Two Conservative Podcasts Walk Into a Bar...

...and an hour later 128 Conservative podcasts leave that bar because, damn, they breed like rabbits. 

 Which I know because I read it in a Respected Publication: 

 The Rise of Right-Wing Podcasts Is Upon Us

...This case begins with a tenuous but nevertheless significant data point. If you were to scan the Apple Podcast charts today, you’d find that a tremendous proportion of the shows occupying the Top 200 spots are explicitly right-wing podcasts. Here’s a non-comprehensive list, as of Monday evening: The Dan Bongino Show, The Ben Shapiro Show, The Mark Levin Podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, The Candace Owens Show, The Glenn Beck Program, Louder With Crowder, The Daily Wire’s Enough, The Sean Hannity Show, The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Michael Knowles Show, The Rubin Report, and whatever that Bill O’Reilly podcast is called. That accounting doesn’t even include shows by sitting Republican politicians, like Verdict With Ted Cruz and Hold These Truths With Dan Crenshaw, which are technically counterparts in the politician pod trend I wrote about a few weeks ago.

(Additionally, you could theoretically sort the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” libertarian types into this mix: the Joe Rogans and Jordan Petersons and so on. But I’m inclined to bracket them out as a separate species of show, since they collectively make up a significantly different kind of political phenomenon at this point in time.)

Anyway, this data point is tenuous because it’s always important to point out the deep imperfections of using the Apple Podcast charts as a representation of the podcast ecosystem...

All of this is really wonky discussion, I know, but I’m setting all this foundation down to push the point: while the Apple Podcast charts shouldn’t be taken at their word, I think the sheer volume and consistency of right-wing shows that currently populates the charts tells us something quite real. Furthermore, according to data made available by Chartable, a podcast analytics and attribution company that tracks Apple Podcast chart positions as part of its services, some of those shows have been charting effectively for the past two years or so. An even smaller number has been charting effectively since the start of the Trump presidency...

This is in contrast to "Non-Dirtbag Left" Liberal podcasts of which, sadly, there exists only one -- Pod Save America -- or so one could fairly surmise from the subtext of article in a Respected Publication.  

Meet the GOP Insiders Rebranding as Bad Boys of Conservative Talk

As a point of personal privilege I will note that the scrappy, "From the Middle of Middle America" Professional Left podcast launched in January of 2010 back when the Pod lads were writing speeches for Barack Obama, and the Pod Save crew launched their enterprise seven years later.  And although it has been a struggle, so far we have managed to stay completely off their radar.  So yay for us!

But today we're doing a compare-and-contrast exercise between two different Conservative ways of speaking about our country -- the state the country is in, the nature and history of the GOP and what the future looks like.   Both of these Conserative voices claim to be our allies, but its the wide differences between them that make them worth examining.

The first is Joe Walsh, who, for several years, had a podcast called "‎F*ck Silence" which was frankly terrible because it was just Joe talking to himself.  That's it.  Boring AF. So unremarkable that when Walsh managed to wheedle himself an invitation to appear on Charlie Sykes Bulwark podcast and they both fell to bitching about how hard on them it had been to lose that sweet-sweet weekly wingnut welfare check from Hate Radio after they'd been "cancelled" by the Right, Sykes -- who hadn't even bothered to find out what Walsh had been up to for the past several years -- suggested that maybe Walsh should consider getting into podcasting.  Because look how well things were working out for Charlie!

Cringy stuff.

Anyway, Walsh's terrible podcast has molted and as reformed itself as "White Flag" in which he has finally figures out that talking to someone else -- having a conversation -- is a better format than sitting in his living room, alone, grousing aloud about stuff.  It's not great, but it's better than abysmal, and the  episode featuring him in blunt, honest conversation with Touré is one side of our compare-and-contrast exercise.

The other side of the compare-and-contrast is Charlie Sykes and his Bulwark podcast which launched in 2018 as a key part of the Bulwark website which, thanks to millionaire donors, the unstinting support of MSNBC and The Weekly Standard Rolodex has grown rapidly to fill the vacuum created by the death of The Weekly Standard.  The Bulwark podcast currently claims to have a download rate of 100,000 downloads per episode, and has spawned eight other podcasts under the Bulwark umbrella, three of which are subscription only.

And once again, although it has been a struggle, so far we at the Professional Left have managed to stay entirely off the Bulwark's radar.  

Well, not entirely.  

Because their whole schtick is that the GOP went suddenly and inexpiably insane in 2016, that none of them or their friends are responsible for any of it and that, when you think about it, it was probably Liberals being terrible that drove the entire GOP base into the arms of Donald Trump.  And when that pile of horseshit is the pillar on which you've built your profitable and influential multimedia corporation, you tend react very badly to dirty hippies who show up with receipts.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Because despite my deep and lingering reservations about Joe Walsh, he was actually willing to have an actual Liberal on his podcast and talk very honestly about the toxic trajectory the GOP has been on for decades, going back to at least the rise of Gingrich and Limbaugh.  There was no shying away from the blunt truth that Conservative media has brainwashed the base and broken the country.  Or about how the Both Sides framing is complete bullshit when one side has drowned itself is a cesspit of its own delusions and no longer recognizes objective reality.   Or about the ongoing legacy of institutional racism -- a legacy that dates back centuries.

What makes this interesting is how radically Walsh's remembrance of things past differs from Sykes'.  After all, both of these guys are both products of and influencers in the same Conservative Hate Machine that made the GOP what it is today.  Both made their living tilling the soil in the the same vineyard of racism and sour grapes.  Both have talk a lot about losing their radio gigs and what a blow to them that there was no longer "a business model" on the Right that would accommodate.  So wasn't the obvious fact that the GOP had devolved into reactionary shitpile of bigots and imbeciles that finally led the to publicly break with the GOP, but the fact that the rise of Trump hit them in the pocketbook.  

