At this point I think the Democratic party would rather cede every office in the country to the opposition rather than tear down their careerist, insider focused superstructure.
If you are losing the chess game to adveraries who started playing the game mere months ago, you need to strip your play down to the bare fundamentals and start anew. What you've been doing isn't working against the softest possible opponents, it's time to pivot.
No comments yet
spacebanana7 · 4h ago
> "Creators in the program are not allowed to use any funds or resources that they receive as part of the program to make content that supports or opposes any political candidate or campaign without express authorization from Chorus in advance and in writing, per the contract."
This type of propaganda may well be counterproductive. Lobotomising your sides' best influencers could ruin their appeal and risk having them create weird echo chambers.
chiffre01 · 3h ago
Considering I've never heard of any of these people, and it says they have a combined audience of 13 million followers, things are looking bleak.
Google says Joe Rogan alone has more than 14 million followers on Spotify and 16.4 million subscribers on YouTube all predominantly male (71-80 percent) as of March 2024
tbrownaw · 3h ago
> Among other issues, it mandated extensive secrecy about disclosing their payments and had restrictions on what sort of political content the creators could produce.
I think I heard about there being disclosure rules for people taking money to promote commercial things. Maybe that needs to apply to politics as well?
IAmBroom · 3h ago
It absolutely does need to happen, and never will. Subtle but effective oversight will not become a popular voting issue, and the majority of those in power will never ask to limit their own power (nor wealth).
ungreased0675 · 2h ago
That was my first thought as well. Paid endorsements should be explicit. “Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.”
You can change to appeal to voters or pay to try and change voters.
jimmydoe · 3h ago
remind me of companies throwing money at marketing with no real product.
washadjeffmad · 3h ago
The purpose is the continued exposure and engagement with marketing, which becomes much less tolerable without constant familiarity and conditioning.
monero-xmr · 3h ago
Considering the shrill “DONATE NOW TO STOP TRUMP!!” emails were actually used to pay off campaign debt (after spending $1.5 billion!) I don’t think the Democrat base is primed for more shenanigans
Also beware many of those texts are from scammers, they have stolen tens of millions from people thinking they are donating to democrats.
fuzzylightbulb · 2h ago
Campaign contributions are being used for paying down the expenses of the campaign? What an outrage!!!!!!
Just imagine if those funds had instead been used to give the candidate's family members cushy six figure "jobs", or if one of their PACs was burning 5 million dollars a month on the candidate's private legal fees [1] to the tune of well over 100 million dollars in aggregate [2]. That would be truly beyond the pale and I am certain that hard working responsible fiscally conservative persons would be outraged at such naked corruption.
And it would be significantly worse if those aggressive donation emails were designed to systematically trick people into weekly recurring donations when they were only intending to make a one time contribution [3]. Shenanigans indeed!
Real talk though, of the two major parties in the US: one party is significantly flawed, the other has installed the most obviously unfit excuse for a human as president and is using every ounce of power that it can seize to make that man an unlimited king. He has deployed the military on US soil in peacetime to disappear the homeless; has prioritized sending masked goons onto the streets to snatch men, women, children, regardless if they are elderly or the infirm, at which point they are forced into concentration camps and/or deported to some foreign gulag without an ounce of due process. The economy is in free fall for regular people, the country's top infectious disease experts are being railroaded for having the audacity of knowing things, our crown jewel research infrastructure is being decimated at the same time that the government is taking large ownership stakes in public companies.
If a person can't see the forest for the trees here then the whole idea of America was completely lost on them from the jump. Regardless we're all going to miss it when it's gone.
IAmBroom · 3h ago
I worry more that they're not primed to win. The party has no standout stars; Gov. Newsom is the closest we have, and half of his promotion comes from Trump attacking him.
We have the most incompetent POTUS in history in office right now; he's so stupid he makes GW Bush look like a Rhodes Scholar. And yet, with all that surface area, and Trump at all-time low popularity... nothing exciting is heard from the Dems.
mindslight · 2h ago
It's the time for making some new stars out of fresh faces. The first fucking state governor that asserts control over their national guard and actually defends their citizens from Orange Kim Jong Un's escalating military dictatorship has my vote.
blargthorwars · 3h ago
Not really a secret: Conservatives are proping up Newsom so when he makes it through the primary, a wet roll of toilet paper could win against him based on "Don't California America!"
