Panic World - Why Democrats keep losing the internet

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Why is the right-wing media machine so massive and able to dominate digital media, while liberals and progressives struggle to keep up? Jon Favreau joins us to discuss the critical players and outlets in the early 2000s that led us to where US politics is today, along with looking back at what he’s learned from launching Pod Save America back in 2016. Our guest Jon Favreau is the host of Pod Save America, Offline, The Wilderness, and others as co-founder of Crooked Media. You can find him on all those shows and pretty much everywhere else online! Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I guess like just start things off for the simple question. You know, like, how are you feeling about the state of the world right now? Optimistic? Like, pleasantly surprised. Like, how are things? Angry, frustrated. I would not say I'm optimistic. I would say the last year, even more so than the last 10 years of living with Donald Trump in our politics.

The last year has really tested me and my belief. about how we might be able to get out of this in a way that hasn't been tested for quite a while. Oh, so you're not a Trump guy. Okay, good to know. Great to know. Not a huge fan. So my, not a huge fan.

Not a huge fan. Okay, interesting. Okay, I'm Rand Broderick. I'm not wearing my Yes We Can shirt today. It's in the wash. This is Panic World. They show about how the internet works our minds, our culture, and eventually reality.

Joining us today is a podcast. You all may be familiar with John Favro from Pod Save America. Welcome, John. Let's Save America with this pod today. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Good talking to you guys. The first question Grant wanted me to ask as a Pod Save Superfan is,

do you wish you guys had kept the title keeping it 1600? No. I don't. I don't. I'm really glad we landed on Pod Save America. though it is funny that some people take Pod Save America is like we were trying to be serious like we thought that our podcast would save America

that it's like a real that wasn't tongue in cheek which I find funny but keeping at 1600 was it was fine for the time but it was also when we thought that the podcast would be like just a side hobby and not our jobs and it would end

after the 2016 election so it seemed to it seemed to fit for the moment but sure well we're going to be going to be going to going back to that period of time a lot on today's episode. Sure. The major theory, the major sort of idea that we're going to be picking apart here is a question that I've actually had for some time, which is this question of why the right-wing media machine is so massive.

How have they been able to dominate digital media in particular so extensively? And why haven't leftists or liberals, progressives, has been able to keep up? And most importantly, how much is that actually costing us in? this current information war that we're in with the Trump administration. And so we're going to be going through that timeline. But before we get to the story of how we got to hear, I wanted to ask you just like generally, like, why do you think the right is so good at the internet, let's call it, right now? Like what to you is the biggest sort of thing that they have over everybody else?

Yeah, I've thought a lot about this. I think in this moment, and obviously that stretches back for maybe the last decade. I wouldn't say they're funny, but they have become sort of nihilistic in a way that allows them to make all kinds of jokes about everything. And sort of the LOL Nothing Matters sort of attitude that you see online is very fitting, I think, for a movement that is primarily interested in sort of tearing down institutions. and convincing people that it's not worth really participating in politics in a serious way or debating politics in a serious way that sort of everything is corrupt. And so we might as well try to get the people who are going to be corrupt for us in power and nothing else really matters.

And so I think the way that the Internet and the way that social media sort of evolved over time, I think prioritizes that kind of attitude, tone, et cetera. So I think that's one part of it. I also think that, of course, just what the algorithms prioritize is a big part of it. Fear, anger works better for them than it works for the left. And then I think we can talk about all the issues the left has had over the last 10 years and probably have gotten a little. I don't know what you're talking about.

You're very well organized. I've been crushing it. little humorless, little scoldy, self-serious. And I think, and part of that is, I will say, an understandable reaction to genuine fear and outrage about what Donald Trump and his movement represents. So it's hard to be funny and light in responding to that. But I do think through that response, the left has sort of at times forgotten how to be light and funny in a way that might not be. warranted, but is certainly necessary to reach a broader audience of people than just political junkies.

The thing you're describing with the nihilism, I think I often refer to as like sort of the race to the bottom nature of the internet, which predated social media. We've gone through stories about it on this show plenty of times. You know, it's this bucket of crabs feeling that a lot of online spaces have. And in fact, when we were putting together the research for today's episode, I want to thank our researcher, Adam, who had a Herculane. task ahead of him to put all this together for me. The right was not particularly good at the internet.

And I wanted to start our story in 1995, because obviously there's right wing media, there's right wing radio, you know, Rush Limba, all that. But 1995 is when a little email newsletter launches from a man in a fedora named Matt Drub. And Matt Drudge, I think is sort of the first attempt at figuring out how to infuse right-wing politics onto the internet in a big way. Meanwhile, the Democrats are embracing a new form of technology called blogs. Do you remember Howard Dean's blog for America? I sure do. I sure do. So I found an article from the University of Vermont here that describes it. Tell me if this sounds right to you. If Howard Dean were an internet company, would he be the smash success of eBay

or the now defunct pets.com? I think it's probably pets.com now. The momentum dean established over the summer and fall bore a striking resemblance to the straight-up curve of the dot-com boom. On Tuesday morning, reeling after Iowa, some of Dean's fans were asking similar questions. All those worries about whether you were preaching to the choir on the blog. Yeah, those were spot on, said one supporter identified as Nadu, which I think it's a fascinating insight for 2003 of this idea that the internet can create a filter bubble. What is your sort of like take on the very early Democrat and Republican blogosphere in the 2000s? What were these spaces like?

