Leftie podcasts I like (TCWD, Champagne Sharks, Escape From Plan A) will occasionally mention the likes of Red Scare/Cum Town/Chapo Trap House. It’s like a passing nod to a different end of the indie podcast ecosystem. But I’ve yet to hear them describe these edgy, super-popular shows as being smart or particularly useful, so I’ve never felt the urge to investigate further.
That entire fiefdom just seems like an internet-accelerated version of asking comedians and performance artists to define our political thinking.
Was the Red Scare podcast ever really "left wing"? Or even about "Soviet immigration" (neither host is really old enough to remember much about the Soviet Union from whence they immigrated as very young children)? I thought they kind of sold themselves as "anti-woke" coming out of the gate, and were in fact some of the first content creators to explicitly try capitalizing on being so. Their entire brand, from jump, was, "We call people gay and retarded". In the New York media sphere I think this made them novel and edgy. Outside of it, this made them what they are: Mean girls. The Red Scare podcast is not hugely popular outside of cities with large media industries for this reason and their trajectory into overt right wing punditry doesn't confuse me at all.
The Conformist is a movie I often contrast with another movie, which is Mr. Klein - they're both about completely amoral (and honestly, bad) men, there's a sort of Euro-existential idea behind both of these films in that the motivations of these fascist collaborators and opportunists is hidden from you. Except Marcello ends up actively murdering a woman he allegedly loves for being a communist, and Robert Klein passively resigns himself to the fate of the concentration camps for not-totally-clear reasons. With the "anti-woke" grift and pandering to Trump supporters, I am not sure I am able to think of it as a form of more-or-less passive resignation and opportunism. Someone who lives in a conservative middle class suburb may be surrounded by Trump supporters that think like them, but in a city, this is less the case, which is why that "mean kids' table" article was full of rich young urban conservatives trying to insist they were "normal" - because they aren't actually "the norm" where they happen to live, they're "the norm" somewhere they find wholly unfashionable and beneath them, and even though Trump soundly won the election, they still think of themselves as some persecuted minority opinion because they share neighborhoods with the exact sort of people who have mutual hostility to the Trump regime & all its grifters & enablers. What I sense is the tension of status anxiety - the desire to be glamorous and urban, while holding beliefs that are roughly exactly similar to uncool, unglamorous suburban parents, and that all of this is an active play to preserve one's cultural capital credentials.
I think Howard Stern (circa 1990s, he's sort of calmed down a bit these days) might actually be a better comparison to this phenomenon. Except there was nothing "haute" about Howard Stern - he very much represented this sort of lower middle class New York milieu and with him the crassness was the point of the spectacle, more than any particular ideology around it. Stern was also a better interviewer and had strong rhetorical ability to lead his guests into answering deeply personal questions or participating in goofy stunts they might otherwise avoid answering - when these "alt right" podcasters or whatever interview Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, they mostly just let them bloviate all their usual talking points.
the Red Scare girls were initially “dirtbag left,” pro-Bernie and so on. Dirtbag left never really meant much except “pro-health care and pro-slurs” but they did at least make a pretense toward being leftist.
I always considered the "dirtbag left" media phenomenon to be mostly millennial 30-something Bernie supporters who traded on making vulgar jokes about Democrats and their surrogates, which occasionally included shots at people who promoted a kind of opportunistic neolib identity politics (e.g. people who tried to paint Bernie/his supporters as racist or sexist for not supporting Hillary or Kamala or some such), but I never really considered them a media phenomenon that actively leaned into bigotry per se.
Whereas I was simply not persuaded with the Red Scare girls, who absolutely came out of the door calling people "gender goblins" and all this other frat boy stuff, and seemed to have way more in common with the sort of faux "civil libertarian" pundits like Bari Weiss, Greenwald, or even guys who eventually became useful idiots for the alt-right but did have some left wing credibility like Matt Taibbi. That they supported Bernie didn't mean a whole lot to me because a lot of similar grifters did and to me their humor was solidly Vice Magazine circa Gavin McInnes with a little bit of, like, pro-Assange/more-anti-Democrat-than-pro-Bernie sentiment on top.
