Who the Hell is Steven Crowder? feat. Byron McKoy (Excerpt)
Byron McKoy and Posting Through It dissect Steven Crowder’s rise—a Canadian-turned-conservative podcaster with 6M+ YouTube subscribers—from child actor (PBS’ Arthur, 2009’s To Save a Life) to failed stand-up comic, whose crude Tea Party-era videos ("Obama’s Moobs", 2009) and Islamophobic/anti-Semitic jokes (Lone Wolf Diaries) fueled his media career via Breitbart (2009) and Fox News (2010–2013), despite internal backlash, including Greg Gutfeld’s leaked DMs calling him "milk-ordering." His 2012 CPAC N-word controversy and 2013 Hannity feud marked a pivot to unfiltered right-wing commentary, cementing his role as a polarizing conservative media force. [Automatically generated summary]
And last week I recorded an episode with the folks over at Posting Through It as part of their Who the Hell is series, helping them figure out who the hell Stephen Crowder is.
So nice to touch base and talk shop with Mike and Jared.
They're Jared, not ours.
Both are great.
But for folks who don't know, Posting Through It, it's a political news podcast that explores the intersection of modern politics and social media through independent reporting, analysis, and commentary.
I feel like if you've been walking in these woods of right-wing commentary, extremism research, you have probably read something or heard something or seen something that Jared Holt or Michael Hayden have done.
Wonderful independent journalists providing analysis and commentary on all your favorite awful things.
Recently, they've had guests like Ken Klippenstein, Will Sommer, Mehdi Hassan, Amanda Moore, and more.
But if this sounds like your kind of thing, feel free to press pause, turn it off, go subscribe to their show wherever you get your podcasts.
And, you know, if you're pod curious, here's a little taste of my appearance where we determine who the hell Steven Crowder is.
Welcome back to Posting Through It.
You know what it is.
I'm Jared Holt.
And I'm Michael Edison-Hayden.
And I'm Byron McCoy.
Today's episode is another installment in our Who the Hell biographical series, where we take a closer look at notable figures associated with the online right.
You can scroll back in our feed to find previous installments.
We've covered everyone from Nick Fuentes to Candace Owens to Dave Portnoy to Matt Taibbi to Bill Maher.
Today's subject is Steven Crowder, who is one of the biggest podcasters in the conservative movement.
Certainly at his peak, was arguably the biggest.
Yeah.
While he's not exactly a household name, he is undeniably a big deal in right-wing media.
According to the metrics that Crowder has shared, there have been days where his show has been the most watched live stream online, including Election Night 2024.
Stephen Crowder has 2.5 million followers on X, more than 3 million followers on Facebook, 1.5 on Instagram, 1.2 on TrueSocial.
His podcast called Louder with Crowder bills itself as the number one conservative daily show.
He has nearly 6 million followers on YouTube and nearly 2 million followers on Rumble, an alternative video platform.
His podcast episodes regularly earn hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of views each.
So you're getting the idea here.
He's a fairly big deal, at least in the world of conservative politics.
This episode will look at Crowder's rise to fame, seeking to explain how a guy raised in Canada came to become one of the most prolific right-wing media personalities of the last decade here in the U.S. We'll make stops along the way to cover the personal and professional scandals that have at points threatened to tank his career.
And we'll explain what the deal is with the show he's made his name hosting.
Some points in this timeline are a little murky, but we've tried our best to corroborate as much as we can.
In the process, we sent requests for comment, requests for information, for media contacts available on Stephen Crowder's website and a few other sources that you'll hear along the way.
We even invited Stephen Crowder to sit down and chat with us ahead of recording.
But at the time we're taping this, we did not receive a response.
Joining us to help explain Crowder is Byron McCoy, co-host the podcast Louder Than Crowder, where he and his co-hosts actually sit down and watch his content slop for the rest of us.
We sure do.
Thanks, Mike, Jared, so much for having me on this show.
Big fan of both of the, you know, both of you, the work you do.
It was actually ShitPost as well as QAA, Fever Dreams, Rest in Peace, and of course, the GOATs over at Knowledge Fight that were very influential in me starting this little program, Louder Than Crowder, which of course is the podcast about the podcast, Louder with Crowder.
But yeah, you're right.
Stephen is unexpectedly influential.
He's managed to keep his head down enough that he doesn't become like the headline news story, but he remains, like you said, one of the most popular, unfortunately, right-wing conservative commentators that are out there.
Well, I mean, he's definitely, he's, he was better.
He's dipping a bit.
But yeah, he's done this.
He's been able to kind of silo an audience of what he wishes were young men between the ages of 16 and 30, but from more likely uncle-aged and up, very much like VFW Hall folks, friends of his dad, we always like to say, you know, claiming to both be an alternative to liberal late night comedy shows as well as the only source for truthful news.
You know, after his show, he suggests that you turn off the news and come back the next day when he's on.
That's the only media you should be taking in.
But what made you so interested in Stephen Crowder?
Because as you and I were working together doing the research for this episode, I kept coming to the impression that Stephen Crowder is woefully undercovered in the press and like completely underappreciated for the star that he is in conservative media.
I came to Stephen and kind of all of this, this, I guess, genre of contents after the failed Hillary Clinton campaign for presidency.
