The 23-Year-Old YouTuber Cable News Can’t Ignore

Adam Mockler has built a multi-platform political media company designed for the algorithm era

May 19, 2026

Adam Mockler is a 23-year-old new YouTuber and political commentator from Valparaiso, Indiana, making waves on cable TV. His operation is digital-first with rapid-response political videos, debate clips, and news commentary distributed across YouTube, Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, and Substack. He has 2 million YouTube subscribers, plus another 648k on Instagram, 207k on X, and 432k on TikTok.

Mockler never graduated college. Instead he went straight to building his own media empire. It’s designed less for the traditions and entrenchment of cable news and instead built for feeds. Which is why his recent appearance on CNN has been so interesting. At first, it may sound counterintuitive that a YouTuber is sitting on a CNN panel. But as Mockler described it to me earlier this week, he understands that legacy media and content creators need each other to thrive.

“I’m a different type of figure on there, but the way that I’ve been working with these shows has been very symbiotic,” he told me.

That was on full display recently when a CNN exchange between Mockler and conservative commentator Scott Jennings went viral after Jennings snapped at him on live television, telling Mockler to “get your f*cking hand out of my face.” Mockler got the credibility and combat of cable while CNN got a clip that went viral.

Mockler’s cable coup says a lot about the current state of our media. Cable still has institutional power but creators understand what people want and how to distribute it better (and quicker) than most. I asked Mockler about that moment, and more.

Here’s our conversation, edited lightly for clarity and brevity.

Give me your backstory How did you get into this work and what have you built so far?

AM: I run a YouTube channel with a few million followers. I created this YouTube channel when I was nine-years-old. I used to get home from school and create all these dumb Minecraft and Call of Duty videos, but they weren’t dumb, because I was learning how to edit in real time. That’s what I really started to enjoy was the editing and the production part of it. In fifth grade, I was debating my teacher about gay marriage because the Supreme Court was talking about it, and I got kicked out of class because I was probably being a disruptive asshole. I was literally like 10 years old or whatever, but I was really into debating. My family was uniquely political. My dad was Muslim, my mom was more on the Christian side, so I just had exposure to these different beliefs. And then in middle and high school I stopped making the YouTube videos (I privated all of them in high school) because I wanted to get girls and actually not be the Minecraft guy all the time. Then finally I graduated high school, and I just hated the college structure. I started going to college, I did this film class, as a side thing, and I realized how much I loved editing again. I was like, wait a minute, I can actually still edit very intuitively, like I’m decent at this. So then there was this Trump rally two states away. I grew up in Indiana. This Trump rally was in Iowa for the caucuses. I drove over to Iowa and debated some Trump supporters in a very respectful way, like I would talk to people in Indiana, and it went viral across the internet. So then I started hitting rally after rally after rally, and essentially by building my own infrastructure and my own team in the independent space. I’ve been able to build my way up into the more Cable mainstream space, and the cool thing is that the cameraman that filmed with me in that first ever Iowa rally is still my main camera guy, helping me at rallies.

I think the Gen Z story that’s analogous here is the scrappiness of building a team in this new world.

Do you call yourself a journalist? Is that label still the same as what it used to be?

AM: I don’t call myself a journalist. I think the label still does hold a gravity to it. That’s why I personally don’t call myself one. I’m a commentator. I call myself a commentator because I give my opinion, my analysis, I debate, and I’m not digging. I’m not out there interviewing people as primary sources on a daily basis to develop my facts. Now, I do go out to Trump rallies and do debates. That’s the closest thing to journalism that I do.

I don’t like the label ‘creator.’ For me, I feel like that kind of devalues it, like I’m not just a small creator. I’m building a business with a team of six people.

I also don’t like ‘journalist’ because the gravity of what I’m doing is not the same as many journalists out there. So, ‘commentator’ is where I’ve landed.

Tell me about the business you’re building. What’s the model? Who is the team around you?

AM: To break down the business model, it’s a digital first rapid response media company. I post multiple videos a day, breaking down the news, and those videos get distributed across every single platform, almost injected straight into your feed on every single platform, for young people, for older people, everyone in between.

