On Jan. 21, around 6:30 p.m. central time, Houston radio host Frank Spagnoletti made a stunning claim to the listeners of KSEV 700 AM—stunning even for this fevered era of paranoia and mass disinformation.
“They’re already among us, cyborgs,” declared Spagnoletti. He returned to the theme repeatedly in his hour-long program. “Cyborg supersoldiers—we see them around, we’ve seen some of them.”
The title of this particular episode was “Beyond the Great Reset,” alluding to the long-debunked conspiracy theory that pandemic restrictions are a prelude to a new regime of biomedical totalitarianism. Yet in his hour-long broadcast, Spagnoletti pushed the twisted vision to its weirdest and most dystopian conclusions: that the goal of the shadowy global elites is not just a unified one-world government, but a fully fused human hive mind in which “electrodes snaking into your gray matter will be thieves slipping in the backdoor.”
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Along the way, the local maritime lawyer also baselessly claimed the novel coronavirus is “military technology.”
Spagnoletti is no isolated crank: his former co-host, who first brought him onto the radio two years ago, was the second-place finisher in Houston’s nonpartisan mayoral election in 2019. And the microphone Spagnoletti spewed his delusions into and the station that carried them across the greater Houston area belong to one of the most powerful men in the nation’s second-largest state: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Patrick spokesman Allen Blakemore asserted that the lieutenant governor neither tunes into the station any more, nor has any involvement in its programming.
“It would be fair to guess that he hasn’t listened to more than eight hours of programming in the past eight years,” said Blakemore. “Operations are overseen by a program manager and a sales manager.”
Blakemore refused to say whether the lieutenant governor believed Spagnoletti’s conspiracy mongering, or in any of the false claims aired on KSEV. The station itself did not respond to requests for comment. Patrick’s most recent disclosures to the Texas Ethics Commission show he remains the station’s owner and president. And even if he has not appeared on it live recently, Patrick is a constant presence on the station: in a recurring clip promoting a syndicated program, as a pitchman for a local tree pruning service, and on the minds of its employees, as hosts have joked on-air about reporting off-color comments to “our boss, the lieutenant governor.”
What is undeniable is that KSEV has helped shape the politics of the Lone Star State. And so, too, has Patrick.
Thanks to the unique structure of the Texan electorate, experts said, KSEV’s core demographic—hardcore conservatives in Harris County, who skew older and white—may be the most important voting bloc in the Lone Star State. And in the past decade and a half, they have launched Patrick into and through the Texas Senate and landed him in the most powerful role in state government.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how much influence they have in statewide politics,” political science Professor Richard Murray of the University of Houston told The Daily Beast. “And Dan Patrick is proof of that.”
In the seven years he has served alongside Patrick in office, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has built up national name recognition, personal political cachet, and a powerful fundraising operation. But experts asserted that it is Patrick, thanks to his position’s control over the agenda in the State Senate, who truly steers policy.
“I think that when you look at raw power, constitutionally granted, the lieutenant governor holds the most, because he is uniquely positioned to stop legislation and punish senators by taking away their committee assignments,” said Professor Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “Patrick really does seem like the kind of ideological warrior who is looking to move the state in a more conservative direction, and he’s much more in a position to do that as lieutenant governor than as governor.”
A former sportscaster born Dannie Goeb, Patrick purchased his first block of time on KSEV in 1987, shortly after bankrupting his chain of local bars. One year later, he bought the station itself with financing from a notorious savings and loan fraudster.
Patrick denied any knowledge of his patron’s machinations to the Dallas Morning News in 2014. But the propensity for questionable business practices has apparently persisted. In November 2021, Patrick Broadcasting LP—the company through which the Republican owns the station—inked a consent decree with the Federal Communications Commission for failing to properly maintain legally required records on the paid political advertising it aired.
Blakemore, speaking on Patrick’s behalf, blamed this on KSEV’s small staff and characterized it as a “minor violation of the timeliness of their political file,” further noting that the FCC imposed no fine. The FCC told The Daily Beast that the station had missed deadlines to disclose its political advertisers for no fewer than four years. The agency said that it had established a new policy in mid-2020 to waive penalties on all stations in violation of the requirements in favor of consent decrees establishing compliance plans.
What has also been consistent over the years has been Patrick’s penchant for outrageousness. He became famous in the early 1990s for stunts like getting a vasectomy on-air—and infamous in early 2020 for his suggestion that senior citizens would willingly sacrifice their lives and health so that the economy could reopen during the worst of the pandemic. He provoked controversy again last year for appearing to blame Black Texans for the state’s spiking COVID-19 caseload.
But even Patrick’s most brazen antics fall well short of the flagrantly false and conspiratorial claims his hosts regularly vent on KSEV.
