Charlie Kirk is worked up. “The world is in flames, and Bidenomics is a complete and total disaster,” the conservative influencer said during a recent episode of his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show. “But it can’t and won’t ruin my day,” he continued. “Why? ’Cause I start my day with a hot America First cup of Blackout Coffee.” Liberals have brought about economic Armageddon, but first, coffee.

Listening to Kirk’s show—which is among the most popular podcasts on the right—can be unsettling, even if you are a conservative. In the past year, the founder of Turning Point USA has uploaded episodes with titles such as “The Great Replacement Isn’t Theory, It’s Reality” and “The Doctors Plotting to Mutilate Your Kids.” He has also conducted friendly interviews with a blogger who once described slavery as “a natural human relationship,” and discussed crime stats with the white supremacist Steve Sailer in a way that veered toward race science. (Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Kirk, declined to comment for this story.)

But the advertisements Kirk reads are sometimes more dire and polemical than what he and his guests talk about during the show. “Rest assured knowing that you’re ready for whatever the globalists throw at us next,” Kirk said at the end of one ad for medical-emergency kits. These ads espouse conservative values and talking points, mostly in service of promoting brands such as Blackout Coffee, which sells a “2nd Amendment” medium-roast blend and “Covert Op Cold Brew.” The commercial breaks sounded like something from an alternate universe. The more I listened to them, the more I came to understand that that was the point.

Some brands, of course, speak the language of Democrats, touting their climate commitments and diversity efforts. But when I listened to left-of-center podcasts, including Pod Save America, Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast, and MSNBC’s Prosecuting Donald Trump, I mostly heard ads from an assortment of nonpartisan brands such as Ford, Jefferson’s Ocean Aged at Sea Bourbon, eHarmony, and SimpliSafe. The closest equivalent I found was Cariuma, a sustainable shoe brand that sponsors Pod Save America.

The right, meanwhile, has long hawked products that you don’t typically see advertised on mainstream outlets and shows. In 2007, the historian Rick Perlstein chronicled a far-fetched investment opportunity involving stem cells and placentas advertised on the far-right website Newsmax. Supplements and gold have become part of conservative-advertising canon, as the writer Sam Kriss summed up in his recent essay on the ads that appear in National Review’s print magazine: “The same apocalyptic note [ran] through all these ads. The hospitals will shut down, the planet will freeze over, you personally are getting old and dying—and now your money might be worthless if you haven’t put it all in gold.”

Some of Kirk’s ads hit the same beats. At times, they sound a little jarring: “You are nine meals away from anarchy,” he said in one ad for buckets of food rations, from a website called MyPatriotSupply.com. Yet as the world of right-wing-coded products has expanded, so has the weirdness of ads for them. “For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America’s only Christian-conservative wireless provider,” started another ad. Switching to Patriot Mobile, Kirk explained, would mean that “you’re sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, our military veterans and first-responder heroes” while getting “the same coverage you’ve been accustomed to without funding the left.” How? By renting access to “all three major networks” via a business deal with T-Mobile, a company that has positioned itself as at least nominally left of center on some issues.

If listeners are feeling charitable, Kirk has options for them too. “Hey, everybody, exciting news. Very, very important. Uh, we are saving babies with PreBorn,” Kirk opened up a dollar-matching promo for a group raising money for ultrasounds, apparently having managed to quantify the precise dollar amount it would take to stop a woman from having an abortion. “For a one-time, $15,000 gift, you’ll provide not just one ultrasound machine, but two, saving thousands of babies for years to come; $280 saves 10 babies; $28 a month saves a baby a month, for less than a dollar a day.”