Leftie podcasts I like (TCWD, Champagne Sharks, Escape From Plan A) will occasionally mention the likes of Red Scare/Cum Town/Chapo Trap House. It’s like a passing nod to a different end of the indie podcast ecosystem. But I’ve yet to hear them describe these edgy, super-popular shows as being smart or particularly useful, so I’ve never felt the urge to investigate further.
That entire fiefdom just seems like an internet-accelerated version of asking comedians and performance artists to define our political thinking.
Hey, I'm one of the founders of Plan A and EFPA (though I'm no longer active)!
Was the Red Scare podcast ever really "left wing"? Or even about "Soviet immigration" (neither host is really old enough to remember much about the Soviet Union from whence they immigrated as very young children)? I thought they kind of sold themselves as "anti-woke" coming out of the gate, and were in fact some of the first content creators to explicitly try capitalizing on being so. Their entire brand, from jump, was, "We call people gay and retarded". In the New York media sphere I think this made them novel and edgy. Outside of it, this made them what they are: Mean girls. The Red Scare podcast is not hugely popular outside of cities with large media industries for this reason and their trajectory into overt right wing punditry doesn't confuse me at all.
The Conformist is a movie I often contrast with another movie, which is Mr. Klein - they're both about completely amoral (and honestly, bad) men, there's a sort of Euro-existential idea behind both of these films in that the motivations of these fascist collaborators and opportunists is hidden from you. Except Marcello ends up actively murdering a woman he allegedly loves for being a communist, and Robert Klein passively resigns himself to the fate of the concentration camps for not-totally-clear reasons. With the "anti-woke" grift and pandering to Trump supporters, I am not sure I am able to think of it as a form of more-or-less passive resignation and opportunism. Someone who lives in a conservative middle class suburb may be surrounded by Trump supporters that think like them, but in a city, this is less the case, which is why that "mean kids' table" article was full of rich young urban conservatives trying to insist they were "normal" - because they aren't actually "the norm" where they happen to live, they're "the norm" somewhere they find wholly unfashionable and beneath them, and even though Trump soundly won the election, they still think of themselves as some persecuted minority opinion because they share neighborhoods with the exact sort of people who have mutual hostility to the Trump regime & all its grifters & enablers. What I sense is the tension of status anxiety - the desire to be glamorous and urban, while holding beliefs that are roughly exactly similar to uncool, unglamorous suburban parents, and that all of this is an active play to preserve one's cultural capital credentials.
I think Howard Stern (circa 1990s, he's sort of calmed down a bit these days) might actually be a better comparison to this phenomenon. Except there was nothing "haute" about Howard Stern - he very much represented this sort of lower middle class New York milieu and with him the crassness was the point of the spectacle, more than any particular ideology around it. Stern was also a better interviewer and had strong rhetorical ability to lead his guests into answering deeply personal questions or participating in goofy stunts they might otherwise avoid answering - when these "alt right" podcasters or whatever interview Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, they mostly just let them bloviate all their usual talking points.
the Red Scare girls were initially “dirtbag left,” pro-Bernie and so on. Dirtbag left never really meant much except “pro-health care and pro-slurs” but they did at least make a pretense toward being leftist.
I always considered the "dirtbag left" media phenomenon to be mostly millennial 30-something Bernie supporters who traded on making vulgar jokes about Democrats and their surrogates, which occasionally included shots at people who promoted a kind of opportunistic neolib identity politics (e.g. people who tried to paint Bernie/his supporters as racist or sexist for not supporting Hillary or Kamala or some such), but I never really considered them a media phenomenon that actively leaned into bigotry per se.
Whereas I was simply not persuaded with the Red Scare girls, who absolutely came out of the door calling people "gender goblins" and all this other frat boy stuff, and seemed to have way more in common with the sort of faux "civil libertarian" pundits like Bari Weiss, Greenwald, or even guys who eventually became useful idiots for the alt-right but did have some left wing credibility like Matt Taibbi. That they supported Bernie didn't mean a whole lot to me because a lot of similar grifters did and to me their humor was solidly Vice Magazine circa Gavin McInnes with a little bit of, like, pro-Assange/more-anti-Democrat-than-pro-Bernie sentiment on top.
Thank you so much - I will try to live up to your recommendation. And I love the images you chose for this piece.