I.
In 2024, something shifted in American politics that most legacy institutions didn’t see coming and still don’t fully understand.
The kingmakers weren’t the New York Times editorial board. They weren’t the network news anchors. They weren’t even the big donors or the party machinery.
The kingmakers were podcasters.
Men—almost always men—with microphones, multi-hour unscripted formats, and audiences of millions who trusted them more than they trusted any journalist, any politician, any institution.
And in 2024, those men decided the election.
Not alone, obviously. But their influence was undeniable. Candidates who wanted to reach young men—and by 2024, young men were the most contested demographic in American politics—had to go through them.
Donald Trump understood this. His campaign didn’t just court podcasters. It centered them. Trump spent hours on Joe Rogan’s show. He appeared on smaller, edgier podcasts. His running mate, J.D. Vance, did the same. So did Elon Musk, who had become an unofficial surrogate for the campaign.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s campaign largely ignored this ecosystem. She went on traditional media. She did carefully scripted interviews. She played it safe.
And she lost young men by 14 points—a demographic Biden had won by 15 points just four years earlier.
That’s a 30-point swing. And podcasts were a huge part of why.
II. The Rogan Effect
Let’s start with the biggest name: Joe Rogan.
The Joe Rogan Experience is the most popular podcast in the world. It has 11 million listeners per episode on Spotify. Rogan’s audience skews young, male, and politically eclectic—libertarian, anti-establishment, skeptical of “mainstream” narratives.
Rogan isn’t explicitly right-wing. He’s endorsed Bernie Sanders in the past. He supports drug legalization, gay marriage, universal healthcare (sometimes). He presents himself as politically open-minded, a guy who just wants to have interesting conversations.
But by 2024, Rogan had become a soft platform for the right.
He had Alex Jones on multiple times. He gave a friendly, three-hour platform to Trump in October 2024, letting him ramble without significant pushback. He did the same for J.D. Vance. And just days before the election, Rogan publicly endorsed Trump.
That endorsement mattered.
Because for millions of young men, Joe Rogan isn’t just entertainment. He’s a trusted voice. He’s the guy who “tells it like it is.” He’s not a politician, so he must be honest. He’s not beholden to corporate media, so he must be independent.
And when that guy says, “I’m voting for Trump,” it gives permission to everyone listening to do the same.
III. The Longform Advantage
Here’s what made podcasts so effective in 2024: intimacy.
A three-hour unscripted conversation feels different than a seven-minute cable news interview. It feels like you’re hanging out with the host. It feels like you’re getting the “real” version of the guest, unfiltered and unedited.
And that intimacy creates trust.
It doesn’t matter that the conversation is often meandering, factually loose, or full of unchallenged claims. What matters is the vibe. And the vibe in 2024 was: This is where the truth lives. Not in mainstream media. Not in newspapers. Here. With us.
Trump understood this. He thrived in longform. He could ramble, tell stories, joke around, and come across as more human than he ever did in a scripted rally or debate.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, declined to go on Rogan’s show. Her campaign reportedly wanted Editorial control or a shorter format. Rogan refused. And so millions of his listeners—many of them persuadable—never heard from her in the format that mattered most to them.
It was a strategic blunder. And it may have cost her the election.
IV. The Manosphere-Adjacent Pipeline
But it wasn’t just Rogan.
There was Theo Von, a comedian whose podcast attracts millions of young men with its irreverent, bro-y humor. Von had RFK Jr. on. He had Trump surrogates on. He created a space where right-wing ideas could be introduced without feeling overtly political.
There was Andrew Schulz, another comedian-podcaster whose show, Flagrant, mixes crude humor with pop culture and politics. Schulz isn’t overtly manosphere, but his comedy often relies on sexist tropes, and his audience overlaps significantly with the manosphere demographic.
There was Adin Ross, the streamer who platformed Andrew Tate and gave Trump a friendly interview on his Kick channel, which was watched by hundreds of thousands of young men in real time.
And then there were the explicitly manosphere figures—Fresh & Fit, Sneako, and others—who didn’t interview Trump directly but spent the entire election cycle telling their audiences that voting for Harris would be voting for feminism, for “wokeness,” for a future where men were second-class citizens.
These weren’t isolated voices. They were a network. And together, they created an attention economy where young men were marinating in a worldview that told them: Trump is on your side. The left hates you. Women are your enemy. Vote accordingly.
V. Attention as Authority
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in 2024, attention became more powerful than expertise.
It didn’t matter that Joe Rogan isn’t a political analyst, that Theo Von isn’t a policy wonk, that Adin Ross has no credentials. What mattered was that they had the audience’s attention—and in a fractured, algorithmically driven media landscape, attention is the only currency that matters.
