Chad Kultgen: What I've learned from doing a podcast with my MAGA parents

My family used to be very close. We took vacations together. We never missed a birthday or a Christmas, even though it meant traveling from different states. And we talked on the phone often. But something happened during President Obama’s second term that changed our family drastically.

I don’t think it was a specific incident. It seems like it was the volume and tone of Fox News during that period and the explosion of Russian-funded Republican Facebook groups that was just more than my boomer parents (and a lot of others) could handle.

I distinctly remember going back home to visit my parents in Oklahoma a week after the Trump “Access Hollywood” scandal broke to experience a literal Fox News echo chamber in their house. They had two TVs on at the same time, one in the living room and one in the bedroom. Both were tuned to Fox News, but the one in the bedroom was delayed by a second or so. So Bill O’Reily’s voice took on a god-like quality as if he was delivering his pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messaging as his own Sermon from his own Mount.

Our relationship had already become strained during Obama’s administration. Our visits with our parents devolved from fondly reminscinsing about our childhoods and filling everyone in on what was happening in our lives in Los Angeles and Dallas to silently sitting on a couch while our dad screamed at the top of his lungs about how stupid we were for voting for Obama.

Sometimes we’d try to argue back, but it never got us anywhere. So when Trump won in 2016, we essentially stopped talking to our parents in any substantive way. We still went to visit them, but less frequently. And try as we might, we could not engage in any conversation that didn’t ultimately end with one or both of our parents angrily yelling about Trump and what they perceived to be his singular ability to save America from a ring of ultra-corrupt Democrat pedophiles who were trying to sell the United States to China. My sister and I adopted a strategy of letting them talk, saying nothing back, wishing them happy birthdays or merry Christmases and returning to our lives.

The 2020 election gave us some hope that things might change. My sister and I both thought that maybe once Trump was out of office our parents would be less interested in politics generally, but the opposite happened. The events that unfolded Jan. 6 and Biden’s subsequent first two years radicalized my parents even further. Fox News became too liberal for them. Now the two-TV echo chamber blasted Newsmax, an even more right-wing, nationalistic cable news station, 24 hours a day. My parents indulged every insane conspiracy theory from Joe Biden having body doubles to Michelle Obama being a man. They were pulled even further into the abyss by a for-profit corporate greed machine that makes money off an entire generation’s inability to decipher truth from modern technology-driven propaganda.

As the division between ideologies in America worsened and plenty of liberal adult children were making the decision to go no-contact with their MAGA parents, I thought there had to be a better way. I didn’t want my parents to spend the last decade of their lives not talking to my sister and I because of politics. So I did the only thing I know how to do. I started a podcast with them.

The first episode of “The Necessary Conversation” aired in August 2022. It was just me and my mom talking about how she grew up, when she first got interested in politics, when she became a Republican and what she thought of the polticial climate at the time. I didn’t know if she’d want to do more episodes. I didn’t know if my dad or my sister would want to do any episodes. The only thing I knew was that I wasn’t going to let my parents’ relationship with Donald Trump be more important than their relationship with their own kids. I wasn’t going to let Trump steal my parents from me. I saw them as victims, no different than any other impressionable members of a cult who were taken advantage of by a charismatic cult leader.

And if I could just engage with them for an hour a week then at least they would have some tether to reality and they wouldn’t be lost forever.

We’ve done the show every week for almost three years now. No one’s opinions have changed and I don’t think they will. That’s not the point of the show. The point is to have a scheduled weekly hour where we all talk to each other. We talk about politics because it’s hard for my parents to talk about anything else, but at least we are talking. I personally think a huge part of why the country is so divided is because both sides have stopped talking to each other, which makes it easier to see the other side as nothing but the enemy.

In the past three months the podcast has gotten more attention thanks to posting clips on TikTok, and I’ve been flooded with DMs and emails of all kinds. I get death threats. I get requests to forward death threats to my parents. I get demands for me to stop giving my parents a platform. I get suggestions on how to trick my parents into thinking Trump got killed. But overwhelmingly the messages I get the most are from people thanking me for showing these conversations because they’re in families just like mine. They’re in situations they felt were hopeless because they didn’t know how to have a relationship with their MAGA family members.

But, they tell me, “The Necessary Conversation” makes them feel like it might be possible to talk to their family members again, like it might be possible to put their family back together.

What I have learned from doing this podcast is that there will be a time in the relatively near future when Trump is voted out of office or dies and the rest of us are going to be left with the ruined husk of America that he leaves behind. One path to a post-Trump America is waiting a few generations for all of his followers to die.

But there is an easier path, and the first step down it has to be taken by those of us who are willing to engage the MAGA people in our lives and just have a conversation.