Manosphere podcasters didn’t win Donald Trump the presidency in the 2024 election cycle, but they went a long way to solidifying the president’s support among large swaths of the young men who follow them. Now — nine months into the implementation of the president’s agenda — the same ultra-popular podcasters and streamers who lent their audiences to the president in 2024 are scrambling to break with his government.
“I really really wish I never got into politics,” Kick streamer Adin Ross recently told his audience. “I just don’t think I’ll ever care enough again for another politician.”
Ross, who has been repeatedly banned from streaming platforms over his use of hateful slurs, interviewed Trump last August at the president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. The streamer encouraged his viewers to vote for the then-candidate, and even gifted Trump a custom Tesla Cybertruck and a Rolex watch. The two bashed members of the traditional press who had grilled Trump’s campaign promises and public statements in past interviews, and gushed over each other.
Trump’s interview with Ross was perhaps the most overtly sycophantic of the interactions the president had with bro-oriented content creators over the course of the campaign, but it was no anomaly. Now, figures like Joe Rogan, Andrew Schultz, and Theo Vonn — who all provided friendly, nonconfrontational spaces for the president’s campaign agenda — are, like Ross, retreating from the MAGA movement.
Comedian Theo Von, host of the This Past Weekend podcast, interviewed Trump the same month as Ross. Trump asked Von about his cocaine use (“That’s down and dirty, isn’t it?”). Von asked Trump what he liked the most about each of his sons. Von would later attend Trump’s inauguration. You could forgive the Trump administration for believing they were on friendly terms when the Department of Homeland Security used a clip of Von saying — in his telling, as an out of context joke — “Heard you got deported, dude. Bye!” in a social media video.
Von was not happy.
“My father immigrated here from Nicaragua. One of my prized possessions is his immigration papers from when he came here — I have them in a frame,” Von said last week. “This was just fucked up. It was fucked up.”
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In a social media post responding to DHS — which was later deleted — Von wrote that he didn’t “approve to be used in this. I know you know my address so send a check. And please take this down and please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos.”
The administration’s authoritarian approach to immigration enforcement has become a point of contention for other content creators considered reliable MAGA liaisons just months ago.
Earlier this year, Rogan slammed the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan men, the majority of which had no criminal record, to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador for indefinite detention without due process.
“This is kind of crazy that that could be possible,” Rogan said in March. “The cause is let’s get the gang members out, everybody agrees, but let’s not let innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs.”
Over the summer, Rogan criticized ICE’s tactics in immigration raids as “insane.”
“There’s two things that are insane,” Rogan said in July. “One is the targeting of migrant workers — not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers — just construction workers. Showing up at construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?”
Rogan’s statements touched on a dissonance that was made explicit by comedian and Flagrant podcast host Andrew Schulz, who once stated that his 2024 vote for Trump was based on “who gets the most pussy.”
“I voted for none of this,” Schulz declared in July. “He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for. I want him to stop the wars — he’s funding them. I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget — he’s increasing it. It’s like everything that he said he’s going to do — except sending immigrants back, and now he’s even flip-flopped on that, which I kind of like.”
But none of what Trump has done since retaking office should come as a shock. Trump had been vowing to go after immigrants — as well as his critics and political opponents — for years. His plans for ruthless, relentless mass deportations were as explicit as his designation of migrants as “poison” to the blood of the nation. It’s a shame that many of the content creators who helped put him back in office only seem to be realizing it now.
From Rolling Stone US