Conservative podcasts have become mega popular in recent years, and are some of the most trusted sources of news on the right: Kirk’s show ranks as the 12th-most-popular “news” podcast on Spotify right now. The show is also syndicated on radio stations across the country and posted on YouTube, where Kirk has 1.7 million subscribers. And although conservative influencers including Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, and Jack Posobiec also promote gold or supplements (or both) on their own shows, Kirk’s ads were the most varied of the conservative-podcast ads I listened to. Some conservatives, however, want no part of these kinds of ads. Earlier this month, the right-wing YouTuber Steven Crowder made fun of his contemporaries for hawking “shitty supplements.” Most of it is “selling you crap you don’t need from people who don’t care about you!” Crowder yelled at the end of a four-minute rant on the matter.

The ads reflect the new paradigm of advertising. In previous decades, ads had to appeal to whole segments of the population—and products were made with that in mind. That some readers of Vanity Fair might want a Givenchy handbag, and some readers of Sports Illustrated might want Callaway golf clubs, was as targeted as ads could get. Now the country has fractured into partisan subgroups, and companies have access to reams of analytics that enable them to target ever more precise demographics. Through shows like Kirk’s, brands such as Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile can reach their relatively niche audiences more easily than ever. (Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But something else is happening too. Kirk and the rest of the conservative-podcast ecosystem aren’t just selling wares. The ads, with some exceptions, are not like ads for beer or pickup trucks that detract from the action while one watches, say, a football game. Rather, conservative ads are constitutive. They enhance and reinforce the arguments that Kirk and others are already making on their podcasts—that Black people are prone to crime, whiteness is getting excised, abortion is murder, and the United States is unstable and on the verge of collapse. The commercial breaks are the final screws needed to construct a self-contained conservative chamber. Kirk has ensconced himself in a world in which he’ll likely never face external pressures to self-moderate in the way that, say, Rush Limbaugh occasionally did when he went too far beyond the tastes of mainstream advertisers.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Don’t read this if you were a Rush Limbaugh fan]

When you’re listening to Kirk talk about Blackout Coffee, you can also look down and see the steam coming off your own cup of Blackout Coffee, and relax while its caffeine helps you “be awake not woke.” You can open a new browser tab and check in on your portfolio, whose wealth managers are endorsed by Kirk, and then look at the price of gold and think about your own supply procured from a company that Kirk himself vetted “from top to bottom.” You can even stop listening to Kirk, go out to your backyard, and make a call, knowing that you’re doing so as a freedom-loving conservative with your Patriot Mobile phone plan.

On The Charlie Kirk Show, there is no longer a gap between the real world and what is playing inside listeners’ headphones. Kirk’s fans can make fewer and fewer compromises on their views and burrow themselves more deeply in the womb of reactionary politics. And with the coupon code “Charlie,” listeners can get a discount to buy something else that will allow them to further immerse themselves inside of it.

Donald Trump’s net worth is dropping rapidly as investors continue to ditch stock in his media and technology company.

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Michael Cohen is an admitted liar and a convicted felon who is openly fueled by a thirst for revenge against Donald Trump. That he is so frank about his motives and past may actually make his testimony seem more credible to jurors.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The real meaning of Trump’s “unified Reich” post Reaganomics is on its last legs. The panic over smartphones doesn’t help teens.

Revenge of the Fixer

For the past week in New York, Michael Cohen has been a valuable—and fraught—star witness in Donald Trump’s criminal trial. The defense has tried to portray Cohen, Trump’s ex-lawyer and fixer, as a jilted lackey—which he openly is. To get a sense of his animus toward his ex-boss, look no further than his T-shirt depicting Trump behind bars, his admission in court that he once called Trump a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain,” and his two memoirs—Disloyal and Revenge—that trash the former president for his many transgressions.

Still, Cohen’s openness about his past and his motivations—in part forced by the public and criminal nature of his previous offenses—may actually make him seem more credible to a jury. His argument in court boiled down to: I committed crimes at Trump’s behest—and suffered consequences—because I would have done anything for him. That transparency made him appear like “the agent who was held accountable, whereas the principal has escaped accountability,” James Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email.

