I have some bad news: Michael "Curious Mike" Porter Jr. has made another podcast appearance.
The former Denver Nugget and prolific podcaster was traded to the Brooklyn Nets a few months ago, simultaneously putting him in a huge media market and making him the best player on an NBA team for the first time in his career, two roles he is not ready for. Porter Jr. is dismally ill-equipped for the former, which was obvious from his ignominious podcasting career spent saying "Nah that's crazy" to anyone who says anything to him and was made even more clear last week after he joined an outer Nelk Boys show to spend 70 minutes talking about, generally speaking, "these females." The specifics of the conversation are predictably nauseating, as is the broader right-wing cultural realignment in which it's constellated.
As for the specifics: Porter. Jr. joined Andrew "Steiny" Steinberg and a malignant lurker identified as Bob on Steinberg's show One Night With Steiny, which is largely dedicated to Steinberg asking pornstars questions like, "In your relationship do you handle a lot of the, like, 'female duties'?" Steinberg is one of the aforementioned Nelk Boys, a Canadian prank YouTube troupe turned, by virtue of being in the right place at the right time and being dumb and odious enough in the right ways, mega-popular podcast and vector of reactionary political influence. To wit: They appeared on stage with Donald Trump in 2020, and interviewed him several times over the next few years, causing many pundits to credit Trump's general election win last November to podcasters like the Nelk Boys making young men racist.
They got into some hot water earlier this summer after letting Benjamin Netanyahu propagandize on their show, literally sticking to the script in the process. They were repeatedly confronted for guilelessly "yupping!" the man overseeing a genocide, and when people got mad at them for "having modern-day Hitler on" the Nelk Boy who is not Steinberg could merely manage, "I'm gonna be honest, that's a good point." Blessed with either bare-minimal curiosity or critical thinking, the not-Steinberg Nelk Boy might at this point stop to wonder why such a powerful person would regard them as a friendly place to get easy PR for awful projects. An important thing about the Nelk Boys—a feature, for someone like Netanyahu—is that they are less evil than really incredibly dumb, so dumb that their stupidity tips over into evil by sheer osmotic power.
Anyway! The other one, Steinberg, has cultivated a friendship of sorts with Porter Jr., which led to the disastrous podcast appearance. As a production, One Night is cacophonous and scattered. Steinberg and the loathsome Bob would constantly talk at the same time, barge in with non-sequiturs, and cut their guest off to argue with each other, typically about some finer point of Instagram DM–sliding etiquette. As a conversation, it is even more atrocious.
Women these days, per the three men slouching around making a podcast, are entitled, spoiled, and out to get you. "I'm not saying I'm a misogynist or anything," Porter Jr. said, misogynistically, "but I'll throw on some Andrew Tate and see how they react." The context here is that he is stressing the need to "test a girl early" and "do your research." Are we talking about dating or acquiring a speculative asset?
Other hits include: wariness of women from Los Angeles, because they've gotten "into that lifestyle" (unelaborated upon); how Porter Jr. doesn't talk back to women officiating NBA games because they're more sensitive; WNBA players such as Paige Buckner and "Teresi" [sic]; how Steinberg ran into Kevin Durant at a Drake show in London and got four dap-ups; how Denver has a lot of swingers and they're all white; whether Steinberg wishes he was black (he does).
"My only thing with a girl is you gotta bring something to the table," Porter Jr. says. "Positivity. You gotta help me mentally. You gotta be able to cook or something, you gotta be able to clean or something, otherwise what value are you bringing to my life?" This is contrasted against how Porter Jr.'s mom raised him and his seven siblings: "Nowadays, they just want to live like queens and do absolutely nothing." The discussion moves on to Porter Jr.'s "celibacy journey" and then how fixing prop bets to help enrich your friends is bad, even if it makes a lot of sense if you actually think about it.
