The Leftist Podcaster Who Studies Online Radicalization

This past March, the Times writer and power podcaster Ezra Klein appeared on “Doomscroll,” a small but influential YouTube interview show hosted by the thirty-eight-year-old artist, researcher, and author Joshua Citarella. Klein, an avatar of the technocratic liberal media establishment, did not fit the profile of “Doomscroll” ’s typical guests, who tend to come from the further reaches of leftist political theory and punditry. Since its launch a year ago, the series has featured such interlocutors as Kyle Kulinski, a populist YouTuber who views political discourse as a “bar fight,” and Brace Belden, a Marxist podcaster who volunteered to fight with a Kurdish militia in the Syrian Civil War. In Klein’s episode, he and Citarella acknowledged that they agree on the need for a “productive