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‘We’re fighting for you!’ Podcaster Ben Meiselas on taking on the Maga media – and winning the ratings battle

by Evelyn Reynolds 11 October 2025, 04:00

Ben Meiselas is a very busy man. So busy, he has to break off halfway through our interview to conduct an interview of his own, for his next broadcast. It’s 7am Los Angeles time when we meet via video call, and Meiselas is already well into another 18-hour day of podcasting, planning, interviewing, meetings and more besides. His “pro-democracy” channel MeidasTouch, which he runs with his younger brothers Jordan and Brett, puts out 15 or more videos a day, most of them presented by Meiselas himself. “I was doing another video before this,” he says, “and so by now I’ve already released one video I did last night, which was my 4am, and now I just worked on my 7am – it’ll get released any minute now. And then I’ll have an 8.30, a 10, an 11.30 …”The prolific output is part of the reason The MeidasTouch has become one of the most listened-to podcasts in the US, routinely beating the mighty Joe Rogan in both video and audio, and even overtaking Fox News in YouTube views. Rogan and others in the right-leaning podcast manosphere are thought to have swung the 2024 election in Donald Trump’s favour, prompting much soul-searching on the American left about its media game, and why they need a Joe Rogan of their own; MeidasTouch seems to have stepped in to fill the void.That void extends far beyond just podcasting, in Meiselas’s view. He is appalled at how the US media has reacted since Trump came to power. “It’s a total capitulation,” he says. “They’re either corporate news – like cable news, [which is] just completely both-sides-ing the issues and intentionally ignoring critical, existential things – or they’re just outright state regime media à la North Korea and Russia: Fox News, OAN [One America News], Newsmax … All of these corporations are run by rightwing oligarchs; they are tools to ingratiate themselves with the regime for other benefits and other business interests.”The spectacle of CEOs and podcast bros alike “kissing the ring” at Trump’s inauguration cemented this impression early on. As counter-programming, Meiselas broadcast four hours of cute puppies and kittens, raising funds for the Humane Society.View image in fullscreenIf the left is looking for its Joe Rogan, though, Meiselas doesn’t quite fit the bill. Where Rogan is casual, rambling and often credulous of his guests’ outlandish claims, Meiselas is focused, well-informed and disdainful. And as you’d expect of a former trial lawyer, he speaks with an off-the-cuff fluency (“no scripts, no notes – that’s part of the connection I build with the audience”), and he brings receipts. If he has a catchphrase, it’s “play this clip” – as he illustrates yet another incidence of Republican duplicity/hypocrisy/incompetence/deception/authoritarianism with video, audio, graphs or data.He can be a level-headed interviewer – this week he has spoken to Democrat leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and newly elected congresswoman Adelita Grijalva. (He breaks off from our interview to talk to a former commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission about free speech and media monopolies.) But over the course of a typical episode – which could be a 20-minute solo broadcast or a 90-minute talk with his brothers – he often becomes audibly outraged at what’s going on.Put that all together, and tonally MeidasTouch is somewhere between wartime resistance broadcast and wrestling commentary. Meiselas is not above throwing out insults: the Republican house leader is consistently referred to as “Maga Mike Johnson”, for example, and he is as merciless about Trump’s health as the rightwing media was about Joe Biden’s. He doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind: “What the hell are these people even talking about?” “Stop making up things and defrauding the American people.” “These people are sick.” And MeidasTouch’s episode titles conform to the hyperbolic YouTube vernacular: “Trump is COLLAPSING under SHUTDOWN PRESSURE!!!”, “Trump LOOKS AWFUL as PRESSER Goes OFF THE RAILS”. One journalist described MeidasTouch’s commentary as “seemingly calculated to appeal to those for whom [MSNBC host] Rachel Maddow is too subtle.”Meiselas makes no apologies for his house style. “I don’t curse,” he says. “I try to still keep it as much as possible appropriate for everyone. But on the other hand, I think where you have characters who are cartoonishly evil, like Maga Mike Johnson or JD Vance, framing them for the WWE cosplay characters they’ve become is actually an accurate way of describing who they are … I’m just trying to reflect the language of, truthfully, what it is that I’m seeing, and I think the growth of the network is the audience responding: ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I see it.’” He is speaking from the same home office in which his 5.5 million subscribers see him every day; it’s somewhat uncanny – as if I’m watching my own personal episode of his podcast.In his view, it’s other media outlets that are not meeting the moment. “We’re beyond a constitutional crisis. America’s living in a dictatorship right now. And the question is, how will an opposition respond to a dictatorship?” he says. “This is not a time to be playing games. People are waking up every day feeling, and rightfully so, that this is really life or death for them. We’re not talking about abstract concepts. People are saying, ‘I may not be able to afford healthcare and I’m going to die.’ So they don’t want to be lectured about, ‘Well, on the one hand; on the other hand.’ They want to be told directly, ‘What are you going to do to fight for my life? What are you going to do to fight for my healthcare? My community is under attack right now. There are masked agents who are disappearing human beings right here.’ Or, ‘I’m a member of a marginalised group’ – whether it’s a gay person, LGBTQ – ‘and I matter. I’m a human being, damn it.’ I think where we come in, very unapologetically, is we say, ‘We’re fighting for you, and we don’t waver on our values.’”This is what separates his operation from the forces they’re opposing, he says, despite their superficial resemblances. “You have to unite people with empathy and love and community and shared values as a force against the hate.” He’s all for building connections: communally, politically and internationally – given the global rise of far-right politics. “That, to me, is more important than, ‘Am I beating Joe Rogan this week or that week?’”View image in fullscreenMeiselas, 40, didn’t set out to build a media empire, nor did he really have to. Until about 2020 he was a partner in a successful law firm and his career was flying. The legal profession was in his blood, you could say. His mother practised law for a spell; his father, Kenny, is a leading entertainment lawyer whose clients include Lady Gaga, the Weeknd, Nicki Minaj and formerly Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was recently sentenced to more than four years in prison for prostitution-related charges. Meiselas actually interned for Combs’ Bad Boy Records for a few summers in his late teens. A Variety profile from 2019 claimed that Combs “took Meiselas under his wing, resulting in a precocious and priceless apprenticeship”, but he was