After The Election, Leftist Influencers Are At A Crossroads

Within seconds of left-leaning pundits calling for a “liberal Joe Rogan” the day after Trump’s reelection, the idea had already become a meme. At this point, posts deriding the notion of the massively-popular podcast host, but blue, are at least as numerous as those sincerely endorsing it. The reason is clear: Joe Rogan – the man and the cultural phenomenon – is not something you can simply grow in a tube, though he does look like a homunculus. But these cries elide a more salient point: There is already a left-leaning content creator ecosystem, and the Democratic establishment chooses to ignore large swathes of it.

For the moment, Democrats remain married to networks like MSNBC and CNN, as well as papers like The New York Times, places that will parrot the comforting lie that Kamala Harris lost because her campaign – which went hard on topics like border control and a “lethal” military while failing to take strong stances on trans rights and Palestine – was somehow too woke. News segments and columns suggesting that Dems surrendered former strongholds because they used words like “Latinx” have left even mainstream names like Jon Stewart baffled. 

Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, the internet’s most visible leftist content creator, has been beating a similar drum for the past couple weeks.

"This is a cynical right-wing framing instead of accurately addressing the real problems that the Democratic party has,” Piker recently said while watching a CNN segment in which Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky claimed that the party faltered because of social justice jargon and alleged capitulation in the face of student protests at colleges like Columbia University. “And this is the only thing your parents are watching. Just remember that. The only thing your parents are watching is this kind of dumb, nonsensical bullshit that deflects the actual responsibility away and just looks at the problem and says ‘You know what it is? We just didn’t do more of the thing that actually made people annoyed with us.’"

Piker spent the months leading up to Harris’ defeat decrying her desperate entreaties to a nonexistent midpoint between Democrats and Republicans. He critiqued her failure to offer voters economic policies that might truly fire them up, especially after the campaign brought on Crazy Taxi expert and weirdo identifier Tim Walz, whose track record as governor of Minnesota suggested a focus on such issues. Piker pushed hard against the Democrats’ unwillingness to platform a Palestinian, so much so that it might have gotten him kicked out of his suite at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

On election night, Piker streamed to over 300,000 concurrent viewers. This put him in league with right-wing heavy hitters like Dan Bongino, Steven Crowder, Charlie Kirk, and Tucker Carlson, pillars of an alternative media apparatus that the liberal commentariat now covets. But instead of holding up Piker as an example of what America’s left could use more of, they invented a hypothetical – an uncritical, subservient totem – in Liberal Joe Rogan. To other leftist content creators, this served as evidence that liberals do not understand Rogan or the non-hypothetical alt media ecosystem that already does exist.

"Joe Rogan is not a Ben Shapiro,” Caroline Kwan, a leftist Twitch streamer who covers pop culture, told Aftermath. “He's not Charlie Kirk. You can say he's part of this manosphere that the Republican party has been courting in its election outreach, but Joe Rogan did not come into his success as a podcaster because he was talking about politics or because he was explicitly a conservative. ... Yes, he endorsed Trump, and yes, he certainly expresses opinions and beliefs that are very right-wing in nature, but he also believes in climate change. He's not a straight-up right-wing dude, and that's why people are drawn to him. They're drawn to the culture that Joe Rogan is part of, that he has created in talking about working out, talking about space, talking about being anti-establishment, expressing distrust of authority."

Admittedly, Rogan has moved extremely far to the right in recent years, embracing numerous conspiracy theories as a result of covid-19 vaccines and lockdown measures. Still, as Kwan sees it, there are clear fissures in a right-wing media landscape that people on the outside looking in might be tempted to view as homogenous. 

"You have the right-wing sphere of commentators and pundits like Ben Shapiro. Those guys are funded explicitly by right-wing mega-donors and corporations – the same that would be funding a Fox News,” she said. “They are explicitly ideological in their conservative politics, and they are news, but in a nontraditional format. They're podcasting. They're on YouTube. Then you have the group of, [for example], Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan and Theo Von, where they are not explicitly and totally political. It's something where they are having conversations with a wide range of people, from conspiracy theorists to Marianne Williamson to Donald Trump to some random dude off the street. It's an online culture of talking about anything and everything versus being an extension of a political party."

