The Nelk Boys Step Into It
Hard to believe it’s already been more than half a year since the so-called “podcast election,” where Donald Trump went on a bunch of dudely pods, bro’d out, and possibly forged a direct parasocial relationship with legions of non-news-consuming young men in a way that may or may not have contributed to the demographic’s swing toward the Republican Party in 2024. Time’s moved strangely since then, at once dragging and flying, largely due to the relentless pace with which the Trump administration has pressed its agenda. What’s harder to believe still is that there’s no real sign of it slowing down. Nationally, the Democratic Party remains well in the wilderness, and whatever opposition there is mostly exists far outside the actual levers of federal power.
Still, something has clearly shifted. Debate continues over whether the Trump campaign’s podcast and new-media push actually helped secure his win last November, but that kind of epistemological ambiguity isn’t entirely new. Political messaging has always been tricky to measure; it’s difficult to draw a direct line between a specific ad or media hit and a vote, even if we generally assume it has some impact with occasional hints in polling data. What matters now is the fact that political actors across the spectrum and across different terrain are acting as if it were effective. Since November, there’s been a clear shift toward expanding beyond traditional media and reaching audiences through these newer, looser channels. For a narrow but telling case study, look no further than Flagrant’s politically flavored guest bookings since January: Vivek Ramaswamy stopped by to hawk DOGE (and its destruction of the federal government’s public-service apparatus), Eric Adams dropped in to salvage his mayoral brand (and elide his various controversies), and more pointedly, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders made appearances to play ball with the bros.
The trend has only gotten bigger and weirder. Earlier this week, Full Send, the fratty, prank-driven YouTube brand and podcast hosted by the Nelk Boys, a.k.a Kyle Forgeard and Aaron “Steiny” Steinberg (who are Canadian, by the way), released a sit-down with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He seemed to be taking a page from Trump — the president has made three appearances on that show over the past four years — in using the show to push his narrative on Israel’s ongoing genocide of Gaza. In case you weren’t already familiar, the Nelk Boys aren’t exactly versed in, let’s say, geopolitical nuances, which is part of the point of their whole thing and a key reason they’ve become so useful for opportunistic political actors. Spitfire News’ Kat Tenbarge put things succinctly in a piece titled “Podcast Bros are Doing War Propaganda Now,” which also provides a good summary of events: “The Nelk Boys are useful idiots, which are the preferred kind of communicators the Trump administration has selected to broadcast its agenda to the public,” she wrote.
The Netanyahu episode sparked an interesting wave of backlash. Tenbarge and NBC News’ Angela Yang cited a Social Blade finding that the Nelk Boys’ YouTube channel lost about 10,000 subscribers following the interview. Tenbarge also observed that nary a positive comment could be found in the episode’s YouTube comments. But, as with a lot of things on the internet, it’s hard to tell whether these data points suggest anything material about whether the Nelk Boys have lost actual power as a result. The YouTube channel continues to show over 2 million subscriptions, and divining real-world sentiment from a comments section is like interpreting the world through X — which is to say, who knows if what we’re talking about is real? That said, what is real is the fact that Forgeard and Steinberg felt compelled enough to respond by going on their own damage-control tour, including appearing on the star leftist Hasan Piker’s livestream to, shall we say, mixed results.
This entire episode captures the surreality of the current moment as refracted through the modern media ecosystem. There are interesting questions to ask: Why is Netanyahu trying to sell his message to this constituency? And why is Full Send catching more backlash for hosting Netanyahu than it did for previous guests like Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, or even O.J. Simpson? But maybe the most important thing isn’t the why, but the fact that the appearance happened at all. A sitting head of state chose to appear on a show that proudly brands itself as dumb as rocks.
The Nelk Boys in and of themselves aren’t important. The deeper conundrum is structural: Traditional media institutions — those that once functioned as arbiters of authority, consensus, and a shared sense of reality — are in decline, while new-media personalities, which tend to operate with little regard for ethics and responsibilities (because they have no structural incentives to adopt them), continue to gain influence, ever deepening the further fragmentation of our information ecosystems. And the thing about the latter is no one actor matters in the larger scale of things; if not the Nelk Boys, there’s always Logan Paul, or Tim Dillon, or Candace Owens, or the Daily Wire universe, or whoever and whatever else that will come down the line. The pipeline is always flowing.
Democrats, for the most part, still haven’t found a reliable way to tackle the challenge of this fragmentation. Gavin Newsom is still podcasting from his governor’s perch; he continues to rotate between across-the-aisle guests like Newt Gingrich, folks from the Democratic establishment like Senator Amy Klobuchar and the Pod Save America guys, and miscellaneous figures like Ryan Murphy. Back in May, the New York Times reported that megadonors were quietly exploring the creation of a “liberal media ecosystem.” The idea behind these initiatives continues to rest on the cliched-but-still-pervasive fantasy of conjuring up a kind of Liberal Joe Rogan. In the meantime, their approach has been halting at best, overthinking tone and performance when what the moment calls for is presence.
The problem with the increasing fragmentation of media is that we become unreachable to one another, and in the absence of political figures trying to build a presence and coalition across different realities, politics more broadly becomes a battle for the most coherent minorities. And that’s kind of a scary thing.
But if there’s one upside to this new environment, it’s that anyone can show up. That’s why I’m interested in watching Democratic politicians test the waters on shows that seem oppositional or just plain dumb. Yes, they risk seeming awkward, out of touch, or uncool. But that’s part of the job. In an era where political power is increasingly shaped by presence, not polish, the act of showing up matters more than ever. If someone like Pete Buttigieg can’t break through after a dozen of these appearances, fine — maybe he’s not the guy for this moment. But if someone like, say, Zohran Mamdani manages to create a real moment, then maybe that’s the model for what’s next.
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