Why Democrats won't create a left-wing Joe Rogan
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Since stono trump t when 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 ministry. The ministry consists of a vast network of influencers, pod casters and streamers that speak to Young man in a way traditional media has failed to.

Influencers like joe rogan, theo van eight and ross or Andrew schultz, once seen as fringe personalities or mere entertainers, have evolved into major political players. Now democrat are left scrambling, trying to understand this world and questioning whether the ministry IT can be countered or even copied. Can they win Young men on the internet back in a way that doesn't radicalize them further? Is that even possible to create a joe? And for the left to break all this down, I brought in josh alla.

Josh a is a researcher who has been studying the radicalization of Young men online for over a decade. He has the host of the doom score podcast that covers culture and politics in the twenty first I judge. Welcome to far user. Hey, teller.

good to see you. I don't .

even talking to a radicalized van online for almost a decade now. Tell me what you've done in the space.

I have interviewed Young people who post radical memes online for the past few years. I've read two books about this i've done in a series of audio interviews. I've done a variety of museum programing in both the states in in europe. So i've spent the last few years just completely immersed in political subcultures, primarily talking to Young people who get politicize online.

I know every time I talk to you, you are in some like deep discussion with like communities of you know, fashion. Fifteen year old literally .

is not a joke actually. Yeah, that I spend a lot of time doing.

You describe to me what the minus phere actually means.

The minus sphere refers to a large variety of channel's, primarily male influencers, who are giving advice about how to date women, how to exercise uh, business advice, starting your small business opening of a drop shipping scm stuff like this is a very large culture and compasses. A lot of different perspectives, some of them extremely conservative, massaging isc, too big of a space to really summarize all together.

Yeah, there's a lot of like I feel, cast of characters around here. We've got understate he sort of the perennial like male lifestyle influences, of course, accused of sex traffic king, super method ism. But then I also trickles down to people like the milk boys, right? We're like playing youtube s and then you've got the comedy world that I think is sort of a Jason to this, the joe rogan of the ovine and some of these other people, right? Like, I mean, even like someone like shame gillis, who's pretty mainstream comedian, and I would say is of adjacent to the broader like minus sphere.

This is part of the problem with the term manufacture, because a few years ago that meant people who are report the like capital, a capital are alright, people who had really reprehensible world views, but now kind of extends to the soft cultural stuff, including like the note boys and comedians and stuff like this.

I would say that we're kind of washing a shift into something that the writer, max read, has described as the internet, which is just a subculture of Young men who are interested in sports and bedding and light beer and those zin the continent 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 graduation 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 manos sphere to refer to all of those communities which .

are very different from each other. What drives people into the manufacture is IT ideology. Is IT a sense of community. Like what makes this broader group of content creators paid? Casters is set a appealing Young man.

A lot of them get into IT through self help, oddly enough. You know um it's it's a very reasonable thing looking into self improvement, into workout advice, into presentation, had to groom yourself, had address. There's very little content that is gear 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 rabid hole.

You can call the funnel. There's various types of models for IT. But people wait into this material slowly over time. Do you think .

it's accurate to see the beneficence sort of one larger collective and group? Or are these odders 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 a 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 gaming 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 is not a kind of homogeneous description manifest. A category is kind of lumping together dozens and dozens of different communities that have a lot of different perspectives.

Are there any historical al parallels to the ministry? Like have have you seen this type of thing before?

It's kind of an anonymous 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 that i'm thinking of. Father coffin, who is a conservative feature during the error 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, ninety years earlier, those things exist, but the kind of soft cultural component that, slowly, a culture ates people to political ideas. Later, we haven't ever been able to measure that in quantitative terms before th, so I think it's in some way is quite new.

Jump tap into the ministry are 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 I did have a big influence. We would be, I think, hard press 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, 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 herded from an influencer and they decided to go and vote that afternoon. They have been listening to these opinions for almost a decade, and that has shaped their world view 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 ve been critics of the ministry kind of completely misunderstand about IT?

I think there is a new jc reflect to kind of write off. All of these Young men is having reprehensible views that they are beyond persuading, and that they basically should not be message to attempted to recruit or bring to 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 deep platform these community as they actually get worse. And we can quantitatively prove that through studies, at this point, the instance 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 kind of the brain of my existence, because I feel like someone that covers Young people in technology and constantly hearing in the media about the male loneliness epidemic. And there's a lot of sort of moral panic about Young man and their place in the world.

And did we alienate Young man? So first of all, do you think that there is a male lonely adem c, an obvious, of course, also a female lonely c. Everyone is longer doing that. There's something really specific and broken right now about with Young man rather like doing that. There is a really uniquely struggling in a way that we haven't addressed.