The way I think of my business is that it starts off with YouTube at the top of the pyramid, if you can picture here, most important, going back to when I was nine years old. YouTube is what I’ve always been good at. And then YouTube is where I spend all of my most of my time thinking about developing videos, making these news videos and these fake videos, and from there at the top of the funnel, the race is off. Then the video gets distributed onto Facebook by my main editor, and it gets distributed onto Twitter. If you go on Twitter right now, all my videos are on there. Then from there, he cuts up a short that he puts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and then from there he shoots it off on Substack and maybe posted on Bluesky and Threads or LinkedIn or whatever, like we basically want to make sure that every single gap is filled in the social media landscape.

We didn’t have a Facebook a year ago, and now Facebook pulls 150 million views a month, and that’s a lot. So that’s a huge gap that we had that we didn’t realize that we’ve now filled. So we got all of these different social media platforms that we relentlessly post across.

I personally prioritize YouTube the most. That’s where a lot of the revenue comes from. It’s based on revenue, just ads that are built into the platform. We have a subscription model on Substack, and people can support us on YouTube for a few dollars a month, but it’s nowhere near our main source right now.

After dropping out of college, [I had to] learn how to build this business and operate this business with expenditures and revenue and balance and all, and now we have a team of my main editor, Victor, we just hired a secondary editor, Ewan, and he lives in the United Kingdom, and when we go to bed at about midnight. It’s 6am in the United Kingdom, so we’re able to do an overnight handoff where I can just send him some videos. That’s been very helpful. We’ve got Hayden, our 20-year-old college student, who’s like the operation supervisor. He does a lot of distribution, a lot of helping with titles and stuff like that. It’s nice to have a bunch of young scrappy people in the space who really, really get it. [There’s] Amelia, a producer we just hired for our new debate show, she’s brilliant. We’ve got Rachel, our main lawyer, who runs a lot of our contractual stuff. She’s also brilliant. We’ve got Chris, a contributor who’s the same age as me, and he makes videos on my channel, so I can double my eyes, I can network. Basically two young dudes pushing out content, and then boom, boom, boom, I’m probably missing some people, I mean, yeah, we’ve got some others. Mike, my core policy advisor too, he’s a law student who helps me, and he’s got a crazy brain for policy. So after all that yapping is basically a team of seven like-minded individuals all pushing forward.

How do you decide what to cover?

AM: Like everybody else in the news space, we’re kind of beholden to the news cycle and what’s happening through the day. The past few months, I’ve spent a lot of time working on developing frameworks surrounding the Iran war, and at first this was going through a lot of history of the United States and Iranian relationships, like we overthrew their leader back in the 50s with the Shah, and all of this history leading up to this today, and now it’s just kind of narrative breaking with what the Trump admin is doing.

I’ve been investing a lot of time into breaking up that narrative. Back in January of this year, when it was about Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, I was doing a lot of time on that narrative.

I’m often times covering what is in the news, but I am selective with what I want to cover. Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about foreign policy and Iran and Ukraine and democracy and the overall corruption coming from the Trump administration domestically. Those are the frameworks I think of things through.

Pro-democracy, institutions, how can we restore these liberal ideals. That’s what I want to push for in our generation, and that’s also the framework for which I’m covering the news cycle.

You mentioned our generation. Would you say your audience is mostly young people? Do you have metrics on who your audience is?

AM: It spans the generational spectrum. I’m gaining more younger viewers as I do more debate. With my news content on YouTube, I’m gonna go by stats, and oftentimes it’s people who watch like MSNow or MSNBC, and they transfer it over to YouTube. So I’ve got an older audience on YouTube. It’s a lot of 25-34, 35-44, 45-54. The 18 to 24 on YouTube isn’t that high. On Instagram, it is predominantly 25-year-olds, 18-year-old, it’s a lot younger on Instagram. TikTok, I don’t really invest in. Substack, is a rather older audience. Twitter (X), I also reach a younger audience. I really, really like that. I’m reaching 25-34. I would like to be reaching the 18-24-year-olds.