I started digging into conservative content to kind of understand how we could get to the place we found ourselves.
In 2016, I was starting out with Ben Shapiro, tuned into Get Off My Lawn with Gavin McGinnis.
I listened to Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Milo Yiannopoulos, even early back before the algo was as like tight as it is now, my algo was fully cooked.
Folks listening may have seen the Change My Mind videos pop up on YouTube.
They don't really do that so much anymore, but I know that that's how I was introduced to him back in 2017.
It was the I'm Pro Gun Change My Mind.
I wasn't terribly political at the time and wasn't really educated in much of this.
I was watching suggested videos on a Friday night with friends.
And me being from Montana and having like veteran friends, one of the people I was hanging out with that night was a veteran, I kind of got tricked by Stephen.
I was like, hey, this guy, he's kind of level-headed, you know, talking about gun culture.
And at the end, he convinced people even to go register for to pick up a gun.
And a week later, he went shooting with them.
And I was like, who the hell is this guy?
He's not level-headed.
Spoiler alert, guys.
And I continued to take in Stephen.
And after some time yelling to myself about his content, I started doing it into a microphone, which has been a little bit more helpful.
So that's kind of my light little journey into this descent into, yeah, Crowder, someone I think has been not covered as much as he should be.
For full disclosure here, Jara, just to say, like, you folks are experts in Crowder, and my only experience with him has been just seeing him, seeing his stupid ass sitting in a chair as like a meme.
So I'm actually more representative of the audience, probably.
We're like, who is this?
Who is this insufferable motherfucker who's always making a smug face?
I'm here.
I'm recovering from shingles.
And, you know, I'm going to be doing my best to fight through this.
And I'm looking forward to being waterboarded with Stephen's incredible jokes.
With a sales pitch like that, I think it's time we start answering the big question, which is, who the hell?
Who the hell?
Who the hell is Steven Crowder?
From Stand-Up to Screen00:14:15
It's July 7th, 1989.
The Grateful Dead plays a historic show in Philadelphia, drawing more than 100,000 fans out to John F. Kennedy Stadium for the venue's last concert before it was shut down.
The first commercial internet providers are starting to pop up.
Political revolutions are underway in Eastern Europe.
The world is irreversibly changing.
Far away, Stephen Crowder was born in Detroit, Michigan.
While the subject of today's episode was born in the Motor City, his family moved to Montreal when he was three years old.
In other words, he grew up Canadian.
Stephen's childhood, you know, we're drawing from a Daily Beast profile in 2013 for a lot of this.
Stephen Crowder told the publication at the time that his parents grew up religious, but weren't too observant before the birth of him and his older brother, Jordan.
After that, he said his parents recommitted to the faith as born-again Christians.
Stephen said his parents really stressed faith to him and his brother, particularly when he came to sex.
He said he got the talk when he was just four years old because they didn't want me to think about it as something that couldn't be discussed, just something that is meant to be between a husband and a wife.
This will come back up later.
In school, Stephen said he was often bullied.
He described himself as a comic book nerd and woefully unathletic, which kind of explains his frustration with any adaptation to comic book source material, things like gender swaps, sexuality, or any ounce of androgyny or asymmetrical haircuts, as well as his distaste for the big game and his halftime and the halftime show satanic rituals.
But yeah, he also, this is interesting, got really into women's swimming around 2022, which is interesting.
Weird timing there, huh?
He told the Daily Beast that he spent most of his childhood afraid, recalling the time he walked away from a fight against a bully out of fear.
And it was that experience, he said, that led him into showbiz.
He didn't want to be afraid anymore.
So that's what we've got for his early childhood.
But at just 12 years old, Stephen Crowder breaks into show business.
He lands a role voicing a character named Alan Powers, a.k.a. The Brain, on the PBS children's show, Arthur.
This voice acting gig is pretty short-lived, but it did get Steven's foot in the door of the entertainment industry.
It remains his most mainstream credit to date.
Also, he, I mean, it was an early meme.
Like the clenched fist meme that you see is the Brian Powers, aka the brain, clenching his fists.
So even before the change my mind, Stephen had that early hit in meme world.
He would, though, go on to have minor roles in a handful of productions.
He also did a commercial for a yogurt in a tube, basically the Canadian version of Go-Gurt.
Did you finish the tubes?
No.
Did you finish all the tubes?
Dad, did you finish all the tubes?
So he's the kid there.
He's the kid running around saying, hey, did you eat the yogurt in a tube?
And the commercial ends with the dad kind of smiling at him and whatever.
I'm always fascinated by the child actor psychology and the different directions it can go.
I assume it's going to only go in a good direction here.
Oh, clearly, yeah.
That, as far as I know, is his first on-camera credit as a child actor.
But he goes on to do have some credits in a couple of small production films, right, Byron?
Yeah.
I mean, his biggest film credit was for this 2009 Christian drama called To Save a Life.
It's a story about a popular kid who re-evaluates his life after a friend commits suicide.
It's such a kind of tonally bizarre film.
It's almost got like Van Wilder energy until this kid comes into a school with a gun and like publicly takes his life in the hallway.
And it bounces back and forth between themes like that.
