Doomscroll: Peter James Fowler

Welcome to Doomscroll. I’m excited to announce episode #06 with comedian Peter James Fowler. In this conversation we’re going back to the early roots of this project — kids shitposting radical politics on the internet.

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This week, my guest is Peter James Fowler. He joins me to discuss his highly influential political meme account that he ran at age 11. Peter is a rising star in the New York comedy scene. He’s opened for megastar acts like Tim Dillon and made an appearance on another show that I can’t name because he roasted the host so badly that they canned the entire episode. Needless to say, he’s an immensely talented guy and this conversation is a lot of fun. We explore:

• The political influence of anonymous child thought leaders who have grown adult followings. (This is much more common than it sounds.)

• The emergence of “new atheism” and the culture wars of the early internet. How evangelical Christianity shaped the conservative movement of this era.

• Most importantly, how our worldviews are shaped by both internal (personal) and external (political) forces. And how to know the difference between the two.

If you’re new here, you may be surprised to learn that I’ve spent the last few years interviewing young people who make radical posts online. This project has traced the pathways from irony to sincerity and from LARP to the real world. As the internet democratizes access to political discourse, fringe ideologies are working their way into the mainstream. In many cases, these emergent political trends are also a gamified form of identity play where young people troll live audiences for sport.

With this program, I want to challenge us to take silly things seriously. As our new media environment is layered atop the real crises of the 21st century, the forces of media and politics have become entangled. These conversations help us to map how today’s social media landscape is shaping real world political discourse.

You can watch the full episode here. Like, comment, etc, subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven’t already. Getting this material out to a wider audience helps me to keep doing the show.

Doomscroll #06: Peter James Fowler: I was an 11 Year Old Right-wing Troll with 10,000 Followers