who owns ksev radio?

“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.”

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 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.

More than 300 supporters had gathered at the Norris Conference Center in Houston to watch the populist firebrand claim victory, but before addressing the eager crowd, Patrick stole a moment to acknowledge those who had tuned in to his message even before he set his sights on Austin. Sneaking off into a quiet corner, the Houston Republican recorded a special message for his radio fans.

“I just want to say thank you to the KSEV listeners. I would not be here on the threshold of becoming the next lieutenant governor without you,” Patrick said in the recorded video, as a sweet jazz piano tune played in the background. “When we ran for the Senate, everyone said, ‘Dan doesn’t have a chance. He’s just a radio guy.’"

In a sense, Patrick was signing off. Even as a senator, he continued hosting the drive-time talk show that launched his political career. Stepping into statewide office, however, would force Patrick to hand over the reins to others.

But Patrick, who declined to be interviewed for this story, didn’t fully leave behind his small radio empire. Three years later, he still owns KSEV-700 AM, “The Voice of Texas.” And even if his voice is rarely heard on those airwaves, the station continues to push Patrick’s agenda — no longer the priorities of a political outsider, but rather one of the state’s most powerful politicians.

With some of Patrick’s friends calling in to programs or hosting them, KSEV rallies its listeners around his efforts to slash property taxes, regulate bathroom use for transgender Texans and beef up immigration laws. And it keeps diehard fans fuming against Patrick’s foes, whether they're Democrats or House Speaker Joe Straus, a more moderate Republican who has largely resisted Patrick's social agenda.

“You’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth — what’s happening in Austin. That, I think, continues to attract people to the station,” said Jared Woodfill, a lawyer, former chairman of the Harris County GOP and an occasional guest on KSEV programs.

During most broadcast hours, the station’s content fits the mold of a typical AM talk radio station in Texas. KSEV broadcasts syndicated programs by conservatives with huge national followings such as Laura Ingraham. Weekday hours are mostly devoted to self-help shows, including "The Lifestyles Unlimited Real Estate Investor Radio Show," which promises to turn any literate Texan into a house-flipping millionaire, and the "Houston Methodist Health Hour," hosted by urologist David Mobley, who fields callers’ questions on everything from erectile dysfunction to lower back pain.

Every so often, Patrick will record ads for local businesses, encouraging people to buy from his friend Vinnie Tortorella at Muscle Cars of Texas, or touting the services of real estate agents Ronnie and Cathy Matthews (who have donated at least $11,000 to Patrick’s campaign). Randall "Buck" Wood, a longtime ethics attorney in Austin and a Democrat, said such advertisements would not run afoul of any state ethics laws, so long as KSEV properly charged donors for air time.

Then there are the drive-time political shows, which resonate with the Tea Party branch of the Republican tree.

Mondays through Thursdays, there’s Dallas-based syndicated host Chris Salcedo, the “liberty-loving Latino,” whose chief target is Straus, the House speaker. On Fridays, Texas Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and one of Patrick’s closest allies, hosts a show called “The Amigos,” featuring three friends who frequently wax on about how much more conservative the Texas Senate is than the House.

When it comes to Nielsen audience ratings, KSEV ranks third among news/talk stations in the Houston-Galveston region, but ratings aren't the best measure of the station's political value, its followers say.

“Even though the following might not be the largest following in the state of Texas, it is a group of activists. And these people vote, and they get their friends to vote,” Woodfill said. “Their base registers voters, turns them out, puts up yard signs.”

At the peak of the 2017 political season, as lawmakers prepared to reconvene in an overtime session, KSEV cranked up the volume on its anti-Straus messaging.

It was the afternoon of June 16, about two weeks after the end of the regular legislative session, and Bettencourt sat behind a microphone in the nondescript northwest Houston office building that houses KSEV. He turned a caller’s question about obstruction in Washington into a commentary on Texas politics.

“Right now, I’m trying to pass property tax relief. We’ve got — the Senate supports property tax relief. The lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, is for property tax relief. Speaker Straus is obviously not for it,” Bettencourt said while hosting “The Amigos” alongside Ben Streusand, a Houston businessman and a onetime Tea Party candidate for the U.S. House, and Eric Andell, a former judge and the station’s sole liberal voice.