You know, Steven, though, his character is pretty much the comic relief.
He plays Doug Moore and his nickname that's assigned to him in that film is the big ugly, which we like to jokingly call him from time to time on our program.
But yeah, he's kind of like the main character's douchey friend.
Where's mine?
Why don't you get your girlfriend and get one for you?
Hey, you know, I don't have a girlfriend.
And Siam Nalatte either.
She got you on that one, dude.
Yeah, you know, your mom got me, okay?
She's an attractive woman.
Your mom and I, we get along.
I'll talk to you about that later.
The big ugly has jokes.
Call me the big ugly one more time.
I'm going to kick your ass.
It's hard.
It's hard to do.
Okay.
No, no hard feelings.
You want to get out of here?
You know I don't need much to skip calculus.
The whole film is available on YouTube.
That bad boy's got 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think qualifies as a stinker.
Someone likes it.
But Byron, you pointed us towards this Q ⁇ A with the cast from the movie.
It doesn't seem like they're big fans of Steven.
Jared, the vibes are bad.
There's nothing.
In the final cut, Doug was more of a jerk than funny.
I noticed.
I came across as much more unlikable than kind of a Weisenheimer.
I was like, I want to hit me.
Yeah, I know I do.
Go ahead.
No, we'll stop the tape.
So his co-stars in the film are just like, yeah, go ahead, just punch this motherfucker in the face.
They're joking around, but what is it behind every joke?
Is a grain of truth?
Yeah, and most certainly there's no like good moments of Doug on the cutting room floor.
There's absolutely no way that they would have made him that unlikable if that wasn't him.
So I have trouble believing that.
So he starts doing stand-up comedy.
Did I have that correctly?
That's around the time when he starts picking up stand-up comedy.
And he actually finds a little success in it, which is also, I think, pretty rare for people who experiment with stand-up comedy.
The early days are kind of tough.
He's been working on his stand-up career for a very long time.
I think even before his role in To Save a Life, but he got his big break at Just for Laps in Montreal, where in 2006, when he was only 18, and this is true, he was the youngest comedian to ever perform at the festival.
And that's something that was kind of significant because the youngest person before him was actually Chris Rock, who was 19.
So having performed there at 18 earned him quite a bit of attention.
It got him booked on XM radio shows, which that was a big deal back then.
That was like one of the major ways that comedians were being found was on XM satellite radio.
And then he claims to have toured across North America.
I don't have any information specifically stating dates that he performed, but.
Yeah, I tried to find tour dates and I spent so long trying to find some archived video somewhere of like his comedy sets.
And I found pages where the videos used to exist, but no videos to be found.
It seems like a lot of that got lost in the dredge of the internet.
But he had a promising start in stand-up, right?
I mean, he went on and did more stuff, right?
This is huge.
Yeah.
This is one that I was really hoping that you would have been able to find because I've also searched high and low for this.
He went on to win the national So You Think You're Funny MySpace comedy contest, which, yeah, I haven't been able to find any footage.
You found something from 2008 archived on his personal MySpace page.
Yeah, yeah.
I found an archive of his 2008 MySpace page.
And the tagline he has on his profile is, it's getting crowded in here.
Actually, can we pause?
I'm going to be sick.
This is rough.
This is more a success than like most people that show up to an open mic night get.
You know, you get to perform at one of the biggest comedy festivals in the world, but especially Canada, and people are saying your name next to Chris Rock, right?
So it seems to be a pretty promising start, but Steven's stand-up career ends up being pretty short in the end of it.
But despite this, Steven Crowder, like, he makes this sort of short-lived stint, this like early, early success in stand-up comedy, a core part of his identity, a core part of his origin story.
But from everything I found, it seems he just flamed out super early.
I mean, he, on occasion, will do a quote-unquote stand-up show.
I caught him not too far away from here, maybe three, three hours away, three years ago.
I watched him perform.
I don't know what he was preparing to do with this.
It seemed like he was going to do a stand-up special, but most of the jokes that weren't just kind of racist observations of the town he was in were jokes that he had performed when he was 19.
I've compared shows that he had when he was like underage, like not able to drink in clubs in LA.
And he was telling these jokes as a full-grown adult man in his mid-30s.
So playing the role of the audience member who has never really encountered Crowder before.
Just in terms of looks, what he looks like, this is a guy who kind of looks like a, you know, an index finger turned into a person.
I don't know how to describe it.
He's just kind of like straight up and down white guy.
There's not much other way to describe him.
He comes out on the stage.
What's the energy like on stage when Crowder comes out to rock the mic?
And is the crowd very much there to see him?
Are they there to see other people?
I mean, it was electric.
Mike, it was entirely electric.
The time I saw him, the venue was at half capacity because we were just coming out of COVID.
This was the first time in a while that I had went in public unmasked.
So that was really cool.
I sat at a table because I went by myself.
No one would go with me.
Sat at a table with a nurse who was complaining about limitations on her job and was talking about the Benny Johnson podcast, which is pretty cool.
Yeah, I mean, vibes, for the most part, they're not comedy fans.
They're just fans of his show.
You know, the same thing could be said when people go to like Joe Rogan stand-up shows or even Mark Maron.
