Progressive Politics

Podcast bros are interviewing presidents and power players without doing basic research beforehand. The result is a propagandistic catastrophe.

A pair of pro-Trump Canadian prankster YouTubers called the “Nelk Boys” recently interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is responsible for the starvation of Gaza and a war on the population that kills hundreds of people per day. It is an unconscionable crime against humanity, which is why he is wanted by the International Criminal Court.

The Nelk Boys, by their own admission, did not do a good job interviewing Netanyahu, asking questions like: “You [and Trump] are very tight, right? Would you call it a ‘bromance’?” They asked Netanyahu what his go-to McDonald’s order is. They raved about the nightlife in Tel Aviv. (“Tel Aviv is lit!”) The closest they came to asking a critical question was when Nelk Boy Kyle Forgeard said that “I’ll see or read stuff on X and people will say, like Israel is killing babies or they’re starving people,” to which Netanyahu just replied “That’s completely false.” (It is true.) Forgeard admitted during the episode that “I see so much stuff about what’s going on in Israel and Iran and Palestine, and to be honest, I just really don’t know what is going on there.” That certainly showed.

Unfortunately, the Nelk Boys are not unique in being completely unprepared to interview political leaders. A number of independent podcasters who have interviewed Donald Trump and JD Vance have been similarly unwilling to do the basic research necessary to carry out an interviewer’s job. These podcasters do not consider themselves right-wing, and in fact hold many left-leaning viewpoints, but because they have totally failed in the task of studying the issues they’re having conversations about, they end up spreading unchecked propaganda.

Look at the kinds of questions that Lex Fridman asked Donald Trump, for instance:

• What drives you more, the love of winning or the hate of losing?

• You’ve said that politics is a dirty game… So if it is a game, how do you win at that?

• You’ve been successful in business, you’ve been successful in politics. What do you think is the difference between gaining success between the two different disparate worlds?

• How do you think you’ll do in the debate coming up, that’s in a few days?

You will not be surprised to learn that Trump thinks he will do well in the debate! From these ludicrous softballs, we learn nothing whatsoever of value about how Trump will govern the country. But even when Fridman approaches the realm of a substantive question, he allows Trump to get away with unbelievable bullshit. For instance, when Fridman says “Let me ask you about Project 2025. So you’ve publicly said that you don’t have any direct connection to—” Trump cuts him off, says he has nothing to do with Project 2025, and Fridman moves on.(After being elected, Trump appointed several of the project’s architects to key positions, and it is now estimated that nearly half of Project 2025 has already been implemented.)

A good interviewer would have gone through Project 2025 item by item, demanding more clarity on whether Trump actually disagreed with the goals of Project 2025, and asking which parts of it Trump would specifically pledge not to implement.