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Brace Belden, Liz Franczak, and Steven Goldberg (a.k.a. Yung Chomsky), are loitering awkwardly outside of a brownstone when I find them on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The minds behind the popular leftist podcast TrueAnon—Belden, the gonzo Communist; Franczak, the analytical Scully to his Mulder; and their enterprising producer, Goldberg—have asked to tour the Nicholas Roerich Museum, a tribute to the famed Russian painter and theosophist. Inside, the walls glimmer with foggy mountain crests and hyperreal colors designed to hypnotize you. Roerich and his wife, Helena, were known in part for embarking across Tibet in search of a mythical land called Shambhala; more recently, Shambhala has become a motif in brainrot videos made by young Marxists pining for a communist utopia.
This is a special moment for the TrueAnon crew, who are about to drop their 500th episode (it airs Nov. 6). It’s a feat for a show that began without much direction, as a kind of pop-up podcast intended to delve into the Jeffrey Epstein case. TrueAnon has since turned its gimlet eye on topics ranging from the genocide in Gaza to crypto grifts. Meanwhile, rather than disappear, the Epstein case has only metastasized in the public consciousness, as President Trump and the Republicans have pivoted from encouraging the conspiracy theories surrounding it to trying to smother them. TrueAnon is the most popular it has ever been and growing fast, to the befuddlement of the hosts themselves. In the last year, their Patreon subscriber number has shot up by 40%; they now gross over $182,000 a month. In an online slopscape dominated by far-right furor and mercenary clipfarming, TrueAnon offers something unusual: carefully researched takes, delivered with humor and genuine empathy.
Like the Epstein saga, which has at various times sent politicians on the left and the right into panic, TrueAnon cuts across party lines. Their viciously anti-establishment ethos—they are as eager to critique what they see as the flailing Dems as they are the right’s “hysterical freaks”—has made the group something like mom and dad to a generation of young leftists. They’re ardently nondogmatic, happy to give credit to China’s authoritative leader (“I think that Xi Jinping in China has done some really impressive things,” Belden tells me), Jordan Peterson (Belden again: “Him telling people to clean their rooms, stand up straight…that's actually good advice”), Donald Trump, and anyone else with an idea they like. Belden, Franczak, and Goldberg have each become “personalities” with ravenous, invasive fans. But after hanging out with them together as well as one-on-one over the course of a week, I get the sense that they don’t really want fame, and at times actively recoil from it. They rarely do press, have no manager or team and no desire to ever run ads; Franczak commutes to their Brooklyn studio from Princeton, New Jersey.
But amid today’s political and cultural tumult, with the far right having seized control of the US government and talking openly of a third term for Trump, the podcast christened with a throwaway QAnon pun is looking more and more like an oracle of our times. “Everything we’ve covered in the show is coming to a head with the Trump administration in a very weird way,” Franczak says.
After the museum and a stop in the gift shop—Belden, spiffy in a salmon-pink corduroy jacket and a yellow bucket hat, buys a magnet; Franczak, sleek and chic in all black, considers picking up a print before deciding it’s not her style—we repair to the Hungarian Pastry Shop nearby. “After doing it for so long, I feel like we read each other’s rhythm really well,” Franczak says, turning to Belden. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Belden replies, swiveling back. “I got distracted by a beautiful woman. I was paying attention but unable to respond.”
“So much for synchronicity!” Liz says with a laugh. “The beautiful woman he was getting distracted by was me, actually. Put that in.”
A few days later, I visit TrueAnon HQ, in a loft in a nondescript building in East Williamsburg. Sunlight streaks over stacks of merch (including the board game it released parodying the Capitol insurrection) and an array of other oddities: a “Kamala Harris 2024” Chinese fan next to a Maoist pamphlet, a postcard from a porn star signed “lustfully” to Brace, a whiteboard to-do list of sorts—“Opening,” “Down Syndrome,” “John/AI,” “Interview,” “Tip Line.” They have just finished recording an episode with the investigative reporter Ali Winston about Terrorgram, 764, and other dark-internet communities breeding school shooters. The idea of Belden and Franczak as two podcasters who spend their weeks here calmly drafting “5 to 20 pages of notes” on Google Docs for each episode obscures the weirdness of their lives up until now.