Politicians understood this. That’s why Trump went on these shows. That’s why J.D. Vance went on these shows. That’s why even figures like Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. made the rounds.
Because these weren’t just media appearances. They were pilgrimages. Candidates were going to the new power brokers, the men who could deliver millions of young male voters with a single three-hour conversation.
And legacy media had no answer for it.
Cable news tried to compete, but a seven-minute interview on CNN can’t replicate the parasocial intimacy of a three-hour podcast. Newspapers tried to cover it, but most of Rogan’s audience doesn’t read newspapers.
The information ecosystem had shifted. And the institutions that used to gatekeep political discourse—the networks, the papers, the Sunday shows—had been bypassed entirely.
VI. The Stephen Miller Tweet
On Election Day, November 5, 2024, Stephen Miller—Trump’s senior advisor and a key architect of his immigration policies—tweeted something that said the quiet part out loud:
“Get every man you know to the polls.”
Not “get everyone you know.” Not “get your friends and family.”
Every man you know.
It was a gender-specific rallying cry. A signal that this election was, at least in part, being framed as a battle of the sexes.
And it worked.
Trump won men under 30 by 14 points. He won white men without college degrees by massive margins. He won men who felt economically anxious, socially alienated, and culturally resentful.
And a huge part of that win was because those men had spent years consuming content—on podcasts, on YouTube, on Twitch, on X—that told them their problems were caused by women, by feminism, by “the left,” and that Trump was their champion.
The podcast ecosystem wasn’t just amplifying Trump’s message. It was constructing it. It was creating a worldview, a mythology, an identity.
And on Election Day, that identity showed up to vote.
VII. TheIllusion of Independence
One of the most insidious things about the podcast ecosystem is that it feels independent.
Rogan doesn’t present himself as a Republican operative. He presents himself as a curious guy who just wants to have open conversations. Theo Von positions himself as apolitical. Adin Ross says he’s just a gamer who likes to interview interesting people.
But the effect is the same as if they were explicitly partisan.
Because when you platform Trump for three hours and give him friendly, uncritical airtime, you’re not being neutral. You’re amplifying him. You’re legitimizing him. You’re telling your audience: This guy is worth listening to. This guy is interesting. This guy is on your side.
And when you don’t platform his opponent—or when you mock her, or when your audience is primed to see her as the enemy—you’re tipping the scales.
This is what made the podcast ecosystem so effective in 2024: it didn’t feel like propaganda. It felt like entertainment. It felt like hanging out. It felt like community.
But it was propaganda. Just a softer, more seductive version.
VIII. When a Podcaster’s Couch Is More Powerful Than a Senator’s Office
No disrespect to podcasters. Truly. I write a blog. I’m not about to pretend the internet is beneath me while I’m standing inside it.
But when a podcaster’s couch becomes a more powerful civic institution than a senator’s office, we haven’t “lost the plot.” We lost the entire concept of plot. The big picture isn’t blurry—it’s gone. Not misplaced. Not misframed. Gouged out.
We’re groping around in a different room, convincing ourselves we’re still looking at the same wall.
Because what does it mean, exactly, when the softest men alive—men whose primary credential is “I talked for three hours”—can shape political reality more efficiently than the people whose job is to govern?
It means the country has started confusing attention with authority.
It means we’ve decided that the man with the mic is more legitimate than the woman with the policy brief.
And the manosphere loves this arrangement, because it was built for it: grievance packaged as content, rage sold as identity, misogyny delivered in “just asking questions” wrapping paper.
So when I say we’ve fallen, I’m not being dramatic. We’re not teetering on the edge. We fell off the cliff, hit the bottom, rolled downhill, fell off the next cliff, landed in a ditch, and then the ground opened up under the ditch.
We are in the cartoon phase of decline—where the fall keeps inventing new physics just to keep going.
IX.
In 2024, podcasts didn’t just cover the election.
They were the election.
And the men who hosted them—men who had built their audiences on a mix of irreverence, anti-establishment posturing, and thinly veiled misogyny—became the new kingmakers.
Not because they were smarter. Not because they were more informed. But because they had the attention.
And in a democracy where attention is the only currency that matters, they had all the power.
Monica Craiyon
Creator, Powerhouse Novelas | Erotic Power Fiction
Powerhouse Novelas is erotic power fiction—stories of devotion, dominance, restraint, obsession, and consequence. These are intimate economies of desire where consent is deliberate, pleasure is intentional, and power is never neutral.
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