you know, the drudge report and I guess early Huffington Post and all this stuff. Well, it's funny because I can situate myself in that time period where, so I graduated from college in 2003 and I get a job on John Kerry's campaign and I am the press assistant on the campaign. And so because Howard Dean was taking off at that time in the summer of 2003, the Kerry campaign decided we need a blog too, right? Howard Dean has a blog and that we had need a blog. blog. And we had a, I forget his name now, but some older guy was our blogger, nice man. And I was then, because I was an assistant and had some time on my hands, I was also part of the blogging

crew. And the challenge then, which, you know, see if you can tell if we've continued to have this challenge as a party, was Howard Dean's blog was like what people were feeling and sort of the organic energy behind the Dean campaign, which, you know, primarily was about Democrats voting for the authorization for the war in Iraq, but also a host of other issues. And John Kerry very famously had a couple different positions on the war in Iraq, voted for authorization. And the message was very tightly controlled on the Kerry campaign.

It was very top down, though John Kerry himself didn't really know what his message was or at least had some conflicting advice. And so from my perspective, as the person who was trying to blog and post, It felt very forced. It felt like I was not able to sort of have fun, say what I wanted to say. Like, we just weren't doing it, right? And it always seems like the Dean campaign was having fun and that those people, we don't know if they knew what they were doing because obviously it didn't work out for them. But at the time it was like, okay, there's an organic energy here that is authentic that we do not have.

That's interesting because reading this back now, it's really funny. One of the commentators like talking about this blog back then wrote, the big irony from my perspective from following online politics is that a lot of politicians have been loath to get on the web because they don't like losing control Howard Dean learned the biggest one stop being an asshole we learned about the insular nature of this medium it can do miraculous wonderful things but it can't win an election it can't win an election which I think is such a fascinating shift to you know we get to 2016 everyone's like the internet won an election and you know this is exactly how it works and was that the feeling then that like the internet was not going to determine the 2004 election it was just sort of like icing on the cake to messaging absolutely yeah there was no the internet then was seen as an opportunity for fundraising and grassroots fundraising and that at the beginning of that right because still grassroots fundraising hadn't really taken off yet for campaigns but it was the first time that campaigns thought okay we don't just need to ask rich people for money that maybe if we have grassroots supporters they can contribute as well There were also like the Dean meetups and we obviously, you know, we can talk about this,

but we built on that for the Obama campaign in 2008. But it was this idea that you can use the internet to potentially organize strangers and bring them together offline to talk about the campaign and organize that way. And it seems like everyone is slowly realizing at this moment that there is something there to the internet. And you start to see the rise of like viral like gate suffix scandals. So in 2004, you get Rathergate when Dan Rather is discovered by right-wing blogs to have faked anti-Bush documents. You get wired reporting on the 2004 election, reporting that it drives so much attention to the internet that it basically just makes the internet this political force.

And then by 2005, you see the launch of Huffington Post as a liberal response to a drudge. Also the beginning of Mashable, BuzzFeed, Vice, Gawker. They're all sort of not inherently liberal or inherently political, but. but clearly like this new media has arrived. And then you get 2007 when Twitter launches, kind of solidifying, I would like the political media class. And we have a very good 2007 tweet to read for you today, which is from the New York Times. And they tweeted in 2007, word up.

It is I, the gray lady, with a shout out to all my hip young friends, just wanted you to know I've added new specialized feeds. Oh, my God. That is wild. So obviously it's a dumb question, but I'm going to ask you anyways, Twitter in 2007 changes American politics, right? In your opinion, does it change it immediately? Or like from 2005 into the 2008 election, like how actually important was Twitter? Not in my experience, not very important at all.

Fascinating. I'm old now, so it's hard to remember shit. But I don't have a memory of Twitter really taking off until we got to the White House. So 2009. And really even it was like, I feel like 2009 into 2010 were, and maybe even 11 were sort of like the heyday of, okay, Twitter is a real thing. This is driving the news. It's driving cable coverage. It's something that we have to pay attention to.

But just to give you some context, we had, of course, like an army of media monitors in the White House in Obama's first term. But even then, people were emailing tweets or something. round individual tweets. That's what the media monitors were doing. So it was not just like understood that everyone would scroll through Twitter. It's like here is an important tweet and we are going to send it to people in the White House comms office. Interesting. Yeah. The 2008 election is the first election that I can vote in. You know, you always have a like a nostalgic fascination with that. But I also think that is defined two threads of American politics online ever since. So you And it's not McCain-O-Bama.

It's Obama Ron Paul, in my opinion. The idea of Obama as sort of the slick MySpace presidential candidate, he's on Twitter, he's got a podcast. And no one knows what those are yet. I went through his MySpace the other day and he's got like, did we have a podcast? Well, there's a wits. So I found screenshots and there's like a widget, like an iTunes widget to like listen to something. I don't know what it is. But then meanwhile, you have Ron Paul who is like deep in Reddit, deep on 4chan.

And his like supporters are buying blimp stuff like fly around cities. They're all like these huge weirdos that are connected to like anonymous and all the rest of it. And you know, when you look back at that moment, to me it's such an interesting snapshot of where everything is going and no one. Like Ron Paul had a makeshift election inside of World of Warcraft, which is something Tim Walls did last summer. Like that's how ahead of the like, but at the same time, the sort of slicker more like TV friendly internet appearance. the hope poster, the Yes We Can. Like, I think that stuff has also stuck around. And I guess, like, as someone who is in the mix there, like, was Ron Paul his internet presence on your guy's radar?

