\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it weren\u2019t<\/span> for Charlie Kirk, I would not be the vice president of the United States,\u201d J. D. Vance said as he hosted The Charlie Kirk Show<\/em> on Monday. This may well be true, because Kirk lobbied for Vance to get the vice-presidential nomination. It\u2019s also a reflection of how deeply Donald Trump\u2019s White House is intertwined with a thriving ecosystem of partisan podcasters who amplify his agenda\u2014and help set it.<\/p>\n In the past decade, American public life has undergone two major transformations: The MAGA movement has swallowed the Republican Party whole. And influencers such as Kirk have elbowed aside traditional media outlets in the quest for attention. Even more important, the boundary between the movement and the influencers is nonexistent: Kirk\u2019s campus-outreach group, Turning Point USA, was ostensibly a grassroots operation, but it was also a mouthpiece for Trumpism. Here\u2019s Kirk talking about his voter-outreach operation during last year\u2019s presidential race: \u201cWe\u2019re working directly in harmony with the Trump campaign,\u201d he announced in an archive clip aired at the start of Vance\u2019s tribute show. \u201cIt\u2019s been vetted, it\u2019s been cleared, it\u2019s been blessed,\u201d he said of his event, adding, \u201cWe\u2019re going to try to win this thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Vance and Kirk were personally close, and the vice president was clearly moved by the shock and injustice of his friend\u2019s assassination. He traveled to Utah to bring Kirk\u2019s coffin home to Arizona on Air Force Two. But the vice president\u2019s decision to host The<\/em> Charlie Kirk Show<\/em> was also a political act. As the party\u2019s most likely nominee for 2028, Vance must hope to inherit Kirk\u2019s organizational infrastructure\u2014and his audience.<\/p>\n Just last week, Kamala Harris was confessing that she felt sidelined as vice president, confined to unpopular policy areas by a president who didn\u2019t want to be overshadowed. Vance has realized that podcaster in chief is a more powerful position than the one he currently holds. Imagine how strange a sitting vice president\u2019s decision to host The<\/em> Charlie Kirk Show<\/em> would seem to a time traveler from 20 years ago. Had Rush Limbaugh died during George W. Bush\u2019s presidency, would Dick Cheney have hosted the radio host\u2019s call-in show?<\/p>\n To those inside<\/span> the MAGA movement, Kirk was not just a friend, a young father, and a passionate advocate for conservative-Christian values\u2014he was just like them<\/em>. From the president down, this is a group of people obsessed with \u201cowning the narrative.\u201d The \u201cperformative utterance\u201d\u2014a sentence that bends reality into the speaker\u2019s preferred form with words alone\u2014might be a concept championed by the postmodern left, but it has been embraced by Trump and the MAGA right, who believe that saying something is 90 percent of doing it.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s White House is a government by the podcasters, for the podcasters. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, was a podcaster. His deputy, Dan Bongino, was a podcaster. Katie Miller, the wife of the immigration czar Stephen Miller, left DOGE earlier this year and started a podcast. Throughout last year\u2019s campaign, Trump took his message to a bunch of male podcasters, who duly rewarded him with softball interviews\u2014or, in some cases, open endorsements. At the same time, Tucker Carlson hosted a live series of conversations across the country with other podcasters (Russell Brand, Jack Posobiec, Glenn Beck) and three people who are now in the administration (Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard).<\/p>\n The symbiotic relationship has continued during MAGA\u2019s return to government: Carlson was one of the guests on Vance\u2019s tribute show. Their opening discussion was about how Kirk first contacted Vance after seeing him on Carlson\u2019s former Fox News program. (In one of this era\u2019s many unexpected outcomes, Carlson is now one of the more Trump-critical voices within MAGA, even though his son, Buckley, works for Vance.) Earlier this year, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tested a new briefing format in which lucky contestants competed to ask her the most sycophantic question. Can you guess who they were? Podcasters. When the Trump administration wanted to pretend it had released the Epstein files\u2014actually some binders full of boring and mostly public information\u2014a group of useful idiots was summoned to the White House: podcasters. Trump recently gave a personal tour of the Oval Office to three hosts of the podcast All-In<\/em>. One of them is his crypto czar, David Sacks, who obligingly gushed about Trump\u2019s redecoration of the room. \u201cIf you look at before-and-after photos, which I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll put on the screen, the Oval looked kinda drab before,\u201d Sacks told his fellow hosts as they waited for the president. Now, of course, the Oval has so much gold leaf that it looks like a Vegas version of Versailles.<\/p>\n Some of the MAGA-aligned podcasts are organic successes; others appear to be little more than vanity projects, sustained by their proximity to the administration. Katie Miller\u2019s podcast, for example, has 5,000 subscribers on YouTube. Her first guest was Vance; her most recent booking was Attorney General Pam Bondi, who insinuated that people should be fired for \u201chate speech.