Breaking the growing right-wing grip on cultural media

Plus, big wins for democracy, Captain Jack Sparrow, and fed-up workers

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.

Tonight, we’re talking about young voters, far-right moneymen, news consumption, and how to shift cultural values through new kinds of media. It’s a continuation of sorts of my piece from Monday night, which has received a lot of great feedback from readers. (Apologies if I haven’t yet responded to your email or comment, I’ve been doing lots of traveling for work!)

One more thing: This has been a very slow month for new paid subscribers, a problem compounded by the fact that I already lowered the price to Substack’s $5 minimum. I happily give away subscriptions to those who can’t afford them, and that won’t change, but the slowdown is troubling.

As we’ll discuss tonight, building and scaling up a sustainable infrastructure of progressive independent media is one of the most vital tasks of our time.

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1️⃣ Utah Republicans’ plot to obliterate the citizen ballot initiative process was tossed by a judge on Thursday. Judge Dianna Gibson ruled that the amendment was invalid because the legislature gave it a very misleading ballot description, suggesting that it would “strengthen” the initiative process despite actually granting lawmakers the power to gut them entirely. Lawmakers may appeal to the state Supreme Court.

2️⃣ The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that school privatization vouchers are unconstitutional. This is an enormous decision from a very conservative court, especially because it’s based on a 1972 amendment that guaranteed all children a free public school education after decades of attempts to keep schools segregated.

3️⃣ Union production workers at Boeing rejected a tentative contract agreement, triggering a strike that begins at midnight PST. A whopping 94.6% of those who voted said no to the deal. Workers said the deal fell far short of requirements on pay, pension, and overtime. Here's my report from July on negotiations, issues facing the 33,000 workers, and the decades that led to this moment.

4️⃣ Big labor news in Disneyland. The NLRB ruled that Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Captain Jack Sparrow can join the union that currently represents Green Army Men from Toy Story, the Avengers, and Simba. Please read this excerpt.

5️⃣ Joe Manchin endorsed former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan for Senate. how excited are you to not hear from that asshole after this year?

Piercing the trust in right-wing media is an urgent task

Tonight I’m from Chicago, where we are spending our last night of the More Perfect Union retreat after three days in Wisconsin. We’ve spent a lot of time in union halls and small former factory cities, where the remaining residents are fighting hard to reimagine their identities and rebuild their main streets and economies after decades of deindustrialization and decline.

A sense of abandonment unites these towns, but they’re also politically split. They were built around corporate manufacturing plants that powered their economies, left to wither when those factories idled. Where there is anger at some companies, they is many cases, their budding recoveries are being driven by the emergence of new corporate employers, who are enticed by rich government incentives. Add in decades of conservative messaging and news media bias on behalf of business, and there are some very complicated feelings about corporate America, policy, and politics.

Older union leaders, who either lost their jobs or saw many of their coworkers get laid off, know that Republicans are the party trying to decimate the organized labor movement and roll back workers’ rights everywhere. They largely indicated support for Democrats, though often with caveats — it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA and trade normalization with China, while foreclosures devastated communities during the Obama years.

Younger union workers, who were either kids when the factories shut down or not even born yet, didn’t harbor those resentments or really remember life before the decline. They were more likely to be attracted to the false machismo of Republicans, as well as their rhetoric about business and taxes. On the one hand, it’s understandable — tax incentives are bringing corporations to town, and corporations are the ones who signed their checks.

At the same time, I would bet that they weren’t all that aware of the deluge of corporate lawsuits seeking to blow up the NLRB, or the lobbying that business groups do to weaken heat and other protections (or prevent them from ever passing). That’s not really their fault — there’s very little coverage of this stuff, and most of it (aside from the videos I continue to produce and stories I write, obviously), is pretty damn dry.

These are guys who said they get their news from Reddit and TikTok, as well as podcasters like Joe Rogan, which goes a long way toward understanding their political sensibilities. Some of them were just 18 years old, others were in their mid-to-late 20s, but demographically, they’re all in what should be the time in which their beliefs run furthest to the left.

Coincidentally, UCLA sent out the results of a new national survey of young voters today, and it contained some very interesting data about voting and media intake. First, here’s how Gen Z consumes (or doesn’t consume) the news:

These numbers aren’t shocking — last year, a poll by Pew Research found that 38% of respondents across all age groups were regular news consumers — but drilling further down into the data offers some serious cause for concern.

Of those 30% of regular Gen Z news consumers, just 57% them said they were leaning toward voting for VP Kamala Harris. On the flip side, 70% of those Gen Z members who don’t follow the news were either dead set against voting for Harris or not yet sure who they’d support.

It’s clear that a lot of work needs to be done to not only turn young people into more regular news consumers but to steer them toward progressive media that can reliably engage them and earn their trust. And that’s going to be much harder when Federalist Society supervillain Leonard Leo begins pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into his plans to de-woke the news.

“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told The Financial Times this week.

Armed with more than a billion dollars and a series of complex legal scam networks that can maximize his dark money, Leo says he plans on investing in a media company next year and wants to find ways of “reintroducing limited constitutional government and a civil society premised on freedom and personal responsibility and the virtues of western civilization.”

Abortion bans and pregnancy tracking, of course, are great examples of “limited constitutional government” as well as “a civil society premised on freedom.”

Leo also said that he wanted to eradicate the “woke mind virus,” which should give you some idea of how deranged the most powerful people in this country have become.

Nonetheless, his impending investment in further beefing up the already dominant conservative media puts us at an even further disadvantage. As far as I can tell, there are no deep-pocketed and benevolent funders that are going to pour millions of dollars into progressive long-term media plans that generally don’t show immediate results or directly impact the presidential election at hand.

In the meantime, odious and racist lies about people of color are going to continue to spread and lead to violence thanks to the power of far-right media and a compromised mainstream media. The only alternative is to help build up a new alternative media, a web of individuals and organizations that can tell stories about policy and culture and change, slowly shifting away from people’s default cynicism and into a new era of believing good things are possible.

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