Brooke and Micah Enter the MAGA-verse. Plus, Liberal YouTubers Fight Back.
51:44 Share

Hi podcast listeners, just popping in here before the show to, you know, deceit. You're listening so you already know that the fact-based media is in the crapper and public broadcasting even more so as the fabricators on cable and online thrive.

This is a weird time to be an American, to hold so many contradictory views of our nation and its people in our heads at the same time. But as that great American Walt Whitman once observed, we contain multitudes. So I want to address that version of you that still risks giving a damn about what's going on because we need you. Chaos now reigns, but it can be reigned in with consistent effort.

We're trying over here, but it's not easy. As the heads of NPR and PBS and countless station chiefs nationwide plead our case to Congress, I'm pleading it to you. We're doing more with less, but soon it may be too little.

Please help keep us doing what we're doing. On the Media is a listener-supported podcast, so the best way to support this show is to become a sustaining member. Giving 10 or 20 bucks a month, whatever you can afford, gives us some financial security or at least predictability that enables us to keep going. To give, go to onthemedia.org slash donate.

Thank you so much. Now back to the show. The news of the week is told by the most popular right-wing influencers. Harvard, you have more money than Jesus. El Salvador is now safer than the United States of America. Largest foreign influence operation in American history is being money laundered through Act Blue.

From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. Online, conservative shows have nearly five times the audience of their left-leaning counterparts. Content about being a better car salesperson or workout content is coded with right-wing ideology. That's a way that these conservatives can then suck people into the right-wing media rabbit hole because they're not looking for political content.

Meanwhile, Democrats have been reluctant to join in. Why would we spend time validating content creators on the left when we've got Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow? On this week's On the Media from WNYC. On the Media is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies.

Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. So this week we decided to do something a little bit different for the show. We had the idea of confining our media consumption to the media of the far right. I mean, really marinate in it for 12 hours straight.

It wasn't meant to be a data-driven exercise, but rather an anecdotal, experiential one. We wanted to see what issues were reverberating in that space.

We wanted to get, in those 12 hours, a visceral sense of the way those media makers depict the world in which we all live. We've known for a long time how influential the media of MAGA are, but Molly Rosen, the producer behind this segment, talked to people who have gathered that data. Hey, Molly.

Hi, Micah. Hi, Brooke. What did they say? So this is what I heard from Kayla Gogarty, who's a research director at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America. We found that right-leaning online shows had nearly five times the total following on streaming and social media platforms compared to left-leaning online shows.

And then I also spoke with a computational scientist and UPenn professor, Duncan Watts. People have been talking about the right-wing media ecosystem and how it's trouncing the left. And we actually see a lot of evidence for that in this data. If you look at the sort of top producers...

They're mostly right-leaning. So that gives some sense for why we're doing this segment. Micah, tell me what media you're going to be looking at. Making my Rumble account. Rumble is a right-wing alternative to YouTube. I'm making my screen name on Rumble, OTMKING420. Perfect. I'll start off by watching some of this stuff. Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, Dan Bongino, whatever. And then I'll let the algorithm take hold.

and see where it takes me. Basically, I'm going to be listening to prominent podcasts. I mean, we've been focused so much on facts more than zeitgeist. And I think that at some point we have to expose ourselves in order to get some understanding. Will we after 12 hours? I'd say the prospect of that is zero to nil. But

Maybe we can get a sense about how a particular story this week is being told through that lens. It's like dipping a toe into the sea. I think we're ready to go. Does everyone have their energy drinks, coffees? Yes. I'm ready to get started.

So the three of us talked periodically throughout the day. Our listening day is Tuesday, but those podcasts don't appear first thing in the morning. So I started by listening to Monday's edition of the Charlie Kirk podcast. And the first thing I learned was what a fabulous human Charlie Kirk is. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job. Media Matters says Charlie Kirk draws 18.6 million followers across several platforms. And one of his, and not just his, dominant themes is that the federal government is rife with corruption.

Where is all of the money that the Federal Reserve is saying that they borrowed to the Treasury? Very complex but important topic of how the government lies to you financially. And if we audited the Fed, got to wonder what would happen. It seems that the only reliable resource is gold. I heard that a lot.

And also where to get it. Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. It's where I buy all of my gold. So rely on gold and self-reliance because most poor people in poor countries, they just don't have it. Living in the third world is a choice. You can enter the second world by simply making good choices. The left wants you to believe that you are captive based on something that you inherit. You're captive based on your circumstances.

