Popular progressive hitting his stride as his independent show takes off, gathers listeners

If you have ever listened to Ben Cominos, either on his former radio show or on his Facebook and YouTube shows, you know just how agile he is with words. He’s able, it seems, to pluck them out of the air as fluent and fully formed thoughts. 

On a recent show, for instance, Cominos, a former popular political personality on WHBY and the most fearless public progressive voice in northeast Wisconsin, interrupted a discussion of abortion in mid-sentence when, on his monitor, he noticed a troll trotting out the boogeyman Republicans are counting on to help them avoid a blue wave on Nov. 3: socialism.

“Excuse me one second, I'm just gonna have to pants somebody,” Cominos said, before delivering what might have seemed like a scripted response. Except it wasn’t. “I can answer that very easily, Jeffrey … Between 1945 and 1983, we were taxing billionaires between 70 and 91 percent. (Progressives) invented Medicare, we invented Social Security, we invented Medicaid. We built the infrastructure that helped us get from A to B across this entire nation, and we never accumulated debt, and we never contributed to the deficit. 

“You know when (this country) did do that? When we started cutting taxes for the billionaires and then starting illegal wars all over the Middle East in the name of placating the Republican Party. Waka waka MAGA, did socialism build America or are you just too stupid to be a part of this conversation?” 

It is that brand of let-’er-rip progressivism for which so many (mostly) young people have been starving. Cominos provides it every morning on “Outside the Box,” the YouTube show he put together in one day when WHBY suddenly let him go in June after four years on the air. In just four months, Cominos has demonstrated that when it comes to landing on his feet he is every bit as nimble as when he is reaching for words. With the exception of a day he missed during the Menasha tornado, Cominos has been on the air every day.

"The fact that so many people have been on board, it has removed the mental burden," he says. "It no longer feels like I'm building something. It just feels like I'm expanding something. I knew the show meant something to people, but I really didn't realize."

‘I feel less alone’

He has served as a much-needed voice in the wilderness for fed-up progressives. Carla Hales is a dutiful listener because she’s frustrated with the two-party system. She says Cominos has made her question things she’d always held to be true about the Democratic Party, especially after feeling betrayed as a Francesca Hong supporter in the gubernatorial primary.

“My values haven't changed, but I'm questioning whether the party I've looked to for representation actually reflects those values,” she says. “I appreciate that Ben is willing to have those conversations. I feel more informed, but I also feel less alone in my frustration. There's something reassuring about hearing someone articulate things you've been thinking and realizing you're not the only one asking these questions.”

Hales is among an army of Cominos enthusiasts who rushed to support his new show and urge others to do the same. 

Cominos, 39, credits this profusion of community support for his ability to bounce back so quickly, though he doesn’t deny that suddenly losing his job was a jolt.

“There was a bit of panic, but I'm very fortunate,” he says. “The community picked me up. I'm not here without the community, I'll tell you that right now.”

He also called on lessons he learned after his mother’s death when he was in his twenties. It was a tough period, he says, especially given she had been a guide for him throughout his life. 

“As bad as that situation was, you learn a lot of skills there,” he says. “So this time, you take the haymaker, you fall down, and before you're even at a two count, you're back up and doing a show again. And I don't take any of it for granted.”

Frustrated progressives

Despite the occasional “pop off” or “crash outs” – terms he and his listeners employ to describe his stream-of-consciousness detours – it is wrong to think of Cominos as a flamethrower or a purveyor of hot takes. He is entertaining, yes, liberally infusing his oratory with f-bombs that never seem gratuitous but rather an extension of his passion and personality. That’s intended. Cominos was a drama club nerd who grew up on Jim Carrey movies. He admits to sitting in front of the mirror when he was eight making goofy faces in the mirror, intent on making his friends laugh.

But while he is seriously entertaining, he is also very much serious, able to call upon a nearly photographic memory filled with facts and stats. He jokes that he’s not smart; it’s just that he just can regurgitate a bunch of information very quickly. Between that, his drama club roots and growing up in a Greek family where he is actually the quiet one, he appears to have been destined for this. 

“Yeah, I'm one of the lucky people that found the job that they were supposed to be doing in life,” he says.

Cominos, who calls himself an FDR Democrat, is both a frustrated and impatient far-left progressive and a bit of a pragmatist when it comes to politics. Which is why, as strongly as he supported Francesca Hong in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, he will vote for David Crowley next week. Still, he says he understands why Hong supporters might choose not to. Young people’s struggles are real, after all. They see an economy not working for them and they don’t see Democrats as being a whole lot better than Republicans when it comes to taking their anger and fears seriously.

“The economy they are dealing with is very different from the economy that everyone else is dealing with,” he says. “If Crowley is the guy, that's great, but then they need to hear X, Y, and Z. Not that they think they’re going to get it from the Republicans.”

But if neither party can deliver, Cominos contends, young people will decide they’re not going to get it from politics and will just turn inward and tune out.

“Everyone knows what MAGA represents won’t work but they have to believe that what the Democrats are proposing will,” he concludes. 

Four parties masquerading as two

When Cominos talks about the history of progressivism in the United States, he refers to five critical precepts. Those include tax margins of 70 percent or more on the highest earners; support for unions and worker pay; government support for education; and antitrust legislation. He also notes that, whereas corporate stock buybacks were illegal 30 years ago, today nearly 70 percent of all profits are funneled back into stocks instead of going to workers.

