The New Yorker:

The comedian’s absurd, poignant work captures the lives of the kind of frustrated young men who helped Donald Trump win the election.

By Naomi Fry

Hark, the manosphere! In the days following the Presidential election, the word suddenly seemed to be on everyone’s lips. Comprising a loose consortium of highly influential, extremely online, and mostly young, white, and right-leaning male podcasters, YouTubers, and Twitch streamers, the manosphere, many argued, was at least partly responsible for Donald Trump’s decisive success among male voters. In the final stretch of his campaign, he courted several of the manosphere’s central figures, among them the comedian and podcaster Theo Von (who, when asked by the Presidential candidate what it felt like to use cocaine, responded, puzzlingly but evocatively, “Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie”); the streamer Adin Ross (who gifted Trump with a Tesla Cybertruck, in which the two sat listening, companionably, to the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”); and, of course, the high priest of the domain, Joe Rogan, who not only shot the shit with Trump on his fantastically popular podcast for a rambling three hours but also officially endorsed him on the eve of the election. (Speaking onstage at the Mar-a-Lago victory celebration, the C.E.O. of the U.F.C., Dana White, thanked Ross, Von, and “the mighty and powerful” Rogan for helping Trump gain the Presidency.)

Would cultivating a liberal-leaning manosphere have helped the Democrats capture the male voters they fumbled? And, if so, who could have been the figure to lead this movement? Post-election, I kept seeing these questions online, again and again, and one tweet I spied suggested a possible answer. The comedian Jeremy Kaplowitz tweeted, “Democrats saying they need a ‘leftist Joe Rogan,’ ” alongside a brief clip from a circa-2013 video featuring the comedian Conner O’Malley. In the clip, O’Malley—a dishevelled, youngish white man in a sports jacket, plaid shirt, and jeans—is seen tromping around a woodsy clearing, using one large stick to simulate a shotgun and skimming over piles of dead leaves with another, all the while reciting a long-winded list of what he would need to hunt down the ogre Shrek in real life. “Fifty million dollars, three million guns, trees that can get out of the water and walk, three goooood Terminators, five Hulks, a Green Goblin costume with a RoboCop helmet,” he says, stuttering slightly, spittle flying. “Six Transformers, a cup of alien blood that is also acid, my dead dad to come back to life and tell me he loves me.”

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