No. Like how? Not at all. In fact, you just telling me that now is like the first time I've ever thought about it. No way. Yeah. That's so wild. Okay.

And at the time I was, you know, I was 24, 25 at the time. So it's not like I was. too old for to get it but like there was no I mean those of us in comms those of us in press just absolutely not well I imagine you had friends in real life and that means you weren't aware of Ron Paul um like in my experience you there was not an overlap you know like I was I was aware of Ron Paul but certainly not his online presence yeah yeah I learned about him via a friend in high school who was really into Bitcoin okay so that's uh I think that's the the world that that those people swam in. So 2007 is I think where all of this gets solidified. You see the rise of Politico,

sort of creating the Twitter media cycle. I've talked to like young, I've talked to like older political reporters who built custom RSS feeds to get tweets slightly faster than everyone else so they could flip them into stories. Like that's how important kind of this world was for them. But I guess like when you look back at the the Politico Huffington Post drugged era, when they are sort of defining things, did you feel like they were shifting the conversation politically, like, in terms of, so how did, how did that shift happen? What did it look like?

Yeah, that for sure, because I remember, I mean, even before the 2008 campaign, I remember, so I was in Obama's Senate office in 2005 and 2006. And I remember when, I think it was probably 2006, when they, when Fox started saying, like, oh, you know, he went to a madrasa. for school because he was in Indonesia. And it was, I remember my now co-host, Tommy Vitor, who was the press secretary at the time, dealing with this.

And it was like, wow, this is really bubbling up because of the internet, right? And like it ended up on Fox, but at the time, he could call Fox producers and yell at them and try to correct them. And it was, you know, it would work to an extent. Maybe it wouldn't. but the birther stuff, right?

This is pre-Trump birth-er stuff, but like the madrasa, the Obama's not from here. And of course, like, I think whether it was the Clinton campaign or someone else had, like, leaked a picture of Obama wearing, like, you know, looked like African garb or something. Like it was, you know. And that kind of stuff, that was the first time in politics. I was like, oh, it's not just like a John Kerry attack

that's going to be a swift boat veterans for truth. If it's going to be an ad, it's going to be shit on the internet that we're going to have to respond to. And we can't necessarily just call up someone at a media outlet and be like, hey, this is unfair. Can you issue a correction? Because it doesn't really matter if they do because it's going to be everywhere on the internet anyway. And that is exactly what starts to happen after Obama wins in a huge way. And it's kind of crazy to look at our timeline I have in front of me and see how fast things start to change here. because Obama wins and you immediately get the start,

the first uses of the hashtag T-C-O-T top conservatives on Twitter. Oh, wow. I forgot about that. Which becomes sort of like the digital arm of the Tea Party. And then you get the launch of Breitbart basically like a year later. Steve Bannon said the original goal was to create the Huffington Post of the Right, which, yeah, I'd say that works. And then you get all in 2011,

you get the start of the Arab Spring, largely on Twitter. You get a few months later the start of Occupy Wall Street on Twitter and Tumblr. And you get this sort of general feeling that the internet is like this inherently liberal revolutionary tool. And I guess, do you know why people, like, why did we think that? Like, why? Like, especially because if you look at it really closely, if you think of the Tea Party, which I, don't think we at the time thought of the Tea Party as an internet community, even though it obviously was. They were obviously, like, mobilizing online. So it's like the Arab Spring was not inherently

liberal. Occupy Wall Street, I even argue, wasn't even inherently liberal towards the end, especially once the 4chan guys showed up. So it's like, I feel like it's such an interesting snapshot of how little we understood of what it was actually, like what the internet was actually doing it and what digital media was actually doing at the time. It's a great question. There are, I think there's a a David and Goliath dynamic to the early internet social media

sort of feel and connect at least with regards to politics and just from my experience that sort of manifest in two ways. One for our campaign right it was like I mean it's interesting you know us versus Ron Paul

the slick internet versus whatever Ron Paul was but I think about us versus the Clinton campaign in the primary and we were, you know, Hillary Clinton fixture in democratic politics, had all the donors, had all the connections, had all the establishment help, and we were the underdogs. And so for us, organizing, using Facebook and using other social media and the internet to organize people, both much like Howard Dean did, in real life, and to raise money that way, felt like, oh, this is a way to connect like-minded people

to sort of take on the establishment in sort of a scrappy way by reaching out to people who we may not know. And it's just a better way of organizing, of grassroots organizing. And Obama was an organizer at heart. It was a community organizer. And so it fit with that.

Once we get to the White House, I think you mentioned the Arab Spring. I actually think that was a huge factor in leading us to believe that the Internet and Twitter especially because it was Arab Spring. It was Iran. It was just a lot of places where we were seeing people organize themselves against autocratic, repressive regimes with social media with some success.

And so it was seen then as this liberalizing force. And I think where it changes is repressive regimes, autocratic regimes became wise to that and suddenly realized that they could also use social media to tell. their ends to confuse people, to divide people, to misinformed people, and to sort of keep power. It's so funny you say that, because that is almost exactly what Cornell West said to democracy now at the time. I'm going to read this to you. Oh, wow.

