There was a specific moment that made Kat Abughazaleh realize the Democrats needed a new approach, and that maybe she could have a role to play. After years of warning politicians and the media about the right’s online tactics as a journalist, she watched everything she was afraid of play out during Trump’s 2025 inauguration.
“Everyone was sitting behind Trump [tech industry leaders like Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook], and I was like, ‘Okay, maybe, maybe this is an exception.’ Maybe [Democrats will] do something. And then they just didn't,” she says. “I just wrote in my planner that day: ‘I'm gonna run for Congress. Fuck it’.”
The 26-year-old blonde-haired, blue-eyed Palestinian journalist first built a career dispelling disinformation and exposing the alt-right for publications like Media Matters and Mother Jones, using TikTok to share her research because she saw the writing on legacy media’s wall years ago. Now she’s running for Congress on a platform that feels ripped from a progressive Reddit thread or lefty Discord chat logs, with the hope that she’ll be a blueprint for other young folks to run for office.
Her run for Chicago’s 9th District began just this past March and will continue through 2026, with the primary in March ahead of the election in November. Her campaign has faced criticism from both the right and the left: Some have suggested that her recent move to Chicago (personal, not political), along with her not living in the confines of the 9th District, makes her a potential politician unaware of what the district needs. (Abughazaleh began her run against incumbent Democrat Jan Schakowsky, who announced her retirement in early May.) Others have suggested her internet fame means nothing in the Congressional arena.
Her campaign appears, at a glance, to be Very Online—with clapbacks, clever videos, and a keen eye for what can be meme-ed or mocked. But can that translate to the real world, especially for someone so young, and with so little tangible political experience?
Abughazaleh routinely calls out establishment Democrats, dresses down detractors who rely on misogynistic tropes, has scared the shit out of Tucker Carlson, been blocked by rabid anti-LGBTQ+ poster Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok) for years, and recently spent a lengthy deposition (“seven hours of the funniest transcript and video and I’ve never looked hotter,” she says) systematically tearing down the right-wing talking points of Elon Musk’s lawyers. Her required Congressional financial disclosures show just how little journalists make (she was salaried at $40,775 dollars with Media Matters), while her social media feeds show just how much shit they take. The results of her campaign are a long ways away, but her positions and how she communicates them are already speaking to a generation of young voters who feel disenfranchised and frustrated by the way the American government has operated in the post-Obama era.
Abughazaleh and I talk over FaceTime in early May, just a few days after an indistinguishable rightwing content creator wondered in a video if she was “just an e-thot flexing her Zoomer clout for votes” while showing a picture of her in a bar, wearing a black crop top, black denim shorts, and black fishnets.
Abughazaleh’s fashion preferences are regularly trotted out to try to discredit her, with a recent, pervy essay from the Chicago Contrarian calling her a “social contagion” and referencing an old Instagram post in which she wears black lingerie and fishnet stockings.“Conservative men be normal about me once challenge,” she posted on Twitter.
“A lot of campaigns, especially establishment campaigns, would be like, ‘delete your social media,’” Abughazaleh says. “I kept it up very purposely—pictures of me bartending, that video of me taking a shot of Malort, or me in a Charizard onesie. Because first off, politicians are just people, and I think it's fine to have someone in an office who has fun and a personality, but also they just latch on to that…And you can just turn it around and be like, ‘Oh no, don't show everyone that I'm hot and fun and worked a service industry job.’ Nooo, don't do that.”
White House counselor Alina Habba recently did this to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, showcasing the right’s tendency to use service work to denigrate women they’re afraid of. But Abughazaleh, unlike so many establishment Dems seemingly determined to play nice and safe in the face of rampant fascism (Tim Walz, who reinvigorated a young Democratic base by calling the GOP weird before he was muzzled by his own party, recently told Politico his presidential campaign with Kamala Harris should have “rolled the dice more”), can and will clap back.
While people desperately search for “left-wing Joe Rogan” who can successfully blend culture with politics so that the former affects the latter, Abughazaleh brings a combination of a shit-poster’s biting wit and the research-backed expertise of a journalist to actual politics with her Congressional run. She declares it’s time for establishment Democrats to “drop the excuses and grow a fucking spine.” As the far right subsumes more of the internet, her website lists Musk, Raichik, and Carlson as “anti-endorsements,” and she turned the aforementioned Chicago Contrarian smear article into a nine-and-a-half-minute YouTube video.
“I’ve been called a slut, a whore, DEI Barbie, and every other name you could think of. Basically, I’m a woman who should keep her mouth shut and her legs spread, but instead, I ran for Congress. And the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings crowd’ seems to have a lot of feelings about it,” she says in the video.
Abughazaleh knows the online right’s tactics because she researched them for years. She’s well-versed in how the hateful ideologies they spread can bleed into our real world with relative ease.
“The Twitter main character of the day might not matter in the electorate, but the way the internet shapes politics now is very different from 2005…GamerGate and shit like that fed into Trump, Tucker Carlson used to farm stories from 4Chan to talk about on Fox…these things are very real, and the ways they affect us are very real,” she says.
This “wires to the weeds” method, where things that happen online spread to the real world, has worked for right-wingers: After the first iteration of GamerGate in 2014, Trump’s former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon admitted to utilizing angry gamers to help boost the then-candidate’s reach and commandeer the 2016 election by flooding the playing field with shit. The establishment left has harnessed it with less success; Democrats have plans to pay influencers to try to take a slice of that digital pie in an attempt to build an influencer army like the one that helped push Trump into a second presidency. But it’s difficult to inorganically grow an ecosystem of rabid supporters, especially when popular sites like YouTube and now Twitter are funneling users towards more reactionary content.
The right’s hateful ideologies used to remain on the margins of the internet, in spaces like 8Chan and KiwiFarms. Now, they’re taking over mainstream platforms like Twitter and YouTube. Streaming sites like Twitch have spawned numerous high-profile, reactionary content creators like Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt, who recently signed with the considerably more right-leaning platform Kick, just seven months after he was temporarily banned from Twitch for a racist rant against Palestinians.
The right has claimed a huge chunk of digital real estate, and now major social platforms are only increasing their square footage. This all happened, at least somewhat, organically, as widespread tech industry layoffs kneecapped trust and safety teams and platforms rolled back hate speech protections after leaders cozied up to Trump and his lackeys. Instead of dying after being exposed to sunlight, these reactionary beliefs survived, evolving ever so slightly to be somewhat more palatable to the general public. Today, most of the popular conservative content creators are savvy enough to avoid spewing outright slurs, but pepper their social media accounts with dog whistles.
The left may not be able to create a similarly successful network of influencers, or take back internet spaces covered in reactionary slime, but it can lean into its more internet-savvy, progressive candidates and let them loose. It’s unclear if Democrats will shift away from Michelle Obama’s 2016 imploration to “go high” when conservatives go low and more towards what we briefly got a taste of when Tim Walz first stepped onto the campaign stage. Will Dems embrace the “dark woke,” an ideology that, according to The New York Times, is “an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing…being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point”? Or will they continue to try to “play nice” with a party increasingly overrun with zealots?
Abughazaleh’s Congressional campaign could bridge this gap. However, that campaign faces challenges on the ground. She’s new to Chicago, having moved there last summer with her partner Ben Collins, who purchased the Chicago-based satire publication The Onion from my former employer, G/O Media, in April of last year. She doesn’t live in the 9th District where she’s running, though she told the Chicago Tribune she intends to move there. “There are plenty of districts that would be easier to carpetbag,” she told the outlet, referring to criticisms of her campaign. “I want to live where I want to live and run because it’s something I believe.”
But more than which district she lives in, there’s also the question of where she spends her time (online) and how (or if) that will translate to real-world action or appeal to real-world voters. Political strategist and Chicagoan Kitty Kurth recently suggested that Abughazaleh’s ability to get TikTok views won’t translate to votes at the polls, telling the Chicago Tribune in the aforementioned article that “it’s about knowing how to organize volunteers…you need someone who knows how to recruit volunteers and what to do with volunteers once you get them, and how to run a field operation. I don’t know that [Abughazaleh] has worked in a political organization, volunteered on a campaign, or knows what it’s like to run a petition drive.”
Abughazaleh recently announced the creation of a volunteer Discord server, asking for people to join who have “ideas or skills” that could help her campaign. She began holding daily office hours from 12-6, and wants her campaign office to become “a community space where people can pick up resources,” asking for donations of canned food, period products, Narcan, and nail clippers. She ran a food drive for Evanston Community Fridge, picketed with Northwestern University’s dining hall workers, walked in the recent anti-ICE protests, and hopes to teach potential constituents how to knit at her rather spacious campaign office. There is a concerted effort to make a local difference, to focus efforts and funds raised on mutual aid, to “materially improve as many lives as [she] can,” she tells me.
Part of that mutual aid has involved helping people run against her: She tells me she has a hard out during our chat because “someone is coming in today that wants to run against me, so I’m going to show her how to go through the FEC [Federal Election Commission] paperwork. Primaries should be competitive.”
This commitment to helping her ostensible opponents was recently taken up by another progressive candidate who’s proven popular online (and in the polls, something Abughazaleh has not faced yet); in mid-May, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani asked potential donors to instead send their money to New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is also running for mayor, in an attempt to block former governor and noted sex pest Andrew Cuomo from winning the Democratic primary in June. While Mamdani differs from Abughazaleh in that he’s been an elected politician since 2021 and is running for an entirely different office, the online reach of his campaign echoes hers, as does his demand that Democrats stop toeing the libertarian line and adopt more leftist ideologies.
These campaigns that blend the local and online are fairly new conceits (though they might remind New Yorkers of City Councilperson Chi Ossé’s 2021-2022 campaign), and they may not be successful–while Mamdani leads other Democrat mayoral candidates, and a recent (albeit small) poll has him ahead of Cuomo, he still faces a challenge–but they mark the left’s first real and consistent attempt to harness the power of shitposting and online organizing in a post-Trump landscape.
Both their campaigns draw on the enthusiasm of an audience tired of how the United States is a gerontocracy, run by desiccated Boomers who leave behind empty seats during one of the most crucial times in modern politics, with tight majorities and charged rhetoric edging us closer to the precipice of fascism. But by harnessing the power of the internet to get young folks out not just to the polls, but also to file their FEC forms, Abughazaleh hopes to take everything she’s learned about modern politics and political tactics and do something tangible.
“I want to give a permission structure to people—you don’t have to wait, no one is going to come and save us. We have to save ourselves,” Abughazaleh says. “If you want to run, do it, and this is how you do it.”
