The Achingly Simple Lesson That Democrats Seem Determined Not to Learn
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Michael Hirschorn
2025-06-10 12:47:07GMT
Credit...Niro Perrone
As Democrats continue to sort through the wreckage of the November election, one idea that keeps circulating is to mint a “liberal Joe Rogan,” or better yet, create a parallel ecosystem of left-liberal podcasters to rival the network that has emerged on the right.
It’s not that they admire Mr. Rogan — his statements about transgender people and race so horrified liberals that many went ballistic when Senator Bernie Sanders accepted his surprise endorsement early in the 2020 presidential race. In 2024 Kamala Harris kept her distance, and Mr. Rogan gave his endorsement to Donald Trump. It’s Mr. Rogan’s influence that Democrats covet, an influence that has only increased in recent years with the popularity of a new crowd of male podcasters whom he has supported and who are now starting to rival his popularity. Amid a widespread — and widely mocked — effort by Democrats to reach young men, several elite liberal groups have sprung into action to counter the Rogan effect. One for-profit startup called AND Media (which stands for Achieve Narrative Dominance) hopes to raise $70 million to fund online influencers. Another similar undertaking has connections to the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
These efforts are unlikely to succeed, because they’re based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what these podcasts are and why they are so popular.
Two decades ago, Andrew Breitbart articulated the theory that “politics is downstream from culture.” That’s no longer quite right. Culture now is politics, and these podcasters — or bro-casters — are a perfect example of why.
Like Mr. Rogan, the podcasters Andrew Schulz, Tim Dillon and Theo Von all came up through the comedy circuit. They have no coherent political agenda, no detailed policy analysis, no claim to expertise of any kind. In fact, it’s the opposite. Mr. Schulz and Mr. Von recently shared their amazement at discovering that 27 million Soviets died during World War II — “That’s unbelievable! You don’t ever hear about that,” Mr. Von marveled.
So trying to create an AstroTurfed lefty version of the bro-casters, trying to find equal and opposite spokesmen for the causes that Democrats care about, won’t work, because these guys aren’t spokesmen for anything.
They’re, frankly, weirder than that. The ideas they articulate can seem 10,000-monkeys-level random, ranging from half-baked libertarianism to late-stage lib-owning to just-asking-questions ramblings about how maybe we need a Nayib Bukele-type dictator here in the United States. Mr. Dillon, a frequent guest of Mr. Rogan’s, last year endorsed his “friend” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president: “He’s out there just going: This is my truth.” Mr. Rogan is prone to “innumerable stoner overreaches that, without fail, continue to land him in ludicrously incoherent political territory,” Luke Winkie recently noted in Slate, including going on record as supporting both universal health care and the idea that Hitler has gotten a bad rap.
But if the bro-casters lack a coherent policy agenda, what they do have is a well of knowledge, honed from years of touring the country from one chuckle hut to another, about how to talk to people without talking down to them. And in a world where authority of all kinds (medical, professorial, journalistic, political) is in decline, where information from top-down media is losing ground to an infinitude of bottom-up sources, this precise kind of realness matters. Authenticity, it seems, is what fills the void when authority dies.
Democrats long since forgot how to communicate that way. They operate on the assumption that ideas and governance are the primary things that move people. That’s why we get endless debates about what Democrats should stand for that are of interest to insiders and hugely off-putting to everyone else. The problem isn’t getting the ideology right; it’s using words like “ideology” to begin with. Democrats are very much not out there going: This is my truth.
If there’s one issue that unites the bro-casters — beyond the need to find three hours of content — it’s a disdain for wokeness. “The word ‘retarded’ is back,” Mr. Rogan recently announced, ridiculously, “and it’s one of the great culture victories.” Mr. Schulz wound up his latest Netflix standup special with a long bit, the upshot of which was basically that people from Staten Island were a super race of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Retards.”
Modern bro-caster culture emerged in part as a response to the enforced sensitivity of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which left many young men feeling vilified for their purported privilege. The comedy of that time mocked the latest language strictures, whichever new initial was being added to the L.G.B.T.Q. array and anything trans. I first encountered Mr. Schulz in 2018 at New York’s Comedy Cellar, when he was a successful but not yet famous touring stand-up comic, developing what would become his signature style: marching up to the line of woke heresy and letting the tension hang there before performing a quick switcheroo. One bit: Schulz introduces the topic of trans women in sports. Nervous anticipation from the audience. Punchline: He’s in favor, because “then women will know what white people went through when we let Black people play sports.” Anti-woke made Mr. Schulz one of the country’s top comics, and now one of its more prominent podcasters.