“I think the Democratic Party has lost its way from that ideology and has embraced a more post-Reagan-style economics,” he says, joking – sort of – that he is enduring his fourth bout of trickle-down economics. “We are four parties masquerading as two parties, and whichever party loses is the one who ends up struggling to reconcile with what that split is within the party. The main difference is when Republican voters tell the party which side they want, the party listens. And when the Democratic voters tell you which side they want, they say, ‘Well, actually, no, you don't. You want this person. You just don't know it yet.’ Yeah, and I think there's a contingency of people getting really frustrated with that.”

It’s why Cominos is an equal-opportunity critic who holds MAGA extremism in obvious contempt but finds Democratic timidity hard to take. Despite a maximum income tax rate of as high as 90 percent before Reagan, he says today’s Democrats are afraid to call for even a 40 percent rate for fear they’ll be labeled socialists. Right now, he points out, the highest marginal rate is 37 percent but is effectively 22 percent for the wealthiest Americans. 

It’s one of the ways Democrats are failing to articulate for working families what he sees as easy selling points. With health care, for example, he points to a chart that shows the U.S life expectancy at 78 alongside $10,000 per capita health care costs, while the per capita cost in all other industrialized nations is $5,000 or less and the life span is 82 years.

“Why isn't the Democratic Party just pointing at this?” Cominos asks. “If you dropped out of school in sixth grade, you can look at this health care chart and see how much less everyone's paying. You can look at how much longer everyone's living. One of the biggest frustrations I feel is that I'm a talk show host in Northeast Wisconsin. Why do I have a fundamental grip of some of these major leftist issues? To me, it feels like you have to actively be ignoring the data (to say) ‘we're going to leave healthcare exactly the way it is, so you don't have to worry about (us embracing) socialism.’ 

“Let's look at how this is working quite literally everywhere else it's being tried, and ask ourselves why we can't do that as well.”

Democrats need to deliver

Cominos says such dithering by the Democrats is what gave us Trump. He worries that the centrist wing is still holding on for dear life even as populists like Abdul El Sayed in Michigan are beating moderates and even as Democrats are the favored party among voters on almost every issue. He hopes Democrats will turn the page from such calcified moderates as James Carville, who recently announced he’d rather the Republicans hold the House than have to compromise with the Democratic left.

“If the Democrats win, they can't pretend that we got here because of Trump's tariffs and Trump's war,” he warns. “Yes, it's so much markedly worse than what it was, but it was bad in 2024 (under Biden). It's why (the Democrats) lost. One of my catchphrases on the show is the Democrats are here to maintain a status quo; the Republicans are here to drag us kicking and screaming away from that. And then the Democrats take back over and say, ‘the best we can do is hold this status quo now, so don't let us lose again.’” 

They need to deliver, in other words. For Cominos, issue No. 1 is a public option for anyone who wants Medicare, which is now available only for people 65 and older. He lived this first-hand after WHBY let him go and he found himself without insurance, unless he was able to come up with $660 a month to temporarily hold onto his benefits. He realized, he says, the difference between talking about someone losing their insurance and the panic of actually losing it yourself.

“It's another thing entirely when you’ve moved halfway across the country for a job, you find out on a random day with no heads up whatsoever you're no longer employed,” he says. “I'm hard pressed to believe that maintaining where we are would be acceptable to most voters.”

Getting his start

Ben Cominos grew up in Pittsburg and graduated from Allegheny College. He was able to pay off his $60,000 in college loans by selling concrete optimization software, something he was good at it but derived no satisfaction from. He knew he wanted to get into radio and landed a job as a producer at KDKA, credited with effectively inventing modern sportscasting, political coverage, and on-air news delivery in 1921.

When he started getting air time, the station discovered his talent and he discovered his vocation. But when the program director got fired, they brought in a guy from New York whose politics clashed with Cominos’s and suddenly he was being denied airtime. Frustrated and aware he had a gift, Cominos applied to eight radio stations around the country and received job offers from five almost immediately. What WHBY offered in terms of creative freedom sealed the decision for Cominos, who moved to Wisconsin in 2022.

“At the time, management was very on board with the way that I presented because I was like, I'm gonna be critical of this administration, and I would be critical of the next administration,” he told them. “I wouldn't want to do (a show) like this in a state where people's minds are basically made up. This is fun for me. This is good.”

Cominos appears to hold no grudges against his former employer. WHBY had made the decision to get away from overtly political programming in favor of community-focused news in his former 8:30-11:30 a.m. slot.

‘And he makes me laugh’

While it’s way too early to say the rest is history, it seems clear Cominos is embracing the opportunity thrust upon him by external events. He is beginning to monetize his talents, though he says self-promotion and asking for money is still uncomfortable for him. But those are the realities of going independent, he says. Beyond the obvious need to make enough money to afford to live, his ethos is pretty simple.

I just want to talk into a microphone, and now that I'm living it, I don't know that I could ever go back to working,” he says with a laugh. “I find that a lot of people in the media try to find ways to gin up the audience, to fear-monger. My show is explicitly based on what I think would make things better, and I'm looking for other like-minded people.” 

He’s found them, it seems. And in growing abundance.

“There are some really amazing Democrats out there, but there are many that don't seem to understand what people really need from their government,” says a program enthusiast whose YouTube name is ‘Jaromanny.’ “Ben reminds me often that voices even within the same side of the aisle of politics often have widely varying views, and he also helps me feel emboldened to attempt to hold political leaders, even the ones I voted for, accountable to us all. 

"And he makes me laugh every time I listen.”

Popular progressive hitting his stride as his independent show takes off, gathers listeners © 2026 by Kelly Fenton is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0