Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why Democrats won't create a left-wing Joe Rogan

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Since the election, Democrats and the media have been in panic mode, trying to figure out “the manosphere.” It’s a vast network of influencers, podcasters and streamers who speak to young men in a way traditional media has failed to. Many of its personalities are Trump supporters, including Joe Rogan. The left has been asking itself how it can win back young men without radicalizing them further. Is there a left-wing Joe Rogan? To help crack the manosphere, Taylor talks to Josh Citarella, host of the podcast “Doomscroll.” He’s been studying the radicalization of young men online for a decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Taylor Lorenz. Welcome to Power User. Since Donald Trump won the election last week, Democrats and the media have been in panic mode. Much of this panic is centered around a powerful online subculture, loosely known as the Manosphere. The Manosphere consists of a vast network of influencers, podcasters, and streamers that speak to young men in a way traditional media has failed to. Influeners like Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughn, Aidan Ross, or Andrew Schultz, once seen as fringe personalities or music, entertainers have evolved into major political players. Now, Democrats are left scrambling, trying to understand this world and questioning whether the manosphere can be countered or even co-opted. Can they win young men on the internet back in a way that doesn't radicalize them

further? Is it even possible to create a Joe Rogan for the left? To help break all this down, I brought in Josh Citarella. Josh is a researcher who has been studying the radicalization of young men online for over a decade. He has the host of the Doom Scroll podcast that covers culture and politics in the 21st century. Hi, Josh. Welcome to Fowry User. Hey, Taylor. Good to see you. I know you've been talking to radicalized men online for almost a decade now. Tell me what you've done in this space. I've interviewed young people who post radical memes online for the past few years. I've written two books about this. I've done a series of audio interviews. I've done a variety of museum programming in both the states and in Europe. So I've spent the last few years just completely

immersed in political subcultures, primarily talking to young people who get politicized online. I know every time I talk to you, you are in some deep discussion with like communities of, you know, fascist 15-year-olds on the internet. Literally, it's not a joke, actually, yeah. I spend a lot of time doing it. Can you describe to me what the Manosphere actually means? The Manosphere refers to a large variety of channels, primarily male influencers who are giving advice about how to date women, how to exercise, business advice, starting your small business,

opening up a drop shipping scam, stuff like this. It's a very large culture. It encompasses a lot of different perspectives, some of them extremely conservative, misogynistic, too big of a space to really summarize altogether. Yeah, there's a lot of like, I feel like cast of characters around here. We've got Andrew Tate. He's sort of the perennial like male lifestyle influencer, of course, accused of sex trafficking. He's super misogynistic. But then it also trickles down to people like the Nelk boys, right, who are like prank YouTubers, and then you've got the comedy world that I think is sort of adjacent to this, the Joe Rogans, the O'Von's, and some of these other people, right? Like, I mean, even like someone like Shane Gillis, who's pretty mainstream comedian,

I would say, is sort of adjacent to the broader, like, manosphere. This is part of the problem with the term manosphere, because a few years ago, that meant people who were part of the like capital A, capital R alt-alt right, people who had really reprehensible worldviews. But now it kind of extends to the soft cultural stuff, including like the Nelke boys and comedians and stuff like this. I would say that we're kind of watching a shift into something that the writer Max Reed has described as the Zintranet, which is just a subculture of young men who are interested in sports and bedding and light beer and those Zin nicotine pouches. And they really like comedy stuff. It's just men's interest and is

not particularly advancing a clear, explicit ideology, just kind of general common sense conservatism. So there's a real gradation from stuff that is within the Overton window, regular politics, and then stuff that is extreme. And part of the problem is that we're using the single-term Manusphere to refer to all of those communities, which are very different from each other. What draws people into the Manusphere? I mean, is it ideology? Is it a sense of community? Like, what makes this broader group of content creators, podcasters, et cetera, appealing to young men? A lot of them get into it through self-help, oddly enough. It's a very reasonable thing looking into self-improvement, into workout advice, into presentation, how to groom yourself, how to dress.

There's very little content that is geared towards young men that does not also include these implicit political positions along with it. So generally people get into it through a cultural layer where they're looking for self-help or exercise advice. And then following that, several years later, there's all of these other things that they pick up along the way. So you can call this a rabbit hole. You can call it a funnel. There's various types of models for it. But people wade into this material slowly over time.

