Why Has Comedy Become So Right-Wing?

Listen − 1.0 x + 0:00 57:39 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show , The Atlantic ’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the Trump administration’s hostility toward NATO. David discusses why NATO was created, what it does, and why we should care about it. David also analyzes the United State’s global leadership role and why so many bad actors advocate for isolationism. Then David is joined by his Atlantic colleague Helen Lewis to talk about the proliferation and importance of right-wing “comedy” podcasts. They discuss why some comedians seem to go right-wing and why a growing audience is drawn to their uninformed rhetoric. Lewis also addresses the complicity comedians and their audience share in the rise of MAGA. Finally, David closes the podcast with a discussion on Edith Wharton’s Autres Temps and how it speaks to moral panics, social pariahs, and so-called cancel culture. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The David Frum Show . I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic . My guest this week will be my Atlantic colleague Helen Lewis, and we’ll be talking about comedy and politics, and how the two combine. My book this week will be not a book but a short story: Autre Temps , by Edith Wharton. Before I turn to either, I’m going to anticipate something that will be said in the dialogue with Helen Lewis, where she talked about one of our challenges in the face of the way modern media works is to keep rediscovering old truths. And so I wanna open this show this week by talking about an old truth. If you’ve been reading in the news, you [may have] seen that the NATO alliance is under even more intense pressure than ever before. The Russians are demanding from the Trump administration not only that Ukraine not be invited into NATO, but that NATO actually step back. And the Trump administration is very hostile to NATO, the vice president even more than the president. [Donald] Trump has often speculated about quitting NATO entirely. And the new National Security Strategy published by the Trump administration is seething with hostility to Europe and NATO allies. So I thought today, I would talk about NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a little bit of rediscovering the old truths: How did it happen? Why was it a good idea? What’s it for? Why do we care? Well, let me recapitulate a little bit some history that, probably, we all know somewhere in our brains but have lost sight of. At the end of World War II, Europe was in ruins, and the Soviet Union was the dominant military power on the continent of Europe and in the Middle East and Asia too, was menacing, threatening, and aggressing against the shattered remains of a war-torn continent. Americans realized they had two urgent tasks if...

Preview: ~500 words