The episode features Joshua Citarella, artist, internet culture writer, and host of the Doom Scroll podcast, which reaches 100,000 weekly viewers after launching just over a year ago.

Citarella discusses his 2018 book Politogram the Post-Left, an ethnography tracking teenagers' memetic activity and political radicalization from mainstream politics to eco-anarchism and anarcho-primitivism over two years.

The conversation explores how Gen Z's unlimited internet access, combined with the collapse of the 1989 liberal democracy consensus post-2008, created a generation testing every possible political ideology through memes and shitposting.

Topics include the rise of right-wing populism across advanced economies, the left's failure to address young men's concerns, and how fringe online communities like Nick Fuentes' AFPAC are shaping real-world politics and policy.

From Gallery Artist to Internet Culture Analyst

Citarella transitioned from showing work in galleries and museums to becoming a podcaster and internet culture writer, growing his audience from 10,000 dedicated intellectuals to 100,000 weekly viewers in just over a year with Doom Scroll.

His 2018 self-published book Politogram the Post-Left examined memetic activity of teenagers involved in eco-anarchy, green anarchy, and anarcho-primitivism - movements rejecting industrial society that laid foundation for today's mimetic ecosystem.

"What I was mining at that time was kids in this Gen Z bracket who were looking at a life where the future they're looking towards is, in some cases, pretty grim" - Joshua, explaining why young people turned to radical politics.

Tracking Political Radicalization Pipelines

Citarella followed teenagers over two years through platform migrations and deplatforming across Discord, Reddit, and Twitter, watching them progress from general lefty politics at ages 13-14 to distributing eco-terrorist writings and IED manuals in encrypted Telegram channels.

"I was just spending an enormous amount of time in these communities and trying to catalog how wide the Overton window was. If you're 15, the acceptable parameters of political debate extended to Trump and Sanders, and then it extended to primitivism and transhumanism" - Joshua.

The key to predicting which trends would persist versus die off was identifying underlying problems that won't go away - downward mobility in the United States for working people has been steady for 40 years, not a temporary trend cycle.

"No one under the age of 25 is a libertarian" - Citarella's 2018 claim about the death of economic libertarianism among youth was dismissed as alien to older generations' experience but proved correct as conservative parties shifted away from libertarian economics.

Gen Z's Unprecedented Political Context

Three factors created Gen Z's unique political landscape: unlimited internet access to all text and history, birth into a world without the 1989-2020 liberal democracy consensus, and freedom from moral constraints enabling extreme shitposting and experimentation.

Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man argued liberal democracy was humanity's final socioeconomic form, creating a consensus that lasted until 2008's financial crisis splintered it into Sanders on the left and Trump on the right.

"Growing up in Gen Z, you don't have that 1989 liberal democracy consensus. Instead, you are born into a world that has no political answers for you while you're given the complete archive of the internet to trudge through every possible meme and political text" - Joshua.

Artist Daniel Keller described teenage memetic activity as a GAN (generative adversarial network) brute-forcing combinations like "monarcho-syndicalism" to test if they work as political ideologies before moving to the next experiment.

Right-Wing Populism's Global Ascendancy

The biggest trend is right-wing populism across all advanced countries including Hungary, Poland, Italy, and the United States, with constituencies that used to vote for labor interests now voting for right-wing populist candidates.

This 40-year trend tracks with the neoliberal consensus, producing not renewed trade unionism but right-wing populism as pushback to austerity and anti-immigration politics - "to the great surprise of people on the left" - Joshua.

Paleoconservatism, a term from Pat Buchanan readopted by young conservatives to differentiate from neoconservatism, has shifted the Overton window - "you watch the rhetoric of a lot of right-wing pundits, they now track with stuff that Fuentes was saying like six years ago" - Joshua.

Nick Fuentes' rise as avatar of the young far right followed the "optics debate" after Charlottesville's Unite the Right rally, where the far-right disputed whether to use pagan iconography and European aesthetics versus more palatable American nationalist imagery.

