A new Taylor Lorenz story in Wired reveals details of a “dark money” operation founded to bolster progressive creators — and, in response, left-wing influencers are defensively claiming they’re not being bought. Lorenz and others are also spreading a powerful new strain of copium: it doesn’t matter what democratic dark money is doing, they argue, because Republicans have done the same (and worse!) for “decades.”

In Wired, after detailing how the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a progressive nonprofit, is paying some influencers up to $8,000/month to “push the party line,” Lorenz claims “Republicans have spent decades building up a powerful independent media ecosystem.” She provides just two examples: Tenet Media’s genuinely corrupt scheme to pay right-of-center podcasters like Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, and a half-a-million-dollar GOP operation with Creator Grid to “[connect] Republican candidates with the internet’s most powerful conservative influencers” in 2024.

Lorenz and her article’s subjects, like Brian Tyler Cohen, believe a shadowy conspiracy of conservative donors beat liberals to the punch. Harry Sisson has, predictably, echoed the same claim: “Republicans have been doing this on their side for years and nobody said anything.”

Aside from the obvious point that neither of Lorenz’s examples stem from “decades” of work, both also reflect efforts to rent influence from figures who are already independently influential. Did these creators become influential thanks to “decades” of funding and resources from “Republicans?” That would be a pretty strange way to describe Tim Pool’s path to success.

Republican donors have, indeed, spent many decades pouring money into clumsy efforts to rival the New York Times in some way or another. The growing consensus in the conservative movement is that all that money bought them nothing. No conservative media outlet ever rivaled The Atlantic until shifts in technology lowered the barrier to entry in the 2010s, and the rising tide of Trumpism lifted the boats of MAGA media along with him and spiking institutional distrust.

The Drudge Report, for example, was not the product of conservative dark money. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are as much commercial enterprises as MSNBC and the New York Times, but were hardly cooked up as actors in a vast dark-money network. The best examples of what Lorenz seems to be describing are Turning Point USA and PragerU, both of which use donor cash in one way or another to support and create up-and-coming influencers. Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and Benny Johnson all came out of the broader conservative movement. My own path into media was through right-wing nonprofits as well. But both TPUSA and PragerU are new, not products of some long march through the institutions, and a longtime staple of the right’s donor class like National Review isn’t exactly as influential as Joe Rogan.

Indeed, no conservative influencer can match Rogan’s power. What’s hurting Democrats — and may eventually hurt Republicans too — is really the dissatisfaction among persuadable independents like Rogan, Andrew Schulz, Theo Von, and Tim Dillon. The left lost the superstars of indie media to Trump because they took their own stranglehold over old media institutions for granted. NPR and the New York Times still routinely rank atop podcast charts; now they just have more competition.

Because centrist Democrats relied on the old guard — finding it fairly easy, for example, to cover-up Joe Biden’s ailing condition — they never invested in alternative media platforms. The right and populist left, on the other hand, were being increasingly ostracized during the media’s cancel culture fever dream. They had no choice but to build their own channels.

This idea that shady GOP donors somehow stumbled into a successful, grand conspiracy that blossomed into new conservative media is hilarious. As technological changes leveled the field between old and new media, conservatives and populist leftists at places like Turning Point and The Young Turks had a head start over whatever dark forces thrust Harry Sisson on the world.

Centrist Democrats and woke progressives are now crying about another vast right-wing conspiracy because they have competition, not because they fell behind on dark money. The Abundance wing just raised $4 million to launch The Argument. Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective is the majority owner of The Atlantic and helped fund Axios. Jobs, as it happens, is a close friend of Kamala Harris. It’s not that Democrats lack benefactors focused on boosting left-of-center voices in digital media. George Soros, for example, took a stake in Crooked Media years ago.

Crooked is actually an instructive example. Pod Save America has always been relatively popular, but the show is gaining clear momentum as its hosts have become more critical of the Democratic Party in the wake of Biden’s loss and the war in Gaza. This shows why Jobs can pour plenty of money into liberal media without turning David Frum and Mike Allen into Joe Rogan and Cenk Uygur. People are less interested in institutional talking points dressed up as news and analysis. In a low-trust environment, authenticity and independence are at a premium — and the establishment left is struggling to provide them.

It’s counterproductive for the left to buy into the myth that evil Republican geniuses plotted, over decades, to seed an influencer network. It’s a goofy victimhood cope that makes establishment hacks feel better about their flagging influence. They fell behind because they rested on their laurels when competition was weak.

—Emily Jashinsky