\u201d<\/p>\n In dictatorships, the government has to spend taxpayers\u2019 money on state media. Here in America, the land of free speech and the free market, people volunteer<\/em> to be Baghdad Bob. Right-wing commentators frequently accuse their opponents of exactly the same vice\u2014being \u201cregime journalists\u201d who are part of the \u201cCathedral.\u201d But many traditional news organizations have strict rules forbidding their reporters from donating to candidates or attending fundraisers,let alone running a grassroots campaign to elect a president. The Republicans have a huge and flourishing podcast industry dedicated to boosting their talking points. The Democrats have Pod Save America<\/em>, on a good day.<\/p>\n This administration is profoundly hostile to the mainstream press because there are now less bruising ways to gain attention. MAGA allies control X and the video platform Rumble, and Trump himself controls Truth Social. Trump-friendly investors have just pledged to buy out TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg appeared next to the president recently and, at Trump\u2019s prompting, talked about how much money his company, Meta, was planning to invest in data infrastructure in the United States. Afterward, Zuckerberg caught on a hot mic admitting apologetically that he had no idea what numbers the president had wanted him to announce. At the same time, Trump and his allies have sued newspapers and broadcasters, and the head of the Federal Communications Commission pressured TV stations to have Jimmy Kimmel\u2019s late-night show taken off the air. Yes, what Kimmel implied about Kirk\u2019s case\u2014that the murder suspect was right-wing\u2014was factually wrong. But when has that ever been the standard applied to things said during late-night monologues? In any case, Trump\u2019s Truth Social posts reveal that the existence of Kimmel\u2019s show\u2014\u201cLess talent than Colbert!\u201d\u2014has bothered him for some time.<\/p>\n The right might say that it\u2019s winning in the marketplace of ideas, but that rings hollow when it\u2019s also trying to buy the market.<\/p>\n Over the past<\/span> week, Elon Musk\u2019s X, which acts as the storefront for many of these podcasts, and the place where their titans interact, has been a mirror image of Twitter immediately after George Floyd\u2019s murder in 2020\u2014an inchoate mass of rage and grief looking for a lightning rod. Back then, in one particularly gratuitous example, a Mexican-American utility worker was fired after a photo on Twitter showed him making an ambiguous hand gesture that some people construed as a white-power salute. In the past week, Kirk\u2019s fans and friends have similarly targeted private individuals who criticized his views, or who have spoken callously about his death. The dean of a Tennessee university was fired for saying she had \u201czero sympathy\u201d for him. The managing partner of a Texas Roadhouse was fired after his wife<\/em> referred to Kirk as a \u201cNazi.\u201d One MAGA influencer claimed that this would make the restaurant\u2019s staff feel \u201cintimidated,\u201d in an unintentional echo of the language used by New York Times<\/em> staffers in 2020, when they argued that an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton endangered their lives.<\/p>\n For several days, a website called \u201cExpose Charlie\u2019s Murderers\u201d claimed to be collating the names of those who celebrated Kirk\u2019s death. (The site now appears to be offline.) That reminded me of another left-wing mass movement, when a list purporting to expose \u201cShitty Media Men\u201d circulated in private chats at the height of #MeToo. That list captured some genuine wrongdoing, I\u2019m sure, but was also a forum for anyone with a grudge or a flimsy allegation to air it unchallenged.<\/p>\n The background of the \u201cgreat awokening\u201d is being used as the justification for the MAGA purges of the past week. Many conservative podcasters who condemned the peak cancel-culture era are now arguing that their own doxxing and firing campaigns are somehow different. \u201cThere is a big difference between the left canceling people and the right canceling people,\u201d posted the podcaster Matt Walsh, a repeat offender in this regard. \u201cThe left cancels you for saying things that are true. To the extent that the right cancels you, it is for saying things that are abhorrent and sick.\u201d The obvious rejoinder is: Who gets to decide what is abhorrent and sick? Personally, I find references to \u201cprowling Blacks\u201d quite sick, or the suggestion that a 10-year-old girl should be forced to bear her rapist\u2019s baby. But Charlie Kirk had every right to argue his positions.<\/p>\n Which is exactly what he did. To use his assassination to restrict free speech is an insult to what Kirk\u2019s friends have told us repeatedly that he stood for, but that\u2019s what you get when you have a government whose highest goal is to podcast. Many parts of American life have proved resistant to the MAGA movement\u2019s performative utterances\u2014the economy, for example, cannot be bullied into growing. But the podcast-industrial complex is useful for establishing new norms and taboos, and expanding the administration\u2019s power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIf it weren\u2019t for Charlie Kirk, I would not be the vice president of the United States,\u201d J. D. Vance said as he hosted The Charlie Kirk Show on Monday. This may well be true, because Kirk lobbied for Vance to get the vice-presidential nomination. 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