Has The Left Finally Figured Out the Internet?

**Kyle Tharp** (0:00)
So like one day, you will see Laura Loomer and a bunch of others talking about why some random legislation is important to the government of India. And you're like, that is 100% paid. And people have slowly been publishing investigations and receipts of this. I think in one instance, I saw a bunch of right-wing influencers were paid $50 just to hit the retweet button on a post.
Others were being paid $1,000 just to copy and paste certain posts. And this is all in hopes of getting in front of Republican elected officials who are all addicted to using the app personally. And they know that they can get their stuff in front of the big guy in the White House as well. So I think X is just like a really, really important platform for them.

**Jon Favreau** (0:48)
I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, Kyle Tharp. Kyle writes an excellent newsletter about all the ways the internet is upending our politics, appropriately named Chaotic Era. He covers everything from the partisan media ecosystem to new digital campaign tactics, to creators on the left and right who are suddenly having a huge political impact. For anyone trying to figure out how the hell people are getting their information these days, it is an essential read. Today, I invited Kyle on to talk about the many trends he's written about, but also to zero in on a couple that I believe may have an outsized impact on the 2026 midterms. Namely, the emergence of pay for play political influencers and whether Democrats have made any progress in figuring out the internet. We also covered the fall of Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, the new success of legacy media on TikTok, and the intense grassroots anger, online and off, around data centers. It was a great conversation and we'll get to it in a moment. But before we do, if you want to hear this episode ad-free, subscribe to Friends of the Pod, subscribers get ad-free episodes of Offline, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, and Pod Save America, as well as special Behind the Paywall episodes, like Dan Pfeiffer's Polar Coaster, Terminally Online, and an extra bi-weekly episode of Pod Save America, called Pod Save America Only Friends. Of course, if you don't care about ad-free episodes, you could always subscribe to support independent pro-democracy media, one of the last outlets left out there that's independent and pro-democracy. So, head on over to crooked.com/friends to subscribe.
All right, here's Kyle Tharp.
Kyle, welcome to Offline.

**Kyle Tharp** (2:20)
Thanks for having me on. We have a lot to discuss.

**Jon Favreau** (2:22)
We do. We do. So, you've been covering the intersection of politics and the Internet for years.
You were first tracking digital ad spending in a newsletter for Courier News, and now you're at Chaotic Era, a sub-stack you launched right as Trump's second term began. Just to start with a big picture question. When you compare the Internet's role in politics today to when you started, what is the single biggest change? What would surprise the 2018 version of yourself?

**Kyle Tharp** (2:54)
I think that's a really great question. I think the biggest thing is people are paying a lot more attention to it. I feel like back in 2018, there was little bits of attention paid to ads on Facebook or whatever, but now it seems like the mainstream political press and generally, voters are much more in tune with how they're being reached online and all the various forces that are influencing them. Now, I think also things are moving a whole lot faster, just like technology is accelerating. And so campaigns and outside groups and other influence operations are just reaching voters at a much faster pace online.

**Jon Favreau** (3:30)
Do you think it's too simplistic to say that we've moved from the ad era to the creator era? I obviously know that ads are a big part of the spending, but it does feel like we're, it does feel like the creators are at least in tight competition with ads.

**Kyle Tharp** (3:46)
Yeah, absolutely. Like, what types of paid media that campaigns are deploying to reach voters has changed dramatically since 2020, since 2016, since 2012 You know, it used to be really capable broadcast, radio, mail, and now not only are people spending tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars on digital advertising on places like Facebook, but they're integrating sort of paid creator marketing campaigns into their media mix in a way that is now spreading down ballot.
You saw a bunch of it during the California gubernatorial primary. There's like every week there's stories about how campaigns are paying off creators and sort of under the table or undisclosed fashion that we can talk more about. But absolutely, I mean, I think so much attention is now being paid to these niche social media influencers, both small and large, that are reaching voters on behalf of candidates, whether they're paid or not, whether campaigns are doing interviews with them or content collabs. It's really taking over our politics. And I think in the midterms, we're going to see a lot more of it. And then heading into 2028, it's going to be insane.