At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.”
[…]
The first out of the gate has been Chorus, a well-publicized liberal nonprofit group co-founded by the Democratic influencer Brian Tyler Cohen.
But others have stayed under wraps until now. In November, Ms. McBride and other liberal operatives gathered in Washington for a series of meetings to survey the election wreckage. At the headquarters of American Bridge, one of the largest Democratic donor networks, they eventually hatched a plan for a for-profit media company called AND Media, which stands for “Achieve Narrative Dominance.”
The company, incorporated in March, says it is aiming to raise $45 million over the next four years. The group hopes to have a $70 million budget over that time frame based on predictions of $25 million in revenue. It says it has raised $7 million so far. Ms. McBride and Christian Tom, who led digital strategy for the Biden White House, have pitched the company to American Bridge donors as a broad cultural project.
They already have these people. It’s Bill Maher, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, etc. They’re just on cable TV which nobody under 50 watches anymore. Not to mention, they’re insufferable to everyone except establishment dems.
Republicans realized this a decade ago, so they gave Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, etc. large online platforms in addition to their cable appearances. Then, they had a slew of talking heads like Candice Owens and Milo Yiannopoulos branch out further into online spaces while the original grifters kept their distance. People like Kirk maintain plausible deniability if they need to burn anyone who steps out of line or becomes too controversial (as was the case with Milo).
It’s why the conservative outrage machine grows and keeps its momentum going, while dems sit around with their thumbs up their asses wondering if some D-list celebrity can topple Joe Rogan.
The sad thing is the left kind of had some of that energy too. The old school “edgy atheist” movement was pretty left-wing, and they did something really important: they mocked the fascists instead of being openly scared of them. Like literally, back in the day, homophobic people were written off as dumbass slobs, and their bigotry is a byproduct of their lack of intelligence. Unfortunately that kind of came apart when people on the right realized they can just basically tell some more privileged atheists 'just play along with it and you can use religion as a crutch to demand special treatment for being one of us ‘normals’."
If dems want an online media presence, I’d argue to try the skeptic thing again now that the right is abandoning it in favor of “I’m sexy!” as an argument.
It also doesn’t help that the dems don’t have any sort of coherent message beyond “We aren’t those guys.” They struggle to stay relevant because their entire thing is being “republican lite” and no one wants that or likes that.
For me this is the pink elephant in the room. How could you appeal to people when your philosophy, or lack thereof, is to be a ratchet for things that make life worse and concentrated wealth upwards? The discussion has nothing to do with how to make life better? No dosing rod for the sentiment of the people you intend to serve? Maybe if you were responding to some societal, cultural desire like Trump did somebody could tap into that and metabolize it for people, becoming popular in the process. Plenty of people did plenty of numbers after Trump noticed angry people and it got metabolized into rants about how Liberals want to steal your penis. You’re not my manager; you’re auditioning for the role of my servant. If you don’t know what I want you’re going to have a hell of a time finding someone who resonates with me.
I think the lib characters you mention also have online presences, but they don’t really appeal to anyone under the age of fifty.
Yeah the lib boomers I know love Kimmel and watch him on YouTube TV. Don’t know anyone younger than them who watches him.
When I was back watching some Hasan streams last year I think IIRC even at the height of that mini donor revolt and Biden dropout, the problem was that these are not even all that bad, there was some good reaction from both Hasan and his type of viewers(chat) to that stuff when they were(I think John was best?) consistently shitting on both candidates but specialy Biden.
I’m going from memory but from the clip segments Hasan would watch on stream, it didn’t even look that bad if they had all kept that consistent at least appearance of indignation and revolt towards the situation. They could have managed to pull some younger viewers through that sort of pipeline, even if just temporarily. But once Kamala’s campaign got underway and that brief moment she was up in the polls etc it was all back to normal then it was realy over.
So I’d even argue the issue is not necessarily just its old cable shit since you know you can find these clips on YT later etc. It realy is more of the shit content. They’re so old and disconnected etc. But if they all even tried to shift there is already a sort of pipeline ready for them.