How Black Friday’s little secret explains the future of media

Check those links

Welcome to a Black Friday edition of Progress Report.

Toggling between reading the news and deleting Black Friday emails today, I had a flashback to the aftermath of 9/11, when George W. Bush declared that America was “open for business” and encouraged a shellshocked nation to go shopping. The exhortation to national retail therapy was ostensibly intended to support a damaged economy and restore a sense of normalcy, sending us back to the malls as conservatives set to work lying to the country and plunging us into chaos.

Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House is not anything like a terrorist attack, but if he and his far-right cohort deliver on even half of what they’ve promised, we’re in danger of a national unraveling. Yet with just 52 days until Trump takes office and begins his “mass deportation” regime, Americans of all ideological persuasion were out shopping and ordering stuff online, as if nothing happened at all.

This is not an admonition or attempt to take some moral high ground; I bought some jeans in a 40% off Black Friday sale today, and have some gifts to purchase later tonight. Consumerism isn’t a bad thing; our overarching goal should be to create a society in which people’s needs are covered and they can enjoy life. But with less than six weeks until the inauguration, we need to make sure that we don’t allow ourselves to be distracted by the crass appeal to our basest instincts is Trump’s stock in trade.

Doing so will require a deeply alert and engaged media, and unfortunately, I’m not so sure that our mainstream national media is up to the task. To understand why, all you have to do is do a search for gift guides. Every news organization has an enormous section stocked with various guides coded by gender and interest, each filled with special links designed to give the publisher a very small cut of every purchase made. It’s standard practice for outlets to disclose this relationship, but that doesn’t always happen — this Washington Post guide doesn’t include any acknowledgment, but the Amazon links are all coded for profit.

Major news outlets have always been reliant on huge corporate advertisers, but making affiliate links a big part of their business is an unfortunate, though perhaps unavoidable, capitulation to new media economics. Amazon and Google, which dominate these affiliate link programs, have conquered our platforms. They own most of the online advertising and now dole out pennies on the dollar for news organizations to send customers their way. They are more powerful than any media company in history. Will any major media company be able to speak truth to power?

I think we already got our answer when the owners of the LA Times, Washington Post, and USA Today all squashed their editorial boards’ planned endorsements of Kamala Harris, who was hardly a lefty firebrand populist. That’s the other part of this equation: the media institutions that aren’t fully acquiescent to major tech platforms are owned by billionaires or private equity companies that have no problem interfering to advance their own agendas.

The only solution is to support and empower independent media, especially progressive independent media.

The media business’s recent and ongoing collapse has led to a recent proliferation of small and single-proprietor left-leaning outlets, but they get almost zero support from a short-sighted donor class obsessed with paid TV ads and quick fixes. The right-wing on the other hand has systematically built up its media apparatus, which has become the major driver of national conversation. It has the power to push Republican politicians towards it’s preferred policies, and failing that, out of office. It also impacts Democrats far more than any progressive media, a problematic state of affairs.

I want to build something brave, uncompromising, and powerful here at Progress Report, all in service of a better collective future. In my day job, I spend all day talking to working Americans and reporting on the issues that matter to them. Combine that insight with a decade-and-a-half spent working in media and I’ve got what I think is an intuitive understanding of how to cover what’s to come over the next four years in a way that reaches and influences people in power. But I can only make it happen with your support.

There is a lot that we can do together. My hope is to get back to featuring more paid outside contributors who are on the ground covering grassroots movements, and I’d like to build out more special series and projects. Ideally I can start turning interviews into podcasts for people interested in getting the entire conversation. With your subscriptions and donations, I won’t have to seek out sponsorships or advertising to keep this going, and I won’t have to worry about being shut out by political institutions that aren’t used to the truth.

It’s hard to pick out just a few stories that can represent the breadth of what this newsletter has done over the past few years, but below you’ll find my attempt to do just that. The small selection of pieces should give you an idea of how far I’ll go for stories that you won’t read elsewhere, and how frequently I’m waving red flags on trends that political consultants refuse to see.

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Reconnecting Democrats and Working People

How Democrats lost young white men (and how to get them back): I’ve spent the past seven years covering organized labor and Democrats’ relationship with working people, chronicling the ups and downs and missed connections. My coverage has for the past year dealt a lot with the rapid defection of young working and middle class white men, which doomed the party in this month’s election.

