Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist, the host of the Power User podcast, and the author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. She joined Current Affairs’ Editor-in-Chief Nathan J. Robinson and Digital Editor John Ross (who was formerly a producer for the David Pakman Show) to discuss her recent bombshell article for Wired: an investigation into Chorus, Good Influence, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the dark money network secretly funding Democratic influencers.

Nathan Robinson

Okay, let’s first try and understand the insidious influence network here and how it works. So maybe you could begin by giving us a little bit of an overview, because it’s a little confusing to understand the relationships here. There’s a group called Good Influence, a group called Chorus, and there’s another that I keep thinking is called the 1619 Project, but it’s called the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Explain that for us first.

Taylor Lorenz

Yes. So Good Influence is a for-profit influencer marketing company that does things like political campaigns, and they did a bunch with the Kamala Harris campaign. They’ve done stuff with Democrats before, like back in 2024, they were working sort of tightly with the Democratic establishment on different sorts of social good-type campaigns. They still operate as a for-profit company. After Kamala Harris’s loss in November, there was all of this sort of public meltdown, where I think the media narrative was like, she just didn’t do enough podcasts—if we had a Joe Rogan of the left, she would have won. Not true. But all of this donor money started to pour in. The lesson that Democratic donors took from Kamala Harris’s loss is not that she had a stunningly unpopular policy slate; it was that she needs more TikTokers to talk positively about her, and that will win the election. So all this donor money is flooding into the space, and Chorus was sort of the first group out of the gate aimed at collecting those millions of donor dollars, and money on the Democrat side, to push this content creator collective.

Chorus launched publicly back in November, I think literally 10 days after the election, in a splashy New York Times article. And they were like, we’re this influencer network, and we’re going to help each other; it’s a public thing, and we just want to help each other and grow the left or whatever online. It was co-founded by Brian Tyler Cohen and then some people from Good Influence. It sort of spun out of that Good Influence crew, but it was a nonprofit. Now that was all public. They’ve done some things that I’ve reported on that were not great. They were stealing some content creator’s images off social media and using them in their fundraising decks. Those content creators found out about it, and they were like, what the hell? Why am I being used in a fundraising deck? I don’t have anything to do with you guys. So there was some dubious stuff there, but the crux of my story is about this recent paid program.

So what was unreported—what is unreported—is the relationship between Chorus and the Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a powerful liberal dark money group, and Chorus is described in these contracts that we got ahold of as a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund. And it turns out that a couple of months ago, Chorus started this paid influencer program, where these influencers are attending daily messaging sessions. They’ve signed restrictive contracts that exert a certain level of control over their content, potentially, according to the contract. And so that is what was unreported. And so I reported on that program, who was in the program, how it operated, and some of the sort of ethical concerns around a dark money-paid influence program on the Democrat side.

Robinson

Now, you begin your story with some of the actual discomfort that creators who were considering participating in this program were feeling about the terms that they were asked to agree to in order to be part of it and receive this money. One of the most important parts of your story is what they were asked to agree to in exchange for this money. And some of them, after your story, have been showing their contracts to sort of supposedly try and disprove your story, but have actually kind of confirmed that they agreed to certain terms. So what exactly were they asked to agree to in exchange for this money?

Lorenz

Yes, a few things. Number one is privacy. In the multiple contracts that we’ve seen, they agreed not to disclose the identity of the funder—not to disclose, basically publicly, that they’re in the program without talking to Chorus first and getting approval. So there’s basically an NDA-type aspect to this, where they’re just not public about the fact that they’re in a paid program and getting paid tens of thousands of dollars of political money. That’s a problem. And then in terms of other restrictions, they can’t criticize other people in the program, according to the contract, which is a problem. For instance, if one of the main creators in the program is pushing some sort of denialist content about certain events or whatever, these creators should have the right to criticize it. But according to that, they can’t. They can’t weigh in. They can’t use Chorus funds to create content that is not in line with Chorus’s policy agenda. At one point, there’s a discussion of that. It’s sort of in the weeds, but basically, they can’t use Chorus resources to do certain things, and they’re supposed to funnel their bookings through the Chorus newsroom and basically loop Chorus in on the interviews that they’re setting up, even externally on their own. And so all of those things, primarily the secrecy aspect of it—when we reached out to ethics experts on this topic, they said this is not a very ethical agreement for our media ecosystem.

