A Time of Monsters: How the Right Conquered YouTube and podcasting in the Early Trump years

Guest lecture by Reece Peck by invitation of DESIRE and ECHO
Brussels
​18.5.26

In this presentation, Reece Peck argued that the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement cannot be understood without first explaining how the Right captured YouTube and podcasting in the mid-2010s. It offers a historical account of that transformation, tracing how online video-once seen as an open, even liberal, experimental media space—came to be dominated by right-wing content creators and alternative media networks. Rather than treating influencers and podcasting as recent or purely technological developments, the talk situates them within a broader shift in the U.S. media system, as younger audiences moved away from cable news toward online platforms. YouTube's open digital infrastructure proved critically consequential, enabling a new generation of "ideological entrepreneurs" to build large, loyal audiences outside the institutional constraints of traditional journalism. Understanding how the right conquered online video and podcasting-and whether progressives can reclaim it—has never been more urgent. The 2024 election was widely described as "the influencer election," in which Trump's campaign deployed a masculinist, alt-media strategy targeting young men. This presentation contends that such success was not improvised but built on years of embeddedness within YouTube's alternative political media culture. The platform rewards not just virality but long-term audience loyalty, parasocial relationships, and stylistic authenticity-assets that cannot be manufactured during a single election cycle. During his time in Brussels Peck also gave a PhD masterclass to students from both the VUB and the ULB.

Reece Peck is an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center and is the author of Fox Populism (Cambridge, 2019). He writes for The Hill and Jacobin and provides commentary for CNN, NBC, and The New York Times.