So this is the predominant narrative that it's an epidemic of male lonely ess that is in cells, in volte, celebrates and and so on. I think there's a general pronounced to 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 adamites ation, those are just measuring the same thing.

I think there's just a regular amount of loneliness. Ss, that is universal to everybody, right? actually? Yeah, I know. And the men seem to get a lot more attention for IT, but I don't know we could actually support that with data. yeah.

I mean, I think everyone, like he said, is definitely lonely. And there are ways to sort of address loneliness in different cohort, probably through different means. And you mentioned that a lot of this ministry here is built around this concept of self help.

This is something I was thinking of, especially with androtten, who the paco lic manufacture. Influencer, in a sense, that he's just like the most massage ist, that and may be the most awful. But in twenty twenty, when he started this thing called hustler's university, where he was sort of teaching people allegedly like how to make online.

And so much of this ministry world is not just IT sounds just like about a Better man, right? In terms of working out in the or getting ripped. It's also about making money. Do you think economic and security among Young man and teenagers also feeds people into this more like radial zed section of that that I mean.

I feeling a broken record because I ve been saying that for eight years. Yeah, I would say the primary as one of the primary drivers, you know, people are there like, okay, andre tatas teaching people had 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 you find dignified hyping 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 upper mobility of many of these Young men, the degree to which the legacy media is uncomfortable, and talking about that like this is the problem.

You know, we put the car in front of the horse, if we're gona blame these people for harnessing an audience that is interested in their material, because theyve been disappointed by the legacy structures. S, so I think there is a larger political economic shift that is far more effective in the radical zing, persuading people, then trying to deep platform these horrible influencers, which I completely disagree with and have no sympathy for them. I hate these guys. But unless we addressed that, that kind of downward mobility that is really pronounced for Young people, jensie millennial s like myself, and particularly Young men under the age of twenty five, then we're just feeding them more and more. Audience, we get a week.

months after month. And I feel like this economic thing is getting really ignored because they think there's a heavy focus like, oh, will their alleges until late sports in uf, c fighters and man just want to be high. And of course, i'm sure a lot of teenage boys want to also be ripped.

All they yes, that is also cool.

but it's crazy. You know, I talked a lot of Young ds. I feel like Young kids today are involved in the economy in such an earlier age, like their pressure 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 brows the like, or that a grant cardone like sales monster type stuff, where they're all big trump supporters, right? There are all super conservative. It's hard to find, I guess, like A A grumble hustle, like influence or that as vouching more progressive values.

I would also throw in that a lot of these Young people have been like trained to do below minimum wage labor in places like minecraft and robo ks. Like we have cultivated the entrepreneurial instinct on children from like age twelve when they start playing these games and then they are selling the resources and and ship in a immo RPG 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 decomposed fied. 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 to vote. In some cases.

we're going to take a quick break coming up. We're going to talk about why democrat will never be able to create the left wing. Joe rogan.

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There is a some viral tweet from democrats that I think out of woke up to this new media landscape last week. They woke up to IT last week, and they really did. And I have to say something very vindicated. I'm sure you are to like, wow, you're right, youtube s can affect people, but you started to see these streets from prominent democrats. And 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 Jordan supported burn's anders in twenty twenty and I think actually showed an openness to supporting progressives or at least morals are like populist democrats. Maybe several years ago, I would argue at least that I mean, at least I did argue my piece that we can't have a democrat, joe, or in a sort of fundamentally misunderstands the media escape. How would you respond to those streets?

Yeah I I should say I really appreciate to 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 baLances. They are funded by billionaire right there, funded by the oil industry and all these other conservative interests. And I mean, it's going to be hard to fine like a left wing billionaire who wants to fund a political program .

that advocate tes.

So yeah, I mean, those are like that is not those that George sorrow is not the left right. George sorrow is like a kind of new liberal third way, whatever that is a very much of market ideology. That's not the kind of like trade unionist left that's going to appeal to these Young men who are looking at all these different content.

So I I fully 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 account how many interviews with Young people, as Young as the age of thirteen, that are into material, so radical that I won't mention the names on this program. The political messaging starts when they are so Young. IT is inconceivable to most mainstream viewers.

So the idea that someone is going out in voting for Donald trump after listening to one podcast from a and ross is just completely, completely wrong. They are acculturated to this material over the course of starting from, like, age fourteen in most cases, and having some type of messaging for the Price political portion of their life is very much necessary. Because if you hear this at age fifteen, like I don't want to journey the union, my workplace, like these guys sound dumb.

The left wing pod casters are influencers. When you're twenty five years old and you're working in the amazon for filming center, you're gona be grateful that you heard that podcast ten 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 I can be done much more in a much more lean sense. I mean, I literally produce a show. I know exactly how much of costs I don't need billionaire under.

