How An Empty Internet Gave Us Tradwives And Trump

For mental health reasons I’m not reading a lot of political finger-pointing this month. But I will read anything Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, and her latest column on the election starts with the understatement of the season, “Everyone is in a tizzy.” It goes on to explain a key reason we’ve ended up in this be-tizzying political fever dream: polarized online spaces where left, right, and center are less important than feelings, aesthetics, and bombast. The worlds of wellness influencers, tradwives, and podcast bros were particularly fertile fields for cultivating younger and nonwhite Trump voters.

To be sure, all podcast bros aren’t Republicans or even conservatives. But this isn’t about how people identify politically. This is about the politics on which the podcast bro brand is modeled. Even left-leaning and center-left podcast bros have the same aesthetics as right-wing bombastic podcasters. If you tune out their words (and who among us doesn’t tune out when listening to a podcast) you are still consuming the cadence and texture of the podcast bro style. If the patter of “Fresh Air” sounds like liberalism, the podcast bro sounds like reactionarism.

When Trump talks, he often sounds like a podcast bro — rambling between ideas, transgressing bounds of propriety, offering dog whistles coded as jokes. When he is looped constantly on television news, that sort of speech starts to sound like the news to a lot of listeners. That is pivotal to how so many wacky conspiracy theories are reality washed. They sound as reasonable and newsy as the character spewing them, once that character makes the podcast bro aesthetic sound legitimate.