The Leftist Podcaster Who Studies Online Radicalization

This past March, the Times writer and power podcaster Ezra Klein appeared on “Doomscroll,” a small but influential YouTube interview show hosted by the thirty-eight-year-old artist, researcher, and author Joshua Citarella. Klein, an avatar of the technocratic liberal media establishment, did not fit the profile of “Doomscroll” ’s typical guests, who tend to come from the further reaches of leftist political theory and punditry. Since its launch, a year ago, the series has featured such interlocutors as Kyle Kulinski, a populist YouTuber who views political discourse as a “bar fight,” and Brace Belden, a Marxist podcaster who volunteered to fight with a Kurdish militia in the Syrian Civil War. In Klein’s episode, he and Citarella acknowledged that they agree on the need for a “productive, Promethean, techno-optimistic future,” as Citarella put it, but differ significantly on how to get there. Nevertheless, Klein is a fan. He was, Citarella told me recently, one of the earliest boldface names to subscribe to a Substack newsletter that Citarella launched, in 2022, to publish research on obscure new forms of political radicalization among young people on the internet. That work, along with “Doomscroll,” has helped build Citarella’s reputation as someone who can read the internet tea leaves and augur the direction of America’s political id. During his conversation with Klein, Citarella observed that many people still don’t take online politics seriously enough. Klein replied, “That’s why I read your work.”

Citarella’s interest in both leftist politics and digital tools of dissemination dates back to his previous career as an artist. In the early twenty-tens, after graduating from the School of Visual Arts, he was part of a cohort of rising practitioners of post-internet art, an emerging genre of works, made using digital technologies and techniques, that embraced the internet as a dominant aesthetic of the times. Citarella was known for slick, strange digitally altered still-lifes and hyperrealistic sci-fi tableaux. He was showing his work in galleries and selling enough pieces to allow him to scale back a day job as a freelance photo retoucher. Then, in 2015, the art market spectacularly imploded, and his sales dried up almost overnight.

“I had no backup plan,” he told me. The realization of his own precarity was radicalizing. “You were used to this extreme stratification of wealth, where you would live at the poverty line and bump shoulders with billionaires at art openings,” he recalled. “It turns out that was actually an indication of a very sick society.” While working night shifts retouching for high-end e-commerce brands, Citarella began immersing himself in economic theories that he hoped could help explain what had happened in the art market. He listened alternately to an archive of lectures from the right-wing think tank the Mises Institute and to the Marxist scholar David Harvey’s close reading of both volumes of “Das Kapital.” He began following Instagram accounts about anarcho-capitalism, the libertarian-adjacent philosophy that has influenced prominent figures on the right, which led him to other accounts that espoused bizarrely niche belief systems, or “E-deologies.” It became apparent that many of the users behind them were preposterously young. “The account would post a selfie on the bus to school, and it turns out it’s a twelve year old,” he said. And though the adolescents’ political philosophies seemed farcical—“Dharmic Eco-Reactionaryism,” “Libertarian Neo-Monarchism,” “Traditional Primitivist Caliphatism”—their radicalization appeared to be very real. As Citarella noted in a lecture last year, some were “circulating manifestos from active eco-extremist groups that contain instructions for how to assemble improvised explosive devices.”

Citarella began to post about these accounts—a corner of Instagram that called itself “politigram”—and, in 2018, he compiled his findings into a self-published book, “Politigram and the Post-Left.” It quickly became something of an underground touchstone, both among the online communities that he wrote about and among older pundits who were fascinated to discover a pocket of online political life that had evaded their detection. In the following years, Citarella launched a Twitch stream, wrote op-eds about online politics for the Guardian, and put out a podcast under his own name which became a modest success. But his research had taught him that the single most powerful vector of right-wing radical ideas was YouTube, where, according to a recent study at U.C. Davis, conservative users are disproportionately shunted down “rabbit holes” of increasingly extremist content compared with their leftward-leaning peers. He launched “Doomscroll,” in September of last year, as what he has called a “tactical media experiment,” designed to create a “new pipeline” that is optimized to funnel politically curious young people toward leftist ideas, contravening the Svengali-like grip of the right-wing media ecosystem that seems to have swung 2024’s so-called “podcast election.” The show quickly built a steady following. By the second episode, featuring the cultural theorist Catherine Liu, it was receiving hundreds of thousands of views. In a recent episode, Kulinski, the fellow-YouTuber, described Citarella as “the closest thing I’ve seen to a ‘liberal Joe Rogan.’ ”

