Doomscroll: Ana Kasparian

Crazy to say this but—we are coming up on 1 year of the show. I published the first episode of Doomscroll on Sept 3rd in 2024. You can now find audio episodes on Apple, Spotify and all other podcast apps. New episodes will premiere on YouTube and become available the following week on the audio feed.

Welcome to Doomscroll. Episode #29 with guest Ana Kasparian is out today.

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This week, my guest is Ana Kasparian, a host and executive producer of The Young Turks. TYT is the original progressive alt-media outlet. Ana’s pioneering work helped to define the field. She has personally seen the rise of alt-media and its eclipse of the mainstream. We discuss:

• Ana’s political journey from the progressive left to “independent and unaligned”. In a media environment dominated by echo-chambers and audience capture, Kasparian is charting her own path.

• We revisit some of her favorite writers and theorists. What political values are relevant today?

• We pay respect to the political genius and lasting influence of Michael Brooks.

Last year, Kasparian’s political commentary took a sharp editorial turn. You can read the backstory in her widely discussed Substack piece. The text was published a few short months before Trump’s historic popular victory in 2024.

I’ve spent the last eight years scouring the media landscape and sorting the signal from the noise. My political trend-casting research often involves diligently scraping and scrolling across a nearly infinite feed of posts and commentary. I’ve chased the bottom of every rabbit hole and browsed radical channels so small that most researchers wouldn’t give them a second glance.

In the alt-media landscape, The Young Turks is an anomalous success. Few channels have achieved such scale, legitimacy or longevity. However, the recent editorial pivot from Kasparian and her co-host Cenk Uygur (the founder of TYT), has been met with some harsh criticisms online. This dynamic indicates something important about the progressive media sphere and the values of today’s left in general.

In 2024, a Republican won the popular vote for the first time in over 30 years. The significance of this outcome is still being absorbed by our culture and media institutions. Narratives are now adjusting in ways that were previously unimaginable. During this period of critical reflection, Kasparian’s personal evolution represents a bellwether for general political alignments in the United States.

In 2025, Media Matters conducted a survey that indicated roughly 9 out of 10 channels on alt-media are conservative-leaning. (I would dispute the methods of categorization used in this study but the general assessment is correct: alt-media is overwhelmingly right-wing.) Many progressives will read the widely circulated Media Matters study as an indication that the left needs a much stronger presence in the alternative media space. But the dominance of conservative channels may indicate something far more uncomfortable.

Unlike legacy news, alt-media allows viewers to choose a narrative that most appeals to them. Adjusting for the sensationalism and attention baiting that is common practice within right-wing media (and of course the ever deepening pockets of the oligarchs that fund them), we are still left with a landscape that is vastly disproportionate. After the 2024 popular victory, the difficult but necessary question we must ask ourselves is; to what degree is today’s left unpopular because most people actually reject it’s ideas? Perhaps part of the reason for the left’s in-fighting, failure, and dysfunction is because audiences and voters are voluntarily selecting to go elsewhere.

Now, not everything that is correct is necessarily popular. I strongly believe in political vanguards and institutions. But today’s left is not lacking in vanguard politics — if anything, it has far too much of them. What we are learning, through painful and repeated failures, is that much of the values and rhetoric of today’s left are unpopular or out of step with the worldviews of most people.

In today’s episode, Ana Kasparian recalls the striking John Deere workers from a few years back. To achieve a national majority, progressive candidates will need to appeal to a base that extends far beyond professional urban elites.

The left is structurally disadvantaged under capitalism. But we also need to consider that one of the reasons we are losing is because people don’t like us. As friend of the pod and forthcoming guest on Doomscroll, Dustin "Dino" Guastella of the Center for Working-Class Politics, recently argued in Damage Magazine: “It’s Our Fault”.

Sometimes, it’s helpful to remind yourself that we are here to win. Our goal is to seize power and transform the world in an irreversible way. Once social democratic policies are in place, they are tremendously popular and nearly impossible to reverse. Social Security has remained intact for over 90 years.

Much of today’s left is concerned with an increasingly scarce moral high ground. Winning is a distant consideration. In this environment, vanguard politics serve as a way to differentiate themselves from the rest of society. And when their political programs fail, they see it as a vindication of their own elite positions. Under this social paradigm, victory is never achieved but breaking rank with the vanguard is met with harsh condemnations.

Kasparian and Uygur’s editorial pivot to a generalized populism, and their painstaking cultivation of a new audience, is an experiment that seeks to align popular media with the audiences who actually need to hear it’s message. As American politics continues to re-align, these new currents will undoubtedly play a part:

Ana Kasparian: Independent and Unaligned | Doomscroll

On this week’s bonus episode, we dive into Ana’s background and formative experiences on TYT. We discuss the horseshoe theory meme and I float a strategic argument: “the neoliberal case for single payer healthcare” lol:

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