It is a revolution. U.S. autumn responding to the Arab Spring. I knew there would be some more outrage as the two-party system begins to decay and the mean-spirredness of the Republicans moving more toward reactionary and quasi-fascist politics. and the relative spinelessness of a Democratic Party tied to oligarchs as well, but centrist in trying to hold off the vicious right-wing politics of the Republican Party, but refusing to in any way be progressive. And obviously he's got a lot more heat on it.

Right. But I think he is very sharp to understand that in a revolution, especially with a brand-new technology, you don't know which way it's going to go. Right. Only that it's going to go. Yes. And we're going to talk about.

the world that is created once that revolution in media starts right after a word from our sponsor Pokemon go to the polls um all right uh so okay so the 2010s it's the biggest upheaval politically in my lifetime i feel like we are still dealing with like we're still trying to understand exactly what happened but if we go through the dates here we get uh the launch of buzzfeed news in 2011 we get gawker and vice also sort of adopting a digital newsroom, and we get the rise of sort of like Twitter as news. And this is when you get in 2012 Newark Mayor Cory Booker as a Twitter celebrity, kind of one of the first Internet's boyfriend kind of ideas. And this is a New York mag piece on the phenomenon from the time. His social media presence is a singular glimpse of the future of political life on the social web that offers a mix of responses to constituents complaining about broken traffic light, self-help,

and the occasional song lyric or words of encouragement for the New Jersey Devils. Do you have any sort of memories about like, no, any of this? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Like, now that I'm thinking about it, I feel like my memory is just Cory Booker had a big social media presence. Right. But I don't remember the presence that well.

People found it very annoying. And I think that was a sign of what's to come. as we enter this transitional period of culture and politics, starting on the internet first and then moving out into the rest of the media second. I mean, the lead up to the 2012 election to me, so it was the first time I'm in a newsroom and I'm sort of covering this live. And it's, it feels like the last moment of the good times in a lot of ways because you get, you get sort of the presence of like Tumblr as this cultural force. So there's a lot of animated gifts flying around. Romney is like obviously a wet fart. I think for me, the moment he's strapped his dog to the roof of his car,

I was like, this, the game's over. And like the social metrics prove that you can go back and look and like Obama is just like searching. So Obama wins in 2012. This is where I sort of want to spend a lot of time today because to me, I don't totally understand what happened. And I don't understand why we didn't clock what was happening. So very simply, like what is your sort of. of sense of the beginnings of Gamergate.

Is that a world that you've gone into a lot? Is it something you've thought about a lot? Was it something that like you were thinking about at the time at all? Definitely not at the time. I don't even think I knew it was happening at the time. I think since I've, you know, launched offline. I've gone back now and, you know, have we had a few conversations, not specifically just about Gamergate, but that Gamergate has come up.

So I like know the broad strokes of what it was. But I in 2013 and 2014, of course, I had just left the White House. It was before Positive America, before any of that. So it was this period where I was sort of just watching politics from the outside for the first time in eight years. And I remember thinking that like things weren't going quite as well and things were deteriorating a bit, particularly online. Interesting.

Though I still didn't have this view, I don't have the view of the internet and social media as I do today or even as I would in 2016. But I thought it was like a, you know, Things are a little bumpy, but then I'm like, well, you know, we had a couple of good years. And so maybe that's just sort of the way the pendulum swings. That's interesting. I mean, just I'm not the first person to make this observation. Like, there's plenty of people who have said this.

But like Gamergate, I think in a lot of ways, creates the playbook that we're still seeing today. And like, it launches in, in August 2014, based off a 4chan thread full of like sort of misinformation about, like, reporting on the games industry. We don't need to rehash it. But it is interesting that Steve Bannon in particular was so sharp about. co-opting it. And he said multiple times that he hires Milo unapolis specifically to write about it and launder it into like larger mainstream media.

And at the same time as that's happening, basically like a year later, you get the pivot to video from Facebook, the first big pivot to video, which sort of changes the nature of digital media. You start to see the layoff starting. But you also, I didn't realize it was this early. I didn't realize that 2015 was the beginning of the Bernie bro.

Yeah. But it is interesting to look at both sides of the spectrum and see that the right is, like, becoming very organized around what are effectively just like conspiracy theories. And at the same time, I'm, please do not email me about this. I'm not comparing Bernie Brose to Gamergate. Please do not do that. I want to live my life comfortably. But it is interesting that, like, as you said, that like the negative rumblings online were being felt across the political spectrum. There was an uglier kind of more aggressive kind of politics happening.

And I don't know what to make of that. I mean, what were your first impressions of the Bernie Broe movement, quote, unquote, which I wish I got a better name for Dirtbag left, let's call it. So my view of this was it started with sort of Occupy Wall Street, right, that we dealt with in the Obama White House, right? So we understood in the Obama White House, and I think this was reflected in the 2012 campaign, that there was an economically populist anger brewing as a, result of the 2008-2007 financial crisis. And of course, we grapple with that the first couple of years of the White House.

And I always tell this story. Like, I remember sitting down with Larry Summers, who was the head of the National Economic Council at the time. I, of course, have not ever taken a class in economics. And here I am writing about the financial crisis. And so I, like, ended up learning a lot from Larry, who treated me like one of his students. and Tim Geithner and that crew. I was the young kid there,

but I was also like the political hack. And so I would be like, okay, well, we have made the decision not to claw back the bonuses from the AIG executives. And there are like pitchforks and torches headed towards the White House.

