fun. But I speak to women a lot about the importance of men and the importance of fathers. I see way too many women falling into the women’s liberation camp, and I can’t stand it, to tell you the truth. I think women and men have different roles, and I really appreciate those roles. 

And the other thing is talking about “Pride.” I’m really honest about how I feel about it. And I think that it resonates with people because I’m not afraid to say what they’re thinking. And I’m OK with getting nasty letters or backlash.  

TNA: You mentioned deep dives, and one of the people you mentioned was Elon Musk. I consider him one of the most mysterious figures as far as motive. He seems to be all over the place. What does Kate Dalley know or think about Elon Musk? 

Dalley: Elon Musk came on the scene in the ’90s and he owned this new sort of what we would call an “app” today. It was like a map-finder for a city. He sold that for millions — I think it was over $350 million — to a company. But the company that bought it didn’t do anything with it. They shelved it, which is really strange behavior. There were a lot of things about how he got into the money, how he started, that [didn’t] make sense. You don’t just come up with an app, sell it for that much money, and then the company just sits on it, a company that has what we know to be ties to the CIA. 

But then all of a sudden this person is created that’s allowed to have satellites. I’m not allowed to have a satellite. You try to go get a satellite — you can’t. They are definitely picky about who gets the option to do this. They’re picky about who gets to work with NASA. They’re picky about all kinds of things. So when I was doing my deep dive on him, I thought he was probably a disinformation artist. I think he’s there to represent himself as a patriot. I don’t think he is. I think that he’s there to make people feel really comfortable with Twitter. I don’t think they should be. I think that he is just like some of the other people I mentioned, like Zuckerberg. I don’t think [Zuckerberg] did Facebook. I think that he was handed Facebook by the CIA. They called it LifeLog. They couldn’t get anybody to take that program on its face because who wants to willingly give up their stuff to the CIA? So you put a nice, friendly face on it, you tell a nice, friendly story about a young kid who gets millions of dollars, who’s never been experienced in business, who all of a sudden investors are just climbing to get to him to invest in his little project.  

When things don’t make sense, we need to pay attention to that and apply logic, which we have a hard time doing. We like the emotion of a story, we like the emotion of an underdog. But nothing about these people’s careers was logical.  

More than meets the eye: Elon Musk is seen by many Americans as a champion of free speech and an opponent of Big Government. The truth is that he’s had a lot of help from the U.S. government in getting his various companies off the ground. (AP Images)

TNA: With Elon Musk, it seems confusing, at least for me. Maybe you got it all figured out. But the thing about it is he took over a platform that was extremely censorious. And then he released the Twitter files. He allowed everyone to see how government agents, including FBI and CIA agents, burrowed into the platform and censored everyone who wasn’t toeing the line. So it seems hard, when you look at this, to say that he may be working with the CIA, the government, whatever. I guess what we’re trying to figure out here is, is he a good guy or a bad guy? We need Elon Musk to be a good guy. But is that blinding us to the fact that maybe he’s not? 

Dalley: I’m going to go with that.  

TNA: What do you think of feminism? What kind of role has feminism had in American society, Western society?  

Dalley: I love this topic. I get fired up. I don’t hear a lot of women talking the way I’m about to talk right now.  

When people tell me that I’m standing on the shoulders of the women before me, I say, “I am not standing on their shoulders. I’m standing on the shoulders of men, founders of this country, who laid out a Bill of Rights, who laid out a Constitution.” Women were inevitably going to be there in these capacities, in these positions. We were inevitably going to start voting. In fact, states were already saying women can vote.  

I think women get very upset at that because we’ve been conditioned to love [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg. I looked into Ginsburg’s career and she really did nothing for women. And here’s the kicker: We already have everything laid out in the Bill of Rights. 

We’re not realizing how calculated feminism actually was. And I’ve talked to many people who were inside this little ring of feminists that started the whole genre. And what’s been fascinating to me is, if you really look at history, did women just suddenly get upset and mad and feel like they weren’t enough in the ’60s? Can you pin down the decade when women got upset? That doesn’t even make sense. So I did a deep dive and realized how many people they put in the college level — they always go to the college level to indoctrinate with their big guns. They took a Gloria Steinem, they took all of these people to be these agitators. They started promoting shows like Maude. You had all these shows on TV that included all these disgruntled women and said that men were the problem. I think it was a very calculated move to do feminism. I think it was definitely orchestrated to take us away from family.  

I don’t meet a lot of really happy feminists. I don’t see a lot of happiness there. I see a lot of selfishness. But that’s not what love is. When you get into a partnership, it’s give and take. That love and respect have to be there, you’ve got to be able to show that to one another. If my husband needs a sandwich, that’s okay. I can fulfill that need. If I need him to go change my oil, that’s what makes me happy. It makes me happy to think that he’s under there slaving away. I love it.  

But we got into a selfish mode with feminism and it’s really hurt our nation. All these young girls are identifying as feminists. They don’t even know what it means. 

