A Democrat has entered the manosphere.
Pete Buttigieg, the previous Secretary of Transportation within the Biden Administration and a presidential candidate in 2020, sat for a three-hour appearance on Andrew Schultz’s Flagrant on Wednesday to debate present occasions, the state of politics, and the tradition wars — his newest foray into breaking exterior of the Democrats’ most popular “echo chamber,” as he put it, and his first into the world of on-line, woke-skeptical bro media.
Sporting a beard, Buttigieg criticized his colleagues within the Democratic Celebration for shirking podcasts reminiscent of Flagrant, which carried out an interview with Donald Trump through the election. In line with co-host Akaash Singh, Flagrant, which has drawn controversy for its hosts’ willingness to engage with racist content, was unable to get Democrats to agree to come back on the present, prompting Buttigieg to call them out for turning down the invitation. “We’ve got to be encountering individuals who don’t suppose like us and who don’t view the world the way in which we do, each as a way to turn into smarter and higher and make higher selections and take higher positions, and likewise to influence,” he mentioned.
Calling Buttigieg “the Democrats’ secret weapon,” Schultz and his co-hosts got here away impressed by the tip of the interview, significantly for having the ability to sit via the complete three hour block. “I feel we’re all wanting ahead to seeing what you’re doing,” he mentioned. “I feel you’re a extremely courageous and wonderful determine in our political sphere.”
“We’ve got to be encountering individuals who don’t suppose like us and who don’t view the world the way in which we do.”
Although he’s not the high-profile first elected Democrat to look on a manosphere podcast — that honor goes to Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VA), who appeared on The Joe Rogan Expertise in August 2019 — Buttigieg has an extended historical past of getting into hostile media territory, making frequent appearances on Fox Information as a surrogate for Joe Biden and even doing a televised city corridor on the conservative tv community. It’s not his first outing within the web creator world, both: he appeared on Jubile’s YouTube sequence Surrounded through the 2024 election (“1 Politician vs. 25 Undecided Voters”).
He’s, nonetheless, not the primary Democrat to interact with the right-wing podcast world after Kamala Harris misplaced the 2024 presidential election, partially as a result of she and her marketing campaign didn’t interact with these influencers to the diploma that Donald Trump did — a large self-inflicted error that steadily comes up in election post-mortems. “All of his podcasts had been reaching the viewers that we had been struggling to drag in… younger males,” Harris marketing campaign senior strategist Stephanie Cutter mentioned throughout an appearance on Pod Save America, “and we noticed that, we knew that.” The most important self-own: Trump famously appeared on The Joe Rogan Expertise simply days earlier than the election, reaching Rogan’s tens of millions of followers throughout Spotify and YouTube alone. Harris, nonetheless, snubbed their invite as a result of inside fears that the progressive staffers on the marketing campaign would revolt.
In an try and keep away from repeating that mistake, California Governor Gavin Newsom has invited MAGA figures reminiscent of Turning Level USA’s Charlie Kirk and Battle Room host Steve Bannon onto his podcast, which he launched in February as an try and “have sincere discussions with those who agree AND disagree with us.”