Ella Langley’s mournful country ballad “Choosin’ Texas” has broken record after record, sitting atop national and international charts for weeks in a row. The Rolling Stone pick for song of the summer is an easy earworm about love, loss, and the Lone
Star State, but some on the right are hearing their own favorite tune: a global conspiracy.
No, the fever swamps of the right are not taking the stance that Langley is a nepo baby, or industry plant, or inflating her streams, — that would be too straightforward. Instead, over the past few weeks, some of the most prominent figures on the cultural right have spread conspiracies claiming that Langley’s breakout hit was able to reach such heights because Elon Musk and DOGE defunded the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The conspiracy asserts that somehow, with its roughly $40 billion annual pre-Musk budget, USAID had been propping up the American rap industry, to the detriment of other, more “American” genres. They claim that by eliminating USAID — the now defunct international humanitarian aid agency — DOGE opened the doors for “American” country artists to once again top the charts — as if rap music is not one of the most quintessentially American cultural creations in the nation’s history.
Their evidence? Well, the timing of the DOGE cuts coincides with a resurgence of country music’s popularity on streaming charts. Maybe this seems plausible if you squint real hard, ignore actual streaming data, and also common sense. There’s also a very blatant element of racism undergirding the whole thing.
In May, far-right social media poster and would-be musician Steve Frassen put out a call to his followers on social media. “ATTENTION PROUD WHITES:Everyone who hated rap in the 1990’s and 2000’s is VINDICATED,” he wrote. “Rap isn’t music.It’s government PISS that was funded by USAID to dumb down Middle America. Take a victory lap, proud Whites who didn’t fall for it!”
Within weeks, the claim made it onto the podcast of the perpetually credulous Joe Rogan, who spread it to his millions of listeners. “There’s some people that believe that gangsta rap when it came about in the 1980s [… was popularized by] some faction, the government, some faction, some intelligence agencies wanting to create more crime,” Rogan said — referencing older, also debunked conspiracies.
“People are pointing out that right now is like one of the rare times where no rap music is on the charts, and they’re saying, ‘Well, how does this coincide with USAID [being defunded]?’ Was USAID like actively promoting rap music?” he went on. “Was that one of the reasons why rap music was so possible? Popular? Is that real? That can’t be real.”
Rogan’s engagement with the conspiracy, which up until that point had been contained to the more extreme cesspools of social media, brought it to the front door of the right-wing creator economy.
Podcaster Tim Pool told his listeners in late July that “Maybe it was the USAID.”
“Rap music just vanished from the Billboard Top 40 for the first time in 35 years. Strange, a couple of months — so this would have been about four months after the shuttering of USAID — rap disappears from the Billboard Hot 100. Interesting,” he added.
While Langley has held the top spot for an impressive 40 weeks, the genre has not “disappeared” from the charts for that same amount of time, as some right wingers are claiming. On July 31, Drake, Lil Baby and Young Miami all held spots in the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. Mac Miller, Ty Dolla $ign, Don Toliver, BabyChiefDoit, and a slew of other artists made the list.
Pool, who seems to be stuck in the perpetually embittered aesthetic of a 2000s Hot Topic teen, went on to suggest that the Black Eyed Peas somehow benefited from this government intervention. “I want you to think about that Oprah performance — the Black Eyed Peas are there — and there’s a big crowd, and on camera, it looks like everybody loves this band, and the song is played on the radio, and it’s put in the playlists, and you will listen to what they tell you to listen,” Pool complained, possibly in reference to a 2009 Oprah show kickoff party.
Click slop creator Benny Johnson claimed on Thursday that “libtards” had no response to Langley and were “in shambles” over Langley’s success. To be clear, there is no discernable backlash to Langley or her music, and she has not spoken publicly about her politics.
Johnson described the hit as a song about “loving Texas,” an example of the manner in which many of these creators are incapable of actual cultural comprehension and are instead simply regurgitating slightly remixed versions of formulaic culture war skirmishes for clicks.
“We were suppressed and our culture was manipulated and psy-opped by our own tax dollars and intel agencies, and Elon Musk shut it all down with USAID,” Johnson said. “Libs have no answer to it. So produce another piece of mumble rap garbage, please, CIA, and tell us that we’re going to like it.”
He repeatedly emphasized that Langley’s song had broken records set by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, two Black female artists, and added that the “queens of pop music” had been “traded for true American culture.”
Country music is absolutely seeing a resurgence in popularity, with artists like Kacey Musgraves, Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, and Stella Lefty all scoring major hits. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, R&B and hip-hop still remain the most popular streaming force in the first half of 2026 when taken as a whole, even as other genres gained steam. Latin, K-pop, and other foreign-language artists have also seen exponential growth.
The decline in rap and hip-hop’s presence on the charts can at least partially be attributed to a controversial rule change that Billboard made in October of last year. The outlet decided to weigh paid subscription streams more heavily than ad-supported ones, setting the stage for the Hot 100 singles chart to not feature a single rap or hip-hop artist in the top 40 spots for the first time since 1990. In response to the change, YouTube pulled out of its data-sharing agreement with Billboard in December, writing that the new policy “doesn’t reflect how fans engage with music today and ignores the massive engagement from fans who don’t have a subscription.” (Billboard and Rolling Stone are owned by the same company, Penske Media.)
It’s far more likely that the genre’s chart troubles have more to do with these factors, and broader ups and downs in listening patterns, than the defunding of a government agency focused primarily on health and development aid abroad. But right-wingers are not interested in the nuances of streaming data and genre growth. They see an opportunity to continue fomenting racist, nativist grievances on the back of a young artist who has done nothing to court a position as the right’s latest culture war obsession — except perhaps produce a chart-topping single in the genre she loves.
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