Of course I vividly recall Glenn Beck's fake repentance a few years ago and how he used his ersatz remorse to play the media like a two dollar fiddle and bilk a few dollars from credulous Liberals, so Walsh gets no pass from me until he's proven himself over time.  However it does appear that, in Walsh's case, his excommunication from the wingnut welfare trough hit him hard enough to knock at least some of the scales from his eyes.

Sykes, on the other hand, has made The Bulwark a bastion of revisionist history and bitching about how stupid and feckless Democrats are.  Basically the same huppie-punching kabuki he performed on Wisconsin Hate Radio for 30 years with a wide schmear of "And Republicans are crazy too!" on top.  

So it's no surprise that the chances that you will ever hear Touré -- or any other actual Liberal -- challenging The Bulwark's official version of the past on Sykes' show are virtually nil.  Instead, Sykes' guests reflect the institutional Center/Right timidity and dishonesty of this large, profitable and Beltway media-savvy corporation.  It's a parade of The Bulwark's own in-house or media-adjacent pundits who never tire of whining about the nefariousness and incompetence of the Woke Left (that's you and me), and former or soon-to-be-former Republican office-holders who certainly aren't going to join the icky, commie Dems, but instead are all apparently starting up their own, boutique Sensible Centrist third party scams.  

So when I hear Sykes say this during his introduction, my ears perked up a little

SYKES:  ...we're going to a little something... a little bit different today.  We're going to break out of the Beltway punditry.  I'm thinking that the title of this will be, y'know, um, Outside the Beltway.

You own Bruce Dumont $5 but continue....

SYKES:  ...and I am joined by my fellow Midwesterner Shannon Freshower from Ohio.

To be 100% honest, I'd never heard of Shannon Freshower before this.  

SYKES:  You're famous for many things and I want to talk about a lot of stuff.  I want to cover a lot of ground.  I want to talk about, uh. what it's like being a Centrist Democrat.

Okay...

SYKES: What it means to be a Centrist Democrat. I want to get your take on the infrastructure bill...

Fine, but I was still confused. I can't name every congressperson, senator and governor, so maybe she snuck past me, but what office does Ms. Freshower hold?  

So I go to The Google and find that Ms. Freshower is a "...litigation paralegal with a master’s degree in American government" who had never run for office before and who got wiped out by Jim Jordan when she ran against him in 2020, which surprised no one considering how heavily gerrymandered the Ohio 4th is.  

Cool.  A concerned citizen stepped into the arena and ran against nearly impossible odds to unseat a monster.  Good on her, although why, out of the +80M Democrats in America, Sykes invited her to the microphone was still a mystery.  

The mystery deepened when, after chatting about the insane way Jordan's congressional district was drawn and Dennis Prager's ongoing descent into blabbering madness, Sykes ask Ms. Freshower a question about what the fuck is happening with rural voters.  

Ms. Freshower began with some background about the lack of broadband access in rural areas.  And then she launched into what sounded like the beginning of a long disquisition on the History of Conservative Radio and how it broke the brain of the GOP base:

FRESHOWER:  ...there's no differential.  You hear it at church. You hear it in school.  You hear it, y'know, your grandparents talking about it.  Because of the structure of the Right Wing in the in the 80s and early 90s...

Warning Will Robinson!

FRESHOWER: ...figured out that if you didn't have access to other things if you could get them on talk radio this... 

Danger! Danger!

FRESHOWER: ...this allowed people to hear things.  And you could control what they

heard.  And then you could sell it and more and more and more.

At this point Sykes attempted to cut her off here because Charlies Sykes does not want to talk about the fact that the work Charlie Sykes did on Hate Radio for 30 years is directly responsible for the shit we're in now.

FRESHOWER: So we're like generationally embedded in this.  That there's a separate universe...

At this point Sykes succeeds in cutting her off.

SYKES: Okay that's... that's... that's right.  That's all true and we've talked a lot about this alternative the alternative reality silos and the power of uh you know the right wing media ecosystem...

No, you really haven't Charlie.  Sure, you started talking a whole lot of shit about "Right Wing media ecosystem" after it fired you, but since its founding The Bulwark has been institutionally hostile to any discussion of the long history and lasting damage done by the "Right Wing media ecosystem" during all the decades it was putting food on your table, a roof over your head and your kids through college.

Instead, Sykes want's his very first "Centrist Democrat" guest to focus on...

SYKES: ...but at some point does that become an excuse for Democrats?  Is there something wrong with the Democratic message?  Have Democrats forgotten how to talk when they have the ability to talk to these rural voters? Because this is happening all over the country...

Yeah, just like Hate Radio, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, etc are all over the country.  

Weird how that works, eh Charlie?

SYKES: ...but a lot of Democrats have just simply written them off.

Now were off to the races.  And once Ms. Freshower takes the hint and started shit-talking Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and "Mr. Sanders from Vermont and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez from New York" and insisting -- 

FRESHOWER:  ...the reality is [that] Senator Joe Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema are not outliers in the Democratic Party.  They are, in fact, the very heart of the Democratic Party...

-- I rapidly lost interest in anything else Ms. Freshower had to say, because I had heard it all before, repeated endlessly, by every other pol and pundit on Charlie Sykes' podcast.  

The only difference is that Sykes now has a "But even Centrist Democrats like Shannon Freshower agree that the Democratic Party is ugly and its mother dresses it funny and The Extreme Left yadda yadda" quote to drop into every conversation from now until the end of time.

Burn The Lifeboats