One night after his now infamous appearance at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden – where he joked that Black people carve watermelons instead of pumpkins at Halloween and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Tony Hinchcliffe appeared on stage in Austin, back at his day job, as the host of the podcast Kill Tony.
When Hinchcliffe took the stage he was still front-page news, the subject of endless cable news panels and late-night talkshow monologues. Some Democratic pollsters were suggesting it was a rare moment that “broke through” with voters and could even help Kamala Harris win in Pennsylvania.
Instead Hinchcliffe walked out to cheers. “Puerto Ricans are smart enough to know when they’re being used as political fodder and right now that is happening and I apologise to absolutely nobody. Not to the Puerto Ricans, not to the whites, not to the Blacks, not to the Palestinians, not to the Jews and not to my own mother,” he said to screams of delight.
The show continued with the opening comic making jokes about putting a Harris-Walz sign on the front lawn being an invitation to get robbed, imagining “some Sam-Smith-looking fuck is in the kitchen wearing a mask in his own house” and finishing the set by joking: “That’s why I have a Trump sign on my lawn with two swastikas on it.”
Kill Tony is a live comedy show that takes place in Joe Rogan’s Austin comedy club, where new comics get to perform one minute of standup before talking with a panel. The show is the most downloaded comedy podcast in history and sold out two nights at Madison Square Garden in August (with special guests including Andrew Dice Clay, the Black Keys and Aaron Rodgers).
It sits in a constellation of entertainment, news and sports programming that has been written about a lot since Harris lost the election. But the Democratic elites have perhaps still not reckoned with the scale of what’s happened. An analogy might be Fox News, which transformed American politics and has probably helped elect thousands of Republicans up and down ballots over many decades.
But Fox News is watched by older people – the median age is 68. Now, a Fox News for the young has been established. It’s not on one channel on a DirectTV box, but its audience is far bigger, potentially reaching 10 times as many people. It’s an amorphous network of podcasts, YouTubers, Twitch streamers and meme accounts from Kill Tony to Joe Rogan to Dilley Meme Team. They encompass entertainment, comedy, sport, health, relationships – but a distrust of the Democrats and the mainstream media permeates them all.
Like Fox News and conservative AM radio, the audiences of these podcasts are scared about a changing world, but their fears are very different from those of older viewers and listeners. They’re less susceptible to bogeymen stories of violent migrants, socialism or kids watching pornography (they are the kids watching pornography). They’re more worried about money in politics, ongoing wars, the #MeToo movement, and liberals who can’t take a joke. They’re also curious about heterodox thinking, history and the environment.
Crucially, they’re not on the fringes. Just look at the Spotify podcast charts. Spotify is the most used streaming app in the US, but it skews younger: about 54% of Spotify users are between the ages of 18 and 34. The top three podcasts in the week of the election – with audiences bigger than those of every news outlet, every true crime show, every wellness blogger – were from Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Theo Von. The rest of the top 25 is made up mostly of other conservative and “anti-establishment” commentators, a combination of veterans of Fox News and young upstarts: the Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, the former navy Seal Shawn Ryan, the former NYPD officer Dan Bongino. Some of these hosts are partisan but most don’t say they are Republican or even rightwing in focus; they say they are independent and challenge talking points from both the left and the right. All have endorsed or shown qualified support for Donald Trump.
Take Theo Von, a mullet-sporting comedian from Louisiana who looks 25 but is actually 44. In his post-election episode, he chatted with Matt McCusker, another podcast host in this sphere. Both men hold loosely liberal values but had sympathies with Trump in this election. Von said he was concerned that the American-Israel Public Affairs Committe (Aipac) and lobbyists had “infiltrated” the Democrats and that the parties were changing. McCusker complained Democrats had started to say “that Liz Cheney and George W Bush” were a good thing and said they “loved strong borders” whereas the Republican party used to “send people to jail for crack” but now wanted to get people out of prison. Then they started talking about having an American Ninja Warrior-style contest to decide who would come over the border. “That’d be awesome, dude!” said Von.
Steve Bannon always said the doctrine behind Breitbart was that “politics is downstream of culture” and that to change politics one must first change culture. It’s a doctrine that guided Trump to victory during his first campaign, mostly with older white voters, but has been taken to a new apex by these podcasters. They blend liberal and conservative culture, blurring the lines of acceptability and making figures like Trump more palatable to those who might have previously abhorred him.
Von, for example, has recently interviewed Trump, the conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, Robert F Kennedy Jr, JD Vance and the psychologist Jordan Peterson but also the softboy British producer James Blake, the progressive comedian John Mulaney and the nonfiction darling Malcolm Gladwell.