not part of Diddy’s entourage or witness to any of wrongdoing, he stresses: “I was very low on the totem pole.” He was actually working on Diddy’s Citizen Change initiative, which was about voter registration for young people.He grew up on Long Island, New York, with his two brothers: Brett, who is five years younger, and Jordan, eight years younger. “We always did things together as brothers,” he says. “Like, we made videos, even in the early days of Adobe editing. We would do comedy skits together in the back yard for fun, and we would make movies together for our school projects.” Then, as now, Ben was the leader, it seems. A confident public speaker, he was president of his student government in middle school and high school, and of various undergraduate clubs. In his early 20s he interned on Capitol Hill, for New York Democrat Steve Israel, then for Hillary Clinton when she was a senator. “I would hand her the speeches before she spoke, answer constituent mail, give tours of the Capitol building – which was my favourite part about it.”He was one of the youngest students at law school, in Georgetown, Washington DC, but he only really became enthused when he began studying civil rights law. He was recruited out of college to a small law California firm and “thrown into the fire”, he says. Within three years, still in his mid-20s, he was in court handling significant cases of brutality and wrongful death at the hands of the police (he assisted the Guardian’s reporting on these issues in 2015), and invariably winning them. That led to representing Colin Kaepernick when the San Francisco 49ers quarterback sued the NFL for excluding him for taking a knee, in what seems like a different era (they reached a confidential settlement). He went on to become a business partner with Kaepernick and they remain good friends.View image in fullscreenIn retrospect, it could look as if Meiselas was destined for a career in politics, but it never really appealed. “When I became a civil rights lawyer, I actually started to not like politics, because politicians would start calling me up for money,” he says. “I still, and I say this all the time on the show, don’t like politics. To me, politics distorts from what the human issues really are.” He doesn’t quite rule it out for the future, though. “I can’t imagine it ever happening. I know it sounds like a political answer to say that, but I really have no desire at all.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt was during the Covid pandemic in 2020 that Meiselas felt the need to get more politically engaged. Again, he doesn’t mince words. “I thought that Trump was killing people,” he says. “He would do these Covid press conferences, and it would be spewing a bunch of nonsense and disinformation. And me and my brothers were like, ‘Are you watching this? What the hell is going on? We need to do something to call this out.’”At the time Brett was a digital editor for Ellen DeGeneres’ TV show, and Jordan worked in marketing. The brothers began producing anti-Trump videos that started to go viral. One of them, with a #CreepyTrump hashtag, superimposed GOP insider Kellyanne Conway’s comments about Joe Biden being “creepy” over clips of Trump’s inappropriate comments about young women, including his daughter Ivanka. They formed a political action committee, to raise funds for Joe Biden’s campaign, but found simply placing TV attack ads to be unsatisfactory – “You’re renting space on their network, and they’re undermining your message with their both-sides-ism.”Then the January 6 attacks happened, and the brothers decided to start their own podcast in earnest. “We just said, ‘Let’s just put out our own show together, from our living rooms,” Meiselas says. “The quality wasn’t great, but the first podcast we put out, there was a decent-size audience and the feedback was great. And so we’re like, ‘There’s something there.’”Meiselas began phasing out his legal work, and fully quit the day job in 2023. As well as him and his brothers, MeidasTouch now has a whole stable of hosts, including Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer; it produces shows not just on politics but on legal and economic matters. And it is expanding internationally: in September it launched a Canada podcast. “For us, the strategy is just to try to be everywhere,” he says. And not just in the interests of expanding the brand: “It may be important in the future to have international hubs getting out the message, in the event that there’s additional kind of clampdowns here.”There is no shortage of material for anti-Maga podcasting at the moment, but will the world still need such granular focus on day-to-day politics once the Trump era comes to an end in 2028 (assuming it actually does)? Even the podcast bros who supported Trump, including Rogan and Theo Von, are now turning against him over issues such as the Jeffrey Epstein saga and his brutal immigration policies. “I don’t think anybody would have signed up for [this],” Rogan said in July.“I think there’s always going to be a Trump worldview,” says Meiselas, “whether that’s embodied in Trump, or a Maga perspective, or the next generation that’s going to push these ideas. And while we’re often framed as anti-Trump or liberal or left, I don’t see it like that at all. Because to me, it’s what Trump represents, and what he does, that I’m against. It’s that he’s laundering a set of ideas that permeate internationally, that impact you in the UK, in Europe, in South and Central America, in Russia. He is a vehicle and a vessel for these concepts that I think bring us back to the dark ages.”Either way, Meiselas’s 18-hour shifts aren’t going to end any time soon – but he is fine with that, he says. At least he gets to work from home. “When I was a lawyer and I would have trials across the country, I’d be travelling for weeks and months, and I’d be in Utah or New York or San Francisco or wherever,” he says.He married last year and has a baby daughter. “She just turned one, so I’m able to do some videos, I get to walk my little girl up the block, we walk back, I do another video, we have lunch together, I do another video. So for me, it’s actually a blessing.” But he laughs as he admits that he’s never really not working. “Even when I’m doing the walks, I’m always thinking a little bit about what’s next. I’m always trying to make the connections in my mind.”But it doesn’t really feel like work, he says. “I don’t wake up and I’m like, ‘Another day at work …’ I feel a broader sense of this historical moment and where the network fits into it. I feel every day is like, ‘This is what I was meant to do.’” More