Debate style videos have clearly popped off. But more recently, I’ve heard young people skeptical of them because they feel like it’s rage bait. Do you intentionally curate your debate videos? Maybe you’re trying to rage-bait, maybe not? How do you feel about that?

AM: I don’t try to rage bait, but I understand how debate videos can be rage bait. I think it’s the current ecosystem that we live in that incentivizes it. It’s not really the fault of any individual actor on TikTok or anyone else like that. I mean, the president, for the past decade, has been using the style of political rage bait to prove a point and to drive a narrative and to draw attention, and then liberals use this debate format and try to gain attention, and people say that we shouldn’t do that, I think is misunderstanding the moment and misunderstanding the game.

In an ideal reality we would all be having one-hour intellectual debates, but in the current reality we live in, we’re dominated by social media and attention spans and trying to drive a message in the 20 seconds that you have when somebody scrolls past your reel, or whatever.

So, yeah, oftentimes my debate reels will start off with an interesting book, and I have to make my point within 40 seconds. The opponent has to make their point. And I have to finish off with a strong closer. I don’t see it as rage bait, but some people just don’t like to debate content. But I think it’s a good way to drive a narrative. I view debate clips as clever ways to drive narratives.

What’s your biggest tip for driving maximum views, given as you described it, the current ecosystem that we live in? Are you maximizing for views? What’s your standard of performance?

AM: It’s not just views, but it’s views that actually count, people that can change their mind. There’s always going to be a trade off on every single platform that you use, where you have to optimize the algorithm, and you’ll have to remove parts of the perfect ideal video. I’m not going to post five minute debates on Instagram. I would love that, but oftentimes we have to cut them down to 90 seconds or 60 seconds, because that’s just how it works.

If I could title my YouTube videos, like, ‘Trump has economic recession indicator shock him,’ or whatever, that would be great. But it has to be like, ‘Trump stunned by this bad news,’ like I have to sensationalize it a bit. And each platform, you have to play to the strengths of that algorithm in order to maximize your reach. If not, I’ll be trading off hundreds of thousands of potential views.

That’s not to say it’s only about how many views I can get, but while maintaining the core integrity of my videos and really just pushing forward my liberal frameworks that I truly believe in, I sometimes want to lean into algorithm optimizing things. So, for example, when I get a really cool CNN clip that I’m very excited about, it’s not like I want to post it on Instagram and be like, ‘MAGA gets destroyed by young liberal,’ like it’s not my ideal title for it, but it really does grab people’s attention. So I do it. And then my video that I’m proud of gets more and more views, because I optimized for the algorithm. So it’s kind of building the song and dance of staying true to yourself while learning to tweak the algorithm a bit. At times it’ll be cringy, at times it feels hard.

You mentioned CNN. You’ve disrupted the cable space. Tell me about your experience.

AM: Disrupting is a really good word. From my point of view, it’s been more symbiotic. I’m disrupting in the sense that I’m a different type of figure on there, but the way that I’ve been working with these shows has been very symbiotic.

About a year ago, maybe a bit more, I began to really want to double down on doing debates, and I hired this PR firm. They got me on Newsmax, on the right-wing station. I went on there and I debated Brilyn Hollyhand, and he’s like the new Charlie Kirk, and we debated for like 10 minutes, and it was just a really interesting clash. All three of them were trying to talk over me, and like, you know, push me down, and it was crazy. I was trying to push back. I was pushing back on them, and it ended up being three v one live on Newsmax. Then I was like, ‘Okay, this is fun as hell.’ Then I started doing hit after hit after hit, iteration after iteration. I remember I was like, I really want to get onto these shows where they really debate in person.

Then finally I got on Abby’s show [on CNN] about nine months ago, which was Newsnight, and the first video I did there is on my channel, it’s me and Kevin O’Leary, and it immediately went super viral. So, the video of me debating Kevin O’Leary was titled ‘I Left Trump’s Friend Speechless on CNN.’ It got like 2.7 million views. It blew up, and then I sent it back to the producers, and I was like, ‘Oh, dude, my audience really likes seeing a young person debate on TV.’ And then they kept inviting me back. Over and over and over.