A day spent listening to the station, which broadcasts out of a faceless office complex on Houston’s western fringe, makes for a jarring journey over uneven terrain. Sunny promos for local contractors vie with apocalyptic political ads, and bland, meandering real-estate programs segue into bilious and paranoid—though no less rambling—conservative call-in shows.
A number of those shows are nationally syndicated programs hosted by the likes of Ben Shapiro and Brian Kilmeade. But Patrick’s old 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. drive-time slot has fallen to a particularly fact-averse Houston original: Chris Blayney, who goes by Chris X.
A three-year veteran of KSEV, Blayney hardly lets one of the four days a week he’s on the air pass without him spreading some falsehood or spurious speculation about politics or public health. Every hour of his show opens with a quote of the fictional far-right dictator Adam Sutler, from the 2006 film V for Vendetta (a clip, oddly enough, in which the character calls for a campaign of fear-mongering propaganda to further entrench his regime).
A particularly egregious example came on the first anniversary of the bloody Capitol riot, in which Blayney alternated between downplaying and suggesting without evidence that the plot was the work of agents provocateurs.
“The people really attacking, were they really Trump supporters?” Blayney questioned at the top of his broadcast. “It was a few hundred people that got out of control, that I think, honestly, I’ve seen enough videos now, they were instigated.”
Over the course of the show, Blayney parroted popular but unfounded Republican claims that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi oversaw congressional security on the day of the electoral vote count and that she turned down National Guard troops. He also raised other debunked talking points about alleged rioter and Oath Keeper Ray Epps and about John Sullivan, who before being charged with attacking the building was known as an unwanted hanger-on to left-wing groups in Utah.
All of this, Blayney maintained, was part of an even more diabolical conspiracy.
“The reality of today one year ago is that these Democrats are liars, and they’re charlatans, and they’re part of this charade to simply obscure the fact that they politicized a pandemic to steal an election,” he said, even though numerous Trump-linked lawsuits failed to produce a scintilla of proof of substantial misconduct in the 2020 presidential vote, and so-called “whistleblowers” largely reversed or contradicted themselves in court.
In the next hour, he compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust, a beloved trope of the anti-vaxxer crowd. “We now know what Americans would have helped the Nazis round up Jews,” he asserted.
Blayney reiterates disproven claims about the election constantly, most recently on Jan. 24, when he berated the beleaguered Biden administration and declared “they stole the election, and now it’s a total disaster.”
Later that episode, he argued COVID-19 was a bioweapon, a notion virtually the entirety of the scientific and intelligence communities has long rejected. (There is a somewhat less fringe debate that remains ongoing about whether it might have leaked out of a lab.)
Blayney’s falsehoods about the election and the pandemic frequently come in tandem. For instance, on his Jan. 19 show, he followed up an extended rant in which he proclaimed, “I don’t believe for a second [President Joe Biden] got 81 million votes” with praise for a local doctor who has treated COVID-19 patients with ivermectin. This anti-parasitic drug has become a favorite folk remedy among conservatives, despite the lack of evidence of its efficacy against the novel coronavirus.
That Houston physician is far from the only fringe medical figure Blayney has promoted on his show.
He was an early and ardent supporter of Dr. Stella Emmanuel, the Houston doctor who became famous in 2020 for touting the unproven COVID “cure” hydroxychloroquine—as well as for claiming some medical treatments contain alien DNA, that uterine fibroids and ovarian cysts result from exposure to demon sperm, and that “reptilians” control at least part of the U.S. government. And on at least five occasions, Blayney has hosted Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, one of the first and most infamous advocates of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles control Hollywood and the Democratic Party.
Blayney and Diaz’s conversations stuck largely to unfounded allegations about COVID-19 and election fraud, but he called Diaz “one of my favorite people on social media” and urged his audience to tune into her podcast Dark to Light—the title of which is a key QAnon catchphrase.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Blayney denied any knowledge of Diaz’s ties to QAnon, which he called “a crazy conspiracy group.” He noted that he has acknowledged on the radio that there were Trump supporters who committed crimes at the Capitol last year, and called for their prosecution. He also asserted he is not an anti-vaxxer, even as he continued to question the effectiveness of COVID shots.
“I do not knowingly make claims on my program that are untrue,” he insisted. “Opinions often change with additional information, so mine will sometimes vary from show to show with added and updated information.”
Blakemore, Patrick’s representative, repeatedly refused to say whether the lieutenant governor believed in any of Blayney’s broadcasted claims about the pandemic, the election, or the Capitol riot. He did, however, say that Patrick is personally vaccinated against COVID-19 and did not seek ivermectin when he recently came down with the virus.