The bro-caster ecosystem is a safe space for men to such a comical degree that it seems less menacing than juvenile. Only in this world could Eric Adams bond with Mr. Schulz over the need for a New York outpost of a particularly baller Miami strip club. By my rough count, fewer than two dozen of Mr. Von’s last 467 shows, spanning almost a decade, featured women, and two of them were Nikki Glaser. But male doesn’t necessarily mean brutish or insensitive. On air, Mr. Von can be emotionally finely tuned, open to thoughtful discussions of mental illness and parenting. Last year, he had an uncannily human conversation with Mr. Trump about, amazingly, cocaine. “Is our conversation going OK?” he asked during an epic dorkfest with Mark Zuckerberg in April. A few years ago, Mr. Schulz let an increasingly drunk Alex Jones wave around a machete and offer to castrate any boy who wanted to be trans — but looking past the theatrics, I find that Mr. Schulz circa 2025 is against racism, welcoming to gay people, largely chivalrous to women, agreeable about ideological differences. He’s decent.
If the Democrats ever want to get their groove back, it won’t work to tune out these folks, or to insist that engaging them is just feeding the trolls. It was the shunning of characters like Mr. Schulz and Mr. Dillon that led them to position themselves as free-speech warriors — the same ressentiment that helped fuel Trump’s victory.
Schulz describes himself as a Bernie bro who voted for Trump not because of any intrinsic conservatism but because Democrats lost their chill. Liberals used to get all the action, Mr. Schulz said recently; now, conservatives are the ones who live large “and say whatever they want.” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, fully taking the bait, called this “possibly the stupidest argument for a transition to MAGA that I’ve ever heard.” But this is sort of making his point, no?
So maybe instead of disdaining these guys and looking for liberal alternatives, Democrats should be taking a deeper lesson from bro-caster success: Get past litmus-test politics and focus-tested messaging. Relearn how to talk like nonpoliticians. Then get over yourselves, go on these shows and mix it up in this brave new world of anything goes.
The podcaster ecosystem is at least somewhat porous, a buzzing hive where there’s plenty of room for fresh perspectives. And the bros, Rogan excepted, seem to be spending a touch less time making fun of wokeness these days — that shtick is less daring now that you can call in the president of the United States for air cover.
Mr. Schulz has claimed on air that he has repeatedly asked Democratic pols (including Ms. Harris) to come on his show and that none agreed. Which is why it felt like a breakthrough when Pete Buttigieg, the former secretary of transportation and a veteran of dozens of Fox News guest spots, spent nearly three hours on the show in April. Go listen to it. It’s amazing. Once Mr. Buttigieg weathers a couple of pro forma gay jibes, he has the opportunity to speak at length, in detail, with humor and passion, about why Trumpism is bad for America. Mr. Schulz, in turn, lays out a road map for left-of-center politicians looking to reach wayward men that every Democratic consultant should pay heed to. Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Schulz talk about being girl dads, Mr. Buttigieg tells the story of adopting twin mixed-race infants and why public investment is a necessary handmaiden to private-sector growth. He uses a few curse words. Mr. Schulz jokes that he may be turning liberal. And, with the necessary caveat that the bro-casters seem to agree with whatever their guests say, maybe he is.
This May, Mr. Sanders sat with Mr. Schulz and his team. Mr. Sanders’s ability to articulate progressive ideas without getting mired in identity politics was on full display. Mr. Schulz introduced him as “the last honest man in politics,” and — after Mr. Sanders recited the lineup of the 1957 Brooklyn Dodgers — said, “I think now we call that autism.” Mr. Sanders laughed. Mr. Schulz asked smart, incisive, generous questions that brought out the best in his guest. And Mr. Sanders got access to a huge audience of people who have little interest in traditional political content.
Who knows if things would’ve been different had Ms. Harris not avoided the bro-casters last year. Either way, fellow Democrats should take the opposite approach. They’d reach a bigger audience and they’d learn a lot, even if they do get called “retarded.”
