Editor’s note: During the holidays, I was in and out. Last week, I posted only two pieces. This week will be the same. I forgot to tell you, but you probably figured the season was the reason. I’ll be back to my regular programming next week with the normal four or five pieces. –JS 

I have been talking a blue streak about how the Democrats need to get in the business of educating the public in order to win elections, rather than hoping a public-school system that’s under daily attack by the Republicans can achieve the same goal without cost to the Democrats.

The real axis in politics isn’t liberal-conservative or left-right. It is true-false. People who understood the facts tended to vote for Kamala Harris. People who believed lies tended to vote for Donald Trump.  

I have reported that there’s reason to hope. 

There are three men competing to be the next head of the Democratic National Committee. They seem to be aware of the problem – that there is nothing on the liberal side that can beat, much less match, the profound media power that’s available to the Republicans, and that the Democrats have denied for too long the reality of information warfare.

For instance, Ben Wikler, who is currently the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told Greg Sargent that “solving the information problem has to be a core focus,” requiring a “constant effort to get out of our heads and into the minds of the extraordinarily diverse electorate that is getting information from a dizzying array of places.”

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE FOR JUST $6 A MONTH!

---

Click here to leave a tip. 10? Thanks!

---

Ken Martin is another contender. He’s currently the head of the Minnesota Democratic Party. He “made an especially important remark also about how Democrats have become addicted to ineffective television ads,” Matthew Sheffield said. “They take away money from the thousands of center-left commentators who would love nothing more than to be paid to advocate against the Republican Party’s extremism and for a shared future where everyone has a chance.”

That’s good, but we need more than action from a relatively weak organization like the DNC. We need recognition of the reality from leading Democrats, especially leading Democrats who have big social-media followings and who are poised to take positions of real authority.

If they can see the problem, perhaps the people with the money will too, which is to say, perhaps the people with the money will understand at last that they have to spend on the right projects. 

Which brings me to Brian Schatz
The US senator from Hawaii is the Senate Democrats’ new chief deputy whip. He’s young, just 52. He’s often on the forefront of liberal causes, especially climate. He has a big following, more than 171,000 on Bluesky, nearly 355,000 on Twitter. And he’s one retirement away from becoming his party’s No. 2 in the Senate. (Dick Durbin, the current minority whip, is 80. He’ll decide whether to run again in 2026.)

I’m so used to hearing leading Democrats who don’t see the infowar that’s in front of them – Durbin, for instance, or Nancy Pelosi – that I’m shocked when I hear a Democrat who does see it. That was the outcome of reading Schatz’s interview with Politico’s Jonathan Martin. 

I was shocked. 

But also delighted. 

Finally, someone close to a figure as high up as Chuck Schumer can explain that all those millions going into campaign ads would have been better spent on developing what Schatz called a “left-wing infrastructure.” More important, I think, is the implication that without that infrastructure, the Democrats can expect to continue losing. 

The whole interview is worth it, but here are some highlights:

• “On the information environment piece, I think there’s the question of left-wing infrastructure, which I think should not be confused with the liberal project of preserving journalism and democracy, which is super important. But the problem is, a lot of liberal donors believe if we just fund good journalism, that that’s a counterweight to the right-wing noise machine. And I think that we’ve now learned that we have to build our own infrastructure, and that’s going to take money and staffing and all of that. I will help with that, but obviously as a federal legislator, that’s not my primary function.

• “Then there’s the obvious part of this, which is the proverbial ‘Should we go on Joe Rogan?’ Of course we should go on Joe Rogan. We should go anywhere within reason where there are voters.”

• “The third part of that, is that it’s not just that we’re unable to reach people. It’s that people are unable to reach us. So, when inflation was pissing people off, you could scarcely find a person in mainstream, left-wing circles, who would even talk about it. Except to explain that the Biden economy was better than other countries. And that the Biden stewardship was better than other industrialized nations. And by the way, I continue to think that’s true and totally irrelevant — if you’re talking about the question of are people pissed about the price of eggs, the answer is flatly yes they are. Not, ‘Don’t you know people are paying more in Paris and shouldn’t you be happy about that.’”

• “That is a function of the information environment, and we tend to think about the information environment almost exclusively with our ability to push out our message and penetrate as opposed to our ability to hear people that we’re not normally hearing from. It’s not just that we should go on Joe Rogan or go on Theo Von. It’s that we should listen. We should swim in those waters. And understand that they’re going to say wacky things with which we disagree, because they’re just regular folks and most people say wacky things which we disagree. I think it’s not just push, it’s pull. We have to listen.”

That’s similar to what I’ve been saying
Here’s an excerpt from an interview I did with “Between the Lines” the venerable radio show and podcast out of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

JOHN STOEHR: I think most of us who pay attention to politics or have paid attention to politics for 25 years or so like myself, we’re used to talking about politics in terms of liberal and conservative, in terms of left and right. And the thing that this election really showed me is that that thinking is upside down and backwards. It’s just not helpful anymore.

The true axis in politics right now is true-false. That’s really what it is right now. And a consequence of this right-wing media apparatus is that we live in an age really similar to the Renaissance period, where there’s so many people who live in darkness.

We live in an age of superstition and fear and tremendous ignorance, and the right-wing media apparatus being what it is, as I describe it in the piece, it just brings out what was already there. I mean, don’t get me wrong. We’ve always had ignorant people, right? It doesn’t make people ignorant. But it reinforces their ignorance.

It justifies their ignorance. It arouses their ignorance in such a way that just enough people in just enough places believe just enough of the lies about Kamala Harris, about the Democrats, period — about reality. I mean, the right-wing media apparatus is so big. There are people in this country, millions of people, who can inhabit a reality that’s very distinct and different from the one I live in, from the one you live in.

And the fact is that people who understood the facts to the best of their ability, they tended to vote for Kamala Harris and people who believed lies tended to vote for Donald Trump. And that’s the true axis in American politics right now.

SCOTT HARRIS: John, briefly describe what we’re up against in terms of the media system on the right that very successfully has a conveyor belt of lies that it’s mainstreaming through podcasts, social media and a lot of other avenues that really evade any kind of fact-checking, where investigative reporting, revealing corruption and malfeasance is totally absent. Tell us a little bit about that system and what you think we have to do as responsible journalists and people with political interests in moving the country forward? What do we have to do to build an effective counter to it?

JOHN STOEHR: We need to stay focused on the effective counter and there is none right now. A lot of us sit around, you know, hoping that the Republicans will stop being terrible. They’re not going to stop being terrible. There are a lot of us sitting around hoping that the mainstream media will do its job, and does by its own principles.

This really is probably not going to happen. We saw it with The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and now most recently with ABC news caving to Donald Trump. We probably can’t have much hope in them. So what do we do?

We need to look to the Democrats and get them to see that they really need to step up. They need to find the money. They need to find people. They need to make the connections and start creating their own media apparatus. You don’t need to lie, just actually need to propagandize the truth. That’s basically what you need to do. You need to speak for the truth, to speak for facts.

Right now, Democrats are in this bad habit of saying to themselves, well, the facts are out there and people will come to their own conclusions. No, no. Absolutely not. The Republicans never let anybody come to their own conclusions. They will lie to achieve those purposes. What Democrats need to do is speak for the facts and push people toward conclusions by way of the truth and toward good policy and so on and so forth.

Listen to the whole “Between the Lines” interview here.