But Charlie is also engaged in the war over the nation's culture and pivots to this amazing new film that I'd never heard of called King of Kings, produced by Angel Studios. Our story begins 2,000 years ago when baby Jesus came into the world. Wait, wait, stop. If it's not about a king, then I'm not interested. This story is about the King of Kings.

done unbelievably well. It's quasi-animated and has Pierce Brosnan and Uma Thurman. And then you can go join the studio, Angel.com. So every single movie on Angel Studios is approved by what we call the Angel Guild, which is a group of over a million people who

So almost...

Every element was don't trust anybody who's in control. But Trump is in control. I know, except that he's not clearing house, firing anyone who who doesn't drink the Kool-Aid. And yet there's still a deep state that secretly controls everything and is responsible for everything. That is exactly the case. And that's where I was on that. How about you?

So I did end up clicking on a video by Benny Johnson, who is a big right-wing influencer. He's also one of the guys who,

who the Department of Justice linked to this Russian disinformation campaign, where it turned out that the Russian government had funneled money to this new media company called Tenet Media. And then Tenet Media hired Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, a bunch of these like right wing creators and like

Ask them to make any kind of content they want. I mean, here's a guy who was literally funneled money from the Russian government and he's going on this rant. The title of the video was Trump set to reveal horrifying intel discovery by Elon and Doge. Trump is saying he's going to announce it. The press secretary is saying that Trump's going to announce it. Elon Musk is teasing it.

And apparently it's going to lead to mass resignations in Washington, D.C. He shows a Fox clip about how the 1630 Fund, which is a dark money liberal group, has allegedly been taking foreign money and using it to rig elections. This is like the most discursive clip.

connecting of dots that I've encountered in a long time. He shows us this headline from the New York Times and he's like, I never say the New York Times is good, but this is a good article. And it's about a meltdown within ActBlue, which is like the fundraising site that a lot of Democratic candidates use. And then he says, here, I'm going to connect the dots for you. He's going to bring out Glenn Beck's chalkboard. Yeah. It's a big jigsaw puzzle and we put it together on this show. Follow the breadcrumbs. Follow the breadcrumbs.

Follow the trail. Put the pieces together. It's a big jigsaw puzzle, and we put it together on this program. He points to a clip of Elon Musk on stage, and he's talking about the fraud loophole, where he says USAID is funneling money to all these NGOs. They'll send the money overseas to one NGO, then they'll go through a bunch of them, and then

I'm highly confident that a bunch of that money then comes back to the United States and lands in the pockets of the people you just mentioned. A lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress. How do they get $20 million if they're earning $200,000 a year? There's no mathematical way for Nancy Pelosi to be worth $100 million. AOC is flying first class.

What is AOC's net worth? Basically, what he does is he poses a question and then he like lets it hang there before quickly moving on to a new topic, then posing another question and so on, inviting us to wonder if and how it might all fit together. The government spent billions in furniture during covid to furnish empty buildings.

Who owns the furniture company? Who owns these buildings? He doesn't say who owns it. He just asks over and over and over. He's very careful. He says, Elon Musk says that George Soros is going to prison for organizing these protests. If we can prove that he, in fact, did that. If you're following and putting the pieces together, Elon Musk has said the Soroses will go to prison if they are found to be funding the terrorist attacks on Tesla.

Somebody's somebody's paying for him. The emotional truth is blasted. And then the little bit of plausible like deniability at the end. It is it is effective, I think, at conveying a message while not breaking the law. I don't know. Did you hear anything about the Salvadoran president's visit to the White House? You mean in connection with the president?

El Salvador was the most dangerous place on the planet. MS-13...

ran rampant. They held the entire country hostage. Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele came up on Charlie Kirk's Monday show. Bukele wins, declares a national emergency, has locked up tens of thousands of narco drug criminals in MS-13, and El Salvador is now safer than the United States of America. What had to be done was outside of what Washington D.C. could tolerate. Round up thousands of people and put them in jail. Not hard.

I watched the SiriusXM show hosted by Megyn Kelly, who of course is the former Fox News host.

She repeatedly mocked the language used by mainstream news outlets to describe Abrego. The corporate media continues to completely misrepresent the now viral case of this guy, Abrego Garcia. Just a Maryland father, according to the media. He's just a Maryland dad. I had the exact same scenario that I heard on the Pat-

Ben David, whatever. Patrick Bet-David. I keep wanting to call it PDQ, but what is it? PBD. The PBD podcast, which is a business podcast, but ideology obviously informs their fundamental beliefs. You know what they labeled him? A hardworking father departed in the family torn apart. Maryland man, they call him. Maryland man. Maryland man. Exactly. Born and raised in El Salvador and a MS-13 gang member. 100%. Maryland man.