These less-political personalities helped the Republican party make inroads among low-propensity voters – those who participate in elections infrequently, if at all – to a degree that polls failed to anticipate. While the right-leaning, brain-pill-popping manscape is hardly the only reason such demographics made a rare cameo in voting booths, it’s hard to overstate the impact of Von’s Trump interview, which garnered nearly 15 million views on YouTube, or Adin Ross’ livestream with the then-freshly-traumatized septuagenarian, which peaked at 580,000 concurrent viewers – and both of which allowed viewers, many young and male, to see Trump in a new light. In the latter, Trump often appeared befuddled and out of place, but Ross’ approach made the encounter memorable, gifting Trump a Cybertruck with an image from his own attempted assassination on it. Moments like that outlive a hundred same-y stump speeches. 

Harris, by comparison, played it safe with her online outreach. Yes, she scored the Charli XCX “brat” meme early on, but she ultimately dodged a Rogan appearance of her own due to fear of backlash and instead went on less potentially-controversial shows like “Call Her Daddy,” an advice and comedy podcast, and “All The Smoke,” a podcast hosted by former NBA stars Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes. While those guest spots generated a few headlines, they did not meaningfully move the needle. In the final weeks before the election, Bernie Sanders, Tim Walz, and AOC all made Twitch appearances in support of Harris, but they again steered clear of any remotely-divisive personalities – though Sanders did at least learn what a vtuber is. 

This, former political candidate and current leftist politics streamer Michael “Mike From PA” Beyer told Aftermath, is the difference between how Democrats and Republicans approach content creators. Democrats desire deference; Republicans will go with whatever gets the job done. He used the example of Harry Sisson, a 22-year-old self-described Democrat with 1.5 million followers on TikTok.

"[Sisson will] go and make that classic soy face while standing in the same room as Kamala Harris, right? It's almost like 'Look at how she's our friend,'” Beyer told Aftermath. “They trade on access, and in exchange for access, they offer guerrilla marketing. It's a shill. They say the Democrats are perfect. They're gonna win, and we love them. They're so amazing. Isn't she a queen? There are a lot of Democrat partisans who will watch that, but they're watching for glimpses of Kamala Harris or whatever. The Republican side has less of that, believe it or not. Even the dumbest commentators on Newsmax are talking about issues and having opinions and disagreeing with Mitch McConnell. ... In the Republican party, populist discontent is the mainstream. In the Democratic party, that's excommunicable."

That’s not to say all Democratic politicians staunchly stick to the path of least resistance. AOC has collaborated with Piker, who criticizes the Democratic establishment nearly as much as he goes after Republicans, at various points – first in 2020 to the tune of hundreds of thousands of viewers, and a handful of times since (mostly recently earlier this year). Piker on his face appears to be a pure political commentator, more similar in focus, if not ideological bent, to Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk than Joe Rogan. But that, say other leftist content creators, is a fundamental misunderstanding of his appeal.

"He's charismatic, good looking, and he has all the nerd interests that Twitch viewers like,” said Beyer. “He's a cross-platform star. He has friendships with people who are not political. He's somebody who can span the whole area of Twitch, from gaming to IRL to activities to obviously commentary.”

People who’ve eschewed traditional media in favor of content creators aren’t just looking for information, opinions, or to have preconceived notions validated. They’re looking for aspirational figures – people they can try not just to think like, but be like. That, to some extent, is what a Joe Rogan or a Theo Von or, more regrettably, an Adin Ross offers. It’s also what viewers see in Piker, who posts pics and videos of his fits and his fitness progress in addition to streaming political commentary. 

"Hasan, with his himbo aesthetic and working out and all that is very appealing to a lot of young viewers, a lot of young men who have said 'Yeah, I once upon a time was falling down the alt-right pipeline, and then I found Hasan,’” said Kwan. “‘And now I'm here.'"

