Mark Kaye has spent two decades behind a microphone in Jacksonville, Florida, building a reputation as a conservative talk show host who doesn’t shy away from a fight. Now the host of Mark Kaye Saves the Republic is taking on two new battles at once — one against what he sees as media dishonesty, and another against a sitting congressman.
Kaye recently sat down to discuss both projects: RightPen.AI, an artificial intelligence tool he built to flag what he calls omission-based bias in news coverage, and his primary campaign against Rep. John Rutherford in Florida’s 4th Congressional District. Both, he said, stem from the same frustration with institutions he believes have stopped listening to the people they’re supposed to serve.
The AI tool came first, and it grew out of Kaye’s own on-air fact-checking process.
“Most people know that the media is lying to them all the time, and this AI tool shows them exactly how, and it’s not your traditional lie,” said Kaye. “Because basically what happens is, if somebody lies to you, you can realize it. But if they’re withholding information from you, it’s tough to figure out. You don’t know you’re being lied to if they’re just changing the narrative by not telling you the whole truth.”
From Personal Tool to Consumer App
That gap between outright falsehood and selective storytelling is what RightPen.AI was designed to close. Kaye said the idea didn’t start as a business venture — it started as a way to check his own work before he went on the air.
“I started using it for my own show, for my podcast. I was trying to verify claims. And I would read these articles from CNN or Washington Post and I’d go, this just doesn’t seem right,” Kaye said. “As I realized that, as I was running it through these various different AI platforms, I built myself a tool. And I could just take any article immediately, I could take any headline, I could take any tweet, and I could just instantly see what was wrong.”
What began as a personal shortcut turned into something he opened up to his audience, and the response pushed him to formalize it.
“As I started using it on my show and I started showing people how it worked too, so we turned it into a consumer product and a consumer app,” the Congressional hopeful shared. “Now we’ve got a thousand people plus all over the world using it every day.”
Kaye said building the tool itself was far less complicated than people assume, crediting accessible AI development platforms for cutting his timeline down dramatically. One feature in particular, inspired by a high school memory, became a favorite among users.
“I’ll be honest with you, it took me probably about 48 hours to get it where I wanted it to, and it’s just using simple tools online,” Kaye said. “One of the key features that I love is that when I was in high school, my teacher would always mark up my term paper with a big red marker and correct all the things that were wrong. So we’ve added that. And if you take a headline from the Washington Post or the AP, for example, it’ll actually rewrite it and cross out what’s wrong.”
That feature has already produced a real-world result, according to Kaye, who pointed to a headline correction involving the Associated Press.
“We got the Associated Press to change one of their headlines about the Supreme Court because we posted the RightPen.AI correction online, and within 30 minutes, they updated their headline,” Kaye said.
Beyond fact-checking, Kaye said the tool now powers a lighter feature built directly from listener requests, tapping into the frustrations people face on social media every day.
“We have an online community, a Facebook community, and they say, ‘Hey, can you do this? Hey, can you do that?’ One of the most fun things that we do is called ‘Reply Mode’, because a lot of people were using it for the snarky replies they got on their Facebook feed or the mean tweets and DMs,” Kaye said. “So Reply Mode will give you, in Mark Kaye fashion, true Mark Kaye tone, great replies to use online, and people really enjoy that as well.”
A Primary Fight Rooted in a Single Vote
While RightPen.AI has become part of Kaye’s daily production process, so has AI more broadly, especially when it comes to research and visual content for his two-man operation. Still, he’s drawn a clear line around what the technology touches.
“I’ll use it for research. For example, if I want to quickly find out every vote that a congressman voted on the wrong way, or if I want to find a list of all the senators who are currently up for reelection this year, it’s a great way to quickly get that kind of information on the fly,” Kaye said. “But that’s it. All the words I say are still my own and all the scripts are still my own and all the jokes are still my own.”
Kaye’s decision to challenge Rutherford traces back to a single, specific moment in Congress: the 2023 speaker fight following Kevin McCarthy’s ouster, when Rutherford was among a handful of Republicans who declined to back Jim Jordan.
“Everybody that listened to our show, everyone that was calling in, they all wanted Jim Jordan,” said Kaye. “John Rutherford, in my district, was one of them. I think he was the only one in Florida. So we got him on the phone, and we’re like, ‘Dude, we all want Jim Jordan. What are you doing?’ And he goes, ‘You don’t want Jim Jordan.'”
That exchange, Kaye said, sent him digging into Rutherford’s broader voting record, and what he found convinced him the congressman had lost touch with his district.
“We started to dig around. And we realized he did this a lot, and his votes weren’t vibing with what we thought they were vibing with, and he wasn’t talking to anybody,” Kaye said.
Kaye initially supported a previous challenger before being encouraged to run himself, leaning on two decades of on-air name recognition in the district.
“The only person that could beat this guy is a true conservative with a lot of local name recognition,” Kaye said, recalling the conversation. “I’ve been on the air here for 20 years in Jacksonville. So I did have the name recognition, and I am very conservative, so I challenged him, and it’s been going great.”
Running for office has taught Kaye plenty about the mechanics of a campaign, particularly the gap between what volunteers and donors are willing to give.
“The one thing that I’ve learned is it requires way more money than you could ever think, and that people would rather give you their time than their money,” Kaye said. “Volunteers are easy to get. Money is a little more difficult.”
Should he win the seat, Kaye said the show isn’t going anywhere — if anything, he expects it to improve with a front-row seat in Washington.
“Right now I get everything second hand. I get it off of Fox News or Newsmax or CNN, or somebody texts me and says, hey, did you know this is happening?” the Mark Kaye Saves the Republic host stated. “But if I’m there, it’ll be firsthand. It’s going to be me saying, guess who I bumped into in the hallway? Guess what I overheard in the congressional men’s room.”
For Kaye, both projects trace back to the same core belief: that institutions, whether newsrooms or Congress, have grown too comfortable ignoring the people they answer to.
“Politicians can no longer be quiet, and they can’t ignore social media, and they can’t ignore podcasts, and they can’t pretend like it’s business as usual,” Kaye said. “That’s why you’re seeing a lot more of these new younger tech savvy people pop up. And that’s another one of the reasons why I’m running.”
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.