Belden achieved some notoriety among the online left as a wingbat who volunteered to serve in a revolutionary Kurdish militia in the Syrian Civil War in 2016. Under the alias PissPigGrandad, he shitposted about smoking cigs in tanks, but he’s embarrassed about all the memes now. Growing up in San Francisco, Belden collected Magic the Gathering cards and played Dungeons & Dragons. But he also got arrested as a tween for hanging out in an abandoned storefront with friends. He was “fucking rude.” At 14, his dad sent him to Monarch, a boarding school for troubled teens in Montana, which he later ran away from. After that he attended a high school for delinquents, which didn’t help matters. “I beat this guy with a chain in the bathroom,” he recalls. “He was asking for it. I’m kind of surprised I got the jump on him, actually—he was an actual real bad kid.”
Around the same time, he got into San Francisco’s punk scene, releasing records under the band names Wild Thing and Warkrime; later in the week, in his dining room of his Forte Green, Brooklyn apartment, he gleefully shows me a stack of his bands’ old records. He at one point ran a DJ series called Sex Night, although it was “pretty much the opposite of an orgy,” and worked briefly as a music writer for Willamette Week, Thrasher, and Maximum Rocknroll.
He was already doing Oxycontin when he started writing, but Belden blames music journalism for his descent into serious drugs. “I first did heroin when I was 18 because I was writing something in Maximum Rocknroll where I did as many drugs as possible in a week,” he says. He went through cycles, quitting and then getting hooked again, until it became impossible to stop. At 21, he started shooting heroin. He spent his junkie years either reading avidly or going into crazed deliriums. “I heard someone recently compare it to being a mailman, making your circuits,” he says. “You’re always short and you’re always sick. I was selling shit, I was stealing from people and work.” He also got into methamphetamines. “I went into meth psychosis a few times, probably more than a few times.” At his rock bottom, San Francisco police arrested him as he was scoring. “It was the most obvious drug buy in history,” he recalls. “A tweaked-out-looking young white guy shaking hands with an old cracked-out-looking Black dude at fucking four in the morning on a corner of Market Street.”
Belden finally kicked the habit after being expelled by a detox facility for being an “asshole, incalcitrant.” He was told, “You’re not gonna stay sober,” and as he describes it, he did, out of defiance. He’s now 11 years sober (he intermittently tugs on a vape during our conversation) and looks back on that time with “tremendous guilt.” “Amends only go so far,” he says. “I try not to let it be the definition of my whole life. But you know, in many ways it is a large part of my life.”
It was after he got sober that Belden decided in 2016 to join a Kurdish militia in Syria. He tells me that he must find grand objectives to devote himself to: “I really need a mission at all times or I feel lost. I work seven days a week, basically. I don’t like sitting around.” After Belden returned to the US, he busied himself successfully unionizing Anchor Brewing Company. Sadly, Sapporo bought the company and “completely ran it into the ground” by changing the beloved logo. “They made it look like fucking Twisted Tea,” he moans. It was then bought by the guy (coincidentally, a Kurd) who owns Chobani; he’s now just sitting on the brand.
Franczak has lived a life just as labyrinthine as Belden’s, if not so addled by drugs and violence. An aura of mystery surrounds her, since there’s barely any biographical information about her online; fans jokingly speculate that she’s a CIA asset. Here’s the Liz dossier: She grew up in Glen Park, San Francisco, in a house wall-to-wall with books. Her dad worked in business consulting and her mom started in insurance, then became a novelist, poet, and teacher. “I was always kind of a smartass, or at least I was told that repeatedly,” she remembers. “A bit of a performer, clownish. I always had a taste for physical comedy.” As a kid, she was a synchronized swimmer. She then went to an all-girls Catholic high school, where she was in the alternative and indie crowd, among the other ’90s kids with “funny hair and fishnet tights.”