Piker has also demonstrated a willingness to engage in lengthy conversations with right-leaning big-name friends (for example, Asmongold and Faze Banks, the latter of whom recently endorsed Trump) that are Rogan-like in vibe but the polar opposite in terms of Piker’s response to his collaborators’ ravings. While things do occasionally get heated, for the most part he listens to what they have to say and draws on a deep well of knowledge to gently push back while avoiding the argumentative fever pitch of a debate. This is the kind of thing Denims, another leftist political streamer, thinks the left needs more of.

"I think [condescension] is a problem that exists on the left,” Denims told Aftermath. “I think everybody who's on the left has known that it's a problem for the longest time. It's very hard to have positions that are left leaning and then educate on why they are the better positions to have without coming off like you're talking down to someone. … The common sense position on immigration would be 'Oh, just close all our borders.' But the reality is, that's not what's going to fix the problem, because that's not what the problem is. So now you have to explain what the problem is, the solution to it, and you have to do it all without being a condescending asshole."

These characteristics, in addition to being in the right place at the right time years ago, have allowed Piker to grow beyond Twitch’s relatively narrow confines. In that regard, at least among leftist streamers, he stands alone. While the right counts among its ranks a whole cinematic universe of Crowder-sized politics yappers and has managed to lure over ostensibly apolitical figures like Rogan and Ross, the left boasts just one Piker – and “boasts” is probably overstating it considering how reluctant the establishment has been to embrace him. 

Other leftist streamers – of which there is a growing faction – are vastly smaller. On a good day, Beyer is, as he put it, “between 10 and 25 percent of Hasan” in terms of viewership. Kwan, who is friends with Piker, voiced concern about being perceived as a “Hasan waiting room,” which is understandable given how many streamers go live early in the day and tend to wrap up just before Piker tends to log on in the afternoon. They are effectively feeding off his viewership, something Kwan wants to avoid for fear of cultivating a community that can’t grow on its own terms, that just trades the same viewers back and forth ad infinitum.

"My question is, are those just Hasan viewers?” Kwan said. “Will they drop you as soon as Hasan goes live, because Hasan is their guy?”

Money Talks

But why aren’t there more influencers with Piker’s size, reach, and most importantly, impact on the left? In part, it comes down to who the Democratic and Republican establishments choose to back. 

"Part of the role of folks like myself is to critique power and present ideas on how to wield power more for the benefit of folks like us, working-class people,” Jack “Riverboatjack” Gardener, a trans political streamer, told Aftermath. “That's just not really where the Democratic party has its goals right now. ... I think they are afraid of tapping into something that is too real, the kind of thing that Bernie Sanders tapped into in 2016. They are afraid of activating that base because it kind of ruins their ability to reach out to their big money donors, and they aren't bringing enough to the table on the merits of their own policy to actually back up that kind of shift in how to approach politics and communications."

Republicans are playing by different rules. Their content creators trade in outrage, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, which keeps their base riled up and ready to lash out. Democrats cold-shoulder criticisms and blame the far-left for defeats, while Republicans let their base drive party messaging, often seizing on social media trends and sending them up the chain from content creators to Fox News and Newsmax to politicians. 

"The right wing has basically moved toward their YouTubers, which is a terrible thing for all of us,” Jacob Geller, a YouTube video essayist whose videos often touch on political subjects, told Aftermath. “The right supports these people with the establishment. It is really hard to find the separation between what is politically acceptable and what is politically unacceptable and has to be said on a detached podcast, because they're all just one big group."

Piker grew organically on Twitch (albeit in part thanks to a significant fame boost granted by his tenure at The Young Turks, a prominent left-leaning news network on YouTube and Facebook, among others, headed up by his uncle, Cenk Ugyur) at a time when few sizable political streamers existed on the platform, and smaller streamers have since attempted to follow in his footsteps. Meanwhile, right-wing influencers on YouTube and other, less-niche platforms are often manufactured, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars. And where talking about politics – especially far-right politics – used to be a big no-no if influencers wanted sponsorships, brands are now more permissive (and, in the alternate brand universes of X, Kick, and Rumble, outright supportive), causing creators in sectors like wellness and lifestyle to come out in full-throated support of Trump following his reelection.   