It can backfire. Democrats did it to talkshow-Trump, thinking he'd be easy to crush in the general against stateswoman-Hillary.
mindslight · 1h ago
Can we please stop casually referring to the fascist movement as "conservatives" ? That label stopped being appropriate with Trump, when the reactionary dumpster fire escaped talk radio and grew into a revanchist destructive movement that consumed the whole party. The label "conservative" is more appropriate for the Democratic party these days - for example why their opposition mostly consists of strongly worded letters, or why they keep sandbagging any of their members who proposes significant action or reform. They're still acting from a place of fundamental belief in our societal institutions, even as those institutions are being torn down.
Deuter8 · 2h ago
>Dark Money Group
This is antisemitic. I don't know how I know, but at this point I know that I just know.
joshcsimmons · 2h ago
What an odd thing to say.
josefritzishere · 2h ago
We were all reading about Russian money funding conservative social media influencers about 2 months ago. A response seemed inevitable.
oulipo2 · 3h ago
I know one person in this group, and basically the article is 100% bullshit... they are quite open (have even public videos mentioning what they do, who they work for), the can talk about ANY subject (israel, US politics, even criticizing the very democrat party) etc
Jgoauh · 4h ago
at this point i'm not mad the democrats are doing propaganda i'm just offended at how shit they are at it. The republicans brainwashed half the country and overturned the constitution with 4 podcast bros and a dream and the democrats are busy trying to kick their most popular members out of the party.
ZeroGravitas · 3h ago
Republican "wingnut welfare" has funded many household names and internet famous cranks over decades so it's misleading to suggest it's only 4 podcasters and they did it without literal billions in funding.
Jgoauh · 3h ago
yeah i know, but still their ratio of influence/crank/dollar is impressive, i was mostly referencing the effectiveness of their male gen-z oriented content.
Ekaros · 3h ago
I never understood how they think they can win anyone over by antagonising them. Especially those who are not rich and affluent enough to be okay who ever wins...
Jgoauh · 3h ago
i know ! its so stupid, all they have to do is ask people what they want and give it to them, but they can't piss of billionaires so they're stuck with 'its not our fault' and 'minorities can hang as long as they work'
The republicans only ask billionaires what they want, politics are so much easier when your entire party is focused on the interests of like 1000 guys
ses1984 · 3h ago
Are we forgetting fox news, rush limbaugh...?
Jgoauh · 3h ago
i don't think the ven diagram between people who watch tiktoks and rush limbaugh has much overlap. I think the republicans strategy towards social media platforms is extremely effective (sadly)
nonethewiser · 3h ago
Or maybe a consolidated media industry is just not representative of what people actually believe.
Jgoauh · 3h ago
well i believe media definitle affects what people believe, of course it only works to a limit, but i don't think a single person should own multiple media outlets. You gotta choose, you get 1 thing, that's it
slipperydippery · 3h ago
We used to limit local market monopolization and total reach of, at least, public airwaves broadcasters.
That was a good idea. But we stopped.
nonethewiser · 3h ago
Seems to be working itself out. Mainstream, traditional, legacy, or whatever you want to call it, is losing their audience.
Cyberdog · 3h ago
Yes, given that Limbaugh has not produced new content in four years due to his death, there would be no overlap nowadays.
slipperydippery · 3h ago
The current far-right effort started with the postwar "think tank" boom, and that crowd has been working (successfully) to bend policy and law so they can enable and guide the creation of massive right-wing propaganda networks since the 70s. Fox News, Sinclair Media, a handful of dominant AM radio and now podcast production & distribution networks, and so on.
This isn't recent; we've been heading this way for decades, and not by accident.
Jgoauh · 3h ago
absolutly but i think a big percentage of the young Rep votes have been entirely endoctrinated by a handfull of social media voices who would have hated the traditionnal rep propaganda. I wonder how american politics would look today without the 3 idiots and their friends
_DeadFred_ · 1h ago
Don't forget Tennent media and secret Russian funding for conservative bloggers.
mindslight · 2h ago
They answer is that they're both funded by and held hostage by entrenched corporate interests. The Democrats in safe blue states are allowed to say and propose whatever lofty reforms they'd like (more fuel for the fire), but when it comes time to vote on a bill, the "moderates" in purple states fall in line to kill it and/or add enough loopholes and pork that the reforms end up pretty hollow. They're also fully supported when they ham up the identity politics and other divisive topics that encourage the plebs to fight one another.
