“ Trueanon ”, the podcast Lefty, drops the listeners in the rabbit holes

It was the 24th anniversary of September 11, and “Trueanon” had deviated from the usual patriotic script. Rather than distributing solemn pedies, the Podcast hosts have announced that the liberal state decomposed.

“And that makes the state brighter, more agile,” said Liz Franczak, co-host, to a crowd of around 800 inside the New York Society for Ethical Culture off Central Park. “Permanent war has given way to permanent governance.”

And then “Trueanon”, as he likes to do, died on his own script.

World war against terrorism? “It is powerful to call it the Gwot,” said Ms. Franczak, pronouncing it as “gee what”. “Why would you say the first letter, then say the rest?” His co-host, Brace Belden, asked incredulous a piece full of caquettes.

They channeled the false hysteria on the Muslim faith of Zohran Mamdani. “Once he is elected, you know that he will wake these cells from the Islamic State,” said Mr. Belden. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was described as a “drunk monster”. The actress Sarah Sherman, of “Saturday Night Live”, sang an interpretation of Creed’s success “with Arms Wide Open” in a bright juicy sewing tracksuit.

He therefore went a recent event for “Trueanon”, the irreverent political podcast organized by Mr. Belden, 35, and Ms. Franczak, 40, and produced by Steven Goldberg, 40, who uses the alias Yung Chomsky. The talkative spectacle, conspirator-conspirator, whose name is a game on the pro-Trump Qanon movement, won a cult for its heads headlong in subjects like the Jeffrey Epstein affair, the opioid crisis and Hunter Biden’s analysis, mixing absurd humor, deep research and sober left.

“What I would say is that the liberal state is decaying,” Ms. Franczak told the public that evening. “That’s what I would say. And now it’s a bit of transit in something else, and it was a process that started on September 11.”

The tone of the podcast is inspired by a moment when politics has come to coat each surface of our culture. In a new era of the media, when right-wing political influencers and so-called manosphere streamers have come down in the dominant current, Mr. Belden and Mrs. Franczak suggest that rudeness, paranoia and dissatisfaction should not belong only to the right right.

They savor the traffic jams of a recurring distribution of centrist politicians and billionaires and managers of the Silicon Valley, but they do not offer much content to their listeners of content or celebrities. The most prominent guests of the show include Marxist writer Mike Davis, who died in 2022, and political scientist Norman Finkelstein.

Mr. Belden, Ms. Franczak and Mr. Goldberg began the Podcast in 2019, just before the upheavals of the Coronavirus pandemic and demonstrations by George Floyd. At that time, the cultural clarity of the movement of social justice and the first years of Biden quickly broke into an anti-“awakened” reaction, a widespread plot and distrust of the institutions on both sides of the partisan fracture.

It was at this point that Mr. Belden and Mrs. Franczak, who met in adolescence of the Punk scene in San Francisco, reconnect on the Epstein affair. Fascinated by the history of a global conspiracy on sexual trafficking involving political elites, they began to chew the details by SMS.

Mr. Belden proposed to make a podcast on the saga. “A kind of true thing, but our version of that,” he recalls in an interview. “And he just turned upside down from there.”

It has been six years since this inaugural episode, in which Mr. Belden and Ms. Franczak have disseminated their theories on the possible links between Mr. Epstein, the CIA, the private islands and the Clinton. Now, “Trueanon” has become obsessed with giving meaning to another emerging saga of our time: what they call “the mass integration event”, starting with the pandemic, when millions of Americans began to live online. They argue that the Internet apparently radicalized everyone, from centrist liberals to conservative voters in the middle class.

This “political content ecosystem”, as Ms. Franczak says – and the reactionary “infotainment” flood that he triggered – turns out to be one of the most complex systems with which they have faced to date. And not only because “Trueanon” is itself a small content operation feeding on the strange dynamics of this environment.

“I always think of the Word of Talk-Radio Rush Limbaugh and which arises in relation to this,” she said. “This ecosystem is so much thicker and so much more omnipresent. He devours everyone and feeds on himself. ”

The podcast built a fervent audience of young leftists, media observers and listeners who have matured at a time of crisis that are overlapping. On the Patreon platform, “Trueanon” is now classified among the five main podcasts and has more than 40,000 paid subscribers, which results in about $ 180,000 in monthly income for hosts.

Over 500 episodes in, “Trueanon” has established itself as a pillar in the current little universe of podcasts and online media on the left. It is often grouped with the “Dirtbag on the left”, the nickname for creators and consumers of podcasts in mid-amers who agitated for democratic socialism and Bernie Sanders, often in roughly formulated calls to their mainly white male audience.

The hosts of the show reject this label, not because they are delicate on their political opinions, but because “Trueanon” is not in order to defend a specific political project.

Joshua Citarella, the host of “Doomscroll”, the youtube online YouTube program on online political cultures, said that “Trueanon” had built a “heterogeneous public” which includes libertarians and conservatives.

“Brace and Liz plunge without fear in these deep and ideologically complicated questions that their listeners want to help digest,” said Citarella. “Things like accelerationism and marginal theories. But they bring him a relevant and radical analysis, without making soap box stands. ”

Their political opinions, however, are extremely specific. Mr. Belden is a self -proclaimed Marxist who has worked variously as a florist, union organizer and member of the merchant navy. In 2017, he went to Syria to fight as a volunteer with Kurdish rebels against the Islamic State and set his way through the conflict. The adventure made him famous on the left online.

Ms. Franczak recalled that her mother had left her school to study to attend the 2003 Iraq war demonstrations, starting her political conscience. Later, she immersed herself in online conversations around the 2008 financial crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement and criticism from the Democratic Party of the Obama era, learning everything she could on monetary policy.

Their parallel pasts fueled their Gonzo appetites, their sometimes obsessive approach to the subjects that fascinate them. In 2021, the pair produced a series of 19 parties on the federal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell on accusations of sex trafficking. Mr. Belden and Ms. Franczak attended the procedure every day at the Palais de Justice Federal in downtown New York.

“Much of what we do is to fight the world in which we live in a rigorous and serious way,” said Ms. Franczak. “But a large part is also how our friendship works, and I think people really respond.”

A few days after their event at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, the three gathered in their Williamsburg studio to record an afternoon episode on the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Sitting around a coffee table, Mr. Belden took blows in a vape pen, and he and Mrs. Franczak began to speak of the disorienting flow of conspiracy theories, political recriminations, points and unleashed mythologies in the hours that followed the murder of Mr. Kirk. Nearby, Mr. Goldberg played with a digital camera while listening.

The hosts agreed that the left did not seem to understand the importance of Mr. Kirk for the conservative movement. Mr. Belden then noted that certain far -right social media accounts Wait that Mr. Kirk’s killer was publicly executed on television.

“You see, this is an excellent example of this information ecosystem in which we live,” she said. “There is the network reaction, the reaction to the reaction. There are all the different forms of psychosis that occur throughout the political spectrum. It is a major event. ”

“It’s just strange, bizarre moments, the man. Things get stranger to the week,” added Mr. Belden, shaking his head.

They agreed with the need for “more theorization” to give meaning at the time – but they also agreed that there was already too much theorization, too many books and too much content.

In other words, it was the ideal moment for “Trueanon” to record an episode.