You know, these people are comedians, but I think first and foremost, at this point in their career, they're podcasters.
So people do love the local racist jokes, though, I'll tell you that.
Big fans of the year and that.
We'll get into some of that in a minute.
But closing up his early life, around the time he's 18 years old, he moves back to the U.S., attends Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.
He drops out after two semesters, but he will also cite this in his origin story, in his credentials, being like, listen, I attended two semesters at a college in Vermont and I took some courses on journalism and media, like 101 courses, right?
It's weird credential to flex, but whatever.
I'm not sure exactly why he dropped out of college, but I think it's possible he thought he had a chance to make it big in show business.
I couldn't blame him if he dropped out because he wanted to chase that dream, but I don't know for sure.
I mean, I dropped out of college to be a touring post-hardcore singer in a band for years.
And look at me now, everyone.
Here I am.
No, one thing that I think before we jump away from his early life that I don't know if we discussed is the role of his dad.
You mentioned his father and his mother became religious after the birth of his older brother, but it was Darren Crowder who I think imprinted his beliefs on Stephen more than anyone else.
I think that also Darren was involved as his manager when he got the roles that he did in film, you know, from the Arthur role to save a life to he did a movie.
Goodness gracious, what was it?
It's called Three Needles, which had Chloe Seveny and Lucy Lou in it, as well as Sean Ashmore.
He had a small role in that.
So like he had a chance to follow his dream.
Like, and I think it was, you know, because of his father, you know, kind of supporting him in this that he wanted to do it.
I think that a driving force of Steven Crowder is to make his dad proud.
So in a 2018 interview with Ben Shapiro, Crowder said he has aspirations of being an award-winning actor.
Sorry.
I got blindsided by that.
And if that didn't work, maybe hosting a late night comedy show.
Oh my God.
Has anybody, just an aside, has anyone seen Todd Solon's film Storytelling?
This is like the, this is, this is like Scooby, the, the main character from that, where he just tells people he's going to host a late night comedy show and everybody starts laughing at him.
Throw Hands, Israel00:06:02
Anyway, adding it to my cue.
Steven Crowder would never realize his dreams of making it big in Hollywood.
Why?
You should have put spoiler alerts in here.
Instead, he pivoted to another form of entertainment.
Is it entertainment?
I don't know.
What do we call it?
Political commentary?
Is that what we're going to say it is?
We'll go with political commentary.
So political commentary.
In 2009, Steven started uploading political commentary videos to YouTube.
You may be wondering, Stephen seemed to have a fairly promising stand-up comedy career.
Seem to.
Why did he pivot into political commentary?
Well, a 2009 installment of Crowder's Lone Wolf Diaries offers us some clues.
You want to read this, Byron?
Of course.
More than anything.
When it comes to the entertainment industry, there is an unspoken policy.
No conservatives allowed.
Sure, I could explain in graphic detail the grandeur of my sex capades.
this is hypothetical, of course, as my sex life is non-existent, or go off on an anti-Christian tirade to much applause.
If I were a dame, I would surely make...
Come on.
I would surely make.
Okay, I got this.
You signed up for the episode.
You got to ride the train.
I would surely make insightful remarks about my monthly cycle and the shortcomings of men in the boudoir.
All too critical accolades.
Begin uttering the words, Muslim terrorism sucks, however, and you will literally begin to hear the sound of sphincters puckering throughout your general vicinity.
He sure thinks a lot about sex for a guy who proclaimed at this time to have no sex life.
Yeah.
Also, he's listening so closely to the air for the hope of hearing a sphincter bucker, which that's a weird mental image that he's got.
He's kind of jam-crammed into something that doesn't have anything to do with asses.
You don't do that, Mike?
I know, like, whenever I'm on the bus or whatever, my ears are tuned sharp.
If you know, you know, I'm not shy of freaky thoughts, but I just, I just find, you know, it's possibly because of that, I'm able to get a little bit of a red flag by the fact that he's like looking in the room and thinking about sphincters.
So his YouTube videos at first are kind of formulaic.
They're all a few minutes long, and he's uploading them every Thursday.
And some of these are just brutal, brutal cringe.
I'm going to play a clip from the first video he uploaded titled Go Team Israel, featuring Obama's moobs.
Man, boobs.
But then, Byron, I want you to just tell us a little bit about these early uploads.
A lot of people have been siding with Palestine.
There's a lot of anti-Semitism going on.
Some people are like, well, you know, the only reason it's like this is because Israel oppresses them.
Okay, let's assume for a minute that that's true.
All right.
Why doesn't Palestine just oppress Israel then?
Well, because they can't.
And why is that?
Well, because they don't have the power, the technology to do so.
Why is that?
Because, because, because and then her head explodes.
I know you wouldn't expect it, but actually some craniums have exploded in this thought process.
It's a scientific fact.
The truth is that it's not.
My cranium is a good idea.
They're right.
I mean, a lot of these other countries are living in the dark ages, but we have to ask, why is that?
Israel has arguably the best military intel in the world.
They crap in sand dunes.
Israel has a high quality of living and is often at the forefront of modern technology.
They sell rugs.
Why do you think that is?
Bro. Dude.
Yeah.
Fucking one Arab guy in the show.