Do you think it's accurate to see the Banasphere is sort of one larger collective and group? Or are these all just like disparate communities that outsiders have looped together? I think both you and I have been saying this for a very long time, but there are a lot of people in these movements. They're very large groups, and they have important disagreements with each other.

and those fractures are actually sources of conflict in which people break off into different political blocks or factions. So you can find things that are like an embrace of conservative traditional gender roles. You can also find things that are rejections of modern society in which people want to revert to feudalism, for example. There's a huge gamut of different opinions in this, how women should be treated, whether they should be in the workplace, whether they should be in the home. There's not a kind of homogenous description. Manosphere is a category. kind of lumping together dozens and dozens of different communities that have a lot of different perspectives. Are there any historical parallels to the Manusphere? Like, have we seen this type of thing

before? It's kind of an anomalous development of the internet, because we haven't really had quantitative measurements of subcultures before. There are certainly political movements in older methods of media. I'm thinking of Father Cofflin, who is a conservative preacher during the era of the Great Depression in which people literally mailed in dollar bills to support his radio program. Very analogous to a Twitch streamer, but, you know, 90 years earlier, those things exist, but the kind of soft cultural component that slowly acculturates people to political ideas later, we haven't ever been able to measure that in quantitative terms before. So I think it's, in some ways, quite new. Trump tapped into the atmosphere so heavily during this campaign.

How much do you think it really helped him? I mean, it's kind of impossible to tell. I certainly feel like it does. did have a big influence, we would be, I think, hard pressed to find the total number of people who decided to change their vote one way or another or decided to come out and vote as a result of hearing him on a podcast. We have an enormous amount of data for how many people that they reach. My perspective on this stuff is that if you're looking for the gate over whether someone makes their voting decision towards option A or option B, you're missing the forest for the trees. These are processes that start eight, ten years before where people are slowly acculturated to political ideas.

So it's not like they heard it from an influencer and then decided to go out and vote that afternoon. They have been listening to these opinions for almost a decade, and that has shaped their worldview as a result. It's a very kind of soft and slow approach if you're looking through the cultural lens. What's one thing that you think critics of the Manusphere are kind of completely misunderstand about it? I think there's a knee-jerk reflex to kind of write off all of these young men as having reprehensible views, that they are beyond persuasion, and that they basically should not be messaged to, attempted to recruit, or bring into some type of political coalition. I have been a proponent for many years of saying that if you don't like these developments in internet culture, then your job is to get in there and try to persuade these people otherwise. You actually have to engage in conversation with them. if you attempt to de-platform these communities, they actually get worse, and we can quantitatively

prove that through studies at this point. The instinct to rule out the possibility that these people can be brought into a different political coalition is, I think, a grave mistake in this point. I want to back up for a second and talk about something that is something that's kind of the bane of my existence, because I feel like it's someone that covers young people in technology. I'm constantly hearing in the media about the male loneliness epidemic. And, you know, there's a lot of sort of moral panic about young men and their place in the world and did we alienate young men. So, first of all, do you think that there is a male loneliness epidemic? And obviously, of course, there's also a female loneliness epidemic and, you know, everyone is lonely.

But do you think that there's something really specific and broken right now about, with young men, rather? Like, do you think that they're sort of really uniquely struggling in a way that we haven't addressed? So this is the predominant narrative that it's an epidemic. of male loneliness, that it's in cells, involuntary celibates, and so on. I think there's a general pronounced loneliness in society that is maybe more likely among young people, but it's just generally trending upwards everywhere. So the idea that increased content consumption and social atomization, those are just measuring the same thing. I think there's just a regular amount of loneliness that is universal to everybody right now, actually. Yeah, I know. And the men seem to get a lot

more attention for it, but I don't know if we could actually support that with data. Yeah. I mean, I think everyone, like you said, is definitely lonely, and there are ways to sort of address loneliness in different cohorts, probably through different means. And you mentioned that a lot of this Manosphere is built around this concept of self-help. This is something I was thinking of, especially with Andrew Tate, who's sort of the pinnacle, like, Manosphere influencer in the sense that he's just like the most misogynistic and maybe the most awful. But in 2021, he started this thing called Hustlers University, where he was sort of teaching people, allegedly, like, how to make money online. And so much of this manistphere world is not just, it's not just like about like betterment, right,

