The Problem with Alt. Media

By Matt Johnson

Monday, October 13, 2025

 

What the Hughes/Smith debate tells us about the podcast era.

 

I.

 

Dave Smith is a comedian and podcaster who has managed to become one of the most prominent political voices in alternative media. He’s appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience thirteen times since 2020, and his political views—especially his contempt for establishment liberals and criticisms of US and Israeli foreign policy—have attracted a huge following there. Smith’s popularity (he has 830,000 followers on X) reflects a general shift away from mainstream media and expertise, and he has been at the centre of several controversies revolving around this shift.

 

His April 2025 encounter with conservative journalist and pundit Douglas Murray on Rogan’s podcast served as a bellwether for an intensifying debate over journalistic and intellectual standards in the podcast era. At the beginning of the conversation, Murray criticised podcasters like Smith, the conspiracist Ian Carroll, and revisionist amateur historian Darryl Cooper (who has described Winston Churchill as the “chief villain of the Second World War”) for pronouncing on subjects in which they have no formal training.

 

But while Murray was right to criticise Rogan for platforming cranks and failing to fact-check them effectively (or at all), he was too quick to dismiss Smith for failing to meet certain thresholds of expertise and experience. Murray objected to Smith spending so much time discussing Israel’s war in Gaza by saying: “It’s a bit weird to be simultaneously saying, ‘I’m not an expert on a conflict’ and talking about it everywhere.” Smith responded by accusing Murray of being “anti-democratic” and “elitist” (an argument that was sure to land with Rogan’s populist audience).

 

The viral moment of the conversation arrived when Murray gasped with incredulity when Smith acknowledged that he had never been to Israel or Gaza: “If you’re going to spend a year and a half talking about a place,” Murray instructed scornfully, “you should at least do the courtesy of visiting it.” Smith pointed out that this was just a sneer, not an argument, and Murray’s criticisms of Smith seemed to confirm the belief—common in the alternative media—that the establishment resorts to smears and condescending dismissals like these because it can’t handle difficult truths. That moment was not representative of the entire conversation—Murray made some strong points about the Russian war in Ukraine, which Smith seems to think NATO caused—but it’s the moment that will probably be remembered.

 

When the Free Press contributor Coleman Hughes invited Smith to appear as a guest on his podcast, however, he adopted a quite different approach. He opened their three-and-a half-hour debate with a disclaimer: “I think a lot of your conversations have devolved into sort of referendums on you as a person, which to me is totally uninteresting.” Instead, he proposed to focus on the “substantive issues that both of our audiences care about.” In his post-match analysis, Hughes reflected that open discussion is the only tool available to resist the bad ideas circulating in the alternative media:

 

In an age where podcasts have replaced television news and influencers have replaced experts, it is important not to dismiss people simply because they don’t possess the traditional credentials. … We must meet the challenge of the modern information age on its own terms, which means rolling up our sleeves and showing the conspiracy theorists exactly why they’re wrong—using hard evidence.

 

The combination of this approach and Hughes’s phlegmatic disposition were disastrous for Smith, who was knocked off-balance early in the debate and never managed to recover.

 

 

II.

 

Most podcasts and YouTube shows are treated as either freewheeling chats or ideological combat. But Hughes approached this encounter like someone who takes his journalistic responsibility seriously. It was immediately evident that he had spent a good deal of time watching Smith’s previous podcast appearances carefully, familiarising himself with Smith’s talking points, and investigating those claims for himself.

 

If Smith wanted to talk about the theories of John Mearsheimer or an obscure foreign-policy memo mentioned by “four-star general Wesley Clark” or an interview that Ariel Sharon’s lawyer and advisor Dubi Weissglas had given to Haaretz in 2004, then Hughes was ready to discuss it all. “None of this is true, Dave,” Hughes remarked after he had patiently listened to Smith rattle through a number of tendentious claims about a neoconservative think-tank called the Project for a New American Century. “Let’s look at their own words. Project for a New American Century is founded in 1998. If you go to their archive online you can find the earliest thing written about Iraq by a member. The earliest thing is written by John Bolton, 1997....” Most of the interview unfolded in this way, as half-understood arguments gleaned from untrustworthy second-hand sources collided with the facts of the historical record.

