Joe Rogan, ‘Hawk Tuah’ and the rise of conservative-leaning online spaces in 2024

There’s the manosphere and the Zynternet and the salt right. And then there are the Barstool conservatives and the dudebros.

These are the terms that have emerged in recent years to describe a sensibility that has taken hold online, culminating with its ascension as arguably the mainstream social media aesthetic of 2024: traditionally masculine, increasingly conservative-leaning and disapproving of (or at least uninterested in) “woke” culture.

It was a year in which podcaster Joe Rogan became a central part of the presidential election, and the biggest meme centered around a then-anonymous young woman’s off-the-cuff sex joke that turned her into a social media personality. One of the internet’s biggest platforms, X, removed many of its guardrails as its owner, Elon Musk, fully embraced Donald Trump’s run for president. And one of the most popular products this year — the nicotine-packed Zyn pouch — became the addiction of choice for many of America’s young men.

And it was a year of masculinity punctuated by Trump’s election win. Jess Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama, said this year’s renewed cultural focus on traditional masculinity is reminiscent of the reactionary shift that occurred after Trump’s 2016 election. Though his 2024 victory injected renewed vigor into these sentiments, she said these spaces have been burgeoning for years.

“There’s Barstool Sports, there’s Joe Rogan, but then I also think about things like tradwives and homesteading and even the ‘I’m just a girl’ jokes and trends that are funny,” Maddox said. “But all of these things are in service of kind of the same project, which is emboldening traditional masculinity.”

These trends are the latest turn in a gender war that traces back decades but has become more recognized amid rising political polarization. And while many of them have few if any direct links with one another, they share a common cultural outlook.

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of digital platforms and media ethics at the University of Oregon, said that as a reactionary wave of internet users reject what they perceive as a dominant left-leaning culture, many in these spaces have united behind the push to return to traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity, among other anti-“woke” ideas.

“It’s a politics that isn’t really a politics. Like, it’s not exactly partisan, and it’s not exactly taking strong policy stances on particular kinds of issues,” Phillips said. “It is just this vague sense that liberals are irritating.”

Tradwives, as Maddox noted, are not new to social media but had a banner year as these gender wars continued to play out online.

This type of content — in which women perform a 1950s-era housewife lifestyle, often demonstrating subservience to their husbands — has surged in popularity: Two of the biggest influencers in the genre, Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, gained millions of followers on social media this year, according to Social Blade. Additionally, President Joe Biden’s 35-point lead over Trump with young women in 2020 shrunk to a 24-point lead for Harris, according to NBC News exit polls, with some experts suggesting tradwife content helped bolster Trump.

Conservative essayist Normie Macdonald attributes much of this to a cultural pushback against the “boss girl era” that some women have grown disillusioned with.

Macdonald, who asked to be identified only by his Substack display name because his critics have tried to expose his personal information before, describes himself as a classical conservative who is deeply Christian and believes in the “model American nuclear family” with multiple children and a man as the head of the household.

But too many people in the right wing today, he said, have been radicalized by the “manosphere,” a network of online spaces that promote rigid notions of masculinity and espouse misogynistic stereotypes about women.

“Picture a young man who is upset at the world because he feels that he can’t succeed or do much of anything in it. And so he goes to his keyboard to complain about this,” he said. “And in the process, he builds up some very extreme and often violent and very off-putting ideas, because there’s a community to welcome him in doing so.”

X, formerly Twitter, for example, has increasingly turned into a hotbed of misogynistic harassment amid a surge in right-wing content, leading droves of liberal and left-leaning users who once regarded Twitter as the internet’s town square to leave X for alternative text-based apps like Bluesky and Threads. This happened in part because of Musk’s takeover, which has included a pullback on moderation alongside his vociferous critiques of the “woke mind virus.”

Musk’s own evolution here — from eccentric billionaire embraced by some liberals to a close Trump adviser — mirrors how some other figures who once regarded themselves as anti-establishment have now found themselves at the pinnacle of the mainstream.

A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment. 

Rogan, whose podcast became one of the hottest topics of the election, is now so universally regarded as a standard bearer of modern media that it’s spurred debates among some on the left about how to replicate his formula of success. His show remains the most popular podcast in the United States, according to data from Edison Research.

His rising success has also coincided with a growing embrace of Trump. Rogan, who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during the 2020 primaries, was one of many podcast hosts considered bro-friendly who were given a shoutout at Trump’s election night celebration.

A spokesperson for Rogan did not respond to a request for comment.

Podcasting, in particular, has played an important role in the changing power dynamics of internet culture.

“The general discourse has shifted further to the right in some ways,” said Adrienne Massanari, an associate professor of communication studies at American University. “But now the discussion is more openly about questions of identity politics and those kinds of things, and much of that is happening in the podcasting sphere.”

Other unlikely figures have emerged as stars in this world. Haliey Welch became one of the year’s most viral internet personalities after her raunchy “hawk tuah” joke about oral sex spread across social media. The moment helped inspire internet culture writer Max Read to coin the term “the Zynternet” as a way to capture just how influential the more masculine-forward parts of the internet had become.

Welch, who did not respond to a request for comment, has since started her own conversational comedy podcast guest-starring fellow influencers. It debuted near the top of Spotify’s podcast rankings as it rode the hype of the “hawk tuah” meme.