Barstool Politics

Its reach is significant: Barstool’s content across all platforms now reaches 66 million people each month, more than twice the average reach of the 105 largest American news sites.^[6]  Online, the free Boston sports print publication turned national multimedia sports company/content brand, has grown into a right-wing, grassroots, national organizing apparatus.

Researcher Kyle Kusz calls Barstool’s culture a fratriarchy, borrowed from that of college fraternities in which they thrive.^[7] A fratriarchy is a form of male supremacist power that reasserts patriarchy through brotherhood-like loyalty and community, at the expense of perceived outsiders. Right-wing media has used outrage and reactionary rhetoric to drive engagement for decades, but Barstool has threaded these tactics and ideas further into the social order of American higher education.

The Rise of Barstool Politics

Portnoy founded Barstool Sports (with a $25,000 loan from his parents) as a free Boston-based sports and gambling newspaper billed as “by the common man, for the common man.”^[8] Though the common man may not have that access to familial capital, Portnoy established Barstool grounded in populism with the aim of appealing to (implicitly White) men within the world of Boston sports. From 2006 to 2010, the site’s 100,000 monthly visitors grew to approximately 1.4 million.^[9]

In a few short years, Portnoy successfully united many young people under the Barstool brand, drawn to the familiarity of anti-woke fratriarchal culture. Barstool would soon expand into a multifaceted lifestyle, sports, event, and merchandise brand, commodifying bro-centric slogans like “Saturdays are for the boys.”^[10] With these tactics, Barstool subtly integrated itself into the collegiate social partying scenes and cultivated an exceptionally loyal, young audience. By 2019, the company touted more than 66 million unique monthly visitors across their multiplatform network,^[11] and over a quarter of college-aged Americans engaged with Barstool content weekly.^[12] Barstool used non-traditional methods of brand curation to reinforce White chauvinism, misogyny, and fratriarchy as the status quo. With a focus on young people, Barstool and its affiliates today host more than 700 social accounts, some with regular reach in the tens of millions, across TikTok, Facebook, X and Instagram.^[13]

As Barstool grew, its fanbase—known as “Stoolies”—became an important part of the brand. Stoolies could be casual fans who consume Barstool content and maybe buy a MAGA hat on their online shop, but some are far more devoted to the brand. Young fans are invited to become part of the company from the ground up, entering a unique media sports space where politically incorrect commentary is encouraged. Intern “viceroys”—an ironically evocative historical term of British empire for a colonial governor appointed by a king—are hired across the U.S. as representatives of Barstool on college campuses and within wider urban communities.^[14] Viceroys maintain a network of “more than 300” Barstool-affiliated accounts, often specific to a school or locality across multiple social media platforms,^[15] to incorporate the Barstool brand into local events, promote brand-wide campaigns, and to scout and re-post viral online content that is “funny, controversial, whatever” (regardless of its relevance to sports or the collegiate world). With the promise of potential promotion, resume building, or college credit, Barstool created a semi-autonomous network of content creators of partiers and fraternity brothers across the country to promote the brand.

The company thrives on strengthening its bond with the fraternity and sorority culture that is deeply imbedded within American academic institutions, perpetuating the implied White male supremacy that aligns with their own “apolitical” politics. Kyle Kusz and Matthew Hodler’s discussion of Barstool’s 2020 web series, “The Barstool Documentary Series,” provides great insight into Barstool’s politics of exclusion. Their analysis makes clear how the company wants to present itself to the world, particularly college students.^[16] Chapter 14 of the Barstool documentary, “The Dixie Tour,” follows a White male athlete’s tour across American football schools in the U.S. South, heavily featuring confederate imagery and iconography with no acknowledgement that these symbols are—and always have been—associated with White supremacy and brutal violence against Black Americans. Portnoy himself acknowledged this association: “I could see how if I were Black I wouldn’t love seeing a flag parading around from the colonial era when this country allowed slavery.”^[17]

Kusz and Hodler point to the documentary’s release timeline (during the racial reckoning of 2020) as an intentional display of Barstool’s “prerogative to ignore, if not defy, antiracist understandings of Confederacy iconography and symbols, thereby modeling to other White Americans how they might do the same.”^[18] Compounded by the persistent appropriation of Black music (and culture) in “overwhelmingly white-majority crowds,” this web-series demonstrates a profoundly political appeal to Whiteness above all else.^[19]

Kusz and Hodler’s reading is reinforced by Portnoy’s own behavior: edgy humor that ignores how jokes about marginalized groups can jeer at systemic injustice, leaving Barstool’s humor tone-deaf at best and bigoted at worst, with absolutely no accountability. In 2020, the year the documentary was released, several videos resurfaced on Twitter of Portnoy saying the n-word and nonsensically calling Colin Kaepernick “an ISIS guy,” exclaiming “throw a headwrap on this guy and he’s a terrorist,” and insisting he looks “like a Bin Laden.”^[20] When these videos became public, as if to emphasize his lack of accountability, Portnoy posted a non-apology video to Twitter taunting his critics: “I’m big. You’re little. I cancel you.”^[21]

Barstool’s heteronormative framing is more subtle but remains central to its voice. While the company has donated to LGBTQIA organizations, sold pride merch during pride month, and teases its own fanbase for homophobic comments, the Stoolies are hardly in lockstep with the company line. Portnoy feigns libertarian attitudes around gender, even once calling a transphobic baseball player “a pompous asshole,” though his clarifying comments more accurately reflect Barstool’s principles: “On this transgender issue I’m fairly neutral. I do think if you have a dick you should use the men’s room … It doesn’t mean I hate transgenders it just means I don’t think making 1 person comfortable should come at the expense of potentially making 3 other people uncomfortable.”^[22]

Portnoy’s recent comments are more in step with the rest of Barstool’s right-wing principles, as he proclaimed: “transgenders should have as many rights as you can give and everything else, but there is an element, and it’s just science that boys and girls, men and women are different.”^[23] Despite his previous defense of transgender rights, his criticism of transgender high school athletes ignores the science behind gender transition and implies that trans girls pose an existential threat to the fairness of children’s sports—a distorted frame that right-wing movements often use to malign gender non-conforming people. Like the Dixie Tour webisodes, these quotes reflect a disregard and hostility toward marginalized people that Barstool perpetuates, hiding behind the idea that acknowledging systemic injustice is just uncomfortable.