Franczak, who played the computer adventure game Myst with her dad, got on the internet at a young age. She reminisces about the first time she flicked on Tor to explore the dark web and how, in the early aughts, she lurked in the blogosphere. She read Blissblog, by music journalist and author (and, full disclosure, my father) Simon Reynolds, critic and theorist Mark Fisher (aka K-punk) and—before he became, in her words, “totally methed-out crazy”—philosopher Nick Land, who helped popularize what would become known as accelerationism, or the idea that technology and other forces should be unleashed to bring about radical societal change. “That became an important background for me when the financial crisis hit,” she says, gesticulating with her dark purple nails, “because in that moment online, people were rehashing a lot of left-wing critiques of accelerationism.”
At 19, she moved to New York, enrolling in Bard College for a semester and a half before calling it quits. She then embarked on a chaotic reel of gigs, including waitressing at a café, which fired her (“I was just really bad, really clumsy. I definitely broke plates, I was like comically bad”), and retail at Issey Miyake in SoHo. Her friends used to sneak her into Marx seminars at Columbia, which she’d leave early to make it to her job as a ticket taker at the now defunct Landmark Theater in downtown Manhattan. She describes the time as a whirlwind of fun.
Later, she returned to San Francisco to work at the vintage reseller Wasteland, and then lived in LA for years while managing the vintage business at Nasty Gal, the clothing resale company known for boosting the “girlboss” strain of millennial feminism. Her job involved hunting for clothing in squalid warehouses. “The worst was one right by JFK [airport] in Queens that was 100% a rag house. It’s piles and piles of clothes that are being sorted by minimally paid Africans or immigrants, like just totally illegal Mob shit. You’re fucking digging through bins and garbage to find stuff. It was really physical work in a way that people wouldn’t think with the whole, like, ‘girlboss’ thing.”
In our interview, Franczak speaks with the same thoughtfulness as she does on TrueAnon, with a streak of self-deprecation (she frequently apologizes for being “bad at this”—expressing her ideas—though she’s not at all). She speaks with an inflection that seems like it should be an accent but is probably just her particular affect, soft and a little fried, like she’s got vibrato on a low setting. She kindly emails me after our meeting to offer more time in case I wasn’t happy with the interview; I was happy with it, but we still meet up again. The prospect of handing over her life to some random journalist is obviously scary. “It’s because I’m such a big Janet Malcolm fan,” she says at one point with a laugh. “I’m aware of how things can get taken out of context. And I like to kind of be in control of that, I guess.”
Franczak has good reason to be protective of herself. Her parents’ address has been doxed, and creepy fans posted her grandmother’s memorial page. She also wants to keep as much of herself away from the algo-churn panopticon as possible, and instead to center her digital presence on her observations about the external world. “I have no desire to pimp myself out on Instagram. I respect my life and my family too much for that. I don’t know, is that a bitchy answer?
“The thing is,” she continues, “we need to all aspire to be more interesting than our own conceptions of ourselves. I genuinely believe that I have much more interesting things to say instead of talking about myself. Unfortunately, we have a social infrastructure that rewards that.”
Franczak and Belden met as teens, outside a punk show at Berkeley, California’s 924 Gilman Street. Belden thought she was “really cool and scary,” and when he was 18, asked her out. She turned him down. “It was one of the best decisions of her life,” he says. They reconnected years later, after Belden got sober and Franczak moved back to SF. They were texting about Epstein in 2019, but they didn’t come up with the idea to start a podcast. That was Goldberg, who scouted Belden as a star talker. He’d been running around with Belden in the SF DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) scene, including the fateful time they drove out to Reno to canvas for Bernie Sanders before the Nevada Democratic primary in 2016. Sanders won—but it was his last victory before a crushing Super Tuesday loss and the Vermont senator’s withdrawal from the race. “For a long time, a lot of people who were there would say that was the last time we felt really hopeful about the world in general,” Goldberg says.
Goldberg nagged Belden into launching a podcast; Belden came up with the Epstein idea and brought in Franczak. There was no five-year or even five-month plan; Goldberg was working as a software engineer at Google, and thought the pod could in part be a vehicle to get people to listen to his music. Then, after only their fourth episode, Epstein died. “I am mourning today, like many of you are mourning, because it seems that our investigation has been stopped in its tracks,” Belden intoned, with his characteristic ironic distance, on an Emergency Episode released that day. “The Clinton crime family has once again proven victorious. But there is one thing that the cabal did not reckon with, and that is podcasters.” They persevered, covering pedophile conspiracy theories, the case of Epstein’s one-time cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione, and eventually dropped a 19-part series on Ghislaine Maxwell’s court trial from the scene in New York. Exactly one year after they started, they had amassed enough of a fan base for Goldberg to quit Google.