The voting public gets tired of the squabbling and seeing the constructive type of reform fail, and switches its attention to the other professional party. The "reforms" then put forth by Republicans are all about getting rid of restrictions on corporate interests, appealing to a fallacy that restrictions on corpos are akin to restrictions on individuals (from the same vein as Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"). When the Republicans get the green light, it's then full speed ahead for sidelining the US government in favor of unaccountable corporate power - as we've seen demonstrated in stark relief with Trump.
People will then slowly realize they've been had, and support for Democrats will grow. But any attempt to rebuild what got destroyed then fails (the original dynamic), and the cycle repeats.
jmclnx · 3h ago
Need to keep the donations from the top 1% flowing. What is needed is a repeal of Citizens United.
Plus if your income is above sat 150,000 USD you can at most donate say 10000 per year to all political candidates, PACs and anything related to influencing political activities.
Or better yet, all these donations must be fully published with the name of the people or all companies related to the company donating. No dark money at all. The published list must be in plain language and downloadable as a plain Text File.
Jgoauh · 3h ago
In many countries an individual cannot donate more than about 10k dollars per year, and companies can't donate anything.
thisisnotauser · 4h ago
This seems like yet another a hilariously disastrous misstep on the part of the Democrats, dark money and restricted speech and red tape. Have they considered just, you know, talking to people on the internet? The way normal humans do? The way Trump has done with such wildly incredible success?
HankStallone · 3h ago
The problem is, they don't like normal people. They don't trust them or think their opinions have value, and they've made that clear over the last several years. It took a while, but the normal people have finally started to get it.
It wasn't always that way. Democrats like Bill Clinton used to be able to go out and talk to normal people and make them feel like he liked them and sympathized with them. I remember when Clinton came to my town after the 1993 Mississippi flood, and even Republicans who met him were impressed and felt like he really cared. It may have been fake (as it certainly is with most Republicans), but he could pull it off. They can't anymore; the contempt is too strong. There's not a single prominent Democrat whom normal people look at and feel like he or she cares about them.
bigthymer · 3h ago
> There's not a single prominent Democrat whom normal people look at and feel like he or she cares about them.
What about Bernie, AOC, Zohran? I think there are a few but probably none of the establishment ones.
hnuser123456 · 3h ago
The DNC sidelined Bernie like you wouldn't believe as soon as it became clear he had potential to be elected. During one of his April 2016 rallies they livestreamed a "reporter" onsite talking about her drunken adventures the previous night rather than showing his speech, the cheers, and the line around the block to get in, that was going on behind her at the time. AOC made no notable efforts to be genuinely inclusive. Zohran is still trying to reach the caliber to be a contender listed next to the other two names and sounds like the infighting is already coming for him.
jdoliner · 3h ago
The problem is that the DNC establishment feels the same way about Bernie, AOC and Zohran as it does about the normal people that they can't talk to.
HankStallone · 3h ago
I almost mentioned Bernie, but his appeal seems limited to people who are very interested in politics and socialism. I'm not sure I'd classify them as "normal." Openly calling himself a socialist is always going to make that a hard sell with normal Americans outside certain groups. Normal Americans don't mind a fair bit of socialism (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, farm subsidies, etc.), but they don't like calling it that.
AOC? Normal people think she's nuts because she's been propped up as "far-left" to make the rest of the party look moderate, but it's not working as well as it used to.
Mamdani hasn't been prominent long enough to say, but his biggest surge in votes came from high turnout among well-off progressive whites, the group that's most out-of-touch with normal people. He also got the youth vote, which is famously fickle. The working-class and poor vote went to Cuomo, so I'd say Mamdani has some work to do to reach "normal people" outside some NYC enclaves. He also has the same limitation Bernie has of labeling himself a socialist.
No comments yet
alchemist1e9 · 3h ago
Yes what a great strategy to embrace the failed ideas of socialism!
You realize support among hispanics will drop to almost zero with that strategy because they know from experience in Latin and South America that such crazy ideas bring nothing but misery to everyone.