in terms of working out in the gym or getting ripped. It's also about making money. Do you think economic insecurity among young men and teenagers also feeds people into this more like radicalized section of the internet? I mean, I feel like a broken record because I've been saying that for eight years. Yeah. I would say that's one of the primary drivers. You know, people are, they're like, okay, Andrew Tate is teaching people how to do drop shipping scams on the internet. And then they forget to ask the primary question that even brings people to look for that material in the first place, which is like, why can't you find dignified high paying work in the richest country in the world? Give me a break. So the inability to talk about the class question

that is destroying the lives, the upward mobility of many of these young men, the degree to which the legacy media is uncomfortable in talking about that, like, this is the problem. You know, we've put the cart in front of the horse if we're going to blame these people for harnessing an audience that is interested in their material because they've been disappointed by the legacy structures. So I think there is a larger political economic shift that is far more effective in de-radicalizing or persuading people than trying to de-platform these horrible influencers, which I completely disagree with and have no sympathy for them. I hate these guys. But unless we address that kind of downward mobility that is really pronounced for young people, Gen Z,

millennials like myself, and particularly young men under the age of 25, then we're just feeding them more and more audience, week after week, month after month. And I feel like this economic thing is getting really ignored, because I think there's a heavy focus of like, oh, well, they're all adjacent to like sports and UFC fighters and men just want to be hot. And of course, I'm sure a lot of teenage boys want to also be ripped and, you know, all that stuff. They do. Yes. That is also cool. But it's crazy. You know, I talk to a lot of young kids too. I feel like young kids today, are involved in the economy in such an earlier age. Like, they're pressured to, like, start these online businesses.

And when you go on the internet to try to find information about starting an online business, these are the influencers that come up. Like, these hustle bros, the, like, or the, like, Grant Cardone, like, sales monster type stuff, where they're all big Trump supporters, right? They're all super conservative. It's hard to find, I guess, like, a grussel, like, influencer that's a, espousing more progressive values. I would also throw in that a lot of these young people have been trained to do below minimum wage labor in places like

Minecraft and Roblox. Like we have cultivated the entrepreneurial instinct on children from like age 12 when they start playing these games and then they're selling the resources and shit in MMOP RPGs and so on. So yeah, just the process of privatization and the market kind of reaching into every aspect of life that had previously been decommodified, like having a hobby as a video game, we are just kind of cultivating a small business owner mentality for a decade before people are even able to vote in some cases. We're going to take a quick break. Coming up, we're going to talk about why Democrats will never be able to create the left-wing

Joe Rogan. There's some viral tweets from Democrats that I think sort of woke up to this new media landscape last week. They woke up to it last week, yeah. They really did. And I have to say, I'm feeling very vindicated. I'm sure you are, too, of like, wow, you're right. YouTubers can affect people.

But you started to see these tweets from prominent Democrats saying, we need a left Joe Rogan. Why don't we have a Democrat Joe Rogan? Which is hilarious, I think, on its face because obviously Joe Rogan supported Bernie Sanders in 2020. And I think actually showed an openness to supporting progressives or at least more sort of like populist Democrats, maybe several years ago. I would argue at least that, I mean, at least I did argue in my piece that we can't have a Democrat, Joe Rogan. It sort of fundamentally misunderstands the media landscape. How would you respond to those tweets? Yeah, I should say I really appreciated your article. What I would describe as the structural asymmetry or structural advantage for the Republican Party being very cozy with capital, being cozy with big business interests. It's kind of hard to have a left-wing Joe Rogan or a left-wing daily wire because all of these things, I mean, just look at their balance.

