Last week, perhaps the most fraught and fascinating political media scandal wasn’t Jeff Bezos’s surprise visit to The Washington Post, but rather a more obscure and potentially seismic controversy. In mid-December, Steven Crowder, the A-list conservative content creator, took his show Louder with Crowder independent from his old employers at The Blaze. In many ways, this was a significant deal unto itself. According to Crowder, 300,000 subscribers were paying $99 a year to join the “Mug Club,” the membership-only community that received premium content from Crowder (as well as the eponymous mug), and Crowder was gunning to replicate that cash flow with a new venture. “I can’t know if you are in, or if you want to be in Mug Club, unless you enter your email to MugClubForever.com,” he said in a grainy Twitter video posted shortly after leaving The Blaze.