TNA: My wife and I have the same dynamic. She doesn’t have to worry about her car because I take care of everything. Meanwhile, she grows food and cooks. She also takes care of our son. In this crazy age, we don’t do public school anymore. And the thing about it is she was a working woman. She has a stack of degrees she earned from the University of Utah. And she’s done it all. And now she’s a homemaker, and she absolutely loves it. And it has benefited all of us.  

Dalley: That is really where we get our joy. The degrees really don’t give that level of joy. The job doesn’t give that level of joy. Raising good kids and raising responsible kids and having a good family life — that brings joy. Our young people aren’t getting that message. The only message they get is “girl power, girl power, girl power.” Sorry, but that is not happiness. 

TNA: It’s not the way we were designed to live. And speaking of that, you had mentioned “Pride.” Do you think there’s any connection between feminism, homosexuality, and transsexuality?  

Dalley: I absolutely do. The trans movement will turn into transhumanism in the future because it’s all about erasing identity. We ruin families and then we ruin identity. And that’s what we’re on the course now to do. I put up an [American] flag on Facebook and I said, “This is my pride flag, I love this flag.” I love what our country stands for. I don’t love what the government’s doing to our country, but I love what it stands for. And a friend of mine who’s really steeped in the LGBT thing said, “You’re making people feel marginalized. If you do that, people will feel sad and that’s not okay. We need to protect these people.” I said, “This is not about that, OK?”  

You’ve got two camps: One is lobbying for feelings to be rights, and one is saying, “We’ve got the rights. It’s already laid out in the Constitution. Everybody in a court of law — it’s the only equality that was laid out in the Constitution, that we’re all equal in a court of law.” So that was all we needed. We don’t need anything else. 

So they’re fighting for bent feelings. Well, too bad. I’m sure the Italians felt marginalized when they came over here, and the Irish felt marginalized. Everybody had their marginalized group, but they weren’t a victimhood group. This is now a victimhood group fighting for feelings and your perception over something. “We can’t let anyone have hurt feelings.” Why not?  

If somebody is gay and wants to be gay, I couldn’t care less. But they politicize it. They’re marching for it and it’s ridiculous. What are they marching for? Feelings! They’re not marching for rights — they already have them. They’re marching for feelings, validity, and acceptance. And you can’t legislate any of those things, you shouldn’t legislate any one of those things. And they won’t stop until it’s completely validated by Christians. And I don’t think it ever will be. So we’re going to have the problem. 

TNA: They’re marching because they want us to celebrate their degenerate lifestyle. They want us to celebrate and recognize it as a legitimate lifestyle. And they cannot stand the fact that we won’t do that. But they will not accept that, will they? 

Dalley: No, they won’t. The politicized faction is saying, “You will keep doing this until it’s all accepted.” It’s really messing with who we are on the God level and ruining the family.  

TNA: They’re attacking the family, they’re attacking the most basic unit of society. And if you are trying to destabilize and destroy the independence of a people so you can make them dependent on you and turn them into slaves, you have to destroy the family unit that doesn’t need you.   

Let’s go back to talking shop. You mentioned deep dives repeatedly, and as someone who does a daily show as well, one of the biggest challenges is research. When in the world do you have time? 

Dalley: I don’t have producers. I have to do it on my own. I know I’ve logged over 35,000 hours; I usually am doing it till about 3:00 in the morning. I’m a fast reader and I actually pray about what I should be reading because there’s so much disinformation out there. And that helps enormously.  

You have to actually test yourself a lot, test what you think, test your boundaries. The only thing I don’t question is God. So when I’m bringing on a deep dive, I don’t request that people believe what I’m saying. What really matters is that we start thinking again. We don’t know how to ask critical questions anymore. And when I bring something up on the show every day, I want people to think [about] it. And if they get to a different place than me, it’s okay. I just want thinking to happen again. 

TNA: The way I came to The John Birch Society was through The New American. This was during 2020, actually. Up until that point, I was considered somewhat part of the mainstream and part of the [Associated Press] cohort. But then 2020 came along and all of a sudden, I looked around and said, “Something’s not making sense. What we’re being told and what’s happening is not aligning.”  

I was running a news site and when the pandemic hit, I got a presser from the local hospital. They’re sending me a picture in a presser and saying, “Look at all these wonderful cloth masks that locals donated,” with the nurses posing with them on. And kudos to my wife, who was our graphic designer and photojournalist. She said, “Why did you run that story? I don’t think those masks work.” So that kind of started me on my journey.  

Covid also killed the advertising business and my subscriptions. So I ended up going back to freelancing and I ran across The New American. I’m reading in April, I believe, The New American’s “Freedom Is the Cure” issue. I’m reading this and I say, “This actually makes sense.”  

As we looked back through The New American, that was one of the many instances where we shone. Later on, I believe it was May 18, 2020, The New American published an issue called “Forced Vaccines and Digital IDs.” And this was hugely prophetic because vaccines were six to eight months away from being rolled out, and we were already warning people that they would try to force you to take these things.  