In this piece, I speak with Michigan state Rep. Joey Andrews, who as a 36-year-old former AFL-CIO employee from a working class background and district, had a lot of insights into the disconnects and how to fix them.

“I've actually had some really hard discussions with other Democrats, particularly Democratic women, about this,” Andrews says. “We can't keep vilifying young white men. We have to address this mental health crisis that they have, and we have to address this culture. And I know it feels like I'm saying we need to focus on white guys, which seems antithetical to what we're supposed to be doing. But they need help, and they need role models, and they do need [our] focus.”

Young Black and Latino men are also shifting right, driven by a number of factors. Among them: the decline in church attendance among young Black men to the religious piety of assimilated, more conservative Latino communities. Andrews suggests emphasizing broader economic programs that focus more on economic class than anything else.

“I always tell people that the class struggle is the fundamental struggle, and at the end of the day, we should be trying to highlight for working class white men why they have more in common with a working class Black man than they do with any CEO,” he says.

After the election, Rep. Andrews texted me saying that the conversation was almost too on the nose.

This union leader wants to flip a red state with populism: Having covered the strike that he led at Kellogg’s back in 2021, I knew about Dan Osborn and his long-shot Senate campaign well before he landed on the national radar. He hadn’t done many interviews at this point, so Progress Report was one of the first outlets to platform his campaign.

I'm working 40 hours a week as a steamfitter right now. I'm doing this race right now with one hand tied behind my back. But March 1 is legally when the campaign can start paying me and I can hopefully take a leave of absence, even if that’s just fewer hours at work. Then we can start trying to hit the 93 counties in person and going out and talking to people and knocking doors. But until that point, I'm working 40 hours. And that's a regular working person, that's why people don't run. It’s difficult, but we're gonna do it.

He wound up losing to Sen. Deb Fischer by just seven points, out-performing Kamala Harris in Nebraska by 23 points. There will be more with him, soon.

Inside the Far-Right — and the People Fighting It

His dad led the insurrection. Dakota Adams is a DNC delegate: This was the product of a long and somewhat remarkable conversation with the son of imprisoned Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. Once his father’s literal and ideological captive, Adams broke free later in the first Trump administration and built a life for himself, enrolling in college and getting a job as a firefighter. He also ran for Montana House of Representatives in a deep red district. Our conversation was all about his experiences, the far-right mind-set, and what it will take to beat those people.

“In an effort to push back against the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, because people tend to organize themselves and their thoughts and beliefs along party lines, there is a tendency to overcorrect,” Adams says. “Especially for centrist liberals, the tendency is to jump to the defense of the status quo or argue against any of the fundamental truths that underlie conspiracy theories, and that's where there is a lot of distance that is created.”

The cost of housing is the dominant issue right now in Montana, where people are moving in from out of state and pricing out longtime residents. There are many different ways to approach that problem, but for Adams, Wall Street firms’ control of so many single-family homes is an important entry point for conversation.

“If you're trying to talk to somebody and you're coming at them with a completely opposing worldview that doesn't even adhere to the same basic facts as theirs, they are not going to be available to be persuaded,” he says. “But if you know that BlackRock is evil, then it's like, okay, so this guy knows a little bit, and you establish an anchor point of shared reality that you agree on as fact. Having that is absolutely essential, or you might as well not bother talking at all.”

Adams knew he wouldn’t win his election, but this is just the start of his work.

After the US’s worst book ban, these teachers and kids took down Moms for Liberty: A feature on the brave activism and brilliant electoral work done by a handful of students and teachers in the conservative town of York, PA. They were able to vanquish some of the nastiest right-wing education ghouls in the country, and this provided insight and a blueprint for others.

Four Democrats and an allied candidate running on bipartisanship won all five available seats on Central York School District Board of Education, seizing a 7-2 majority after three years of tumult that rocked the local community and made national headlines. It took two election cycles to achieve the majority, underscoring the amount of work and finesse that went into the once-improbable triumph, which was among the most prominent and inspired of a nationwide rebuke of rabid ultra-conservatives.

“You have these people who ordinarily, if things were status quo, probably would not have run for school board,” Jackson said. “But because things were so bad and prepared to get worse, they took one for the team, and they stepped up, putting themselves out there for the right to have a go at them.”

Inside progressives’ biggest win of 2024: Another deep dive and how-to guide for progressives campaigning in red areas, this feature looked at the remarkable work of the anti-school voucher campaign in Kentucky.