Robinson

With the Sixteen Thirty Fund, what do we know? It’s a dark money group, and we don’t know that much. But what do we know about where the money is coming from? Do we know anything about who’s pouring money into this?

Lorenz 

We only know people who choose to disclose. The way that dark money groups work is they’re these big sort of fundraising mechanisms. They often raise millions and millions of dollars and then funnel that money into Super PACs, which influence our elections. But they do a lot behind the scenes, and the whole point is that they’re big black boxes. So some people, for instance Pierre Omidyar, who funds the Intercept and funds a journalism initiative that I’m part of that’s an investigative journalism fellowship—he values transparency, and he’s publicly disclosed that he gave a gift to it or whatever. Sometimes you’ll see reporting that’ll say, we found out that so-and-so gave dark money here and there. All billionaires give dark money left, right, and center. But we actually don’t know. We don’t know. For instance, the Sixteen Thirty Fund received a $50 million gift, I think it was last year or 2023—I can’t remember. But we don’t know who that is. We don’t know the identity of that person. We don’t know what their policy agenda is. I don’t think that you give $50 million without expecting some sort of action to take place. You’re pushing some sort of agenda. So this is the problem with dark money groups as a whole. There’s a lack of transparency.

John Ross

One question I had, Taylor, is the dark money is one part of this. But if I were to just go on the FEC (Federal Election Commission) website right now and look at all the contributions to Good Influence in 2024, I can literally see that the Kamala Harris campaign gave them more than $600,000 in 2024. They received $30,000 from the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) and $50,000 from Vote Save America. This isn’t dark money. But do you have any sort of indication as to where this money is going, if it could potentially be going to influencers who are associated with the Good Influence?

Lorenz

Well, a lot of the creators in the Good Influence for-profit side of things are now involved in Chorus. There’s a lot of overlap in those realms. And so I think you can see by the disclosures that we do have around Good Influence, which, again, is a for-profit company that is separate from the nonprofit Chorus—although they are co-founded by some of the same people—you can see how closely they’re aligned with the Democratic establishment and that tight relationship that they’ve had with it, where they’re doing a lot of work with these Democrat establishment groups with content creators. Because that’s their whole thing, involving content creators and social good.

Ross

And meanwhile, they claim that they’re independent and they’re independent progressive media, yet they have this weird sort of overlap.

Lorenz

Now they’re claiming to be nonpartisan, which is very hilarious, because the entire thing is, if you read the article that was written about them at launch, specifically to fix the messaging problem that they believe the Democrats have. Here’s what Brian Tyler Cohen said about launching Chorus back in November in the New York Times:

“We have an obligation to do it”—to launch Chorus—“because the Democratic Party has been so slow in adapting to the media environment that we’re in right now.” 

So you hear them say this stuff, how they’re going to help the Democratic Party and all this, and then now, since my story came out, they’re like, “we don’t—political?” It’s very silly.

Robinson

I want to dive a little more into precisely what the problem with this is, because a lot of the influencers who have been part of this came out afterward and said, well, but this is a good thing. The Republican Party knows how to build a giant propaganda apparatus. The Democrats need to do the same thing, and finally, they are supporting these independent creators. And that’s all very positive. I think it’s worth kind of discussing what happens, or what the risks are of having influential creators—these are people, often, who have very big audiences—take this kind of money and agree to these kinds of terms. Obviously, as you said, there’s just an inherent ethical problem with it, which is, if you’re independent, you shouldn’t take shadowy money from a political party and call yourself independent. But also, there is a way in which it will cause these creators, whether they are conscious of it or not, to steer clear of topics and of criticisms that they might otherwise make of the Democratic Party. It means that the moment they talk about, for example, Gaza—it’s not that there is evidence of explicit censorship on these issues, but they are aware that their money is coming from a political party that doesn’t necessarily want them to talk about certain things. 

