Pete Buttigieg makes his first foray into the podcast manosphere

A Democrat has entered the manosphere. Pete Buttigieg, the former Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration and a presidential candidate in 2020, sat for a three-hour appearance on Andrew Schultz’s Flagrant on Wednesday to discuss current events, the state of politics, and the culture wars — his latest foray into breaking outside of the Democrats’ preferred “echo chamber,” as he put it, and his first into the world of online, woke-skeptical bro media. Sporting a beard, Buttigieg criticized his colleagues in the Democratic Party for shirking podcasts such as Flagrant, which conducted an interview with Donald Trump during the election. According to co-host Akaash Singh, Flagrant, which has drawn controversy for its hosts’ willingness to engage with racist content, was unable to get Democrats to agree to come on the show, prompting Buttigieg to call them out for turning down the invitation. “We have to be encountering people who don’t think like us and who don’t view the world the way we do, both in order to become smarter and better and make better choices and take better positions, and also to persuade,” he said. Calling Buttigieg “the Democrats’ secret weapon,” Schultz and his co-hosts came away impressed by the end of the interview, particularly for being able to sit through the entire three hour block. “I think we’re all looking forward to seeing what you’re doing,” he said. “I think you’re a really brave and amazing figure in our political sphere.” Though he’s not the high-profile first elected Democrat to appear on a manosphere podcast — that honor goes to Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VA), who appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in August 2019 — Buttigieg has a long history of entering hostile media territory, making frequent appearances on Fox News as a surrogate for Joe Biden and even doing a televised town hall on the conservative television network. It’s not his first outing in the internet creator world, either: he appeared on Jubile’s YouTube series Surrounded during the 2024 election (“1 Politician vs. 25 Undecided Voters”). He is, however, not the first Democrat to engage with the right-wing podcast world after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election, in part because she and her campaign did not engage with these influencers to the degree that Donald Trump did — a massive self-inflicted error that frequently comes up in election post-mortems. “All of his podcasts were reaching the audience that we were struggling to pull in… young men,” Harris campaign senior strategist Stephanie Cutter said during an appearance on Pod Save America, “and we saw that, we knew that.” The biggest self-own: Trump famously appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience just days before the election, reaching Rogan’s tens of millions of followers across Spotify and YouTube alone. Harris, however, snubbed their invite due to internal fears that the progressive staffers on the campaign would revolt. In an attempt to avoid repeating that mistake, California Governor Gavin Newsom has invited MAGA figures such as Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and War Room host Steve Bannon onto his podcast, which he launched in February as an attempt to “have honest discussions with people that agree AND disagree with us.”