Protect Our Schools was very deliberate about centering normal people instead of politicians. Coots, a veteran Democratic campaign manager, oversaw the operation but stayed as out of the spotlight as possible.

“We prioritized local messengers everywhere,” she said. If we got asked for a comment, [we’d send] local messengers: teachers, parents, students, community members. Whereas on the other side, the only messengers they ever had were politicians and policy people coming into communities that were not theirs to tell them what they needed.”

The coalition allowed Protect Our Schools to burrow into local communities far away from Lexington, Frankfort, and Louisville, where the distrust of politicians is especially high. The Kentucky Center for Economics, a nonpartisan but left-leaning think tank, produced reports detailing how school vouchers would impact all 120 counties. That customized information made people pay attention, even more so when it came from a trusted messenger.

The Vote No campaign won with 65% of the vote. Please read the piece and take notes.

Trump's judicial guru declares holy war: I unearthed a speech by Federalist Society VP and Supreme Court powerbroker Leonard Leo that underscored just how deranged he is.

“The barbarians are determined to threaten and delegitimize individuals and institutions who refuse to pledge fealty to the woke idols of our age,” Leo boomed. “The secularists are fine with Catholics in the public square so long as we don't, you know, practice our faith. They want us to draw the curtains at home and keep it in the pews, and it remains to be seen how long they'll accept even that.”

He had even harsher words for progressives, casting himself as a victim of the people whose rights continue to be stripped away at his behest.

“The progressive bigots distort who we are and what we believe in,” Leo whined, “and will go so far as to intimidate or harass us in public in an effort to drive us into professional and social exile.”

More to come on this guy.

Free speech showdown and the future of small-town America: A feature on a gay lawyer who moved back to his small Ohio hometown, set up his own practice, and took on the most powerful lawmakers in the state over a bigoted anti-drag ballot initiative. This was one of my favorite pieces of the past few years.

National Politics and Hard Truths

The campaign to save Kamala Harris’s campaign: Written several weeks before the election, this piece distilled several years of warnings and concerns that I’d expressed very frequently in this news letter.

Her campaign has since pivoted to appealing to a vanishingly thin band of Trump-averse neoconservatives, which has coincided with a statistically significant regression in critical battleground state polls.

It’s been a steady drumbeat of public appeals to the elite, including high-profile, high-dollar fundraisers that drew media coverage from coast to coast; leaks to reporters about business leaders that could serve in a Harris administration; and regular appearances by surrogates like Mark Cuban, who has frequently undermined Harris’s most basic populist promises.

Backing off the economic populism has coincided with an odd decision to focus on the one thing that has never seemed to bug voters: Donald Trump’s perceived willingness to blow up political norms and wipe out the sclerotic establishment.

Needless to say, the Harris campaign did not take my advice.

Israel’s war puts the Democratic Party at a crossroads: It hadn’t even been a month after the Oct. 7th attacks by Hamas when I foresaw — with unfortunate accuracy — how the United States’ unequivocal support for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s disproportionate (and eventually genocidal) response would divide the Democratic Party and cause key demographics to revolt.

The pressure is growing for Democratic lawmakers to come down harder on Israel’s far-right government, especially as it ignores all recommendations and pursues maximal destruction. Muslim-American voters have started to promise to abstain from voting for President Biden in 2024, millennials and Gen-Z were already disillusioned by the administration before this disaster, and the marches through the streets are only going to grow larger.

It shouldn’t have been such a shock to Democrats when Muslim-American and young people drifted away and even abandoned the party this year.

Learning to let go: While written to address how Democrats were hiding the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s clear dementia and using her as an excuse to not take any action on judges or Supreme Court accountability, this piece was really about the party’s sclerotic leadership and inability to meet the political moment.

The Democratic Party is run almost entirely by octogenarians who refuse to relinquish their grip on power, no matter how much damage they’re causing. Products of a DC that has not existed for decades, leaders like Pelosi, Durbin, Janet Yellen, Merrick Garland, and the version of Joe Biden that’s been reemerging this year are simply not equipped for our new era of political warfare. Deals may get hammered out from time to time in Washington, but sociopolitical detente is no longer possible.

Arizona is on the verge of a political earthquake: An interview with Arizona state Sen. Christine Marsh, who discusses assaults on public education, abortion, and housing in a way that speaks to the challenges faced by Democratic legislators nationwide.

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