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NDN News: Fox “News” and Getting Louder, MAGA Doesn’t Play In the Battlegrounds, The NDN Transition

Fox “News” and Getting Louder – Over the last few weeks we’ve learned that the leaders of Fox News, from Rupert Murdoch on down, understand that they are a Republican organization pretending to be a news organization. Pretending is the key here. It isn’t just that we now know they lie to their viewers to make money, and have directly encouraged extremists and insurrection, but we also now know that the very idea of Fox "News" is itself a lie, a deeply malicious falsehood, an ongoing elaborate fiction maintained by the anchors and staff there, every day.

Fox News can keep on pretending they are a news organization but there is no reason official Washington must keep playing along. I offer some thoughts about not playing along in a new comprehensive piece in Politico and in a new thread.

A central reason I am shuttering NDN is that I've become convinced that anti-MAGA, pro-democracy forces here in the US have to organize themselves differently to counter the vast, modern propaganda apparatus the American right has built. There is no real analog to it on the left, and the right uses this highly networked media ecosystem to drive and often overwhelm the daily political discourse here in America. I saw this first hand in a very powerful way in my battle against the red wave last year. The red wave was a fiction created by the right and pumped into our politics. It wore people down, and even though there was a lot of data showing that the narrative was a false official Washington could not break free. Tom Bonier and I were even attacked by independent journalists for challenging this right wing fiction – Hopium, conspiracy theories, astrology. All sorts of words were used. And then on election day the fog of the right wing noise machine lifted, and we learned that it was all made up after all. The 2022 election red wave consensus wasn’t just a miss – it was the opposite of what actually happened in the election – which was all about Democratic overperformance. But that the right could get away with something like this red wave campaign changed me. It made me realize that I had to do what I had been doing for years in new ways.

In Greg Sargent’s Washington Post piece on Fox last week he wrote: “Similarly, strategist Simon Rosenberg is urging fellow Democrats to confront Fox News’s mythmaking by “getting loud” themselves, to displace right-wing agitprop with Democrats’ own media-conscious messaging and theater.” Yes I am urging all of us to take more seriously the right’s information superiority and organize ourselves to counter it far more effectively. We all have to get louder; new institutions and capabilities have to get built; and we need to reinvent the War Room for this new networked media age, and get 4m people to see themselves as info warriors, participants in this info battle everyday not just at election time.

In building our response to the right we have to build where media and communications is heading, not where it’s been. It’s why I am setting up shop this week on Substack, a powerful new communications platform It’s why I’ve been promoting four new center-left media organizations, for the use of media organizations to supplement traditional electoral politics has been a central strategy the right has employed for decades. We have too much of our collective capacity sunk into 501 c4s and c3s, who by law are very limited in what they can do and say. Organizations like the ones I hosted a few weeks ago – Meidas Touch, Courier Newsroom, Deep State Radio, Resolute Square – are the future of our politics. The many Zoom-based grassroots organizations which have launched and grown in recent years, and the remote organizing that they do, is the future of our politics. Substack, YouTube, Zoom, podcasts, influencers, video, video, video – the creator economy – is the future of our politics (matches very well with what politicians already do). The right is ahead of us in moving their politics into this new world. I am shuttering NDN and diving into this new world myself. I will still be Simon - liberal, Democrat, strategist, Hopium purveyor - but will be connecting with all of you in new, better and more modern ways.

See this new Daily Beast article on how freshman Rep. Jeff Jackson has broken through on the Internet to get a better idea of what I am talking about. It’s a new day; we are behind; we have a lot of work to do to ensure freedom and democracy prevail. You can find me talking about all of this at length in a new interview with Gen Z activist Victor Shi, and in a Zoom-based discussion I had with the NDN community last week.

My Interview in Politico – Did this interview with Ari Hawkins for Politico last week on 2024:

THREE QUESTIONS WITH… Nightly spoke with Simon Rosenberg, a veteran of two Democratic presidential campaigns and a political strategist with NDN, also known as New Democrat Network, a soon-to-shut-down liberal advocacy and research group that he has led since the 1990s.

You were among the few political strategists who continuously expressed skepticism about the idea of a “red wave” in 2022. Are there any similar forces that you see shaping the 2024 election cycle that will affect Biden’s reelection campaign?

Part of the reason that so many people got the election wrong in 2022, is that they overly discounted the ugliness of MAGA. In the 2018 and 2020 elections, there was an overwhelming vote against MAGA in those two elections, and the Republicans ran towards those politics in 2021, which I felt was a huge error. Usually when a party fails politically they run towards a new politics and not a politics that didn’t work.

Where Republicans have to be worried in 2024 is that the presidential battleground has now voted against MAGA in three consecutive elections. There’s muscle memory in now understanding the dangers of MAGA and the two leading Republican candidates right now, look and feel very MAGA.

For DeSantis and Trump, whoever of the two win the nomination, are going to be entering far more hostile terrain than DeSantis has faced in Florida for example, or Trump did in 2016, because there’s now been three elections in the battleground where Democrats have done well and Republicans haven’t.

Which Republican candidate would be easiest — and most difficult — for Biden to run against in the 2024 race?

I don’t think we have any way of knowing that right now. I think it depends on how the candidates in the Republican primary perform. Certainly, I think there’s still a lot of big questions about DeSantis and his ability at the national level. I think he’s run too far right in a way that it would be difficult to present himself as anything other than a MAGA candidate, which won’t be helpful in the battleground.

We’re favored to win the presidential race in 2024, because the basic dynamic in 2022, which is that basically, we’ve done a good enough job and they’re still a little but too crazy — could still be the basic dynamic in 2024. There will be a sense that, ‘hey, the Democrats, Joe Biden, did a good job. You know, why get rid of them?’ And then you look at the Republicans and they still feel a little bit too crazy. That’s the likely scenario today, but of course, that could change.

If Biden doesn’t run for a second term, will the party immediately coalesce around Vice President Kamala Harris or will there be a contested nomination?

If Joe Biden doesn’t run, Vice President Harris will be the front runner for the Democratic nomination, but there will be a contested and vigorous primary.

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Godspeed, Simon

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