078: Who the Hell is Steven Crowder? feat. Byron McKoy

Off the top, some Patreon shout outs. We've got D bag. Yes. LM and Carrie Mayorello, those are some listeners who gave a little bit extra on the Patreon. Thank you so much. You could sign up for that Patreon at $5 a month you get weekly premium episodes. The last one covered all things Jeffrey Epstein TPUSA Super Bowl show, which I'm sure will make another appearance on next week's premium in the Katie Miller podcast. Personal favorite of Mike and mine. Also Trump going to the bathroom

in his pants. Oh yeah, did Trump shit himself? Anyway, 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. 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. Steven Crowder has two and a half million followers on X, more than 3,000,000 followers on Facebook, 1 1/2 on Instagram, 1.2 on True Social. His podcast called Louder with Crowder bills itself as the number one conservative Daily Show.

He has nearly 6,000,000 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 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 US. We'll make stops along the way to cover the personal and professional scandals that have at points threatened to take 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 Steven Crowder's website, and a few other sources that you'll hear along the way. We even invited Steven 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 host 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 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 acknowledged 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, Steven 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 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 Steven Crowder? Because as you know, you and I were working together doing the research for this episode. I I kept coming to the impression that Steven Crowder is woefully under covered in the press and like completely underappreciated for the star that he is in conservative media.

I came to to Steven and kind of all of this, this, I guess, genre of contents after the failed Hillary Clinton campaign for presidency and I started digging into conservative content to kind of understand how we could get to the place we found ourselves in 2016. I was start out with Ben Shapiro, tuned in to get off my lawn with Gavin McGinnis. I listen to Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Milo Yiannopoulos.

Even even early back before the Albo 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 changed my mind. I, I wasn't terribly political at the time and wasn't really educated in, you know, much of

this. I I was watching suggested videos on a Friday night with friends and me being from Montana and having like veteran friends, one of the one of the people I was hanging out with that night was a veteran. I kind of got tricked by Steven. It's 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 to pick up a gun in 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 continue to take in Steven. 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, my light little journey into this descent into, yeah, Crowder, someone, I think he's been not covered as much as he should be. For Full disclosure here, Jared, just to say like you, you, you folks are experts in Crowder.

And I had 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 mother fucker who is who is always making a smug face? I'm, I'm here, I'm recovering from shingles and you know, I'm

trying. I'm doing my, I'm going to be doing my best to fight through this and, and, and I'm looking forward to being water boarded with Stevens. Incredible jokes. But the 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? 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 under way in Eastern Europe. The world is irreversibly changing. Far away Steven Crowder was born in Detroit, MI, 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. Stevens childhood. You know, we're drawing from a Daily Beast profile in 2013 for a lot of this. Steven 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.

Steven 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, Steven 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 swap, 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 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, Steven Crowder breaks into show

business. He lands a role voicing a character named Alan Powers, AKA The Brain on the PBS children's show Arthur. This voice acting gig is pretty short lived, but it did get Stevens 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 the clenched fist meme that you see is is the the Brian powers AKA the brain clenching his fist. So Oh yeah, before the The change my mind, Steven had that

early hit in Meme Meme world. He would though go on to have minor roles in a handful of productions. He also did a commercial for a Go, a yogurt and a tube, basically the Canadian version of Go Gurt. Did you finish the tubes? No. Did you finish all the tubes? No. Dad, did you finish all the tubes? So that he's the kid there. He's the kid running, running around saying, hey, did you eat? Did you eat the yogurt in a

tube? And the commercial ends with the dad kind of smiling at him and whatever. I. I'm always fascinated by the the child actor or psychology and how the different directions that can go. I assume it's going to only go in a good direction here. Clearly, Yeah. That as as far as I know, is his first like on camera credit as a child actor. But he he goes on to do, you know, to have some credits in a couple 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. And 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 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 he's kind of like the main character's douchey friend. Where? Where's mine? Why? Don't you get your friend and get? One for you. OK, you know I don't have a girlfriend since you have no latte either.

She. Got you on that one, dude. Yeah, you know, your mom got me, OK? 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 saying something funny. Call me the big ugly one more time, I'm going to kick your ass. Sorry. I'm sorry. Something dude, OK. No, no hard feelings. You want to get out of here. You know, I don't need much to skip gargulous. The whole film is available on YouTube.

That Bad Boys got 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I shouldn't qualifies 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. And the final cut? Doug was more of a jerk. Than funny, I know I came across as much more unlikeable than kind of a wisenheimer. I was like, I, I, I want to hit me. So yeah, I I know I did. Go ahead, you have a nice.

No, we'll stop the tape so. So so his Co stars in the film are just like, yeah, go ahead, just punch this motherfucker in the face you. Know I don't think. They're they're, they're joking around. But what? What is it? Behind every joke is a grain of truth. Yeah, and most certainly there's no like good moments of, of, of Doug, like 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 I have trouble believing

that. So he starts doing stand up comedy, if 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 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 is 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 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 I found pages where the videos used to exist, but no videos to be found. It seems like a lot of that it got lost in the 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, 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 talking about of of his 2008 Myspace page and the tagline he has on his profile is It's getting crowded

in here. I actually totally pause. I'm going to. 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 seems to be a pretty promising start, but Stevens 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 of comedy, a core part of his identity, core part of his origin story. But from everything I found it seems he just flamed out super early. I mean, he, he on occasion we'll do a quote UN quote stand up show.

I, I caught him not too far away from here, maybe 3-3 hours away three years ago. I watched him perform. I don't know what he was preparing to do with this. It seems 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 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, like a, you know, an index finger turned into a person. I don't know how to describe. He just kind of like straight up and down white guy. There's not much other way, other way to just to describe him. He comes out on the stage. What's the energy like on stage when Crowder comes out to to, you know, 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, it was entirely electric. I the time I saw him, the venue was in 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, you know, 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 Marc 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 fan, so that you're in 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 US attends Champlain College in Burlington, Vt. He drops out after two semesters. But he will also cite this in his origin story in his credentials being like, listen, I attended 2 semesters at a College in Vermont and I took some courses on journalism and media, like one O 1 courses right? I 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 if in a band for years, but 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 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 Steven more than anyone else.

I think that also Darren was involved as his manager when he got the roles that he did in, in film, you know, from the Arthur role to to save a life to he did a movie. Goodness gracious. What was it? It's called 3 Needles, which had Chloe 70 and Lucy Liu 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's 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, yeah, I got blindsided by that. And if that didn't work, maybe hosting a late night comedy show? Oh my God, has anybody interested aside, has I ever seen Todd Salon's film storytelling?

This is like the this is this is like Scooby the the main character from that where he's just tells people he's going to host a late night comedy show and everybody starts laughing at him anyway. Adding it to my queue. Steven Crowder would never realize his dreams of making it big in Hollywood. Why? 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? What do we call it? Political commentary?

Is that what we're going to say it is? Polka with political commentary. So, political commentary in In 2009, Steven started uploading political commentary videos to YouTube. You may be wondering Steven seemed to have a fairly promising stand up comedy career. Seemed 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 can explain in graphic detail the grandeur of my sexcapades. This is hypothetical of course as my sex life is non existent. Or go off on an anti Christian tirade. Too much applause. If I were a Dame I would surely make do I have to come on? I would surely make OK I. Got this. You 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 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 that's a weird mental image that he's got. He's he's kind of jam crammed into something that doesn't have anything to do with asses. You, you don't do that, Mike. I know like whenever I'm on the bus or whatever I my ears are tuned sharp.

If you know, you know, I'm, I'm not shy of freaky, freaky thoughts, but I just, I just find, you know, possibly because of that, I'm able to to get a little bit of a red flag. The better 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, 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. OK, 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. My craniums, 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? Yeah. Fucking you're the one Arab guy in the show. Trigger, trigger warning, man, I'm a little tired with the with the fucking shingles. So but I will get up and I'll throw some hands over that. What do you fucking talk? Who the fucking shit in Dunes, motherfucker?

This dumb kid, Yeah, sitting on on YouTube. It's not very subtle. No. And honestly, yeah, I mean, that's that's that could be the theme of this. Yeah. No, you tell me to to describe things like the dark Pelosi with water boring boarding the Obama song. I gots a Peace Prize, which I I think was the one that really

broke through the mainstream. These are all kind of formulaic of the time YouTube 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 contacts for people who are listening and regularly listen to our show.

You might be like shocked at like how you know, slavishly he lathers up Israel here because things have changed pretty radically in that like, yeah, the the, the, the, the populist right has become much more openly anti-Semitic And those 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. This is what you what you 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 a, 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 contacts for that. I do want to say, of all the early videos I watched, the best 1 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?

You 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? Do 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 that. The dumbest passing thought I've had while like taking a shit and just give it to the bear the

bear craves. There's also the there's also the Nick, 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, don't forget that there's there's two bodyguards behind the camera in, in face masks and stuff like that. Yeah. Normal shit.

Really cool normal stuff and I'm feel feel comfortable talking about children in a daycare with you. How benevolence, Benevolence. Amazing. The brightest minds give that. 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 let's listen to Steven Crowder's stand up. This first one is from 2009, I believe, to the Tea Party rally. He's some of the entertainment. Weather the scorching he 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 seeing these people.

They're like have you been outside? It's sunny 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 cheer for the cap and trade tax. All right? Relax. I didn't pass it OK. Awesome. You are correct, Sir, Yes.

This just really good shit. And 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 Tea Con 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, 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 if 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.

That was like. Yeah, that was like the pseudo journalistic 1. And then there would be like, so many people want to have gay sex with Obama, like in the comedian style, where there's just a 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 let's, let's, let's pitch that one, Yeah. And that one's sticking around. There's no way that guy's straight. The problem solved. How it is say.

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 sex man in America. But you give that to Hugh Jackman, not the guy who looks like the photo negative of Alfred Newman, okay? I think it's interesting. Even people in the crowd are like, oh. Yeah, that was that was. Don't know about that one.

Do you like 1 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, Can you believe this? Can you believe that actor Michael B Jordan is like, what? 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 notice that when Don Lemon got arrested at 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. 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 and 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. The. Dallas Tea Party. Come on everybody. Not that little Elvin, Harry Reid, not John Penn. These people.