And how am I supposed to explain this to people? And Larry very calmly would be like, well, it's just contract law. Like we cannot, we have made a contract. The government has engaged, entered into a contract and we cannot just pull these bonuses back because it's just not legal and it's simply not part of contract law. And it's like, okay, that's a great explanation in your classroom at Harvard.

But it's like, I don't think this is, this is not going to land on the internet. But it was like that moment, I was like, oh, there are certain things that we are trying to grapple with in the White House where lawyers, bureaucrats, tradition, it's like, it's preventing us from from sort of responding to the populist anger that's out there in a way that would be satisfactory to the people who are angry because we're sort of trying to do it by the book, right? And then at the same time, you know, like Obama would do an interview where he was like, yeah, I don't think we need to give more bailouts to fat cats on Wall Street.

And then we'd go through like a weak cycle of stories about how he was too populist and too angry and too mean to the rich because he called people on Wall Street fat cats. Right. And so we knew that was brewing. And then by the time we get to 2012 and the reelect, even before we knew we were running against Romney, we were like, okay, this re-election campaign, it has at least respond to some of that populist anger that's still out there. And the fact that wealth inequality and the growing gap between rich and poor that the financial crisis only accelerated, like we have to respond to that. And we have to have an agenda that speaks to that. And so we knew that existed.

And so when Bernie comes along in 2015, I was not surprised that his movement sort of took off, right? Because we knew that was brewing since like at least 2010. I think what happened in the Democratic primary there, though, is because Hillary couldn't outflank Bernie on the left on the economy. Right. She decided to outflank him on identity issues and social and cultural issues. And so the version of the Democratic Party that becomes like, you know, more focused on identity inflected issues, cultural issues, eventually what the Republicans would call woke, all that kind of stuff. That begins with Bernie versus Hillary in 2015 and 2016. Because the Bernie bros are seen as like, yes, they're economically populist, but there's misogyny there, at least with some of the online folks, right?

There is maybe accusations of xenophobia, right? Bernie is like not very liberal on immigration in 2015, right? And in the next iteration he is in his next campaign. And so that cleavage in the Democratic Party starts to emerge, I think, in that because of that primary in 2015 between Bernie and Hillary. So this is an excerpt from Hillary's book after the 2016 election. And she writes, because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn't make an argument against me on policy.

So he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character. Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist. And then she concludes with, I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were too. And to see this infighting against the backdrop of what's happening on the right is especially frustrating 10 years later. Because as this is happening, in 2015, Trump retweet. Pete Pepe the Frog for the first time. Mm-hmm.

And then he goes on a rant a few months later about the all-female Ghostbusters reboot. They're remaking Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford. You can't do that. And now they're making Ghostbusters with only women. What's going on? Effectively sort of connecting the dots between this like very pop culture-focused Gamer GameRame movement with grievances about woke and all this stuff and a larger sort of MAGA movement. And the Democrats are completely in free fall here. They're all fighting with

each other about what the Democrats mean. And it's interesting you brought up the Occupy thing as this thing that wasn't squashed. And I hadn't thought of it that when I think that is an interesting way to think about it. Hillary's campaign, though, is not really focusing on that. They are doing the Manichin Challenge with Bon Jovi on a plane. They are doing a remix of the Hamilton musical. There are 10 things you need to do. Number one. to vote and it's on. You post that Hillary sign up on your lawn. Number two.

Call some undecided's with your crew. Your cousins in Ohio, maybe try and flip them blue. Number three. Watch Hillary examine the terrain. Watch a campaign with a man Tim Cain. Ah, Tim Cain in the membrane. Tim Cain in the brain. Number four.

Hillary makes each decision, looking at the world from a rarefied position, a public servant with people. Genacity, agility. Mehente, experience is not a liability. Fine. And then of course the Pokemon Go to the Poles moment, one of my favorite moments ever.

Because we're gonna have a lot of jobs, jobs from building infrastructure to coding, creating new apps. I don't know who created Pokemon Go. But I'm trying to figure out how we get them to have Pokemon Go to the polls. At the same time as all this is happening.

So you have the right consolidating power, sort of understanding how to speak the same meme language with each other. You have the Democrats running what is essentially the cringiest version of a 2008 election in 2016. Without that, without the candidate. Without the candidate, yeah. And then you have the complete implosion of digital media. So Mashable starts layoffs in 2016. Mike.com starts layoffs in 2018.

The Guardian publishes a piece called, the future of digital journalism is in question as BuzzFeed and HuffPost lay off a thousand. So people are noticing, like even in 2018 that journalism is in a lot of trouble. You start to see buyouts, vice.com starts to implode, and Breitbart is doing tens of millions of views. They are dominating Facebook. And what we'll see from this moment on is a new right-wing media company dominating the conversation as the one before it, you know, recedes into, you know, more and more obscurity. For instance, after the Breitbart boom, you have a bunch of imitators. You have the Daily Wire. They get huge on Facebook. Then you also have the free press, Turning Point USA.

They're all right there engaging in this nonstop culture war. To sum it up, lefty leaning, progressive leaning, digital media outlets, this like new wave of MTV's and Rolling Stones that we were all thinking we're going to change the world. They're out. And replacing them is right-wing, propaganda pretending to be those kinds of sites making those kinds of youtube videos making those sorts of podcasts and then comes a little media company right in the middle of this called crooked media yes i remember uh so i moved to l a in 2014 and uh john lovitt is already here he's uh writing a television show creating a television show creating a television show creating a television television show called 1600 Penn with NBC and Josh Gads.