Michael Hirschorn is the chief executive of Ish Entertainment.
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Michael Hirschorn
2025-06-10 12:47:07GMT
Credit...Niro Perrone
As Democrats continue to sort through the wreckage of the November election, one idea that keeps circulating is to mint a “liberal Joe Rogan,” or better yet, create a parallel ecosystem of left-liberal podcasters to rival the network that has emerged on the right.
It’s not that they admire Mr. Rogan — his statements about transgender people and race so horrified liberals that many went ballistic when Senator Bernie Sanders accepted his surprise endorsement early in the 2020 presidential race. In 2024 Kamala Harris kept her distance, and Mr. Rogan gave his endorsement to Donald Trump. It’s Mr. Rogan’s influence that Democrats covet, an influence that has only increased in recent years with the popularity of a new crowd of male podcasters whom he has supported and who are now starting to rival his popularity. Amid a widespread — and widely mocked — effort by Democrats to reach young men, several elite liberal groups have sprung into action to counter the Rogan effect. One for-profit startup called AND Media (which stands for Achieve Narrative Dominance) hopes to raise $70 million to fund online influencers. Another similar undertaking has connections to the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
These efforts are unlikely to succeed, because they’re based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what these podcasts are and why they are so popular.
Two decades ago, Andrew Breitbart articulated the theory that “politics is downstream from culture.” That’s no longer quite right. Culture now is politics, and these podcasters — or bro-casters — are a perfect example of why.
Like Mr. Rogan, the podcasters Andrew Schulz, Tim Dillon and Theo Von all came up through the comedy circuit. They have no coherent political agenda, no detailed policy analysis, no claim to expertise of any kind. In fact, it’s the opposite. Mr. Schulz and Mr. Von recently shared their amazement at discovering that 27 million Soviets died during World War II — “That’s unbelievable! You don’t ever hear about that,” Mr. Von marveled.
So trying to create an AstroTurfed lefty version of the bro-casters, trying to find equal and opposite spokesmen for the causes that Democrats care about, won’t work, because these guys aren’t spokesmen for anything.
They’re, frankly, weirder than that. The ideas they articulate can seem 10,000-monkeys-level random, ranging from half-baked libertarianism to late-stage lib-owning to just-asking-questions ramblings about how maybe we need a Nayib Bukele-type dictator here in the United States. Mr. Dillon, a frequent guest of Mr. Rogan’s, last year endorsed his “friend” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president: “He’s out there just going: This is my truth.” Mr. Rogan is prone to “innumerable stoner overreaches that, without fail, continue to land him in ludicrously incoherent political territory,” Luke Winkie recently noted in Slate, including going on record as supporting both universal health care and the idea that Hitler has gotten a bad rap.
But if the bro-casters lack a coherent policy agenda, what they do have is a well of knowledge, honed from years of touring the country from one chuckle hut to another, about how to talk to people without talking down to them. And in a world where authority of all kinds (medical, professorial, journalistic, political) is in decline, where information from top-down media is losing ground to an infinitude of bottom-up sources, this precise kind of realness matters. Authenticity, it seems, is what fills the void when authority dies.
Democrats long since forgot how to communicate that way. They operate on the assumption that ideas and governance are the primary things that move people. That’s why we get endless debates about what Democrats should stand for that are of interest to insiders and hugely off-putting to everyone else. The problem isn’t getting the ideology right; it’s using words like “ideology” to begin with. Democrats are very much not out there going: This is my truth.
If there’s one issue that unites the bro-casters — beyond the need to find three hours of content — it’s a disdain for wokeness. “The word ‘retarded’ is back,” Mr. Rogan recently announced, ridiculously, “and it’s one of the great culture victories.” Mr. Schulz wound up his latest Netflix standup special with a long bit, the upshot of which was basically that people from Staten Island were a super race of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Retards.”
Modern bro-caster culture emerged in part as a response to the enforced sensitivity of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which left many young men feeling vilified for their purported privilege. The comedy of that time mocked the latest language strictures, whichever new initial was being added to the L.G.B.T.Q. array and anything trans. I first encountered Mr. Schulz in 2018 at New York’s Comedy Cellar, when he was a successful but not yet famous touring stand-up comic, developing what would become his signature style: marching up to the line of woke heresy and letting the tension hang there before performing a quick switcheroo. One bit: Schulz introduces the topic of trans women in sports. Nervous anticipation from the audience. Punchline: He’s in favor, because “then women will know what white people went through when we let Black people play sports.” Anti-woke made Mr. Schulz one of the country’s top comics, and now one of its more prominent podcasters.