"The amount of money in the right-wing influencer machine is insane – just completely out of control,” said Geller. “The left doesn't have that. You lose sponsors for talking about Palestine. With the funding some of these right-wing shows get, you could support 100 video essayists."

Citizens Divided

Overt political content is one piece of the puzzle, though. Liberal pundits seized on Joe Rogan in part because he’s representative of a tactic at which the right has proven ruthlessly adept: Trojan horsing talking points into nearly every imaginable arena, especially ones that appeal to disaffected young men. 

Take, for example, video games. On platforms like Twitter and YouTube, the past year has been defined by a growing, intensely conspiratorial anti-woke movement in games, championed by creators like Asmongold who are first and foremost gamers rather than political commentators. Misinformation-laden rants against the inclusion of people of color or queer themes in games prime typically-apolitical viewers to receive similar messaging from the right – and to believe that if they just side with the party that’s offering a quick fix for what they’ve been told is society’s biggest problem, their video games will become great again. Asmongold himself recently completed the line between point A and B by going on an overtly racist rant about Palestinians, which got him suspended from Twitch for two weeks.

Despite all the misinformation, Beyer believes there’s a kernel of truth to gamers’ concerns – and that’s the problem.

"What's wrong with gaming right now is that it's owned by a few mega-conglomerates that buy up all studios, and they produce games that are by committee for the purpose of creating addictive loops of exploitative microtransactions, and the developers are put under extreme time crunches, and they're not given time to fully polish the game,” said Beyer. “You have a decline because [of] the imperative of making higher profits than the previous quarter. It recalls the enshittifcation of everything. And how do you process enshittification? Do you think about abstract issues of economic production and means of production and rights – and esoteric ideas about ownership and creativity? Or are you thinking 'Oh, there must be a cabal of people with bad intent who hate me'? We are more wired to look at a personified threat than we are a complex, multifaceted thought." 

It’s a complex issue, one that requires time, effort, and research to untangle if you’re not taking the easy route of plopping down in front of a camera and saying what feels correct to your viewers, even if it’s not rooted in anything resembling observable reality. This is not to say that there aren’t content creators who push back against these corrosive lines of thought, both in video games and other artistic and cultural mediums. But they are, in multiple senses, outnumbered and outgunned. 

In the mid- and late-2010s, the conversation around “deradicalization” – that is, rewiring the worldviews of people who’d had their brains hijacked by the far-right’s alt media ecosystem – centered around YouTubers like Natalie “Contrapoints” Wynn, who weaved political, social, and pop cultural criticism into lengthy video essays that explored topics like “Incels” or, simply, “Men.” A whole scene for leftist video essays emerged, and it still exists. Arguably, there are now more YouTubers than ever posting left-leaning deep dives into games, movies, and TV shows, as well as politics. They just can’t compete with the ruthless efficiency of the far-right slop machine, which further benefits from algorithms that studies have shown tend to favor far-right content over less incendiary alternatives on the left. 

In March of this year, Wynn released her most recent video, a meticulously-researched and written three-hour opus about the Twilight series that touches on political ideas like sexual hierarchy and the current favored bogeyman of both Democrats and Republicans, identity. Meanwhile, Ben Shapiro has posted three videos a day nearly every day, which he does every week, like clockwork. You will not be surprised to learn that other far-right influencers employ a similar strategy, as do creators whose work appeals to right-leaning audiences, like Asmongold, who often cuts up recordings of his Twitch livestreams into four or five YouTube videos per day. 

Leftist streamers like Piker can, to an extent, imitate this model, but not many people are capable of spending 8-10 hours per day talking about politics from an educated yet accessible leftist perspective. It takes a deceptive amount of work, not to mention a uniquely resilient personality.

"You have to have a very particular set of traits to be able to stream for the amount of time that it takes to be a streamer,” said Geller. “[And] it is exhausting being a full-time political operative in this kind of sphere. I started doing this thing because I love writing about art and video games, and I do really enjoy sometimes incorporating explicit politics into my writing. But if somebody told me this is what every video has to be, I think I would just burn out so much more quickly."