In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and violating campaign-finance laws by making hush-money payments—one of which went to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. He testified that, during the 2016 election, when she was considering publicizing the story of her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, Trump ordered Cohen to “take care of it.” In turn, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 of his own money, which he claimed was later reimbursed by Trump.

On the stand, Cohen largely remained calm, though he had some shaky moments. He admitted during cross-examination that he had stolen tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization, pocketing some of the money earmarked for a tech company. (When a prosecutor later probed him, he said that he had been angry because his bonus was cut.) The defense repeatedly tried to assail Cohen’s credibility—an obvious way to undermine a man who had previously lied under oath. Cohen testified that he had spoken with Trump in October 2016, via Trump’s bodyguard’s phone, about paying off Daniels. Attempting to ding Cohen on the details of the call, the defense insisted that Cohen hadn’t spoken with Trump and had actually discussed a different matter with the bodyguard, but Cohen stood by his testimony. Trump’s lawyers also called into question Cohen’s money-related stake in the trial. Cohen admitted that he has a financial interest in the outcome of the trial, because he writes and podcasts about Trump, but added that an acquittal would be better for him economically because it would give him “more to talk about.”

A common paradox lies at the heart of Trump’s criminal case, Sample told me: “To get at the truth in prosecuting criminal enterprises often requires relying on liars.” In most cases, being a convicted felon would make a witness far less credible. But the fact that Cohen has already served time in prison for admitting to crimes related to hush-money payments actually adds to his credibility as a witness here, Valerie Hans, a professor at Cornell Law School and an expert on juries, told me in an email; jurors won’t have to wonder if Cohen is testifying as part of a plea deal to avoid prison time for those charges.

In contrast to the prosecution’s parade of witnesses, Trump’s defense team presented only two witnesses before resting its case earlier today. (Trump himself did not testify.) One of the witnesses was Robert Costello, a lawyer who once did some legal work for Cohen. He was positioned to be a Cohen-antagonist, and he claimed that Cohen previously told him that Trump “knew nothing” about the hush-money payment to Daniels. But in the process of trying to impugn Cohen, Costello “succeeded in impugning himself,” Sample told me. The judge scolded Costello after he reportedly told the courtroom to “strike” something from the record and continued to speak after objections were sustained. “The circus-like debacle of Costello’s testimony is a microcosm of why the defense called so few witnesses,” Sample explained.

Cohen’s history of fealty to Trump, and his willingness to bully and lie, is well documented. That his past would be an asset may seem strange—but the prosecution is banking on him. After Memorial Day weekend, the jury will convene and begin their deliberations. Their decision to convict or acquit a former president will largely hinge on whether or not they think they can trust the word of Michael Cohen.

Related:

Michael Cohen, mediocre hero Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial

Today’s News

Trump’s defense rested its case in his New York criminal trial. Closing arguments are set to begin next week. Rudy Giuliani and 10 other Trump allies pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, forgery, and fraud charges in an Arizona criminal case related to their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. One man died and multiple passengers suffered injuries when a Boeing plane flying from London to Singapore encountered severe turbulence; the aircraft plummeted roughly 6,000 feet within the span of five minutes.

Evening Read

Illustration by Nick Little for The Atlantic

The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing

By Tyler Austin Harper

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”

When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself” …

What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Billie Eilish wears sunglasses and squats in front of a blue gradient background

Listen. Billie Eilish’s new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, sustains a mood of longing that is very now, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Watch. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (out now in theaters) proves that this blockbuster franchise keeps evolving for the better, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Among the many absurd details of the hush-money case are the alliterative, somewhat zippy pseudonyms that Daniels and Cohen apparently used in a nondisclosure agreement. Trump went by “David Dennison,” and Daniels was called “Peggy Peterson.” Earlier in the trial, Keith Davidson, Daniels’s former lawyer, testified that he had come up with the monikers—and that David Dennison was the name of a real person on his high-school hockey team.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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