Going back to the September 14, 1998 issue, we were one of the few outlets who said that the “Millennium Bug” was not going to be as devastating as they said it would be. Everyone was saying that everything was going to crash because of the Millennium Bug. The grocery store wouldn’t be able to open, you won’t be able to pull your money out of the bank. But we said, “We don’t think it’s going to be that big of a deal.” 

We also predicted the migrant invasion. And we predicted that they would find the technology to avoid running out of oil. In the ’80s, in the ’70s, they were warning that we’d run out of oil. But The New American came along and said, “No, there’s going to be a technology that’s going to enable us to reach levels of oil that we hadn’t before.” And that’s what happened with fracking.  

Dalley: We have two sources of news: It comes down from Reuters and it comes down from AP. It’s interesting that those two news sources sort of control everything. They controlled all the way down to local news what was going to be printed about 2020. When they are in lockstep, government and media, lies are being told. That’s usually what happens — it’s lockstep stories. I was actually on The New American with Alex Newman and talking about the fact that I got my husband out of pneumonia — they tried to call it Covid — out of ICU. He was supposed to die, actually, the way they saw it. But I actually removed their experimental drug. I said, “No way, no way on a ventilator — put him on high dose vitamins.” And 36 hours later, he was sitting up and eating in his bed and walked out wearing flip-flops. Three days later, he was playing golf.  

When I did that story with Alex, I was talking about the fact that we are being told all these lies. They have served up this pandemic and then they have served up their solution, but it’s the solution that is hurting people, not what they’re saying the pandemic is. Then I noticed that cemeteries everywhere and funeral places, they weren’t growing, they weren’t making way for 500,000 bodies. Nobody made more room for these things.  

TNA: The moral of the story is that fake news kills.  

With our remaining time, how much hope do you have? You love America. You love the Constitution, as we do here. Do you think we’re going to make it out of this? What’s the future for America? 

Dalley: The media and the government want our eyeballs on the election. That’s all we hear about all day. Either that or Ukraine, which is a money-laundering post. So we have this whole election thing in our face 24/7, which tells me that there isn’t much hope in that election, that the president of the United States probably isn’t going to run the country, that we have been co-opted for over a hundred years on the presidency. And that’s why they want you tuned into it, because it’s a nice big distraction.  

What it comes down to is this: Our hope is in cities and counties. Our Founders did not hope for a more reasonable king. We did not hope for a better king. What we did was we said, “This is up to us. We have to now create this government. We have to now put it in the people’s hands.” And that’s dangerous because people can be easily co-opted, and easily brainwashed. But they knew that it was going to be the only hope, getting it in the people’s hands to basically own our government, which I hope we would still do, but we don’t right now. We’ve got to get that back.  

So this is why the media 24/7 is going to shove the election in people’s faces. Because they want us to think there’s a savior out there in one person that’s going to do all the heavy lifting and you can just go back to work. That is not how this is going to go down. It took sacrifice for the Founders, but we are a society that does not want to sacrifice. Nobody wants to be uncomfortable, and we want one person to save us. We want a politician to go in the ring and save us. So then ask yourself this: “Under which presidency did we get back our liberty?” We haven’t gotten back any liberty for over 150 years. We have not gotten anything back that’s been taken from us. That tells me that no matter who’s in, the answer is never going to be in the presidency. The answer is only going to be in us not complying. And the more we see through the lies, the more we see what’s actually happening, then we take a stand. And our not complying in vast numbers is actually the thing that will save us because there’s nothing they can do. 

The people that run this world, they rely on the minions. Minions can be people seeking a better job. Minions can be people that are intentional about it — they’re carrying out the actions. We saw this in 2020 on display, but it takes an awful lot of “good people” who continuously do things to their neighbor, tattletale, do all of this stuff to their neighbor. That is going to be what hurts us. Because the elites can’t do it on their own. They can’t carry all that out. They have to have citizens who are willing to do their bidding. And as long as that’s happening, we can’t save it.  

TNA: This is something I see with Trump. I’ve been to Trump rallies. I was just at CPAC as well. Even among patriots with good intentions, they’ll say it: “Trump’s going to fix everything,” or “only Trump can fix it.” And this is something that we’ve pointed out here at The New American and The New American Daily.  

You mentioned not complying. What does not complying look like? That seems like a loaded verb here. 

Dalley: It’s very loaded. Not complying means that you walk into the grocery store without the mask. There’s a lot of things you can do. You leave the job when they say, “Get the shot or you’re fired.” Those are the kinds of sacrifices — it doesn’t mean bloody revolution. We already fought that. We already did that. The Constitution’s in play now. Now we have to start addressing the fact that we need to take that law of the land, the Constitution, and actually respect it and utilize it. But the only way that we’re going to do that is by seeing through the lies, seeing the very carefully orchestrated plans that brought us to this point. They’re going to want digital ID for travel. Don’t travel. You will change the face of that industry. But we have to take the stand to do that in numbers. That’s what they’re most afraid of — they don’t want us to do that.