You probably do need just to be realistically about IT millionaire under. You do have to find people who are sympathetic to the cause, but we don't need George sorrow to fund network of left wing pod casters. You know, we can do that.

We a lot of left tween pogis was already, I will say, but you're right. I mean, I think it's not just the funding of what the funding is part of IT, but it's also this sort of broader collaboration. And this is another critic of leftest specifically, which is like they eat their own right? Maybe we are 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 net, boys like he's, I can be chAllenged if cella was to have gone on his son, piker, who is phenomenal and and brilliant, he would eat her up right like he would .

critique yeah, I know i'm participating in IT now. No yeah yeah.

But what 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 what the left doesn't have solidity. These like far left do you know content creators that are appealing, they need to get on board with the centrist democrats. They don't have. They're not towing the .

line enough right yet. So in internet discourse, there's a popular term called the overton window. The overturn 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, two thousand eight up until twenty twenty four, that over ten 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 over ten window has shifted its moved towards the alternative media sphere, that is conservative wind IT doesn't necessarily mean that the people on the the left of 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 ended shifting right words. So the gap between the old media sphere and the mainstream has actually become relatively more narrow on the right, where IT has gotten obviously observer ably larger on the left. Imagine if kala Harris went on the huston 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 tween podcasts ers aren't on board enough? Or is IT that we have mainstream democratic dites that sort of completely out of step with the ideal what most Young people on internet support?

That's it's the latter, is the latter. Now I mean, they're just far too much kind of third way. Blair, right? Clinton, the new liberal compromise.

I guess when we also think about democrats and Young men, I want to go back again to twenty twenty, because this is when you had burning on rogan ride. I think he he went on actually, end of twenty nineteen.

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 their male and a lot of Young progressive felt alienated from the democratic party like these, sort of like this gender. Straight men thought that they were being pushed down or their voices weren't supposed to be heard, right? This is this critique. How much of that critical do you think is real? And do you think the democratic party kind of abandoned Young, straight man?

I mean, IT is a extraordinary 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 pod casters. We're going to talk to Young men. So it's a pretty big narrative clip that kind of hard to to grasp.

I would say that Young men are quantitative, timely, 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. Like 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 you're going to come up with?

What about on the spare dosh? Oh my god, the amount .

of money alone?

incredible. I won't bring things back to tech because I think there's also a conversion to be had around like platforms. And you mention the d platforming. These influencers doesn't work and I actually grew with you.

But but I want to hear you sort of to that out because, you know, in the twenty tens of this idea that really emerged, like kick these people off instagram, facebook, whatever mean entertains been d platform. He was kicked off like tiktok and youtube and step and their powerful evaporate. Do think that still a true belief.

I think in the case of influencers, IT does clearly quantitatively reduce their audience and .

their messaging, like ban all these people done with problematic .

manufacture 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 valuable situation where you're debating whether it's more dangerous to society to have 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 capital, for example, and streaming IT on social media, those are grounds for deep platforming. But then there are people who are kind of like in the middle tear 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 deep platforming joe rogan, for example, which some people will suggest.

yeah, good luck on that one. Not going anywhere. But I also think what a lot of these conversations failed to take into account is also that the right has the past jackie building up this alternative platform ecosystem? Or if you do get the platform on youtube, you can just go have a show on rumble.

If you get deep platform on twitch, you can make millions on on cake. IT feels increasingly impossible to deep platform people, especially in the podcast world. Or as media just gets more distributed, it's like this that even work. Yeah yeah. I mean.

that may you you very right about this IT may actually be a phenomenon of an older period of social media when we are having these conversations. Eight years ago, the all 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 can roll this forward eight years or now.

IT may be just impossible to meaningfully the platform someone because all of our audiences are so spread. And if you're not on this one platform and if you're not on x, then you'll be on threads. Or if you're not on threads, then you will be on blue sky and there's going to be some place where people can get yourself 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 think at that point.

kicking off any extremist.

no.

that's I think they're modified ing that they're .

monetizing IT quite well. There seems to be they're racking IT in from that. I think they're incentivising IT too.

if i'm being honest. Oh well, yeah, yeah. If you have to make a prediction, we can have eight years from now.

Where do you see the manisty going? Do you see this broader ecosystem becoming more mainstream and more influential? Or do you think that could fit away? Is that a product of this unique political time?

As long as i've been doing this work in reviewing 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 tranced. Cle is going to end.

And over the entirety of that time, IT is 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'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 chatty with today.

Thanks, heller. These are, I think, very important issues. Happy to discuss them. A huge fan of your writing in your work, so thank you.

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