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In late May, four of Texas’s top Democrats convened on Zoom to strategize about the 2026 election. The upcoming Republican primary battle for Senate pits incumbent senator John Cornyn against the state’s more right-leaning attorney general, Ken Paxton, and is expected to be bruising – greasing the skids for a potential Democratic pickup. With governor, attorney general and lieutenant governor also in play, the question the liberal quartet aimed to answer was whether they might divvy up these contests, thereby avoiding a contentious primary of their own.On the call were three fixtures of Lone Star Democratic politics: Beto O’Rourke, Colin Allred and Representative Joaquin Castro. Less well-known was the fourth man, a 36-year-old member of the state’s house of representatives from Austin’s district 50 named James Talarico. A former middle-school language arts teacher and aspiring Presbyterian minister with the earnest demeanor and yearbook-ready countenance of a young Ron Howard, Talarico had begun his political career in 2018, flipping a swing district to become the youngest member of the house. A good bit greener than his colleagues, Talarico seemed an unlikely aspirant for the Senate run.Then along came Joe Rogan.The world’s most influential podcast host had learned of Talarico from comedian Brian Simpson, who had been awestruck by a viral clip of the state senator taking a Republican colleague to task for her “idolatrous” bill forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments. A producer reached out, and within a few weeks the virtually unknown official was stepping into Rogan’s Austin studio to offer his gloss on the radical teachings of Jesus. If the conversation was friendly – about two hours in, Rogan was practically begging Talarico to run for president – the reviews from Rogan’s right-leaning, MMA-loving fanboys were less so. Many took particular issue with Talarico’s reading of the Bible as arguably pro-choice or at least ambivalent about abortion.Even so, Daniel had entered the lion’s den and held his own. Within hours of the show’s airing, Politico was enthusing that “Joe Rogan’s Latest Guest Might Turn Texas Blue” and Talarico’s beaming choirboy mug was front and center on the Drudge Report.“I learned this when I flipped the Trump district at the beginning of my career,” Talarico said. “It’s almost like asking someone on a date, or any relationship in your life – you have to put effort into it. If we’re not going to make the effort to show up in these places where people are, then we can’t be surprised when they don’t make the effort to get off the couch and vote for us.”The week marked a notable turnaround for a politician who just a few years ago hit what he calls his political “rock bottom”. It was the fall of 2021, a year that had begun with the January 6 insurrection and a catastrophic winter storm that killed hundreds of Texans. Meanwhile, “Maga” was ascendant in the Lone Star state. Officials rammed through the nation’s most unforgiving abortion ban, legalized permitless carry and implemented a new civics curriculum Talarico describes as a “historical whitewash”.Then came an aggressive attempt to curtail voting rights that led him and dozens of Democratic lawmakers to flee the state in an attempt to deny the legislature a quorum. After 38 days, Talarico was among a handful who saw the writing on the wall and returned to Austin. As he explained in a lengthy op-ed, Texas Democrats held a dwindling stack of cards, and Congress would need to address the problem at the federal level. (The House delivered, but the bill failed in the Senate due to opposition from senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.)Despite Talarico’s hopes that ending the standoff might preserve a modicum of bipartisanship, it was not to be. In October, the legislature voted to redraw the state’s congressional districts – an attempt to dilute the political power of Black and Latino voters and “kill me off politically”, he said. “Walking on to that floor and realizing that my [Republican] colleagues weren’t looking me in the eye, I felt like I had lost hope, not just in my colleagues and the institution, but in whether democracy was even possible in such polarized and divided times. It was my lowest point in public service so far.”Overcoming an urge to pack it in, he opted to fight. As it happened, a seat in solid-blue Austin, where he’d grown up, was open. Talarico moved home and won handily. (Now, Texan Republicans are contemplating another redistricting as a way to further dilute the Democratic vote. “Clearly their gerrymandering didn’t hold from five years ago, and so now they’re having to get back in there and do some touch-ups and fortifying,” Talarico said.)Following his crisis of political faith, he made another critical life decision, enrolling in the seminary with the goal of becoming a minister. “Jesus gave us these two commandments, to love God and love your neighbor,” he explained, noting that he considers his political career a vehicle for doing the latter. Now he understood: the two injunctions went hand in hand. Getting in touch with God, “or whatever you consider to be the ground of your being”, is what Talarico says makes love of neighbor sustainable. “Whether that’s in public service, as a teacher or a nurse or a firefighter or a police officer, or whether it’s with activism or volunteering or just being a good person in your community, it is difficult and sometimes exhausting work, and that’s why we have to be connected to something deeper.”An outspoken progressive Christian is something of a unicorn in today’s political environment – a sign not only of the secularism that has characterized the Democratic party since the Reagan years but of the ever-increasing ties between the far right and the evangelical movement. Perhaps nowhere is this alliance more pronounced than in Texas, where the last legislative session saw a flurry of bills that would, among other things, allow prayer in public schools, fund parochial schools with taxpayer money and outlaw the provision of litter boxes for students – an actual bill based on a debunked rightwing hoax. The latter proposal stalled after Talarico’s polite if methodical humiliation of the bill’s author became one of his many viral TikToks; the others, including the Ten Commandments bill, became law.Talarico has done more than simply oppose what he considers to be bad legislation. He regularly calls out fossil fuel barons Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who backed the legislative crusade. “They basically own every Republican member of the state senate,” he said, noting that they are by far the state’s biggest political donors. “They own a majority of Republicans in the state house. They own every statewide elected official. And they run a massive network of thinktanks and advocacy organizations and media outlets. So their empire has really taken over state government. And they have a pretty extreme theocratic vision for for the state and the country.” Asked whether a Handmaid’s Tale-style dystopia seemed possible, he said, “We’re a lot closer than people think.”Talarico defines the effort to wed government with biblical ideology as Christian nationalism, “the worship of power – social power, economic power, political power, in the name of Christ”, as he put it in a 2023 guest sermon. Accusing adherents of turning Jesus “into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear-mongering fascist,” he declared it “incumbent on all Christians to confront it and denounce it”. Posted to YouTube, the sermon has since garnered 1m views.The question now is not merely whether Talarico can translate that kind of social media buzz into votes but whether he wants to. He expects to obtain his master’s in divinity next year, and he often speaks of his desire to one day take over the ministry at his home church, St Andrew’s Presbyterian.But a slight detour to the US Senate seems increasingly possible – an indication of his growing popularity and ambition as well as a notable vibe shift on the left. A recent poll found that 62% of Democrats wanted