Every weekday, a bearded, bespectacled man in a plaid shirt settles down in his studio in Nashville, Tennessee to host his wildly popular online talk show. Aged only 38, he has the world-weary countenance and demeanour of an older man, and the deadpan delivery of a clever American who hates what other clever Americans are doing to his country.
He has many targets: transgender ideology, wokery in all its forms, progressive media, The Brutalist. On every show, he “cancels” an individual whose left-wing views he finds especially appalling. As he often mentions, he has six children, including two pairs of twins, and is a devout Catholic who, having been called a “theocratic fascist”, now uses that label in his X bio. Meet Matt Walsh.
One of the most successful independent platforms to be established in the last decade, the Daily Wire has more than one million subscribers and reported revenue north of $200m last year. The company’s co-founder Ben Shapiro is also its lead presenter and campaigned with Donald Trump in the presidential election.
Yet the Daily Wire’s undoubted breakout star is Walsh, not least because of the success of two hugely controversial documentary films: What is a Woman? (2022) and Am I Racist?, which was released in US cinemas last September. Almost universally passed over by film critics, the latter still managed to be the highest-grossing documentary of 2024.
In the November issue of Prospect, I wrote about the new wave of “red-state entertainment” and Maga-friendly content creation typified by Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone and its spinoff shows. But that is only the start of the story.
It has become commonplace to the point of cliché to describe Trump as a “transactional” president who puts deals ahead of values, principles and legal obligations. This is true, in as far as it goes. But it masks the cultural ferment around the new administration, and the loose-knit network of podcasters, polemicists and keyboard warriors who have fought and continue to fight on its behalf.
It’s true that Trump is a ‘transactional’ president, but these is also a cultural ferment around the new administration
Most are considered far beyond the liberal pale: for instance the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights NGO, lists Walsh under the heading “Anti-LGBTQ, General Hate”. But the cultural reach of these figures, and their impact upon right-wing thinking and policymaking, within and beyond the US, is now too great to be overlooked. This is no time to avert our gaze or be squeamish.
In What is a Woman?, Walsh asks his interviewees a series of basic questions with all the sangfroid of Sacha Baron Cohen in character. “I’m just trying to start by getting to the truth, you know,” he says to Patrick Grzanka, a professor who specialises in intersectionality, sexualities and gender at the University of Tennessee.
“Yeah, I mean, I’m like really uncomfortable with that language of ‘getting to the truth’,” Grzanka replies, “because it sounds actually deeply transphobic to me. And, if you keep probing, we’re going to stop the interview.” Walsh: “If I probe about what the truth is?” Grzanka: “You keep invoking the word ‘truth’, which is condescending and rude.”
In the end, Walsh breaks character and delivers a scorching speech to the Loudoun County School Board in Virginia over its transgender-affirming policies. “You prey upon impressionable children,” he rages, “and indoctrinate them into your insane ideological cult, a cult which holds many fanatical views, but none so deranged as the idea that boys are girls and girls are boys.”
To his opponents, the whole exercise was gutter “gotcha” journalism. But—like it or not—What is a Woman? clocked up hundreds of millions of views online. Walsh’s success also put rocket boosters under the work of Maga groups such as Moms for Liberty campaigning against “woke ideology” in educational institutions. And his cultural fingerprints can be clearly detected in the series of executive orders rushed out by Trump in his first month back in office, declaring that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female” and directing the government to “enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality”.
A similar impact might be attributed to Am I a Racist?, in which Walsh lampooned the diversity, equity and inclusion industry and posed as a DEI consultant—even persuading Robin DiAngelo, the bestselling author of White Fragility (2018) and Nice Racism (2021), who took a $15,000 fee for her interview, to pay $30 in “reparations” to the movie’s black producer.
Again, the movie’s message—that DEI is a divisive hustle, in which battalions of consultants fleece corporations and individuals by making them feel guilty—has now translated into the official policy of the Trump administration. All federal DEI programmes were outlawed by executive order hours after the inauguration on 20th January, and government staff working on diversity programmes sent home two days later.
Of course, Walsh has not been the only protagonist in this aggressive cultural strategy. Christopher Rufo, initially a close ally of Ron DeSantis and the intellectual force behind the Florida governor’s “war on woke”, was summoned to Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s victory to present a plan to rid American universities of critical race theory, gender ideology and diversity programmes.
A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Rufo personifies the influence that a well-connected culture warrior can have if he attracts the attention of the powerful. His Substack feed, which has more than 111,000 subscribers, churns out newsletters with headlines including: “Whistleblower: There’s a Trans Cult inside the NSA”; “The Right is Changing Cancel Culture’s Rules”; and “We’ve Stripped $1 billion from the Left’s Patronage Machine”.
Aged only 40, Rufo is the polar opposite of the old-school Republican party apparatchik. On his lively podcasts, he hosts fellow conservative intellectuals such as Rod Dreher, Heather Mac Donald and Eric Hendriks-Kim, but also presents investigations designed to shock and infuriate—such as the episode posted in May 2023 entitled “House of Horrors: ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ at Texas Children’s Hospital”.
