On money for progressive influencers
Welcome to Number Two Pencil
Hello from Book Land
Hi! I’ve missed writing for the internet since I started working full time on my first book, PICK ME: THE RIGHT-WING SIEGE OF GENDER AND GEN Z, and a New York Times article from today got me so worked up that I had to dust off the old blogging hat. I hope you’ll stick around – everything’s free.
That said, if you’re so inclined, please make a pledge for a future subscription as I plan to expand this platform. I would greatly appreciate it – it will enable me to go to the distance with this book and get you quality reporting on Substack.
A little about me
I’ve been researching, reporting, and writing about the conservative movement for nearly a decade now. Previous at Media Matters for America, my work has focused on trend forecasting — what’s up and coming in right-wing media, how we got here, and where it’s taking us.
Today I’m focused on the right-wing media’s cultural noise machine, which was a decisive factor in the 2024 election. It’s often assumed that the youth always have and always will hold progressive views, but our fractured media environment — the manosphere, tradwives, Turning Point USA, Rogan and “hustle culture” and babyfaced neo-Nazis and more — suggests otherwise. As I write (and write and write and write it, dear God I need to start hanging up pictures of grass on the walls of my apartment to remind me of the outside world) I want to stay in touch on Substack, react to the news of the day, set the scene from inside my research, and share about what this process is like.
I named Number Two Pencil after a oft-repeated Steve Bannon-ism, who challenges his listeners to “get your number two pern-cils” out (in his exaggerated Virginia accent) whenever he’s about to launch into a rant. Here I am following his suggestion.
Mad cash dash
As a gossipy bitch of the district, I know all anyone (who have holes in their hearts big enough to work in politics/media) is talking about is this new effort among liberals to build up progressive influencers, and Teddy Schleifer’s latest for the NYT, Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering G.O.P. Clout Online, is a well-reported look inside.
The impulse to incubate a counterweight to the demented constellation of right-wing hucksters radicalizing your children by saying slurs while playing Minecraft for 8 hours on the internet is the correct one. To demonstrate just how great the need is, Media Matters recently published a viral study illustrating the imbalance.
But here are my concerns about how the establishment is going about fixing the problem:
There’s still a tremendous resistance to criticism within the DC establishment. Without leadership turnover among the consultant class, the same people who were telling us a year ago that Joe Biden was the only person who could beat Trump in 2024, even as their own numbers showed him losing in safe states like New Mexico and Virginia, are the ones pitching themselves as the best options to carry this influencer project forward. Anyone fronting these ventures needs to be able to tolerate the idea that what they did in the past didn’t work. That’s going to require listening to creators with left-wing views that are unpopular in DC, as well as hiring young political staff who spent the last year biting their tongues about Biden’s age and the genocide in Gaza and giving them a chance to honestly express their views. I haven’t seen that willingness among seasoned operatives in the last horrible few months, and without an open mind, this project is dead on arrival.
Without making room for that criticism, their intended audience is just going to keep hating Democrats. There’s a lesson to be learned from the 2010s right-wing blogging revolution. Breitbart, for example, was a fringe site until Steve Bannon grew it into a “platform for the alt-right,” playing a critical role in steering the outcome of the 2016 election. He did not build Breitbart by flattering the Republican establishment and hoping they’d open doors in return. Instead he mobilized racist, xenophobic and misogynist strains of the online right to relentlessly attack the Republican establishment and create a lane for Trump to take it over. If Democrats want people to listen to them online, the establishment must yield to its base’s anger: not by feeding hate, but by making a rigged economic system and an out of touch political class the enemy and soon to be thing of the past. No one scrolls TikToks and lingers on focus group tested talking points.
These firms should give creators they partner with a chance to be themselves without attaching too many strings to the money if they want to build an organic audience to have an effect like the manosphere did in 2024. They can’t refuse to fund people who attack the rich or criticize the Democrats or oppose genocide in Gaza or at least, they shouldn’t expect that if they do, it will be popular online. Given they’ve spent the last 10 years diminishing the public sentiment that made our favorite curmudgeon the good senator from Vermont so popular, I won’t hold my breath that this time will be different.
Andrew Marantz’s Battle for the Bros in the New Yorker said it better than I could:
The “Rogan of the left” formulation isn’t entirely vacuous, but it’s easy to misinterpret. Rogan-like figures can’t be engineered; they have to develop organically. Their value lies in their idiosyncrasies—their passionate insistence on talking about chimps and ancient pyramids, say, rather than the budget ceiling—and in their authenticity, which entails an aversion to memorizing talking points. Many Democrats assume that what they have is a messaging problem—that voters don’t have a clear enough sense of what the Democrats are really like. But it’s possible that the problem is the opposite: that many swing voters, including Joe Rogan, got a sense of what the Democrats were like, then ran in the opposite direction.
Anyyyywayyyyy, here’s what I’m into
There’s my take. Felt good to pop one off and I’m going to keep doing so here when the mood strikes.
In the meantime, some stuff I’m into
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned A Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert. It’s a retrospective of aughts that shows how Spice Girls feminism made popular culture a primary vehicle for Y2K misogyny.
Backlash by Susan Faludi. A feminist classic. Girl on Girl is kind of like an updated Backlash.
My Listen to Sade T-Shirt I got at the Andre 3000 New Blue Sun concert last year. Consider the suggestion.
Thanks for reading, hope to hear from you, so I don’t have to start posting TikToks of myself. Stay safe.
Love this. Love Susan faludi
One string that must be attached is encouraging your audience to vote for Dems. Breitbart would never tolerate its writers creating a permission structure to vote third party. That's a total disaster.