The world’s oldest hatred takes over the world’s newest medium
by Seth Mandel | Commentary | May 2025
On March 13, podcast king Joe Rogan asked his guest: “When did Hitler start going after the Jews?”
It was a grim turn for Rogan, who conquered the podcast industry with hours-long casual interviews, sometimes with news makers but often with fellow comedians. The guest on this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience was Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust revisionist and admirer of David Irving, perhaps the most famous Holocaust denier in history. Cooper’s response to the question was to paint Hitler as a sympathetic figure encumbered by his love for his fellow Germans: “He came to believe that yes, the German masses, they are in a sorry state right now. But the reason for that is that they’re being manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the, you know, the Jews who own the theaters and put out the, you know, films and whatever else. They’re being manipulated and corrupted by these people.… I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his anti-Semitism was what allowed him to love the German people.”
Even stranger than the dark deviation from comedic fare was the reason Rogan invited Cooper on in the first place: to defend Cooper from the backlash to his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, in which the former Fox News ratings colossus and current MAGA-world whisperer indulged Cooper’s revisionism while the two discussed the possibility that Winston Churchill was the villain of the Second World War.
A week earlier, another star MAGA podcaster, Candace Owens, received the coveted guest spot on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend. The career path of Von, a stand-up comic and a former cast member on MTV’s Road Rules, is remarkably similar to Rogan’s. (Rogan even got his first break on MTV back in 1994.) Owens is a provocative conservative influencer whose most notable original novelty was that she is black—and who has descended into obsessive and conspiratorial Jew-baiting. Owens talked to Von at length about her problems with Israel. It uses America as its “piggybank,” harbors pedophiles, is involved in some type of Moroccan blackmail scheme involving the wife of France’s president, ran a “sexual blackmail” empire through Jeffrey Epstein, and probably killed JFK.
The same day that Von interviewed Owens, Rogan interviewed Ian Carroll, a goofy but popular “truth-teller” who read from the same talking points as Owens regarding Jeffrey Epstein.
All of this thrilled the white-nationalist influencer Stew Peters. He was giddy over Owens and Carroll “discussing Israel and Jews to their respective audience on a couple of pretty mainstream shows.” Peters extolled “the noticing,” which is social media shorthand for buying into a universal theory of malign Jewish control. He was astounded at “the massive surge in social media figures who have long toed the line… [on] the JQ”—that would be the Jewish Question—“who are now suddenly coming out as ‘noticers.’”
If this round-robin of Holocaust denial and conspiracy-theorizing about the malign invisible hand of Jewish power were just a matter of a few alt-right political figures getting louder, it would be concerning enough. But we’re seeing the melding of these disparate influencer strands into a sort of right-wing mono-counterculture. And as the mainstream culture to which it is counter has been consumed by its own progressive form of anti-Semitism since the attack of October 7 on Israel, the Jews, once again, are caught in the middle.
What’s even worse, the right-wing influencer counterculture barely qualifies as a counterculture in the traditional sense—it’s right there with the big boys. When Spotify finally began releasing podcast follower numbers last year, Rogan was at the top, with 14.5 million. And that was lower than his number of YouTube subscribers or Instagram followers. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and JD Vance each had their own turn as guests on the show.
Trump also appeared on Von’s show, during which the two had an oddly compelling conversation about addiction. (Trump’s brother and Von both battled substance abuse.) That Trump could be so engaging in this format was seen as a major advantage over his opponent, Kamala Harris. At Trump’s Election Night victory party, Ultimate Fighting Champion honcho Dana White—for whom Rogan sometimes works as a color commentator during matches—gave a speech in which he thanked Von by name with the president-elect standing behind him.
Two weeks before the election, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn reported that in a string of battleground polls in May 2024, the No. 2 predictor of whether a 2020 Joe Biden voter was planning to switch to Trump was “whether the respondent had a very favorable view of the podcaster Joe Rogan.”
Rogan and Von and the influencers trying to follow their lead aren’t ideological conservatives, but the frustrated everyman quality they exhibit appeals to a demographic (young, male) that has been trending to the right. And in the world of this counterculture, figures like Carlson have so much influence that Rogan will spend hours talking to a guest about that guest’s appearance on someone else’s show, because that someone else was Tucker Carlson.