God Bless America. It's a mic drop at the end. He didn't pick that up. God Bless America, Mic Drop. Yeah, sometimes you got to do it. So he gets noticed by Pyjama 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, 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 systems 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 of blogs, I guess in a series called Lone Wolf Diaries in June 2009, the first video on his YouTube channel with a pyjama media, PJTV, their sort of video offshoot at the time, a watermark for that brand is on

there. That video was of him impersonating Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and having a fake argument with him doing a a parody or like fake. Like if they had had me on TV, that's this is what I would have said kind of thing. Would later credit PJTV 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 PJTV watermark is swapped out for a watermark for a non profit called the National Center for Public Policy Research. In a 2023 newsletter of theirs I came across that 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. There's some good old Washington DC mumbo jumbo shit.

I'm not sure why this is missing in most of the biographies you'll find online from Steven because the title card says louder with 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 Steven 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 rate arrangement was like. But we'll just put that as a footnote here afterwards. This 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, etcetera.

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. 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, 'cause who is this kid who's talking about abstinence? Who you know. Well, it's who's this kid who's. You know, 23 you don't know who you're gonna be sexually yet, so to talk about it with such authority and arrogance, I. Don't know who I'm gonna be. What? You don't know who you're gonna

be sexually yet. You're gonna 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. Doesn't there should be no. But there should be no confidence there there. And you know, you slip by the 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.

Is this not really personal for a concept about abstinence? I'm saying the whole point is that there's. No, wow, he's right. You could tell it really seems to catch him off guard too. He 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 the screen or, you know, in safe territory.

But Speaking of behind the screen, she's referencing some columns that he'd done recently as a 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. Going to my head I like could not buy line a piece like this.

Oh, it's a nightmare. We we we covered it all on the 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 Victoria Burger released some DMS that he said he received from the from from Gutfeld, 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 just a glass of milk cross legged on the floor of a bar. He 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 and claims everyone at Fox News hates working with him. Thick Burgers 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 Victoria guarantee, and Victoria is definitely going to make a cameo and we when Mike Sternovich gets to Who the hell is treatment? Oh, absolutely. Around this time our boy Crowder is doing speaking circuit circuit on college campuses. The College Republican Club invited him to speak and he went to do right wing stand up and discussion. There are some light 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. Always 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 there's like so ideological that it makes it not funny, right? You, you have to be like kind of light hearted. Otherwise, you're just like, you know, formatting your political rant with the occasional punchline. Yeah, you can't directly reference policy in your 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 the polls where he's wearing a 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 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 created. 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 Steven Crowder. But I'm like, a sick degenerate when it comes to politics. And, like, I've 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, you know, moments where he broke through, at least in main 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, 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 the Koch affiliated libertarian conservative political advocacy group. But eventually, the unedited footage of this confrontation, it pointed more towards Steven 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 Cenk at The Young Turks really did celebrate this moment and kind of blew it up. Like, I think I think that beyond the, you know, the clips airing on Fox News, it was really the 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 C pack in a breakout room that includes AI. Don't know how to describe this but 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 so. Yeah, the 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 inward. But we'll listen to the clip. I normally would not play a clip like this with 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 when I mean, you'll notice like there is some like weird laughter that happens when Michael Richards and Kramer like kind of yells the N word. Because when people when people get feel uncomfortable, they also laugh, right? Like people just just don't know what to do. And you're in a setting where you're supposed to laugh. And I, in those laughs, have that feel like they have a little bit of a nervous high

pitch like. And it's not very many laughs. It's just like one lady. I I do have to say this is probably like the craziest CPAC breakout room I've ever seen. I've gone to that. 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 C PAC. The verse was used to point out the hyper PC disingenuous liberals 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 mainstage at C Pack.

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 said sent Victoria Burger, you know, is 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 Stevens early life and career that we could corroborate and 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 YouTube again. I think, I think my primary thought is not a particularly sophisticated 1 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 fall back. 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 era. So after Fox News, there's a period in Stevens career that even after researching and trying to ask around, still remains pretty unclear to me. There's this span, you know, between late 2013 and sort of the fall of 2014 where Steven still uploading YouTube videos. He's pulling some views. I'm not sure it would have been enough for him to make a living.

He's got these occasional speaking gigs at Republican clubs and college campuses. But again, I'm pretty murky about, like, what is happening in this period of his life. But September 2014, he gets his next break after Fox News. Tell me about that Byron, because this is where his flagship show Louder with Crowder would begin. Yeah, you could call it a break. It is a 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM slot on a an AM radio station in Ann Arbor, MI called WAAM Wham Talk 1600. I mean, it's the drive time.

It's the drive time slot to be fair, but it is AM radio in 2014. Yeah, so you're right. I mean, I, I guess the, the owners of the station must have liked them. He must have charmed someone. Yeah. This this show, it marks kind of his return to regular broadcasting. He is no longer just exclusively a YouTube. And I should say it was great of you to point out, Jared, that.

I mean, I don't know what he was doing necessarily to financially sustain himself because he was now married at this point. And I don't know exactly. Yeah, how he could have been supporting himself. Maybe he was living with his father, who knows. But really stiff at the beginning, these early shows, he's got that kind of novice novelty radio voice. Really important. Yeah. All of his, his interviews, what she somehow landed. What are you talking about?

All right, Mike, I wouldn't. I would never dare say that about you. I don't like what you're insinuating about the Posting through It podcast. When we come back from the break and then you're yeah, fade out to music. Oh my God, you should hear. I don't know if you've heard any of the the 1st 30 episodes. Not only did they go in and out of segments with Weezer tracks for the most part, big Weezer fan back then, Steven was Foo

Fighters, things like that. But he was also Co hosted by a guy that worked at Wham, A gentleman named Dan and went by Fun Dip. His last name is Martin. And yeah, I've, I've tried several times to get in touch with Dan in several different ways, some more direct than others, leaving comments on his really, honestly informative videos. He's a big Beatles fan. He loves vintage stereo systems and record players loves playing

the bass clearly fun dip. They called the base man fun dip Dan, but I reached out to him directly finally for comments about, you know, getting an interview with him under my my podcast network e-mail audio wool and he replied, I'm sorry. I want nothing to do with Crowder, ever, Dan. Interesting. Yeah, I, I, I didn't want to pry too much more after that because it sounds very clear that he's uninterested and that that break was not necessarily a good one

that he was anticipating. He still is a ADJ at that same radio station, though, playing, playing the hits, doing a great job. But in addition to radio, the Louder with Crowder show very quickly pivoted to video and it was uploaded to Stevens YouTube channel. And you know, it was 2014. This is very ahead of ahead of time. You know, not many shows were doing YouTube that way or at least even recycling content the

way he was. He would do, you know, his normal time slots on the AM station and then he would, you know, do additional time live streaming. But he had this kind of segmented, you know, this is the the uncensored post show on some sort of streaming platform. But again, yeah, you've really have to give it to him for that kind of, you know, ahead of ahead of the curve. Very quick to embrace technology. You mentioned Dan AKA Fun Dip Martin not being interested in

talking to you. His producer at the time was a guy named Jared Monroe. He'll come up later in this episode. He goes by not gay Jared in the Crowder universe. He's doing his own media adjacent company now, similar to Dan's response. I've reached out to his company and was like, hey, can I, can I talk to Jared Monroe about Steven Crowder? And I got a similar response from that spokesperson saying, you know, Jared Monroe is not interested in any opportunity

like this. So it seems the people that have overlap with Steven Crowder really want nothing to do with him, seem to not even want to be associated with him anymore. Well, Jared's Jared situation is a little bit more unique and I think we'll we'll talk a little bit about that later on in the episode. But he was also kind of, you know, he got in between Dan and Steven when Jared showed up. It there's a little bit of conflict and you know, Dan was very quickly removed from the show.

But all the best to Dan and very interesting that Jared's new media company, which I I think they have something to do with the comedy world. I don't know how deep you went into that, but. Not not too deep, right It's this episode about Steven Crowder, not Jared Monroe, right? But I just want to note his radio show those like early clips, a big theme and it's it's almost a callback to his earlier uploads on YouTube is the anti

Islam stuff. He is doing these stunts and gags about it. 1 he parodies Bob Ross painting the Prophet Muhammad. He does that one twice actually, because he did he does it once in 2016 and then the next year in 2017 he does it again. Except Bob Ross is said to be painting with period blood. So really side crack and stuff here. Honestly, just really a funny guy. And you know, the reason that every week my job is just so enjoyable.

Like I'm just blessed to have this opportunity to talk about Steven every week. This this radio show, though, it eventually becomes his podcast. You know Louder with Crowder makes Steven, you know, bigger than he ever has been. The the the show, once it pivots to video and and leaves for YouTube, it's a roaring success. It not only goes to like a video format, it also at some point around here circa 2016 was hard

to nail down an exact date. Goes from being a weekly show to a daily one and you get what would become known as the Mug Club. Byron, could you explain Steven Crowder's Mug Club? Because it doesn't exist anymore, right? But this was like a big, this was a big thing with his show. Yeah, it was a big thing. It's a it's a point of pride for the listeners of the Ladder with

Crowder show. It's a physical display of their support because at that point, around 2016, when Steven went independent and left the radio station, I guess briefly before he got some backing elsewhere, he had this idea to fund his operation by selling memberships that involved, I guess there were annual memberships. And of course he always provides promos and discount discounts for active military and law enforcement. But you for having annually sponsored his show, would receive a mug.

And this is a hand etched Made in the United States mug that people can drink beverages out of what they watch this program. But the evolution of that, I'm not sure what we can get into that later. But things change things, you know, As times change and the property moves hands, you know the mugs might fall to the wayside. Do you have a mug? I mean, this is a shrug club mug. It's, it's a louder, louder than Crowder mug. So we we have, we have our own

mugs. Yeah. That's like me and Mike talking about music where I'll be like, yo Mike, you got to check out this like new Rat Boys album. And he's just like, dude, no, fuck that. Check out this limited edition 1993 CDI got in downtown New York, Manhattan. There was a little shop over there I go. It was fucking awesome. It was amazing. I saw shows there. This is awe Techer. You ever heard Awe Techer Jerry? This is. When I bought the CD, people

didn't know this shit. People know this shit. They got wise to this shit. They got they got wise to. I should note also mugs are a bit of a subculture among guys like this. The Scott Adams show talk show was like very mug centric, right? It was just. Do the morning sip or whatever.

