This far-right podcaster is telling his fans to harass hospitals

Stew Peters is a powerful yet under examined force in far-right political media. He's using that influence to steer conspiracy theorists toward healthcare workers

Radical Right podcaster Stew Peters has been encouraging his fans to harass healthcare professionals who work at facilities that he baselessly claims are part of a global conspiracy to conduct a genocide via COVID-19 treatments.

Peters is an influential far-right podcaster who hasn’t met a conspiracy theory about COVID-19 that he didn’t like. He regularly evokes violent rhetoric, calls conspiracists to action, and cuddles extremist movement figures on his program, which is produced by a failed far-right political candidate who has assured white supremacists that "Stew gets it. He gets the agenda." Peters has gradually steered into darker territory, most recently marked by him joining white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes’ propriety video streaming service “Cozy TV.”

The amateur rapper turned podcast host receives surprisingly little scrutiny from mainstream sources, given the degrees of his online influence and extremist sympathies. On Telegram, Peters has amassed more than 330,000 followers. On Gab, he has more than 100,000. Some videos that Peters has posted to the alternative video platform Rumble have been viewed more than 1,000,000 times. His most popular Rumble videos are chock-full of COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories; all 66 that received more than 100,000 views at the time of writing were about the pandemic, and most were about vaccines specifically. That level of influence has enabled Peters to book Republican political candidates and elected officials on his show at a steady rate. (He was recently set to have Rep. Jim Jordan on his show, but the booking fell through.)

So why have so many people never heard of Stew Peters? Will Sommer wrote a great profile on Peters for The Daily Beast last year that aptly noted:

Peters’ rise reflects the tumultuous environment of digital right-wing media, where a previously little-known bounty hunter can emerge out of practically nowhere to become a power player.

Let’s just say that Peters has not been following Uncle Ben’s advice. Rather, Peters’ power has correlated inversely with his levels of responsibility.