For years, progressives have fantasized finding a Joe Rogan of their own: someone butch and sonically seductive to beguile America’s acne class with sports jabber and pronoun jokes before turning the screws and making them vote his way.
But Blue Joe Rogan will never materialize. And that’s for the best. Blood-sport propaganda by a UFC hype man doesn’t work in defense of liberal democracy. Liberalism, after all, rejects demagoguery as coercive, infantilizing, and anathema to critical thinking. While Rogan reliably slams the id with porny language, simian posturing, and primal sounds—and of course the Goebbels combo of repetition and cartoonish lies—progressive gab needs something closer to reason.
When Ben Meiselas, a mild-mannered lawyer who sees himself as Mr. Rogers, entered the podcast-and-video octagon with the MeidasTouch Network (pronounced Midas, like the king), he seemed plenty reasonable. But no one saw a Rogan-slayer in him. Meiselas didn’t get drunk. He didn’t drone on about kettlebells or yuk it up with Alex Jones. Instead, he sat alone in his living room and, in short intervals, registered measured anger at Trump’s malignancy.
Working mostly behind the scenes were Ben’s younger brothers and partners at MTN, Brett and Jordy. The three of them had grown up as Long Island jocks. With swagger and accents in the vicinity of ex–Trump lawyer Michael Cohen (Cohen is an MTN contributor), the bro status of the actual bros was never in question. But MTN also had a whiteboard vision: to make a case, by any media necessary, for “empathy, compassion, equality, lifting people up, growing communities, truth, data, and democracy,” as Ben told me.
Something clicked. Ben says MTN’s YouTube channel now gets 300–350 million daily views. This is more than Fox News. The MeidasTouch Podcast regularly hits number one, with twice or even three times the monthly downloads of Rogan’s show. According to Ben, MTN also has the fastest-growing newsletter on Substack.
MTN is not above calling out “Rogan bros,” but the network is rarely on attack. The Meiselas (“my-SELL-iss”) brothers come off more like middle linebackers, defending America’s conscience against the hourly blows Trump delivers to it.
“I always had the view that a leader, or someone behaving in a quote-unquote masculine way, is someone who defends people against the bully,” Ben told me. “He doesn’t become the bully.”
This is a switch in progressive media’s posture from Trump’s first term. In those bygone days, prosecutors like Andrew Weissmann and Joyce Vance believed—like the rest of us—that Trump would soon find out the consequences for having fucked around so absurdly. The buttoned-up, institutionally grounded, legally deft prosecutions—the Mueller investigation, two impeachments, limitless civil suits, 88 criminal indictments, and 34 felony convictions—would finally bring Trump to heel.
So. No.
America in 2025 is a nation of Trump, not laws. And the Meiselas brothers, for all their self-promotion and lapses into banality, are who have stepped up. They’re the ones mounting a 24/7 case for a client on trial for its life: American democracy.
As a civil rights attorney at Geragos & Geragos, the L.A. defense firm (boldfaced clients include Roger Clinton, Winona Ryder, Michael Jackson, Colin Kaepernick), Ben Meiselas is well cast in the sacred role of what ancient Greeks called a Paraclete—a comforter, advocate, and protector.
The tide he and his brothers are most determined to stem is the Bannonian flood of bullshit. They love their receipts. When Stephen Miller lied daftly on Fox News that the Supreme Court had decided “9–0” that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland sheet-metal worker arbitrarily thrown into that El Salvador torture prison, was at Trump’s mercy, Ben pounced on the moronism. Reading from the Supreme Court’s entirely opposite decision with the gusto only an attorney can bring to legal documents, Ben set the record straight.
There are other hosts of the MTN shows, but Ben is almost never off the mic. His forte is let-me-get-this-straight recaps of the regime’s depravity and ineptitude, like so: “Let me repeat. Donald Trump appointed Jerome Powell in 2017. OK? So now Donald Trump is attacking his own person because his own person is saying accurately that the economy is struggling right now.”
Brett and Jordy, for their part, are media and marketing types. The caps-lock Gen-Z titles on Ben’s reasonable analysis are no doubt their handiwork: “TRUMP HAS MELTDOWN!!!” and “OMG … UTAH TURNING BLUE?!!”
“Defense” is a word that recurs on MTN. Notably, ads on the show aren’t for the soft stuff like MeUndies that I promoted on Trumpcast years ago. MTN features ads for LifeLock for preventing identity fraud and Mantis X, a shooting system that “helps you train smarter, shoot better, and defend what matters most.”
At times, Ben’s voice, which dominates the networks, sounds like the monotonous safety warnings at the end of a pharma ad. And indeed if the dominant spectacles these days are Trump’s bellowing bafflegab and Rogan’s androgen orgy, a few cautionary notes about side effects are useful.
But are Americans, who have been so jerked around, ready to proceed with caution when the administration is rushing us, under the banner of fake emergencies, into tariffs, kidnappings, deportations, Signalgates, the extortion of higher education, and the annihilation of Social Security? The MTN at its defense-lawyer best is delaying the electric chair with checks, balances, and facts.
Who would have guessed audiences would be dazzled by prudence? But if they really are, it’s a HUMILIATING ROGAN SMACKDOWN!!!—or at least a green shoot in a salt-sown media landscape.
The post Liberal Media in Crisis? Not the MeidasTouch. It’s Bigger than Rogan. appeared first on New Republic.
