Barstool Sports and the Current MAGA Moment

As someone who doesn’t watch or care about sports, I know very little about sports media, so my familiarity with Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sports was very much on my periphery. I had a vague sense of how awful him/it was, but no information to go on beyond that.

Well, that changed after listening to this podcast. And you may wonder why you’d want to subject yourself to 90 minutes of learning about one of the shittiest people on the planet, but I think it’s *vitally* important for people who live in reality-based information silos to learn more about how we got to our current moment and why so many of us who inhabit worlds that are fact-based and not nazi-adjacent just get absolutely blindsided by things like the two elections of Donald Trump.

There are so many parallels between the popularity of Barstool and MAGA, it’s frightening. In fact, as this podcast very astutely points out, things like Barstool and Gamergate were very much proving grounds for MAGA. They’re all cults centered around the most toxic idiots on the internet. They’re all troll armies. They all have an undisguised loathing for women and POC. And most importantly they’re all movements and moments that give people permission to be their absolute worst selves.

Editing to say: It really hit me how much MAGA centers on monetizing being awful and how absolutely dystopian that is.