She left the NY Slimes
@Peloni Anyway, he is taking issue with the rise of what he calls the “woke right” which needs to be opposed now as the “woke left” was not – he is appealing to centrists, left and right, is a supporter of Trump and a personal friend of Vance, a pro-Israel Christian, as she is Jewish, and who left the NY Slimes over its antisemitism, or a future conservative administration could be the mirror image of the Obama Biden regimes. And he wrote a book she thinks is important. What do you think? I was impressed.
The Radical Right Is Coming for Your Sons | Bari Weiss & Rod Dreher
The Free Press
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxQ3QqAQ3Uw
@Sebastien
Yes, I agree. I think the likes of Carlson and Owens pose a very great threat. He does an impressive job articulating the threat they pose. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
@Peloni No, though that’s in the ballpark. Am I mistaken?
@Peloni Didn’t Ted write a piece about this? That’s what I was searching for to no avail.
@Sebastien
Do you mean this one:
https://www.israpundit.org/candaces-jewish-problem/
Bari Weiss piece belongs here. Google has a more intuitive search capability though the one about the left does quote her. It’s about the “woke right” which is less influential now but now is the time to nip it in the bud before it’s too late.
The men discussed in this article, while they may have a lot of visibility, are not the majority of conservative men. Conservative men are made up by and large by Jews and Christians and occasionally a Muslim who is vocal and clear about the danger of radicalized Islamists. By and large the Christian men, whose comments I have read on various substacks, on The Last Refuge, and on X, value Jews and Israel highly. They are by far, the majority, whereas Israel bashing and Jew hating commenters are not only a minority, but often following a hateful comment about Jews some other man will comment and ask them to stop their hateful comments about Jews!
I think there is a mountain of statements from Trump that make clear his support of Israel and how necessary it is that America be there to help Israel at her hour of need.
I do not see Trump really wavering from that stance, I see him as someone who attempts to see the positive in all the members of his cabinet. (judging by the videos of his cabinet meetings) He appears to be solidly behind Israel and then there is the “deal making” Trump who seems willing to try out “deal making” as part of successful foreign policy.
The latter appears to be the Koch Brothers’ approach to foreign policy, i.e. deal making favorable to their business interests. I don’t know if Trump really accepts the views of the Koch brother ideologues or if he listens and keeps his own counsel. He has been vocal about not wanting any of them in his cabinet.
I do not doubt that Gabbard has a lot of baggage. Certainly if she was a supporter of Bernie Sanders she likely also supported his anti-Israel stance. But I doubt Trump would have hired her if she was truly stuck in an anti-Israel grievance mode. It would really be a bridge too far, as he has spent so much political capital on supporting Israel every which way he can.
I know it is part of being human as well as being Jews, that we are sensitive to the perception that a person who once appeared friendly to Jews suddenly appears to have second thoughts, but the operative word there is “appears.”
I think it is only fair to wait and watch a person’s ACTIONS and then decide if this President who has been the most friendly President in our history to Israel, has truly changed his mind about Israel.
I do not know what happened with the “apparent” backing off of the attack on Iran and how it really came about. I doubt we have all the facts at this time. It is even possible that it was done to [falsely] reassure the Mullahs. Not everything we “learn” from social media is factual, right? And we know that the MSM in the US is total propaganda. All of the so-called “facts” out there may just be smokescreen. It is something like a Rorschach test: we see in it what we will.
Far from being manly, these are pathetic weak men and total losers. I too wish for Tate to go down as sinwar did. If he thinks that raping women and strangling babies is “masculine resistance” he certainly has a depraved idea of what constitutes masculinity. In fact it is Israel that is the masculine face of resistance, while the west cowers in the face of muslim aggression. Even Israeli women have more courage than western men.
Far from destroying nations that the Jews immigrated to, they enriched those nations in science, medicine, technology and the arts. What are muslims bringing to the west other than violence, rape gangs and sharia law.
While they go on and on about Epstein, they defend the lowlife pedophile Tate brothers.
Far from destroying the nations they immigrated to, Jews enriched those societies in science, medicine, technology and the arts. What have muslims contributed to the west other than violence, rape gangs and sharia law.
Underhanded Isolationists Sabotaging Trump’s Iran Policy
https://substack.com/home/post/p-161545112?source=queue