There’s also the issue of research. Sarah Z, a video essayist who focuses on pop culture, internet history, and fandom, pointed to the example of The Gravel Institute, a left-wing attempt at countering conservative advocacy channels like notorious propaganda firehose PragerU, which has over three million subscribers on YouTube and publishes multiple videos per day.

"As of now, [Gravel Institute has] under 400,000 subscribers, and they have not put out a video in over two years,” she said. “I don't actually think their videos were all bad. In fact, I thought that their documentary on Cambodia was quite well researched and well crafted, but that's also why it couldn't work. That's why it couldn't be the new PragerU. It was aesthetically similar in that it was bite-sized political content with cute animations, but unless you have massive amounts of money to start with, you can't simultaneously be an educational channel and a constantly-producing slop machine. If they wanted to produce content at the same rate as PragerU, they would have to produce content that's worse, at which point we're losing sight of our original goal."

"If you want a Fox News, a Joe Rogan, anything like that, you are asking for an infrastructure system that needs misinformation to succeed,” Kat Abu, who makes fun of conservatives from networks like Fox News on TikTok, told Aftermath. “I don't think that's necessarily the [solution to the problem of right-wing media dominance]: making people less informed."

Geller believes this same principle applies to The Rogan Of It All.

“The reason that the right gets to have their Joe Rogans and their Ben Shapiros is because you can make an incredible amount of content when you're just saying words and never have to verify them with anything,” Geller, who read a gargantuan book on torture for a recent video about Call of Duty, said. “It takes a long time to be correct, and it takes a very short time to be wrong. ... It's not that leftists never make things up, but it's almost part and parcel with being a right-wing influencer: You just get to go out and speculate on vaccines, whereas the left is not really held to that same standard, nor would leftists want it to be that way. Leftists love being critical of other leftists, and I think if big creators are out there truly just making shit up in the way that Joe Rogan does, they are not going to maintain a platform, because that's not what people are looking for." 

(Un) Friendly Fire

Left-leaning creators also operate in a more fragile ecosystem than right-wing ones. This is especially notable when it comes to conflicts: A little over a year ago, Piker and longtime YouTuber Ethan “H3H3” Klein hosted a regular podcast together. Now, following a series of disagreements over the conflation of anti-Israel sentiment with anti-Jewish sentiment, the show is on indefinite hiatus, and Klein has dedicated himself to Piker’s downfall, resulting in – among other things – several Arab streamers in Piker’s sphere getting suspended for a month over spurious claims of antisemitism after the ADL got involved.

Subsequent complaints from Democratic representative Ritchie Torres caused Twitch to adopt a whole new set of policies around labeling political streams so advertisers can avoid them. Amid this backdrop, a campaign led by a creator named Dan “DanCantStream” Saltman has been reaching out to hundreds of advertisers with evidence of supposed antisemitism on Twitch, beginning with Twitch’s admittedly disastrous failure to reenable email verification in Israel and Palestine for a full year, but now centering on creators like Piker, who regularly criticizes Israel for its ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.

As of last week,Twitch updated its hateful conduct policy to forbid use of the word “Zionist” when used to “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief,” a decision the ADL applauded. Despite – or perhaps because of – all these attempts at placation, big-name streamers are now saying their ad revenue has cratered. Faze Kaysan recently claimed that his channel was demonetized entirely from ads (though not subscriptions and donations) because he applied an “Iran” tag to it. Another streamer, BigEx, reported experiencing a similar drop off after he applied a “Venezuela” tag to his stream.

Others recently began claiming that their ad revenue has fallen off a cliff without an apparent cause. TheStockGuy, for example, said during a recent broadcast that he used to make $600-$700 per week from ads, totalling out to around 40 percent of his Twitch income. Now that number has dropped to $15. 

"I don't know what's going on,” TheStockGuy said. “I have no idea. I don't pay attention to this shit on my platform. I have nothing to do with it."

