Alex Haurie | APRIL 2025

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       In the last four years of our media consumption, one thing has become very apparent, and that is the politicization of almost everything in America. From regular politics, town halls, video games, movies to even local grocery stores. Anything and everything in our daily lives now has some political influence over it. The result of this stems from growth in effectiveness of right leaning political messaging and how they target daily experiences of the everyday American on how these experiences may or may not affect them. Left leaning messaging however has not kept up with their opposite, which has led to broken messages that lead to little outreach and at times fall flat. But how did this happen? What led to this snowballing of very heavy sided political content and messaging from one side and not the other? We have to see how both political sides have changed in the face of advancing technologies.

       With the rapid evolution of the Internet, media and news consumption has changed drastically over time. The days of getting your news from the TV and paper are gone, now you go to websites and podcasts for your information. This started back in 2016, conservative speakers began blowing up on the internet for creating controversies across North America with a message that resonated with people. Jordan Peterson was one of the first popular conservative personalities to hit the online mainstream with his rhetoric on the Canadian C-16 bill which was about gender rights for women and specifically transgender people. Many people across North America rallied behind his words and began searching for him on platforms like Youtube and twitter where his popularity would continue to grow. Taking advantage of this popularity, Jordan Peterson began to spread his outreach to very popular podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience and that opened the door to many more conservative speakers who decided to use this opportunity to start building an infrastructure of online conservative messaging through different speakers. Ben Shapiro would go on to create “The Daily Wire” in 2015 and would slowly build a network of conservative speakers who would all work together to spread republican messaging through the internet. Through this they gave themselves the nickname “The Intellectual Dark Web” which consisted of Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin and Steven Crowder. They made youtube videos, podcasts and live web shows where their mission was to constantly attack left stream media. As more people shifted away from news outlets on television and moved to the internet, the hold that outlets like the daily wire began to grow. But as this conservative growth was beginning, what were liberals doing to compete? Nothing.

       Left leaning content didn’t start gaining traction on the internet until much later and have been severely behind conservative movements. Even today in 2025, there is currently no big internet personality on the left that even remotely has the same reach or influence as Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan. The left movement currently doesn't do anything to cultivate an audience and their messaging from one person to the other is so different that they cannot get behind a message. Infighting between left content creators is very common in the online space which does nothing but divide their own communities and makes it so much harder to unite together. Personalities like Hasan Piker and Destiny who can be seen currently as the two most popular left leaning speakers in the space have had an ongoing blood feud since 2020. This leads to their audiences fighting each other venomously to the point where nothing gets done as they are too busy infighting. Meanwhile, conservatives are running laps around them creating a uniting message that destroys any chance for a left leaning message to thrive.

      If democrats want any form of hope of regaining the online audience which has become a majority of Americans, they need to create these open spaces, platforms and speakers that can all come to an agreement under a unifying message to combat the conservative messaging space that the republicans have spent years cultivating.