No comments yet
blargthorwars · 3h ago
I'm a Republican: I think Bernie Sanders actually cares and isn't a lizard person.
actionfromafar · 3h ago
I wonder if it's something in the water. (Or that money=free speech.) The Republicans also stopped listening and going out to meet people and see them. It's all a photo op now, and somehow Obamas fault.
selimthegrim · 3h ago
AOC? Really?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 3h ago
I do talk to you people like a normal human - I constantly belittle and insult you!
stickfigure · 3h ago
To put this as politely as possible, none of the normal (adult) humans I know talk like Trump.
nonethewiser · 3h ago
Then you might be living in an information silo
murph-almighty · 1h ago
What state do you live in, and what is the density of your neighborhood (e.g. urban, suburban, rural)?
stickfigure · 18m ago
California rural.
slipperydippery · 3h ago
In his first campaign especially, he talked exactly like a normal Republican voter. They say shit like "why don't they just build a wall?" (or they might suggest planting minefields along the border, super-common suggestion from R voters) and hate trade with China (so does a good chunk of the left... neoliberalism was never popular, "both sides" of politicians just agreed on it, until Trump) and want to lock up all the democrats and simply round up and deport all "the illegals" by any means necessary. His stuff he's doing with the military, sending them in to cities? They love that shit, they've wanted it to happen for years, they don't understand the legality, that they have hilariously wrong understandings of what cities are like due to propaganda and their own lack of experience with them, any of that, they just want "scumbags" beat up and thrown in vans. Truly, talk to them, I'm not exaggerating.
That's how he won, he exploited the gap between Republican voters and Republican politicians. As soon as I heard him sounding exactly like your average R voter chattin' at a diner, I knew he was dangerous and we were in for a wild ride.
estearum · 3h ago
To suggest the right wing media ecosystem is "just talking to people on the Internet" is hilariously divorced from reality.
That just seems like an influence campaign. I expect every country to try to meddle in each other's politics, for their own gain.
Also Tim Pool? Rubin? Those are small fries. Putin couldn't afford Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro?
estearum · 3h ago
Right... that's how influence campaigns work. They take root at low-level inputs and get laundered onto larger and more legitimate platforms.
A brief visit to Twitter will show you the hordes of bots constantly farming outrage bait, which then gets picked up by the micro-influencers, which then gets picked up (with some FSB financial assistance) by Tim Pool, Rubin, and Benny Johnson, which then gets picked up by Rogan and Shapiro, which then gets picked up by the Department of Homeland Security's official press releases and finally encoded into next week's executive order.
This is a description of a successful information op.
(Edit: The other commenter is correct that this is also happening within the BLM and BLM-adjacent movements and the green party -- all the same dynamic, but only one has found a direct route to an especially mercurial president's ear)
reverius42 · 3h ago
Do you mean Tim "White House Press" Pool? Not such small fries anymore.
If you are losing the chess game to adveraries who started playing the game mere months ago, you need to strip your play down to the bare fundamentals and start anew. What you've been doing isn't working against the softest possible opponents, it's time to pivot.
No comments yet
This type of propaganda may well be counterproductive. Lobotomising your sides' best influencers could ruin their appeal and risk having them create weird echo chambers.
Google says Joe Rogan alone has more than 14 million followers on Spotify and 16.4 million subscribers on YouTube all predominantly male (71-80 percent) as of March 2024
I think I heard about there being disclosure rules for people taking money to promote commercial things. Maybe that needs to apply to politics as well?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/us/politics/kamala-harris...
Just imagine if those funds had instead been used to give the candidate's family members cushy six figure "jobs", or if one of their PACs was burning 5 million dollars a month on the candidate's private legal fees [1] to the tune of well over 100 million dollars in aggregate [2]. That would be truly beyond the pale and I am certain that hard working responsible fiscally conservative persons would be outraged at such naked corruption.
And it would be significantly worse if those aggressive donation emails were designed to systematically trick people into weekly recurring donations when they were only intending to make a one time contribution [3]. Shenanigans indeed!
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/politics/trump-legal-b... [2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trum... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donatio...