Lorenz 

I think there are layers to the problem with how this program is structured. You brought up the dark money thing. I talked to Anna Massoglia. She’s an amazing reporter, one of the best reporters in the country on dark money, and former investigations editor at OpenSecrets. And if you go on my YouTube channel, I have a video with her about this exact topic. She said this has been an idea that some Democrats have put forward of, well, if we just sort of play the dark money game too, we can stick it to them. And it’s the same thing that you hear a lot from the Democrats: we just need a few good billionaires on our side. It’s like when Elon Musk had a feud with Trump. These are the same people who are reaching out, saying, hey, Elon, we want you on our side. No, this is a fascist tech billionaire. I actually think we shouldn’t cater to people like that.

But it’s this idea that a few good billionaires will save us. It’s delusional, because the vast majority of dark money and billionaire funding is on the right. So if you’re going to do this shady game, it’s not going to work, and all you’re doing is further eroding trust in our media ecosystem. The way to dismantle their power would be to pass stricter FEC regulations and pass laws around this, which is hard, but also just to set a culture of transparency and say, unlike the right, where you can’t trust what you’re seeing because half of them are being paid by shady organizations, we don’t do that. You can trust us, and we have a level of transparency, and that’s good for the ecosystem. And then the transparency and the disclosure is the second part of that, which is that even if you were comfortable taking the dark money or whatever, and you don’t care who it comes from, you should disclose it to your audience. If you’re presenting yourself as a journalist online, which some of these creators are doing, you should be open about the fact that you’re going to receive tens of thousands of dollars from a political organization for a political agenda.

Robinson 

John, you did have personal experience with this. Before you came and joined us at Current Affairs, you did work on the David Pakman Show. David Pakman is one of the creators who was exposed in Taylor’s reporting as being part of the Chorus program, receiving money from that, and also has received money from Good Influence. And so you observed behind the scenes what this relationship looked like. You were there pre-Chorus. This was Good Influence. But could you talk about how this relationship actually worked behind the scenes?

Ross

Yes, so I’ve actually personally edited a few videos that were essentially advertisements for candidates that David did for Bob Casey Jr., Jacky Rosen, and Tammy Baldwin, which were prompts given to us by Good Influence. And I always just thought that it was very shady that someone who purports to be an independent, progressive content creator was doing advertisements for various candidates in the first place.

Robinson

Yes. And Taylor, you’ve reported previously about the way that the Biden White House, I believe you said, shut out creators that deviated from the party line. So what they might argue is there tends not to be explicit censorship, where they come in and say, don’t say this. But what you found is that there are doors that close to you if you say particular things. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

Lorenz 

Yes, so I wrote a story last year for the Washington Post where I spoke to a slew of these Gen Z content creators that were previously involved in TikTok for Biden, which is a coalition of a bunch of Gen Z content creators that really worked aggressively to turn out the youth vote and deliver the win to Joe Biden in 2020. Joe Biden’s team literally thanked them and credited them with helping to turn out the youth vote. After he was elected, throughout 2021 they were being invited to these briefing calls. It was this thing where it seemed like they were getting access, so they were sort of working on things. Then they started criticizing him.

So Biden obviously completely lied about the pandemic being over. He forced everyone back to work with no worker protections, lifted mask mandates, and forced exposure for service workers. It was devastating. So a bunch of disabled content creators were like, hey, what are you doing to ensure that we have paid sick leave? Why are you removing mask mandates in the midst of an ongoing airborne pandemic? What the hell? They’re shut out all of a sudden. Climate activist Elise Joshi gets up in front of [White House press secretary] Karine Jean-Pierre and starts questioning her about policy, saying, Hey, you guys said you were going to do all this for the climate, and yet you’re approving these drilling projects. What’s up with that? Immediately, suddenly, the climate activists are not getting invited.

