But are they working as businesses?

Five years ago, it was harder for online voices to make a living. Now we have subscription platforms, mid-roll advertising, rev-share models, even merch! You can get a Lemon Head hoodie for the low, low price of $65 at Don Lemon’s Shopify portal!

Brian told me that he had around 8 million followers across platforms at the end of 2024. Today he’s pushed that up to almost 14 million—in just 18 months. That’s a sign of his work ethic, but also the fact that there’s a gettable, anti-Trump, cord-cutting audience that wants what he’s selling. You also have a bunch of individual creators—Keith Edwards, Suzanne Lambert, Adam Mockler, etcetera—who were certainly posting before Trump 2.0. But they blew up after the Democrats shat the bed in 2024, vowing to stop playing nice and to get down in the mud with Republicans. Edwards told me today he’s added 1.6 million followers since Trump’s second inauguration.

How much of what’s working is actual journalism, as opposed to just progressive tantrums?

This is where I should say that plenty of these channels, while generally being friendly to Democrats, also do valuable journalism in their own ways. I wrote about More Perfect Union last year—it was started by Bernie Sanders’s former campaign manager to tell issue-based stories critical of corporate interests. They were covering populist frustration with A.I. data centers before the mainstream press. There was Jon Favreau’s contentious Pod Save America interview with D.N.C. chairman Ken Martin over the party’s failed 2024 autopsy report—an absolute masterclass in skin-peeling and a true embarrassment to Martin. And Martin asked to do it!

Zeteo has also done some great reporting. Mehdi Hasan, relentless as ever, recently kept Michigan’s leftist Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, off balance by pressing him on why he was hiding his personal financial disclosure from voters. MeidasTouch News, which has more than 6 million very loyal fans on YouTube, hired the very good Scott MacFarlane from CBS News as their chief Washington correspondent. They also had some riveting on-the-ground livestreams during the Minnesota ICE protests. There’s also The Bulwark, of course, which has found massive success in the anti-Trump space. They’ve expanded their journalism portfolio, hiring real reporters from Politico and elsewhere to cover the Democrats with a healthy dose of skepticism, along with their usual Trump haterade.

Brian argues that Democrats need to venture beyond progressive media and prove they can “hang” in culturally disparate spaces. But is the party’s problem fundamentally about distribution, or do too many Democratic politicians lack the personality, confidence, and cultural fluency that this medium rewards?

Democratic staffers and politics junkies love to focus on tactics, but you are correct, it’s a question of talent. This is just an updated version of the Kerry–Bush beer test. Let’s be honest, a lot of politicians are nerds. Or lawyers. We need nerds and lawyers in government, but nerds and lawyers are hard to plug into a vertical scroll on the platforms. Attention has always been the lifeblood for any politician, but used to be limited, generally, to news programs, radio, newspapers, etcetera.

Now politicians are competing for attention not just against other politicians, but against athletes, hot people, actors, Iranian propaganda videos, A.I. slop, and so on. What’s even harder is they’re competing for those precious first one-to-three seconds of every shortform video, the crucible moment in our dopamine-addled brains that determines whether you stay or swipe and move along. Tough thing for Hakeem Jeffries or any buttoned-up Democrat to do, even though he’s been trying and at least getting out there.

But you still need longform content to clip from.

True, and there’s a related dynamic. The clip economy relies on longform content—podcasts and YouTube shows. Meaning that if a candidate wants to create a flywheel of content from a single appearance—think of Pete Buttigieg going on the anti-woke Flagrant podcast with Andrew Schulz last year—that candidate has to be on his or her game, on camera, for 30 minutes or more. Just hanging out in a live-fire setting where the hosts might ask about U.F.O.s or the NBA or trans bathroom laws. A lot of morons go on big podcasts, but politicians—even the dopes—are expected to be smarter than Logan Paul. So the bar is even higher. One has to sound smart, but also relatable, and funny, all while just hanging out. A great example dropped just today. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore went on the viral music show Track Star and talked about hip-hop and soul music he likes, but also smoothly weaved in stories about himself, Black culture, civil rights, poverty, Baltimore. Really solid media hit on his part.

The great promise of creator media is authenticity and intimacy; the danger in politics is that creators become little more than campaign surrogates. Do you worry about these creators losing credibility as campaigns pour more money into this ecosystem?

Well, creators are trying to get paid, and they always will. I’m more worried about voters being fooled or spun by creators who are being paid by candidates and interest groups. This is one of the major questions for the Democratic coalition heading into 2028. Imagine some mom in Grosse Pointe scrolling Instagram next winter, and she sees a video from a local food creator in Detroit raving about Andy Beshear’s plans to cut grocery costs. Absent federal disclosure requirements, that’s what we’re looking at heading into this next cycle.

This problem flared up in California during the acrimonious gubernatorial primary this summer—and California actually has a disclosure law on the books for influencers and creators dabbling in politics. Gavin Newsom signed the legislation three years ago. Still, during the heated primary, influencers from around the country were being paid by billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer’s campaign to promote his campaign, with many not disclosing that they were taking a check. The primary’s eventual winner, Xavier Becerra, also ran a paid creator program with similar disclosure problems. And by the way, plenty of these creators who took money were political newbies, some from other states without similar laws who might’ve just forgotten to add the disclosure until it was too late. Sorry, fam! It’s just a mess.

What really stinks, too, is that one of the left’s most popular Gen Z social media stars, Carlos Eduardo Espina, who delivers Spanish-language news to more than 14 million followers, also took money to promote Steyer ($100,000!) without telling his followers. That’s too bad, because the progressive creator class, and digital strategists in the Democratic Party, like to hold up Espina as a prized example of someone who cracked the code on delivering “news” to young people and casual voters who don’t follow traditional media.

But the creator ecosystem will always be pay-for-play and unscrupulous. Political influencers on the left have certainly grown their reach and power since 2024, but a few of them are a little too sanctimonious about their craft. Aaron Parnas, a left-leaning Gen Z “news” creator, claims to be the Walter Cronkite of his generation by bringing headlines to his millions of followers on TikTok and elsewhere. What he doesn’t say is that he built that following by ripping off headlines and original reporting from actual news organizations and passing it off as his own. Cronkite would hate it.

I’m surprised that wasn’t a bigger issue nationally, to be honest. Is there some regulation in the works around that?

The California governor’s race was so chaotic and unregulated during the primary that Rep. Mark Takano of Riverside introduced legislation in Congress that would require people on social media to disclose payments from campaigns. But that law would apply to human influencers. What about realistic-looking A.I.-generated influencers peddling campaign spin and shitposting? That’s going to happen sooner than we think with generative models getting better by the day. Facebook grandpas are already getting hoodwinked by fake, A.I.-generated MAGA babes in their feeds. The California primary was also plagued by thousands of fake spam bots that surfaced on X and Facebook mysteriously promoting Becerra and attacking Steyer.

And those were just static avatars. It’s going to get worse. Voters on the left and right are going to get duped by fake influencer videos—or perhaps more depressingly, they’ll know they’re watching a hot robot and just won’t care either way as we all amuse ourselves to death.