“If it weren’t for Charlie Kirk, I would not be the vice president of the United States,” J. D. Vance said as he hosted The Charlie Kirk Show on Monday. This may well be true, because Kirk lobbied for Vance to get the vice-presidential nomination. It’s also a reflection of how deeply Donald Trump’s White House is intertwined with a thriving ecosystem of partisan podcasters who amplify his agenda—and help set it.

In the past decade, American public life has undergone two major transformations: The MAGA movement has swallowed the Republican Party whole. And influencers such as Kirk have elbowed aside traditional media outlets in the quest for attention. Even more important, the boundary between the movement and the influencers is nonexistent: Kirk’s campus-outreach group, Turning Point USA,

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