Bettencourt goes by the “Tax Man" on the show and often references his quest to lower property taxes. In advertisements for his tax firm, Bettencourt encourages KSEV listeners to protest their property taxes and to seek out his services for better results. At the Capitol, he and Patrick have pushed legislation that would make it harder for local governments to raise property taxes.

Salcedo, who joined The Amigos that day, butted in: “That’s conservative versus liberal — liberal being Joe Straus, and a conservative represented by Paul Bettencourt.”

Patrick and Straus, already rivals going into 2017, ratcheted up the ill will between their chambers as they squabbled over high-profile issues throughout the legislative session. The leaders have held dueling press conferences, and each has accused the other of forcing Gov. Greg Abbott to call the special legislative session that kicked off last week.

They’ve fought over education financing. Patrick, unlike Straus, wanted to spend taxpayer money for private school tuition and, ahead of the special session, likened Straus’ school finance plan — which sought to add $1.5 billion in state funds for public education — to a Ponzi scheme that would lead to a statewide income tax.

They’ve fought over bathroom use. Patrick, branding his effort a “privacy bill,” wants to require Texans to use restrooms and locker rooms corresponding with the gender listed on their birth certificate. Straus views the policy as a solution in search of a problem, with the potential to scare away businesses who view the proposal an attack on transgender people.

On air and using social media, KSEV offers a running commentary on these battles. Straus' office declined to comment for this article.

During the June 16 episode of “The Amigos,” Bettencourt referenced comments Straus made at a Texas Association of School Boards gathering — deriding Patrick’s bathroom proposal and likening such policies to “manure.” Straus also said some of the educators would make great state senators.

This didn’t sit well with Bettencourt, who declined to be interviewed for this article.

“For the first time that anybody’s aware of in the House or Senate, we have a legislative leader going around asking people to run for the other chamber’s position because obviously you don’t like the public policy position,” Bettencourt said.

Salcedo jumped in.

“I think it takes a pile of manure to know a pile of manure, and that’s my thought on Joe Straus, number one. Number two, we have a fantastic governor, a fantastic Senate here in the state of Texas, and we have a cancerous House of Representatives run by a man who lives and gains his power through the ... use of manipulation and coercion and threats to his own political side and universal support for Democrats in this state,” Salcedo said, adding that Abbott, in calling a special session, “had to come in and wipe rear end like a child.”

Salcedo's blistering attacks aren't limited to Straus. Less than two months earlier, Salcedo used his microphone to hammer Democrats trying to resist Patrick’s agenda and blasted state Rep. Victoria Neave, D-Dallas, for staging a hunger strike in protest of Senate Bill 4, the crackdown on "sanctuary" jurisdictions that Abbott ultimately signed into law.

Neave said her last solid food had been a Communion wafter in church. That became fodder for a mocking impersonation by Salcedo: “Look at me, look at how I’m using Christ and I’m saying that Jesus Christ was also a proponent of lawlessness,” Salcedo said. “These left-wingers, in their never-ending quest to thwart the rule of law and undermine the Constitution of the United States, will resort to anything, even bringing in the Catholic Church.”

Before Salcedo and Bettencourt, Patrick's voice filled the rush-hour slot. It was the last leg of a decades-long journey on the air that included jobs as a sportscaster, reporter and talk show host. He had a knack for attention-grabbing stunts. He once took off his shirt, donned a blue cowboy hat and had two women paint his torso in a show of support for the Houston Oilers. As a radio reporter, he once underwent a vasectomy on the air.

Patrick nabbed his first radio gig as an 18-year-old in 1968, according to his campaign materials, and after college, beginning in 1977, he spent eight years as a sportscaster on television — a career that brought him to Houston’s KHOU, where he became one of city’s most popular TV personalities.

Patrick also dabbled in business. In the early 1980s, Patrick teamed up with several investors to open up Dan and Nick’s Sports Market, one of the nation’s first sports bars, according to a 2007 Texas Monthly profile of Patrick. Soon, the investors expanded their franchise, building a total of five bars in fast-growing Houston, which was flush with cash during an oil boom.

But bust followed boom, ravaging Houston's economy, and Patrick was forced to close several bars. At age 36, he declared bankruptcy, and a crowd of angry creditors and lawyers dogged him for years.

Trying to turn his luck around, Patrick bought a block of time at a small radio station in Tomball: KSEV. He built a radio studio in his surviving bar and started a sports talk show, selling ads himself to scrape by, according to the Texas Monthly profile.