He loved the 1600 thing. He really liked. Yeah, well, yeah, I know. That was before. So he has this. He's doing television writing. Tommy and I start a consulting firm where we're just writing speeches for people. Tommy's in San Francisco.

I'm here in L.A. And we're sort of watching politics from afar. Dan is also in San Francisco. He's like running comms for GoFundMe. And we, we, we, had conversations this group of people about at this time, about like how there's not, there's not a lot of progressive media out there. There's not a lot of like left of center media that like in an opinion sense, right? Not just like journalism, but like, you know,

punditry. And that, and I think we all had sort of our beliefs about like how the Clinton campaign was going and how the Democratic Party was going and how like things were, you know, the Obama era is ending and why isn't there media where Democrats or liberals or leftists can be not so self-serious, not take themselves seriously, but also like take politics seriously, joke around a little bit. And then especially reach out to people who might not be interested in politics or who might be cynical about politics or just sort of turned away from politics and sort of bring them into the process. And then when Hillary loses...

And now you're trapped being a podcaster forever. Until Hillary wins, this is your life forever. Real, real monkey's paw situation there that I'm still, I'm still living in. Yeah, the worst curse of all. Yeah. When Trump wins, we're like, look, maybe this is our chance to take the podcast that has become very popular and start a progressive media company that's not just podcast, but, you know, everything else that we, we now do.

And that's sort of how we started the whole thing. It's fascinating to think of like you guys launching in the middle of this. because, like, as you said, you weren't like a super online guy, but to look back, like, the whole era is ending. Like, the whole thing, like, in a lot of ways, like, I mean, obviously hindsight 2020. But I guess, like, when you, when you look back at that, were you aware of just, like, how dire things were, you said that you thought Hillary would win, like, why did you think Hillary would win?

Like, I'm curious. Also, for the record, I was not living in the U.S. at this point. So I was covering sort of the rise of far-right populism outside of the U.S., And I had just lived through Brexit. So I had a very different attitude to my America friends where I was like, the shit's cook, bro. Like, this is over. It's like, what was it? Like, how did, what was the optimism?

You know, what was driving it? So a few things. First of all, it was certainly not a lot of faith in Hillary Clinton as a candidate. I would just be very honest. I remember before Obama even jumped in the race. And I, it was like, two, 2005, 2006, and I made a bet with Robert Gibbs, because he was, who was Obama's press secretary at the time, would go on to be his press secretary in the White House and my boss in the Senate office. And Gibbs was like, oh, you know, Hillary's going to end up being the nominee in 08. And I'm like, no, she's not. He's like, what do you mean? No, she's no, who's going to do it? He's like, your, our boy John Kerry, after losing an 04, like, there's no one else is going to beat her. And I'm like, I don't know who's going to beat her. Like, what about Obama? He's like, he's not going to run. He's just, he just got to the Senate. And I'm like, okay. I don't know who's going to beat Hillary Clinton, but someone is going to beat Hillary Clinton because there is just, I do not think she has it to be this party's nominee.

So I've never had, you know, whatever. I don't want to speak too badly at this point, but I never had a lot of faith in Hillary the candidate. What I did believe was that the country would just not vote for Donald Trump. I thought she would win by default. And I was also someone who early on did believe that Trump would win the Republican primary because I kind of had seen at that point that, that the Republican Party was not in the, we're going to nominate another Mitt Romney mood after what happened in 2012. So I was not surprised that the Republican Party,

which was sort of a mess after Romney lost in 2012, ended up with Donald Trump. So I saw that coming, but I was like, there's just, you know, I bought into the demographics or destiny argument and thought, okay, I know the voters that Donald Trump will get. I know that we are going to continue losing non-college white voters from, even from Obama levels, even though he was the first black president. And that was a big deal.

But, like, he did really, really well with non-college white voters compared to everyone since then. And so I knew we lose that. But when I did the math, I was like, look, the country's becoming more diverse. The electricics becoming younger. And it's even though she's not the greatest candidate, Donald Trump is just too much for the country. Like, he's not, he can't do it. So that's why I thought he would. No, I think that makes sense.

And it's interesting you describe the Republican Party as a mess post Romney, where it's like politically that that's probably absolutely true. We only look back at the things like the Tea Party and birtherism and Gamergate as successes because they did succeed in 2016. And it's like if they hadn't, like this would just be more of an identity crisis for this party. 2016 is the culmination of all of this energy and it works. If it hadn't worked, we would look at, you know, meme warfare as being really embarrassed. And it was really embarrassing, but for the Republicans, it's crucial. And I think if it hadn't have worked, there would have been a major identity crisis. If these young, fashy, far-right millennials working their way up the party had failed, had lost the election in 2016,

it's possible the Republicans would have splintered into a million different coalitions and actually be going through the Democrats seem to be going through right now. It's also possible that the Republicans would have just kept losing. They would have just put more Romney's, you know, more Ted Cruzes out into the field. And that is the world that I like to think about when I go to sleep at night. And after the break, we're going to be talking about sort of the world that we are now forced to live in and what, you know, where we go from here. But first, a word from our sponsors, Charlie X, EX is brat. So, Pod Save America appears. America is saved.

we're all good. The internet landscape that we kind of took for granted in the 2010s is also gone. So Twitter is now X. Joe Rogan is the biggest personality on earth. The GOP is basically being led around by podcasters to either work for it or are working with them. You know, Hawk Tua happened. We all forgot about that. But that was like a real lightning rod for a while.