Trigger warning, man.
I'm about to throw hands.
I'm a little tired with the fucking shingles, but I will get up and I'll throw some hands over that.
What are you fucking talking about?
Who fucking shit in dunes, motherfucker?
This dumb kid.
Yeah, sitting on YouTube.
It's not very subtle.
No, and honestly.
Yeah, I mean, that could be the theme of this.
Yeah.
No, you tell me to describe things like the dark Pelosi with water boarding, the Obama song, I gots a peace prize, which I think was the one that really broke through the mainstream.
These are all kind of formulaic of the time YouTuber videos, you know, kind of mimicking the style of early influencers like Jenna Marbles or Smosh or Shane Dawson, but bringing to the table kind of the crass, frankly gross political beliefs that he's talking about at the dinner table at his house.
So it's, I think it's surprising to him that it, that it wasn't more successful because he puts a lot of effort into this being very much of the time and like puts a lot of time into thinking about YouTube as a platform, which, you know, eventually follows him to where he ends up.
But I want to inject one other point that I think might be useful context for people who are listening and regularly listen to our show.
You might be like shocked at like how slavishly he lathers up Israel here because things have changed pretty radically in that like, yeah, the populist right has become much more openly anti-Semitic and those kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have become really dominant on the right and kind of held off almost at this point only by Trump himself.
They're really, really growing.
It's almost hard to imagine someone doing something like this now.
Why Obama Had To Be Gay00:06:13
This is what you would do this now online and he would have been hounded by people being like good goy or whatever, like good goy behavior, good goy content or whatever, good goy slop.
I mean, it's it is it is a thing of its time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this kind of Islamophobia, you know, just open, you know, racism towards Arab people is also very of the time.
And I don't say that to write Stephen a blank check and like let him off the hook here, but also context for that.
I do want to say of all the early videos I watched, the best one is where he's walking around sticking a microphone in people's faces and asking them questions about Joe Biden while dressed up as a cartoon bear, a big bear.
Yeah.
He's doing man on the street interviews asking people who Joe Biden was.
And I guarantee you he didn't just publish absolutely every one of those and kept everything in full context, right?
He didn't just approach people dressed as a bear to confuse them on the street and then only publish the dumbest takes or most confused or I guess dismissive takes, right?
Dude, if a bear walked up to me, a guy dressed as a bear walked up to me and started asking me about politics, I would feel a responsibility to just unload the stupidest shit in my head.
Just like the dumbest passing thought I've had while like taking a shit and just give it to the bear.
The bear craves my tone.
There's also the Nick Shirley angle to this also, where it's just if somebody comes up to you in that context, in any weird context and puts a microphone in your face, you're like, oh my God, it's a pedophile.
I better get out of here.
And don't forget that there's two bodyguards behind the camera in face masks and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Normal.
Really cool, normal stuff.
And I feel comfortable talking about children in a daycare with you.
How benevolent, balevolent.
Amazing.
The prejudice minds.
Give that kid a Pulitzer Prize.
Anyway, back to Steven.
He's still trying to find something to do with his stand-up at this time, but it changes quite a bit.
He's got a new target audience.
Tell me about this.
Yeah.
I mean, around this time, he starts doing stand-up for tea party events.
And I believe we have a couple examples.
Are you going to play some of these, Jared?
Yeah, yeah, we have some clips.
Let's listen to Steven Crowder's stand-up.
This first one is from 2009, I believe.
It's at a tea party rally.
He's some of the entertainment.
Weather, the scorching heat.
Give it to yourselves right now for stand out here for the cause.
You guys stick it through, man.
And you know what that means?
The global warming alarmists are out in flock.
Seen these people?
They're like, have you been outside?
It's shiny and warm, and it's not even mid-July.
Proof of global warming for you.
We had a different word for it as a kid.
What was it?
Oh, yeah.
Summer.
Boom.
I have a friend who's actually, they're militant environmentalists out here right now.
We got the cap and trade tax.
Yeah, let's hear for the cap and trade tax.
All right, relax.
I didn't pass it.
Okay.
Awesome.
You are correct, sir.
Yes.
Just really good shit.
And this is an audio podcast, but in these videos, the camera crew keeps cutting to the audience to get their reactions.
And I told Byron and Mike before we were recording, the people in this crowd are like the oldest people I've ever seen, which tracks for a tea party rally around this time.
This next clip is from Tcon Midwest.
This is a couple years later, but it's another example of the kind of comedy he was doing for tea party activists.
And the media, though, they have a, they like Obama.
They like this guy.
I don't want to say the media has a toward love affair with Barack Obama, or even that Brian Williams wants to be his girlfriend, but.
Do you guys get it?
The punchline is that he's gay.
Oh, huh.
It feels like there are multiple angles to try to get Barack Obama to be gay.
There was the story about him smoking crack in the limousine.
Yeah, that was like the pseudo-journalistic one.
And then there would be like, so many people want to have gay sex with Obama, like in the comedian style.
There's just like different ways to try to make him gay.
Yeah.
And when that didn't work, they were like, well, maybe his wife's secretly a man.
Maybe his wife's a guy.
Let's pitch that one.
Yeah.
And that one's sticking around.
