On a recent episode of "1819 News: The Podcast," 1819 News CEO Bryan Dawson and reporter Craig Monger explained how the cultural conversation once dominated by Democrat woke dogma is starting to shift back toward reality.
Dawson and Monger began by discussing Esquire's recent Pulitzer Prize-winning story on Bubba Copeland, the late mayor of Smiths Station and local pastor who killed himself in November 2023 after an 1819 News report exposed his double life of online perversion. As with many stories in national media about Copeland, Esquire — in its "factually bereft, emotionally driven editorial" — omitted key and shocking details from Monger's original reporting and painted Copeland as a beloved trans figure driven to suicide by a right-wing news site.
"It was very unpleasant, and that kind of rubs off on you," Monger said of writing the original articles. "It's, you know, the dirtiness and the far-reaching effects of what Bubba Copeland did. They're still being experienced by people in his town, and they still probably will for years. And I think that that is something that's gotten lost in this, that he did significant damage to a lot of people in his community and in his town. And that is completely lost in all the coverage that's done in the mainstream media, and especially this piddling Esquire article."
Monger, as well as Dawson and other 1819 staff members, became the target of vicious online threats after publishing the stories, so much so that security had to be hired. While that was the reaction to Copeland's suicide two years ago, news of Esquire’s award received a different response.
Dawson referred to Esquire's post on X congratulating itself for winning the Pulitzer, which quickly received a community note and lots of comments to fill in the details the outlet left out.
"When this first happened, it was probably 90% sympathy for Bubba Copeland and 10% people defending us, Dawson said. "Well, so now, when this thing wins a Pulitzer, this is the greatest thing ever. It's immediately community noted, which I think is fantastic. And this is what the community note says: 'The article that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize trivializes the fact that former mayor Bubba Copeland used photos of women and children to create transgender fetish content and even wrote a sexual fantasy about murdering a woman in order to steal her identity.'… It's good to see that people realize what's really going on here because when this happened, it was extremely controversial."
Monger pointed to efforts in the state legislature to protect children from radical LGBTQ ideology, which is part of the larger cultural shift under the Trump administration away from trans ideology and toward common sense.
"[T]he new cultural trajectory that we're on is people do feel a bit more comfortable talking out about these kind of things about the silliness of the transgender ideology that's just everywhere and the left really overplayed their hand with that, especially because of what Mack Butler and Scott Stadthagen are trying to take care of because of how badly it's affected children. Our Attorney General Steve Marshall, who has, he will go down in history, I am sure of this, as one of the most important figures in exposing the lies behind the transgender industry and how it was simply used as a money-making scheme for people. And it was done to target children, and the 'medical guidance' that they used to justify these procedures was completely fabricated. It was made up. They just pulled it out of their proverbial posteriors. So it is amazing to see."
He continued, "Well first of, all I am proud that Alabama played such a role in that, but also I am just so glad to see that the cultural conversation is actually swinging back to a level of normalcy because a bill telling people not to talk to children about removing genitals or changing your gender, or that you even have a gender, it's just objectively nonsense, and thank God a lot of people are seeing that for themselves."
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