Democrats still fail to understand what a media that opposes Trump would actually look like

One, this is a terrible idea.

Two, we did have have an effective leftist media once: alt newspapers. Mega-donors should just fund those.

But yeah, we've already discussed this last year and it was still a bad idea!

Like... look at The Onion and its current success. The model still works for fks sake. Just fund alternative weeklies. A leftist Rogan is fundamentally impossible because leftists cannot field a Rogan and remain leftists. If you value human lives you can't run a show where eugenists freely blabber.

If you value leftist economics then you can't run a shoestring chat show. If you value leftist ideology you can't run an individualist one man show that sits a host on top of the tower!

Right, this is another big problem. Rogan emerged out of a long period of support. If we're ungenerous we'd prob put the start point with Bannon and his leadership at Breitbart and that is when the foundation for an audience that obsessed over Rogan began.

Fundamentally the problem is if you want to match the philosophy of the core of the democratic base and successfully argue for people to come over then you must create media that is cooperative, local, closer to the ground, and more community-based.

Rogan isn't even right wing per-se, it's just that his show perfectly matches his values and his values are "be a dude, get buff, and seriously discuss the inane ramblings of morons who have no proof or support for anything they say" and you can't create a liberal version of that!

I really have to emphasize the Dems screwed themselves by letting the liberal press die. Alternative weeklies were fundamentally the core of left wing political work in America and they've basically all been killed off. Big wallets can get started funding them again but:

1. it will take time to liftoff
2. Rich Dem funders are going to have to deal w/the fact that a well funded & independent alt press is the only way to move forward but that alt press will insult them and regularly oppose their interests.

Leftist politics is inevitably critical of the wealthy. Can Dems deal with that? Not at the moment.

The proof is in the current state. If big Dem funders were prepared to support real leftist or liberal media then they would have done it already. They would have saved alt weeklies. They would have rewarded public media. They would have preserved existing liberal and leftist press. They didn't.

If you are rich, or a bundler, and you care about the values the Dems supposedly represent, set up a big chunk of money you can't touch and shove it at any publication that is co-op or employee-run in the form of year-round Dem political ads.

I really want to emphasize that this used to be a norm. You'd see blue ads for candidates or issues across Gawker, Wonkette, Salon, Kos, etc... all the time & Dems just stopped doing it. They didn't realize that the point of those ads isn't the ads' success, but keeping your media allies running.

This is a long solved problem, but that's not what these bigwig Dems are really looking for. I suspect they want what Rogan is to the right-wing, a guy who will basically take the side of any big money interest who shows up to talk. There's no future in trying to create that on the left.

You want a media that favors Dems in a time when the right is fundamentally defined by lies & fraud? Give ProPublica, The Onion, and 404 Media a billion dollars each. Then find whomever is doing the reporting on your town that you actually read and give them 1m a year to build a small news org.

Support your local NPR and PBS stations! Just funnel Dem money into getting real educational programs back on to public broadcasting and watch a new generation show up to 2032 ready to lock in Dems up and down the line. If we last that long.

One of the most prominent right wing political figures just dived into raw sewage and posted it to Instagram. It won't take much to get people to realize these people are not very smart and not very engaged in helping anyone but themselves.

(An additional good thread on this)

It's not hard, it's just not going to help the ultra wealthy and so the Dems will do literally anything other than funding educational or leftwing programming and publications. Can't wait for them to give Destiny his own TV channel or something equally stupid and wasteful.

Project Bullhorn plans to include a for-profit arm that will “have the potential to reap significant returns,” according to a concept document obtained by The Times. “We will need to create self-sustaining businesses if we want to build an echo chamber with sufficient scale and reach.”