There's no way that guy's straight.
Problem solved.
It is sane.
Let's listen to a little more of this.
I mean, you had to name this guy the sexiest man in America, Barack Obama, by People Magazine.
Really?
The sexiest man in America?
Like, you give that to Hugh Jackman, not the guy who looks like the photo negative of Alfred E. Newman, okay?
Aw.
I think it's interesting.
Even people in the crowd are like, oh.
Yeah, that was fun.
Don't know about that one.
One style of making a joke or even a statement or doing anything is to definitely don't find someone who is like objectively more attractive than you and be like, what's up with everybody finding this person so hot?
I mean, really, right?
I mean, can you believe this?
Can you believe that actor Michael B. Jordan?
It's like, what on earth are these women thinking?
Are they out of their fucking minds?
Am I right?
Who's got some laughs, right?
You know, it's just really, it doesn't really work very well when you're Steven Crowder talking about talking about Barack Obama.
I don't know.
The sexuality obsession is kind of a bizarre thing that the right has anyway.
I mean, you noticed that when Don Lemon got arrested, the comment sections on pretty much absolutely everything focus on his sexuality and what's happening to him in prison in their heads.
You know, they're obsessed with the junk.
Pajama TV Watermark Mystery00:04:51
Can't get it out.
Even if you were thinking, well, you give Steven the benefit of the doubt here.
Like, sure, he's making these videos, but he's pursuing stand-up.
But I just want to play this clip, winding the clock back again a couple years to a Tea Party rally in Dallas, just to be clear that Steven Crowder is all about the Tea Party movement.
It's a mic drop at the end.
If you didn't pick that up, God bless America, mic drop.
Yeah, sometimes you got to do it.
So he gets noticed by Pajama Media, now called PJ Media, and owned by Salem Media Group.
Are they still kicking around, by the way?
And Breitbart News and files video columns under their Big Hollywood vertical.
Most of the posts appear to be aggregating his YouTube videos, but there's some occasional blog in the mix there too.
The first few with 2009 datelines are titled Getting Louder with Crowder.
I guess they found a rhyme, right?
So yeah, that would go on to be the name of his podcast, right?
So I was a little unclear exactly on the timeline of Steven Crowder's early work in right-wing media.
I reached out to some folks, including Steven's team.
I reached out to Breitbart.
I reached out to a handful of different folks, organizations, didn't get a lot of useful information back.
But here is the timeline, the best I could figure out with all of that in mind.
So in January 2009, his first Breitbart article appears with his byline.
The point of the article is just to promote the second video on his YouTube channel.
I am curious how he got plugged into Breitbart so early.
I don't know if Breitbart had a like unpaid contributor system similar to Huffington Post at the time, right?
Like if he could just sign up and like fill out a couple forms and be able to post on Breitbart or if he was chosen and that sort of thing.
I didn't get any clarity on that from Breitbart when I reached out.
So there's kind of like two things he is posting on Breitbart.
Short little articles to promote his YouTube videos, which he calls video columns, and written columns, blogs, I guess, in a series called Lone Wolf Diaries.
In June 2009, the first video on his YouTube channel with a pajama media PJ TV, their sort of video offshoot at the time, a watermark for that brand is on there.
That video was of him impersonating Keith Olberman on MSNPC and having a fake argument with him, doing a parody or like fake, like, if they had had me on TV, this is what I would have said kind of thing.
Would later credit PJ TV and I guess whatever compensation he was getting for these for being able to up the production value of his videos.
In October 2010, the PJ TV watermark is swapped out for a watermark for a nonprofit called the National Center for Public Policy Research.
In a 2023 newsletter of theirs, I came across the orchestra described itself as a, quote, communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today's public policy problems.
That's some good old Washington, D.C. mumbo jumbo shit.
I'm not sure why this is missing in most of the biographies you'll find online from Stephen because the title card says Loud Earth Crowder sponsored by National Center.
I reached out to National Center to ask about this, and the spokesperson who responded to me had no idea what I was talking about or asking about, was like, we don't partner or like sponsor anything.
And I was like, well, here's a post on your website from the time that says Stephen had, quote, completed 18 videos with the nonprofit, which I thought was kind of a strange choice of word.
It makes me wonder if there was a program or, you know, what that arrangement was like.
But we'll just put that as a footnote here.
National Center Mystery00:14:52
Afterwards, his videos are sponsored by Liberty Alliance, which was a media company spun up in the remnants of the Tea Party movement.
That doesn't seem to last too long.
That website, as far as I can tell, doesn't exist anymore.
But most importantly, during this time, he also gets the attention of Fox News, and that offers him a paid contributor contract.
That's like kind of a big deal.
I think, wasn't he also one of the youngest contributors at that point?
Well, I mean, if he's under, if he's under 55, like, yeah.
Anyway, he starts appearing on shows like Hannity and Red Eye, etc.
Specifically on Red Eye in 2010, Amy Schumer famously questioned whether he should even call himself a comedian.
My point by saying that, you know, you don't think it should be used as a bargaining tool.
Yeah.
I mean, as far as the kind of point of the column is that abstinence is the one taboo issue regarding sex.
I mean, it's like, oh, it'll be a dirty stand-up comic.
