Is Ye, Formerly Known as Kanye West, Actually Bailing Out the Ghost Town That Is Parler?
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The rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, faces an uphill battle to revive the “ghost town” that is the conservative MAGA site Parler, say hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill in this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast.
Ye is buying the social media platform after being kicked off Instagram and Twitter for an antisemitic post, Parler’s parent company announced Monday.
“If you wanted to buy a right-wing social media platform, this is not even the one that you would want to get,” Sommer says, reflecting on “how much Parler is irrelevant even within the mostly irrelevant world of right wing social networks.” Sommer says since its Jan. 6 “heyday,” the platform has a fraction of the users other conservative sites like Truth Social or Gab have.
“I’m not sure how much research Kanye did, because this is actually coming in a moment when we’ve seen tons of research about how irrelevant these alternate social media platforms are,” Weill adds, citing a Pew research report from Oct. 6.
“I’m one of the rare people who actually occasionally logs onto Parler. It’s a ghost town, folks. I mean, you’re seeing Laura Loomer copy-paste her incendiary Telegram post into there.”
“It is grim. It is like Facebook Marketplace, but nobody in it. Grim, not good staff.”
Weill said the purchase sounded like a “bailout” for the floundering social media site.
“I looked it up, it’s like 1.3 million monthly hits, which is abysmal. It’s so bad that it stinks.”
Also on the podcast, Kyle Spencer, journalist and author of the new book Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, talks MAGA media personality and radio talk show host Charlie Kirk and how he got his start.
“It’s fascinating how much they loved him,” Spencer says of Kirk’s popularity inside donor circles for his “endlessly fascinating” organization Turning Point USA.
“They adore this guy and part of the reason they adore him is he comes off as a kind of puppy dog when he first meets a lot of these donors in 2012.
“He’s desperate for friendship, he’s desperate for camaraderie, and he has this sense that these Republican and conservative ideas are actually great ideas and if only somebody could message them better to young people, that they would become popular with young people. Donors were so turned on by him.
“When I would talk to people early on who supported him, they would describe an atmosphere in which everybody wanted to hang out with Charlie. I think it’s important to understand that he had that pull.
“As he grew the movement, he is really charismatic. Once I met him, he was a lot more polished. He’s a really smart guy. So actually it’s not uninteresting to talk to him because he has a lot of thoughts about why he’s able to do what he wants on college campuses.”
Republicans Have Made Kanye West a Conservative Celebrity
Then, in this week’s “Fresh Hell” segment, Sommer reviews the Fox Nation special The Trial of Hunter Biden, which he describes as “honestly one of the strangest pieces of content” Fox has ever produced.
“This is so weird. This movie… looks like it was made with roughly $13. Like the lighting is awful. It makes My Son Hunter… I mean, it makes it look like Avatar. It looks awful. This is sort of middle-school theater lighting. Not really high budget here.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
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