Real talk though, of the two major parties in the US: one party is significantly flawed, the other has installed the most obviously unfit excuse for a human as president and is using every ounce of power that it can seize to make that man an unlimited king. He has deployed the military on US soil in peacetime to disappear the homeless; has prioritized sending masked goons onto the streets to snatch men, women, children, regardless if they are elderly or the infirm, at which point they are forced into concentration camps and/or deported to some foreign gulag without an ounce of due process. The economy is in free fall for regular people, the country's top infectious disease experts are being railroaded for having the audacity of knowing things, our crown jewel research infrastructure is being decimated at the same time that the government is taking large ownership stakes in public companies.
If a person can't see the forest for the trees here then the whole idea of America was completely lost on them from the jump. Regardless we're all going to miss it when it's gone.
We have the most incompetent POTUS in history in office right now; he's so stupid he makes GW Bush look like a Rhodes Scholar. And yet, with all that surface area, and Trump at all-time low popularity... nothing exciting is heard from the Dems.
It can backfire. Democrats did it to talkshow-Trump, thinking he'd be easy to crush in the general against stateswoman-Hillary.
This is antisemitic. I don't know how I know, but at this point I know that I just know.
That was a good idea. But we stopped.
This isn't recent; we've been heading this way for decades, and not by accident.
The voting public gets tired of the squabbling and seeing the constructive type of reform fail, and switches its attention to the other professional party. The "reforms" then put forth by Republicans are all about getting rid of restrictions on corporate interests, appealing to a fallacy that restrictions on corpos are akin to restrictions on individuals (from the same vein as Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"). When the Republicans get the green light, it's then full speed ahead for sidelining the US government in favor of unaccountable corporate power - as we've seen demonstrated in stark relief with Trump.
People will then slowly realize they've been had, and support for Democrats will grow. But any attempt to rebuild what got destroyed then fails (the original dynamic), and the cycle repeats.
Plus if your income is above sat 150,000 USD you can at most donate say 10000 per year to all political candidates, PACs and anything related to influencing political activities.
Or better yet, all these donations must be fully published with the name of the people or all companies related to the company donating. No dark money at all. The published list must be in plain language and downloadable as a plain Text File.
It wasn't always that way. Democrats like Bill Clinton used to be able to go out and talk to normal people and make them feel like he liked them and sympathized with them. I remember when Clinton came to my town after the 1993 Mississippi flood, and even Republicans who met him were impressed and felt like he really cared. It may have been fake (as it certainly is with most Republicans), but he could pull it off. They can't anymore; the contempt is too strong. There's not a single prominent Democrat whom normal people look at and feel like he or she cares about them.
What about Bernie, AOC, Zohran? I think there are a few but probably none of the establishment ones.
AOC? Normal people think she's nuts because she's been propped up as "far-left" to make the rest of the party look moderate, but it's not working as well as it used to.
Mamdani hasn't been prominent long enough to say, but his biggest surge in votes came from high turnout among well-off progressive whites, the group that's most out-of-touch with normal people. He also got the youth vote, which is famously fickle. The working-class and poor vote went to Cuomo, so I'd say Mamdani has some work to do to reach "normal people" outside some NYC enclaves. He also has the same limitation Bernie has of labeling himself a socialist.
No comments yet
You realize support among hispanics will drop to almost zero with that strategy because they know from experience in Latin and South America that such crazy ideas bring nothing but misery to everyone.
No comments yet
That's how he won, he exploited the gap between Republican voters and Republican politicians. As soon as I heard him sounding exactly like your average R voter chattin' at a diner, I knew he was dangerous and we were in for a wild ride.
https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-presidential...
Also Tim Pool? Rubin? Those are small fries. Putin couldn't afford Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro?
A brief visit to Twitter will show you the hordes of bots constantly farming outrage bait, which then gets picked up by the micro-influencers, which then gets picked up (with some FSB financial assistance) by Tim Pool, Rubin, and Benny Johnson, which then gets picked up by Rogan and Shapiro, which then gets picked up by the Department of Homeland Security's official press releases and finally encoded into next week's executive order.
This is a description of a successful information op.
(Edit: The other commenter is correct that this is also happening within the BLM and BLM-adjacent movements and the green party -- all the same dynamic, but only one has found a direct route to an especially mercurial president's ear)
(edit: context) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/maga-commentator-who...
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/i-told-you-so