their party’s leadership replaced. And a strong contingent has shown a hunger for candidates, such as Talarico, who are willing to lean into progressive values without apology (he has, for example, mounted a forceful defense of gender-affirming care for trans kids).While Talarico makes a strong case for the undercurrent of wealth redistribution inherent in Jesus’ teachings, he doesn’t call himself a socialist – certainly not in Texas. Still it’s not hard to see parallels between his meteoric rise and that of New York City’s socialist mayoral hopeful, Zohran Mamdani, another young state legislator whose online savvy, bold progressivism and evident sincerity have endeared him to liberal voters. (In 2019, Talarico walked across his 25-mile district – nearly double the distance of Mamdani’s recent Manhattan hike.)For Talarico, the key to winning over the electorate is authenticity. “Voters can sniff out that consultant-driven messaging,” he said. “The poll-tested stuff is just not going to cut it.”Moreover, voters are spoiling for a fight. One quality they appreciated in Trump, he said, was the aggression he’d shown on behalf of his vision, however malevolent. Democrats, he said, need to bring that kind of energy to the fight for a better world. And while Jesus Christ was famous for his humility and pacifism, Talarico noted, he was also an uncompromising radical who could tap into a combative side when needed.“If we are doing our best to mimic Jesus, being kind and humble and meek are all part of it,” he said. “But when the powerful are abusing people, we have to stand in the way, and that requires courage and bravery, and speaking truth to power.”In late June, Talarico appeared at a town hall in San Antonio alongside Castro and O’Rourke, a show of unity before what may well turn into a heated primary race. Befitting his status as the youngest and least seasoned politician on the stage, he spoke first. But as Talarico recalled the story of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple, when he ejected the money-changers and merchants from the Lord’s house, he didn’t sound like a man inclined meekly to wait his turn to run for higher office. “To those who love democracy, to those who love our neighbors,” he proclaimed, “it’s time to start flipping tables.”As for the Senate race, Talarico is praying on it. He’ll make a decision this summer, he said. More
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A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revolting | Sam Wolfson
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 April 2025, 11:00
Sam Harris is the kind of guest Joe Rogan loves to have on his podcast: he dresses awkwardly in a sport coat with jeans; he undertook a PhD in neuroscience after a transformative experience with MDMA; his tone is accessible yet patronising; he has a sense of academic authority which belies a set of controversial views that include calling Islam “uniquely uncivil” and almost unfettered support for Israeli attacks on Gaza; he made an app called Waking Up, which promises to be “a new operating system for your mind”. Rogan has hosted Harris on his podcast many times and the pair call each other good friends.But even Harris seems perturbed by Rogan’s more wholehearted embrace of Musk and Maga. “He’s in over his head on so many topics of great consequence,” Harris told his listeners of his own podcast last week. “He’ll bring someone in to shoot the shit on ‘how the Holocaust is not what you think it was’ or ‘maybe Churchill was the bad guy in world war two’ … or he’ll talk to someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson, who lie as freely as they breathe, and doesn’t push back against any of their lies … It is irresponsible, and it’s directly harmful.”Joe Rogan’s podcast success has in large part been about building a community of regular guests from the worlds of comedy, wrestling, psychedelics and non-fiction publishing, a kind of Rogansphere that has begun to feel like a subculture. He hosts his favourite guests time after time, with many of them building entire careers off their appearances on the show.But recently, various members of the Rogansphere have started to turn against their leader. They can’t understand how the host of the most popular podcast in the world seems to have gone from examining both sides to defending Elon Musk at every turn and providing a platform for second world war revisionists.View image in fullscreenIn the past few months, Rogan has called people who thought Elon Musk’s hand gesture was a Nazi salute “dumb”, “crazy”, “illogical and weird” and defended it by saying it’s how Americans used to give the pledge of allegiance in the 1940s. Weeks later, he gave a very sympathetic interview to the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who has previously called Winston Churchill the main villain of the second world war and tweeted an image of Nazis in Paris, saying it was “infinitely preferable” to the drag “Last Supper” scene at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony.Rogan wasn’t always like this. Over the past decade he has built his podcast into by far the most successful in the world, weathering numerous controversies. He spent much of his career being mislabelled as ideologically rightwing or misogynistic when in fact he’s more of a simpleton who agrees with almost everyone who comes on his show, even when the things they’re saying are contradictory. He has been a staunch believer “in just asking questions” but not so much in listening to or processing the answers. He has supported both Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr, and has taken conflicting views on everything from trans rights to Ye, sometimes hilariously so.The best thing you could say about Rogan is that he is distrustful of all mainstream narratives, in an indiscriminate way. That’s led to him promoting a number of conspiracy theories that fly in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence about vaccines and the climate crisis, but also vocally criticising the war in Gaza and the influence of lobbyists in Washington DC.But his outlook has shifted since Trump was elected for the second time, a victory many credit to a good performance on Rogan’s podcast and Rogan’s subsequent endorsement. On Saturday night at a UFC fight, Rogan ran into Trump, warmly embraced him and said: “I’m so happy for you sir.” Many of his biggest fans, those that discuss episodes in detail on Reddit and Discord, are complaining that he has become a shill for the elites he used to claim to distrust.Rogan has tended to brush off these critiques in the past, saying he’s just an interested comedian asking questions. But even Rogan’s comedy friends have started to bristle at his unwavering support for Musk. Rogan values comedy above all else, investing much of the riches from his podcast in the Austin comedy scene, buying up clubs and appearing regularly as a panellist on Kill Tony, the open-mic standup podcast that takes shots at perceived wokeism. Rogan has a regular cast of comedians on his podcast including Shane Gillis, Kyle Dunnigan and Tim Dillon. These comedians give Rogan his street credibility, and he in turn has given them a huge platform.While they haven’t turned on Rogan yet, they are incredibly disparaging about Musk. Dillon called Musk’s White House press conference “the grossest and cringiest shit anyone has seen for