TrueAnon was always at a higher production value than most DIY pods, both in the research and planning and the final polish. Goldberg describes himself as the George Martin or Brian Eno of the TrueAnon Beatles. “Liz and Brace are the songwriters, the performers,” he says. “I’m sprinkling some pixie dust on it.” That dust includes the musical leitmotifs that give the pod a sense of heightened reality and specific audio cues for certain impressions and little in-joke references and samples.
As the Epstein case waxed and waned, TrueAnon branched out, releasing a series on the JFK assassination, a three parter on Tesla Motors and Elon Musk, and coverage of Charlie Kirk’s murder, among many other hot-button topics.
One of their most fascinating and poignant projects was The Game, a five-part series on Synanon, the religious rehab turned (allegedly) violent cult therapy program. It culminated in a group trip to Idaho, where Belden attempted to find a man named Patrick McKenna. McKenna founded Monarch, the camp for troubled teens that Belden says took him against his will in the middle of night at 12 years old, and, he says, forced kids to do things like get on their hands and knees like dogs and scream, “I do not deserve to live.” At the start of the last episode, Belden tells Franczak how he’s fantasized about confronting McKenna many times: “I want him to humiliate himself in front of me. Prostrate himself. I want him to act like he forced thousands of kids to act.” They hop across towns, country clubs, and stake out a house, but never find him. The episode climaxes in a phone call where Belden finally makes contact and asks McKenna to apologize. McKenna hangs up. I don’t think I’ve ever been more touched by a podcast.
But TrueAnon is not all super serious—it’s also very fun. They went to San Francisco to interview Belden’s dream guest, the writer William T. Vollman, in his barb-wired bunker. They crack jokes about cloning Franczak, and dissect the ABDL (Adult Baby/Diaper Lover) fetish, one of Belden’s many—anthropological, not actual—erotic obsessions. You could practically print a “Little Red Book”’s worth of all the quips Belden made to me:
- On the speculation about the radio host in One Battle After Another being modeled after him: “Dude, everybody thinks that somebody who has glasses is based on someone!”
- On Casey Affleck, who he says tried to buy his life story: “I was like, I’m not giving a guy who just got MeToo’d my life rights…to fucking steal my soul.”
- On the Russian and Turkish Baths in the East Village: “[Go] if you ever wanna get your dick sucked by a Hasidic Jew. That’s the thing people don’t understand—if you go to enough places, you can get your dick sucked by any member of any group. You can get head from a rabbi, full beard, dangling on your balls…. I’ve seen it—I’m an ethnographer…. My one superpower is I’m not affected sexually or emotionally by most things that I see.”
- On Licorice Pizza: “Are we really acting like people wanna fuck Alana Haim?”
Franczak and Belden, are, in many ways, opposites. Franczak agonizes over what to say on the record, doesn’t like to make predictions, and refuses specific political labels. Belden’s a loud-and-proud communist, “classical ML” (Marxist–Leninist) with a touch of “non-dogmatic Maoist.” When I narc to Franczak about some of the ridiculous things he tells me (“I’ve definitely had to piss on chicks and shit like that in my life. Who hasn’t? But I didn’t enjoy it”), she scrunches up her face like, Oh God, really? Of course, that’s why they work so well as a duo. He’s mischievous, she’s refined, and sometimes they switch roles.
The tenor of the show hasn’t really changed since Trump’s reelection, but they’re being more thoughtful about what they say in light of potential crackdowns on leftist (and even baseline Democratic) activity. Belden knows he’s on some government lists; he FOIA’d himself once and was freaked out to find his file was “entirely withheld for national security reasons.” “Not to be George Conway, ‘They’re coming to get me.’ But we’re not as well-positioned as maybe some other critics with lawyers,” he says.
