MSNBC and CNN panelists blamed Vice President Kamala Harris’s decisive loss on podcasters like Joe Rogan, claiming that a right-wing "media ecosystem" radicalized Americans into voting for President-elect Donald Trump.
Political analyst Anand Giridharadas argued that conservatives’ alternative media served as "a radicalization funnel" that use "low-level annoyances" like the cost of eggs to push people to "fascist politics."
"What they have done in their online media ecosystem is build a radicalization engine, literally the way militant groups do around the world, that takes people from relatively low-level annoyances … and then moves them through YouTube videos, through podcasts … all the way, slowly, slowly, slowly, to a full blown fascist politics," Giridharadas said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday.
"It's an elaborate, multi-billion dollar infrastructure, and there is nothing like it on the pro-democracy side," Giridharadas added. "When a man is just lost and lonely and not yet radicalized, we don't have the equivalent of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to move that man in a feminist direction."
Similarly, PBS NewsHour correspondent Laura Barrón-López said Democrats had no counters to media like the Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s most popular podcast. She also argued that Harris couldn’t overcome "disinformation, misinformation, or different propaganda" being fed to the American public.
"Maybe it's not so much Democrats’ policies or messaging or the words they used specifically," she said Wednesday on CNN’s Inside Politics, "but there is an entire right-wing media ecosystem that doesn’t exist on the left, and it does not exist in the center or mainstream, and people are getting their information in very different ways now."
"Donald Trump and Republicans and Elon Musk and Joe Rogan know exactly how to reach Americans where they are regardless of age and demographic, and that played a big role in this," Barrón-López continued.
Trump, meanwhile, was the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote since 2004 after making gains in several demographics, including Latinos and black men. Political analysts predicted that the election wouldn’t be decided for several days because of razor-thin results, but the contest was called for Trump with a decisive number of Electoral College votes by early Wednesday morning.
A New York Times article, "Devastated Democrats Play the Blame Game, and Stare at a Dark Future," echoed Giridharadas and Barrón-López. The piece detailed how Democrats are "beginning the painful slog into a largely powerless future."
Some Democrats "turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them," the Times wrote Thursday. "They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda."