Podcast Rankings and Conspiracy Theorists

Will the tension unite or divide?

A tyrannical unity will always destroy a divided movement. The left is a united tyranny, but the right is divided, and I think I can demonstrate this based on a recent chart that is going around X, formerly known as Twitter. It’s called The Top 40 Conservative Podcasters.

To demonstrate this we will use good-ole-fashioned Cross Country scoring, where you take the position your individuals finished and add them together. In the example below, I went through the list of like-minded conservatives and put them into two teams and then added their scores together, as if the list below were a 5k race between two rival teams.

The Top 40 Conservative Podcasters

To highlight the divide among Conservatives, I looked at a few different questions: Who was supportive of Trump while DeSantis was in the Primary? Are they likely to be early adopters of conspiracy theories or wait six months? And which hosts would likely ally with Candace Owens recent departure from the Daily Wire, even if they haven’t done so publicly?

In short, if Ben and Tucker were starting high school political clubs, who do I think is mostly likely to join the Elitist Club (Shapiro) or the Populist Club (Tucker), respectively. Here is the break down.

Not everyone will agree with my categorization. I don’t listen to all of these, so you may have an argument for why someone should shift the teams. For example, John Solomon and Allie Stuckey I’m not as familiar with, though I have seen their posts in my timeline from time to time, so I did a quick search of their socials and podcasts to categorize them. Either way, if you were to field a team based on the list, the scores would still end up, as Lego Darth Vader would say, “Pretty darn close.”

Typically in Cross-Country, if you take your top 5 runners vs another team’s top 5 runners, you get a better picture of who has the better team. Right now, these scores align with the reality that the Trumpkins have not only more reach, but more influence. It also shows that despite Alex Jones not making either “Varsity” squad, the more sensational content is the content that is resonating with people, not necessarily the personality (sensational doesn’t mean false, by the way). This experiment doesn’t determine who’s right or wrong on the issues, but it does mean that more populist content is becoming a dividing issue between elite conservatives and cultural conservatives. This means that there is an incentive to become more sensational even if it’s not necessarily a true story. This may also explain some of the recent fallout between Daily Wire and their longtime friend, Steven Crowder, as well as their more recent falling out with Candace Owens, but I digress.

In short, the divide in the conservative party is real and it’s not a sign that “freedom is alive” on the right. The divide is not a a political problem, it’s a values problem. And to make matters worse, not only do they not consider each other allies, they also don’t respect one another. They are literally a divided house of elephants and rhinos. If their top 40 podcasters are split down the middle ideologically on fundamental issues, the Conservative movement will eventually die, either by natural causes or the jackboots of the left. When similar comparisons are done to the left, politically speaking, they are united on nearly every issue and each proposed political or cultural solution.

Take any major cultural issue that the right believes is important and you will find substantial division. The prolife movement is a great example. None of these influencers agree on whether IVF and surrogacy should be supported by the prolife movement. Many prolifers will even suggest that IVF is providing such a good to the mother who wants a child, that it’s morally licit for the mother to pursue abortive fertility treatments even though other child embryos will be lost. Others will point out the inconsistency of being prolife on abortion, but then being willing to sacrifice a child for the possibility of having a family. Ask a leftist and they will say abortion, surrogacy, and IVF are all part of the woman’s choice. The left may be authoritarian in nature, but they are not divided.

Where The Divide is Headed…

Those who still believe in an elite institution, whether that be Harvard or Yale, or a private college that has yet to bend the knee, are those who would fall into the “Elitist” category. This is not necessarily a negative category. It is merely to highlight those who believe pedigrees conferred by the system, i.e., PhDs, JDs, MDs, etc., are the pre-requisite for a bringing about real change. They want a DeSantis because he’s a man who obtained status in a culture against him. They see this as a sign that he has wisdom, not that he may have made moral compromises to get to where he is today. The elite may not see these compromises as significant because they are ultimately pragmatists, rather than principled in their conviction.

A good example of this is Tucker vs Ben Shapiro. Anyone who listens to Ben Shapiro, knows that he went to Harvard and that his wife is “a Doctor”. There was even a Freedom Toons episode about it. But where did Tucker Carlson go to university? Probably some Ivy League thing. The point is I have no idea, not because he’s never said it, but because he doesn’t flaunt his education to his audience. This isn’t necessarily a negative for Ben or for Tucker, its just to show that they are catering to different audiences.

The other group is the Populists. They lean into their common sense, but they often emphasize what they have in common, i.e. what is going viral, over what is reasonable. They take risks, not based on what is politically advantageous but based on their conscience. They place a high value on morality, and they will sacrifice their well-being for what they believe is right. But they also tend to be sensational. They don’t “believe Alex Jones”, but they think he “makes some good points.” They trust their gut more than they trust the system. For them, degrees and corporate success are a sign of suspicion unless of course your as sensational as they are. This is because they, like the left, value victim status. In order to win their trust, they want to see how you lose more than they want to see how you win. This is why they disdain the DeSantis crowd because the DeSantis crowd, after losing the primary, continues to blame Trump supporters for wanting Trump in office over DeSantis. This is not because the left is making Trump a martyr; it’s because Trump is not afraid to be a martyr and for people who are taking stands in the work place and putting their small businesses on the line, this is the type of person that “speaks their language” of morality, which is ironic considering who Trump is.

The Populists are a complicated group of individuals whose simple view of life is no indication of their monetary accomplishments or their political pull. However, their “simple way” of viewing the world tends towards an oversimplification and being led to believe they have the knowledge of “what’s really going on.” They tend to emphasize faith over reason, while the elites emphasize faith through reason. This doesn’t mean that faith and reason are opposed. Just that they are approaching our cultural divide from different starting points.

Both groups have their strengths and weaknesses but as their content shows, they are using their strengths to exploit each other’s weaknesses, either implicitly or explicitly. Both groups see a storm on the horizon, and they are both presuming that the sign of who’s right is decided by who is left standing after the storm has passed. But when we read the stories of those who survived political tyranny, they survived for one of two reasons: providence or cowardice. Rarely is someone hailed as a survivor because they “saw it coming and everyone else just didn’t listen.”

We are now living in a political tyranny, and the reality is the conservative movement, the movement against the totalitarian and Marxist ideologies of our day, is divided like a fault line through California. If they do not unite, they will not stand. As mentioned above, a united tyranny will always outlive a divided movement. Hopefully, the elites and the populist can find a way to unite on issues, otherwise the house will not stand.