 

At other points, Hughes simply confronted Smith with objections that Smith did not seem to have heard or considered before. Smith began by telling Hughes that he experienced a political awakening when he watched former Texas Rep. Ron Paul debate former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani during the Republican primary in 2007. Smith celebrated Paul for “tearing down the lie, the propaganda which dominated right after 9/11, which was the idea that the terrorists hate us for our freedom.” Al-Qaeda’s suicide squads, he explained, have “real grievances ... with American foreign policy.” Smith kept returning to this belief that Islamist terrorism is best explained as retaliation for Western malfeasance, Palestinian suffering, and so on.

 

Hughes countered that the atrocities committed by jihadists can’t be adequately explained by these grievances, which are obviously secondary to their theological motivations. Osama bin Laden, he pointed out, was angry about the presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia: “The only way that this is a legitimate grievance is if you add the special ingredient of radical Salafi Islam.” After all, he pointed out, the United States has had troops stationed in South Korea for decades, but “there’s no South Korean group flying planes into our buildings.”

 

Smith responded to this point with the kind of vague appeal to authority he usually treats with disdain. There have, he retorted, “been many books written” about the motivations that drive terrorist organisations, and the evidence is in: “If you’re Bin Laden trying to get suicide bombers,” you should “point at all the innocent people who have been killed” by the United States. Smith would employ this tactic on multiple occasions during the debate, usually when confronted with a quote, argument, or other piece of evidence for which he did not have a rote response ready.

 

The notion that Bin Laden was some sort of anti-imperialist who cared about human rights and oppression is not just absurd, it is the inverse of reality. Al-Qaeda’s ultimate goal was the revival of a global Islamic caliphate governed by Sharia, in which non-Muslims would be ruthlessly subjugated. This is an unapologetically imperialist ideology. We don’t need to rely on neoconservatives or Zionists for this information, we can simply listen to what jihadists actually say.

 

In a 1999 referendum overseen by the UN, East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia, which had brutally occupied the country for a quarter of a century. Pro-Indonesian militia groups backed by the Indonesian armed forces began massacring East Timorese and destroying their homes. In September 1999, a multilateral peacekeeping operation authorised by the UN and led by the Australian Defence Forces deployed to East Timor and oversaw the country’s successful transition to democracy.

 

In October 2002, the Southeast Asian jihadist group Jemaah Islamiyah detonated three bombs in Bali, an attack that left 202 dead, including 88 Australians. Jemaah Islamiyah, which had links to al-Qaeda, claimed that Australia’s role in facilitating the transition to independence for East Timor was the reason for the attack. A year earlier, Bin Laden had condemned the liberation of East Timor: “The crusader Australian forces were on Indonesian shores, and in fact they landed to separate East Timor, which is part of the Islamic world.” In August 2003, a terrorist group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—which would later become al-Qaeda in Iraq—detonated a truck bomb targeting the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq. The UN representative Sérgio Vieira de Mello was killed in the attack, which Zarqawi justified with reference to Vieira de Mello’s role in facilitating the transition to independence in East Timor.

 

Smith may believe Bin Laden and other jihadists are motivated by their outrage at human-rights violations and civilian deaths, but this outrage is instrumental. Australia is no imperial superpower, and its citizens were massacred because its soldiers helped a country escape imperialist oppression. If Smith wants to live in a world in which Western powers respect the professed grievances of jihadists, he would need to oppose the liberation of East Timor. In fact, given Smith’s contempt for the liberal-international order and the use of American power, he’d have to accept a whole lot of imperial domination and violence if the United States withdrew from the world.

 

Hughes asked Smith what he thought would happen if the United States heeded his advice and pulled out of the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere. Smith began by saying that he could not comment on an “unfalsifiable counterfactual” before conceding that, yes, states like Russia and China probably would dominate their “spheres of influence” in the United States’ absence. “Yes, it will suck to be a little country next to a bigger, much stronger country,” he allowed. “That’s already true. That’s true with America. We’re more guilty of making it suck for little countries than any of them are.”

 

Is the United States guilty of dominating the Baltic states? Or its East Asian allies? Would those countries prefer to see the United States retreat to fortress America? Of course not, because they recognise that American power is the only bulwark they have against aggressive dictatorships. But because this self-evident fact doesn’t fit into Smith’s narrative in which the United States is a uniquely rapacious and cruel imperial colossus, he simply refuses to see it.

 

III.

