Barstool Sports: A Conservative Think Tank
Dave Portnoy shares his right-wing politics with the world. It's more delusional than you can imagine.
A few months ago, I was talking to
about her work studying the “Womanosphere” — a network of conservative women influencers who preach traditional gender roles, patriarchy, and subservience, despite leading multi-million dollar businesses and opining on politics (instead of listening to their husbands, who Jesus Christ made better at brain-thinking). Her thoughts are spelled out in the episode, but the TL;DR is that Katie couldn’t get a straight answer to a simple question: “What is modern conservatism?” The women at TPUSA and other conferences called themselves conservatives, but favored abortion rights. From the stage of a political convention, they told other women to stay in the kitchen and leave politics to men. To put this phenomenon into its most bizarre form, I’m mystified by the right-wing women political commentators who advocate for repealing the 19th Amendment because they don’t think women should discuss politics… which undercuts their existence as women who talk about politics.
Outside of the Womanosphere, this question sticks with me. In 2025, what is a conservative? It’s certainly not any of the things National Review claimed it was during the Obama years. As Trump attempts to end birthright citizenship and run for a third term, conservatism certainly doesn’t care about constitutionalism. Neither is there a regard for America’s global reputation, which Trump has driven lower than his own approval rating. Claiming individual freedom is a joke when the conservative Supreme Court says cops can stop you for your skin color, and anything about traditional family values is a nonstarter.1 So, in 2025, what is conservatism? What is it that unites the MAGA coalition together?
A recent interview with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy gave us our answer.
Last Sunday, Portnoy was interviewed on CBS about Barstool, politics, and antisemitism. The inspiring event was an incident in which he was accosted with an anti-semitic slur in Mississippi. While answering a question about why he supports Trump and why he believes the Democrats lost young men, Portnoy provides a window into what it means to be a conservative.
His answer hits all the classics of reactionary thought: “Young men are being cancelled for saying chicks are hot and White men are blamed for colonialism.”
It goes without saying that this is delusional. I had no shortage of critiques about the 2024 Democratic campaign, but I can’t remember a single politician being “anti-normal guy.” Their message failed to attract them, but that’s very different from Portnoy’s characterization that they were chastising people for calling chicks hot. However, I do remember a lot of Republican politicians saying Democrats were “anti-normal guy.” It’s the go-to talking point of J.D. Vance, who uses a fake moral panic to draw young men into his fascist ideology.
“My message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive.”
As for Portnoy’s complaints that White men are blamed for colonialism, this is also not true. The source on this is me, one of Dave’s fellow Whites. I’ve lived my whole life in America and spend a lot of time in the leftist spaces commonly mischaracterized as overly woke. Never once have I been asked to apologize for colonialism (lol) or made to feel bad about it (lmao). Much like his complaints about society being “anti-normal guy,” there are plenty of right-wing voices saying, “Unlike the left, we don’t want you to feel bad about being White!” Dave Portnoy isn’t responding to reality, but the conservative alternative reality that has been conjured to make guys like him mad. This is why I see modern conservatism as less of a principled movement centered on concrete beliefs and more of a collective delusion shared by participants who mutually agree for it to be an outlet for their insecurities: personal, political, or social. Here, Portnoy confirms my theory:
“With the Trump stuff, he won the election. And you had a candidate calling you a deplorable, or a Nazi if you vote for him. I don’t know if they used that exact word, but it felt like that.”
And, there it is. Dave Portnoy “felt” like he was being called a Nazi, just like he felt people blamed him for the Trail of Tears, just like he feels there’s a war on the normal White guy. These are delusions. It’s not even clear which Democratic candidate he’s talking about. Clinton called some Trump supporters deplorables in 2016, but this conversation was about the 2024 election. To us, that makes no sense. But in the mind of a reactionary, there’s no difference, because neither the date nor what was actually said matters. It’s the feeling that matters, and the feeling that drives Portnoy’s response to this imagined attack on his demographic.
Later in the interview, Portnoy describes overly sensitive feminists as “getting mad at Diet Coke cans for causing eating disorders.” Again, this is a conservative delusion. When I searched for what he was referring to, I expected something modern and consequential: A boycott by a prominent women’s rights group, or even a statement from Planned Parenthood condemning deceptive marketing tactics that lead to poor health outcomes. Nope! The only mention of this event that I could find was a Wall Street Journal article from fourteen fucking years ago. By the way he talks about it, you can tell this event (or rather, single article in a conservative newspaper), shaped his worldview. Because the conservative delusion Portnoy lives within isn’t real, they have to go to extreme lengths to justify their illogical thoughts and psychotic politics.
But it’s not just the collective delusion that defines conservatism. It’s the commanding need to bend the world to resolve these nonexistent issues that makes conservatism both particularly dangerous and insufferably annoying.
A day before the CBS segment aired, Portnoy appeared on Lara Trump’s Fox News show to discuss the antisemitic incident. Predictably, the conversation focused on Zohran Mamdani and college campuses.
A reminder, this incident happened in deep red Mississippi, which voted for Lara Trump’s father-in-law by 22 points. Somehow, Portnoy finds a way to blame Mississippi’s antisemitism on “college campuses,” which is code for anti-genocide protestors, and social media. The first is a nonsensical claim, because they weren’t on a college campus. But Portnoy is right about antisemitism on social media, but not how he thinks. There is more antisemitism on X/Twitter nowadays, but not because of supporters of Palestine. It’s because Elon Musk let all the Nazis back on and has been actively promoting them.2 And if you’re going to talk about antisemitism in a deep-red state, a more logical topic of complaint would be the President, who dines with Holocaust deniers such as Nick Fuentes and refers to bankers as “Shylocks.” But in the conservative delusion, Trump can’t be antisemitic because he loves Israel. So, it must be something else, which conveniently fits with Dave and Lara’s Zionism.
Though the shared psychosis of right wingers has led to immense human misery, a small silver lining is how funny it is to watch these people bring their imaginary victimhood into the real world, creating the most hilariously dumb statements possible: such as a women political commentator saying women should have the right to vote, and the founder of a notoriously bigoted media company claiming he has a “good moral compass” and never makes jokes “from a place of hate.” This would be news to anyone who has a passing familiarity with Barstool over the last two decades.
Because conservatism is more of a vibe than a set of principles, you don’t really need to know what you’re talking about. Dave’s political thoughts are likely well-received around other reactionary rich men, but they sound like gobbledygook to those who haven’t given ourselves Computer Madness. For example, here’s Dave Portnoy’s contribution to the never-ending anger around people using nontraditional pronouns.
“People get too worked up about ‘He, She, Verbs.’”
You heard it here first, folks. Verbs: The New Woke Threat. This astute political analysis is brought to you be the men behind “Guess That Ass.”
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In Solidarity — Joe
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/09/supreme-court-immigration-los-angeles-reaction
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/x-twitter-elon-musk-nazi-extremist-white-nationalist-accounts-rcna145020
The right has been creating its own "realities" for decades, maybe centuries. You still hear about the antiwar protesters who accosted vets returning from Vietnam at airports with shouts of "baby killers." The real reality is that the antiwar movement worked closely with vets in organizations such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War and before that at coffee houses set up close to military bases. However, the baby killer lie was repeated so many times it became the reality. It has now become an accepted "fact" and good luck trying to dispel the myth. But there are always grains of truth in their myths. I'm guessing that there were instances of random people verbally attacking vets. Likewise, having spent decades on college campuses as both a student and faculty, I can personally attest to rare occasions when people on the left spouted absurdities. We are not immune to our version of MAGA, but they are the exception not the rule.
Being an asshole and not apologizing for it. Thats modern conservatism.