In his new book, “The Disenlightenment,” the playwright David Mamet calls President Donald Trump “a hero” who saved America from lawlessness and corruption, slams liberals as “the enemy of Constitutional democracy” and argues that free speech is under assault from the left.
These positions put Mamet — a self-described former “brain-dead liberal” — at odds with most of his peers in the left-leaning entertainment world, where he’s celebrated for acclaimed plays like “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Speed-the-Plow.”
But Mamet has found a receptive audience for his hard right polemics on podcasts, where he has been energetically plugging his book.
To promote “The Disenlightenment,” which was released this month by the conservative imprint Broadside, Mamet made appearances on a constellation of podcasts — among them popular shows hosted by the military historian and conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson, the comedian Adam Carolla, the TV host Mike Rowe and the pundit Hugh Hewitt.
He also chatted with the music producer Rick Rubin and the comedian and TV host Bill Maher, a Democrat, who, in a testy exchange, challenged Mamet on his unfounded claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Mamet’s provocative performances made ripples of news: His podcast exchanges were written up in HuffPost, The Daily Beast and Mediate. The book shot up into the top 50 on Amazon’s best-seller list. And strong first week sales drove it onto The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, where it debuted at No. 13.
“That’s what sells books, when there’s some friction, rather than two people just agreeing with each other,” said Thomas Flannery, a literary agent at Vigliano Associates, which represents Mamet, who declined to comment. “Podcasts are a great lane for conservatives — there’s so few other places you can really go.”
In an era when mainstream media is increasingly politically polarized and siloed, and authors face dwindling opportunities for coverage in print and on television, podcasts have emerged as the rare popular medium where hosts are willing, even eager, to engage with the opposition.
“There is a lot less ideological conformity in podcasting,” said Eric Nelson, Broadside’s publisher, who noted that podcast hosts “are less worried about having people from across the aisle on.”
Podcasts have also become one of the few forms of mass media that indulge lengthy conversations about serious topics, allowing authors to speak in more than a 30-second sound bite. Writers from across the political spectrum have flocked there to push their books, and some political podcast hosts have even branched into book publishing. Crooked Media, a liberal media company that produces the popular “Pod Save America,” started its own imprint, which released the best seller “Democracy or Else” by three of that show’s hosts.
Still, within the burgeoning podcast ecosystem, conservative commentators — and right-leaning manosphere influencers like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Theo Von and Andrew Schulz — are dominating the discourse.
Conservative voices are abundant on Spotify’s list of the 100 most popular podcasts — among them Tucker Carlson, Tim Dillon, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro; Rogan, whose politics are protean but seem to align with populist, libertarian arguments, regularly tops the list.
With close to 20 million subscribers on YouTube, Rogan can send book sales skyrocketing, and now commands the kind of clout that was once wielded by Oprah Winfrey and Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air.” Publishers say that a Rogan appearance typically delivers an immediate sales boost of 3,000 to 4,000 copies, and can have a bigger and longer lasting effect on audiobook sales.
In March, after Dr. Suzanne Humphries went on Rogan, sales spiked for her 2013 book, “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History,” which questions the efficacy of vaccines and antibiotics. The week after their conversation, the book sold 4,118 print copies, up from 286 print copies the week before, according to Circana BookScan.
“That could be the difference between being a best seller or not,” Flannery, a literary agent, said of a Rogan appearance.
And the conversational fireworks that ensue can drive online chatter and book sales. The CNN anchor Jake Tapper and his co-author Alex Thompson made the rounds on both right- and left-leaning podcasts to talk about their best seller, “Original Sin,” an explosive account of how Democratic leaders and White House staffers failed to address former President Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline.
They spoke with prominent conservatives like Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Jonah Goldberg, Piers Morgan and Kelly, the former Fox News host, who criticized Tapper for failing to rigorously cover Biden’s cognitive lapses on CNN — a contentious back and forth that went viral and set off an avalanche of online coverage.
Douglas Murray, a British conservative author who’s known for his hard-line anti-immigration views, went on Rogan’s podcast in April, shortly after the release of his new book, “On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization.” The conversation took a surprising turn when Murray broke rank and challenged Rogan for hosting people who have spread fringe theories “of a very dangerous kind.” Their clash was rehashed on social media for days and written up in Newsweek, The Independent, National Review and The Hollywood Reporter.
Not long after, Murray’s book, which was published by Broadside, popped onto The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list at No. 2. Despite getting very little review coverage in mainstream publications, it has sold around 70,000 copies across formats, and roughly 40 percent of those sales are audiobooks, according to his publisher.
For Murray — who promoted the book on more than a dozen popular podcasts — that format has largely supplanted television and print as the way to reach a broad and more ideologically varied swath of readers.
“Years ago, an author, whether they were perceived as being on the right or the left, would go pretty much everywhere, then the media ecosystem became almost entirely binary,” Murray said. “Effectively, people were invited on to agree with the host. I don’t like that ecosystem, and I think the podcast sphere has completely broken that down.”
For conservative authors, even a Fox News appearance isn’t as reliable a launchpad for books it once was, according to publishers. Hosts like Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, whose audiences once snapped up the books the hosts recommended, are no longer with the network.
The conservative audience has fragmented, with some viewers and listeners drifting to far-right outlets like One America News Network, or toward commentators that hold Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-adjacent libertarian views, which overlap with the far left.
And in some cases, conservative-leaning authors are finding that podcasts can break them out of the right-wing media echo chamber.
“The big podcasts attract people irrespective of party,” said Adam Bellow, executive editor at Bombardier Books and publisher of Wicked Son Books, both imprints of the conservative publisher Post Hill Press. “The extremes in American politics on both sides are becoming more radical and more strident, and the majority of people are turned off by this.”
The podcast explosion hasn’t been a uniformly positive development for authors and publishers. People who are listening to three-hour podcasts may have less time to read or listen to audiobooks. Publishers also worry that public figures who might once have written a best seller may now decide to drop a podcast instead.
And podcasts, a more freewheeling format, tend to be unbound by conventional journalistic ethics; Rogan’s show, and others, have become platforms where conspiracy theories and extreme views can flourish, further eroding their listeners’ trust in experts and in institutions like traditional publishers.
This worries Murray, even as he’s benefited from podcast exposure. So when he went on Rogan’s show, he lit into the host for promoting fringe theories. Rogan dismissed the critique, and on a later podcast said Murray was trying to “keep people that are outside of the circle of expertise from talking about things.”
“It’s a shock among some people that anyone would criticize Joe on his own platform, but I thought it had to be said and done, because I think the podcast ecosystem, which had been an insurgent medium, is now very powerful,” Murray said.
Many of Rogan’s listeners were livid. But it was undeniably great publicity. For days afterward, the Murray-Rogan fight was debated endlessly across social media — and on other popular podcasts.
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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