a long time … I disagree with close friends of mine who think Elon Musk is the new Jesus.” Gillis laughed about Musk’s salute on his podcast, and said he thought Musk was “psychotic” and “fucking weird” for lying about how good he is at video games.Rogan meanwhile has recently called Musk “a super genius that’s been fucked with” and “one of the smartest people alive”.This emerging divide between Rogan and his comedic milieu came to a head last month at the recording of Kill Tony’s first special for Netflix (filmed at Rogan’s Comedy Mothership club in Austin). Both Dunnigan and Rogan were on the panel together but Dunnigan was in character, hilariously, as Musk. It was a brilliant and vicious send-up of Musk’s bizarre humour and minimal intelligence that had everyone laughing except Rogan, who avoided making eye contact or saying almost anything for the entire episode. It seemed as though he didn’t want to give any impression to Musk that he was was mocking him.There are no simple ideological lines being drawn between Rogan and the guests that are turning on him. Douglas Murray, for example, is an incredibly conservative pro-Israel historian who supports the withdrawal of visas from students who demonstrated on college campuses last year and has said he wants to ban “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries”. In many ways he is to the right of Rogan, and used much of his appearance losing a debate on the podcast with his fellow guest Dave Smith over Gaza. Yet he also used his time to admonish Rogan for having too many amateur and conspiracy theory-minded historians on the podcast. “I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people. You’ve now got a big platform and have been throwing out counter-historical stuff but a very dangerous kind.”Rogan had very little in the way of a meaningful defence. Defending why he had the conspiracy theorist and Pizzagate proponent Ian Carroll on his program, Rogan replied: “I just think I’d like to talk to this person … I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business? Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.”There are no smart guys here; both Murray and Rogan have tendency to use circuitous straw man arguments that suit their specific brand of politics. But it does show cracks in the cultural wing of Trumpism.Rogan himself seems to be backing down from a full-throated endorsement of the president’s policies, calling the Venezuelan deportations “horrific” and “bad for the cause”, and calling Trump’s feud with Canada over tariffs “stupid”. Last month he said healthcare should “100% should be socially funded” and was celebrated by Bernie Sanders for doing so.Yet these acknowledgements of bad policies haven’t translated into a lack of enthusiasm for either Trump or Musk, yet. But with Rogan it only takes one convincing guest to change his mind.What’s more, Rogan’s main constituency of listeners, young men, appear to be feeling buyer’s remorse about Trump, with new polling suggesting the group is swinging away from the president. Where his audience go, Rogan tends to follow.On his podcast, Harris told his listeners: “Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe [Rogan] has interacted with information.” Rogan might revel in criticism from progressives, but barbs from his friends are likely to sting. How long Trump can count on Rogan’s cuddles and warm wishes might depend on whether his favourite guests begin to ostracize him. More
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The Guardian view on the US immigration crackdown: what began with foreign nationals won’t end there | Editorial
by Evelyn Reynolds 8 April 2025, 17:38
While running for president, Donald Trump promised voters “the largest deportation operation in American history”. Now he wants to deliver. Thousands of undocumented migrants have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials since he returned to the White House. On Monday, the US supreme court lifted a judge’s ban on deporting alleged gang members to Venezuela under an 18th-century law, though it said deportees had a right to judicial review. Even the Trump-backing podcaster Joe Rogan has described as “horrific” the removal of an asylum seeker – identified as a criminal because he had tattoos – under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.What’s truly new is that the administration is also targeting those who arrived and remained in the US with official approval, such as the Palestinian activist and student Mahmoud Khalil. Normally, green card holders would be stripped of their status if convicted of a crime; he has not even been accused of one. But Mr Trump had pledged to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests that his administration has deemed antisemitic, and Mr Khalil was a leading figure in the movement at Columbia University. The president crowed that his arrest last month was “the first of many”. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts, was detained by masked agents in the street, reportedly for an opinion piece she co-wrote with other students. Unrelated to the protests, dozens if not hundreds more students have had visas revoked, often for minor or non-criminal offences.This crackdown is exploiting legislation in ways that were never intended. The Alien Enemies Act was previously invoked only in wartime – but Mr Trump casts mass migration as an “invasion”. Mr Khalil and others are targeted under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows deportations when the secretary of state determines that a foreign national’s presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. And while this campaign is indiscriminate in many regards, Mr Trump’s offer of asylum to white Afrikaners facing “unjust racial discrimination” in South Africa speaks volumes about who is and is not wanted in his America.The current fear among migrants, with all its social costs, is not a byproduct of this drive, but the desired result. The Trump administration is trying to push undocumented individuals into “self-deporting”, which is cheaper and easier than using agents to hunt people down. It reportedly plans to levy fines of up to $998 a day if those under deportation orders do not leave – applying the penalties retroactively for up to five years. Fairness, never mind mercy, is not relevant. The administration admits an “administrative error” led to the expulsion to El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia – who is married to a US citizen and was working legally in the US – but fights against righting that wrong.This crackdown should frighten US nationals too, both for what it says about their nation’s character and for what it may mean for their own rights. The Trump administration wants to remove birthright citizenship and is ramping up denaturalisation efforts. “I love it,” said Mr Trump, when asked about El Salvador’s offer to jail US citizens in its infamous mega-prisons – though at least he conceded that he might have to check the law first. The chilling effect of Mr Khalil’s arrest on dissent is already being felt by US nationals too: the first amendment’s protection of free speech is not exclusive to citizens.“The friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment; but the citizen will soon follow,” Thomas Jefferson wrote when the alien and sedition laws were passed. That warning now looks more prescient than ever.
