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.
_____________
What connects this motley crew? Their obsession with two things: manliness and Jews. And perhaps no one better embodies this dual obsession than a former kickboxer turned massively popular professional misogynist.
On February 27, Andrew Tate landed in Florida. His presence immediately divided conservatives. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Dana White have been among his defenders. Tate has appeared on Candace Owens’s show. Others, like Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, panned Tate and his admirers. Tate had flown to the U.S. from Romania, where he and his brother are under investigation for human trafficking and rape charges. The two also face accusations of money laundering and sexual misconduct involving minors. Florida’s attorney general said he has opened an investigation into Tate as well.
Tate peppers his social media interactions with Jew-baiting and Holocaust revisionism and then plays the victim when criticized. “America believes it has free speech. It doesn’t,” he said last year, explaining: “If you speak out against the Jews in America, you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.” Tate claims to have converted to Islam and has expressed his admiration for Hamas since the attacks. “I can only pray for a death as heroic as Yahya Sinwar,” he posted last year. “Brave, defiant in the face of evil.” Perhaps his most characteristic statement of all was when he called Hamas “the masculine spirit of resistance.”
Tate is a belligerent version of a familiar character, the type of male life coach who used to call himself a pick-up artist. In the social media age, if this character has an archetype, it is a man named Dan Bilzerian.
You can watch videos of Bilzerian with titles like “The Secret To Making Women Chase You” as you ingest cannabidiol from Bilzerian’s own company and dab on a drop of Bilzerian’s branded pheromone booster. The “King of Instagram” is a former professional poker player and gun enthusiast who built a social media following by repeatedly posing with scantily clad women. He is also the son of Paul Bilzerian, a corporate raider living in exile in the West Indies who left the young Bilzerian with a trust fund before going on the run.
All that stuff gets people’s attention. But if you want to keep their attention, you have to dream bigger. So Bilzerian wants to save the world—from the Jews. “I believe that Jewish supremacy is the greatest threat to America, and I think it’s the greatest threat to the world today, I truly believe that,” Bilzerian explained to Piers Morgan in November.
He has thoughts on the Holocaust, too, of course. “I would bet my entire net worth,” he said, that the number of Jews killed in the Shoah was “under 6 million.” But even if you accept the 6 million figure, Bilzerian insisted, “Jews have killed far more Christians than that. I mean it’s not even close, if you look at the Bolshevik genocide, the Holomodor… they basically invented the genocide.”
While Bilzerian isn’t sure exactly how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, he confidently blames the Jews for killing JFK, citing the fact that Jack Ruby (who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, not the president) was born Jacob Rubenstein.
The JFK theory helps illuminate how this conspiracy pipeline operates—and how the people who claim to question everything are often the most susceptible to groupthink. Why would the Jews kill JFK? Because, Bilzerian explains, President Kennedy wanted the predecessor organization to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to register as a foreign agent.
It’s a popular theory among this influencer herd. When Thomas Massie, the least friendly Republican in the House when it comes to Israel and the Jews, called for AIPAC to be registered as a foreign agent, Candace Owens replied, “I’m pretty sure they murdered JFK for trying to get this done.” And when someone on X asked Ian Carroll whether AIPAC could be sued into registering as a foreign agent, Carroll responded: “They already assassinated the president of the United States over it, I don’t think a lawyer stands a chance.”
Bilzerian’s disciples in the “Manosphere” got in on the act, too. Myron Gaines, cohost of the Fresh and Fit podcast, declared that “Israeli involvement” in the JFK assassination was “proven,” and pivoted from there to questioning the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Gaines (a pseudonym) is another example of the range of the dual obsession with manliness and Jews. A former Homeland Security agent, Gaines is the author of the book Why Women Deserve Less, which purports to answer questions such as “Why, in general, does it feel like pulling teeth to get girls to do anything?”
Here is where the Manosphere’s tough-guy façade starts to crack. Gaines laments that “today’s women could not be less interested in today’s men.” Gaines and his cohost Walter Weekes call their show “the No. 1 podcast for men.” Gaines’s vibe of desperation is probably what keeps him from getting what he really wants, which is to succeed Tate as the Man of the Manosphere.