I know that because I don't want to get us sidetracked here because but there is a very we should talk about it briefly on premium Jared, but there's like there is now like an AI generated version of the Scott Adams show that is running every day to an audience of people who have brain matter leaking out of their ear. It's. Kind of a cult. And it's to every every episode. Like we'll start with hope. Here's my mug. Time for a little quaint cup of coffee.

And he the the dead. Scott Adams goes and drinks the coffee. Anyway, get carry on. Anyway, you talked about the show getting some new back in 2017. Mark Levin's conservative review TVAKACRTV inks a deal with Steven Crowder to air louder with Crowder on its video streaming platform. And when CRTV merged with the Blaze TV, which was Glenn Beck's competitor in 2018, Crowder's contract carried over.

That would be sort of his main hub of operation all the way until he departed in December 2022. More on that in a minute. But throughout this time, you know, he's doing The Daily Show behind a paywall, but he's still uploading clips and hits and and sorts of things to YouTube. And I, I want to go through some of that. He's uploaded so much stuff. We can't cover all of it, but we're going to try to play out some of his bigger hits or his bigger sort of moments of notoriety.

Because this period here when he's at CRTV and The Blaze, when I'm looking back on it, I consider this like the height of Steven Crowder's career. Which is really interesting, right? Like the fact that he arguably was the biggest he's ever been while behind a paywall, Like, and, you know, the fact that Blaze was unable to, you know, find a contract that was worthy of him at that point. Like it's really interesting. 2017 in September, he went quote UN quote, undercover with Antifa.

So this was after the Unite the Right protest I guess. So this was, this was like a very big genre that was ultimately seized by Andy, No. That's true, but Andy no has the 0 less charm than Steven Crowder somehow. Yeah, yeah. This was like, you know, the kick off of this, every right wing influencer after Unite the Right when the country was sitting around being like, holy shit. So like Nazis, Nazis support

this. It it was an effort to recast the real threat as the people who protested against the Nazis, not the Nazis. So Crowder hops on this and we'll see you throughout the rest of this episode. He is a a big bandwagon hopper. But tell me a little bit about this video. And he gets some notoriety for it, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, he did basically. I think it was in response to a handful of conservative folks being boycotted.

This, this, you know, there was the, the, was it a Milo at Berkeley that got protested by quote UN quote Antifa? Correct. And there there were, there were fires at that. And we covered it actually on the on The Who the hell is Bill Maher? Because Bill Maher kind of had him on and let him do a little star turn to show to show about how, oh, look at how many people are are upset about free speech. And, and this was a similar response to a Ben Shapiro speech that was happening in Utah.

And Steven, this is so interesting. He the video that he posted got so much coverage that actually Joe Rogan booked him and not Gay Jared to be on Joe Rogan's experience. The Joe Rogan Experience, Yeah. I like Joe Rogans experience. Undercover with the Antifa and that fucking that one was disturbing to me because first of all, you look like you slide. Right in like a. Glove buddy like. I was almost matching the guy when I got there. Guy, gal, we don't know.

And I thought our costume wardrobe lady had actually just just stolen his clothes because it was almost identical. Yeah. To what he was wearing. Isn't it funny? Though that when you're a slender man like people assume immediately. So many things. Oh yeah, I can get away with so much crap. Isn't that weird? Yeah, well, like, what is it about slender people? There's something there, right? Like what is it about slender people that are almost always left wing?

Weakness. Well, just you fucking throwing his producer right under the bus there. Weakness. I mean, this is a character that he and he, you know, called not gay Jared as an insult, so implying that he was gay. Yeah, also hilarious to me that you have to employ like a wardrobe person to put you in like a hoodie and a bandana. He.

I also like, I like, like the brain cells in Rogan's head kind of screened together to form a little Ferris wheel that provided him slowly provided him with that analysis where it was just like, oh, yes, they're slender. You can get away slender people. The, the whole, the whole video, lots of issues with this. It's edited in a like surprise, surprise, deceptive way that makes the context kind of even

hard to understand. In the Joe Rogan episode, Steven says that there were no arrests based on the coverage that they did, but the FBI talked to them and some of the people they talked to were arrested later for doing other things. So he kind of, in this roundabout way, takes credit for, you know, having stopped an antifa attack, but he didn't

directly do anything. University of Utah police evaluated his footage and as well, and they determined that the individuals didn't pose A credible threat that warranted action. So. What a surprise. Yeah, maybe I need to come up with an elaborate lie to get on Joe Rogan. That would be kind of fun. But his, I guess his popularity was about to really start peaking, right? Yeah, yeah. So around 2018, I couldn't nail down an exact day for when he did the first one of these.

He starts doing Change My Mind speaking stunts on college campuses and and out in public. That's how I know him, by the way, just to be clear. I was like, you know, I think many of the people in the audience will know that, too. Yeah, you've undoubtedly seen this as a meme format.

Steven Crowder with one of his little mugs sitting at a table and there's a sign on the front that says, like, guns Rock, change my mind and invites people to, invites people to debate and then clips up those debates and uploads them on to YouTube or his, you know, various platforms. Yeah, the, the whole idea of change my mind. I don't know exactly where he talked about this, but he claims it was an idea that Fox turned down.

He says this is a way to kind of, you know, I guess, repair the feelings that he has about having been fired. From there he got one over on them. He also said that this was originally a book idea. I don't know how it would have been a successful book, but. Just reading the pages of a book screaming. I guess so, yeah. You know, his his extremely researched debates, he he shows up with these binders of information on the topics that he has very selective of course.

But he has these quote UN quote debates with random unprepared college students on subjects like abortion is immoral or male privilege is a myth or affirmative action is racist, things like that. And there was something about the algorithm at YouTube at this time that really made this, you know, flourish. It was a extremely popular little moments for conservative media.

And as I said at the top, this is how I was introduced to Steven. And, you know, he was somewhat convincing to me and, you know, sure, a dumb me at the time who was, you know, learning about politics really. And sadly, yeah, I guess if I would have if I would have been a different person, if I'm honest. But yeah, it's it's it's no surprise that this format really took off and was influential. But this is Pete Crowder.

Changed my mind. You know, how influential was this in the whole setup on on Charlie Kirk? Because it kind of looks aesthetically very similar to the, the, the type of setup that Charlie Kirk used to have. And I, you know, looking at the kind of overlap of that, I'm not entirely sure. It seems that they're both doing it at the same time, but that but certainly the Steven Crowder one at that moment was more famous than Charlie Kirk's. I think Steven Crowder did do it first.

I I was actually on another Joe Rogan Experience episode from last week or earlier this week with Andrew Wilson, the blood sports debater. I can't remember what his his weird, dumb show is, but he mentions at the top, actually, that Steven Crowder claims to have felt guilty for having given Charlie the idea that eventually would be, you know, putting him in a situation where he lost his life.

So whether or not that's true that, you know, Steven did that before Charlie, I think it is true, but I don't know. And I wouldn't give him full credit for having, you know, come up with the idea of having conversations with college students behind a plastic table. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, conflict gets clicks, right? And I think this was like a way of saying, of proving out this idea of like, OK, you can go give a speech on a college campus, maybe people will protest you.

But if they don't, or if you're in an area where that's pretty unlikely, like down in Texas or I don't know, like in North Carolina or something, you can still get that conflict by debating college students, which I've always thought was just really, I've always been put off by it, right?

Because it's punching down. You're taking somebody who's like professionally trained, has talking points ready to go and pitting them against just some like random undergrad who is still trying to figure out who they are as a person, let alone like what they think about the world. So it's I think they figured out it's like we can get conflict content where we almost always win the argument or at least

appear to win the argument. You know, Charlie Kirk did a version of change My Mind. But also, you know, generally this period also gives rise to like all kinds of Internet debate content, all kinds of just like man on the street protest stuff. It's just really start to explode around this time. And the way that Steven did it is different as well than than the way Charlie did it.

Steven does it as a surprise. Charlie at least planned his events and people would show up prepared to debate. They wouldn't be students, you know, between classes. And I think one of the last one of the last change my minds before he decided to take advantage of the death of Charlie Kirk by bringing them back and also making really sick edits where he's putting on a bulletproof vest and getting out

of a van to do this. The most recent change my minds, Steven Monticelli, the journalist from Dallas, I don't know if you're familiar with him, does great work. He sat down with Steven and debated him. And that was kind of the death of change my mind for Steven was, oh, now I'm talking to someone who actually knows, no offense to the to the youths who are debating Steven, but knows

what they're talking about. So that really changed the way Steven approached, changed my mind, at least for a couple years. So Stevens also been at the forefront of battling with social media platforms over alleged censorship, alleged shadow banning. He on several occasions has filed lawsuits, none of which

went anywhere. But where he really made headlines for this was in 20/19, he went to war with a Fox News reporter named Carlos Maza. And this is where I'm going to put a disclaimer that when I worked at Media Matters at the start of my professional career, I overlapped with Carlos a little bit. We never worked together really closely on anything. But just throwing that out there. So this was back when platforms were still sort of pretending to care about community guidelines.

You know, it's post 2016 election. It's post Unite the Right platforms are feeling pressure from legislators, that sort of thing to take content moderation seriously. And Carlos Manza had published a video at Fox criticizing YouTube for not enforcing its, you know, pretty clearly stated community guidelines against bullying, against hate, against this and that when it came to high profile content creators on the platform.

That piece prompted a kind of reaction from YouTube, right, where channels were getting demonetized, some channels were getting banned or earning suspensions. Steven Crowder is weighing in on this, and he catches heat for how he repeatedly disparaged Carlos Masa, who is openly gay and Latino. Crowder defended it as harmless ribbing and quote UN quote playful comedy. Here's just like a a super cut of a couple of those. Favorite and list piece right from boxes.

