By now, it’s conventional wisdom that Democrats would love nothing more than to find their very own Joe Rogan. Yet there’s a fine line between pundits’ wishful thinking and full-scale political suicide — one which party operatives seem increasingly unable to grasp.
Democrats are pursuing not one, not two, but a whopping 26 initiatives aimed at replicating Donald Trump’s appeal with podcasters and influencers in the digital space, The New York Times revealed on Tuesday. The party’s goal is to develop influencers in apolitical spaces like “sports or lifestyle podcasts” who can resonate “organically” with audiences while subtly building “online enthusiasm” for Democrat candidates. And they’re hitting up donors to the tune of tens of millions to dollars to do it.
Like a dog with a bone, the Democrats just can’t let go once they have a self-flattering theory of their own failures. In 2016, it was the two Rs — Russia and racism — and they tore the country apart with race riots and political witch hunts to prove their point. While the 2024 consensus — that Trump won “because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts” — might be more honest, the proposal to simply “throw enough money at the problem” seems all but destined to fail.
The Times profiled several of these burgeoning initiatives, all with similar, vaguely empowering names that say nothing substantial at all.
AND Media, which stands for Achieve Narrative Dominance, plans to fund influencers while “co-producing their content.” It’s already raised $7 million of its $45 million, four-year fundraising goal.
Another, Project Bullhorn, will also back creators while working as a “matchmaking service” to book them on influential YouTube shows and podcasts. It aims to raise $35 million.
Channel Zero will “provide back-office services to content creators,” while Double Tap Democracy will help grow 2,000 smaller, “apolitical” accounts. Project Echo has pledged a $52 million war chest to a vague “influencer program,” most of which it aims to obtain from donors.
Behind the projects are a predictably swampy who’s who of professional operatives and corporate elites, all promising donors a major return on investment. But even the Times is skeptical: “The quiet effort amounts to an audacious — skeptics might say desperate — bet that Democrats can buy more cultural relevance online, despite the fact that casually right-leaning touchstones like Mr. Rogan’s podcast were not built by political donors and did not rise overnight.”
For once, the Grey Lady gets it exactly right.
While Democrats certainly failed at messaging in 2024, that’s only the symptom of a larger problem. It’s not that the Biden-Harris administration failed to adequately sell its record on unlimited immigration, transgender ideology, and the green revolution. It’s that these polices are bad, Americans recognize them as such, and they aren’t biting no matter what smooth talking points Democrats roll out.
The solution would require letting go of the reins of power, allowing the “marketplace of ideas” to work freely, even, or especially, when it leads to new ideas that buck party consensus. Rogan and other independent podcasters don’t take their cues from on high; they’re naturally curious and bring people on from all walks of life to explore ideas or phenomena that they, and their viewers, find interesting.
Meeting people where they’re at — this is what democracy is supposed to be about, and it’s what makes shows like The Joe Rogan Experience so appealing in the first place. Yet it’s the one thing that the Democrat Party, with its obsession with rigid conformity that crushes people for the mildest dissent, can’t accept.
Remember, leftists already had their own Rogan; it was Rogan himself. But their increasingly authoritarian ways left no room for independent thinkers, pushing generally liberal guys like Rogan into the right’s arms by default.
Somewhat ironically, the Democrats’ leftist authoritarianism cannot co-exist with the podcast sphere’s true liberal ethos. These new initiatives may try to appropriate the fun, casual, and accessible style of Rogan, but if they embrace him in substance, then they’ll lose the ability to gate-keep the party narrative from on high. Yet style without substance will feel just as performatively inauthentic as everything else Democrats have trotted out in the Trump era. From the beginning, this multimillion dollar project is destined to fail — and leave donors more disillusioned than they already are.
However, this harebrained scheme is about more than simple Democrat incompetence; we’ve arrived at a new era in the culture war. For the first time in decades, Democrats are genuinely worried about their grip on the culture, and they have absolutely no idea how to compete.
For years, this cultural insecurity was solely the right’s domain. Mainstream culture skewed left, while the right was confined to its echo chamber, failing to produce breakout culture. We tried to replicate the left’s cultural dominance, but our attempts at movies were painfully preachy, our literature nonexistent, our press simply reacting to the dominant narrative of the day. While the left still largely controls Hollywood, academia, and the press, these institutions have lost much of their prestige and influence; they’re now the ones in an echo chamber.
Today, your office water cooler talk is much more likely to be about Rogan’s latest episode than the cover story of the Times. And it won’t feel like you’re discussing “right-wing culture,” but the pulse of America’s current zeitgeist. That the left is now trying to copy this zeitgeist in as painfully inept a way as the right once did is all the proof that you need: After decades, the leftist grip on culture is finally over.
Gage Klipper is a writer based in New York. Previously, he was the culture critic at the Daily Caller and an editor at Pirate Wires.
Jesus Christ is King
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