An hour after Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, Phillip Stucky was on the streets of Washington, D.C., iphoness in hand, looking for protesters. He was running on fumes. The previous night, Stucky had also been out on the streets, filming Facebook Live videos for The Daily Caller, the conservative news site where he is a reporter. A group of protesters had thrown garbage at him, shattering the edge of his cell phones. But Stucky, who is broad and tall (“He’s the nicest guy, but he’s built like a linebacker,” his boss tells me), hadn’t been that nervous, and the video reached the Facebook feeds of 1.8 million people — huge —a big win for the seven-year-old news site. So Stucky went home, ate some Pizza Hut, walked the dog, and took a nap in an easy chair.

But within a couple hours he was at it again. He’d heard reports that someone — maybe democratic socialists, maybe anarchists — had been breaking bank windows, so he headed out to shoot more live footage. On Inauguration Day, The Daily Caller went live 21 times, raking in millions of views, with several of the videos filmed by Stucky. (Technically, Stucky works for The Daily Caller News Foundation, the Caller’s nonprofit wing.) For the young news site, the inauguration represented a chance to lift its status from a bootstrapping startup and ascend to the dominant ranks of conservative media — a shift it believes it’s making, in part, with its constant use of Facebook Live.

Back in the site’s newsroom, a team of reporters sat around desks strewn with empty cans of Diet Coke and Monster energy drink. They were excited; this was exciting. A few of them shouted, in a low cheerful boom:

“TRUMP Daaaaaa-Y!”

Just a few days earlier, the Caller had co-hosted an inauguration party with Facebook in The Hay-Adams hotel, where from the roof you could get a clear shot of the White House — Trump’s new home. Throughout the night they’d broadcasted a constant stream of Facebook Live interviews with guests like Laura Ingraham, the radio host and Fox News personality, and Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation.

It was the kind of party that under different circumstances might have been hosted by a more traditional outlet—The Washington Post, or Fox News—but this merger between publisher and platform had made The Daily Caller’s rise to broadcasting prominence possible. “We want to make sure that you at home know what’s happening in your White House,” said Kaitlan Collins, a reporter recently promoted from entertainment editor to White House correspondent, in a video. Through Facebook Live, The Daily Caller wouldn’t just explain policy: It would take its audience into the inner circles of the new administration.

Facebook hasn’t had the easiest relationship with the right. When Gizmodo surfaced reports that the site’s algorithm regularly suppressed conservative news last May, a group of right-wing media outlets met with Mark Zuckerberg in what amounted to a peace summit. As journalists have pieced together the list of media partners — including the New York Times, Buzzfeed, and NPR — that Facebook has paid millions of dollars to create videos for Live, no conservative outlets have been among the names. And, since the election, the site has been lambasted by the left for failing to regulate the kind of fake news that hit Hillary Clinton hard enough to lift her opponent to that house on 1600 Pennsylvania. Facebook Live, however, might well be Mark Zuckerberg’s gift to right-wing-news—a medium designed to be low-key and at home in your News Feed, with a potential reach in the millions.

There’s a unique opening in conservative media, one that has a slew of sites systematically turning to the live-streaming feature. It stems from a single idea: Liberals have more choice in what they watch, and for a long time Republicans have felt limited to Fox News. In 2014, the Pew Research Centerreleased a poll showing that unlike their liberal or moderate peers—who watched and consumed a wide variety of news—conservatives were limited to Fox for most of their political information.

That seems to be changing. Facebook doesn’t release rankings of Facebook Live pages, and few analyst organizations are equipped to independently verify their traffic. But in the months just after the election, using word of mouth and sources at Facebook, I spent time with a few conservative news organizations and individuals who are using the emergence of live-streaming and the massive reach of the Facebook platform to reach legions of conservatives hungry for their kind of news.

A lot of people, like me, were shocked by the results of the election. We blamed everything—the filter bubble, the New York Times, Nate Silver. Much of the shock was underwritten by surprise: the news organizations covering the news that appeals to Trump’s base aren’t necessarily broadcasting on TV, or printing their news on newsstands. Unless you agree with them, you probably don’t know what they’re showing. Whether you’re watching or not, these streamers have impact — and they might be the next big force in right-wing media.

Dan Bongino can pinpoint the Facebook Live that he’s sure helped keep Hillary Clinton from the Oval Office. A few days after the FBI re-opened its frenzied email investigation, Bongino took to the Facebook page of the Conservative Review, a federalist news and opinion site launched by radio personality Mark Levin in 2014, where he posts Live videos three days a week. A former secret service agent who worked for the Clintons during Bill’s presidency, Bongino felt he had insider information: “She’s a fraud; she’s a phony; she’s a total fake.” He was sitting squarely in front of the camera, in a leather chair in his home office, spouting all the reasons that he hates Hillary Clinton. “You are about to elect a president who thinks the constitution is a roll of toilet paper, she’s gonna wipe her caboose with it.”