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‘He is not a gang member’: outrage as US deports makeup artist to El Salvador prison for crown tattoos
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 April 2025, 16:40
For as long as anyone can remember Andry José Hernández Romero was enthralled by the annual Three Kings Day celebrations for which his Venezuelan home town is famed, joining thousands of fellow Christians on the streets of Capacho to remember how the trio of wise men visited baby Jesus bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh.At age seven, Andry became a Mini King, as members of the town’s youth drama group Los Mini Reyes were known. Later in life, he tattooed two crowns on his wrists to memorialise those carnival-like Epiphany commemorations and his Catholic roots.“Most Capacheros get crown tattoos, often adding the name of their father or mother. We’ve lots of people with these tattoos – it’s a tradition that began in 1917,” said Miguel Chacón, the president of Capacho’s Three Kings Day foundation.The Latin American tradition appears to have been lost on the US immigration officers who detained Hernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist, hairdresser and theatre lover, after he crossed the southern border last August to attend a prearranged asylum appointment in San Diego.Hernández, who is gay, told agents he was fleeing persecution stemming from his sexual orientation and political views. Just weeks earlier, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, had unleashed a ferocious crackdown after being accused of stealing the presidential election to extend his 12-year rule.But Hernández’s tattoos were deemed proof he was a member of Venezuela’s most notorious gang, the Tren de Aragua, and a “security threat” to the US.View image in fullscreen“Detainee Hernandez ports [sic] tattoos ‘crowns’ that are consistent with those of a Tren de Aragua member,” an agent at California’s Otay Mesa detention centre claimed, according to court documents published this week.Those 16 words appear to have sealed the fate of the young Venezuelan stylist, who friends, family and lawyers say has never committed a crime.On 15 March, after more than six months in custody in the US, Hernández was one of scores of Venezuelans flown from Texas to a maximum security prison in El Salvador as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. To the horror of their relatives, some detainees were paraded before the cameras and filmed being manhandled by guards and having their heads shaved before being bundled into cells.“Let my son go. Review his case file. He is not a gang member,” Hernández’s mother, Alexis Dolores Romero de Hernández, pleaded as she came to terms with her son’s disappearance into the notorious Central American “terrorism confinement centre”, known by the Spanish acronym Cecot.“Everyone has these crowns, many people. But that doesn’t mean they’re involved in the Tren de Aragua … He’s never had problems with the law,” said Hernández, 65, who has not heard from her son since he called on the eve of his transfer to let her know – incorrectly – that he was being deported to Venezuela.View image in fullscreen“We know nothing. They say nothing. They give no information. That’s the trauma – not knowing anything about these young men, especially mine,” Alexis Hernández complained.Her son’s plight has caused outrage in Táchira, the western state where he grew up, with people packing Capacho’s picturesque 19th-century church, San Pedro de la Independencia, to demand his freedom.“We’re talking about someone who has been part of Capacho’s Three Kings Day celebrations for 23 years,” said Chacón, who is leading the campaign. “That’s why I’m doing everything I can to get this young man released. He is completely innocent.”Krisbel Vásquez, 29, a manicurist, denied her “calm, kind and humble” childhood friend was a villain. “I’ve known him all my life. He doesn’t bother anyone,” Vásquez said, urging Trump and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to backtrack.Xiomara Ramírez, 57, said her son had grown up with Hernández, with the pair doing homework together at her house. “I wonder why so much injustice. Why doesn’t the US give good people like Andry opportunities?” Ramírez asked.Melissa Shepard, an attorney from the California-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, representing Andry, was perplexed that her “very sweet, kind and thoughtful” client had been incarcerated in “one of the worst places in the world.“The fact that this administration has taken somebody who is so vulnerable and put them into such a terrifying situation has just been horrific. We fear that if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone,” she said.View image in fullscreenGrowing indignation over Hernández’s plight, and that of other apparently innocent Venezuelans deported to El Salvador on the basis of their tattoos, is spreading to unexpected places.“It’s horrific,” Joe Rogan, a Trump-endorsing podcaster, said on his latest show. Rogan supported Trump’s offensive against Venezuelan “criminals” the president claimed terrorised the US. “But let’s not [let] innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs,” he said, asking: “How long before that guy can get out? Can we figure out how to get them out? Is there any plan in place to alert the authorities that they’ve made a horrible mistake and correct it?”But the Trump administration has shown no sign of reconsidering its decision to send so many Venezuelans to El Salvador on the basis of such flimsy evidence.On Monday, Trump thanked Bukele for receiving another group of alleged Latin American criminals “and giving them such a wonderful place to live!”Bukele said the deportations were “another step in the fight against terrorism and organised crime”, claiming the 17 detainees were all “confirmed murderers and high-profile offenders”.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, bristled when questioned about agents’ use of a “points system” to classify detainees as gang members based on their tattoos or attire. “Shame on you and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these [criminal] individuals,” she replied, claiming “a litany of criteria” was used to correctly identify “foreign terrorists” or “illegal criminal aliens” for removal.View image in fullscreenShepard questioned the administration’s assertion that detainees such as Hernández were being “removed”. “He has been disappeared,” she said. “I know the government tries to use the language that he was ‘removed’ [but] … he has absolutely been disappeared.”Thousands of miles away in Capacho, Hernández’s mother spoke sorrowfully of how her son had decided, against his family’s wishes, to abandon their economically damaged country last May and make the perilous journey north through the Darién jungles between Colombia and Panama. “He left because he wanted to help us … and to fulfil his dream,” Hernández said, adding: “Now the reality is different.”On a recent evening, she and hundreds of protesters filled the San Pedro church for their latest vigil in support of Hernández. The crowd included three men dressed as the Three Kings, who wore theatrical beards and diadems dotted with fake jewels and carried plaques bearing the words: Conscience, Justice and Freedom.“We, his family, and the entire town vouch for [Hernández’s] innocence. It’s not possible that in Capacho having a crown tattoo is a symbol of pride, but for him, it makes him a criminal,” Chacón said, appealing directly to the presidents of the US and El Salvador.“I know Trump is a good man and Bukele is a good man,” Chacón said. “But it cannot be that they have sent this young man to prison. There must be many others like him.” More
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Trump’s White House is filling with alleged sexual abusers … led by him
by Evelyn Reynolds 24 November 2024, 12:00