The bro-caster ecosystem is a safe space for men to such a comical degree that it seems less menacing than juvenile. Only in this world could Eric Adams bond with Mr. Schulz over the need for a New York outpost of a particularly baller Miami strip club. By my rough count, fewer than two dozen of Mr. Von’s last 467 shows, spanning almost a decade, featured women, and two of them were Nikki Glaser. But male doesn’t necessarily mean brutish or insensitive. On air, Mr. Von can be emotionally finely tuned, open to thoughtful discussions of mental illness and parenting. Last year, he had an uncannily human conversation with Mr. Trump about, amazingly, cocaine. “Is our conversation going OK?” he asked during an epic dorkfest with Mark Zuckerberg in April. A few years ago, Mr. Schulz let an increasingly drunk Alex Jones wave around a machete and offer to castrate any boy who wanted to be trans — but looking past the theatrics, I find that Mr. Schulz circa 2025 is against racism, welcoming to gay people, largely chivalrous to women, agreeable about ideological differences. He’s decent.
If the Democrats ever want to get their groove back, it won’t work to tune out these folks, or to insist that engaging them is just feeding the trolls. It was the shunning of characters like Mr. Schulz and Mr. Dillon that led them to position themselves as free-speech warriors — the same ressentiment that helped fuel Trump’s victory.
Schulz describes himself as a Bernie bro who voted for Trump not because of any intrinsic conservatism but because Democrats lost their chill. Liberals used to get all the action, Mr. Schulz said recently; now, conservatives are the ones who live large “and say whatever they want.” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, fully taking the bait, called this “possibly the stupidest argument for a transition to MAGA that I’ve ever heard.” But this is sort of making his point, no?
So maybe instead of disdaining these guys and looking for liberal alternatives, Democrats should be taking a deeper lesson from bro-caster success: Get past litmus-test politics and focus-tested messaging. Relearn how to talk like nonpoliticians. Then get over yourselves, go on these shows and mix it up in this brave new world of anything goes.
The podcaster ecosystem is at least somewhat porous, a buzzing hive where there’s plenty of room for fresh perspectives. And the bros, Rogan excepted, seem to be spending a touch less time making fun of wokeness these days — that shtick is less daring now that you can call in the president of the United States for air cover.
Mr. Schulz has claimed on air that he has repeatedly asked Democratic pols (including Ms. Harris) to come on his show and that none agreed. Which is why it felt like a breakthrough when Pete Buttigieg, the former secretary of transportation and a veteran of dozens of Fox News guest spots, spent nearly three hours on the show in April. Go listen to it. It’s amazing. Once Mr. Buttigieg weathers a couple of pro forma gay jibes, he has the opportunity to speak at length, in detail, with humor and passion, about why Trumpism is bad for America. Mr. Schulz, in turn, lays out a road map for left-of-center politicians looking to reach wayward men that every Democratic consultant should pay heed to. Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Schulz talk about being girl dads, Mr. Buttigieg tells the story of adopting twin mixed-race infants and why public investment is a necessary handmaiden to private-sector growth. He uses a few curse words. Mr. Schulz jokes that he may be turning liberal. And, with the necessary caveat that the bro-casters seem to agree with whatever their guests say, maybe he is.
This May, Mr. Sanders sat with Mr. Schulz and his team. Mr. Sanders’s ability to articulate progressive ideas without getting mired in identity politics was on full display. Mr. Schulz introduced him as “the last honest man in politics,” and — after Mr. Sanders recited the lineup of the 1957 Brooklyn Dodgers — said, “I think now we call that autism.” Mr. Sanders laughed. Mr. Schulz asked smart, incisive, generous questions that brought out the best in his guest. And Mr. Sanders got access to a huge audience of people who have little interest in traditional political content.
Who knows if things would’ve been different had Ms. Harris not avoided the bro-casters last year. Either way, fellow Democrats should take the opposite approach. They’d reach a bigger audience and they’d learn a lot, even if they do get called “retarded.”
Michael Hirschorn is the chief executive of Ish Entertainment.