It's ridiculous. It's bonkers. You're being given a free pass as a crappy writer because you're gay. That setter line on his little queer graph there? What is what is that is queer violence, Phil. OK, so the little queer can eat his chips all nonchalantly. It's code for rape. Mr. Queer Eating Chips on the Vox channel. So just gross. Yeah, you seem to have a little bit too much fun doing his gay voice. I just want to. I just want to put a little pin

in that. It's also worth noting at the time, Steven Crowder was also selling merchandise for his show that featured homophobic slurs. So YouTube initially in this sort of standoff with Carlos Manza, sides with Steven Crowder. And this angers a lot of employees at YouTube who make their anger about this really known inside the company. Soon after they reverse course and they demonetize Steven Crowder's channel. Years later they'd re monetize it saying that Steven had

learned how to be a good boy. But that is like wavered on and off with different bits of content offensive shit that Steven Crowder's put out. Steven continued to battle with YouTube throughout the years. The platform would give him a community guideline strike. Here for election genialism. Another one here for mocking police killings of black people. One here for harassment and bullying. But YouTube has a three strikes rule. So he would get like suspended for a week.

He gets suspended, you know, for a couple of weeks. He'd lose ad revenue for a little bit and get it back. But he never got enough strikes sequentially to get banned from the platform. His channel still sits there today. It was very strategic how he would do this too. He would like the week that his

second strike expired. He would manufacture a new situation in which he could get attention by receiving one more strike and being removed off of YouTube for a week and then come back with his big oh I'm being censored episode. So honestly kind of smart. Also a way to direct people to

the paywall. So November 2019, he reenacts the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. Everybody take a shot because it's the Jeffrey Epstein has been mentioned in In a recent episode, he tries to debunk reports that Epstein hung himself inside his prison cell wearing a neck brace and an evil Knievel costume. Steven did not die from this Everyone so. Steven, don't. Worry, don't get sad. I'm trying to imagine a situation where he like accidentally hangs himself on his podcast. I mean.

We're doing a bit. I mean. Wouldn't be surprised, you know, we may live to see an instance in which some some idiot that we covered does a bit and then dies from it. Surprised it hasn't happened yet. I was going to say it. Probably has, we're just not remembering it.

I mean, I, we recently covered, you know, following the, the murder of Renee Goode, he decided to do a reenactment similar to this in the parking lot in which he stood in front of an employee's car and pointed a small gun at one of them who was in the driver's seat. So kind of a. Pointed a gun at one of his employees. Yeah, Jesus, what a. It was a small gun, Jared. It was not one of his biggest guns, but yeah, he did decide to try to prove that Renee Goode deserve to get shot 3 times and

killed. Yeah, yeah. So 2020 comes around. Steven Crowder's still gung ho. I mentioned earlier he's a bandwagoner, and there's a whole lot of bandwagons to jump on this year. You've got COVID, you've got the Black Lives Matter protest, you've got the election. Of course, Byron, how do you understand like what Stevens role was in that sort of ecosystem? Because like we said, this is the height of Stevens career, right?

But as we mentioned a second ago, it was also the height of YouTube's managing how they censor things. So dancing inside of COVID and BLM and election denial because all of those things, you know, talking poorly about COVID regulations, which he did frequently. I should also mention he decided to go to two shows a day instead of one a day during COVID in which he, you know, made all of his employees come to the office and they didn't have any masks.

So that was pretty cool to put more people in danger more often. And you know, 2020 election denial. He would spearhead these campaigns trying to point out, you know, election address irregular irregularities you would like go. I think he sent some of his employees to Arizona, New Mexico. I'm not exactly sure to look at where some unhoused people had been placing their address and it was like like 3 people had an address that was like a vacant

lot or something. But he makes huge deals out of this. And of course, the BLM stuff, that's all violent riots. So it was just a, it was mess, it was a mess, It sucked, it was terrible. And, you know, every chance he got, he would use these culture war topics to not only make his audience grow, but also make himself a victim of censorship. Which brings us to an awful thing that he decided to cover and focus quite a bit on.

We talked about the Stievel Knievel reenactments and the Jeff. Did we talk about Jeff? Yeah, we sure did. He re enacted the the police murder of George Floyd in April of 2021. During Derek Chauvin's trial, he claimed to prove that kneeling couldn't kill anyone of, quote, moderate health. He was. Doing a a science experiment.

He loves science experiments. He loves just like, just like Point McDonald. Kneel on someone's neck to with to prove, which is the big talking point from the racist right in particular that let me see if I've got this correctly, that George Floyd had a level of toxicity in his system from drugs that needed that and that's ultimately what killed him. And then this was somehow normal police. Police work, like kneeling on this man's neck for 9 minutes and the better part of 10

minutes really. Yeah, yeah. So he has his employee dress up as like a Reno 911 style cop and kneel on his neck for 9 minutes. And him and Co host Dave Landau conversed and said how you doing? He's like, I'm doing fine. He's just face down in his parking lots. You know, clearly, Yeah, clearly. This was exactly the same elements and you know that that went into the murder of George Floyd, so. Yeah, I watched, I watched this

video. I mean, to call this a reenactment, it feels like a real stretch. You can tell his employees are like not putting their full weight on their legs. They're leaning on their thighs. Yeah, elbows on thighs. They're like repositioning at several points because, like Stevens uncomfortable and you know, and but then the take away is that well, George Floyd died because he was a drug addict, right, which was like you mentioned, Mike, the racist talking point from the radical

right. It's just a clearly racist experiment, and those don't happen live on comedy shows. But it's also I think I think we I have to, I have to just, you know, declare here that it is not it's not an experiment when you go out to prove your propaganda, right? You're not like scientific inquiry. What is it? Let me see. No, I mean, the reality is he's trying, he's trying to provide fodder for people who think that George Floyd had not been killed by the police officer by the drugs, right?

I mean, that's that that's the reason to stage it. It's not anyway. But that goes out without saying. Maybe. But I think we should under score that well, in November 2021, this really wonderful guy who has in a very strong opinions about George Floyd uses the the N word. I would like when when it's uses the N word, like it's a like it's a fucking screwdriver or something. Yeah, he says it. He says the N word. We've already heard him almost say it.

Now he's actually saying it. And yeah, no, needs to play a clip of that. I think you got a pretty good idea what type of person this is. Everybody knows what that word is and what it sounds like. We're going to skip that clip. He's the great value version of like a real political commentator.

Like he he's generic. And the only thing that he's been doing recently is, you know, being escalatory, you know, because he's running into walls with the way that, you know, the content that he's sharing is now. It's milquetoast at this point. You have to be inflammatory. And I think that that is what he's more skilled at than, you know, providing actual personal opinions on politics. I don't think he has much of that.

Yeah, I, I mean, before we get into the part of Stephen's story where shit's about to hit the fan from a lot of different directions, I, I wanted to get your thoughts, Byron, because certainly, like what you just said, Stephen knows how to be inflammatory. He knows how to get attention for himself, whether it's through these stupid stunts, being deliberately offensive, whatever it may be.

But you know from your time watching Louder with Crowder, not to be confused with the excellent Louder Than Crowder podcast, you know, once he gets people's attention and has them with him, you know their curiosity is piqued. They're interested, whatever they're here, they're there to check them out. Is there anything that stands out to you as maybe why, like that would explain how he ended up being so successful converting those people into

like die hard audiences? Because it's, it's one thing to like, you know, TuneIn to the posting through a podcast because you want to learn about Steven Crowder and who the hell that guy is. It's another thing to be like, wow, I really love these guys. I'm going to sign up for the Patreon and like binge the episodes and stuff. Like, that's somebody who, like, really likes the show, right? Which I do, and I do Patreon. Yeah, go check that out, guys.

Oh, sign up. Everyone on the Patreon show can shout out Byron, but but yeah, how how does Steven do it? I mean, what's? That's the big question. I don't know if I'm being honest 1 I don't think his metrics are real. I think that looking at like his early really influenced that might be more attributed to luck and timing than anything else. But I, I don't know why people tune into his show beyond them clearly having hateful beliefs.

Because the program itself, like as a commentary show, it's looking at news and giving opinions that are, maybe This is why it works. It's giving like gut opinions that are coming from a really, really dark place. And I think that often it's those instinctual hateful beliefs and someone just saying it plainly and flatly and bluntly, that's that's really magnetic to someone like that because they don't have to do it themselves.

It's an ID program, you know, it's not smart, it's not funny, and you don't have to think too much about it. And I think that that's what's drawing people in. Are you taking notes, Mike? You guys got to be Dumber I. I I'm going to reserve some of my thoughts about this for my my final take. All right, well, shit's about to hit the fan. So it's January 2023.

Steven Crowder has left Blaze TV at this point, but we learned in January 2023 that he had projected an offer from the Daily Wire. The way we learn about that is because he starts a spat with the Daily Wire. The offer is insane, as we come to learn about it. The Daily Wire, which is the outlet that has, you know, Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro and Andrew Clavin and those guys. Candace for a bit. Yeah.

Candace Owens for a bit, too. They offered Steven Crowder $50 million over the course of four years, with the potential to extend that an additional 2 years at the same rate. I want to under score that. That is how much you know billionaire slush money runs around in the right wing spaces as as opposed to our world. Yeah, I'd also like to add that they also offered him a, a, a speaking role in the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin as part of this detail as deal as

well. Dude, that's on my much must watch list, but I just can't bring myself to swipe the credit card on the Daily Wire. So there's $75 million potentially on the table here. And what do they want from Steven? Host a podcast 4 times a week and do it with full editorial control.

But there was a catch. And this is what Steven Crowder would take issue with the Daily Wire about, which was that if Steven lost advertisers or he got demonetized or banned from major platforms, his pay would get docked in some cases by double digit percentages. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You're telling me that this, this company, if I don't make them any money, they don't want to pay me money? This is weird. Yeah, it's crazy.

It's crazy. If I if I'm hired to produce a show and then that show gets banned and removed from its distribution platform, they're not. I just don't make money now. You guys are evil people. So, yeah, the the demonetization clause was really contentious. It was something Steven focused on because of course, he had been demonetized by YouTube three years prior. That's something there's a big difference between demonetization and being actually blocked from the

platform. So he hadn't been making money on YouTube for years. But yeah, this meant under the contract written the terms as written, that he would start by only making 75% of that. So the deal would be 430 thirty $7.5 million instead of 50 from day one. Oh well, in that point, count me out, dude. 37.5 Get. Get out of here. Honestly it's I'm feel like I'm being exploited and ripped off just looking at this.