I want to return to the Bukele Oval Office visit. It was really interesting to see some of these right-wing pundits try to spin that comment from Trump about sending American citizens to the prison in El Salvador. I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws. But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking.

that are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, okay? Here's how Megyn Kelly put it on her SiriusXM show. Trump's desire, potentially, to send convicted serial killers or child molesters who are U.S. citizens in our jails now

to that prison, like to house them in prisons outside of the United States. And he said, we're actually looking into whether that is legal. Not you're deported because we don't like you, Adam Liptak. Meanwhile, Benny Johnson just immediately folded this new extreme idea into his monologue about people who've set fire to Tesla dealerships. This is not the F around years. The F around years was in the before time. That was the last couple of years. You could F around.

You can burn things. You can attack things. This is the find out years. The find out years is you go to Guantanamo Bay for this. Or better yet, El Salvador. Ship them out. I did want to ask you about any ads that you saw because the ads have been the most fun part for me. I saw a Don Jr. ad for a company called All Family Pharma that will get you ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for 10% off with the rumble code.

That was pretty good. I got that one a lot. I heard that one too, but not pitched by Don. It was Matt Gates. That's why I trust All Family Pharmacy. They provide ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, antibiotics, supplements, vitamins, so much more. There was a really good one that I saw from a guy who has a special device that you can scan to find secret cameras that might have been hidden around your home.

And he's like, you could be recorded for hours and you wouldn't even know about it. And it's becoming more common. He said there have been numerous incidents in which Uber drivers have tried to film their passengers. That one was pretty good. It can pinpoint the location of hidden cameras from a whopping 32 feet away. And you can use it too.

With one button operation, it instantly detects hidden devices to give you back your peace of mind. My recommendation? Arm every member of your family with one of these. Privacy seems to be on the brink of extinction. My very favorite commercial?

It's for Ammo Squared, a subscription ammo supply service. That was on Glenn Beck's show. Life gets busy. Prices go up. Stores run dry. Before you know it, your stockpile isn't a stockpile anymore. It's just half an empty box in the closet. That's where Ammo Squared changes the game for you. Because you never want to be caught short of ammo.

And then later on, there was a beef subscription service, which you do to support American farmers. Out on the wind-rustled prairies that still exist in this country, between the veins and the arteries of American cities, towns, and even just some wild spots in the road, there still exists the men and women who have always made sure that America's supper was waiting for them. So when you subscribe to Good Ranchers, you're putting your money behind American agriculture.

I want you to go to Good Ranchers. I will say one thought I had. Do either of you watch Rick and Morty? Oh, a couple of times many years ago. Okay, there's a great episode. It's called Rick's D-Minutes, and it's where Rick, who's like the genius grandfather, he installs a interdimensional cable box in the family home so they can watch cable from every dimension.

And that is what watching Rumble feels like because you see the ads that are from like a different planet, a different timeline. And like you can imagine somebody finding it normal, but it's so alien. It's so weird. To you. The tone. To you. What? To me. Yes. Yes. Like there's one ad in the Rick and Morty episode.

by this guy named Ants In My Eyes Johnson, and he can't see or feel, and he's trying to sell TVs and radios and stuff. He's like, I don't even know what I'm pointing at because I can't see anything or feel anything. I'm just Ants In My Eyes Johnson. And there's so many TVs, microwaves, radios. I think, I can't, I'm not 100% sure what we have here in Stockton.

because I can't see anything. Our prices, I hope, aren't too low. Check out this refrigerator. Only $200. What about this microwave? Only $100. That's fair. I'm ants in my eyes, Johnson. Everything's black. I can't see a thing. And also, I can't feel anything either. Did I mention that? But that's not as catchy. So I'll keep at it, but it is kind of driving me crazy. And it is making me feel quite depressed that...

You might only get your information from this and you would be this angry, this distrustful, this fearful. I mean, if you watch CNN and MSNBC, you also become fearful and angry. I don't feel like that is like unique to Rumble. I agree. But just the level of paranoia and the particular villains that are chosen is

It just makes me feel bad for anyone who would embody this emotional space. And it's not even based on what is happening, but what could happen or what did happen, we think, but no proof. You know, all of this corruption, all of this chaos, all of this lying, there's no, nothing to back it up. So it sounds like four hours in, you don't feel like better about the world that we live in.

