At the top of each episode of This F*cking Guy, the most thrillingly acerbic podcast to arrive in a month of rainless Sundays, host Erin Ryan lays out the rules of engagement for the evisceration that is about to follow. “Welcome to the latest edition of… the series where we spotlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck,” she says.
Since its initial launch as a YouTube broadcast in 2025, the show’s (to date) 46 episodes comprise a library of nihilistic miscreants, overpromoted incompetents and wanton narcissists. As well as being of service to the modern-day listener, in its impressive attention to telling detail, the catalogue might yet prove useful to future historians seeking to explain the United States’ nosedive into depravity and derangement in the second decade of the 21st century.
In what sounds like the guest list for the most exclusive VIP room in Hell, the podcast’s Hall of Shame has to date featured caitiffs such as (among others) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the conspiracist Laura Loomer, FBI director Kash Patel, bigoted gobs-on-sticks Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, and the paedophile’s consigliere Ghislaine Maxwell. Despite tacking to the left at times, the broadcasters are happy to take aim at otherwise untouchable fellow travellers. With evident glee, Christopher Hitchens is described as “100 per cent a dick”.
As an offshoot of the wider-ranging Hysteria podcast series, in which stories and news items are examined through a female perspective, This F*cking Guy is tightly scripted. Ryan’s CV features a spell as a writer on the sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; in the company of a co-host – for 45 episodes, the recently departed Obama staffer Alyssa Mastromonaco – she sounds like the hippest and most withering student at the kind of university from which meeker attendees graduate with post-traumatic stress disorder.
When irked, the punches are precise and unforgiving. Introducing listeners to an edition dedicated to the former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, for example, Erin Ryan noted that “that’s Karoline with a K – she would add the other two Ks later”. Training her sights on Jared Kushner, the host opined that the son-in-law-in-chief’s position as the United States special envoy for peace missions “made about as much sense as choosing a heart surgeon based on how many hot dogs they can eat in under five minutes”.
At its core, though, the material is serious and insightful. In a quite magnificent summation of the moral poverty of media hustlers, during an episode about the former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the hosts noted that “while [Kelly] has no trouble attracting an audience… she’s never part of the national conversation for saying something insightful or smart. It’s just acting like a cunt or glomming on to topics that everybody else is already talking about, offering nothing of value beyond more noise. It’s cheap.”
I happened upon This F*cking Guy by accident. Seeking a spot of intel about CBS News failer-upper Bari Weiss – duly skewered, naturally – I figured I’d listen for a few minutes to see if its rhythms accorded with my own. Laughing and wincing in equal measure, three hours later, come bedtime, I’d necked a further three episodes. Two weeks on, I’ve only got a few to go.
Despite laying waste to all it surveys, TFG is especially impressive when lunging for the throat of brittle “alpha” males such as “border patrol Napoleon” Greg Bovino and secretary of – sigh – war Pete Hegseth. American politics is patriarchal at the best of times; in these worst of times, the scene is misogynistic. But with her sharp mind, quick wit and intellectual independence, I like to think that Erin Ryan well knows that she is precisely the kind of woman these facsimiles of masculinity fear the most. There is joy to be had in the certainty that, were they to listen to her, they’d know it too.
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It perhaps goes without saying that This F*cking Guy has no time for hubris. Throughout, each broadcast is absent the reflexive earnestness of progressive podcasters who cling to the belief that the goings-on in DC, and beyond, are anything other than a grotesque realisation of a country’s worst characteristics. This isn’t an anomaly. America: you are where you are for a reason.
Instead of mythical homilies to an imagined national story, Ryan and Mastromonaco seem to understand that their homeland is a place of bare-knuckled hustle in which the cream sometimes sinks to the bottom. In rebutting the crap that has risen in its place, to positions of extraordinary power and influence, This F*cking Guy is a nourishing and welcome entry in the war of resistance.
This F*cking Guy, from Crooked Media, is available on all major podcast platforms