Then, Gaza. The genocide, after October 7, goes into full effect. And at that same time, they’re passing the TikTok ban. Biden starts aggressively pushing the TikTok ban, which, as we know per Representatives Mike Gallagher and Mark Warner, who co-sponsored that bill, was about censoring content about Gaza. And so then creators start going at them about TikTok and Gaza. Those creators are soon not invited. And as I reported last spring, pretty much that whole coalition of content creators that had previously capped for Joe Biden so hard—they were out there pushing for him so hard in 2020—were basically all de facto blacklisted for speaking about these issues and questioning the administration’s gross mishandling of things like the pandemic, certain climate issues, and Gaza. And then, of course, we saw this happen again at the DNC in Chicago last year. You saw Hasan Piker literally have his credentials revoked on stream for interviewing members of the Uncommitted Movement. So time and time again, we see the Democrats try to exert this top-down control over the media climate and revoke access to anyone who is too critical of the party establishment.

Robinson 

I think your story is very important for helping us understand how media works, but [also] how the creator economy works behind the scenes in progressive and Democratic circles. There’s a famous clip of Noam Chomsky talking to a BBC journalist, where the BBC journalist aggressively disputes Noam Chomsky’s theory of Manufacturing Consent. And he says, you think I’m self-censoring, but I’m not self-censoring. And Chomsky replies with this wonderful reply where he says, I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I think you believe everything you’re saying. I’m just saying if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting. You were selected, basically, for your opinions.

So I’m sure that a lot of the creators who work with Good Influence or Chorus would say, Chorus has never told me—they’ve never dictated—what I have to say. But the point is that if you said something different, you wouldn’t be getting the money. And in Pakman’s case, specifically, if you look through his channel, it’s almost all anti-Trump content, and I don’t think there’s hardly a word on Palestine. 

Ross

If I could jump in there real quickly.

Robinson

Yes, I wanted to bring you in here, John, because you worked there, so you have a little bit of personal knowledge of the fact that this is deliberate.

Ross 

It absolutely is deliberate. I actually have an email from him after he visited the White House last year on the day of Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. He was invited to a private, off-the-record meeting with Kamala Harris and several other content creators, including Brian Tyler Cohen and the Meiselas brothers from MeidasTouch, and he told me that they all sort of talked among themselves at the White House, not in an official capacity during the meeting, but just casually as colleagues among themselves, and they talked about what their editorial stance is on Gaza. And he told me in an email that they talked among themselves and came to the conclusion that the topic is too divisive and might drag down their channels, that it’s a poison pill, and that it’s better if they just don’t talk about it at all.

Now, Brian Tyler Cohen literally has never done anything on Gaza. Beyond that, during the 2020 primary, even though he was regularly putting out videos covering news and politics, he never once mentioned Bernie Sanders during the 2020 primary. And we see today with the rise of Zohran Mamdani, has Brian Tyler Cohen covered him? No, not at all. So I would suggest that, yes, there absolutely is suppression on Gaza. But that also goes beyond that to a broader shutting down of leftist issues. If you are a content creator and you have a platform of 3-4 million people, and it’s your job to analyze news and politics for a living, and yet you don’t ever mention Gaza, I just don’t understand how you would be able to sleep at night. I certainly wasn’t able to when I worked for him. To be honest, I sort of feel like I have blood on my hands. He has this audience of 3 million people who are broadly moderate, centrist liberal types, who, theoretically, if they did hear about what was happening there, then they might have been more critical of Biden. There might have been potential to pressure him and change his policy on it. But because it was shut out entirely, it became much less present in the public discourse around a certain type of person who isn’t getting their news from actual journalists but paid shills for the Democratic Party.