Was that ever the objective? Well, you know, it could be like all sunny in the MAGAverse. That's true, but it's not because as many social critics have noted, it is designed around an us versus them paradigm. You can't live in a happy world if you have a them to worry about. And that is what defines the MAGA universe. You don't need to go any further than Donald Trump who created it.

Yes. Well, we're four hours in, only eight hours to go. Should we say? Well, I may go an extra hour just to make up for the hour I missed. I don't believe you. I don't think at 10 o'clock you're going to still be listening to this stuff, but I'll buy you a beer if you actually do that. Okay. Cocktail, please. Okay.

Coming up, Brooke and Micah start to feel the pain. I feel like I'm being beaten down by just so many nefarious plots everywhere. Yeah, it's exhausting. This is On The Media.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Olinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. So we're in the middle of recapping our day watching some of the biggest stars of right-wing online media. Micah, I'm wondering if this particular assertion came up in your listening, because it sure did in mine. It's the one that says the left is the most violent extreme, not the right. Charlie Kirk really leaned in on this. New story. Washington State professor.

has been arrested after allegedly assaulting a student with a MAGA hat. And Kirk said, obviously, violence is the default tool of the American left. According to the media, they say, oh, it's a right wing phenomenon. That is a brazen, absolute lie. President Trump has survived multiple assassination attempts. Nearly every cabinet official receives death threats. We get death threats on almost a daily basis.

Luigi Maggioni is celebrated as a hero of the left, but CNN says that it's all right wing. While America's roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right wing extremism.

From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to January 6th. There is simply no equivalent on the left. There's simply no equivalent on the left. Really? How about, I don't know, everything that happened during Floydapalooza and Black Lives Matter? And Kirk said he was having this debate with himself before he went to bed. What is more dangerous? If CNN said that,

And they didn't know the truth, meaning that they were lying, but they didn't know it. Is that more dangerous, meaning that they were naive? Or is it more dangerous that they knew they were lying and they lied anyway? I think it's dreadfully more dangerous, infinitely more dangerous, but

to know the truth and suppress the truth and still lie. And there was a long discussion about how the Democrats work in lockstep. And we, you know, we have free speech. We're capable of disagreeing with each other. I mean, look at the Congress. Republicans are afraid of

for their own families if they, you know, go out too hard against Trump. And then Jack Posobiec joined the hour. The Pizzagate conspiracy theorist.

And there was a nice, tight discussion on Democrats suck and so do the media. A lot of discussion of the media there. Nice. And then I went downstairs and ate some ice cream, which is when you called me. Did you all hear anything about Harvard? Yep. All day long. The Trump administration freezes more than $2.2 billion after Harvard rejects its demand. How they're a tool of the left. 96% of

You know, Harvard...

You know, you have more money than Jesus. Glenn Beck show. Okay. And I know at the time he didn't have pockets, so he didn't have a lot of money. But the guys who were out there collecting money for him now, they got a lot and you have more. I'm done bailing your ass out. You don't pay taxes and I'm still paying for you.

No, you get no federal money. Absolutely no reason for us to be giving Harvard one dime. No, not a dime. He did quite a lot of that, which which was fun. Do you like listening to him?

I actually enjoy listening to him, at least compared to the others. He's not stupid, and he's a real showman. He knows how to use the medium. I mean, they all heaped contempt on universities and public broadcasting, both for their contemptible elitism. But no one else did it with so much flair. It was LBJ that started the Corporation for Public Broadcast.

And you know why? Because the elites said there's just too many people. They're not going to be educated. They're just going to be watching this crap on television. So it was the elites.

that got together and said, this is bad for society. We've got to have something that no one will watch. Am I right? Am I right? Next up, I watched Ben Shapiro, who presents himself as the nuanced policy wonk of the conservative punditocracy. He went deep on tariffs, talking about why Trump should trust Scott Besson, but not Peter Navarro. He read the tea leaves on China's trade war retaliation against Trump.

But what I found most interesting were his comments about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who he sees as the future of the Democratic Party and a mortal threat to the conservative project. And this is why it's very important for the Trump administration to succeed in its agenda and not be bogged down by distractions, because what's coming around the corner is an AOC truck. I'm just warning you right now. That's the way this goes. If the Trump administration fails in its actual agenda, what comes around the corner is a left wing populism led by whomever Bernie taps on

on the shoulder. After that, I watched Candace Owens, a creator who gained prominence as a political commentator on Ben Shapiro's network, The Daily Wire.