And the rise of TikTok. during COVID and after COVID we have TikTok. And I think we have the final kind of fracturing of any kind of liberal coalition, at least online, specifically around Israel. And I think going into the 2024 election, the Democrats really just didn't understand how fraught this coalition was, or if you could even call it a coalition. Because I think now it's very clear that there are things that we might put under the umbrella

of liberal politics. leftist politics, progressive politics that do not get along, are not compatible. At least that's what I think. From where we sit now, a year later, like, I'm genuinely concerned that there isn't a way to create an anti-Trump umbrella because of how segmented and fractured these different groups are. I don't know. How do you see that landscape now? It's a good question.

I think I noticed this. So I, you know, I have a podcast called Wilderness. And since, like, 2018, I've been doing, like, I've just conducted some focus groups myself with voters. And at the beginning of that series, you would ask people where they got their news from. And you'd get local TV. Some would, the more politically engaged would say cable. And then you get some people saying, like, on Facebook or on Twitter, right? And you get, like, specific platforms.

Then by the time I get to 2022, I did one before the midterms there, and I asked people where they got their news. And suddenly, like, people would just start saying more, my phone, and they would stop. That's weird. And they would stop saying outlets, naming outlets. And they said, oh, I just looked on TikTok. And I'm like, what is on? They're like, the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is like a bit.

It's on my TikTok all that. And it would be, like, progressive people, but they're getting it from the daily mail because that showed up in their TikTok feed. And the brand and the company or the outlet that was like delivering them the news was less important than either the platform or just a general. It's coming. It's on my phone. Okay. That's fascinating. And I think it definitely like gels with what we have here kind of like you see the post-COVID rise of, you know, already popular people like Hassan Piker or the leftist pocket of YouTube that's sometimes called bread tube.

the Chapo guys, they're not called Comtown anymore, but they were Comtown and now they're just like normal celebrities, which is weird. I know. But I think it starts to show like a weird thing with the Democrats that the Republicans don't seem to have an issue with. And it's something that I would like love your take on because the Republicans over the last 15 years have basically found a way to either use the internet like monkeys with typewriters to surface like policies or big lie conspirators. that they can get behind or also just personalities like charlie kirk was effectively my take on it is that the reason they're so upset about him in an existential way right now dying is that he was their attempt at homegrown trump the idea of a young influencer being bred to be a presidential candidate yeah to replace the cult of personality that's my take on it and so they were very very

fluid and very flexible with the internet to the to the to the chagrin of everyone on earth why haven't the Democrats done the same? Like what is it? Like is someone who's been inside the mechanics of the party? Like I don't understand is it as simple as it's the Israel question

or is it as simple as the wealth inequality question or is there something that average people just don't like I have to imagine if you're a 22 year old person with liberal progressive views or leftist views you are going, why isn't Hassan Piker the Joe Rogan of the left just by default? Why isn't it?

Why isn't he in the terms of like, why isn't like, why aren't political candidates from the left or the center left working with influencers and and upstart digital media and creators the same way the right are? So I think I think you probably have to back up before Gaza because I think some of this begins in in 2017 and 2018 in the response to Trump, right? And so the response to Trump. you get a quote unquote resistance movement. And the resistance movement is the most mainstream democratic movement of the various sort of factions that splinter after Trump. And it is the wine moms and it is the center left people and it's the people and, you know, who are in Democratic. I think from this group of people, you get a lot of Democratic staffers. and you get a lot of people who work in Democratic politics.

And I do think that this faction of the party has the politics generally of the 2016 Hillary campaign. Uh-oh. And partly by that, I mean an emphasis on these identity-inflicted issues. Yeah. And at the time, you also start, you get Me Too. and then after Me Too, you get, of course, then 2020 happens. COVID. COVID becomes another identity inflected issue, which against the right, right?

100%. Around, you know, masking becomes a symbol that you're, you're wearing a mask, you're a fan of Fauci, you got the bobblehead. And so that sort of kind of liberalism exists. And it is, I think it is a powerful force within the party. online at times, it can go, and this happens on a lot of media outlets, this is when you get like the freak out over cancel culture, right? And so does the Me Too movement go from a focus on sexual assault and sexual harassment to, okay, now we're going to, you know, start yelling at this person or that person online.

Then you get COVID. Then you get George Floyd and the protests of summer of 2020. You get the defund the police movement, right? And so you start getting, I think the left and the center left, or basically from the far left through the center at this point, which is the coalition you end up needing to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, begins to splinter. And it has held together basically up through 2020 barely because there was a feeling that like we got to beat this guy. But the cracks were all there. And it was economic, right? There was like a Bernie left and more of a center left.

there was people more focused on issues of race and policing and civil rights. There were people more on gender equality and sexual harassment and the legacy of the Me Too movement. There's people focused on like, you know, this is where you get the yard signs, right? Like in this house we believe in science kind of stuff. And that is just a because it is when I say identity issues, it then also becomes more individualistic in a way. And so there is a focus on rights, identity, and less of a focus on sort of like solidarity across various issues and political beliefs that you would need to keep a movement cohesive in order to defeat what ends up becoming an authoritarian threat. And I think the diffuse sort of views and beliefs of everyone who's not MAGA becomes a problem and becomes harder to keep together, especially. with the fractured media and information environment and like algorithmic bubbles.