Lorenz 

To me, what’s so insidious is you saw this strategy emerge. Because the denialism didn’t just start with Gaza. We’ve seen them shut down progressive wings of the party before, and that’s why I bring up the Covid stuff and the climate stuff and some of the other criticisms from activists who had challenged Biden previously. It was just this complete bad faith attack and shutdown of criticism. And I think it’s been really corrosive. Because, like you said, it’s not even just the Gaza stuff, which is the most extreme example of this. This is a genocide. How on earth do you call yourself a political creator and not acknowledge it? But also, a lot of liberals that consume all of this liberal slop online also believe that Covid magically disappeared when Biden took office. They also believe that Biden was working tirelessly for the people and climate and all this. And it’s like, did he do some good stuff? Yes, I’m not saying he’s as bad as Trump. But it is the curation of this very specific pro-Democrat worldview that ignores these real issues that are affecting working class people and the most marginalized people in society. And when creators who are among those marginalized people or affected by these policies or care deeply about them, like Elise Joshi, who’s done amazing work, they’re shut down and excommunicated and left off the White House Christmas party invites. And I think that’s important. It just reflects the broader problem of this party and their complete unwillingness to adopt popular policy positions and engage with the actual base of their policy and the real working class people in this coalition.

Ross

To go off that, I don’t think the purpose of this cohort of creators is to strengthen the Democratic Party. Their role is to protect the Democratic establishment. They’re best understood as, essentially, the unofficial marketing and public relations arm of the Democratic Party, as far as I am concerned. Because how can you have a stronger Democratic Party if you completely ignore Gaza in your coverage and you pretend that this is an issue that people don’t actually care about? How can you strengthen the Democratic Party when we see so much organic, fiery, grassroots energy behind Zorhan and you don’t even cover it? Their role is to do bland interviews with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer that never get to the heart of why the Democratic Party is the only thing more unpopular than Donald Trump right now. But the thing that gets me so upset over it is that these people are incredibly privileged. They have this amazing platform whereby, if they did do the kind of interviews with Hakeem Jeffries, for example, that Krystal Ball did with Elissa Slotkin on Breaking Points, that might force them to be better and to make the party better and to make us an actual resistance party to Trump, instead of whatever we are now.

Robinson

Taylor, I was just looking back through your book, Extremely Online, and one of the things it’s about is the explosive growth of the creator industry and the way in which, you say,

"when one thinks of the media, one can think of broadcast news and newspapers, but in reality, creators are the media of today. The media landscape, in that they dominate, is only becoming more digital and more and more distributed."

And that thing that I thought is you’re an actual journalist who writes for real publications, and there are codes of ethics that journalists have to follow, like things about disclosure, and it’s rather striking that if you’re a creator, it’s very murky what you even have to disclose and what your role really is. We talked to Kat Abughazaleh after she went to the Democratic National Convention in summer 2024, and she said it was very strange because the party was courting the creators then. It wasn’t very clear—are they journalists? Do they have any obligations to do more than parrot the party line? Are they allowed to take money? They were all given Harris for President sweatshirts—is that a responsible thing? It’s like, well, I’m not a journalist; I’m a creator. Talk a little bit about the broader context of how this happens in the context of the decline of journalism and the rise of this kind of ambiguous influencer role.

Lorenz 

So one thing I talk about in my book, which is about the history of the content creator industry—not just the political content, but the broader, mostly entertainment-focused content creator industry—is the rise of bloggers. And this is actually how I came up. I have zero background in journalism. I never studied journalism. I got popular by blogging, like a lot of other millennial media people. And so you saw blogging emerge in the aughts as this first sort of disruption. The first person issued a White House press credential as an influencer was actually a blogger back in 2005, and you start to see these bloggers suddenly sitting front row at fashion week or whatever. These were people who were not institutionally approved. And so you started to see people question, okay, what is this? What is this new type of figure? Who are these people? How should we deal with them? And the mainstream media sort of apparatus basically co-opted the blogging industry. They hired Ezra Klein. I ended up in traditional media. They took everyone who was really successful online, and they sort of co-opted them in traditional media. And that kind of went along for a while, but then you started to see the explosive growth of YouTube and video and TikTok. And you have this new class of independent content creators that, unlike the bloggers who couldn’t really monetize effectively on their own, can monetize effectively because there’s a lot more brand money in the space since 2015. And specifically, the far right really started to court these creators. I was in the room at the Hilton when Trump won in 2016. It was full of other Internet content creators/posters. So this industry evolved. These content creators don’t have any background in journalism. Some of them do pretend to be journalists, but a lot of them will say, I’m not a journalist, and I don’t care to be a journalist, or they call themselves citizen journalists, whatever. But they don’t abide—there’s no consistency. The FCC has never effectively regulated this industry. There’s no oversight. It’s really the Wild West, and that’s in part also because there are no journalists covering it. I am the only mainstream reporter who even had this as a beat. And even now, if you look at the mainstream journalists who cover this industry in the traditional media, their job is to sort of write a big profile of a popular Substacker every two months. They’re not doing accountability-focused journalism on the industry. So we have this multibillion-dollar industry—I think it’s going to be a half-a-trillion-dollar industry by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs—that’s totally unregulated. It’s the primary way that most people are getting their news, and it’s not beholden to absolutely any sort of ethical standards. It’s just a recipe for disaster when it intersects with our political system, which it, of course, has.