So Jeremy Boring claimed that this would have been scratched out in negotiations in a response video to Stevens concerns. But Steven viewed the fact that it was included at all as either incompetence or bad faith. Yeah, I remember him talking about.

It is like this is proof that conservative ink or, you know, big, big right wing media is in bed with tech companies and they're not really about free speech like they say they are because they won't guarantee him in writing off the bat an additional $12.5 million is this argument. Well, he deserves an additional 3 to $4 million a year. You. Know my thought about this is he doesn't seem like a guy who believes in much.

Why not just take it, get whatever of that money you can until your thing does get thrown off or just make the water down the show as much as possible. Don't use the N word anywhere and just ride it out. A lot of these clowns, these Mark Levin, all these type of guys, they, they're able to be racist pieces of dog shit everyday without getting to platform. Figure out a way and get your $50 million. Mike, that requires skill.

He's not a skilled broadcast. Take your vacations to Tokyo and take it, you know, and, and, and, and have your, your champagne by the beach and do your, I mean, what I mean, $50 million maybe, I mean, maybe he's, maybe he's an artist and

he could not be compromised. You know, in a worst case scenario though, where Steven lost all of his advertisers and got banned from all major platforms, his salary would have effectively been $0.00 and the Daily Wire would retain the rights to his content and all his very cool merch, as well as his e-mail list. All those mugs did Steven's like don't fuck it, don't tread on my mugs. Have either of you ever like come across like right wing

merch like this in the wild? Just like seen it like at the airport some fucking guys wearing a shirt or something. I. Don't know the airport I think is the only place I've encountered it. Mate the airport or like it would have to be if I go down to the loop in Chicago for some reason occasionally there will be like a tourist wearing like a MAGA hat or something but. I'm not talking about MAGA hats because that's like, that's just like you're walking out of the street.

You're like, I'm a fucking asshole. Like, you know, there were there were a few guys that I would see like right after Trump won in New York City wearing them. And it's like you're just, you're just asking me to like, you know, whack them in the fucking back of the head and knock it off onto the into the fucking drain. But. That's don't say that that's one of Stevens biggest fears is the knockout game. No, but I'm not like, you know, I'm not going to be careful.

I'm not. I'm not going to do that because I'm a law abiding citizen, clearly who's listening to this? I'm talking about like merch. I'm talking about like some fucking dipshit in like a Nick Fuentes quarter zip or whatever. Like you just never see people wearing these things like it around. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they maybe they get it and then they realize, actually I could get my ass beaten very severely today if I wore this.

I should just wear it in the house while I'm listening to my garbage. I don't know. Being based in Montana and just a couple hours away from northern Idaho, sometimes I do stumble upon folks like this. I'm lucky enough to be in a very liberal tiny little dot college town, so things are good and safe and fun for me here. But yeah, it doesn't take, doesn't take far. I I will not delay us any further back to Crowder.

Back to Crowder. So he's freaking ticked off that he is given this bullshit contract from the Daily Wire. It's offensive. And he's also, I think a little sore because when he left the Blaze when that contract wasn't renewed, they kept all of the e-mail lists for his mug clubbers, which was something like 300,000 people. And that really upset him that he didn't have rights. They also kept his archives as far as I could tell. It's all behind the pay wall if. You want to go watch old Louder

with Crowder episodes? You still have to give money to Glenn Beck. Yeah, we've never covered the Blaze era on our show because it is behind the pay wall, unfortunately. But it is like, like we said, like the most popular time in his career. So that must be kind of a bummer. But this is This is why Steven called this Daily Wire contract a slave contract in theory. The. Slave being a fucking slave. Podcasting. I'm sorry, what? Yeah, Chain behind this desk

talking to a camera. Oh, no. He was thinking that the Daily Wire would be making bank off of his show and that he would get nothing. What did he want? He wanted $30 million a year. Wanted $120 million over the course of four years, not fifty $120 million. And this is according to Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring. The Daily Wire accused him of setting up an online fight to boost himself, which I I was

monitoring this as well. I'm so glad that me and my good friend Ben Shapiro also caught the same details. We did The Who is the the old who is on stopbigcon.com, which is the new phrase that he developed. He wants to stop big con large conservative On December 12th of 2022, Steven Crowder registered the domain. On December 15th, he announced his departure from the blaze and asked people to join mug club and then went on his winter

break. And then when he came back on sometime in January, he secretly recorded Jeremy boring in a date Daily Wire contract negotiation and released this leaked conversation and kicked off his stop Big Con campaign, which is him going against other conservatives is something that he's been increasingly willing to do, which is quite interesting. He loves to cannibalize and, you know, splinter apart these these audiences and, you know, scoop

up as much of it as he can. But I got to say, this is not a good look for him. I don't think that this turned out to be 1, the right choice to turn down a lot of money and security or, you know, to like people don't, I don't know, I guess look at how the Daily Wire is doing now. You know, they're also struggling. So I don't really know who wins here.

But I do know that it was a really public and kind of obnoxious little infighting moment that I think he, I think he was the biggest loser of. Yeah, I mean, also notable about this spat is that it draws Stephen a lot of criticism from other conservative media personalities who finds the whole thing in poor taste, right.

It's like somebody walks up to you, wants to give you 50 million fucking dollars and then you try to ridicule them or you try to suggest that they're in the pocket of like tech companies or something, and you air it out all publicly and and like you force that outlet to respond to you. It's just this attention money grabbing stunt. A lot of people in that media space, you know, we know from things we covered earlier in the episode, he's not an especially

popular guy. But like this, this burns some bridges for him, I think. It's a true Sophie's Choice, really. So a couple months later, in March 2023, Steven Crowder signs a contract with Rumble, an alternative video platform that's got investments from JD Vance and Peter Thiel, in addition to a host of other sort of reactionary investors. Right? This was going to be the new YouTube.

And of all the alternative platforms out there, this one has, you know, it has probably been one of the most lasting successes, at least on paper, right? This company is making a shit load of money. It's not clear how much money they give Steven Crowder, but, you know, I mean, this is where he goes after declining 50 million bucks. So I have to wonder because the company, as far as I could tell, hasn't disclosed how much he's

making off this contract. But they did put out a press release saying that within the first five months of Steven Crowder launching his show doing his Daily Show with Rumble, the show generated over $7.5 million in subscription payments to the Mug Club. He claims he had the most watched stream. On election night in 2024 via Rumble. Claims that, claims that he also had an election integrity map that he had in place to catch shenanigans in real time that broke within 7 minutes.

Something like that didn't work the entire night. I mean, it's pretty cool stuff. So in April 2023, I was acquainted with Steven Crowder in a more intimate way as someone who didn't follow him too closely before then because I saw footage, ring footage of him appearing to berate his pregnant wife. So it was Yasher Ali. Big big fan of that guy. What a weird character he is. Published his Ring footage of him doing that.

Hilary Crowder. Apparently that's the wife leaked that to Yasher. Allegedly this was recorded two years earlier in June of 2021. In the video she's pregnant, she's carrying twins and he unloads on her using for over using her car. Yeah, they share a car. You got to? Yeah. They have one car, Mike. Thank you. We got one car. He unloads her for using the car, the family car, because he wants to go to the gym and the

audio on this is not pleasant. So I think trigger warnings there for misogyny and threats of domestic violence, Jim. I can go to my parents, I can't call my friends. I can't go. I can't. Be home. You're gonna take the car and leave me here, Hillary. Just think of how boxing is made me. What do you need me to? Pick up. I'll get it. I'll be back when I'm back. No, that doesn't work either. You'll be back when you're back. It doesn't work.

Either I I understand the difference between one life. Being set to the second and you're going. Back on back, the student. The only way out of this is discipline. Respect. We're at an. Impact good. Because you can't have any. There you go. You throw your hand, you give up. So I just said the only way this is discipline of respect. You said that we're at an impact. No, we are. At an impact. OK, I love you. But. Steven. Steven.

Here, he's sick. Watch it, watch it, fucking watch it. I'm going to let go. I'll get what you need me to get it and I I need. Some space we need you to stop and Beijing for. A little bit. OK, I. Love you, I love you very. Much I don't love you, that's the big problem. I've never received love from you. And the fact is, when I go look, I need an ABC and D, You just can just put about it, you know? No, but I love you more than life itself, OK? It's not fair. It's not fair and it's

disingenuous. I'm just going to stop it there. I think folks get the picture. Jared, it's been a while since I've heard that and still just so upsetting. Just makes me so fucking mad hearing it every single time. I can't imagine to talking talking to anybody like that, let alone somebody I love who's. A correction though, he says he doesn't love her. No, he doesn't love at. Least he's at least he's honest about that.

So to paint paint an even richer picture, Hillary was 8 months pregnant with twins and Steven was sitting in on patio furniture in his backyard blowing cigar smoke towards Hillary. And that little comments about putting on some gloves. That was because she was complaining. Complaining, she said that she didn't want to. It had something to do with picking up dog poop or applying A Suppository into a sick dog of theirs that would have caused problems for her pregnancy.

The medication would have. So he's mad that she didn't want to do that. Yeah. Couldn't go get the, you know, the Traeger wood pellets for his his grill. What if him and his friends wanted to go to the gym that she couldn't take the car? So this is the. Equivalent. So I don't know much about the dog medicine, but pregnant women aren't allowed to clean the litter box usually because, Yeah, because there's like bacteria, whatever this is.

Like instead of just doing, doing the little bit of extra house chores during that time, it's like, it's like, it's like, figure it out, Figure it out, woman. Well, and and you did stop at Jared before he threatens her saying I will fuck you up, which is a really foul that I he's verbally abusing his wife on ring Cam. We don't have the full context of it, but I feel it's safe to say that that's that's what we got.