“Doomscroll” has featured many figures from the ranks of the “dirtbag left,” the loose media sphere known for its crass, confrontational style, and he shares many aspects of the dirtbag political outlook, which is class-conscious, labor-oriented, and interested in the counterproductive excesses of “wokeness.” But, compared with guests such as Will Menaker and Amber A’Lee Frost, of the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” or Hasan Piker, the rabble-rousing Twitch streamer, Citarella comes off as reserved, professional, and media-ready in the traditional sense. Clean-cut and unshowy, with an easy, authoritative manner, he introduces each guest in dryly neutral terms and steers conversations without dominating them, an approach that he describes as “social-democratic Lex Fridman,” after the impassive computer scientist turned podcaster beloved of the tech-right. The majority of “Doomscroll” interviews are shot in a white-walled studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, giving each episode a stark uniformity. The editing, lighting, and over-all production quality, accomplished with a scrappy team of part-time staff, rival that of much bigger video podcasts from outlets such as the Times. Citarella told me, “We have kind of jokingly called it ‘prestige podcasting.’ ”

For tactical reasons, he has also tried to avoid preaching only to the converted. “I think most people’s media strategy is to pursue a dedicated audience with a set editorial line,” he said. “That is essentially the editorial concept behind every existing left-wing media channel right now, and it has gotten us here.” He has conducted polite and inquisitive conversations with ideological opponents including the MAGA cheerleader Dasha Nekrasova, of the podcast “Red Scare”; the conservative Canadian journalist and popular YouTuber J. J. McCullough; and the libertarian-leaning, internet-famous sex worker and self-taught data scientist Aella. He has also made a point of pandering to the “manosphere” by publishing a series of syllabi that suggest both left-wing readings and fitness routines. (A few years ago, he underwent an “auto-experiment” in “hypermasculinity”—lifting weights, chewing tree resin, sunning his testicles—in an attempt to refute a right-wing theory that men with left-wing politics are “low T.”)

“Doomscroll” has been particularly focussed on harnessing the gleeful energy behind the widespread backlash against wokeness and directing it, in high Marxist fashion, to a more materialist analysis of the phenomenon. For this, he has looked to academics such as Liu, a repeat guest, who assails the “virtue hoarding” of the professional managerial class; the sociologist Vivek Chibber, who believes that identity politics has led to an “abandonment of radical scholarship” as it was traditionally conceived; and the writer Jennifer C. Pan, whose recent book, “Selling Social Justice,” argues that the anti-racist movement has served as a smokescreen to protect corporate interests and preserve the status quo. “ ‘Chapo’ and ‘Cum Town’ and those podcasts would give you permission to dunk on, like, the annoying woke libs,” Citarella told me. “Jen Pan’s book will give you the rigorous and quantitative arguments about why universal policies like the New Deal benefit Black Americans.”

Citarella mixes in lighter fare, such as a recent interview with the musician Matty Healy, the 1975 front man and Taylor Swift’s ex, to rope in viewers and offset his scholarly bent. But most of the podcast’s lineup reflects his pedagogical aims. In future episodes, Citarella plans to outline “left accelerationism,” a movement that seeks to bring an end to capitalism through a combination of automation and universal basic income. When I asked him how confident he was that such ideas could gain traction, he brought up the example of the Mont Pelerin Society, the think tank founded by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek that birthed neoliberalism. Initially, its members “were looked at as kind of fringe lunatics,” Citarella said; over time, they managed to “basically rewrite the entire political common sense of the world.” Online figures on the right, such as the neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin and the crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, have been injecting outré ideas into the conservative mainstream for years, he added. Why can’t those on the left do the same?

I spoke to Citarella last week, not long after the right-wing activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was shot dead by what appears to have been an extremely online twenty-two-year-old. The alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, engraved his bullet casings with video-game references and other messages that he described as “mostly a big meme.” Citarella noted that he’s been warning, for more than half a decade, that too many people remain under the mistaken impression that “what happens on the internet isn’t real.” He added that “the professional commentary class” has been particularly insulated from the power of digital discourse, because “they pay attention to the legacy sources of information, and they’re just not having the same media-environment experience as most people in the country.” What is needed, Citarella’s strategy suggests, is an understanding of a kind of post-internet politics, where, like it or not, online life is embraced as part and parcel of how modern belief systems are formed.

Citarella explained that when he first became interested in online radicalization, he would sometimes use anonymous social-media accounts to share memes, to see if he could seed Gen Z communities with “rehabilitative ideas.” Years later, he noticed that memes he had created based on the Marxist cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s cult book “Capitalist Realism” had continued to circulate. People had also started making new memes about Fisher’s work using Citarella’s templates. Now, with “Doomscroll,” he hopes to do something similar on an increasingly large scale. “It’s a four-year arc to do interviews with Presidential candidates in 2028,” he said. If his podcast can be considered a kind of art project, he added, “The medium I’m using now is influence.” ♦