The TrueAnon crew are very concerned about the future. Belden thinks we’re already 20% of the way into a new US civil war, but he’s not sure if it’ll lead to small-scale arrests or wider unrest. “I welcome it, frankly,” he says, but quickly adds, “let me rephrase that a little bit. I’m anti-violence and I don’t want anyone to ever get hurt. I’ve been in a civil war, I fought in a civil war, they’re not fun things to be in…. I don’t think the good guys, if there was even any in the fight, would win. But eventually something like that needs to happen, or, it will happen. Nothing lasts forever.” I joke that he’ll be in charge of the Ridgewood brigade of tote-bag-carrying TrueAnon fans. “Hell no, I’d fucking round all them up and put them to work. There’d be a nose ring check,” he says with a chuckle. “The septum [piercing people], we’re putting you—not in the gulag, but maybe digging some ditches somewhere.”
But they’re not in the business of full-on doomsday prophecies; they want TrueAnon to be, in Belden’s words, “clear-eyed,” which is what’s missing in today’s hypercharged feeds and click-hungry media outlets. “We try to grapple with reality as reality is, as opposed to lapsing into fantasy or nightmare,” Belden says. “If we made the podcast 30% dumber, we would be twice as big. Not saying that we’re fucking Mensa Weekly or whatever, but certainly rage-bait is very well rewarded.”
“I try to have appropriate fear,” Franczak adds. “That’s what I call it. And I think that’s both optimistic and pessimistic in some ways. I’m sorry, I’m so bad at this.”
Fans have called Franczak out for being what they see as “blackpilled,” or unwilling to prescribe solutions to panicked young leftists. In her mind, she’s just trying to not give in to the “schizophrenia” that pollutes what she calls the “bum-fight content economy.” “I think that’s really important, especially when there’s so much fucking noise and bullshit artists…it’s a moon shot for all these people to get fame. A lot of people sell people bullshit and I don’t like that. I’m not gonna do it,” she declares. “Everyone wants a mommy and daddy.”
Part of the blackpilled vibe may just be TrueAnon’s awareness of their own limits as a moderately sized radio show without any political power. They laugh at the idea of a “Joe Rogan of the left” and gesture at how miniscule they are compared to a titan like Candace Owens.
“Candace Owens is so big,” Franczak says at one point.
“She’s very skinny,” Belden shoots back.
“No. She’s so popular. When people say we need a left-wing answer to all these men, I’m like, Candace Owens has 8.5 million followers. Nick Fuentes has 200,000 concurrent viewers. How do you get up there?”
“There are all these [concerns], like, How do we prevent Gen Z radicalization? You’re not going to. It’s just going to happen. These trends happen in societies,” Belden says. “There’s no podcast answer to that.”
Ironically, this honest, anti-self-aggrandizing mindset is a major element of what makes the crew so endearing, and may help them actually get to a place where they can influence politics. Or at least it’ll help them nurture tens of thousands of young listeners. They obviously have some sway and speak proudly of how, whenever an author comes on the show, they get a serious spike in book sales (some writers have even gotten deals for eventual bestselling books based on their appearance on the podcast).
Still, TrueAnon hasn’t used the podcast to aggressively support a political candidate, not even Zohran Mamdani (whom Belden regards with skepticism). “We’ll see,” he says about Mamdani. “There’s a long trend of politicians moderating as things change. He is already a fairly moderate left-wing guy. It’s tough to be mayor.” (Belden does shout out Curtis Sliwa, whom he’s been trying to get on the show; seeing him outside once was like “Jagger walking down the street in ‘69.”) Belden hasn’t voted for a president since Obama in 2008, which he did because he was 18 and thought it was fun. But he votes and donates for other things, and is involved in opposition events and rallies in the Philippines, after he visited once and admired how organized he found the activists there.
One of the main issues TrueAnon are focused on right now is the “influencerization” of everyday people, brought on by the migration of so much daily life onto the internet during COVID. They’re also concerned about the US economy’s reliance on insubstantial and unstable financial instruments, business models, and technology: vaporware, b2b SaaS, NFTs, and, of course AI (one typical estimate says that AI investments drove nearly 92% of GDP growth in the first half of the year). Franczak also worries about what’s happening to the generation of kids nursed on MrBeast, a YouTube star she describes as “cybernetic,” “part-machine,” a digital specter “optimized for the algorithm, not for a viewer” who feels like “looking into something very dark and sinister.”