That's interesting. The idea, because in a lot of ways, it's sort of a holdover from the way social media used to work, which is like the Facebook quiz boom was because your identity was the way you would communicate on Facebook. You would say, like, I'm a Scorpio or I'm a Hufflepuff or whatever. Yep. And like the Democrats, using that term very loosely at this point, still feel like, blue sky to me feels like extremely 2014. Yes. It is a place where like 20, to me it feels like very 20, like 2018.

2018. Blue sky is like forever in 2018. So does that explain kind of like why when Biden is trying to reach out to influencers? Like it doesn't work because there's not. in a lot of ways, I guess what you're saying is like, because there are so many groups within a coalition that you would need, you can't have a Joe Rogan of the left, quote unquote. You can't have one personality to suck up all of that energy and speak to everyone without pissing everybody off. I mean, Biden reaching out to influencers. He's reaching out to influencers. It's like a top down structure. And so the influencers he's talking to are like sort of house organs here, right? It's like, it's not.

And look, I say this is, a lot of people think that that's what Potsave America is, right? And that we're like, we represent the establishment of the party. But we, a lot of Democratic politicians don't always, we're not like the first stop because we will, you know, ask uncomfortable questions sometimes. And we're not even, I mean, you're probably like, not really, but like not compared to some of the influencers that they do reach out to, we're a little more confrontational. and I think Joe Rogan becomes Joe Rogan, not because, like, someone thought, like Donald Trump thought, oh, he's on the team and now I'm going to reach out to him. It's that, like, oh, he's had conversations and had people on that I think could overlap with what I'm doing, and I'll go on there and we'll put Republicans on there. And if, you know, they get some shit from Rogan on certain issues, that's fine. But at least they can try to, like, find some kind of commonality with him on some issues that would have, that would be mutually beneficial to both of them.

so i mean do you think though like that pods of america speaks to i mean like i'll i'll give you an example yeah sure uh sunday i did not look check my phone did not i was like i'm going to take a break from twitter and i'm going to listen to the interview between uh ezra klein and tana hussie codes oh sure yeah two people who i respect a lot and think are great right all that kind of stuff and and i and i I've been involved in the argument that they're having, right, myself in different ways. And I sit down for breakfast and I listen to the whole thing. And I'm like, wow, that was a great conversation. It was frustrating at times, but it really was like illuminating for me.

And I thought Tanaasi Coates did great. And I thought Ezra did great. And what a, you know, good conversation. And then I go online and everyone is so mad. Yes, we're still talking about it. Still talking about it today. And I'm like, that's great. But watching people sort of like split up into teams.

just based on that conversation and I was like wow I thought that was a conversation that potentially could bring some people together or like because it certainly did the two of them that were having the conversation but the way that it the way that it sort of lands within the Democratic coalition or with the broads left of center coalition that we're now with is it immediately sort of funnels people into sides and it's just it's very it's very tough to keep it together in that environment So I know you don't have a ton of time left, but basically just like really last question, if you can fit it in is just like how how does Pod save America or you personally, I guess, like how do you start to build that coalition? Like how does anyone? Because like I, you've almost black billed me on my own show here thinking about like the systemic problems within the Democrats to come together, assuming we have a fair and free election again. But like what is the what is the first step here? if things are this splintery. The only thing I can think of and what we're trying to do here

is to be a home for voices from Hassan and folks on the left to come on and chat all the way to, you know, the corporate Dems that make people crazy or, you know, or the or never Trumpers, right? Or people like that. Because into like have conversations

where we can disagree and debate and whatever else without doing what people do online with each other. And then hopefully that, you know, makes the people that we bring on the shows feel comfortable chatting more. And maybe we can have some conversations. And maybe people can see that if they didn't like Hassan Piker, he's not the villain they thought he was from online or maybe, you know.

He's very handsome. He's very handsome. I don't know how you can not think he's handsome. People would like him. And same thing with, you know, our friends at the bulwark. And I think that having those conversations offline or on a podcast where you're not quite mediated by the algorithms is somewhat helpful. It's only a first step. Like I don't think it's going to solve anything.

But it's what at least we're trying to do is to convene and be a place where, like, you don't have to be totally scared that we're going to scream at you. But yeah, we might disagree. And we might have someone that you disagree with. And we can debate in sort of a, you know, hopefully constructive way. You know, we're trying to do that with like CrookedCon in person this fall in D.C. And where we have, you know, everyone from Hassan to Andy Bashir showing up. And, you know, we'll see if we can make that work. You should do a thing where like Ezra Klein has to sit surrounded by blue sky leftists and they all just scream at him like one of those Jubilee videos.

I'd pay good money for that. Me too. We might have to do that. It might not fix democracy, but it would make me feel better. And that's all that really counts. Yeah. I want to thank you for coming on the show. I typically ask our guests, you know, say where people can find you online, but I assume people know where to find you online,

but do you have anything you want to plug before we send you on your way? Just, you know, we're trying to build our YouTube channel over Pod Save America, so go check it out and subscribe to YouTube. Our YouTube, it's free. I'll have to just just hit subscribe. And big fan, big fan of you and this pod and Garbage Day. So it was a good. Thank you so much.

It was great to chat with you guys. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Barone, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing.

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