Discussion | Reece Peck | More than Money and Algorithms: The Long Road to Counter Trump’s Online Influence
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Global New Right Working Group on Tuesday, April 22nd at 5:30 PM for a lecture by Reece Peck, “More than Money and Algorithms: The Long Road to Counter Trump’s Online Influence.” Following the presentation, Peck will be in conversation with Erica Robles-Anderson and Douglas Rushkoff.
This presentation examines Trump’s masculinist “alt-media strategy” in the 2024 election to explore the right’s dominance in the online media landscape. Often referred to as “the first influencer election,” post-2024 election analyses have highlighted the pivotal role alternative online media played in securing Trump’s second presidency. While some commentators have focused on the quantitative edge—such as Trump appearing on over twice as many podcasts as Harris—others have emphasized the influence of key MAGA-aligned figures, like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. In this talk, Reece Peck, the author of Fox Populism, spotlights a less appreciated but crucial factor: Trump’s historical relationship with alternative online political media. Only politicians with deep ties to online subcultures can effectively leverage them when election season rolls around. Unlike the Democrats, who attempted to build relationships with alternative media on the fly, the MAGA movement had well-established roots in this sector, tracing back to the Republican primary of the 2016 cycle. Passionate fandom and parasocial bonds between content creators and their audiences cannot be manufactured overnight—they develop through long-term narrative-building and relationship cultivation. Peck stresses the importance of a cultural-historical approach to analyzing online political media—both as an academic framework and a strategic political tool.
Reece Peck is an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge, 2019). His expertise lies in conservative media, populist rhetoric, and class politics. His writing on YouTube politics has appeared in academic journals like Television and New Media and popular outlets like The Hill and Jacobin.
Erica Robles-Anderson is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, with affiliation in Religious Studies. She is a historian interested in how cultural narratives shape migrations into new technological regimes. Erica is currently writing a trilogy about American collectivity which looks at how conservative religious technocultures have transformed religious institutions, kinship structures, and schools in the past half century. She is the author of several publications about software design, megachurches, screens and gender, suffering, mediation, and social reproduction. She is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief (with Arjun Appadurai and Vyjayanthi Rao) of Public Culture, an award-winning journal for transnational studies of culture.
Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, he also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He serves as a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.