I’m so grateful to be able to refine and flex my debate skills at a young age that I hope I’ll be able to carry with me. It’s a good training ground, and then [the clip] is blowing up on my YouTube channel. The reason why I think it’s symbiotic is because I get from them the credibility of CNN, and debating these people I oftentimes wouldn’t have access to, like, who thought Kevin O’Leary would be debating a 22-year-old at the time, and then for them, I’m able to, I hope, draw viewers and basically give them a secondary distribution vehicle where they can pull 2 million views on, like, a video that I posted where they don’t really have to do anything. It’s kind of like building off each other’s backs, and sometimes it blows up and grows crazy. Like the Scott Jennings moment.

Tell me about that.

AM: My analysis is the Iran war is breaking these MAGA people. It’s very hard to go on TV and defend an illegal war day after day after day. Scott Jennings and I were rather affable for a while. I actually learned a lot from him. He doesn’t know that, but as a young dude, going into these CNN studios, or these spaces, as a young person, you’re a sponge, and you learn from the people around you.

I learned a lot from him, and I also learned, like f*ck the rules, basically. That you can play the game how you want. I gave back to him the exact energy he gives other people. I wasn’t even that aggressive, I just tried to pin it down. He immediately snaps on me and can’t handle it.

Most of all, to kind of talk in our lane for a second, there is a generational gap, and that’s where the disrupting comes from. There’s a generational thing that happens when I’m in these rooms, where age is always the first thing people bring up. Probably just because I still have a baby face, but they’re like, ‘How old are you?’ And then there’s oftentimes a dismissal from right wingers who can’t possibly be questioned by a young person. A lot of older right wing men, or just older men in general, you can tell have never really been questioned or pushed back on in a significant way for decades. I’m not even talking about CNN. I’ve been on other shows or panels or doing events, and you push back on a dude, and it’s like, have you never been pushed back on before?

Like, how are you 55-years-old, and you’re just shocked that I asked you a question.

So, there’s a generational divide here, where the angst of young people is going to begin to rapidly push back on older people, and they’re not ready for it, and I hope to continue leading that on.

What does cable news do that you genuinely can’t? And what do you do that they will never do?

AM: What they do that I can’t, is provide this sprawling infrastructure deep, deep legacy, credibility. I hope that someday my name brings a lot of credibility in this deep institutional manner. But right now, they still blow my mind when it’s like I get into the studio, they get me in the makeup room, there’s a set, there’s all of the insane CNN stuff. I mean, it’s wild. I’ve never even been on podcasts that are close to that, except for the Daily Wire on the right. But yeah, I mean, there’s just a lot of legacy and credibility and connections that are existing in corporate media due to largely a lot of donors, the corporate interests.

Now, what I do is, I think all of us in independent media have a level of scrappiness and fast-paced moving that some news orgs lose in their rounds and rounds of editorial checking. It’s kind of a double-edged sword, because in independent media, people can say anything.

I’m able to give my opinion in a unique, free way, I’m able to do whatever the hell I want with no strings, nobody pulling the strings behind me. I often joke to my audience, like, I could literally make a video just entirely shirtless, and there’s quite literally nobody that could stop me, other than commenters that would be like, ‘What the hell?,’ there’s nobody above me that is telling me what to do on a daily basis. There is no mechanism by which my work is shot down by higher ups. Now I have people fact checking me, and I have my team making sure I’m factual, but I feel like I move at a pace of the distribution speed and decisiveness. Now that being said, of course, the mainstream anchors who are live reporting news are doing a very good job of that.

The Two Gen Zs in the news

The Great Gen Z Dividing Line, Faith Hill for The Atlantic

An exceptionally noteworthy read

Gen Z’s political gender divide is now showing up in schools, Kevin Mahnken for The 74 (I spoke with Mahnken about The Up and Up’s research for his thorough report)

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