One night after his now infamous appearance at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden – where he joked that Black people carve watermelons instead of pumpkins at Halloween and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Tony Hinchcliffe appeared on stage in Austin, back at his day job, as the host of the podcast Kill Tony.
When Hinchcliffe took the stage he was still front-page news, the subject of endless cable news panels and late-night talkshow monologues. Some Democratic pollsters were suggesting it was a rare moment that “broke through” with voters and could even help Kamala Harris win in Pennsylvania.
Instead Hinchcliffe walked out to cheers. “Puerto Ricans are smart enough to know when they’re being used as political fodder and right now that is happening and I apologise to absolutely nobody. Not to the Puerto Ricans, not to the whites, not to the Blacks, not to the Palestinians, not to the Jews and not to my own mother,” he said to screams of delight.
The show continued with the opening comic making jokes about putting a Harris-Walz sign on the front lawn being an invitation to get robbed, imagining “some Sam-Smith-looking fuck is in the kitchen wearing a mask in his own house” and finishing the set by joking: “That’s why I have a Trump sign on my lawn with two swastikas on it.”
Kill Tony is a live comedy show that takes place in Joe Rogan’s Austin comedy club, where new comics get to perform one minute of standup before talking with a panel. The show is the most downloaded comedy podcast in history and sold out two nights at Madison Square Garden in August (with special guests including Andrew Dice Clay, the Black Keys and Aaron Rodgers).
It sits in a constellation of entertainment, news and sports programming that has been written about a lot since Harris lost the election. But the Democratic class has perhaps still not reckoned with the scale of what’s happened. An analogy might be Fox News, which transformed American politics and has probably helped elect thousands of Republicans up and down ballots over many decades.
But Fox News is watched by older people – the median age is 68. Now, a Fox News for the young has been established. It’s not on one channel on a DirectTV box, but its audience is far bigger, potentially reaching 10 times as many people. It’s an amorphous network of podcasts, YouTubers, Twitch streamers and meme accounts from Kill Tony to Joe Rogan to Dilley Meme Team. They encompass entertainment, comedy, sport, health, relationships – but a distrust of the Democrats and the mainstream media permeates them all.
Like Fox News and conservative AM radio, the audiences of these podcasts are scared about a changing world, but their fears are very different from those of older viewers and listeners. They’re less susceptible to bogeymen stories of violent migrants, socialism or kids watching........