“It went nuclear right away,” Bongino tells me proudly. He lives in Palm City, Florida, far from the beltway, and he was picking his daughter up from school as we spoke. Since it aired, the video has picked up over a million views and 7,500 comments, which started trickling in the moment Bongino started speaking. More important, it was shared 36,544 times, by individuals spotting it on their News Feeds. Traffic-wise it’s an outlier for Bongino, but it’s not so far off from the hundred thousand or so who regularly tune in for his Conservative Review dispatches.

And, like most of his videos, he didn’t script anything. Bongino was making Saturday breakfast, for example, when the Conservative Review called to tell him that Fidel Castro had died and asked, did he have something to say? He did. A few minutes later Bongino was in front of a camera in his office, filming a video titled, “Castro was a brutal murderer and a thug, nothing more.” That one blew up too. “It’s gotta be at a million right now,” he tells me. (594,000 views, but close.)

Bongino is a good talker. On the phones, chauffeuring his kid, he’s warm and affable and surprisingly quick-witted — sparring with both of us, kid and reporter, at once. His easy charisma is part of what draws him to Facebook Live, and why he thinks a generation of Republicans weaned on talk radio are especially primed to make their mark on the platform. It’s easy to think you can talk, sans producers and off the cuff, for an hour—but in practice almost everyone fails. According to Bongino, Facebook Live isn’t about the beautifully articulated thought or cinematic camera work.

“You know, Alexis,” he tells me, “it’s about the riffs and the rants.”

And thus, he likes to keep his rants feeling riff-y. He’s filmed Facebook Lives in hotel rooms, in his car, by the pool, in his office. Late last summer, when he signed on to contribute videos, the Conservative Review sent him a Mevo camera and a decent mic, but often Bongino will just pull out his phones. He doesn’t worry about the lighting: When you’re talking to someone in person, who cares about the lighting? He usually doesn’t shave. After a life of suits, he always wears a t-shirt on Facebook Live.

The casual attitude is part of what makes the medium work, and why political rants can sit in tandem with makeup tutorials and soccer moms in Chewbacca masks singing along to the radio. The comments flash on screen in real time as you interact with your viewers, creating a natural echo chamber for political news. “The readers like to feel like their voice is heard,” says Conservative Review editor Gaston Mooney. “It’s a little more intimate than sitting, watching on your 32-inch TV.”

Some might argue that it’s also an apt metaphor for the conservative party, in a moment when populist ideals and authenticity read as their own breed of authority. “There’s a real danger to be seen as an insider when it comes to these institutions that conservatives have been battling for generations,” says Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center and author of Messengers of the Right, a history of conservative media. Opting out of the accessories of The Media—the verbose diatribes, the scripted visuals, the well-coiffed hosts, and the expensively arrayed studioses—also allows you to opt out of the establishment stigma. “There’s a way that Donald Trump and conservative Facebook Live have the same aesthetic, which is rough around the edges and a little undone and therefore more authentic and more believable,” she says.

The way Mooney tells it, the aesthetic makes his viewers feel respected rather than intimidated—it turns viewers into followers. “I think the audience can tell when you’re trying to blow smoke at them,” he says. “It might help with your ratings, but in the long term [it’s] going to come back to bite you.” It also helps that Fox draws most of its contributors from places near its Northeastern studioses—what Mooney calls “the Acela corridor bubble”—while with his Live roster, Mooney can promote voices from anywhere in the country. Mooney, for instance, is based in Greenwood, South Carolina, a place where his young sons can have “enough room;” other contributors hail from places like Connecticut and Iowa. “The magic of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook algorithm is [the social network] can deliver this type of content directly to whomever wants it,” he says—including to moderates, who might not turn on Fox News but will click on a video dangling in their feed. If the voters are spread throughout the corridors of America, then so, too, should be the commentators.

Even by new media standards, the Conservative Review is young. Its strategy hinges on the idea that independent video is part of what’s going to court people who are unsatisfied with Fox News. Right now, the company is revamping a 4,000-square-foot office near Union Station in D.C. to house studio space for its Facebook Live operation and the four subscription shows it streams as a $99-per-year bundle. It’s also a measure of its ambition: from the new offices you can spit and hit Fox News and C-SPAN’s studioses. “We get can get a pretty sweet shot of the Capitol Building,” says Mooney.