You're cracking new ground there, Copernicus.
But once you talk about abstinence, everyone all of a sudden they put you like, right now we have to talk about it.
Because who is this kid who's talking about abstinence?
Well, it's who's this kid who's, you know, 23.
You don't know who you're going to be sexually yet.
So to talk about it with such authority and arrogance.
I don't know who I'm going to be what?
You don't know who you're going to be sexually yet.
You're going to be into really weird things in about a decade.
Oh, I have no doubt.
I have no doubt.
Trust me.
And the thing is, it says that there should be no confidence.
So there should be no confidence.
You know, you slip by the dirty comedian thing, but honestly, you call yourself a comedian, but you don't do it that much.
Like I go fishing a couple times a year, but I don't introduce myself on TV as a fisherman.
Wow.
This is not really personal for a concept about abstinence.
I'm saying the whole thing.
Wow is right.
You could tell it really seems to catch him off guard too.
He seems a little upset by it.
He's hurt by that.
I feel like at this point he's he's been in a, you know, in safer territory with not as much pushback.
He's kind of been doing everything, again, from behind a screen or, you know, in safe territory.
But speaking of behind the screen, she's referencing some columns that he had done recently as a group contributor for Fox about abstinence.
And this is all in his kind of trademark, flowery, overwritten style.
Women are all dames, that kind of stuff.
Those are no longer available on the Fox News website.
They are definitely on the Wayback Machine, though, and are very fun to read if you ever get the chance.
Got into my head, I like could not byline a piece like this.
Oh, it's a nightmare.
We covered it all on the podcast, and it was a very painful thing to read.
His style, very much Tumblr era, but like, I don't know, bro culture.
It's just like some weird blend of that.
It's terrible.
And at Fox, I mean, no one really liked him.
And I'm not surprised.
The lovely and talented Vic Berger released some DMs that he said he received from the from Guttfeld, who you heard in that red eye clip from 2017, in which Greg said that he once saw Crowder sitting cross-legged at a bar and ordering milk.
Yeah.
Not even chocolate milk, no flavor in the milk, just a glass of milk cross-legged on the floor of a bar.
He says that Crowder calls himself Gutfeld.
That is, says that Crowder calls himself a comedian but never performs, suggests that Crowder has, quote, issues with his sexuality.
Nice.
And claims everyone at Fox News hates working with him.
Vic Berger is an amazing satirist, but we reached out to him to make sure that those screenshots of messages he received from Greg Gutfeld were legit and not, you know, a bit.
And he said they are 100% real.
Love that.
With exclamation points.
That's a Vic guarantee.
And Vic is definitely going to make a cameo when we, when Mike Cranovich gets the who the hell is treatment.
Oh, absolutely.
Around this time, our boy Crowder is doing a speaking circuit on college campuses.
A college Republican club invited him to speak, and he went to do right-wing stand-up and discussion.
There's some light coverage in university student papers of this, and the reviews are lackluster.
Seems most people found him kind of annoying and thought his comedy was too obviously pushing conservative talking points.
Oh, it was a huge shock there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing.
We've talked about on prior episodes, you know, where, you know, they're like, why aren't there any conservative comedians or right-wing comedians?
Or we talked about it, I think, in the context of Dave Rubin, maybe.
He got a little mini one on our premium.
Yeah.
It's like these people are trying to be funny, but they're like so ideological that it makes it not funny, right?
You have to be like kind of lighthearted.
Otherwise, you're just like, you know, formatting your political rant with the occasional punchline.
Yeah, you can't directly reference policy in your stand-up bits.
I just don't think it works.
Unless you're on, you know, at, I think, where he was on C-SPAN, there's a great clip of him that we pulled where he's wearing a turquoise sweater with a polo shirt underneath.
But yeah, the same with Midwest Tcon.
Like he wasn't even really killing there.
And he thinks that he can take that to a college campus and not be seen as boring and pushing conservative talking points.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to read that review.
If all your talking points are about just like what's on Fox News and being like, Muslims, am I right?
College kids are going to be like, huh?
What?
I mean, maybe less so now that everybody's like wired into social media, but around that time, I mean, I just can't imagine this landed very well.
No.
This is Dane Cook era.
Like someone's, you've got to be splashing water in your face and making yourself look like an alien from the alien films.
Yeah, you've got to fart into the microphone.
That's what they crave.
That's funny.
Honestly, it always works.
Jumping up to 2012 now, he's still a Fox News contributor.
And this is around the time I first heard about Stephen Crowder, but I'm like a sick degenerate when it comes to politics and like have spent most of my life staring into the void.
Tell us about what happens with Crowder.
Oh, I mean, this is just when Crowder absolutely gets his shit rocked by a guy at a union protest in Michigan.
Definitely one of the moments where he broke through, at least in mainstream, you know, political coverage, I guess.
It's also viral on Twitter in a sort of non-partisan way.
Like just, it was just everywhere.
Oh, absolutely.
I was going to say kind of like Richard Spencer getting punched, but that is certainly partisan and delightful still to watch to this day.
Showing off that frog pin.
I love it.
It's a Pepe.
But yeah, Crowder, he edits this pretty deceptively and puts it up on YouTube.