Donald Trump was found civilly liable last year for the defamation and sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Carroll – just one of the more than 27 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. In January 2025, he will again be president of the United States – the first to take office with a court-adjudicated history of sex crimes.And it seems he’s eager to pack the White House with people just like him.Four of president-elect Trump’s cabinet-level nominees have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from workplace sexual harassment to assault, and a fifth is embroiled in a sexual abuse-related lawsuit.As Americans brace themselves for Trump 2.0, it’s time to be clear-eyed about the Maga machine: a history of alleged sexual criminality isn’t a bug, it’s a central part of the hardware; an organizing principle that clarifies how Trump and those like him view their power and how they intend to wield it.Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the former representative Matt Gaetz, was concurrently under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House ethics committee for allegedly violating federal sex-trafficking laws and statutory rape. The disgraced representative also reportedly bragged about his sexual conquests and showed nude photos of women to his fellow lawmakers. On Thursday afternoon, Gaetz announced he would be withdrawing his name from consideration to avoid being a “distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition”, just hours before CNN published a report about a second alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a 17-year-old. (The age of consent in Florida is 18.)Gaetz’s withdrawal provided a brief moment of relief. But, still, Trump’s would-be cabinet is filled with alleged criminals, all of whom the president-elect has vociferously defended, and all of whom deny wrongdoing.Elon Musk, whom Trump has tapped for the made-up position of “efficiency czar”, reportedly exposed his penis to a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016 and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. Musk’s company SpaceX paid her $250,000 in 2018 to settle the sexual misconduct claim. He was also sued this year by eight former SpaceX employees, who alleged that the CEO treated “women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter”.Then there’s the nominee for secretary of defense, the Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a staff member of the California Federation of Republican Women in 2017.In the police report that was filed at the time, and which was obtained by the New York Times, the unnamed woman told law enforcement that Hegseth had taken her phone and blocked her exit from his hotel room before assaulting her. Though Hegseth was never charged with a crime, he did enter into a nondisclosure agreement with the woman, which included a financial settlement.Robert F Kennedy Jr was accused of sexually assaulting Eliza Cooney, a former family babysitter, in the late 90s. Trump now wants him to run the Department of Health and Human Services.Finally, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, was recently named in a lawsuit alleging that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, failed to stop an employee from sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 90s, when the McMahons were running World Wrestling Entertainment. (An attorney for McMahon told CNN that the lawsuit is “filled with scurrilous lies.”)These picks feel comically brazen, like shots fired directly at the #MeToo movement, which erupted in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Trump, a man who has threatened to sue every one of his accusers and has openly bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent, is attempting to exact revenge on a movement designed to use the collective to force consequences for a handful of powerful predators.#MeToo was just one piece of a slate of shifting gender norms over the last decade. Now, we’re living in the middle of a backlash.Roe v Wade has fallen, a known sexual abuser is re-entering the Oval Office, and the very online far right has found a new slogan: “Your body, my choice.”In Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,she writes that these moments of backlash are not random. They are “preemptive strikes”, which “have always been triggered by the perception – accurate or not – that women are making great strides”.The perception that women were gaining status at the expense of men’s, combined with the real ways in which many men in this country are struggling economically, socially and mentally, has seemingly helped fuel the Trump campaign.Trump sneered at “childless cat ladies”, courted Joe Rogan listeners and crypto-bros, and trotted out Hulk Hogan to perform hyper-macho drag at the Republican national convention. The campaign deployed far-right influencers to wax poetic on X – which Musk owns – about the dangers of “toxic femininity” and mock the peeing habits of men who supported Kamala Harris.On election day, Trump senior adviser and noted white nationalist Stephen Miller tweeted a very particular plea: “Get every man you know to the polls.” After Trump’s win, the far right were out in full force celebrating what they clearly perceived not just as a win for their preferred political leader, but for their gender as a whole; they flooded X and TikTok with the phrases “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” and crafted supercuts of liberal women crying.Perhaps what Trump is counting on is that people who oppose the draconian agenda of his administration will be so exhausted by the piling horrors that they’ll get overwhelmed and give up – that all of the allegations will blend together and the backlash will become the norm. And yet, we know where a backlash brews, so does a resistance to it. More
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Donald Trump attends UFC match with key allies Musk, Rogan, and RFK Jr – video
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 November 2024, 02:26
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Musk says Trump’s podcast appearances made ‘big difference’ in election
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 November 2024, 18:08
Donald Trump’s stunning election triumph was won partly thanks to his willingness to undergo freewheeling interviews with popular podcasters like Joe Rogan, the US president-elect’s most influential backer, Elon Musk, has claimed.Speaking to Tucker Carlson, Musk said Trump’s three-hour conversational encounter last month with Rogan – America’s most-listened-to podcaster – and other podcast appearances allowed listeners to decide whether he was a “good person” and was a major point of distinction from Kamala Harris.“I think it made a big difference that President Trump and soon to be vice-president Vance went on lengthy podcasts,” Musk told Carlson, who expressed agreement.“I think this really makes a difference because people like Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is great, and Lex Fridman’s and the All-In podcast. To a reasonable-minded, smart person who’s not like hardcore one way or the other, they just listen to someone talk for a few hours, and that’s how they decide whether you’re a good person, whether they like you.”Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, each underwent several podcast interviews during the campaign, including on Call Her Daddy, in which the US vice-president talked about abortion.But she did not appear on The Joe Rogan Experience. The podcaster later said he declined her campaign’s insistence that it should last for just one hour, rather than three, and that Rogan travel to meet her, instead of his preference that it take place in his studio in Austin, Texas.Musk, who has frequently belittled Harris, claimed she had refused a three-hour sit-down because it would have exposed her supposed inability to talk in a relaxed and spontaneous manner.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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“I actually posted on X [that] nothing would do more damage to Kamala’s campaign than going on Joe Rogan, because she’d run out of non sequiturs after about 45 minutes,” he said. “Hour two and three would be a complete melted puddle of nonsense. So, it would just be absolute game over. That’s why she didn’t go on.“But, on the other hand, Trump, he’s there, there’s no talking points. He’s just being a normal person, having a conversation and doing three hours of Rogan, no problem.”Rogan’s interview with Trump, conducted at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort, was noted for its friendly exchanges and words of praise from the podcaster, which included him lauding the then candidate’s speaking style and “comedic instincts”.“You said a lot of wild shit and then CNN, in all their brilliance by highlighting your wild shit, made you much more popular,” Rogan told Trump, explaining his ability to get more publicity than other politicians.“It’s funny. It’s stand-up. It’s funny stuff. You have, like, comedic instincts. Like when you said to Hillary: ‘You’d be in jail.’ Like, that’s great timing. But it’s like that kind of stuff was unheard of as a politician. Like, no one had done that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe podcast host compared Trump’s behavior to the more “rehearsed” speech of other politicians – possibly implying Harris.“When you see certain people talk, certain people in the public eye, you don’t know who they are. You have no idea who they are. It’s very difficult to know,” Rogan said. “You see them in conversations. They have these pre-planned answers, they say everything. It’s very rehearsed. You never get to the meat of it.”Rogan ultimately endorsed Trump on the eve of the election after hosting another interview with Musk, who told him that X – the social media platform that the Space X and Tesla entrepreneur owns – would not be allowed to exist if Harris won the election.After being criticised early in her candidacy for avoiding challenging interviews, Harris sat for several television interrogations, including with CBS’s 60 Minutes and Bret Baier on Fox News, a pro-Trump network where she was subjected to multiple interruptions and hostile questions on rightwing talking points.Trump held more interviews but generally chose friendly settings, including Fox and Newsmax, where his views went largely unchallenged. He pulled out of an interview with 60 Minutes, which has been interviewing presidential candidates for more than half a century, after objecting to the programme’s plans to factcheck him.Shannon C McGregor, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, told the Hill that podcast appearances gave voters a better insight into the candidates as people than regular television interviews.“It gives listeners a better sense of what the candidates are like than the CNN interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, especially for people who aren’t super interested in politics,” she said. More