He filed for divorce, I guess, hired a divorce attorney in January of 2021, five months before this footage was recorded. Hillary didn't have any idea that he'd hired a lawyer yet. He he was planning to leave, but then was, you know, maintaining this traditional marriage brand, which was a struggle for him to kind of square. Then Hillary eventually filed for divorce December 2021, leaving after learning that he had already hired attorneys. Steven, she claims, which I think.

I don't know what his excuse was, I'm racking my brain, but he wasn't present for the birth of their twins. Jeez, dude. Yeah, really rough stuff. This footage though, it it it came out two days later after that divorce was filed by Hillary and Steven announced the divorce on his show and blamed his bad decisions and felt really remorseful about the way he treated his wife. And wait, actually, no, he blamed his wife for the marriage

falling apart. He was publicly in this segment express expressing how he was against no fault divorce and he straight up said that this was his biggest failure, saying quote I made the wrong choice talking about marrying her. Look, I get it, there are multiple sides to every story. But one thing that is undeniable in this case, that's no one's fault but my own, in that I picked wrong, and that's certainly not the fault of my children. Shit doesn't stop hitting the fan, though.

Months after that, May 2023, workplace harassment accusations against Steven Crowder go public. So there's a handful of investigations published. The first one that really rocks is from the New York Post. You know, it has, I think it was like nearly a dozen former Louder with Crowder staffers on various levels of attribution. I'm just going to read a quick little blurb from it to kind of

paint the picture. Crowder allegedly sent production assistants to do his laundry and could be a quote, unreasonable micromanager who would make wild requests after hours to quote, set people up for failure. Ex staffers claimed that he would regularly berate his team and threatened to fire people on the company's discord channel.

He even went after his own father, Darren Crowder per one source who claimed Crowder would yell at his dad in front of employees when Darren was working as his son's Booker. In addition to this, the stand out allegation against Steven Crowder is that he on multiple occasions exposed his genitalia AKA whipped out his Dick in front of staff. Feel like taking your Dick out is like #1 on the list?

Yeah, you just and it's pretty easy not to do is the cool thing, right, So. You know, there's like there's like multiple chances for you to stop before you pull your Dick out. You think about it and you look down. You have to what? You have to like unbutton on zippers. You've got to pull it down, you've got to whip it out. I think there's like multiple stops on that train where you can get off the ride. It's.

Like I like the idea that this, this like 2 second thing being broken down and it's like, well, it's like, wait a second. It's like bullet. It's like bullet time in the matrix. Or it's like, yeah. No, he responded to these allegations by doing what he does best, a skit in which he showed his genitalia to a staffer. Oh. Comedy, of course. That comedy. Yeah. It's honestly the show is a who

you guys should check it out. Apparently though, like zooming in and on one of these specific allegations, he climbed over and dropped his junk on top of Jared's shoulder. I think this is while they were in a moving van while they were preparing or heading to a change my mind event. Nope, nevermind. Right here in my notes, he Jared was sleeping on a plane. So that means that it probably happened more than once in my brain on a plane.

Just pull that out. Apparently he did it to Jared while he was sleeping on a plane in 2018. On a on a plane. I mean, I guess, I guess he's making big money. In theory this could be a private plane, but now I'm also imagining Steven Crowder doing this like in Economy on like Delta Airlines flight, whatever, you know? It's like the.

On a private. It's like the bit that Al Franken got cancelled for where he sort of like pretended to the, you know, touch the boobs as a gripping person, which which of course, this is very controversial now. It's like, you know, it's been relitigated quite a bit. What happened with Al Franken but not bringing that up. But it is that that's sort of like oops, sleeping person. Maybe I can do something silly here. It's. Jocular.

It's it's locker room humor. I don't particularly like waking up with a penis on my shoulder, but it's only happened. It's only happened about a half dozen times to me. I have seen him on private jets before. One of my favorite pictures shows him in a new button up shirt that still has the lines from where it was folded at the JC Penney where he got it, which is pretty cool. He's a sharp dresser. I really think he's got great

fashion sense. But Steven tries to kind of shake this all off, laugh it away. That is until he can't really do that any longer when not Gay Jared decides to sue him and Steven ends up losing that lawsuit in his order to pay $58,000. Since then, a handful of staffers have come out even since the the what you discussed. Jared Stevens always hiring. You can go to the website and get a job there pretty easily. Yeah, yeah, when I was looking, they're hiring a social media manager right now.

Oh Dang, that's a new one. Yeah, I'm always looking for opportunities, so yeah. Stuff out there, you know, That'd be a great job for posting through it, Listener. If I don't want it, because I do know a lot about the show, Steven, I'm your guy. Just kidding. Yeah. Listen, there's, there's been a handful of claims that you, you went by Jared.

He apparently allegedly offered and asked staffers for prescription drugs like Klonopin and Percocet cannabis gummies, which I that's fine, I don't care about that. But he required staff allegedly again to work 100 hours plus a week and to sleep in the office without overtime pay. When staff complained about lack of sleep, he responded.

Be a little grateful buddy. He also would buy, I don't know the exact name of the book, but books about radical accountability and would give them that when they would mess up following the coverage of his bad behavior.

The entire company after that New York Post article came out, the entire company and I think Media Media did some stuff as well, but the entire company had to sign updated Ndas, which you know, if the results of Jared Monroe's lawsuit kind of point that it's just it actually doesn't really matter. They're not enforceable, or at least they weren't so.

It's always a good place, you know, when you have a ton of allegations about workplace harassment and unfair labor practices is to force all your employees to sign really tight Ndas. That's a that's usually a good sign that you're in the right and have nothing to hide. Of course. Well, he starts getting kind of sloppy after this. I mean, he, he has made a lot of

bad blood in pretty short order. This catches up to him May 2023, same month, you know, but as all this stuff's coming out, there's a mass shooting in Allen, TX. Folks might remember this. It was at like a outside promenade, like a shopping mall kind of area. And it comes out that the perpetrator had neo Nazi tattoos and Stevens response and a lot of the right wing media response at the time was to call it a psyop because the perpetrators name was Murcio Garcia.

That's not European white name right? So Steven and other people in right wing media start attacking and showing photos of a random guy in Texas who happened to also have that name. They aired photos of him in their coverage. They claimed that they had to do this because the mainstream media was refusing to tell the

truth about the story. And according to a letter that his mother sent one network, not Steven, but a different network that also aired photos of her son, it turned their life upside down. They were getting death threats, they were being harassed and her son was associated with a neo Nazi mass shooting. A lot of people forget also that there were like 2 narratives that were kind of going at that

time. The white nationalist group VDR for example, put out post saying that like this is it, this is a Hispanic shooter, you know, this is it. This is this is where the invasion will get you right? And, you know, surprise, this guy's out of social Russian social media site sharing quite literally VDR links. Yeah. And he turned out to be a white supremacist. So, you know, I think it is important to frame Crowder's actions in that context, in that

he was sharing this guy's name. But it was also most likely about the, you know, inspired by the 1st push of that information, which was the fact that this guy was had a Latino last name and background and his ideology, his right leaning ideology became more apparent as time went on actually. Well, he was inspired kind of by one of his good friends, Alex Jones, and his mistaken coverage around Sandy Hook.

Which is interesting because Steven and Gerald ended up getting sued by Mauricio Garcia's family and deposed by the God attorney, a Mark Bankston hero attorney at large. Mark did a wonderful job. If you have a couple hours to spend, YouTube did a great job with providing those depositions to us and Mark did a wonderful job. Yeah, so Steven and Gerald Morgan, who's like a producer on the show, right? Gerald Morgan is the CEO now.

He he became CEO because Steven was using him to shield all his assets during the during the divorce, Gerald Morgan technically owned Stevens Lake House because they didn't want to give Hillary any of it. So pretty cool stuff. So scummy dude, but also you're the CEO of a podcast, all right man. I mean, he's a CEO of a podcast as well as a conversion therapy like pro conversion therapy guy too. So yeah, he does a lot, chuckles a lot of different hats. Cool guys.

Wears them too. Anyway, so Steven and Gerald Morgan, they get deposed. And according to a posting through a listener who works at the same law firm that handled this case, shortly after those depositions, Crowder settled the case. We don't know for how much, but, you know, I assume that means that Steven Crowder and Gerald Morgan walked out of those depositions and we're like, well, fuck, you know what? Let's just cut him a check and like try to move on from this year.

Basically everything that was happening devastated Steven Crowder's reputation, and some analysis from Media Matters shows that Crowder's content has really started to perform quite poorly on Rumble these days. He's tried to recover, but it seems like most of those efforts have flopped. I mean, I gave a look guys on just to see how he was doing on X. For a guy who has ostensibly the better part of 3,000,000 followers is 2.5 million

followers. There's a lot he's doing the kind of engagement that you would expect to see from like a dirtbag left tweet, you know, like he's cracking, you know, he's cracking 1000 likes on most of his posts. And and of course we can't really be sure on X for example, how many of those are legit or botted up. Yeah, yeah. And I, and I looked at Social Blade, which is like a analytics tracking company just for his YouTube channel to see sort of how, you know, is the channel

still growing? And what I saw is that his YouTube channel, which I mean, granted, Rumble is his primary home these days, seems to be shrinking. Like people are unfollowing or they're deleting their accounts or whatever it may be. But like his follower count. Maybe they died of COVID. His follower counts going down slowly. It's a slow, slow burn, but going down nonetheless. I always look at these examples of actual interaction on Stevens social media.

He does occasionally does a call for action. He does something every I can't remember what month it is, but he has cultural appropriation month and he has a theme every week, a very racist theme. And he has his his followers post dress up like costumed versions of the themes and interact with him on Twitter. And he gets, listen, I'm telling you 10 of responses to these, which is really heartening.

One time he spent, I think it was 20, we estimated $20,000 in a Times Square billboard and told people to go down to Times Square and take selfies in front of it. And he got two people to do it. Are we? Are we titling this? Who the hell is Steven Crowder? Or who the hell was Steven Crowder? Oh, that's a good. Question. He's not dead, Mike. But I mean, people die in different ways, you know, MF Doom will live forever, you know? Well, we're not. We're. Not that's true.

