At his victory celebration on Tuesday evening, with a visibly pleased President-elect Donald Trump by his side, Dana White, the president of UFC, took the opportunity to express his gratitude to certain individuals.

Among those acknowledged were “The Nelk Boys”, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ with the Boys and, certainly not least, the influential Joe Rogan.

For the average media consumer of a certain generation, only the last name might ring a bell. The Daily Beast humorously described the acknowledgement as one of the most unusual expressions of thanks since George Washington’s election in 1789. However, disregarding these new media stars is increasingly misguided, considering their significant influence in shaping the electorate that voted Trump back into the White House.

The Nelk Boys, Ross, Von, and Will Compton and Taylor Lewan of Barstool Sports’ Bussin’ with the Boys are all comedians and lifestyle podcasters with enormous followings on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Snippets from their shows are widely shared on social media, amassing billions of views. Unlike well-known conservative online personalities like Charlie Kirk or Candace Owens, this group rarely delves into politics. Instead, their content ranges from interviewing fellow comedians, streaming video games, discussing sports and their personal lives, or simply having casual conversations. Their political discussions do not always align with predictable ideological lines; apart from Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, Von and Rogan have also hosted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on their shows.

What they do have in common is a natural skepticism towards authority, a conviction that most politicians are dishonest, and an inherent interest in anything that might benefit their personal brands. These characteristics attract them to Trump and his continued portrayal as a rebellious outsider determined to clean up Washington. These qualities also resonate with their devoted audience, mainly young men who have built their identities around the personalities of these online creators.

This is a form of political engagement that is essentially non-political. Any political ideology is wholly concealed within the lifestyle that these content creators are marketing — a lifestyle that young men are enthusiastically purchasing. So far, Democrats have struggled to challenge or emulate this concept, primarily because the issue they face is more cultural than political.

In the aftermath of the 2024 election, liberal commentators and Democrats have acknowledged their problem with young men and argued that they need their version of Joe Rogan. Or, at the very least, that Harris should have agreed to Rogan’s conditions and appeared on his show.

However, the idea of creating a “liberal Rogan” misunderstands Rogan himself: His appeal among young men extends beyond his politics, which seem to be more related to anti-establishment credibility than any deeply held ideology. (Rogan endorsed Sanders in 2020 following his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience.) If Democrats want to address the issue that caused men aged 18-29 to shift 30 points right from 2020 (according to The Associated Press), they first need to understand the problem. It’s about politics, but it’s also about how the prevailing online culture has influenced how young men view themselves.

Democrats may have been surprised by the rightward shift of young men who frequently listen to Theo Von, but it’s not entirely unexpected. Conservatives have spent decades building an alternative media ecosystem that leverages anti-establishment suspicion and distrust of mainstream media. Influential talk radio figures like Rush Limbaugh paved the way for contemporary counterparts like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, both of whom host hugely popular podcasts on Spotify. Liberals have always found it difficult to establish themselves in this media frontier; the top explicitly political show for liberals is Pod Save America, which typically ranks behind Kirk and Carlson on Spotify.

Now, much like the Republican coalition, the media enterprise initiated by conservatives is evolving into something bigger and more inclusive — a haven not just for staunch ideological conservatives, but for any disenchanted young man who resents authority figures as represented by liberal elites in politics, entertainment, education, and beyond. Carlson and Kirk may be in the top five, but Rogan consistently ranks number 1 on Spotify. In the void left by liberal media, he and his fellow podcasters reach a broader audience of potential political converts by downplaying politics — a turn-off for many young people — in favor of comedy, video games, sports, and lifestyle content. They have become a gateway to more straightforward political content from figures like Carlson, Kirk, and ultimately Trump.

“They don’t trust The New York Times or CNN,” says Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the think tank the Center For New Liberalism and the author of the substack Infinite Scroll, where he writes about the politics of posting and the social internet. “This goes all the way back to the newsletters that Ron Paul used to send out, the rise of talk radio, cable news like Fox News and their own websites like The Daily Wire and Breitbart. … So I suppose it’s not a surprise that when it comes to social media, they were very willing to copy that product.

The Trump campaign effectively leveraged this to their electoral advantage with his series of podcast appearances, expanding their coalition and persuading enough young men — the least likely demographic group to vote — to turn out at the polls. Statistically speaking, not all those voters are Breitbart readers or Carlson superfans, but a significant number of them listen to Rogan or Von, who generally ranks near the top 10 on Spotify. The Harris campaign’s countermove in the podcast space involved sending her to chat with Call Her Daddy, a very successful program that ranks in the top 20 of Spotify but mainly caters to women, and All The Smoke — a podcast hosted by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson — that doesn’t chart on Spotify’s Top 50 sports podcasts. Welcome to the League, indeed.

Rogan, Von, and other creators who conversed with Trump have extensive reach beyond Spotify. Their content is incredibly popular on YouTube and TikTok, where algorithmic factors also push regular listeners towards more conservative viewpoints. For instance, fans of Von’s comedy might find TikTok recommending clips of his interview with Trump, which could then lead them into more pro-Trump content from openly political figures like Carlson. Conservative content is generally more successful on TikTok.

“[TikTok] prioritizes engagement, not neutrality, so they’re going to favor sensational, polarizing content, and conservative content is really good at that,” says Ioana Literat, a professor of communication, media, and learning technologies design at Columbia University and the co-author of Not your parents’ politics: Understanding young people’s political expression on social media. “It’s framed around populism, anti-establishment sentiments, and cultural nostalgia; all of these things drive really high engagement.”

Gamers, streamers, and podcasters, Literat argues, have been particularly effective in the past few years at reaching a young male audience.

These content creators are not directly telling their viewers how to vote. In fact, they rarely talk about politics at all. Instead, they are teaching their followers how to converse, what to consume, how to exercise, how to live. What they are selling is a lifestyle. The traditional ways of constructing a personality — through friendships, blockbuster movies, religious organizations — are becoming obsolete. What’s replaced it is the vast expanse of the internet.

“A lot of people actually form their identities online these days, as opposed to in real life,” says Johnson. “Now it’s more like, ‘I based my identity on this group that I joined on TikTok when I was 20, and I thought they were really funny, and so then I subscribed to their Patreon and I joined their Discord, and now their whole worldview is my worldview.’”

Trump incorporated these sorts of personalities directly into his campaign — from the Nelk Boys rallying with him to Dana White basking in the glory of victory. It made his politics seem more like a lifestyle — and therefore something that many people could relate to.

It’s challenging to identify progressive equivalents of this phenomenon — Hasan Piker, perhaps? — let alone any on the same scale. And many of the successful left-wing lifestyle podcasts are hosted by irony-poisoned comedians and influencers who are not particularly fond of Harris.

It’s unclear if there’s a demand for a substantial cultural center-left, or what that would even look like online. (For what it’s worth, a recurring Republican concern is that most mainstream, offline entertainment — television, movies, etc., is subtly center-left coded.) But what is clear is that if Democrats don’t acknowledge the scope of their problem with young men, there’s no hope of addressing it.

“[Democrats] have decided certain forms of masculinity are really, really unacceptable,” Johnson says. “But I think where we went wrong was that liberals and progressives never really articulated an alternative to what we were saying was bad. We never presented an alternative masculinity.”