But last year, the two had a falling out, in part over her defense of a anti-Semitic Kanye West tweet. She's still defensive regularly, by the way. She's since built a massive audience on her own, over 16 million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and X. We have an update in the Blake Ryan-Justin saga. It's weird. It involves a fake subpoena. I think it's definitely fake. This was her latest podcast, Procrastination.

partly about the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni feud that's transfixed like half the internet. We have been saying this from the beginning. The New York Times began working on this article with Jennifer Abel. I haven't been following the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni saga. You can help me with that, Molly. What do I need to know?

They made a movie version of the novel by Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us, that was a lot about domestic violence. That was a big theme in the book. And then on the movie, Justin Baldoni, who was the director and a lead actor, Blake Lively, who was the other lead, accused him of basically crossing her boundaries in various ways, refusing to get an intimacy coordinator, refusing to get a

talking about her body. And then he got very concerned that she would talk smack about him. And so then he got a reputation destroyer to start tearing her down prior to her coming after him, which is what he expected. And so I think this lawsuit is...

Are they countersuing each other? Yes. She was suing for defamation and then he was countersuing. Yeah, correct. All throughout this protracted drama, Candace Owens has been on top of the story, documenting what feels like, you know, every incremental update and morsel of new information. She's doing this for a very specific reason.

This is Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal YouTuber with 4.3 million subscribers. I spoke to him earlier in the week, and we'll actually hear from him later in the show as well. He thinks there's a lot to learn from how Candace Owens is making content out of all of this. She's able to touch people that aren't going to seek out overtly political content, but rather...

bump into her because they're interested in cultural content. And so they subscribe and then offer some right-coded or overtly right-wing positions on other stuff. And that's how people kind of build up their worldview. That's exactly what I heard on this episode of her podcast. The first half features the lively Baldoni update, but this is where she took it in the second half. You can't say that the Jews had anything to do with Christ.

Killing Christ, which is, you know, that is not any symptom. It's anti-Catholic. It's anti-Christian to tell me that we can't discuss how Christ was murdered.

in a country that has free speech, if you say, I think the Holocaust numbers were exaggerated or I think they were underreported, that should be a matter of academic debate. That shouldn't be a matter of you being suspended from campus. Somebody could say, no, let me rebut that. This only exists for the Holocaust.

If you go Google right now, Bolshevik revolution, how many people died? They'll give you a range, 40 million to 60 million. All this for a podcast that was advertised as being about celebrities? I feel tremendously optimistic about the younger generation that's coming up. And I'm tremendously optimistic about the conversations that we're having. Even Tucker Carlson going out on the third rail and discussing 9-11 again. And...

And people that are starting to finally remove the blinders from their eyes and see how unreal the world we live in actually is and how orchestrated it all is. That's kind of the first step, right? It's like realizing. Throughout the day, I heard a lot of this style of conspiracy theory rhetoric, a sort of tacit reference to The Matrix.

You know, take the red pill and you can see the hidden forces that control your lives, that kind of thing. But for all the talk of brave truth-telling, none of these hidden forces were unmasked or identified. The specifics were always just taken

tantalizingly out of view, like Candace Owens' theory about the secret puppet master controlling Donald Trump. Whoever is behind him whispering in his ear is the person who is running the White House. And it used to be Jared Kushner. And I don't know who that person is now.

but I don't like it. That Tucker Carlson podcast episode that she referenced features former Congressman Kurt Weldon discussing the deep state plot to cover up 9-11, profit off of American wars, and undermine Trump from within the government. There are scumbags that work in our agencies, and I know them, and they're making money, and their million-dollar companies are going to be exposed if it's the last thing I do. And until we understand that, it's not going to stop.

And Donald Trump's people need to understand that. We're not playing tiddlywinks out in the schoolyard. We're playing with bad people. Who are the bad people? We never learn. I think the idea is if you really want to know the truth, you have to keep listening and watching and following along.

Brooke, what did you learn from this 12-hour MAGA media experiment? Nothing that revelatory. I was expecting to hear that cutting taxes is great for the economy, which history has repeatedly shown is simply untrue, that President Trump is saving the economy, even as the financial markets lurch, consumer confidence wanes. And of course, I heard that Biden is more responsible than Putin for Ukraine's desperate plight.

Most of all, I heard that the left is more corrupt, more violent, more debauched, and more dangerous than our country can sustain. Inside those studios, it seems no serious attention is paid to the chaos outside, but there is abundant clarity within.

Buckle up, everybody. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go.

Coming up, we hear from some of the left-wing online figures trying to fight back. This is On The Media. On The Media.

