Two years ago, on the night of the 2024 presidential election, UFC CEO Dana White took the podium at Donald Trump’s Palm Beach victory speech and rattled off a list of thank yous to some rowdy podcasters and YouTube pranksters: the NELK Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With The Boys, and “last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.” Just months prior, these names were seldom mentioned in the mainstream press, but now, they were known on a national stage as having powered Trump’s return to office by hosting him on their platforms and revealing his more personable side. The victory that night seemed to go well beyond the electoral conquest; one of the defining cultural legacies of the 2024 election cycle is the imprecise but vivid concept of the “manosphere.”
By 2026, the novelty of Trump and Von joking about the potency of cocaine, as they did in one of the signature moments of the 2024 campaign, has worn off. The president’s approval rankings tanked despite his enduring presence as a pop culture figure. Rogan endorsed Trump in the final days of that race, but he recently described Trump’s “really crazy” 1,300-word Truth Social tirade against Bill Maher as having the ring of a “girl who got dumped.” He has roundly criticized Trump’s handling of the Epstein Files, a signature issue for the podcast class, and described the Iran war as a “betrayal.” If the end of MAGA is in sight amid Tuesday’s blue tsunami, so is the notion that Republicans had captured the coveted, low-propensity demographic of young men: the New York Times estimated that Democrats won 18-to-29 year old men by 24 points on Tuesday, a 38 point swing from Trump’s 2024 victory among them. Democrats are content creators too now, and the most notable political appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience over the last couple of years was James Talarico’s. “You need to run for president,” Rogan told Texas’s new senator-elect.
And so when C-SPAN made the somewhat mindboggling announcement that the staid public-affairs network would simulcast election night coverage hosted by Patrick Bet-David, a Florida-based podcaster known for his interviews with Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, it was less of a capitulation to the so-called manosphere than an emblem of the modern media free-for-all. Of the online personalities loosely associated with Rogan’s milieu, Bet-David’s backstory is the most colorful. A refugee from Iran, he joined the Army upon arriving in the United States; he has said he worked for a time as a bodyguard to a high-level Los Angeles cocaine dealer. Bet-David now operates a media company called “Valuetainment” after making his riches with an insurance company that has been widely described as a multi-level marketing operation. After interviewing the leading looksmaxxing personality Clavicular last week, he was now responsible for providing C-SPAN’s conservative perspective. A spokesperson for the network described the programming to me as an effort to achieve “a marriage of traditional media and new media.”
“In the 2024 election, we invited Pete Buttigieg, God knows how many times, never showed up,” Bet-David told me in the lead-up to the evening. “Pete Buttigieg was here last week. We did a two-hour podcast together right before the midterms. And so the market is realizing that’s the direction you got to go.”
