Podcast bros are doing war propaganda now

On Monday, YouTubers called the “Nelk Boys” welcomed Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu onto their “Full Send” podcast. For a little over an hour, two 30-year-old men who are best known for their frat-boy behavior sat by dumbly while a head of state wanted for crimes against humanity spewed propaganda to their audience of over 2 million subscribers.

A lot of comments called the episode “dystopian.” It is. But it’s wholly unsurprising—and fans of the Nelk Boys don’t seem to realize that it’s the same kind of content they’ve enjoyed watching all these years.

Unlike the previous “Full Send” interviews with Donald Trump, JD Vance, RFK Jr, Elon Musk, OJ Simpson, Tucker Carlson, and Andrew Tate, the episode with Netanyahu went over like a lead balloon. YouTube doesn’t publicly display dislikes anymore, but web extensions can show you the numbers. As of writing, the video currently stands at more than 118,000 dislikes compared to 28,000 likes. According to Social Blade, a social media analytics tracker, the Full Send podcast channel and the main Nelk Boys channel have both lost about 10,000 subscribers since the episode aired. After about 10 minutes of scrolling, I couldn’t find a single positive comment on it. One top comment with over 21,000 likes says “This was pitched to Netanyahu like this: ‘don’t worry these guys are idiots, you can use their platform to push whatever propaganda you want and they won’t push back on anything.’”

The Nelk Boys quickly spun into crisis PR mode, addressing the fallout in a livestream where hosts Kyle Forgeard and Aaron “Steiny” Steinberg agreed with a comment that said interviewing Netanyahu was like “having modern-day Hitler [on].” They also joined socialist commentator Hasan Piker on Twitch so he could explain to them that Netanyahu wasn’t using their platform to “promote a book […] he’s promoting a genocide.”

This rankled Steinberg, who argued that they had previously platformed people like Simpson and Tate on their podcast without receiving the same backlash. And therein lies part of the issue.

What Netanyahu was doing on the “Full Send” podcast is exactly what Trump previously did on the “Full Send” podcast to help him get re-elected president. It’s exactly what Simpson and Tate were doing there, too. The Nelk Boys, whether they’re cognizant of it or not, are running a reputation rehabilitation and management clinic for the worst of humanity. And many of their listeners only started to care yesterday.

The Nelk Boys and their audience are one slice of the sprawling YouTube ecosystem of pro-Trump podcast bros. They host pseudo-journalistic interviews that give their subjects a soapbox to preach whatever their agenda is for an hour or more. In February 2024, Media Matters published a compendium of the Nelk Boys pushing extreme misogynistic views alongside guests like Tate, performing racist and transphobic stunts, and hanging out with antisemitic influencers—including one who praised Adolf Hitler as a “good guy.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise to the Nelk Boys that some of their former fans are now spinning antisemitic conspiracies about them on X.

At the beginning of their episode with Netanyahu, Forgeard said they were “not qualified” and “should not be doing this.”

“I am not claiming to be an expert on this issue or anything like that,” Forgeard said as a disclaimer—before engaging in over an hour of back and forth about the issue with Netanyahu. Another one of the Nelk Boys’ questions was which fast food establishment was Netanyahu’s favorite.

These bits were widely mocked, but this is exactly the same style these types of podcasters use with other heads of state who have wrought mass suffering, like Trump.

When Trump appeared on Logan Paul’s podcast last summer on the campaign trail, Paul’s co-host asked Trump about the “Gaza situation” and whether Trump’s opinions on Israel and Netanyahu had changed over the past six months. Trump said “No,” and rambled for three minutes about other topics. Trump has appeared in videos and podcasts with the Nelk Boys multiple times. When Trump won re-election, UFC CEO Dana White shouted out the Nelk Boys and a slew of other podcast bros during an addendum to Trump’s victory remarks.

The “Full Send” podcast with Netanyahu even took place at the Blair House, the official President’s Guest House operated by the State Department that welcomes foreign leaders and other heads of state, Netanyahu said during the episode. Forgeard didn’t seem to know where they were.

The Nelk Boys are useful idiots, which are the preferred kind of communicators the Trump administration has selected to broadcast its agenda to the public. Netanyahu is also closely aligned with Trump, who has increasingly replaced traditional media with deferential influencers who lather him with praise. “We’re technically journalists,” Forgeard added at the beginning of his interview with Netanyahu.

Tragically, for millions of viewers, people like the Nelk Boys are replacing traditional forms of news media. More than half of Americans report getting at least some of their news from social media, and I have a strong suspicion that the numbers are actually higher. The viewership, profit, and access granted to new media—which includes people as self-admittedly dumb as the Nelk Boys—has skyrocketed compared to the bleak outlook for traditional news media.

Getting news on social media isn’t always a bad thing, either. A lot of journalists have adapted to it and creators can do journalism well. When it comes to coverage of Israel and Gaza, the legacy media has a strong bias in favor of Israel. Palestinian journalists on the ground in Gaza have used social media to share news and information in a way that traditional media gatekeepers don’t allow.

Footage of the genocide has dominated social media platforms for almost two years, causing an enormous sway in public online sentiment that helps explain why so many progressive and conservative influencers have broken from the parties to condemn Israel. A lot of creators and their audiences are genuinely horrified by the atrocities. Right now, Israel is starving Gazans to death by enforcing population-wide famine conditions. New photos of emaciated dead children were all over social media this weekend and have begun to appear in places like CNN broadcasts more frequently, too.

Forgeard and Steinberg lack the empathy or the savviness that some of their influencer peers and former “Full Send” guests possess. They have not walked a tightrope of alignment with the systems that promote genocide while claiming to be against it. They don’t understand why their audience is comfortable enabling someone like Trump or Tate but not Netanyahu—why they care about some kinds of violence but not others. Instead, the Nelk Boys have marveled at their own proximity to power. They expressed that they would like to interview Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un someday, too. I have a feeling their audience would enjoy that.

“I mean, for any backlash, this is just an opportunity you can’t really pass up,” Steinberg said. “There’s no one else doin’ this.”

Thanks for reading, and if you want to support my journalism, consider a $5 subscription.