This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. You'll see your favorite actors, directors, and comedians on late-night TV shows or YouTube. But what you get with Fresh Air is a deep dive. Spend some quality time with people like Billie Eilish, Questlove, Ariana Grande, Stephen Colbert, and so many more. We ask questions you won't hear asked anywhere else. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger. After Trump's win last November, there were many think pieces about how the dispersed group of influencers known as the Manosphere may or may not have helped Trump win over young male voters and other audiences who had ditched traditional media.

To even the playing field, the thinking went, the left needed to cultivate its own Joe Rogan. The hugely popular socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker was heralded as that guy and was the talk of the town in venues like The New Yorker and elsewhere.

But all the attention on Hasan Piker may have distracted from another cohort of left-wing online personalities, like progressive content creator Brian Tyler Cohen, who posted his first political video on YouTube in 2018. Trump just told the single most outrageous lie of his presidency at a campaign rally. And I realize the gravity of what I just said, that he's told over 5,000 lies during his time in office. But this lie...

This took the cake. I spoke to Brian Tyler Cohen this week. I just tried to break things down as simply as I could. I don't have a background in D.C., so if I'm going to be able to understand it, then it has to be dumbed down enough that somebody who's never even stepped foot in Washington could actually figure out what the hell was going on. His videos tend to start with a punchy viral news clip, followed by commentary. Here's a fun game. See if you can pinpoint the exact moment that Trump realizes the entire stadium is booing him.

Yeah, it's not a hard game. In 2023, Cohen landed a gig at MSNBC as a contributor. Our friend Brian Tyler Cohen has been tracking this for us. He's a YouTube star, one of the best communicators out there. But a little over a year into the job... It felt a little bit like I was going backwards. This idea that I would go from having millions of subscribers...

on YouTube to a legacy media outlet where, you know, look, there are some shows where it's just a few hundred thousand viewers per episode. The reality is that I kind of saw the writing on the wall in terms of where people are consuming their content. And last October, Cohen quit MSNBC, returning to YouTube full-time. Today, he has 4.3 million subscribers. People are flooding into the independent media space.

According to a study from Pew Research Center last fall, around one in five Americans now get their news from influencers. Cohen says that the Democrats have neglected the independent media landscape for as long as it's existed. They always just viewed legacy media as our message distribution system. Why would we spend time validating content creators on the left when we've got Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow? And of course, now we have no infrastructure because there's never been any money invested into it.

Meanwhile, billionaires like Ferris and Dan Wilkes have poured millions of dollars into outlets like PragerU and The Daily Wire, which helped conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens reach huge audiences. It's incumbent on folks who do care about democracy to start investing in building up content creation on the left. Like Brian Tyler Cohen, YouTuber David Pak

Pac-Man has also cultivated an audience of millions on the platform with his progressive politics. Whereas Cohen's videos are pretty polished, he's often wearing a suit, Pac-Man is much more casual. Donald Trump's new medical report is out.

And it is not a health document. It is a campaign ad. It is a propaganda document. And of course, Trump's golf game, apparently unstoppable. You don't usually read about one's golf game in a medical report, but you do here. And they even threw in that Donald Trump had a perfect score. Pacman's politics have attracted the attention of the right-wing commentators you heard from earlier, like Candace Owens. David Pacman does not have a soul.

He doesn't have a soul. When I spoke to him this week, David Pakman told me there's a growing community of like-minded lefty YouTubers now. He mentioned Brian Tyler Cohen, but also Midas Touch, Luke Beasley, Adam Mockler, Jesse Dollimer, and Brittany Page, among others. I asked him if their cohort has a name. No.

For YouTubers, you guys are really not taking advantage of this branding opportunity. It's a little surprising. You're probably right. I mean, listen, if it were the right, they would have figured out a great name already and had three funders for it and probably two conferences. How would you explain how we got to this moment where it feels like conservative voices won the internet?

For all of the wild claims about George Soros, this and that, the truth is we don't really have the funders on our side. I think on the political left, there is money. It disproportionately floats directly to candidates, sometimes to third party groups of different kinds, but there's not really been a movement to fund what we do the way that the right has done it. So I think that that's one layer to it.

Another layer also is that the right is way better at taking over the non-overtly political spaces. And so if you flip around a lot of the social media apps and you find content about being a better car salesperson or you find content about doing real estate wholesaling,

or workout content. A lot of it is, it's red-coded is what I call it with right-wing ideology. And this includes a lot of the shows that Trump and Vance really successfully used last year, like the Nelk Boys and others, where he's appearing in an unstructured format, he's hanging out, he's weighing in on not all political topics. The left is getting crushed as far as that goes. And I think that that's another layer to it.