Patrick arrived at KSEV just in time to take advantage of its legal strife — and ultimately take it over. Its owner, a podiatrist, faced a lawsuit from shareholders, and Patrick offered him a way out. Patrick persuaded the owner to sell him the station for its remaining debt and talked the shareholders into ending their lawsuit for a cut of the station’s earnings.

By 1988, Patrick ran the place. Shortly after, a little-known right-wing commentator contacted Patrick about getting some air time. Patrick agreed, and the commentator, Rush Limbaugh, quickly exploded in popularity. So did Patrick, who turned the focus of his talk show from sports to politics.

Fashioning himself as a populist, Patrick took aim at establishment figures in Houston and Austin and preached his view of fiscal conservatism and Christian values.

By most accounts, the seeds of Patrick’s political future were planted in 2003 at a hearing about property taxes at the Texas Capitol. Patrick had traveled to Austin with a band of supporters who wanted to cap the amount property appraisals could rise at 3 percent per year, down from a maximum of 10 percent.

He found an unfriendly audience at the Capitol, where prominent House Republicans opposed lowering the cap, believing it would starve local governments of necessary funds.

The day ended with Patrick shouting at lawmakers and a state trooper being called in to restore order. A few years later, with the encouragement of his radio supporters, Patrick ran for a Senate seat in 2006 and won easily on a promise to curb property tax growth.

Patrick continued to broadcast throughout his Senate tenure, leading to cold treatment from some lawmakers, who viewed him as a novelty or showboat. But, at least early in his legislative career, Patrick’s radio pulpit also instilled fear.

"No member wants a radio station coming out against them," state Rep. Jim Murphy, a Houston Republican, told the Houston Chronicle in 2007. “They tend to get on an issue and stay there. You'd rather have him for you than against you.”

With the help of his radio fans, Patrick continued to win elections and grow his profile in Austin. By 2010, he formed a Tea Party Caucus in the Legislature. By 2012, he chaired the Senate Education Committee. Now, as lieutenant governor, some see Patrick as the most powerful politician in Texas.

He’s hardly the first politician to use radio as a springboard. Vice President Mike Pence and former Texas Gov. Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel  — a populist who promoted Hillbilly brand flour and the Ten Commandments on air during the 1930s — both used radio to help kick-start their political careers. And former President Ronald Reagan — "The Great Communicator" — rode his acting and broadcast talents into the California governor's mansion before earning two terms in the Oval Office.

Those figures, however, didn’t continue to own radio stations after winning office.

These days, Patrick doesn’t have much time to hang around the studio, according to current and former workers and his official calendar. When he does stop by, colleagues greet him with a “hello stranger,” his spokeswoman says. But with Bettencourt — the successor to both Patrick’s Senate seat and his Friday radio spot — filling that prime slice of drive time, Patrick doesn’t need his own mic to put his agenda into the ears of KSEV’s listeners, who one one former producer called mostly white, male and suburban.

Andell, the liberal voice on “The Amigos,” was one of several current or former station employees who said Patrick did not dictate any of the show’s content. But by tapping on-air personalities who share the lieutenant governor’s politics, Andell said, Patrick doesn’t need to give orders to get his message out.

“I should be so lucky to plan to run for public office and have a radio station at my disposal,” Andell said.

Whether he’s appearing on his own station or another, Patrick is still using radio to move the Republican Party closer to what he envisions.

This was apparent on Sept. 19, 2016, when the presidential election was in full swing. Patrick went on Ingraham’s show — broadcast to KSEV listeners and to conservatives across the country — to pressure U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz to endorse the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

Patrick had until that moment been a staunch supporter of Cruz. But, speaking to Ingraham, he gave Cruz some advice — or, perhaps, a threat.

"You know, I stay loyal to my friends, and Ted’s a friend, but obviously I’m disappointed," Patrick said, referring to the fact that Cruz had so far refused to endorse Trump. "I’m hoping there’s still time for him to come forward, or I think he and all the other people you named will be left in the rearview mirror of the Republican Party moving forward.”

Within a few days, Cruz had endorsed Trump.

Description Dan Goeb Patrick is an American radio talk show host, television broadcaster, and politician. He has been serving as the 42nd lieutenant governor of Texas since January 2015, under Greg Abbott. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Patrick began his career as a radio and television broadcaster. Wikipedia