Racked by Pain and Enraptured by a Right-Wing Miracle Cure

Michael Chesebro awoke to the same reality as he did each morning, with pain radiating up his spine and into his shoulders before he opened his eyes. He remained still for a moment, summoning the courage to reach from his bed to his night stand. He rolled onto his back, which was fused together with metal after almost 20 years as a paratrooper in the military. He extended his arm, which he had broken several times while wrangling bulls and horses on his ranch outside Cheyenne, Wyo. Finally, his hand found his cellphone, and he logged on to the online universe where he spent most of his days.

“How’re we all doing this morning?” asked Michael, 63. “I’m hurting again — too much time spent jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.”

“You served our country well,” a retired teacher from Kansas responded.

“Hang in there, patriot,” a truck driver in Texas said. “Remember, the pain’s only real if you believe in it.”

“Distract me,” Michael said. “What part of our country is falling apart today?”

On the other end of his phone were hundreds of people in a live voice chat for Patriot Party News, one of about a dozen far-right media platforms that has grown in both size and influence over the past few years, not only by creating an ecosystem of disinformation but also by providing an authentic sense of community. The company was co-founded in 2020 by Warren Armour, a conservative with no media experience who runs a flooring company in Tennessee, but Michael admired the Patriot Party News slogan when he first saw it shared on Facebook last year: “If you hate mainstream media, you are going to love us!”

Michael started watching the site’s daily videos about election fraud and vaccine pseudoscience, some of which have now been viewed more than a million times. He signed up for the company’s social media platform and paid $8.99 a month to join the audio channel, which functions like an old ham radio and promised him the chance to “meet comrades in our battle for the soul of America.”

On some days, Michael listened to the channel for as many as 12 hours, with the audio feed piped directly into his hearing aids to drown out the tedium of his pain. He narrated his daily ranching tasks for the group and sent photos of his crops. Other members responded with recipes, virtual prayers for rain and a steady drumbeat of extremist political ideology that increasingly mirrored his own. In a fracturing country, here was an echo chamber with the power to turn fringe conspiracy theories into widely accepted political dogmas — that the Covid vaccine was poison, the mainstream media was deceitful and the federal government was controlled by a “deep state cabal” that had stolen the 2020 election from former President Donald J. Trump and was now trying to orchestrate his assassination.