I mean, listen, if we're talking hip hop, I did see feel very old today when I went to Spotify and saw that it's been 20 years since J Dilla's Donuts came out. Is that is that your speed Mike? That sounds like something you. Do I do enjoy that record? All right, well, Steven, listen, we're not he's not quite quite done yet because he's actually at this point, August of 2023. And this is actually the birth of my podcast Louder than Crowder. I decided to jump in here.

Crowder held a heavily promoted re platforming conference. So this is a rebirth where he announced that mug Club would

become an umbrella network. This is post Big Con flop and he is bringing other canceled conservative figures, most notably Alex Jones, the most censored man in the world, alongside other band personalities like alleged sexual assaulter Bryan Callen Stevens, favorite comedian and a very racist guy, Nick Dipaolo. The Hodge Twins, who I should point out recently had David Duke on their show.

That's kind of cool. And prematurely introducing anti vax comedian Jim Breuer from the brew universe folks he was he was initially announced to be part of the mug club network but that didn't happen and Jim clarified that on his podcast pretty soon after St. Steve's a good guy but we we were never really going to do it. I think Steven was convinced that Jim was actually going to be producing a stand up comedy special for him.

And given the special that Steven produced and released for Bryan Callen recently that came out on YouTube and didn't do very good numbers. I think Jim dodged a bullet there. Even for Goat Boy. You know, he also said that this was his, he was going to use his platform to help smaller conservative creators. He pointed towards the slave contract that he was offered at the Daily Wire, saying that other conservative creators smaller than him were offered even worse, you know, conditions

and he was going to be the. Opposite of that. Oh, even even even worse than $50 million. Right. God, Can you imagine 30 million? Well, the cool thing is Steven didn't help anyone out. He didn't he didn't ever bring on any smaller creators to his network. And in fact, that network mug Club would eventually be rolled into Rumble Premium. And Jared, you mentioned, yeah, we we just don't know how much he's making as part of this deal.

We don't know what kind of cut he's getting as part of Rumble. I certainly can't imagine he's he's getting Bongino Box right? Bongino's like a part owner of Rumble. Yeah, yeah, Bongino's heavily invested in the platform. I think he has like a 8 or 9% stake is what I saw in some reporting from a few years ago. But yeah, a lot of right wing personalities that have been, you know, at battle with tech companies have tried to do versions of this.

Like one of the first ones I remember was Box Day. That's a throwback. You know, he had a platform where he would upload stuff. Gavin Mcinnis, Anthony Cumia, I mean, Sensor, there's been so many of these and they just like constantly merge and like one fails and then it gets absorbed over here and over there. I I don't think it's actually like a good source of money and it completely isolates your audience, right? Like, how do you get people to

discover? You have to get people to discover and pay for a paywall, like to get to the content like you're you're just not going to reach new people there. But I also can imagine Rumble, who he has a contract inked with at this time, has got to be looking at him and being like, what the fuck are you doing, man? You're going to start a media network.

Yeah, no, you're not. You're going to tell them to get on. Rumble is what you're going to do, Steven. Rumble is a platform baffles me like you said that they're doing well financially, but how much money can you make off of ads saying that you can cure your cavities by drinking apple cider vinegar? You know, like there? Have you seen the ads on Rumble other than the ice ones that you get pretty much constantly? I am so suspicious of that platform.

I also put out some pieces last year at my job at open measures looking into like what really looked like to me, like bot activity on Rumble and that that's making up like percentage points at the very least of what's on the site. So I don't trust the stats on there either. It's just very sketchy, very sketchy platform. For him being the face of what's called the lineup at Rumble, which is a collection of creators like Tim Poole, it was Vince who was taking over for Dan Bongino.

But yeah, it's just baffling. He's not even in a featured creator slot on the main page at Rumble right now. Lo Fi Girl gets is more featured than Steven Crowder right now. Well, got one more face plant to recount here before we start to zoom out, talk about the current day and sort of our reflections towards the end. Here. Steven Crowder gets excerpts of writings left behind by Audrey Hale, who was a mass shooter that in 2023 attacked the Covenant School outside of Nashville, TN.

Steven has excerpts, right? I mean, like a handful of pages and he's taking them out onto a show and saying this is proof that this mass shooter was motivated by anti Christian sentiment that they were trans, that they were, you know, basically painting the portrait of this like mentally ill leftist out to kill right wing children or the children of Christian conservative people. Police investigate this leak. Crowder claims that these writings are part of a manifesto

the shooter left behind. And years later, after federal investigators went through what was a ridiculous amount of material that shooter left behind, videos, notebooks after notebooks after notebooks came to an entirely different conclusion, saying that Audrey Hale wanted to be famous. They wanted to have notoriety. They openly fantasized about like true crime documentaries being made about what they did.

You know, that was that was the motivation and that they had no reason to believe that, like politics really factored into it. They were a former student at the school and thought, wow, shooting up kids in a school that's going to get the headlines, that's going to be like they're going to Remember Me like Columbine and Stephen. His response was very lackluster of just like a they say Biden's in office when this report comes out right.

So it's just like, well, of course the Biden administration's going to claim this. They're covering it all up. But it but it's really the way I see it, just a really embarrassing blowing the lid off of sort of what Stevens shtick is there? The final investigation report doesn't name Steven explicitly, but you know, they're kind of sub tweeting him throughout it.

This wouldn't have been public if if it wasn't for him making such a mess of it, claiming that this is all just white Christians are the new victims and this is all just part of this larger trans panic around mass shooters. So it's a it was a mess. Yeah, that was part of his what what we call the MCU, the Mug Club undercover investigation unit that he has over there. That's what he calls it. So it's just people emailing and shit him shit right Like.

Yep, that's all it is. And I think it was a similar connection that he had with an ATF agents post Charlie Kirk that got him a scoop. The scoop that was again a misguided representation of of what was said on the shell casings and what it meant. And he, of course, he went on, aired the next day talking, talking about that as well, incorrectly so. So remember this guy in the two semesters of college he attended, apparently you know, According to him, took media and journalism class.

Jared, he doesn't know the difference between the first, second and third hand source is what he said during his his conversation with Mark Bankston during that deposition. So awesome. Yeah. Didn't learn much at media school. Nope. So this guy is kind of like slowly rotting, it looks like, you know, as a content creator before our eyes, you are subjecting yourself to this stuff. What? What are you seeing? Like, what? What? What is he now?

What does he do? Yeah, when I TuneIn daily now it's you know, it's actually pretty good. Things have gotten really funny. Mike things have taken a turn. He's no he's the worst. It's awful. The show usually starts with he does a cold open where he talks about the topics he's going to be hitting, does a really funny and you know, song parody or a commercial for a finance company that is somehow still racist and they're still somehow still offering him. I had money for that.

And then we roll into an opening where he usually will play whatever racist clip is trending on conservative TikTok. One of his employees will send him something he finds funny. It's maybe it's a stabbing that someone is committing in France. Maybe it's someone speaking in a different language that he finds

funny. It's all kinds of really cool, funny ways to start a show before talking about the news and having really terrible but still base level takes because his audience doesn't want to hear nuance or, you know, any sort of actual understanding of a situation. They just want to hear what the talking points are across conservative media and then add a little bit of violence to it, a little bit of pro violence talk. But. But yeah, we usually count 3 to

4 accents per episode. That's always fun. Keep track with his his impressions. And yeah. And there's a rotating cast of behind the scenes, behind the scenes employees. Tim the toolman is the main dude. He's been there for a very long time. His third chair is usually a comedian. How many don't like Tim the Toolman? Tim, you don't like that? Well, I mean, it's it's not it's a much shorter person than Tim Allen, but this guy, listen, his

legs dangle from his chair. He hops down and it's it's pretty cool. He's been Stevens friend for a very long time. But for the most part, people don't stay very long. I'm telling you, you got to give you're looking for a gig. You got to keep your eyes on the website because he will give you a funny nickname. And as someone who's never been given a nickname, maybe that's something I'm looking for. But it's just, it's a nightmare. And it's, it's just such a poorly produced show on a daily

basis. They get things wrong. But for the most part, sometimes we find ourselves sitting down to make comments on the show and it's just like, there's nothing to say. He's just saying racist, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic things. And you know what is there to critique about that? You know, it seems like he has been trying to do these sort of same attention getting stunts or, or, or you know, going out to the extremes to try to stir up some controversy.

He recently hosted Nick Fuentes for an interview. Like he he got Nick Fuentes after red scare got Nick Fuentes right. Maybe that tells you where his show is at currently. He also recently published a video about replacement theory and stuff. But I just don't like when he did this on YouTube, it would create a conflict between him and the platform. And now they're censoring him. And now it's like, you know,

look at me, I'm under attack. And that can really invigorate like a parasocial thing with his audience or get people there or get people curious. But Rumble doesn't give a shit about any of that, so. It's do whatever you want. If these are attention seeking stunts, they don't really work anymore. You have to get creative, Jared. You have to escalate the and. That's giving him the benefit of the doubt. That's looking at him cynically.

It's also completely possible he just believes this kind of shit straight up. At this point, I think that is possible. Recently, I think it must be within the last year, he went on Pierce Morgan's uncensored program and he was challenged to say the N word. They're like, well, then just say it. And he just said it three times. And that was kind of the kick off of his new era of, of saying the N word and also complaining that Piers Morgan on his uncensored show censored him

from saying the N word. And I'm like, that's a weird thing to be complaining about. So then he, of course, published the uncensored version on his YouTube page, which I don't know, man. Yeah, absolutely right. At this point, he's really done it all. And it's kind of just down, but also in a different direction from here, right? Like, there's only escalation and, you know, intensification of his beliefs at this point. That's probably as good a place as any to wrap it up here.

Mike, thanks for hanging in there. I know you're under the weather hanging out, but I'm glad you could. You can make it with us today. In for a penny, in for a pound. What, what, what possibly could shingles really be compared to listening to listening to Steven Crowder use the N word? But Jared, you've heard about this. What, who, who, what, What the hell? Who the hell is Steven Crowder? What is Steven Crowder? Maybe. I don't. Yeah.

What is what is he? I. Mean, when I look at Steven Crowder having, you know, gone through everything to prep this episode with tremendous help from Byron, right? I mean, I, we both brought in stuff here and like, I had never really spent that much time looking into Steven Crowder before. And I started to wonder, like, why that was. Because the more I looked at it, the more I was like, holy shit, this guy's a big deal. Or at least was right.