Gaines’s desperation also shows up in his anti-Semitism. He, like the white-nationalist Peters, revels in the “great noticing.” Although Gaines shows no sign of being a white nationalist himself (his family is Sudanese and his anti-Semitism appears less ideological), he invites white nationalists like Nick Fuentes on his show. He doesn’t allude to conspiracies so much as he shouts them uncontrollably: “Hitler was right” about the Jews, he rages. “You come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your f—ing central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community.” Jews, Gaines says, enter a society and “destroy it from within.”
Last year, Gaines welcomed to his show Jake Shields, a former UFC fighter and anti-Semitic agitator with a large following on social media. “In the past when someone started to notice jews [sic] controlled America they could get you blacklisted by yelling antisemite or nazi [sic],” Shields posted on X last May. “That stopped working so Congress rushed to pass laws making it illegal to question Jewish power.” In December, Shields promoted one of his shows by extolling “the brave Americans who Lynched [sic] child rapist Leo Frank”—Frank being the innocent Jewish man framed and then dragged from his jail cell and beaten to death for a teenage girl’s murder in 1913, an event that led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League.
Gaines and Shields both lamented the wider public’s ignorance. “No one even knew what a Zionist was until October 7,” Gaines asserted. The two then proceeded to educate their audience. Shields mentioned the late-19th-century meeting of the Zionist Congress, and Gaines interjected, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, something Herschel. Forget his name. Something Herschel.” These are the supposed real experts on Zionism—the ones who don’t know Theodor Herzl’s name.
_____________
This combination of arrogance and ignorance is a hallmark of the “just asking questions” influencer corps. At the same time, there is something telling about Gaines’s crazy statement that no one knew what a Zionist was until October 7, after which “people started looking into this conflict.” On October 7, only one side was carrying out violence, and all that violence was against innocent Israelis. There’s an echo of this same idea near the end of the Joe Rogan–Ian Carroll interview. Carroll goes on a rant about the Jewish state being essentially a criminal enterprise founded and governed by mobsters and terrorists. Then Rogan cuts in and says: “And what’s interesting is, you can talk about this now, post–October 7.” To which Carroll responds: “Exactly. It opened wide open.”
October 7 was a moment of Jewish vulnerability, and it brought a particular coalition of alienated Internet celebrities out of the woodwork: washed-up UFC fighters, wannabe pick-up artists, pseudo-historians and philosopher-bros chasing respectability, trust-fund Instagram royals seeking validation from serious-minded people, right-wing populist lay preachers with a persecution complex. These are self-styled tough guys (and gals) who can’t explain how a state made up of supposed genetic degenerates keeps coming out on top. Israel is the Jew of the nation-states; how did it field a fearsome army and a network of super-spies? It must be lying, cheating, and stealing.
Nick Fuentes, ironically, has been the most honest and forthright about the envy and frustration of the tough guys and the “master race” types. In December, a bit over a year after the war started, Israel had turned the tables on its pursuers. Fuentes, on his America First show, had a radically self-aware meltdown. “It’s time for a little self-reflection, it’s time for a little honesty,” Fuentes said smiling, palms held up as if in surrender. “Do you know how much it sucks being on the other side of Israel?” Then came a brief airing of grievances: “They killed everybody in Hezbollah. They made Hezbollah look like an absolute b—ch when they blew up all their pagers. And then they blew up all their other stuff the next day, and then they killed them all.” He concluded: “Damn, this sucks. It’s just watching this defeat in slow motion.”
The world of right-wing influencers is obsessed with conquest and superiority, and on October 7 they thought their time had finally come. Yet 18 months later, they’re back where they started. So they have taken their quest to the 21st century’s version of the wise men atop the mountain: the podcast maestros with massive audiences and an endless appetite for questioning everything. They are crowdsourcing their war on the Jews.
Photo by Andrei Pungovschi/Getty Images
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.
