Joey Pfeifer/Semafor
The News
On Jan. 30, the day the first episode of her new show dropped on YouTube, Brett Cooper threw a sold-out surprise live show in the basement of the Stand, a New York City comedy club near Union Square. Appearing onstage with no opener, Cooper admitted to the audience that she had never done anything like the appearance before, but was simply going to share what had been on her mind since she left the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s powerhouse conservative media company.For the next hour, Cooper kept the crowd of mostly young women’s rapt attention as she weighed in on the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni scandal (she’s very skeptical of Lively’s complaints of misconduct), celebrated her own decision to get married young, and summarized her experience watching the American presidents interact at Jimmy Carter’s funeral earlier this year. The crowd cheered when she offered advice to an audience member looking for other gay conservative men in New York.
Cooper, 23, peppy, with a rapid-fire cadence, is one of the highest-profile faces of a new generation of creators on the right reaching out to younger women. These YouTubers and writers are often avatars for (or cheerleaders of) a “trad” lifestyle, espousing traditional gender and family values that are part nostalgia, part revolt against liberal feminist cultural views. They’re powered by social media algorithms on Instagram and TikTok, where young women are the dominant users.
This ecosystem of young conservative female voices fills space for a generation of women who are at least curious about some traditionally conservative views — but aren’t always interested in the entering the digital man cave that is the overwhelmingly male right-wing podcast space.
“For a long time there has been this conversation on the right that has been very male-centric,” Rachel Janfaza, a writer and researcher focused on emergent Gen Z political views, told Semafor. “There are a lot of values that women — young women, in particular — are espousing right now that do align with some of these more right-wing women. And I think a lot of that does stem from this nostalgia for the past, for a time period that many members of Gen Z never actually experienced themselves.”
Cooper, a former teen television actor, found her calling after her acting career ended when, at 19, she refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine. She’s garnered a massive YouTube following — 1.4 million subscribers across 10 episodes, resulting in 17 million views and counting — with videos unpacking celebrity scandals (How Blake Lively Ended Her Own Career) and arguments against progressive ideology in public schools and on college campuses (It’s Time to Abolish the Department of Education — Here’s Why).
Another major voice in the space is Alex Clark, the Turning Point USA influencer who’s dubbed her followers “cuteservatives.” She’s become a Make America Healthy Again influencer with her podcast Cultural Apothecary, where she weaves together interviews about the dangers of microplastics, hormonal birth control, nonstick pans, and anti-depressants with Bible teachings and the benefits of homeschooling. There are figures like Riley Gaines, the former NCAA athlete turned Daily Wire contributor, who hosts Outkick’s Gaines for Girls podcast, focusing on cultural issues around sports from a conservative woman’s perspective. Her relentless criticism of trans athletes on her show and others helped land her on the guest list for Trump’s speech to Congress last week.
There are older bloggers who’ve embraced the same model, like Jessica Reed Kraus, a suburban mother whose opposition to lockdowns in California during the Covid-19 pandemic supercharged her lifestyle “mommy blog,” House Inhabit, and who became a chronicler of the fashion, lifestyle, gossip, and vibes of MAHA, and later, MAGA. And there’s Evie Magazine, a digital tabloid that combines listicles like “The Cutest Spring Dresses for Every Occasion” with stories like “People Think Blake Lively’s CIA-Connected Hire Is Manipulating The TikTok Algorithm And Headlines” and “New Reports from Harvey Weinstein’s Trial Have People Questioning #MeToo All Over Again.”
For years, conservative media was built by and for older men. That’s the vein in which Fox News founder Roger Ailes reportedly directed a “leg cam” at his female hosts’ bodies. In the late 2000s, nearly 73% of radio mega-broadcaster Rush Limbaugh’s audience was male, as was much of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly’s audience. A snapshot of news consumption in 2012 showed that while conservative media was largely the domain of older male audiences, women overwhelmingly made up the audiences for daytime television and networks like MSNBC.
By contrast, Cooper’s audience today is largely women. While her YouTube viewership skews male, among consumers on Spotify and Facebook, her audience is largely women: According to a spokesperson, it’s 60% female, 32% male, and 8% unspecified on Spotify, and 62% female, 38% male on Facebook.
In an interview with Semafor in February, Cooper said that although she didn’t initially care whether her audience skewed female or male when she started appearing in videos for the Daily Wire, she thought there was a space for younger voices, particularly those that espoused political viewpoints but were not “just making people angry.”
“I looked around me and I was like, ’Okay, I’m not crazy. There are no young women. And even with older women, they weren’t speaking to a younger generation,” Cooper said. Like Megyn Kelly, for example: “She’s great, she’s super powerful, her podcast has blown up. She was not on my radar when I was an 18-year-old.”
She added: “I started the show knowing that there were a lot of men out there, and they probably were older, they were in their 40s, but men had male voices to look up to,” she said. “As a woman that is more on the right, that was raised more right-leaning, I didn’t have that. And so in the back of my mind, I was always like, I could offer that to young women who were in the same position as me, who are just normal American girls who didn’t really fit in with this mainstream leftism that was becoming very, very pervasive in our pop culture and Hollywood and our schools.”
