My Experiment with the “Progressive Media” Problem
There are parts of “progressive media” I want nothing to do with.
If you’ve been with Un-Diplomatic a while, you might’ve noticed that over the Christmas holidays, there was an eight-week stretch where I was live-streaming a lot on Twitch—2-4 hours at a time, 3-5 times per week. It was an experiment triggered by a number of problems swimming in my head throughout 2024.
The Origin Story
The backdrop was the presidential election, and my not so quiet conviction that Biden/Kamala had zero chance of winning because their ties to the people were totally astroturfed and their policy agenda was bad for the majority of Americans. But the realization that I needed to be thinking more about media came closer to home.
Last year, one of the guys I train jiu jitsu with said he had been listening to my podcast and that he didn’t know what I was talking about half the time. I asked him what he meant. He replied something like,
The words you’re using, bro. I never even heard of those words. Like geopolitics, kuuush (gestures with his hands at his temple like his mind was blown). What even is diplomacy, bro?
Jiu jitsu mats are the only place where you’ll find cops, drug dealers, military vets, college professors, tech bros, Russian mobsters, and real estate developers all spending time together in harmony. That unique cross-class sociality has been part of my life since 2008. And so I’ve always been trapped in some version of a code-switching dilemma: The language we have for talking about war, peace, and class conflict is an unfamiliar one for the masses. And yet, if you can’t persuasively explain something to your Uber driver, you probably don’t understand it as well as you think.
Anyway, I’ve been reminded of that conversation on the mats every time I see people talk about the Democratic Party’s “struggle to win over [content] creators,” the tired discourse about a “Joe Rogan of the Left,” and, more recently, a series of stories revealing that progressive-liberal media itself is chock full of grifters.
Basically, I started to diagnose a problem last year: A systemic failure of the Democratic Party to meet people where they are. Some of that is about rhetoric or communication mediums, but that surface-level failure is bound up with a repudiation of policies that appeal to the interests of people where they are in terms of their class position. An elite project is almost by definition going to be alienating to the masses, and that’s what the Democratic Party had become.
And so I’ve increasingly come around to the idea that good policy relevance should reach the public, and that we’ve been wrong-footed in trying to appeal primarily to oligarchs and Washington technocrats.
But where does a class-focused street preacher of international relations in the 2020s meet the people? Well, according to my Gen Z followers, Twitch. Several readers of this newsletter and listeners of the show had been urging me to get on Twitch for a while. They say young people rarely subscribe to newsletters. They say Twitch is literally where the youngs are. And they say my flavor of analysis speaks to their interests and experiences better than most. There’s a gap in media, and it’s currently being filled by content slop and reactionary politics.
So I thought I’d see if it was possible to build up an audience as an unapologetically antiwar, class-conscious dispenser of hot takes. I’ve had The Un-Diplomatic Podcast since 2019, but I’d never put any effort into marketing it (no time or money). I didn’t even bother setting up the YouTube channel until 2022. And prior to December 2024, YouTube was just a place where I would throw up unedited video from my audio-facing episodes. I hadn’t attempted to build the channel or get to know how success on YouTube worked, and it showed in the fact that I had less than 200 subscribers to the channel as of 2024.
So in December 2024 I got serious about figuring out YouTube at the same time that I ventured into livestreams on Twitch. I wanted to see what it would take to grow Un-Diplomatic’s footprint in the progressive media sphere since nobody in that space was really covering foreign policy.
The good news is that my results from this experiment are validating. In two months, I increased my subscriber count 6x, and got more than 4,000 watch hours in that same period, which is a lot.
The bad news is that Un-Diplomatic is still considered a very small channel, indy media is a crowded (and sometimes corrupt) space, and the sizeable following the show has built in the audio format counts for very little on the new-media platforms. In fact, real “success” on the platforms of the future seems to hinge on two things—having paid sponsors/patrons and appealing to social-media algorithms.
What’s inside:
Manipulating the algorithm
Selling out: Astroturfing your way to political influence