Over the weekend, Megyn Kelly posted that Right-wing commentator Mark Levin has a “micropenis”. Levin had earlier called her “an emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck”. None other than Donald Trump weighed in on Truth Social, praising Levin as “a truly Great American Patriot”. Earlier this month, meanwhile, Ben Shapiro accused Piers Morgan of platforming “actual Nazis”, while the British presenter called the Daily Wire co-founder “a propagandist”. For good or ill, we’ve come a long way from the days of William Buckley and Norman Podhoretz.

The proximate cause is the ongoing war in Iran. Conservative media has been split into pro-war hawks — Shapiro, Levin, Lindsey Graham — and an anti-intervention wing including Tucker Carlson, Kelly, Majorie Taylor Greene and Dave Smith.

This kind of discourse — online, vicious and polarized — is hardly new for American politics. I watched a Left-wing version of this play out from the inside between 2015 and 2021. For three years, I co-hosted the podcast What’s Left?, which started as a Bernie Sanders vehicle promoting class politics and attacking liberal identitarianism. My show and others — Chapo Trap House, Red Scare and a smattering of smaller operations — were labeled the “dirtbag Left” and targeted identity-focused liberals in similar terms to those which Kelly and Levin are exchanging now. The language was vicious, and the audiences grew.

Some podcasts went Right and hoovered up all the money along the way. Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova of Red Scare started attending New York Young Republican Club parties alongside Roger Stone. A few operations tacked back towards the Left to keep cashing in; Chapo Trap House moderated its rhetoric, recalibrating its anti-Democrat posture while maintaining the audience it had built during the Bernie wars. Others disbanded when the parties involved couldn’t find enough ideological common ground to continue. What’s Left? closed up shop in October 2022 as my co-host and I drifted further apart. The revenue dried up once the shared enemies — Covid safetyism and a Democratic establishment that had embraced identity branding over class warfare — were no longer enough to sustain an audience that had splintered over everything else.

It was a game of musical chairs, and most of us lost. For a time, the Right offered bigger audiences, less internal policing, and a few rich patrons unconstrained by popular opinion. The Left offered what then passed for credentialed respectability, but only for those lucky few willing to take the institutional knee and play nice.

The Right’s podcaster wars follow the same structure. Kelly, a former center-right “Fox News blonde”, appears to be positioning herself further Right. She’s siding with Carlson’s anti-intervention faction, attacking Shapiro as a censor and deploying language calculated to signal she’s no longer bound by institutional decorum. Shapiro is fighting to maintain his role as conservative orthodoxy’s gatekeeper, purging anyone who questions the pro-Israel consensus. Carlson is building a parallel media empire that draws from the same dissident-Right pool that Nick Fuentes inhabits.

Polling data suggests the Republican base is watching all of this the way the Democratic base watched the Bernie wars: with mild interest. Time will tell if they too remain largely immovable when the general election rolls around; after all, 90% of Bernie supporters stuck with the eventual Democratic nominee. A recent survey found Trump at 81% approval among Republicans — higher than Barack Obama or George W. Bush at the same point in their second terms. The Iran war remains unpopular nationally but enjoys strong Republican support. The base sticks together because, as remains the case for Democrats, there’s nowhere else to go.

The broader ideological outcome is starting to take shape. The Carlson-adjacent, war-skeptical wing will likely expand its influence among the base, especially if the war drags on and casualties mount. But to inherit Trump’s movement and seize the reins of the GOP, figures like Kelly will have to play the game — backing the President publicly, seeding dissent through proxies, and waiting. As happened on the Left, whoever is still racking up views when the dust clears will claim they were right all along.

---

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

MoustacheClubUS

---