And it gets picked up by his good old friends at Fox News, where he was still a contributor.
Apparently, he was there with Americans for Prosperity, which is the Koch-affiliated libertarian conservative political advocacy group.
But eventually, the unedited footage of this confrontation, it pointed more towards Stephen or his aggressive behavior may have instigated the altercation, leading the local prosecutor to decline pressing charges against the union member and people like Sam Cedar at the Majority Report and Chank at the Young Turks really did celebrate this moment and kind of blew it up.
Like I think that beyond the clips airing on Fox News, it was really the new progressive media that really brought the attention to this moment at the time.
And it was pretty delightful.
Let's keep going.
Mike, tell me about what happens in 2012.
So he does a parody rap song at CPAC in a breakout room that includes a, I don't know how to describe this.
Exactly.
I mean, he, so from my point of view, he just says the N-word, but it designs it to be like a fake out of saying the N-word, right?
That's the way it seems to be designed.
But when I hear it, it just seems like he's gleefully saying the N-word.
Yeah.
The lyrics that you're hearing are, yeah, but right now you're high.
Ain't you a big hitter?
But I'm back from the dead now bringing back all my knickers, like the pants.
It's a fake out on the N-word, but we'll listen to the clip.
I normally would not play a clip like this with a racial slur, but Steven insists that it's not.
I'll let the listeners decide.
Yeah, that lands him in a lot of hot water.
Well, you know what's interesting about that is it has some laughs.
Like there's some laughter there, but like there is this thing when, I mean, you'll notice like there is some like weird laughter that happens when Michael Richards, the Kramer, like kind of yells the N-word.
Because people, when people get, feel uncomfortable, they also laugh, right?
Like people just don't know what to do.
And you're in a setting where you're supposed to laugh.
And those laughs have that feel, like they have a little bit of a nervous high pitch.
And it's not very many laughs.
It's just like one lady.
I do have to say this is probably like the craziest CPAC breakout room I've ever seen.
I've gone to that conference like a gazillion times.
And most of the time, these breakout panels are like, they'll just put you to sleep.
Yeah.
Anyway, Crowder responded to the controversy in Huffington Post, which, as I mentioned earlier, was a news publication, but also a blogging platform at that time.
So he could have bylined something for Huffington Post despite being conservative.
Mike, do you want to read what he wrote in Huffington Post, how he defended this stunt at CPAC?
The verse was used to point out the hyper-PC, disingenuous liberals who today seek for a reason to be offended under every rock.
Then he claims that writers who pointed out the song had an N-word joke in it were engaging in, quote, character assassination.
So that's the headline about him, but it doesn't set him back too far because the next year, he's tapped to MC, the main stage, at CPAC.
Later that year, in 2013, he wound up getting canned from his Fox News gig after he went on a podcast and started bitching about doing business with the network, trying to negotiate contracts with them, and pretty explicitly criticizing Sean Hannity, who he said let liberal guests on his show just plow right over him.
And from the DMs that Greg Gutfeld sent Vic Berger, you know, supposedly with people at the network not really liking him very much.
Seemed like that was enough for his Fox News chapter to come to a close.
This is the end of a contract that he negotiated with the help of Ben Shapiro, actually.
Ben Shapiro was his entertainment lawyer.
That's how they first met, which is kind of a bizarre little coincidence, but I would imagine that this was not the advice that, you know, Ben would have given in terms of negotiating a contract.
It seems like he, well, and we'll talk a little bit later about his techniques in that as well.
He's not great at it, spoiler.
So that's most of Steven's early life and career that we could corroborate and find.
Child actor in Canada, early stand-up comic, ends up, you know, kind of flaming out pretty quick and taking a political bend.
Got PJ Media, Breitbart, Fox News, and then a pretty unceremonious firing from Fox News.
You know, before we go on to the next era of Steven Crowder's career, which would end up being sort of the defining one for him, just curious if you guys have any thoughts.
I just think that's what you get for ordering milk at a bar.
You know, you get fired.
You lose your career and you go back to the blue sheet.
You're now a YouTuber again.
I think my primary thought is not a particularly sophisticated one is he doesn't seem very funny.
And it really is a reminder that if you're a comedian, you don't have the goods.
This type of political stuff is waiting for you there as a fallback.
And it seems like there are a lot of cases like that.
There's even some cases on the left.
And he's just not funny, man.
We're now entering the Louder with Crowder.
We sure are, Jared.
I think that's probably a good spot for us to stop.
If you want to hear the rest of this conversation, it's about an hour and a half more.
The beginning of the Louder with Crowder era, and then soon followed by the, you know, rapid but deserved dissent, you know, where we are now with a, you know, man-child in a bunker.
But yeah, we talk all about that at this point.
Pop on over to the posting through it feed.
Make sure to subscribe to Jared and Mike's podcast.
Once again, I had so much fun talking with them about this, and it sounds like you'll be hearing their voices on our show very soon.
So look forward to that.
Next week, Jared and I return to talk about, oh, God, what an awful couple weeks it's been.
I'm looking forward to sharing Steven's perspective on all of that with y'all very soon.
But until then, thanks so much for listening and take care.
You've been listening to an Audio Woll original produced by Byron McCoy.