Last January, he was instrumental in the fall of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first black president, having alleged plagiarised passages in her PhD dissertation. It was surely no coincidence that Trump made so much of gang violence in his September debate with Kamala Harris (“They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently”), only hours after Rufo and his colleague Christina Buttons published a sensationalised account of Tren de Aragua street gangsters from Venezuela terrorising Aurora, Colorado.
If Walsh’s superpower is a mordant wit that commands the attention, Rufo’s success reflects sheer persistence—and a readiness to venture outside his comfort zone. Last January, he debated the impeccably liberal academic Yascha Mounk on Bari Weiss’s podcast, Honestly. Two months later, he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, well before the world’s most successful podcaster (previously a supporter of Bernie Sanders) had pivoted to Trump. Then, in May, Rufo took part in a discussion hosted by Stanford University’s Classical Liberalism Initiative—by no means a home game for a Maga enthusiast.
But this persuasive campaign has been central to his work. In the concluding chapter of his 2023 book America’s Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, Rufo writes: “The urgent task for the political Right is to correctly understand the contours of the current revolution and create a strategy for defeating it on real political grounds: revolution against revolution, institution against institution, negation against negation.”
In all essentials, this is what Trump has been enacting at warp speed since January. On 19th February, for example, after a direct appeal by Rufo to Elon Musk, the US Department of Education announced the immediate cancellation of grants worth $226m to the “Comprehensive Centers Program”, initially introduced during George W Bush’s presidency to increase educational capacity, but (it was alleged) subsequently hijacked by “radical agendas… including race-based discrimination and gender identity ideology”.
In practice—and especially in the age of reflexive action by Trump and Musk—culture is the connective tissue that binds campaigning, satire and polemic with policymaking, government and real-world action. One of the many errors made by progressives during Joe Biden’s presidency was to underestimate the force of this cultural resurgence on the right—of which Walsh and Rufo are only two prominent examples—and to dismiss such content as too extreme to be worth taking seriously.
Most unexpected of all, perhaps, has been the cheerleading role assumed by Marc Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, one of the principal venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, and of Netscape, the early web-browser giant. A loyal and active Democrat until Barack Obama’s second term, he became increasingly disillusioned after 2012 by what he saw as “a rebirth of the New Left” in elite institutions and the “Great Awokening”—and then switched sides emphatically during the Biden era.
As he told the New York Times in January: “They came for business in a very broad-based way…. The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of DEI in very destructive ways.”
Like many of his fellow tech titans—Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, most obviously—Andreessen sensed and associated himself with a fundamental realignment of interests and allegiances. During Trump’s transition, he spent at least half of his time at Mar-a-Lago engaged in the recruitment and vetting of candidates to fill the highest ranks of the incoming administration. He helped Musk establish the Department of Government Efficiency. He also did the podcast round, an unofficial spokesman for the new era.
What singles Andreessen out is his indomitable cheeriness: in contrast to Musk’s “Dark Maga” and Zuckerberg’s latest chain-wearing, jiu-jitsu “bro” persona, he sees in the second Trump ascendancy a Reaganite “Morning in America”. A mile-a-minute speaker, almost to the point of breathlessness, frequently laughing, he has even hailed another “Roaring Twenties”.
Marc Andreessen has become unofficial spokesman for the new era
Where Trump’s opponents see a mortal threat to democracy, Andreessen identifies a chance for America, turbocharged by AI, cryptocurrencies and the conquest of space, to become the greatest country in the world. He is unstoppably optimistic and—no less important—personally agreeable to an extent that conspicuously eludes many, if not most, of Maga’s key proselytisers. Andreesen’s shtick is not that of the glassy-eyed commissar or the jack-booted thug. He is Charlie Bucket in the Chocolate Factory.
As part of his mission, he loves recommending books: Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind (1953); Victor Sebestyen’s biography of Lenin (2017); and James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941) and The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943), both key Maga texts by an author who mesmerised George Orwell and is widely considered to be the model for O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Most revealingly, perhaps, Andreessen swears by the hitherto obscure 1864 study The Ancient City by the French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. As he put it on Lex Fridman’s podcast in June 2023, this account of Indo-European culture before the classical era portrays a “civilisation [that] was organised into cults—and the intensity of cults was a million-fold beyond anything that we would recognise today”.
With a chuckle, Andreessen observed that contemporary life is “very colourless and grey, as compared to how people used to experience things. Which is, I think, why we are so prone to reach for drama. There is something in us, deeply evolved, where we want that back”.
This, to my mind, is the poker tell. What unites these Eminent Trumpians—Walsh, Rufo, Andreessen and many others like them—is a taste for thrills, spectacle and neverending action. They are bored by the procedures and protocols of old-fashioned liberal democracy, with its regulations, safeguards and crash barriers. They crave the dopamine rush of relentless disruption, destruction and upheaval.
Which is fine if you’re safely in the driver’s cabin of the juggernaut, directing the Big Orange Man behind the wheel towards the next target. But if you’re on the highway? Not so much.
Either way, we dare not ignore them. For now, and by far, they are the most powerful cultural force on the planet.
