In the desensitised times of 2026, courting controversy is tough work. Not for Steven Crowder. He seems to do it effortlessly.
Upon earning early infamy as an outspoken comic on Fox News, Steven went it alone in 2013 with the premiere of his wildly popular show Louder With Crowder. For over a decade, it has been one of the most-viewed politics programmes in the world, inviting acclaim and venom in comparable measure. Here, he created the Change My Mind format, which would be adopted by countless commentators the world over.
Why did we invite him on?
Even in the attention economy of online politics, many pundits are compelled to bite their tongues. To say the softer version of what they truly believe, to make it palatable to mass audiences.
Steven is no such case.
For his entire career, and particularly since moving his show to Rumble, Steven has been devoted to expressing his views precisely as they are, no matter how caustic or uneasy, even to his ‘own side’. Like him or not, it makes him an ideal guest for a show like ours.
What did we talk about?
It’s no secret that the right is fracturing all over the Western world. Zionist neoconservatives face off against Buchananite paleocons, who distinguish themselves from race-based identitarians and self-described “traditionalists.” It’s a wing of politics that can’t decide whether it wants a radical future, or the lost past; to conquer the world, or retract from it entirely.
The conditions are kinetic in Europe, but especially in America. Under their binary system, right-wingers are going to have to decide their identity before the next election. What are they going to bring to the national stage under a united front? Is it even possible?
Steven has friends and enemies in all camps. It uniquely places him to weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of each, and talk frankly about the future of his movement.
And so he does. But first, he wants to establish a gentleman’s agreement.
”Let’s first agree that this is going to be fun. I don’t normally do sit-down interviews, and that’s because I know the game. You guys need your clips, and I get it. So, which camera do you want me to look down? This one? [looks down lens] ‘Jews, blacks, trans kids, Mexicans. I dislike all of them.’ There, now we can have a conversation.”
Well, with that out of the way, let’s talk.
We were in America the week Trump was most recently elected. Palpable among the right-wingers we had on that season was a euphoria; a rich relief that things were finally going to turn around. America had, in the loudest possible terms, declared that it had had enough. Enough of wokeness, enough of foreign wars and endless engagements, enough censorship. Steven remembers that time well.
”I remember that election night, and here’s why it was so important to me. We followed every election since 2016, and when 2020 happened there was this terrible feeling of ‘Oh, that was wrong, and I can’t do anything about it’ … And I never wanted to feel so powerless again, like I was still at the mercy of legacy media. That’s why 2024 mattered.”
Two years later, the mood is very different. Trump is as unpopular as he - or any president, for that matter - has ever been. His party faces a trouncing in the upcoming midterms, and many of his most central promises have been tarnished in the most inarguable, humiliating ways.
Steven has his criticisms of the leader, but is keen to give credit where it’s due.
"Nobody’s perfect, and neither is Trump. But he has done more than he gets credit for. He dealt with immigration; he’s done more good socially and culturally than anyone. It’s hard to me to look at a guy who, if he’d lost, would be in jail and criticise him. Sure, he said ‘No New Wars’, but you can go back to the ‘80s to find him talking about nuking Iran. Now, I think his war has been conducted badly, but I also understand the reasoning behind it.”
All things are understood in comparison. To Steven, Trump is best assessed in the light of his enemies and what his enemies want. Framed that way, perhaps Trump’s record doesn’t seem so bad.
”The left will try wokeism again the second they get a chance. It’ll be the exact same agenda but dressed up in ways that people can’t recognise, and we’re already seeing it. Lindsay Clancy, the Cornell 7, the trans issue - we’re seeing wokeness come back already. And that’s the left. That’s what they’ll do if they get the chance. This bullsh*t that ‘it’s not right vs. left’. It is. It is right vs left. It’s the best way of dividing people, and the left are wrong about everything.”