And you believe that there's a kind of algorithmic bias towards some of the red-coded content, or at least there's some kind of affinity between the types of messages that the right puts out and what social media likes.

I'll just give you one example. If we just think about the issue of abortion, right? The idea that killing is bad, abortion is killing, it should be illegal. It took me three seconds to tell you that.

There's no equivalent opposite on the political left. It's not we love abortions, the more the better, right? We're trying to find a conversation here about bodily autonomy, about medicine and science, about the law.

And we're already lost. It's taken me 20 seconds just to give you the framework under which we would have that conversation. So I think that algorithmically, a lot of these ideas do lend themselves to the way the right frames the issue. That's a good example. Can you give me some others? Tax relief is another one. Like, it's your money. You should get to keep it.

On the left, we don't say, "You should have as little of your money as possible," right? We're saying, "Listen, if we understand sociology and anthropology and political science, we know that when we get beyond Dunbar's number of groups of 150 people,

certain aspects of what we do have to be centralized and you can use the word coercive for taxes, but it's a form of necessary coercion. We've lost, right? I mean, it's a different format. And I don't say we've lost in terms of we have the wrong idea. What I'm saying is it doesn't lend itself to TikTok. I mean, it's not so hard to translate some...

some of these left-wing positions into quick-hit emotional messages. On the abortion one, you could say, Republicans don't respect women and they want to dominate them. On tax relief, if you were a certain kind of Democrat, you could say, government helps people and protects us from, you know, craven criminals and billionaires. I don't know, right? You're not wrong. And listen, I also am trying to work within the system and

And so on taxes, one of the things I've been saying is we want taxes as low as possible while funding the areas of absolute importance to have a functioning liberal democracy. Right. And I'm even kind of hesitating as I tell you, because I'm trying to figure it. But but you're not wrong that the left can do better on this stuff. But it takes a little more thinking to do it. What you're getting at is that.

Even understanding what has helped the right create or capture these platforms and algorithms, you're not willing to play by the exact same rules because you approach your content differently. Is that fair to say? Yes, and also, there's a big discussion that takes place among our cohort in terms of the feedback we get.

you guys are resorting to the same types of YouTube titles. It's the clickbait titles and so on and so forth. And I've been super upfront with my audience. Listen, we are trying to get an audience for the content we're doing because we believe the message we're putting out is better for the country. Given that, of course, I'm going to choose titles that I think will get a bigger audience rather than a smaller one. I'll give you an example. If I spend seven minutes talking about Caroline Levitt's latest press conference,

I could title it White House Official Answers Questions from the Press. I could give it that title. That's going to get very few views. And so instead, I go, Caroline Leavitt Tells a Lie a Minute in Unhinged Rant.

I don't believe it's inaccurate, right? If I were to title it Caroline Levitt rushed off stage in a stretcher, it's obviously not in the video. That's a problem if that's the title I'm picking. But editorializing and sort of playing the formats for the different platforms, I think that it's inevitable that you just have to do that. What else do you think these right-wing creators are doing that others on the left just haven't kind of caught up to or figured out yet?

I think the cross-pollination among the shows and with elected officials in the Republican Party has been executed really well. There's a much more sort of working relationship where audiences see these folks as people they want to hear from rather than someone who shows up to give me

kind of anodyne talking points. And I think that has to be part of the community as well. It can't just be the content creators. It also has to be the lawmakers. I think that's another aspect that they've really mastered on the right. Yeah, it's interesting. About a year ago, a viewer called in and asked you,

I see you talk with Congress people sometimes, but why don't you do it more often? Do you think it's that they didn't trust you? Is that they were like, who is this guy? To a degree. There's a couple of things going on. One was the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party.

was much more deferential to corporate media. That's number one. Number two, obviously it gets easier to book people the bigger you get. You know, now I have over six million followers across all my platforms. It's much easier to book people when you have those numbers. I just say, listen, my political record is an open book. I've got tens of thousands of videos.

give me 20 minutes, give me a half hour. If the interview's 10 days from now, I can't tell you what the topics will be because they're going to be topical based on what's going on. You can see what the interviews will be like. And if that sounds good, let's do it. And they've been significantly more receptive to that. So if there's anything right now that gives me cautious optimism, it's that. You went to the White House after the election while Joe Biden was still in office. I mean, you spoke to the president. What did you tell him?

It was in a group setting, so I didn't tell, you know, you don't tell the president stuff per se. You know, I think I would kind of challenge that language. Okay.