The Conservative Review may not have as big a brand or offer as large a paycheck as working for a broadcast network, but it offers its personalities the promise of something bigger than fame: autonomy. “I’m always joking that I’m on the D-list and I’m OK with that,” says Bongino. “I get to rant to a loyal audience of followers. You get to say whatever you want, and people don’t have to worry that you’re hearing something out of a focus group. I can go after democrats, liberals. I can go after whomever I want. Conservative Review could not care less about whatever I do—they have a policy of ‘just rock and roll’ babe.” And the point, after all, is not money—it’s getting the message out, which is why Bongino is willing to work for “peanuts.”

“Last month I drove to Boynton Beach, Florida, it’s an hour and a half, to give a speech to senior citizens about the Trump presidency,” says Bongino. “Facebook Live’s the same thing, it just saves me an hour and a half.”

It’s worth noting that mainstream and liberal outlets are colonizing Live as well. The last few videos from the New York Times earned 157,701 views (an interview with a farmer and an urbanite) and 163,921 (about MLK day). But the Live videos of upstart sites like The Daily Caller and the Conservative Review are not so far off from those numbers. In a sense, they may even have an edge. Unlike the mainstream media, these outlets draw from a tradition of outsider broadcasting.

Conservatives never set out to create talk radio, the story goes; it arose out of a confluence of circumstances. A platform waiting to be populated meets a group looking for a megaphones, and voila—you have Rush Limbaugh. “Talk radio has always been the medium of the dispossessed,” says Brian Rosenwald, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of conservative radio. “Even as conservatives have reshaped the political culture of the country, they still feel like the scrappy underdogs. They feel like there are scores of people who call them names and drive them underground. They feel Hollywood and entertainment is uniformly liberal; they feel universities are uniformly liberal. ‘I can’t watch an entertainment show without being reminded of liberal values.’”

This self-proclaimed outsider status provided an opening—first for talk radio, then for Fox News to launch in 1996. “They’re saying what people wish they could say and don’t feel like they could say,” says Rosenwald. Oddly, the outsider psychology doesn’t shift when Republicans are in power. Though the Bush presidency incubated a few liberal media upstarts, like Democracy Now and Media Matters, conservatives never lost their stronghold on the airwaves. This, according to Hemmer, comes from a difference in how the two parties use technology. “Liberals are very good at using technology to organize, but conservatives know how to use it to spread a message,” she says.

And signs point to a shift in how that message gets out. Since the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, the meeting has hosted a ‘radio row’ where the conservative radio personalities do their reporting and interviews. But in Cleveland in July, attendees joked it should be renamed ‘media row,’ because most publications now were filming on Facebook Live.

Facebook launched Live in September of 2015 with a shaky video of Mark Zuckerberg giving an office tour. What was less clear, at the time, was how the product would come to be used — by people fooling around with personal videos, or by news organizations tackling it in a strategic way.

“Facebook Live has been an absolute game changer,” says Leigh Wolf, video production manager at Townhall.com. The news site, which pegs itself as the number one producer of conservative news on the web, has been playing around with video for a while — live streaming, posting to YouTube. But Facebook Live reaches the people who aren’t actively looking for Townhall.com but might be open to listening to, say, a rant about the Affordable Care Act. “People get that content in their feed and you’ll end up with more views [than] for anything else,” he says.

In the journey to figuring out Townhall.com’s Live voice, Wolf has been throwing stuff on Facebook to see what sticks. The site will cover protests and rallies in D.C., using just a reporter and a cell phones. Recently, he’s found that polls posted to Live have been going “just bananas. It’s like Buzzfeed: You click the corresponding emoji to answer whatever question you wanna ask.” The questions range from the serious, such as “Which Media Organization is the Most Biased?” (winner: “all of the above,” closely followed by “The New York Times”), to the downright silly, such as “Trump: Naughty or Nice?” (overwhelmingly, nice for the win).

It’s not competing against broadcast segments with Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck, but the ratio of effort to impact is high. Throw a question and some backing music on the site, then wait for four hours and a few hundred thousand views. “I would just say from my perspective there’s going to be a massive shift in cable and satellite news,” says Wolf. “Really, you’re already seeing it.”

The Daily Caller didn’t even try live streaming until half a year after Live’s launch, in April of 2016. At the time, the Caller used to house the bottom half of a skeleton in its D.C. newsroom. Often, reporters waiting on votes or stories would try to chip golf balls through the ring of the pelvis. One day, the round became so raucous that everyone stopped working and started putting. They wondered if maybe there was a way to turn it into content—and that was how they decided to broadcast their first story on Facebook Live.

Immediately, comments started trickling in. Most were annoyed: What were they doing, screwing around like lazy liberals? But people were watching, and that stuck with them. “The end result was that we had just massive viewership on this random stupid video in the middle of the office,” says publisher Neil Patel. At one point, Vince Coglianese, the site’s editor-in-chief, turned to Patel and mused: “You know, we can build a studio pretty easily.”

