Relentless, available for streaming on all major podcast services, has gained the cult of self-proclaimed “servant” as a clear right-wing alternative Under Save America and her brothers. But is anything good?
In more than 100 episodes, the show has shown some real advantages – two out of three presenters are public relations experts, too familiar with the points of pressure and hypocrisy of the political media and rely on them fairly – but the disadvantages make the whole product very unsatisfactory.
First, his success in breaking into DC’s conservative halls of power reveals an extremely awkward contradiction at its core: for a podcast that puts his brand on the image of a bad boy and a willingness to slander holy cows, he is inextricably linked to the establishment that former President Donald Trump he objected, and that her hosts almost literally personified.
Worse, he commits the chief sin of any cultural feat, which boasts of being inflated and punched in the chest as a pawnbroker for the new. completely in the face generation. It’s often as simple as kids would say, terrify, its geriatric-millennial hosts who combine too much online, a strangely hostile digital pathos with a host of outdated cultural references – an audio recording of “Fame,” more than one mention of Milli Vanilli – making them sound like self-proclaimed “cool” teachers trying to have a “rap session «With their students.
Of course, creating a ridiculous podcast is not a sin, and those who listen impatiently Relentless they will be satisfied each week as long as they feel they own the aforementioned libraries. But more than the awkwardness of what the hosts say, it ultimately reveals what they are no I say about the embarrassing status quo of the GOP after Trump.
Holmes and Duncan, who are essentially partner men, the sore points around the pandemic, the January 6 riots and the false allegations of electoral fraud, have persistently avoided in their interviews with Republican hopes to secure a united front before 2022; the joke that makes up the rest of the show is no longer introspective. Explicitly, the podcast raises the question of how Republicans can regain power in liberal-dominated politics and media. But the implicit question it poses is much harder to answer: is it possible for the Conservative establishment to re-establish itself with little more than an anti-establishment coating?
No partisan worthy of their salt, and certainly not the ones they are well paid for their work, will turn their platform into a kind of endless session of the fight against Maoism. But the overall effect Relentless is to house Republicans in a kind of rhetorical Potemkin village, her view changing for every guest, a ’22 race and unforeseen events in the real world, with the only constant being the unwavering, strangely omnipotent perfidy of Democrats. It’s red meat for the faithful and probably an effective Alka-Seltzer for calm, mainstream conservatives in liberal geographic bubbles (such as show hosts). For everyone else, it’s a disorienting, overtly unpleasant listening experience – and fatally, one that, compared to its conservative media rivals, seems almost comically timid when confronted with reality.
Conservatives have a special connection to the radio conversation. Here, of course, are the late Rush Limbaugh, who reshaped the media landscape of the right in his own image, and followers such as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, who timed their rise with the rise of Fox News to wild success; in the modern age, about half of the top 20 U.S. political podcasts on Apple’s podcast service, according to the Chartable industrial tracker, slender conservative. (Relentless, from this writing, stands at number 40. During a recent episode, its hosts complained about unfair promotional behavior by Apple for ideological reasons, despite shows number two and three on the same scale hosting decidedly illiberal Steves Crowder in Bannon, or.)
The movement and format match well, the latter offering hours of empty space that can be filled by any crazy truth-teller willing to step in and challenge the liberal establishment. Which must have been all the more annoying when the Liberals, after years of failed attempts – Air America, anyone? – finally broken code. Under Save America, led by a group of former Obama employees who was and remain a cultural phenomenon with a #Resistance flavor. Its appeal to besieged, apocalyptic-minded liberals over the past four years has been easy to understand, to convey (e.g. Relentless) an easy relationship between the hosts and a parade of quasi-news lively conversations with the top of their party.
Under Save America showed in real time how a common enemy in the Trump administration brought together a scattered large Democrat tent and gave Under the Sava crew and their followers body spirit split conservative media were sorely lacking. Relentless it does not do so, and its many shortcomings stem from its half-attempts to repair these threads.
His hosts accept the senseless allegiance of the stubborn Trumpist right without fully embracing Trump himself; Recognize the Republican Party’s need for “development” but not the compromises involved in accepting the ideas presented by their reformist peers; lobbying PG-13, “Let’s go, Brandon”In the style of insults without accepting the cheerful brutality of the internet home right. The show leaves neither fish nor poultry feeling weird, avoiding both Claremont’s erudition and the frantically swampy rage in triangulation that is hard to imagine pleasing the often inflexible, irritable conservative media consumer.
This dynamic becomes most evident in the show’s interviews with a handful of Republican leaders who are almost synonymous with intra-right controversy, such as the aforementioned vice president. Performed in front of a smiling audience celebrating the beginning Pence’s new nonprofit organization, Holmes begins the interview with a version of the same admiring non-question at the level of “Good Morning America,” with which the show begins most of its interviews with elected officials: “Four years, working as hard as you could work, getting to the last part of it you have a nice life, you have nice friends. .. you just keep getting involved in it, you set up this special group, you have a podcast, you have it, you travel all over the country, you’re still right in the game. ”
Pence playfully offers some principles of duty, profession, and work still to be done for the conservative movement. The rest of the interview mostly follows this formula, but for one brief, fleeting moment, he threatens to turn into something actually compelling when the pseudonym Smug asks Pence how often talked to his former boss since they left office. Pence, whose literal execution was demanded by the crowd on Jan. 6, describes the end of the Trump presidency and the events of that day as “difficult” and “dark,” but the moment the Republican party “moved”. Which, of course, he is right about – the GOP strategy that is Relentless The goal of the hosts is, despite Trump’s own unusual performances, to avoid the anti-democratic excesses of his flag bearer, such as an unpleasant drunken uncle on Thanksgiving.
This is understandable, but it makes the conversation very boring. You don’t have to be happy with the alarm, the fascism around every corner #Resistance guard, to admit that January 6 was a unique moment in American history, especially for a conservative movement like the conspiracy movement of the Trump era. “dream politicsIt spilled over into a violent reality. Relentless is essentially boring because – by its very nature as anything but the official arm of the GOP campaign – it cannot discuss anything that gives today’s conservative intellectual and political world a turbulent, unexpectedly radical character.
The lack of either frankness or solidity makes it all the more fatal for the show to be as painfully ridiculous as it is. Rush Limbaugh was not an intellectual heavyweight, but when he said his talent was “borrowed from God,” even his worst opponents had to acknowledge his ability to broadcast television. Holmes, Duncan and Smug, moonlighters as they are, don’t bring exactly the same heat. Despite the superficial similarities with Under the Sava, the combination of avoidance-based politicking and awkward counterfeiting in the show makes it difficult to imagine who for – and it is almost impossible to imagine him serving the same function as his liberal counterpart as the media engine of a great organizer.
This is a really missed opportunity: if you blink, you can see the outline Republican after Trump Barstool in the witty, frat-boy ethos of the show. But when her hosts, all experienced connoisseurs, spend much of their performance dealing with Bill Kristol or Jen Rubin columns, or foam up and condemn the evil of capital gains tax, as they did in a recent episode, it increases credulity. to imagine them as populist champions.
After all, it is a “Ruthless” product that is very topical, as it combines an explicit political message with a prefabricated cultural attitude that must be accepted by the audience. This phenomenon has an unpleasant, propagandistic touch, no matter on which side of the hallway it is carried out, whether it is good or bad. Relentless it happens to do this very, very badly.