If there’s one issue that unites the bro-casters — beyond the need to find three hours of content — it’s a disdain for wokeness. “The word ‘retarded’ is back,” Mr. Rogan recently announced, ridiculously, “and it’s one of the great culture victories.” Mr. Schulz wound up his latest Netflix standup special with a long bit, the upshot of which was basically that people from Staten Island were a super race of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Retards.”
Modern bro-caster culture emerged in part as a response to the enforced sensitivity of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which left many young men feeling vilified for their purported privilege. The comedy of that time mocked the latest language strictures, whichever new initial was being added to the L.G.B.T.Q. array and anything trans. I first encountered Mr. Schulz in 2018 at New York’s Comedy Cellar, when he was a successful but not yet famous touring stand-up comic, developing what would become his signature style: marching up to the line of woke heresy and letting the tension hang there before performing a quick switcheroo. One bit: Schulz introduces the topic of trans women in sports. Nervous anticipation from the audience. Punchline: He’s in favor, because “then women will know what white people went through when we let Black people play sports.” Anti-woke made Mr. Schulz one of the country’s top comics, and now one of its more prominent podcasters.
The bro-caster ecosystem is a safe space for men to such a comical degree that it seems less menacing than juvenile. Only in this world could Eric Adams bond with Mr. Schulz over the need for a New York outpost of a particularly baller Miami strip club. By my rough count, fewer than two dozen of Mr. Von’s last 467 shows, spanning almost a decade, featured women, and two of them were Nikki Glaser. But male doesn’t necessarily mean brutish or insensitive. On air, Mr. Von can be emotionally finely tuned, open to thoughtful discussions of mental illness and parenting. Last year, he had an uncannily human conversation with Mr. Trump about, amazingly, cocaine. “Is our conversation going OK?” he asked during an epic dorkfest with Mark Zuckerberg in April. A few years ago, Mr. Schulz let an increasingly drunk Alex Jones wave around a machete and offer to castrate any boy who wanted to be trans — but looking past the theatrics, I find that Mr. Schulz circa 2025 is against racism, welcoming to gay people, largely chivalrous to women, agreeable about ideological differences. He’s decent.
If the Democrats ever want to get their groove back, it won’t work to tune out these folks, or to insist that engaging them is just feeding the trolls. It was the shunning of characters like Mr. Schulz and Mr. Dillon that led them to position themselves as free-speech warriors — the same ressentiment that helped fuel Trump’s victory.
Schulz describes himself as a Bernie bro who voted for Trump not because of any intrinsic conservatism but because Democrats lost their chill. Liberals used to get all the action, Mr. Schulz said recently; now, conservatives are the ones who live large “and say whatever they want.” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, fully taking the bait, called this “possibly the stupidest argument for a transition to MAGA that I’ve ever heard.” But this is sort of making his point, no?