While the company employs several women and people from marginalized groups, including their female former-CEO Erika Ayers Badan, these hirings are often seen as “strategic moves intended to preemptively dismiss outsider criticisms of Barstool,”^[24] often softened with tongue-in-cheek humor. Badan’s podcast “Token CEO,” named for her appointment to the position, along with the “Loud & Complicit” podcast hosted by two female Barstool employees, make light of the company’s endemic culture of misogyny. Like Stoolies calling for a boycott of the company’s Pride merchandise,^[25] these jokes reflect the downside of this corporate culture: any effort to soften the corporate image is undermined by misogynist, transphobic, and chauvinist attacks from Dave Portnoy, fans, or both. An egotistical strong-man leader constantly bonding over masculine debauchery is a common trope within right-wing politics, fascism, and, most essentially, fratriarchy.

Fratriarchy and Fraternity Culture

Researchers like Kusz identify fratriarchy through narratives of supremacy. Fratriarchy manifests in behaviors like “marauding, drinking, watching sports, gambling, and womanizing,” that invite young men to shamelessly privilege concerns of “bros” at the expense of all others.^[26] Uninhibited male behavior, normalized with phrases like “boys will be boys” and claims to “locker room talk,”^[27] becomes a glorified performance of masculinity regardless of consequence. Euphemisms like these mischaracterize all collegiate athletics as rife for abuse, a tremendous disservice to those working to instill more positive models of masculinity.

Since 1776, fraternities remain nearly ubiquitous across American college campuses as primarily White organizations.^[28] What became known as “white clauses” were present in Greek life charters well into the 20th century, requiring that members be White, Christian men.^[29] Historically White fraternities (HWFs) illustrate the dangers inherent to fratriarchal ideology. When the interests of the in-group become supreme to the comfort, wellbeing, or physical safety of the out-group, organizations like fraternities (or incels and police forces) will protect the in-group at all costs.^[30] In many cases, Greek life provides a community that helps students adjust to college life and creates community and support for future endeavors. At its worst, when paired with fratriarchal values, it fosters a culture complicit with abuse. In fratriarchies, group interests are privileged over individual accountability, and those harboring discriminatory ideas can easily feel their prejudices are justified, or mainstream. Barstool’s own tactics are so distinct and widespread that they have begun to be called the “Barstool Republican:”^[31] an American man characterized by his implicit White victimhood and a critique of minority empowerment as a threat, even within supposedly apolitical spaces.

A 1992 study into the adverse impacts of Greek life highlighted the system’s potential to perpetuate abuse. Researchers found that 80 percent of Greek life members were binge drinkers,^[32] women in Greek life are 74 percent more likely to be raped,^[33] and as the 2015 Netflix documentary, The Hunting Ground, examined, fraternity men are three times more likely to commit rape than their un-pledged classmates.^[34] In response to the long-held climate of hazing, assault and de-facto segregation of HWFs, a cohort of former sorority and fraternity members organized “abolish Greek life” movements across university campuses nationwide in 2020.^[35] Still, like Barstool, Greek life membership overwhelmingly consists of society’s most empowered demographic groups organized in strict hierarchy:^[36] a reality that makes them extremely resistant to attempts at reform, and more appealing to those in search of fratriarchal politics. Through the Viceroy program, Barstool has become a brand synonymous with fraternity, drinking, and party culture across the US. As Portnoy curates a culture of fratriarchy at Barstool, viceroys normalize and spread it within fraternities themselves, making Barstool a younger, hipper arm of American right-wing political media.

The Barstool Impact

Hypermasculinist far-right movements like the Wolves of Vinland define themselves in opposition to a global “mono-culture” standing in for a nebulous racialized other. These talking points have been understood by post-war scholars of fascism to recharacterize right-wing politics as “cultural, artistic, or meta-political,”^[37] targeting identity and culture as a precursor to direct politics. Barstool’s rhetoric is generally more implicit, but Portnoy insists that the company is not run by a “woke overlord.” Using the language of far-right movements, this tone maligns corporate leadership as an amorphous, all-powerful other working against the interests of the in-group—or simply too-woke to appreciate Portnoy’s humor. Just as misogynist incel communities grew out of earlier, more inclusive incel movements,^[38] Portnoy grew Barstool from preexisting (politically ambivalent) networks within college sports and drinking culture, luring these audiences with implied supremacism deceptively framed as apoliticism.

Though framed as ‘harmless’ humor, many of these jokes enforce the message central to fratriarchy and Barstool conservatism: those who advocate for systemically marginalized perspectives, notably absent from Barstool’s worldview, belong to a nebulous outgroup unworthy of regard or sincere acknowledgement. The normalization of, and complicity with, these values in online spaces (social media, podcasts, brand sponsorships) has been exacerbated and renewed among Barstool’s young outreach channels. In trafficking outrageous content designed to draw engagement with their worldview, Barstool is poised to continue expanding fratriarchy and right-wing influence in America for years to come.