If you happened to tune in to America’s most popular podcasts these last few months, you might’ve heard some peculiar voices.
Joe Rogan is a big deal. He averages eleven million listeners per episode, or about three times the number of people who watch Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC in prime time combined. And guess what? He recently welcomed both Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper as his guests. Carroll is a conspiracy theorist who has argued that 9/11 was a secret Jewish plot against America, and that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent tasked with controlling America’s elites by obtaining compromising photographs of our best and brightest with underage girls. Cooper, a self-described amateur historian, got lots of press recently when he argued that we’re getting World War II all wrong. The real aggressor was that bloodthirsty brute, Churchill, who, egged on by shadowy forces—Cooper wouldn’t say precisely who they were but intimated that they control the banks and the media all over the world—pushed the peaceable Hitler into war. And on several other occasions, Cooper has explained that Hitler was forced to kill some Jews only because the Wehrmacht wound up taking more prisoners of war than Germany could afford to feed.
Theo Von, a jovial broadcaster who beams his chats to nearly four million devotees on YouTube, has palled around with Candace Owens. The former Daily Wire contributor now believes that Judaism is “a pedophile-centric religion” rooted in child sacrifice and has implied that the Israelis assassinated JFK.
And if that wasn’t enough, we have the triumphant return of Andrew Tate, who routinely gives Nazi salutes, praises Hamas, and prays for radical Islam to destroy the West. His video instructing his followers to “slap, grab, choke” any woman who accused them of cheating has been viewed more than 11.6 billion times. Tate and his brother were arrested in Romania in 2022, accused of holding several women against their will, filming them engaging in sexual acts, and selling the videos. Tate had barely touched down in Florida when he was welcomed on the uber-popular Patrick Bet-David Podcast and celebrated as a misunderstood maverick.
Other examples of morally repugnant attention-seekers being feted on our best-lit public platforms abound. Which means, alas, that we have a very big problem on our hands.
To hear some of our more astute public intellectuals tell the story, the problem is the rise of anti-Semitism on the right, the equally frightening doppelganger of the anti-Jewish hate we’ve seen erupting this past year on progressive college campuses nationwide. The theory goes that, just like the woke left, the woke right sees the Jews as a uniquely malevolent and all-powerful force that must be crushed if we’re to make America virtuous again.
This explanation is partly right but mostly wrong. Tate, Carroll, Cooper, Owens, and their ilk may dislike Jews, but anti-Semitism isn’t the real issue. Nor, for that matter, is their deep distaste for America. Instead, what we’re looking at here is a rapidly escalating spiritual crisis.
Like all crises worthy of their magnitude, this one, too, contains multitudes.
One element: the triumph of rampant individualism, even among those who purport to hold conservative values. Snake charmers like Tate or Carroll appeal to their confused and disgruntled flock because they present themselves as prophetic truth-tellers shunned by the mindless mob. Agree with my incendiary statements, they hiss, and you, too, can become a courageous lone wolf in a herd of dull sheep. This gambit is much simpler—and, alas, much sexier—than asking their audiences to build community and follow Scripture, tasks that demand discipline and depth of mind, heart, and soul. It’s no coincidence that Tate built his reputation as a fitness titan and punch-throwing he-man; like a degenerate Charles Atlas for the twenty-first century, he sells the dream of bulking up from weakling to apex predator overnight.
It’s no coincidence, then, that Tate and the others appeal mostly to men. As my Protestant rabbi Aaron Renn correctly observed, men have been abandoned by our culture. In liberal circles, they’re accused of toxic masculinity and told to check their innate privilege. In traditional spaces, they’re found guilty of being insufficiently devoted to their families and faith. Nowhere do they receive much empathy or permission to engage in uniquely masculine virtues, which means they’re likely to fall for the first jaunty figure offering them a joyous vision of manhood, no matter how warped or depraved.
Which is where we come in. We have two tasks. Both are as difficult as they are essential.
The first is political. It’s likely no coincidence that Rogan booked Carroll the same week Von welcomed Owens. Conservative podcasts are a small universe with a limited cast of producers, promoters, and bookers, which means we should ask how it came to pass that two of our culture’s most virulent voices were asked to come on two of our most popular shows at the exact same time. This may be a coincidence; but it could also mean that political players, including foreign governments like Qatar, may be actively promoting the worst parties on the conservative camp in order to gain malign influence in Donald Trump’s America. If that strikes you like too hazy of an idea, go online and watch Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister, cozy up to Tucker Carlson, while ignoring his own nation’s generous support of Islamist terrorism and ongoing promotion of the interests of American foes like Iran.
And ask yourself, too, why there’s a sudden spike in antiquated anti-Semitic canards we thought had gone extinct. Think about it: Trying to argue that Judaism is inimical to Christianity is not only an act of tremendous intellectual dishonesty; it’s also a time-honored political ruse to rob communities of faith of their true values and supply them instead with incendiary ones designed to further nefarious partisan goals. In that way lies ruin.
The conservative movement is too often scarred by needless—and needlessly vicious—infighting. One should think thrice before turning on a fellow defender of the faith simply to signal a greater degree of ideological purity. But I suspect that the Tates and the Carrolls of this world share nothing with those of us who care about nation, God, and family. The evidence suggests that they would like to see America in shambles and are giddy to watch traditional virtues devoured by unchecked sexual appetites. We should reject them and the glamor of their social media antics firmly, and we should insist that our elected officials, cultural luminaries, and anyone else claiming to uphold traditional values do the same.
Which leads me to the second, and more difficult, undertaking. Observing young people huddling around noxious figures, it’s tempting for those of us with a bit of gray in our hair to wag our tongues and bellow at the youth to simmer down and toughen up. I’ve done so myself, on more than one occasion, and I’m tempted to do it again when I read reports like the one that appeared the other week in the Wall Street Journal. There has been a steep rise in the number of high school students who take advantage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and petition to gain more time on their exams. “If you don’t have extra time,” one tenth grader at a private Massachusetts school told the paper, “then [it’s a sign] your parents don’t love you, because it’s so easy to get it.” That so many young Americans now think only of themselves, willing to pose as disadvantaged victims in need of a handout if doing so gains even the slightest personal benefit, is a disgrace—reason enough to want to rail against the young.
But that, the writer Stephen Wolfe has helpfully admonished us, entails practicing spiritual Baby-Boomerism. This pathology involves a scowling dismissal of the young while simultaneously refusing to realize that there are many real and insurmountable problems that even the most gritty member of Gen Z cannot overcome merely by trying a bit harder.
We don’t want kids to take relationship advice from Andrew Tate and history lessons from Darryl Cooper. To prevent that from happening, we need to offer better alternatives. Yes, we must insist that they take responsibility for their lives and do so in ways that honor their faith traditions and prioritize communal well-being over facile individual gratification. But we must also show them enormous love, show that we care about their very real predicaments, and that we have communal and spiritual resources to offer rather than empty pep talks about bootstraps and hustle.
Politics is aesthetics practiced by other means, which means that we shouldn’t be afraid to challenge the loathsome loudmouths in their own game. For every braying Tate advocating violence against women, let there be a steelier man roaring about respect. For every Carroll distorting history, let there be someone speaking the truth with as much confidence and more verve.
Put simply, then, the general idea is this: Everything is downstream of culture, and the kids who tire of the left’s insufferable preachiness and reflexive defeatism are going to look for more exciting heroes. Unless we give them a King David for our time, they’ll turn to Conan the Barbarian. We need to get into the game. It is up to us believers to teach the pagans once again that faith triumphs in the end.
