In Marianne 2024, Progressive Pundits Desperate to Recreate Bernie Magic
The online progressive indie media ecosystem owes its existence to the Democratic primaries of 2016. The Bernie Sanders campaign served as a red pill moment for progressive Democrats who all of the sudden saw their party’s true colors for the first time, and it happened just as the podcast/YouTube world was becoming more mainstream and accessible to mass audiences.
The Bernie vs. Hillary saga, in addition to providing an endless supply of emotionally charged content, also served as a built-in narrative arc for shows like The Young Turks, Secular Talk, The Humanist Report, and others. Just as most successful television series contain episodic stories within an overarching plot, these lefty online programs covered each and every development of the campaign as part of a larger story unfolding in real time, ensuring their audience would be back for more.
And even after the primary ended, online creators were further blessed with the most darkly comic general election in history, followed by the Trump years, and then again by a second Sanders run.
Since the election of Joe Biden, however, the progressive media hustle has become a far greater challenge than ever before. This, to be clear, is not for a lack of material; the Build Back Better debacle, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Twitter Files, the Republican #ForceTheVote throwdown, and, most recently, the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, have all given content creators the chance to sink their teeth into important and consequential stories and provide alternative perspectives to the mainstream media.
But presidential campaigns come with the unique benefit of essentially writing themselves, making the day-to-day duties of online commentators far easier than having to sort through dozens of different stories and choose which ones to cover and how to approach them. Elections are simple good vs. evil stories in which one hero character must overcome numerous obstacles, beat the odds, and defeat their villainous opponent. They’re the kinds of popcorn movies that audiences crave, and when done well, are almost always box office gold.
And so now, as the 2024 primary season begins, many in online left media are, for the first time ever, faced with the bleak reality of a presidential campaign with no candidate to support. Their story has no protagonist. There’s no Rocky Balboa in the ring. No Atticus Finch in the courtroom. Any screenwriting teacher would insist such a dynamic spells certain doom for a Hollywood script.
Undoubtedly, professional YouTubers who made their bones in 2016 are aware of this looming catastrophe in which a presdidential election will come and go without the massive boost in engagement, subscriptions, and donations that comes with championing a candidate and confirming the biases of their most avid supporters.
It is for this reason that so many of these pundits are so desperately trying to sell their followers on Marianne Williamson’s 2024 primary challenge to Joe Biden. Despite her non-existent polling support as of last week, and 4% support this week after being proposed by Morning Consult as the sole alternative to Biden, many in progressive media are pitching Marianne’s campaign as a blockbuster threequel to the two Sanders efforts in hopes of recreating the same spike in viewership that accompanied them.
At first glance, this seems like a rational business decision, albeit a shallow and cynical one. The only problem is that by the third time around, many in this space have already come to know how this movie ends: dashed hopes, deflating defeat, and a reluctant Blue-No-Matter-Who endorsement from the candidate which fractures their coalition. Who’s buying a ticket to see that?
Marianne 2024 is a non-starter for the same reason they never made Million Dollar Baby 2. Audiences wouldn’t have lined up the first time if they knew Maggie Fitzgerald would end up sucker-punched, paralyzed, and euthanized. They sure as hell couldn’t be fooled again, unless of course, they were the contingent of progressive Democrats who seem eager to waste yet another chapter of their lives trying to win a rigged game.
And so I implore these hapless patsies to understand that while Marianne will lose her primary and bend the knee to the DNC (please stop with the delusional “dirty break” talk, we’ve addressed that already in case you’re interested), the progressive media personalities promoting her now will have fared very well by the end of this affair if they manage to make loyal viewers out of you right now. And that’s where their motivation begins and ends.
They’ll tell you that the alternative to buying into Marianne is detachment and despair, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Kshama Sawant’s Workers Strike Back labor movement is a ray of hope that I’d encourage everyone to look into. Mutual aid efforts to communities in crisis like Flint and East Palestine are both practical and fulfilling ways to get involved and make a difference. The anti-war movement, while far smaller than it should be, is trying to make a comeback. Marianne-backing podcast hosts could devote their channels to these struggles if they wanted to, but that would be far more difficult and far less lucrative.
They’d rather attempt a Hangover 3-style reincarnation of the Bernie campaigns - slightly straying from the formula while rehashing the same basic themes. Of course, The Hangover 3 sucked, because ultimately there was no more juice to squeeze from that fruit, but it did make a lot of money.
The same applies here. Those propping up Marianne will win either way if they can successfully make suckers out of their viewers, the only ones who will have truly wasted their time and effort when it’s all said and done, and the ad revenue is in the bank. Don’t get fooled a third time.
What a scathing rebuke of the "progressive media" scam. I love it! I could hear Kule Kulinski's predictable lecture against "giving up" while reading it. It's an insightful piece on how even these perhaps once well-intentioned cheerleaders for the Sanders "movement" (as we all were at some time) have still fallen into the trap of all content creators: stick to your brand and please the algorithm gods- or go back to your day job. Facing that reality, it's not surprising that most YouTubers, after a taste of monetization and free time, will sell us out.
As for Marianne, her 2020 campaign was doomed, not just because it was on the Democrat party ticket, but because she made ADOS reparations its central tenet. To her credit, she's correct that it needs to be addressed; and, up to the point where she STILL says "we" need to keep voting blue (gag me with a spoon) she's a fairly savvy politician and far moreso than the "Orb Mom" and other epithets with which she was dismissed.
HOWEVER. When we can't even get the country to quit bitching about Medicare for All, in what reality did she ever think she was gonna get past the "bUt hOw yA gUnNa pAy fEr iT?" of a multi-trillion dollar reparations bill? Not to mention that, while the country is speeding off a climate cliff and millions of all ethnicities are struggling just to stay housed and fed every month, trying to convince people that ADOS was our national top priority was just absurd.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a valid thing unto itself in terms of being justified and necessary; but to run on it in an already-doomed primary gambit and think she'd win was delusional. It will be amusing to see, if Marianne repeats that performance in the next primary, how David Doel etc. are going to sell people on that.
When these online personalities are labeled grifters, I think a lot of us mistakenly take it to mean they're being paid by billionaires or (lol) by Russia. No, we're their marks. They're swindling us out of our efforts and precious energy, and selling it to YouTube as scrap.