And I knew he was a big deal, but I just never really took the time to try to actually figure him out. By the end of it, I feel like I was just more sad than anything. He's just kind of a, in my view, a sad guy. You don't not to go full armchair psychologist, but there's like some kind of like I, I feel like I recognize some kind of like self hatred thing going on, some sort of like really deep insecurity here that like plays out. We've seen this with like so many people.

It kind of plays out the same way we've seen it and other people, right. But mostly who do I think Steven Crowder is? I have to thank Byron for texting me this morning. A link to one of Steven Crowder's playlist on Spotify called Big Chillin. It is Byron. I think you put it best like this dude goes to a wedding and it's like they're playing all my favorite songs right now. I've never met a One Republic fan. It has it. Seems like it's just Steven Crowder.

It has like, OK, so I skimmed it briefly, but it had, I was like, what is this song? I don't remember what the band is called like, but like it. But it's like that song that's like, this is going to be the best day of my life. Dump, dump, dump dude. And I was like, I only know that for like fucking like drug commercials. It's like drugs that get rid of rashes and like, you know, that you can go back outside again and like, and shit like that.

I, I've, I've never like he listens to like music that you hear and fucking Ms. now like drug commercials where it's sort of like, hey, your herpes is under control and it's like, and then you need an uplifting song that's like Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo. That's what fucking Steven Crowder is listening to when he's walking around or driving

in his car, apparently. Yeah, I mean, on this playlist we've got you mentioned One Republic, The Lumineers, Milky Chance Train, Coldplay. Coldplay, man. Jeez. Al City. The Fray. Avicii genuinely listens to Imagine Dragons. He's got Thunder on here. Maroon 5. Like I I don't even know how to put it into words, but I know exactly who this motherfucker is. I don't listen to any bands with a fucking number on it. Like straight up, it's just.

I know, I know this guy. I've met a thousand of these guys before. The last thing he added to this just a couple days ago, about a month ago, was Iris. Dizzy up the girl or Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls off Dizzy up the girl. Oh dude. And one song just added one song to it. Big chilling, man, Big chilling, Big chilling. That's what he listens to when he's big chilling, smoking a cigar, saying God awful shit to his wife. Mike, you've been a trooper hanging in there.

I apologize also because my, I'm like completely blasted. I took Ativan as well because I was like, I'm like, you know, just I want to be like my there's like nerve pain. I was looking to calm that down. So I'm very sedate today. But but Mike, after listening to all of this, who the hell is Steven Crowder? I mean, he sucks. So I have like very little to add here. You guys know a lot more than I do.

But I just want to just like point out one phenomenon that may be of use to our listeners who've made it to the end of this, which is since the Trump era, there are very few people in this mega world who really stand out as being irreplaceable. This guy is replacement meet. He is, he is replaceable. And I point I, I want to, I just want to as a point of comparison, you have somebody who is essentially a shark like Stephen Miller innocently.

I know it's an insult to sharks. What do sharks do? They're they're just part of the ecosystem. But like in the sense that like he's just, there's no feeling. There's no depth of humanity. He's up at 4:00 in the morning. He's sharing things about immigrants. He's just hell hell bent on making this psychotic project run. You got somebody like Steve Bannon who I think is legitimately intelligent, all judgements aside about his morals. He is a person who is willed a lot of this into being.

You have somebody like it, Donald Trump, who is unmatchable skills as a carnival Barker. Crowder is like one of those guys who has power, or had power for sure over people largely because of all this like slush money and garbage that just floats around from billionaires to prop up this despicable project and make all of our lives much worse.

Basically keep us from having affordable housing, keep us from having affordable healthcare, keep keep the rest of us from living so they can accrue more and more money. And he's the perfect tool for that. As you can see here, a guy who is not who could not have really made it as a as a comedian, right.

He just doesn't have the goods who who's handsome enough to do louder with Crowder, but is not handsome enough to do whatever comedic films or something like that might come with a personal economy. So he's he is a guy for when his his story collapses, they will find somebody else. And the same thing is true for Matt Walsh, who's a guy who we're going to eventually, probably I do on here. Maybe we'll do it before his peak like implodes. But these people are replaceable.

And while they're at, you know, the top of the game, they are really they really start to believe that they are a special talent. And I'm sure that right before that fucking Ring Ring footage emerged, he really thought there was nothing you could bring him down because he was just such an important person. And well, guess what, buddy?

You're not. Byron, I feel like I I have overindulged and Steven Crowder, in the process of preparing this episode, you have consumed way more, way more than I have. So tell you, you tell us, who the hell is Steven Crowder? Well, you, you both said a lot. So I'm not, I'm not going to, I'm not going to dive too deeply. But I will say that from everything I've taken in, like maybe policy aside, I think that like Steven is just an insecure

boy. He's painfully struggling to rebound from, you know, his childhood up through today. Like he hasn't really grown as a person. He's a product of a racist Christian nationalist father, which we didn't really focus on too much because there's nothing too well documented. All I know is from the little snippets I get from Stevens upbringing, I know that there's

a mention of him. You know, this is one of the things that drew me to him too, is that I'm I'm a similar age and we kind of culturally started from the same place. Like he was like an emo guy he used to listen to like Dashboard Confessional and a bands like that. And there's this moment where he said that his he was wearing a bandana in his back pocket and his dad told him to take it out and called him a slur. He didn't explicitly say that part, but I think that's implied.

Steven is still trying to impress his dad, and it's because of all of this that he is struggling to connect with his peers, you know, fighting the beliefs that have been impressed on him and his desire to participate in pop culture. It's kind of this weird, perfect storm. And then he got really lucky being an early adopter of new media and and following YouTube trends. And that is what brought him into the mainstream. I don't think he's got the chops for it though.

And now he's found himself isolated, kind of lashing out at any once friendly conservative peer that he had. And his influence is sliding, which is only making him desperate and explicit in his hate. Like he's stuck. He's surrounded by people he pays to be his friends in a compound that he never leaves. And he's sad. Like you said, Jared, I just wish that his his sadness didn't have to affect so many people.

I want to interject something real quick here, but it sounds like you're at the end of the thought. But I, I think I think this is useful to people because, you know, if you follow this all through, you will recall that he was offered a lot of money from Daily Wire. Do you think he wishes he took that money? I think he does. I think he I think that in the window where he was making the largest career mistakes was when it was a very emotionally difficult moment when his his

marriage was failing. Like if you read how much of A wife guy Steven was at the beginning, like he wrote, like we point out, we didn't read them these articles about abstinence. He wrote an article about his first night with his wife. He was the definition of a wife guy. And it all fell apart around the same time he started making these massive career missteps. So yeah, I think he regrets it a lot. I mean, I think. It seems like he was so high on

his own supply, man. Like he's just like, you know, there's as I say, it was like, you know, it's sort of like you think you're talented and you think you're not replaceable and like in reality, you completely are. I'm not, you know, I mean, it's a jokingly reference MF Dune, but like all all, all artists who have like some kind of signature talent that they bring that is very specific to them.

You know, when you're reading books, when you're reading it and you're like this, this is this person's voice. This is there. There's only one person like this, right? You see, like Christopher Walken act or something like that means you may not be the greatest actor you've ever seen, but there's something that's so idiosyncratic about Christopher Walken. He's like, well, Christopher Walken does that.

Steven isn't anything. And like, you know, his, his ability to entertain and engage is again, very, it's very lukewarm. It's a very lukewarm thing. And it's like, buddy, there is another. Don't you understand You, you you. You know how grateful you should be when someone offers you $50,000,000 to be what you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His, his shit is so low brow. Anybody can do that. Anybody can do as long as they are willing to swallow their

shame, is the caveat. Anybody can do what Steven Crowder does. I mean, I, I hate to be so like empathetic in this experience with him because I agree. Like there's this, also this. Level here we try to see something in them as well as also. Wondering. What might have happened had he died in during one of his many death experiments? But we we also try to look into his heart.

Yeah, the thing that I mean, there's this also this some some sort of level, some degree of narcissism that makes him feel like he's capable of doing all of this stuff mixed with insecurity, which is a creates a Crowder. And that's what we've got. And I just wish, I wish that it, you know, I wish that it didn't have to affect, you know, marginalized people and also take advantage of an audience

that he's exploiting. You know, I think that I think that he's found a way to do that a little less good than he used to. So thank goodness for that. Byron, that brings us to a close here. You Co host podcast called Louder than Crowder, which is the the official, the flagship podcast about the podcast Louder with Crowder. Tell folks about that. I'd love it if Mike and I could join you guys for one coming up in the near future. Yeah, I hope you. I hope you are. You're welcome anytime.

Yeah, Louder than Crowder. It's a weekly podcast with I guess it's a recap podcast. We we tend to focus on as though we pick an episode once a week and break it down on these larger events. Like we just got done covering the Alex pretty assassination and that covered a span of dates. But yeah, we we like to goof around, but also it's a tends to skew serious from time to time. Me, my Co host Dennis and my good friend Jared sit down.

Yeah, once a week. And it's available at on all podcast platforms, Spotify, Apple podcast, whatever you listen to louder than Crowder. And we also have something called the Shrug Club, which is at shrugclub.com or patreon.com/shrug Club where we investigate his stand up comedy. We found some leaked comedy and don't know how this happened.

It's crazy. I just so happened to be at the same show a couple years ago that Steven performed at and somehow I acquired all this audio from this stand up set. So we're breaking that down there. We also have live streams that are also rebroadcast as part of the Shrug Club, so you can go check that out. Folks, go check out Louder Than Crowder and keep an eye out. You might recognize a couple of voices on that show here in the near future. Well, thanks for tuning in.

That was a long journey, but now you know more about Steven Crowder than you ever did. We hope this can be a conclusive biography of Steven Crowder, but there's been too many. Jared's mentioned on the show. I'm getting confused. I think it's time for us to go. We will see folks on the Patreon on Thursday. There's a link to that in the description. We're going to update you on the good stuff, on all the news that we missed while doing this.

And for everybody else, we'll see you here next week on Monday. Take care. Bye everybody. See you.