Blayney’s conspiracy-mongering never quite attains the delirious heights of Spagnoletti’s. And, unlike the cyborg-phobic host, Blayney’s show does not start with a disclaimer that “this program has been paid for all or in part by the host and KSEV is not responsible for its content.” Nonetheless, Spagnoletti delivers his tirades in what appears to be a KSEV studio, into a KSEV microphone and in front of a KSEV sign, and the ads and the call-in number are the same as for every other show on the station. “Frankly Talking” airs exclusively on KSEV, incorporates the KSEV logo into its own, and KSEV houses its episodes on its Soundcloud with the rest of its original content.
The recent episode in which Spagnoletti raved about human-robot hybrids was just one of seven he dedicated to the Great Reset, though he has gestured toward theory in far more episodes, dating all the way back to when he shared the program with Buzbee in 2020. Biden’s Build Back Better proposals, the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, mask mandates, discussions of racism in public schools, multi-family housing development, liberal prosecutors and judges releasing rather than locking up the accused: all, according to Spagnoletti, are part of the expansive plot to dissolve all nations and human relations and reconstitute the world into a single socialist order.
“The whole thing is meant to control society, and to break it down, from the individualistic nature that is the American way of life,” he asserted on his Jan. 14 program.
Spagnoletti also frequently claims COVID-19 was manufactured to advance this insidious agenda, and has further falsely asserted that the COVID-19 shot does not provide protection against severe illness, and that those vaccinated against the virus are more infectious than the uninoculated.
He, too, has flirted on-air with Jan. 6 conspiracy theories.
“Many of them looked like FBI agents to me,” he said on his Jan. 7 broadcast this year, echoing an increasingly popular and completely unsupported article of far-right faith. “It’s the U.S. government which can become the enemy when it oversteps its bounds in order to try to manipulate people to an end.”
Blakemore noted that Spagnoletti pays for his airtime—just as Patrick did when his voice first graced the station’s frequency. The lieutenant governor’s spokesman, and Spagnoletti, also told The Daily Beast that the show has been canceled, though neither would say who made this decision or when.
Spagnoletti, for his part, denied being a conspiracy theorist or opposing COVID-19 vaccination, even as he continued to rail about the Great Reset in an email to The Daily Beast and referred to an unspecified “detriment” to getting the jab. And Blakemore refused to say whether Patrick endorsed or denounced any of the outlandish claims the host made on his station.
This is part of a pattern for Patrick and other leaders in his party, according to the University of Texas’s Professor Blank.
“You see this with Patrick and you see this with others: it’s not that there’s an active effort to spread conspiracy theories, but there is no appetite to discredit or discount them. I think that’s the position that Dan Patrick has taken,” the academic said. “If you were to hear content on Dan Patrick’s radio that pushed the truth that the election was run well and there’s very little evidence of widespread fraud, and stressing the importance of vaccines and vaccine boosters, that would land Dan Patrick in much more hot water in Texas.”
It’s difficult to determine how many people Patrick’s station exposes to such extreme and inflammatory programming. Recent ratings data for the station is hard to find, and KSEV did not supply any. The Texas Tribune reported in 2017 it was just the third-biggest talk radio channel in the Houston-Galveston market, and its listenership has almost certainly shrunk since, given industry trends and the pandemic’s impact on commuters.
Its heavily Republican listener base is by far the minority in the state’s biggest city: in 2019, then-KSEV host Tony Buzbee—a flamboyant local lawyer who shared and later ceded the mic to Spagnoletti—lost the run-off vote for Houston mayor to Democratic incumbent Sylvester Turner by a whopping 12 points.
But such results can be deceptive, asserted University of Houston Professor Murray.
The metro area’s sheer size means it is home to one of the biggest troves of Republican votes in the state. And, for nearly three decades, the victors of the GOP primaries have captured every office representing the entirety of Texas. KSEV listeners’ intense engagement and participation in politics only amplifies the signal they send to Austin and Washington, D.C., argued Murray.
“This has given him an enormous amount of power in the political process,” Murray said, referring to Patrick. “The content traffics in the outer reaches of political misinformation, that has a lot of influence with white conservatives and conservative voters, who are so influential in Texas politics.”
But Blank argued the fault for KSEV’s content lies not in its stars, but in its listeners themselves.
“It’s getting increasingly hard to separate what is actually a conspiracy theory and what is a belief held by a substantial enough portion of the population that political actors feel they can advantage themselves by shifting to address it,” said Blank. “I think it’s lamentable, don’t get me wrong. But can you imagine how many radio stations in Texas not owned by the lieutenant governor that are spouting nonsense and conspiracy theories every day? And it doesn’t really seem that there’s any penalty for anybody.”