A few weeks later, Coglianese was on the floor of a spare room, slicing laminate flooring with an X-Acto knife and plastering fake wood paneling to the wall. “It’s kind of a Mad Men-esque style to it,” he says, showing me into the room, which is decked out with a mid-century modern couch, a faux-fur pillow, and a throwback “We Are At War” poster. “We didn’t want it to look like we’re a fake cable news show,” he says. “We didn’t want to fake anything except for the wood behind us. We just wanted a place to sit down and casually have conversations and drink beer on camera and talk about bombs.” He looked back at the set. “We should probably get a plant for the corner or something.”

If Facebook Live is the future — the next step of talk radio, the next iteration of Fox News — then The Daily Caller wants to mark its territory in the mainstream of the platform. It wants to be part of a group of sites that might include opinion-based news outlets like Breitbart; individual personalities, like The Blaze’s Tomi Lahren; or, eventually, offshoots from Fox News who can capitalize on their own fame sans network. “We do this as a downstream investment on future traffic,” says Coglianese. “If people are watching our video and engaged with it, they’re more likely to see Daily Caller content in the future.”

To encourage that traffic, The Daily Caller tries to make things lively. They’ve played trivia games where the person with the losing answer had to take a spoonful of Nutella from a giant container. (That one didn’t work so well; the reporter got most of the questions right.) When they found a scoop in a WikiLeaks release of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, they broke the news directly to Live, with Coglianese reading aloud from printouts. They broadcast for hours from Donald Trump’s victory party, keeping the camera rolling while they marched around looking for someone to interview and sometimes turning it backwards, selfie style, to narrate while walking. Even with Trump’s message of populism, most people can’t get inside the Trump victory party—but with Live, “we can take you behind the curtain and show you what it’s really like in the room,” says Coglianese.

On a Monday in November, I stopped by The Daily Caller’s offices to watch the behind-the-scenes of their behind-the-scenes takes. Earlier over the phones, when I asked Coglianese what the broadcast would focus on, he told me he had no idea. “Generally it’s like: Hey, what do you wanna talk about?” Frankly, I thought he was lying. But there was no discussion of topic until Coglianese and Christian Datoc, a young political reporter at The Daily Caller, were sitting on the couch clipping mics to their lapels.

“We need something to get people going — something about Romney?”

In the background a heater made a grumbling noise. Over the weekend Romney had met with Trump, and rumors were circulating that he’d locked in the secretary of state position. The site’s video editor, Mike Raust, was sitting behind the camera, adjusting the audio levels using lime green ear buds—usually, though, an intern produces because the taping is easy.

“Should General Mattis be secretary of defense?” Coglianese said.

“M-A-T-T-I-S?” Raust said, tapping into the laptop.

And then, they started chatting. “Romney’s a ‘Never Trump’ but conceivably he’s going to be a diplomatic secretary of state,” said Coglianese. “What do you think?”

As they spoke, I watched the comments from Facebook flash on the screen. “NO to Romney! HE is a RINO!” “Romney nooooooooo…..” Raust sorted through them and pushed the most interesting to the video.

It doesn’t seem like much, but documenting comments and polls in real time, cheaply, is a relatively new activity. For years, real-time polling was limited to big-budget television, like the season finale of American Idol. Coglianese and Raust addressed the comments, one by one—they were overwhelmingly anti-Romney—and then cut off broadcasting.

They’d taped for 15 minutes; almost 900 people had commented, and 250,000 had watched the taping. “So far, a quarter of a million people just watched us shoot the breeze,” Coglianese said. “Not bad.”

Coglianese took me out of the office through The Daily Caller’s front lobby, which is plastered with photographs of their reporters in the field. There’s one with Neil Munro getting yelled at on the White House Lawn. (Politico called the incident a “heckling” and a “surprising breach of etiquette.”) There’s another photo, also of Munro at a press conference, this time getting in Eric Holder’s face. There’s a picture of Michelle Fields, sandwiched between protesters and police during an Occupy Wall Street meeting in New York City. Another one shows a close up of a reporter’s bloody, swollen eye—an injury frombeing hit in the face with a liquor bottle during protests in Baltimore. “It’s kind of an incredible experience and a good way to welcome people in the lobby, just pictures of bloody reporters,” Coglianese explains.

Coglianese hasn’t yet figured out how to make money with Facebook Live— really, no one has—but that doesn’t dissuade him. People are abandoning their cable subscriptions and cutting their cords, and that’s all the support he needs. The Daily Caller will be moving into a new office in the spring—one with two or three Live studioses that will allow them to expand. They’ll have roundtable discussions, guest speakers, Q and As—content that starts to look a lot more like Fox News. But on the internet, there are lots of people thirsting for content, and there’s a good chance the video Coglianese is shooting with his iphoness might get as many views as one shot by a professional camera and a video team. With Facebook Live, he has the resources he needs.