But other streamers think they at least understand the broad strokes of the issue, with big names like Matthew “Mizkif” Rinaudo calling for politics to be “permanently” banned from Twitch, even if that means Piker gets the perma-boot in the process. One wonders what Rinaudo would have said if chatters name-dropped Asmongold, his friend and stablemate at streamer organization OTK who has a history of heinous political statements, instead of Piker. Asmongold and Piker, in turn, have gone back and forth on who deserves blame for the predicament Twitch now finds itself in. For the most part, though, Piker sees this as the impact of a bad-faith campaign against him and other leftist political streamers, with other, unrelated streamers getting caught in the crossfire.

“[The campaign] is completely rooted within no real ambition to tackle any bigoted sentiment whatsoever; it is just cynical as fuck,” Piker said during a recent broadcast. “The very same people that have launched these campaigns are openly talking about how funny it is. They don't even give a shit about it at all. And now you've got random content creators getting screwed over. It's crazy."

The “ban politics” opinion is not echoed by all of Twitch’s most-outspoken mainstays.

"Every platform is doing things that would make advertisers leave," Kacey "Kaceytron" Caviness said in response to the suggestion that advertisers getting cold feet is proof that Twitch is in the wrong. "Trust me, Twitch has a much better handle on the content on their platform than the plethora of neo-Nazi shit you see on YouTube. There just aren't a bunch of no-life hall monitor incels reporting it."  

YouTube is a relevant point of comparison, as some creators have begun referring to what’s happening on Twitch as its own version of YouTube’s 2017 “adpocalypse,” a series of advertiser boycotts that forced the company to pour millions into creating one of the most sophisticated ad targeting systems in the world. It remains to be seen whether Twitch will take drastic action; one report suggests that the actual number of advertisers pausing spending on Twitch has been “limited but not insignificant.” Nonetheless, drama farmers like Daniel "Keemstar" Keem have taken to catastrophizing about this supposed purple-hued adpocalypse for content.

But over the weekend, the adpocalypse narrative took some pretty serious hits. TheStockGuy returned after doing some tinkering and figured out the culprit on his end: Turns out, he'd previously applied an "election" tag to his channel. Once he removed it, his ad revenue went back to normal. This suggests that Twitch is diverting ads from political content – not that advertisers are suddenly abandoning the platform in droves.

"There's not a fucking adpocalypse," TheStockGuy said. "It is an advertising thing that is happening to a specific subset on the platform. I took it off, and guess what? I'm back."

Jason "PirateSoftware" Hall, who regularly manages to pull in over 10,000 concurrent viewers and is, by most important metrics, a big streamer, offered a similar read of the situation.

"There's no adpocalypse going on," Hall said during a recent broadcast. "None of our ad revenue has changed. None of the ad revenue of any streamer that I know has been changed. I know that there were some problems with specifically certain tags that were on Twitch that people were talking about, but none of our shit has had problems."

Aftermath reached out to Twitch with questions about recent ad revenue woes, but did not receive a response.

Sometimes drama leads to increased viewership. After all, if right-wing creators have taught us anything, it’s that rage on the modern internet means engagement, and engagement means more prominent algorithmic placement. This is the principle that underlies an overwhelming amount of right-wing content. But today’s fights could also have lasting consequences, whether they come from interpersonal feuds or from popular creators who claim some degree of liberal- or leftist-ness while regularly espousing right-wing talking points, like The (Increasingly Transphobic) Young Turks or debate-bro scene king Steven “Destiny” Bonnell, the latter of whom has been banging the anti-Piker drum so hard recently that it’s on the verge of caving in. 

Though Twitch has tried to at least performatively champion progressive causes over the years, it is uniquely vulnerable to outside influence due to its relatively small size and lack of profitability. Public conflicts involving both creators and influential external forces like the ADL put additional pressure on Twitch to apply its purposefully-vague rules against streamers dealing with bad-faith attacks and other applications of strength in numbers.