When Internet Subcultures Shape Real Politics

A small lefty anarcho-communist Discord group during the pandemic organized mutual aid networks distributing food and supplies to hundreds of people in their local communities, demonstrating direct real-world manifestation.

Nick Fuentes' AFPAC (America First Political Action Conference) represents media entities crossing over into political organizations, while Curtis Yarvin's 2010s blogging influenced JD Vance's political program despite being niche intellectual commentary.

"During the Georgia Senate runoff, Destiny mobilized his Twitch followers and had more people canvassing and knocking doors than the Capitol D Democratic Party" - Joshua, noting this got basically no mainstream press despite being a major turning point.

Raw Egg Nationalist, a Twitter account, has been "quietly influential" in propagating memes about seed oils and health that now appear in mainstream discourse, despite the poster himself not being a major media figure.

The Left's Failure With Young Men

"Whatever we have today that constitutes today's left, I don't think that thing has room for men. I don't think it has room for much of anybody. It's a few people in kind of their academic or media positions desperately clawing on to eroding power" - Joshua.

The scalable left resembles the 1970s with robust trade unions and 31% union density (now 11%), when wages and productivity were aligned - divergence happened right around the neoliberal turn in the 1970s.

"I would hear endless kind of casual misandry, and these people's political needs are not important, and it's their turn to take a back seat. I've watched them drift further and further into these other political worldviews. They would try to join left-wing groups and just be told to shut up" - Joshua.

Young men who voted for Trump in 2024 and Mamdani in 2025 exist in non-insignificant numbers - Mamdani had a plus 40 margin with men 18-29, demonstrating openness to counter-narratives from either left or right as long as they're not establishment center.

Memes as Political Infrastructure

Memes function as transmittable units of information beyond just square JPEGs - they're patterns and stories humans repeat, including vertical videos and any transmittable narrative that forms ideological worldviews.

"After having done many extensive interviews of young people who are politicized, we basically just carry these stories that either a professor told us or our dad told us - we're some amalgamation of all of these little tidbits of narrative that we piece together" - Joshua.

"Irony poisoning" occurs when people float jokes they claim not to believe to "piss off the libs," then work their way up to actually believing them a few years later - a common progression in online political radicalization.

Targeted meme campaigns like "baking kits" (zip files with transparent PNGs for meme formats) coordinate 100-1,000 people in Discord servers to flood the internet with content about specific topics - Andrew Yang's campaign used this strategy.

Healthcare as Competitive Advantage

"The number one reason for bankruptcy in America is medical" expenses, with Americans spending two-to-one what other countries spend per capita on healthcare compared to nationalized systems like the NHS.

Citarella's New Orleans ghost tour guide in 2019 said "if you get hit by a bus, you better walk it off" because he and his girlfriend both had cracked teeth they couldn't afford to fix despite working good jobs.

"The NHS, for example, is more competitive than the U.S. model as a percentage of what each individual in the society expends for their healthcare" - Joshua, arguing redistribution of resources can be more competitive and cost-saving than neoliberal models.

Citarella experimented with hypermasculinity including lifting four times weekly, sunning his balls, taking Infowars supplements, and mewing, publishing Auto Experiment Hypermasculinity - his political position remained basically the same afterward.

Trump and Mamdani Break the Kayfabe

Trump and Mamdani's meeting demonstrated a brief breaking of political Kayfabe where "they're almost able to break the frame" - Joshua, noting both are "just two guys from New York just shooting the shit" despite being political opponents.

"Vagal authority" describes how one person's nervous system dictates a room's emotional state - the Trump-Mamdani interaction may have succeeded because both were regulated enough to avoid shouting and hollering, making them look less petty.

"You can call me a fascist. I can call you a communist. It doesn't matter" - the two briefly acknowledged the game before returning within a week to calling each other the biggest threat to democracy or America's future.

The White House now has a "Department of Posting" creating elaborate graphically designed memes and snappy videos demonstrating hyper-literacy in internet aesthetics - "Trump himself is maybe one of the greatest posters of all time" - Joshua.