The Edgelords

Joe Rogan’s podcast yesterday featuring Douglas Murray and Dave Smith talking about the Middle East conflict (among other topics) failed to move the needle in either direction—at least not on any of the subjects the “debate” was purportedly about.

The pro-Israel camp was unmoved by Smith’s emotional petitions on behalf of Palestinian civilians. Those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause were unconvinced by Murray’s arguments about experience-based knowledge, with many criticizing what they took to be Murray’s message that only experts should speak their minds.

Murray stumbled on a key issue regarding reporting when he upbraided Smith for not visiting Israel or Gaza. I generally agree that it’s a good idea to visit a place you write about, and the fact is that there are thousands of reporters who have spent lots of time in Gaza and Israel and have spoken to lots of people there, and who see it just like Smith. Indeed, very few journalists under the age of 50 who have covered the conflict for Western media—from the Associated Press to El Pais, the Guardian to The Washington Post—do not believe the same things about Israelis and Palestinians that Smith does.

What’s interesting here is that Smith and other podcasters who boast of ostensibly provocative takes insist that they’re unveiling dangerous truths the media doesn’t dare speak for fear of upsetting powerful forces. But the self-styled dissident podcasters’ “edgy” takes are mere repackaged establishment wisdom that they generate in consort with one another.

“There’s just no way to get rid of Hamas, without it being replaced by more Hamas or a Hamas-like group,” Smith tells Murray, on the inevitability of resistance against military force. “It’s General McChrystal’s ‘insurgent math.’” Citing the premise of Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine is strange. Smith is famously, and rightly, critical of the United States’ failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the only people who think the retired four-star was right to spend American lives and money cheaply by prioritizing the hearts and minds of people who wanted to kill Americans are: West Point faculty; think tank experts scattered across Washington, D.C.; and family and guests gathered around the Thanksgiving table at the Bush ranch.

Even the role Smith and Rogan play is an establishment category—a comic who is not just a jester, but a gimlet-eyed and idiosyncratic observer of current events celebrated for relating sardonically to his young and disaffected audience. It’s Jon Stewart, but for right-wing audiences.

So what, exactly, is happening here? Call it the wages of Russiagate.

Starting no later than December 2016, the American media began collaborating with U.S. spy services in an unprecedented effort to topple the president of the United States. The media had long tilted left and thus earned the disdain of the right, but using leaks of classified information to interfere with the administration of government made the media, in the eyes of the right, an enemy institution. The media’s complicity in subsequent anti-Trump operations—from the special counsel investigation to the two attempts on Trump’s life—plunged half the country further and further into doubt, despair, and even paranoia. After all, with the January 6 arrests and prosecutions, it became clear the Joe Biden White House and its media auxiliaries were aiming not just at Trump but his supporters as well. Grandmothers, veterans, clergy were being rounded up for exercising their first amendment rights. The press cast them as insurrectionists, and reported favorably about children who turned their insurrectionist parents over to the police. Under those circumstances, who could you trust?

That’s the environment that the new right-wing media—these podcasters—inherited.

One option would have been to approach audiences knowing that since these Americans have gone through hell, many of them all but broken, they need their faith restored. To move forward they need to know true things about the world, their communities, and themselves or we will be lost as a nation. In short, that it’s the media’s job to help them believe again.

But that is not the choice the podcasters made. Rather, consciously or not, they saw the right—their audience—as easy marks, made even more vulnerable with additional doses of fear and panic and falsehood. You have no control over your own country, or even your lives, they tell them, sometimes daily. Trump has no control over the government, they say over and over. Neocons are driving us to war with Iran and thousands will die, they tweeted again and again. The reason Smith and others are disguising establishment talking points as new right wisdom is to herd their audiences into the pen the left built for them.