They're funded by billionaires, right? They're funded by the oil industry and all these other conservative interests. And I mean, it's going to be hard to find like a left-wing billionaire who wants to fund a political program that advocates for them not existing. I mean, it's entirely kind of injurious or something. Yeah, I mean, those are like that is not those, that George Soros is not the left, right? George Soros is like a kind of neoliberal third way progressive, whatever. That is very much a market ideology. That's not the kind of like trade unionist left that's going to appeal. to these young men who are, you know, looking at all this different content. So I fully agree with you. What I would throw in there, though, is that I think there are leaner ways to accomplish this. And just because it is difficult does not mean that it isn't also necessary. I can't count how many interviews with young people, as young as the age of 13, that are into material so radical that I won't mention the names on this program. The political message, starts when they are so young, it is inconceivable to most mainstream viewers. So the idea that someone is going out and voting for Donald Trump after listening to one podcast

from Aidan Ross is just completely, completely wrong. They are acculturated to this material over the course of starting from like age 14 in most cases. And having some type of messaging for the pre-political portion of their life is very much necessary because if you hear this at age 15, you're like, I don't want to join a union in my workplace. Like, these guys sound dumb. The left-wing podcasters are influencers. When you're 25 years old and you're working in the Amazon fulfillment center,

you're going to be grateful that you heard that podcast 10 years ago because that will then inform your decision to actually organize in the workplace. That's the game that we're playing with this kind of material. I think it can be done in a much more lean sense. I mean, I literally produce a show. I know exactly how much it costs. I don't need billionaire funding. You probably do need, just to be realistic about it, millionaire funding.

You do have to find people who are sympathetic to the cause, but we don't need George Soros to fund a network of left-wing podcasters, you know. We can do it. We do have a lot of left-wing podcasters already, I will say. But you're right. I mean, I think it's not just the funding, though, right? The funding is part of it. But it's also the sort of broader collaboration.

And this is another critique of leftists specifically, which is like they eat their own, right? Maybe we're all guilty of this ourselves. But when Trump goes on Rogan, like, that's going to be a very friendly interview, right? Like, when he goes on the Nelke boys, like, he's not going to be challenged. If Kamala was to have gone on Hassan Piker, who is phenomenal and brilliant, he would eat her up, right? Like, he would critique her. Yeah, good. I know.

I'm participating in it now. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, like, what do you think of that? Like, do you think it's also just like, like, what would you say to these critiques of like, well, the left doesn't have solidarity? these far-left, you know, content creators that are appealing, they need to get on board with these centrist Democrats. They don't have, they're not towing the line enough. Right. So in internet discourse, there's a popular term called the Overton window. The Overton window refers to the range of acceptable political debate at a certain period. And so I would argue that from, you know,

let's say 2008 up until 2024, that Overton window has been shifting towards the right. So if you have this alternative media space where there are content creators with dissenting opinions from the mainstream that are on both the left and the right. As the Overton window has shifted, it's moved towards the alternative media sphere that is conservative aligned. It doesn't necessarily mean that the people on the left have opinions that like shouldn't be heard or are beyond the pale. It just means that what we call the center consensus is actually floating and it's shifting right words. So the gap between the alt-media sphere and the mainstream has actually become relatively more narrow on the right, where it has gotten obviously observably larger on the left. Imagine

if Kamala Harris went on the Hassan-Piker stream. I imagine they would not get along in the least. I see an opportunity now for the Democrats to really kind of reimagine themselves entirely. I mean, this is such a devastating defeat on every category. Yeah, I mean, this goes back to like the question of, like, is it that these left-wing podcasters aren't on board enough? Or is it that we have mainstream Democrat candidates that are sort of completely out of step with the ideology of what most young people on the Internet support? That's the, it's the latter. It's the latter. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're just far too much kind of third way Blairite, Clinton, yeah, neoliberal compromise. I guess when we also think about Democrats and young men,

I want to go back again to 2020 because this is when you had Bernie on Rogan, right? I think he went on actually end of 2019, but you had this moral panic in the media of the Bernie bro, right, where there was like toxic young men are supporting, you know, progressives and Bernie and they're toxic and they're male. And a lot of young progressive felt alienated from the Democratic Party. Or like these sort of like cisgender straight men felt that they were being pushed down or their voices weren't supposed to be heard, right? This is this critique. How much of that critique do you think is real. And do you think the Democratic Party kind of abandoned young straight men? I mean, it is an extraordinarily weird period because I've gotten shit for being a Bernie bro for

eight years, basically up until last week when the predominant narrative became that we need more left-wing podcasters who are going to talk to young men. So it's a pretty big narrative flip that's kind of hard to grasp. I would say that young men are quantitatively, one large demographic that are not being spoken to by the current iteration of the Democratic Party. If there were a labor constituency in the Democratic Party, it would be speaking to them. You don't have to message to people just based on their identity or their race or whatever. If you're trying to reach young white men, you can talk to them in the workplace. The thing that unifies everyone in society is that we all need to work.