 

Smith’s arguments about US foreign policy will be familiar to anyone who has read writers like Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, or Norman Finkelstein. Since 11 September, there has been a large and voluble contingent of commentators—foreign-policy realists, anti-imperialists, libertarians, and paleoconservatives—eager to blame the United States for most of the violence and instability around the world. These are people who, upon seeing Russian tanks roll into Ukraine, immediately start searching for ways in which the United States and NATO are actually responsible. The smouldering rubble of the World Trade Center was likewise evidence of a principled revolt against American hegemony.

 

There’s nothing new about any of this. Just as there were prominent fascist and communist sympathisers in the United States in the 20th century, there are now Americans who believe the US-led international order—the rise of which has coincided with an unprecedented era of global integration and prosperity—is the greatest tyranny on earth. Smith has seen his popularity explode for reheating arguments that have been in circulation for decades.

 

One of the main sources of disagreement in the debate with Hughes was Smith’s insistence that the United States invaded Iraq because Israel demanded it (this was the longest chapter of the debate and it begins at 55:30). There’s no need to rehearse the entire argument, but Hughes’s case can be summarised as follows:

 

1.      Pro-Israel lobbying organisations have a relatively small combined budget.

 

2.      Israel failed for decades to convince Washington to support lesser requests—like recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights—which suggests that it does not have the clout to push America into any war it doesn’t wish to fight.

 

3.      Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq.

 

Smith made the usual arguments about the influence of “the lobby” in the United States, drawing heavily on Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. For example, he claimed that the role of prominent pro-war neoconservatives in the Bush administration—people like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith—was evidence of Israeli influence. But he is just committing the same logical fallacy as Walt and Mearsheimer. The fact that some pro-Israel Bush administration officials supported the Iraq War doesn’t prove that the Israel lobby convinced them to do so. Israel didn’t install those officials in the administration, and they arrived at their views about Israel the same way millions of Americans have—out of a sense of political and cultural solidarity.

 

Part of the debate dealt with a 1996 document known as the Clean Break memo, signed by several future Bush administration officials, including Richard Perle and Feith. The signatories offered a number of suggestions to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, one of which was to “focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” Smith believes this memo proves that the invasion of Iraq was a war for Israel. There are a few problems with this view: first (and most obvious), the policy recommendation was travelling from America to Israel, not the other way around. Second, as Hughes pointed out, neoconservatives advanced many arguments in favour of toppling the Iraqi regime, and the benefits to Israel were not nearly as salient as the fear that Saddam Hussein was building and hiding weapons of mass destruction. And third, when Netanyahu delivered a speech to Congress in favour of the Iraq War, he was a former Israeli prime minister—Sharon was in power, and he thought the Iraq War was a stupid idea.

 

The obsession with the memo among many anti-Israel commentators is bizarre to begin with. They seem to believe that this six-page document produced in 1996 is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the United States’ invasion of Iraq. But the Iraq War received overwhelming Congressional authorisation and 72 percent of Americans supported it in March 2003. Walt and Mearsheimer’s argument that the Israel lobby was the “principal driving force” behind the decision to go to war—a decision that likely wouldn’t have been made without its influence—is ludicrous.

 

As Smith’s argument that Iraq was a war for Israel crumbled before Hughes’s carefully marshalled arguments, his hostility to arguments from expertise rapidly diminished: “I highly recommend people read Mearsheimer’s book The Israel Lobby,” he said. “This world-renowned scholar wrote a book about the most controversial topic in the world, and so he just went out of his way to back up everything he says in the book.” Earlier in the conversation, Smith said Mearsheimer “wrote a book called The Israel Lobby where he really details this pretty, like, extensively, with all the footnotes and citations that you need.”

 

Smith later complained that his critics were simultaneously urging him to cite experts and criticising him for doing so. He doesn’t understand that his reliance on someone as notoriously unreliable as Mearsheimer is the problem. Nor does he understand that there’s a difference between expert citations and appeals to authority—the insistence that Mearsheimer is “world-renowned” and very careful with his footnotes and citations isn’t actually an argument at all.

 

The debate between Hughes and Smith over Israel’s alleged role in the Iraq War is a reminder that the “do your own research” crowd has its own cherished dogmas and gurus. Many of the most popular figures in alternative media are intensely suspicious of established sources of authority—but it doesn’t take long to reveal that there are even bigger problems with their own sources and methods.

 

IV.