“It’s funny ’cause everyone’s like, there’s no mass culture, there’s no monoculture,” Franczak says. “But the feed is mass culture. Literally, people are speaking in YouTube cadence, learning from videos. These ineffable ways that this stuff is changing everyday life…. It just makes me want to retreat more and more. Not in a ‘touch grass’ kind of way, but almost like I’m fucking scared of it.” She used to tweet daily but now she’s mostly stopped: “I got a glimpse of myself as a commodity and I’ve never been able to get back into it.”
Belden, on the other hand, seems to be diving fully into the ether. He’s become something like a prompt Picasso in the domain of futurist avant-goonslop. He has a personal archive of AI weirdness he’s concocted, including a mutation of Senator John Fetterman in a squalid, dimly lit room; his tongue lolls out in famished urgency, and his two massive, mud-speckled feet jut out like an offering. He’s also created a sort of feminized self-portrait, topless, with breasts.
Belden got into AI slop after sinking into Instagram Reels, the holy land of shortform stupidity, and being served up AI clips of “sexy girls with quadruple amputations.” He learned that these armless, legless figures are called “nuggets,” which is slang among those with acrotomophilia, or an amputee fetish. “It seems like a pretty risky fetish to have, right?” he muses, stroking his chin. “Because what if you’re like, This will be the ultimate orgasm—and I cut off my leg and it’s not?” From there, he explored the myriad other ways shitform video makers try to seize your attention online. “That’s the reason I started getting all this Down syndrome AI porn. Through that I investigated AI porn, and now I make John Fetterman porn.” He shows me even wilder, more disturbing AI blueprints he’s made, explaining that they’re part of a larger conceptual project too secret for me to detail in print. He also, completely unrelatedly, is writing for an upcoming TV show that hasn’t been announced yet.
Outside of their hit podcast and Belden’s “research”…well, they try to be normal people. They socialize together and separately in a wide milieu. Belden lives near comedian friends like Adam Friedland and the comedian and Saturday Night Live star Sarah Sherman, aka Sarah Squirm; he hosts dinner parties, and he’s in a reading group with the artist and rapidly growing podcaster Joshua Citarella. The night before we meet one-on-one, Belden went to a party for David Adler, a researcher who was detained on the flotilla to Gaza, and another one to celebrate the new season of Noah Kulwin’s podcast Blowback. But he also hangs out with random subgroups—graff guys, punk world lifers, journalists. It’s similar for Franczak, who tells me about her friend Brent Freaney, who designed both the TrueAnon logo and Charli xcx’s Brat album cover. They’ve started integrating their friends into live talk shows—Friedland will be at the next one.
It's the sense of community, and of heart, that really grounds the show. Their Patreon functions like a closed-off Discord, with regulars who’ve shared their own Monarch horror stories and who write essay-length comments. Making the podcast over the last six years has rewired the trio’s lives in unexpected ways. They attend each other’s birthdays and exchange gifts, like custom monogrammed Epstein black books and Trump-style parody letters. They’ve spent Thanksgiving with Franczak’s family, where she cooked all of the 15 dishes. She lives with her husband, a TrueAnon fan she met after he DM’d her. Belden officiated the wedding; Goldberg read a speech that made her dad cry. “I think there is a mischaracterization or an assumption of me as being excessively private, or secretive even, and it’s not that,” Franczak tells me. “I’m just protective of this thing. These boys and this show are my life.”
It’s easy—and correct—to doom about our awful political reality, but TrueAnon retains some faith in the future. “I think everything is about political choices and every moment is contingent. Nothing is written in stone,” says Franczak. When I chat with Belden in his apartment, which he shares with his longtime girlfriend—it’s decked out with a banana-themed lamp and a hallway filled with giant pictures of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong—he speaks with a kind of childlike buoyancy. “To be a Marxist is to have a material understanding of the world. And that’s a big part of why I like doing the show, so that I can actually understand the world. Ultimately, I genuinely really do believe in changing the world. It sounds silly, but what else is there?”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ashley Markle