We all need to sell our labor on the market because this is a capitalist society. That's not going to change anytime soon. but if you want to reach them, maybe don't do, like, it's just too narrow of an approach to do, like, identity-based targeting to like, okay, so we'll insert Democratic ads into Sunday night football. Is that really the solution they're going to come up with? What about on the sphere, Josh? Oh, my God, the amount of money alone, incredible. I want to bring things back to tech, because I think there's also a conversation to be had around, like, platforms. And you mentioned that de-platforming these influencers doesn't work. And I actually agree with you. But I want to hear you sort of tease it out because, you know, in the 2010s, there was this idea that really emerged of like kick these people off Instagram, Facebook, whatever. I mean, Andrew Tate's been deplatformed, right? He was kicked off like TikTok and YouTube and stuff. And their power will evaporate. Do you think that's still a true belief? I think in the case of influencers, it does clearly quantitatively reduce their audience and their messaging. Absolutely. Okay. So shouldn't we just like ban all these people then with problematic manisphere opinions? Well, the thing that happens is that the audiences that then migrate to their new platforms become more radicalized than they were before.

So you're then in this kind of whackamol situation where you're debating whether it's more dangerous to society to have a large group of mildly radical people or a small group of very radical people. And that's a difficult cost benefit that has to be done kind of case by case because in some cases people do horrific acts in the real world. You know, those are the types of things that we want to avoid. I think at the worst ends of this, people who are calling for violence in the real world, who are committing crimes, who are like storming the Capitol, for example, and streaming it on social media, those are grounds for deplatforming. But then there are people who are kind of like in the middle tier that are amenable to some of these ideas, but they actually just need to be met with conversation. So having the Bernie Sanders go on the Joe Rogan show is like a far better response to this than deplatforming Joe Rogan, for example, which some people will suggest. Yeah, good luck on that one. He's not going anywhere. But I also think what a lot of these conversations fail to take into account is also that the right has spent the past decade building up this alternative platform ecosystem, where if you do get deplatformed on YouTube, you can just go have a hit show on Rumble. If you get deplatformed on Twitch, you can make millions on kick.

It feels increasingly impossible to deplatform people, especially in the podcast world or as media just gets more distributed. It's like, does that even work? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that may, you're very right about this. It may actually be a phenomenon of an older period of social media when we were having these conversations eight years ago. The alt platforms were far, far smaller than they are now. And that media system has grown substantially. So we may be looking at a future if we kind of roll this forward eight years from now. It may be just impossible to meaningfully de-platform someone because all of our audiences are so spread. And if you're not on this one platform, you know, if you're not on X, then you'll be on threads. Or if you're not on threads, then you'll be on blue sky. And there's going to be some place where people can get your stuff and it'll be widespread enough that shutting off one valve, one output for it does not meaningfully limit its reach for the audience. So I don't think at that point. Kicking off any extremists. No, that's true. That's true. I think they're monetizing them. They're monetizing it quite well. Yeah, it seems to be they're raking it in from that. I think they're incentivizing it, too, if I'm being honest. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. If you had to make a prediction, speaking of eight years from now, where do you see the Manosphere going? Do you see,

this broader ecosystem becoming more mainstream and more influential, or do you think it could fade away? Is it a product of this unique political time? As long as I've been doing this work, interviewing young people writing about internet culture, there have been so many people who have said to me that this stuff is over, it's a trend cycle, it's going to end, and over the entirety of that time, it has only grown larger and more influential. This is the new world, this is the new media landscape, the old model, I'm sorry to say it, it's not going to be around for much longer. So we are looking at the shape of the future.

We need to take these things seriously and consider how we want to be involved because they are not going anywhere. Josh, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thanks, Taylor. These are, I think, very important issues. Happy to discuss them. A huge fan of your writing and your work. So thank you. That's all for this week's episode.

You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larchuk and Jalani Carter. Our video editor is Sam Essex. Our executive producer is Zach Mack. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like this show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And in the meantime, subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.com on Substack. See you next week.