 

Smith’s inability to do his own research and maintain logical consistency exposes major problems with today’s alternative-media ecosystem. Smith has spent hundreds of hours on some of the world’s most popular podcasts, and for the most part, his interlocutors are ill-equipped to challenge him. By adding a more rigorous voice to this echo-chamber, Hughes exposed the kind of shoddy reasoning, poor grasp of the facts, and second-rate rhetorical tricks with which the political podcast circuit is awash.

 

Just as some of Smith’s bad ideas can be traced to Mearsheimer, many other bad ideas can be traced to Smith. “I’m not the guy to get political information from,” Rogan declared in August 2024. “If you want that from a comic, go to @ComicDaveSmith. He actually knows what he’s talking about.” In the podcast era, how many people have followed Rogan’s advice and treated amateur pundits like Smith as intellectual authorities? How many get their history from Cooper or their news from Rogan?

 

Something strange happened a few weeks after the 7 October atrocities in Israel—Osama bin Laden began trending on TikTok. A huge number of creators started sharing the “Letter to America” Bin Laden had published more than two decades earlier. “Everyone should read it,” one of them declared, with a warning that it had “left me very disillusioned.” Another said: “I will never look at this country the same. Please read it.” A fitness influencer told NPR that she was sympathetic to 11 September conspiracy theories and attempts to look “beyond the narrative of the mainstream media.” As the videos became increasingly popular, TikTok scrambled to remove them.

 

In that letter, Bin Laden defends the slaughter of civilians. He vows to make “Shariah the supreme law” and demands that Americans convert to Islam. He condemns homosexuality. He describes AIDS as a “Satanic American Invention.” And the letter is, naturally, viciously antisemitic. Bin Laden states that the “creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased.” He claims that Israel is planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and says Sharon visited to “pollute” it. Jews, he declares, “have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense.” This was the letter making the rounds on TikTok and impressing its users shortly after the largest massacre of civilians in Israeli history.

 

Millions of Americans have come of age politically in the podcast era, and many of them weren’t alive on 11 September. They don’t know much—if anything—about al-Qaeda’s ideology. They couldn’t tell you why jihadists massacred civilians who were enjoying a night at the beach in Bali in 2002. They probably don’t know that American no-fly zones protected Iraqi civilians from the genocidal dictator left in charge of their country after the Gulf War, nor do they realise that NATO intervened in Bosnia to repel a genocidal assault on the Muslims living there in the 1990s. They certainly wouldn’t know this if they listened to Smith, who uttered several easily disprovable falsehoods about the wars in the Balkans during the debate.

 

According to Smith, “No expert has any evidence that we halted a genocide in progress” in the Balkans. He continued: “The FBI went over there and investigated afterward and they just didn’t find anything to back up those claims.” Smith also said Slobodan Milošević “never even got convicted of the genocide charge in the International Criminal Court. He got convicted of war crimes and I think some other lesser charge.” He concluded: “That thing was sold on lies just like all the other wars in my lifetime have been.”

 

Smith got nearly everything wrong. First, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)—not the International Criminal Court, which was founded nearly a decade later—secured a long list of convictions of Bosnian Serb commanders for directing and participating in the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia: Ratko Mladić, Radovan Karadžić, Radislav Krstic, Vujadin Popović, Ljubiša Beara, and many others. Second, Milošević wasn’t convicted of anything—he died before a verdict could be reached. But genocide and complicity in genocide were among the charges he faced. And finally, the NATO bombing campaign in Bosnia worked—less than three months after the intervention began, the Dayton Accords ended the war. Similarly, it only took NATO 78 days to bring the Kosovo War to an end—a conflict that involved war crimes, including arbitrary massacres of civilians and mass displacement.

 

There are vast gaps in public knowledge that cause ears to prick up when a murderous theocrat like Osama bin Laden declares that the United States is the “worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind.” Commentators like Smith widen these gaps when they grant the central premises of America’s most implacable enemies to serve their own ideological agendas. The only way to close those gaps is through properly informed debate, and these conversations will be far more effective if they aren’t plumped with endless recitations of one interlocutor’s credentials and another’s lack thereof. Hughes understands this, and his call to “meet the challenge of the modern information age” with a renewed commitment to unfettered conversation comes at a critical time.

 

In an open civil society, you’re only as good as your last sentence—no matter how many letters are next to your name or how many prestigious outlets have published you. But at a time when anti-establishment fervour seems to be reaching new heights every day, it’s important to remember that many of the podcasters and bloggers in the alternative media are no better at sorting fact from fiction than the mainstream figures they decry. In fact, they’re often much worse.