Going forward for the next election cycles, what do you think about how we should be engaging with creators like you? And I said what I just told you, which is listen,

Let some of the elected officials just appear, let their personalities come through, be less risk averse, be less hands on, just kind of make it easier to engage in these conversations rather than on October 15th figuring out whose show can we appear on with only two weeks left before an election that we know doesn't work. So that was kind of my main message.

And do you feel that Democrats have taken some of these suggestions to heart? Like, have you noticed a difference? We are not getting the sort of feeling of concern as to what might you ask. There's a little more, you know, the boss can handle questions.

let's let the boss go and do his or her thing rather than wanting to talk to me two or three times before an interview. That I'm seeing as a change. The frequency with which some folks are willing to appear, I think, is also a change. I mean, I think it's a little early to really say as we approach the 26 midterms, I think we're going to have a better sense of like, is there a different approach here to independent media? Yeah.

One of the narratives after the election, obviously, is all about Joe Rogan. Kamala Harris should have gone on it. He laid out the red carpet for Elon Musk and Trump and J.D. Vance. You know, positively or negatively, a lot of people ascribe a lot of agency to Joe Rogan. Do you think he deserves so much importance in that conversation?

The right is much more interested in a soul and singular leader than the left. And you might remember when Donald Trump and others would say, there's no way people support Biden because you never see Biden hats. You never see Biden stickers. You don't see people putting a Biden flag on their boat. This is sort of the phraseology and imagery that is very relevant to the right.

I think Obama was generationally unique in the way that he inspired people. And there was a little more of a personal interest in Obama. But the way I viewed Biden was election day. What's my better option? And I think that's the view a lot of folks on the left. So to the extent that the left needs a Rogan, I think that narrative is wrong. What I thought was useful about the Rogan critique, though, was that.

Doing more of those shows and appearing in more of those unstructured environments could only have helped her unless you believe she quite literally couldn't handle those situations, which is not my impression right now.

Democrats are quite critical of their own candidates and that there is some risk in putting Kamala Harris or whatever politician in front of somebody who could reflect poorly on them, who might have a big audience but has baggage. There has to be an expansion of getting in front of blue-coded, non-political audiences.

And this is something that with our cohort, we do talk about a lot, which is we have a pretty significant, significantly low ceiling of

in the sense that a lot of the country does not watch overtly political content. They don't listen to overtly political podcasts. They don't watch overtly political YouTube channels. And so as much as we grow, we will be restricted by the fact that we are in an overtly political content space. And so there has to be some expansion to blue-coded spaces. Now, the right has been far more inclusive than the left.

And the left has done, in my view, too much purity testing and excluding. And the way it often shakes out, and remember, once they're in power, this goes out the window. This is to win elections. With the right, if they find someone who's a lifelong Democratic voter, loves 98% of what the Democratic Party is offering, but has some area where they're like, I don't know about this thing.

For the purposes of getting a vote and getting the votes of the followers of that person, they welcome them in. They go, come on in. Absolutely. Let's work on that together, which we agree about. On the left, the instinct is different. It's even if we agree 92% of the time, this 8% is so much of a concern that I don't even really think you're part of the movement I'm a part of.

And that is exclusionary. What's a sticking point issue that you're thinking of? On Israel-Palestine, I've seen, I mean, I favor a two-state solution. Palestinians should have an autonomous state. I want the blockade lifted. Israel's settlements are going to have to go. Netanyahu is not going to be an arbiter to peace. But if you're calling for the elimination of Israel, I'm not with you, right? I've been told you're on the right.

What are some other risks you think Democrats could be making to kind of build a more modern, more expansive online media strategy?

I actually do think that there are Democratic elected officials now doing some of the things that a year ago I would have said they should be doing. There are senators now who are doing direct-to-camera videos on the social platforms. They're getting huge views because voters actually like just hearing from them in a less structured sort of format. I think that's a good thing. Who?

Adam Schiff is doing it, and he's doing it quite well. Cory Booker also has been doing it. Ro Khanna is doing more of it as well. The rallies that AOC and Bernie are doing, the real crowd sizes, John Ossoff has done some interesting events in Georgia. There's a lot of folks, Greg Kassar, who I've interviewed a couple of times, is doing some interesting town halls in redder areas.

And the interest in that and the turnout is also together with the other things making me sort of cautiously optimistic. But to be honest, it's so early. It would be very much beyond where we are for me to make any kind of prediction as to what effect this is going to have.

David, thank you so much. My pleasure. David Pakman is the author of The Echo Chamber, How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America. He's also the host of The David Pakman Show.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candace Wong. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering help from Jared Paul and Amber Bruce. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger.

Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. In addition to this award-winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.