What you need to know is right there in the podcast description: “A leftist podcast about your mee-maw’s genocidal Facebook feed.” Today’s mainstream media will rarely acknowledge the violence proliferating on social media. From Nazis recruiting teenage boys on 4Chan to anti-abortion minion memes from your grandma, it is undeniable that conservatives on social media have coalesced into a political force that frequently results in real-life harm, with those called the “alt-right” as its actors. As the Minion Death Cult puts it: “The world is ending. Your uncle’s Facebook feed is responsible. We’re documenting it.”
Alex Edward and Tony Boswell began the Minion Death Cult podcast in 2017 as a response to the growing influence of far-right social media trends. Their mission? To document and analyze them, paying particular attention to the trends that seem too frivolous or obscure for mainstream liberals to validate. Even the title of the podcast is a reference both to the way Minion memes are used on Facebook among boomer communities to spread conspiracies and to the use of the moniker “death cult” for the 57% of Republicans who stated that 176,000 deaths from coronavirus would be acceptable, according to a CBS News Battleground Tracker poll…