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Rogan, Musk and an emboldened manosphere salute Trump’s win: ‘Let that sink in’
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 November 2024, 15:50
Late on Tuesday night, when it became clear that Donald Trump would be re-elected as president of the United States, the so-called “heterodoxy” was elated.For years, these male podcasters, influencers and public figures had marketed themselves as free-thinking pundits who evaded the bounds of political classification. “Their political views could once have been described as libertarian,” Anna Merlan wrote for the Guardian in August; the word used to describe them pointed to the same, derived from the Greek heteros, meaning other, and doxa, meaning opinion.However, in 2024, the heterodoxy universally endorsed, supported and celebrated the hyper-masculine promise of Trump. This has created a moment in which the vast majority of online voices who appeal to young men are explicitly pro-Trump. In the wake of his win, those who at least feigned political ambivalence now feel no need to moderate themselves.Joe Rogan reacted to Trump’s win on Tuesday night by yelling a reverential “holy shit” in a video he posted to X that showed him watching Trump’s election party on Fox News. Rogan, whose chart-topping podcast has an estimated 81% male audience, considers himself more of a conversationalist than a pundit but nevertheless endorsed Trump hours before the election, after hosting Trump and JD Vance on The Joe Rogan Experience. (He invited Kamala Harris, but they could not agree on interview terms.)Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary and then voted libertarian, and initially liked Robert F Kennedy Jr in 2024. He has supported left-leaning policies like drug and marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage and abortion rights, though he vehemently opposes gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Ultimately, he attributed his pivot to Trump to Elon Musk, the last guest to appear on his podcast before the election.“If it wasn’t for him we’d be fucked,” Rogan posted, referring to Musk. “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way.”Musk, who is generally well-liked among heterodox figures and their supporters, was gleeful as it became clear that Trump had won. He posted a picture to X showing him holding a sink in the Oval Office – a reference to his 2022 takeover of Twitter HQ – captioned “let that sink in”, seemingly relishing the business success and policy influence he anticipates having under a second Trump administration, which he helped secure.Musk’s shift to the far right – after voting for Obama and opposing Trump in 2016 – became noticeable during the pandemic, when he became frustrated that lockdown requirements were slowing production at SpaceX and Tesla. Since taking over Twitter, now X, he has re-platformed Trump and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones as well as racist and sexist provocateurs like the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” Fuentes posted on Tuesday night; the phrase has been making rounds on social media since. Musk personally shares an increasingly large volume of far-right content on his own page – especially transphobic content, seemingly in response to his estranged daughter coming out as transgender.While final election data has yet to be released, initial exit polling indicates that men, and particularly young men aged 18-29, were a crucial pillar of support for Trump. Now more than ever, young men are at odds with more liberal young women, supporting Trump over Harris 56% to 42%, while young women preferred Harris 58% to 40%, according to exit polls. These young men, especially those without a college degree, have expressed feeling unfulfilled, dissatisfied with their jobs and lives, and desirous of a society and home life with traditional gender roles. For years, media outlets have documented how more and more young men have been radicalized after consuming content from right-leaning entertainers and commentators, especially on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Now, as more of those men have reached voting age, this phenomenon appears to be benefiting Trump and the far right.One 2021 study found that a leading predictor of support for Trump – over party affiliation, gender, race and education level – was belief in “hegemonic masculinity”, defined as believing that men should be in positions of power, be “mentally, physically, and emotionally tough”, and reject anything considered feminine or gay. Some heterodox influencers gained a following by embodying or promoting precisely this brand of masculinity, and giving their followers a script for blaming dissatisfaction on women.Jordan Peterson, who has built a career as a pop pseudo-psychologist promoting patriarchy and the revival of the “masculine spirit”, considers himself to be “devoid of ideology”, but has aligned himself with rightwing figures like Tucker Carlson, Andy Ngo and Matt Walsh and frequently decried the media’s coverage of Trump, calling it biased. He was quick to celebrate Trump’s victory – albeit in a backhanded way. “Thank Heaven for working class slobs,” he posted to X at 1.40am.Nico Kenn De Balinthazy, better known by his YouTube moniker Sneako, took to the streets of New York on Tuesday night in a Make America Great Again hat and an American flag draped around his shoulders. Sneako, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 before switching his allegiance to Trump, could be seen trying to provoke the people around him, gloating as the results came in. He loudly laughed at one woman who was crying. The day before the election, he had posted on X: “Kamala Harris is proof that women shouldn’t vote.”Not every heterodox figure has been explicitly pro-Trump this year. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, which is overwhelmingly geared toward men (particularly college-age men), was also quick to react to the election results. In a video posted to his Instagram, Portnoy – who has been accused of consistently misogynistic behavior both at and outside work – didn’t celebrate Trump, who he has never endorsed, but he expressed indignation at liberal voters.“People like myself, independents, moderates – the Democrats gave us no choice,” Portnoy said, at times slurring his words. “That was the worst campaign. And their pure arrogance and their moral superiority have driven people away. If you say you’re voting for Trump, suddenly you’re a Nazi, you’re Hitler, you’re garbage. Enough. Enough.”Lex Fridman never endorsed Trump either. The science and politics podcast host is less brash than the bulk of the heterodoxy, but is still popular among young men and still friendly to rightwing figures like Carlson and the former Trump adviser Stephen Miller when they stop by for interviews. On election night, he replied to Musk’s enthusiasm for Trump with a rocket emoji and “LFG!”He also was sure to acknowledge a perceived win for himself as he celebrated Trump’s. “PS: Long-form podcasts FTW,” he posted. “I hope to see politicians from both sides doing 2-3+ hour genuine, human conversations moving forward.”During this election cycle, Trump’s embrace of the bro-centric podcast scene came as he sidelined (and in some cases, fumbled) traditional campaign tactics like door-knocking and canvassing. This choice appears to have had no negative effect on his election bid. In fact, it may have even helped him. Trump’s victory could very well be an emboldening choice among heterodoxy figures, who now see the possible fruits of openly embracing the right. They certainly aren’t going away. More

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