If a news peg for Porter Jr.'s appearance on One Night can be said to exist, it is the 13:55 video titled "A moment of honesty..." he posted on the Curious Mike YouTube page a few days prior. In it, Porter Jr. delivers an oblique monologue discussing how "women has always been my vice," his Christian faith, and the contradictions therein. These are potentially hefty topics, undercut by typically Porterian flourishes like "sometimes we get sucked so deep into our phones; pause." With Steinberg on One Night, Porter Jr. does not expand on this rambling video so much as he talks past it, underscoring in the process the gulf between confessional YouTube video and meaningful processing of whatever stuff he's dealing with.
On its own, a player of Michael Porter Jr.'s middling status baring his confused, ugly thoughts about women is depressing, though not exactly newsworthy. What is more interesting here than his thoughts specifically are their form and distribution. So much of cultural production now, especially the stuff that is well-funded and influential among the forthcoming generation of apex consumers, straddles this precise line between dumb and harmful. Not all of the stuff exploding in popularity and cultural relevance is this explicitly right-wing in the traditional, polarized sense, but much of it is right-wing in its sensibilities and worldview, effectively meeting the same ends.
Sports gambling, to use another particularly Porterian point of reference, is a useful example. The addiction mechanisms that generate billions for online casinos are not themselves going to turn millions of young men into raging, active culture warriors, but they do foment and feed a potent anti-sociality. How many times has an athlete spoken out—as Porter Jr. does in this very interview—about the death threats they get from seething bettors or the ubiquity of people haranguing them at games? Yet the sports media apparatus nominally in charge of confronting this problem is totally bought off, as are the leagues themselves and their broadcast partners, so the culture that follows in sports gambling's sludgy wake is predictably gross. All we have left are these three jackasses, standing athwart history, yelling, "Bruh."
Sports gambling is a part of a grander collage of right-adjacent post-pandemic online culture that includes the Young Money Hustler crypto guys, anyone seeking a check on Elon Musk–era Twitter, the Nelk Boys themselves, and people making AI-generated viral posts about news events that didn't happen. There are varying degrees of predatory cynicism on display here. All exploit the isolation and atomization now endemic to society. Another unifying feature is a moth-flame relationship to power. Another, of course, is that they all make you stupider. Given that combination, current lousy material conditions, and Trump's war on the organs of liberal power, think how this characteristic anti-sociality might express itself: in rage toward a perceived, convenient antagonist, whether a basketball player missing a three-pointer to ruin your parlay, a woman who will not date you, or the specter of "woke" and cancel culture.
So where does Porter Jr. fit? Neither sports generally nor basketball specifically are resistant to this drift, though one thing they have going for them is that the theoretical object at their centers is a game: Though people have tried, it is hard to make something like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's ballhandling a referendum on wokeness. But sports and sports culture—always at least mildly reactionary—have seemed increasingly aligned with the rise of this particular stupid strain over the past year. One of the more intriguing things Porter Jr. says in his One Night spot is that he only makes YouTube videos "as a hobby." It's a borderline disarming remark at first blush, until you realize he's making a mirror of something remarkably ugly. While there's not really anyone else in the NBA who matches Porter Jr.'s unfiltered nonsense, he doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It would probably be alarmist to project Porter Jr. as the future of anything. He certainly is not the future of the Brooklyn Nets! But his particular brand of loud, online wrongheadedness is ascendant, and however monotone and mumbly his delivery he's effectively screeching his misogynist pablum out to an audience increasingly given to lauding it. I want to find comfort in the fact that Porter Jr.'s ideas and modes of expression are bafflingly unsophisticated and wrong, and he himself an astoundingly uncharismatic exponent of them—but millions of people love that stuff now.
One thing I do find some grim comfort in: imagining the results of the Porter Jr.–as-best-player experiment the Nets are undertaking next season. Some poor rookie will have this dullard taking them under his wing as their vet—a role he's perhaps even more disastrously unsuited to model than "man any self-respecting person should consider dating," but a potentially transformative new tanking strategem.