Know More
While many new conservative creators don’t have much of a focus on the specifics of electoral politics, others are more explicitly aligned with the Republican Party.The Conservateur, a small digital publication, was founded in 2020 by a group of former Fox News and Republican staffers. While publishes infrequently, its political views and connections within the party have resulted in impressive access to prominent conservative women. It has run interviews with Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt about her family, spoke to Cooper about her wedding, and carried pieces on Lara Trump’s workout and fitness fashion line.
Founder Jayme Franklin told Semafor that she launched the publication as a corrective to women’s magazines that have gone too far to the left.
“I grew up with fashion magazines stacked next to my bed. And I would open these magazines after Trump got elected and it was so off-putting. Not just politically — I feel like the message that they have for women, I just really disagreed with it,” Franklin said.
But like their counterparts in the “manosphere,” many of the new conservative media personalities appealing to younger women are not explicitly partisan or involved in electoral politics or wonky policy fights.
Cooper said that she didn’t grow up with conservative media, but started discovering right-leaning influencers in her later teenage years as she became increasingly alienated from classmates in LA who expressed views far to her left. While Cooper often talks about politics on her YouTube show, she is more interested in the personalities behind politics and how it impacts culture. (The most constant thread running through her show is “cultural trends,” she said.).
That mix wasn’t dissimilar to what Kraus, a new friend of Cooper’s, tends to focus on. When Semafor spoke with Kraus last year for her first profile with a major news organization, she also emphasized that although she was increasingly covering politics, she was more interested in the social scene than the nuts and bolts of policy, and if people wanted to consume that content they should read news outlets like Politico.
“I really focus more on humanizing them in a way that interests me,” Kraus told Semafor at the time. “I don’t feel like it’s my job to cover everything, and I’m not good at that. I know my limits.”
Max’s view
Since the election, media critics have credited (or blamed) Donald Trump’s continued dominance to the newly-emergent “manosphere,” a loosely-affiliated network of podcasters, comedians, and thinkers who have found large, captive male audiences for anti-establishment content and views online. But as Joe Bernstein pointed out in The New York Times, that genre of men’s media has a long history. The “manosphere” that rocked the 2024 election may have featured some names that people over 40 hadn’t really heard of. But their freewheeling style and ideology would be familiar to the generation that made shock jocks like Don Imus and Howard Stern popular in the 90s.As conservative talk radio and Fox emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, there were other conservative women in television and radio that understood that a large portion of their audience were women. Dr. Laura Schlessinger had a large radio audience among middle-aged women who she spoke to about political and cultural issues, while The View cast Elisabeth Hasselbeck to serve as the show’s conservative voice. There’s a long list of well-known conservative women who worked as political pundits and appeared on Fox and in political news magazines.
But none of those personalities reached younger women at the scale that this generation’s commentators do today. Both Cooper and Clark’s podcasts have put up numbers rivaling the biggest podcasts and YouTube shows in the country. Reed-Kraus, who writes for a slightly older audience, has had one of the most popular independent newsletters in the country for years.
Sitting in that basement near Union Square, I was struck by how many young womenwere there to see Cooper. This was a far cry from the male-dominated conservative media spaces I have spent time in, like the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which always seemed to attract a lopsided number of younger male attendees. After Cooper’s appearance in New York, users on her very active Reddit page summarized the event, seeming more interested in the details of her personal family life and her views on celebrities and other conservative media personalities than her political positions.
While some of what stars like Cooper talk about is expressly partisan, some of the content also calls back to an older, more traditional kind of women’s media.
The generation of women’s blogs and publications that grew out of the 2000s, like Jezebel, Vice’s Broadly, and New York’s The Cut, among others, brought contemporary feminism to mainstream audiences and acted as a counterweight to legacy commercial magazines aimed at women.
“Traditional women’s media, from the 70s and 80s until riot grrrl, was culturally conservative whether or not we would call it that,” Stella Bugbee, the former Cut editor who now runs the Style Section at The New York Times, told Semafor. “Magazines that focused on how to get a man, how to lose weight — that’s Cosmo. What we experienced in the last 15 years, with The Cut and Jezebel and Bustle, to a certain extent were the aberrations.”
Indeed, the backlash to feminist values that these creators believe are reflected in mainstream media is part of their success. In some ways, their new-media content is a callback to the long-ago era that these legacy women’s publications left behind.
“The fact that these creators present themselves as having these heterodox views is, I think, what is really appealing to the young women who are consuming this content,” Janfaza said. “And when I hear young women tell me that they follow or subscribe or regularly watch or listen to any of these creators, the reasons why they say they do is because they like the fact that they’re pushing against the grain and giving them an alternative perspective that they’re not really seeing in mainstream media.”
Notable
- Cooper told Bloomberg (and us) that she sees herself more like Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper (no relation) than anyone in conservative media.
- Some publications have found backing from prominent conservative public figures. Rolling Stone reported in 2023 that the founder of Evie Magazine had been linked to Peter Thiel.
- Clark, who told the Washington Post she grew up dreaming of working at Teen Vogue, became one of the most well-known MAHA influencers last year despite her lack of a medical background and her penchant for sharing unsupported and dubious health claims. “Alex is able to create trust with young women because of this parasocial relationship,” a health expert told the Post, “even when she’s spreading absolute nonsense.”
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