Part 3: How We Fight Back — Building a Media Ecosystem to Meet the Moment

You can’t out-firehose a firehose. But you can out-community it.

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen explains how even the most successful organizations can fail when they cling to old models in a rapidly changing world. Today, Democrats face exactly that challenge. Our communications playbook—built around campaign calendars, media buys, and short-term (and often last minute) messaging blitzes—is dangerously outdated. Even our core organizing model, which relies on volunteers talking to strangers, has become less effective in an era where trust and authenticity matter more than ever.

The landscape has shifted. Today, connection and culture drive how people engage, organize, and share information. But our biggest challenge isn’t just updating tactics or polishing our message - it’s meeting the scale and permanence of the right-wing’s 24/7 disinformation machine. The full impact was felt in 2024, when falsehoods about voting, public safety, and the economy outpaced mainstream narratives and correction efforts, shaping public opinion before the truth even had a chance to register.

To truly fight back, Democrats must move beyond the idea of temporary campaigns. We need to build an entirely new media infrastructure: one that is continuous, culturally relevant, locally grounded, emotionally resonant, and designed to scale. This is not just about getting smarter with messaging - it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we engage with people, community by community, all year long.

We must build not just to respond—but to reshape the landscape.

“A message without connection is just noise.”

We’ve watched the collapse of trust in mainstream institutions create a vacuum - and we’ve seen the right fill that vacuum with chaos, emotion, and a firehose of falsehoods. The question now is not just how we respond (temporal and reactive), but how we build (semi-permanent and long-term). Because we can’t fact-check our way out of a legitimacy crisis. We can’t rely on media coverage from institutions people no longer believe in. And we certainly can’t win the war for attention with a strategy frozen in a view of a 2008 information marketplace that has not existed for some time.

Here’s the hard truth: The left doesn’t just have a media problem - we have a media infrastructure problem. The right has spent decades building an emotionally resonant, participatory, always-on ecosystem that feeds outrage, identity, and belonging. More importantly, Trump and the Republican Party will pluck ideas from this ecosystem and operationalize it, which reinforces the power and relevance of said ecosystem (e.g. Laura Loomer’s National Security Council purge) The left, by contrast, builds seasonal ad campaigns, comms teams with long approval chains, and institutions built for broadcast - not conversation. We invest in think tanks, not meme pages. We still buy time on platforms people stopped watching five years ago. If we want to win hearts, minds, and votes, we need more than facts. We need emotional connection. We need scale. And we need narrative power.

SO HOW DO WE FIGHT BACK?

1. Invest in permanent, decentralized digital infrastructure.
Right-wing media never goes dark between elections—and neither can we. We must build and fund year-round progressive media properties: Substacks, social feeds, YouTube channels, podcasts, meme accounts, and local video teams. These platforms must be independent but aligned, trusted by their communities, and agile, emotional, and grounded in values. Think: a thousand authentic voices, rooted town by town.

2. Lead with local voices to rebuild trust.
Most Americans no longer trust national media—but they will listen to someone they know. National influencers still matter, but nothing is more powerful than local leaders speaking with cultural credibility. We must elevate local storytellers, invest in community-driven content that reflects real lived experiences, and treat organizing hubs as content engines—not just field operations. If the right can create fake local news outlets, we can build real ones—rooted in public schools, union halls, Facebook groups, and community networks. And we must re-engage the factory towns and small communities that feel left behind. Luckily (though not for them in this moment), this Administration has revealed quite early they don’t actually care about these communities and are not going to address their core needs or concerns. This gives us an opportunity that we must not squander.

3. Center emotional storytelling that people want to share.
Facts don’t go viral - feelings do. The old saying of “facts don’t care about your feelings” has been turned upside down to great effect by Trump and the right wing: “feelings don’t care about facts.” To break through the noise, progressive content must tell stories of struggle and hope, not just cite data. It must tap into values like fairness, dignity, belonging, and justice. It must be visual, emotional, punchy, and built for platforms like TikTok, Reels, group chats, and DMs. This isn’t about dumbing it down—it’s about making it felt.

“The problem with the Democratic Party is that it’s run by former high school debaters—they think you can change hearts and minds with the perfect seventy-word paragraph.”

4. Flip the script—don’t just defend, go on offense.
We spend too much time responding to right-wing attacks. It’s time to take the fight to them. That means exposing corporate greed and billionaire hypocrisy, calling out extremism as un-American, and framing our values as common sense: strong public schools, fair pay, bodily autonomy, real freedom. And we need to say it in plain language. Not consultant jargon. Not cable news lingo. Just talk like real people.

5. Empower people to participate—not just consume.
The right’s media machine works because it’s participatory. Their base doesn’t just watch—they remix, comment, create, and share. We need to do the same. That means training progressive digital storytellers in every town, offering easy-to-use toolkits and templates, and turning passive supporters into active co-creators. This isn’t a broadcast model—it’s an organizing model.

We can’t out-Fox Fox—but we can out-community them.

Fox News has reach in their television, web, and podcasts. But what about your old friend from high school? Your local union president? Your niece on TikTok? They have trust. If we build a real ecosystem—powered by trusted messengers, local voices, emotional storytelling, and community participation—we won’t just respond to the firehose of lies. We’ll create a rainstorm of truth that spreads person to person and douses the fire – eventually.

Final Word: The Mission

This is about more than messaging—it’s a democratic imperative. If we don’t build something new, we risk losing more than just elections. We risk losing the public square—and possibly the country itself.

This year, we face critical races in Virginia and New Jersey, and high-stakes Supreme Court elections in Pennsylvania.

So let’s begin now. Build locally. Speak emotionally. Create relentlessly. And never let a lie spread faster than our truth can catch fire.