Denims, who was among the streamers that got suspended from Twitch for a month following claims of antisemitism, sees two options: stay on Twitch and risk getting suspended again – and now, possibly demonetized – or go to YouTube and just face possible demonetization.

"I think if Twitch was the same size as YouTube, they wouldn't care about, like, the Steven Crowders of the world, the way that YouTube doesn't care about literally Steven Crowder [himself],” Denims told Aftermath. “But because Twitch is, relative to YouTube, much smaller, they actually have to care a lot, which has put them in an awkward position where they want to capitalize on political content because they're a company, but they don't want to hurt their bottom line, and they already aren't making any money because streaming is very expensive. 

“For me, it makes me feel like Twitch is not really my home anymore, because they're in this transition period of growth,” Denims continued.“I think between getting your [YouTube] videos demonetized and getting banned on your streaming platform, I would prefer to get my videos demonetized and try to work around whatever got me demonetized for the next video and the one after that."   

Nothing Is True, And Everything Is Possible

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. While leftist content creators face an uphill battle no matter which platform they’re on, there is a clear opportunity to build formats that are new, different, and perhaps better – removed from both party-line-towing traditional media and alt media’s endlessly-spurting slop firehose.

"I don't know what my future is going to look like,” said Kwan. “But I really like the fact that I cover a lot of pop culture, and I am a leftist, and I try to fuse the two and teach people, educate people, entertain people, but above all, create a community that is a positive one – not one where we're disseminating hateful views that are further marginalizing already marginalized people."

"A lot of what is considered to be quality work coming out of the left is enjoyable because it's what people like Joe Rogan are not: tightly scripted, well researched, and unambiguous in conclusions,” said Sarah Z. “I don't think that is a bad thing, and I also don't think we should be considering deradicalization as a primary goal, because artful treatment of the news and broader culture is important, but it's going to influence and create culture with a very different timescale and potential for spread than the reactionary stuff."

She went on to draw a parallel to the recent election: Democrats spent much of their time reaching for the center and tailoring their messaging to (largely-imaginary) disaffected Republicans. In the end, hardly anybody on the right or left was excited by what they were saying. Despite demand for an alt-alt media ecosystem, content creators needn’t fall into the same trap, especially when, at the end of the day, it’s on politicians to offer people change worth mobilizing around – and not on content creators to prop up dud policies.      

"I don't think our goal should be explicitly to attract right-wing audiences,” Sarah Z said. “And of course, that doesn't mean there's no space for people who don't already agree with us. But as far as I can tell, with the recent election, conservative voters tend to vote conservative. … I think this focus on creating a media ecosystem that brings in outsiders is less impactful than making work that energizes and educates those who are already willing to listen. I think to strive for conversion as a primary goal is to intentionally create work that's less than substantive."

Geller hopes he can at least provide a persuasive alternative to what’s out there, something that sticks in people’s minds long enough to maybe change them.

"I don't think that the right provides a very interesting way to critically analyze or take apart art, and so I'm kind of hoping that it is almost implicit in my approach,” he said. “What I would love to happen is [somebody is] stumbling across YouTube, they see one of my videos, watch it, and it is considered enough that then they see the contrast with an Asmongold, and they think 'Wow, I guess I've been eating trash, and I just didn't know it until now, because I had never eaten anything that wasn't trash. Here's something that provides some other version of what this could be.'"

Beyer, who is part of the cadre that streams nearly every day like Piker, sees each time he goes live as an opportunity to build and strengthen his community for whatever lies ahead.

"I'm really interested in what will happen when we have, as capitalism inevitably does, another economic contraction,” Beyer said. “Will we have another opportunity? I think the reason why Bernie Sanders was not able to win is because economically, in 2016 and 2020, the economy wasn't that bad. ... If the left-wing bubble had happened, corresponding with a decline in confidence in capitalism or the markets themselves, it might have been a different outcome. So I'm building for the opportunities that lay ahead one day. There's a really big silver lining to Kamala Harris losing, and that is that the field is open, and we'll have nobody to blame but ourselves if we choose to do another Biden, Clinton, Obama, [or] Harris Democratic party."