Insufferable Woke Cringe Is Killing The Democratic Brand

It's not just the one Zoom call

Being an ally means being willing to be uncomfortable. No one is more uncomfy than someone talking to their bigoted family members. Over half of white people, or almost half of white people, voted for Donald Trump both times he ran for president. So you know someone that you need to talk to. Do it.

Arielle Fodor claims to be a former kindergarten teacher and I believe her. Only a failed kindergarten teacher could ever be so authentic at infantilization. She calls herself “Mrs. Frazzled” on TikTok, where she “influences” app users. Fodor is also reportedly a failed actress, which I also believe, for she recites her lines with the authenticity of an infant. She is an especially infantilizing influencer. Kirsten Fleming nailed her in the New York Post as “a mid-level marketing mama on the verge of being invited to the annual conference in Cabo if only she can enlist five more eager wine moms to her vitamin-selling team.” Take that exact person and put her on TikTok, because Twitter has become X and belongs to Elon Musk, now, and he is the new King of Bad Things.

Arielle Fodor uses viral video in the way that progressive activists have developed since 2008, when Organizing For Obama dicovered the power of YouTube. As media professor Carol Vernalis explained in her groundbreaking essay three years later, it was the definitive moment when Americans turned to the internet for political news content. Video was the king format, a fact that Mark Zuckerberg misunderstood when he destroyed several websites by convincing them to switch to Facebook video production. By 2017, Twitter had emerged as the top platform for cross-platform video virality. That is, any video posted on Twitter would be more likely to ‘cross over’ to other platforms — YouTube, Instagram, Facebook — than the other way around.

For progressives with a ‘theory of change’ in which viral video is a key ‘get out the vote’ (GOTV) technology, Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been a disaster, and their resulting desperation fully explains the advertiser pressure campaign leveled against the app since he bought it. One key organization involved in that World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) campaign, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), announced that it is “discontinuing” after Musk sued them last week.

Having lost Twitter, TikTok was the number two cross-platform performer, so efforts by Congress to regulate the app or force its sale resulted in further activist backlash. Members of the Democratic ‘squad’ who called such efforts racist were in fact echoing the talking points that progressive organizers put out in their webinars at about the same time, fearing the loss of their fallback viral video platform. They have yet to find a replacement.

I know these facts because I was watching those webinars in which progressive activists bemoaned the loss of their control over Twitter, discussed the pro-TikTok talking points they wanted Democrats to use (and that Democrats did use). I listened to them complain about the insularity of the “safe” alternatives they have created on Mastodon and Bluesky.