These podcasters are nothing like the extremist far-right white nationalist and men’s rights influencers, such as Andrew Tate and Gavin McInnes, who are explicit in their hate speech. Instead, they feature left-leaning and comic guests alongside hard-R Republican ones and then include extreme voices, normalising them by association (McInnes appeared on Rogan and Andrew Tate has appeared on Carlson; Rogan says Tate “says very wise things” among “ridiculous shit”). Kill Tony has an incredibly diverse mix of regular comedians, including a huge number of comics with disabilities. It also has lots of white comics who say the N-word. It’s not simple.
That’s not to say these programs are moderate. Much of what is said is abominable – racist, hate-filled conspiracy theories and a buzzing misogyny permeate many of them. The problem is that very few in the traditional media are following when they cross the line – instead they tend to label them all as impossibly illiberal or the vestige of conspiracy theorists. Fox News brought with it an entire ecosystem of Fox News critique: in the 2000s, Jon Stewart became a media studies professor for Americans, analysing and skewering the worst excesses of cable news. Authors such as Michael Wolff and Brian Stelter made their names writing books that explained the inner workings of Fox to liberals and the non-profit Media Matters for America employed a full staff to watch, summarise and push back against Fox News talking points. There is no similar ecosystem monitoring what is said in these brocasts, despite their ever-growing popularity.
Part of the reason for that is that they are all incredibly long – often more than three hours. In the past week alone, Joe Rogan has put out over 15 hours of podcasts; Sneako, a Twitch streamer, has been live for 33 hours and Steven Crowder, another Trump-friendly host, has been streaming on Rumble for over 11 hours. There’s been seven hours of content from Shawn Ryan, six hours from Dan Bongino and four from Theo Von. That is much more time that most people with busy lives can afford – but if you’re working lonely days from home, driving an Amazon delivery van or just sitting around playing video games, the hosts can become friends that play in the background, much as Fox News has been to older Americans.
That constant companionship is crucial to many young men in the US, who are experiencing powerful loneliness. Two-thirds of American men aged 18-23 agree with the statement “no one really knows me”. Almost 30% of younger men reported not spending time with someone outside their household in the past week and only one in five men say they have three or more friends in their local area they can depend on. These numbers are even more stark among men who did not go to college, who complain of little or no social or civic engagement.
This long format not only creates deep bonds with the listener, it goes some way to soften the guests. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defence secretary, is arguably one of the most heinously malicious actors in American media. During the first Trump administration he successfully persuaded Trump to pardon Edward Gallagher, a Navy Seal who had been reported by his own commandos in Iraq for stabbing a teenage captive to death and killing a school-age girl from a sniper’s roost. Hegseth calls him a warrior and a war hero.
But in the long rambling format of the Shawn Ryan show, Hegseth seems at least human. He talks about his tours and “the ideologues who want to bring a meritocracy to heel” with “trans stuff”. He says that they need to “hire the guy that did Top Gun Maverick” to make military recruiting ads and make combat standards “whatever they were in, say, I don’t know, 1995”.
All these podcasts have similar structures: they’re kind of boring, kind of personal, unedited, the research perfunctory, conjecture flows freely, conclusions are delusive, the people who host them are not that smart, and so it’s easy to get cosy in the warm blanket of male grievance with a man who believes war crimes are justified and women shouldn’t serve in the military. Fox News screeches at you until you’re terrified; these shows lull you in until you’re at ease.
A Reddit thread from a few years ago titled “I don’t have friends I have podcasts” laid bare how extreme this relationship can be. The original poster was complaining that it had become hard for him to have a conversation. “I used to work alone and I would listen to the Joe Rogan experience to fill the silence which was ok at that time but it has grown into me choosing to listen to strangers talk rather that have my own conversations. I enjoy podcasts still, I am just frustrated with myself for pushing people away and substituting life interactions for conversations I don’t get to be a part of.” Commenters agreed – one said that at “a time and place where I felt really isolated, podcasts filled the void perfectly” but now they are “still isolated – sometimes when I’m with actual people, I am looking forward to when I’m alone and listening”.
Trump ended up winning men under age 30 by 14 percentage points, according to results from AP VoteCast, a large survey of people who cast ballots this year. That is a nearly 30-point swing from 2020, when Joe Biden bested Trump among the same group by 15 percentage points.
Before the election Democrats talked about having a strong ground game. They might be better than Republicans at reaching people within communities – Black communities, LGBTQ+ communities, labor unions – but they have not recognised that many young people, mostly men, exist almost entirely without community. They might not ever go to a Trump rally, but when they listen to him on a show like Von’s or Rogan’s, they’ve got a friend.