Ross

I wanted to jump in really quick and just give another way that I think Good Influence can provide value to the creators in a way that I don’t think has been widely commented on. While I was working for David Pakman, it was expressed to me that one of the greatest sources of value from Good Influence was these petition links. It was actually my job to put the links to these petitions as a pinned comment on all the YouTube videos that came out. I looked at some of the recent ones. For example, "Tell Trump to stop the authoritarian takeover of DC" and "Tell Trump, don’t spend $200 million on a new ballroom." And the thing is, it was actually never made clear to me if these petitions were even real. The chief purpose of them was data collection to get information from the audience: their names and emails. Because when you’re a big YouTuber, it can be really difficult to get that kind of data from your audience. Everything that we collected would go on the mailing list, and it was also shared with me that it was also given to Good Influence. What Good Influence would do with that data, I’m not sure. It might sound like a small thing, but it’s difficult to overstate just how valuable that is.

Lorenz

"We are harvesting emails under a different pretense and then using those emails potentially for profit." You’re either selling that email list to another Democratic consulting firm or a campaign, or whatever. That’s the goal of those data harvesting schemes.

Ross

Which always felt so scummy, because the people who are signing these petitions just think that they’re doing a good deed.

Robinson

And Good Influence is directly paid. John, you mentioned earlier the FEC filings that show that the Harris campaign directly gave this organization a ton of money. We don’t know exactly what it got for that money. It would be nice, though. But they might have gotten a lot of emails, and that might be the reason that you get all these texts that say, "It’s Chuck Schumer here," or "It’s Barack Obama here."

Lorenz

Obviously I can’t speak to any of the Good Influence practices that you saw working there. But what I will say is that all of these problems, and the reason why a lot of my book is about the entertainment industry aspect of it, is that this is an industry that has emerged that is so much bigger than just the political landscape, and all the sort of shady digital marketing practices that brands engage with are now being applied to politics in recent years. And I think that’s what’s so important to understand. And I reported on this actually when I read about meme pages. I don’t know if you guys remember that Mike Bloomberg was secretly paying meme pages to post pro-Mike Bloomberg memes in 2020. It was a scoop I had.

Robinson

Very effective. It worked in American Samoa.

Lorenz

Right. But there are all these traditional digital marketing tactics that were never regulated and should have always been. We should have laws around certain things and data privacy laws. Especially data privacy. We should have regulations in place. But because the influencer industry is so out there, and there’s not a lot of critical reporting on it, and it’s all just kind of, again, the Wild West—like money, money, money—we don’t have any protections. Now all of these tactics are being applied to politics, and it’s having significant effects, I would argue, on our political ecosystem.

Ross

One of those effects, I think you mentioned before, was about how the Democratic Party thinks that it doesn’t have a policy problem; it has a tactics and messaging problem, which is why they are recruiting all of these influencers. There’s also been reporting that Cohen has been invited to closed-door sessions with prominent Democrats to coach them on digital strategy. So it really seems like the Democratic Party is just outsourcing their messaging problem to these influencers, but their content isn’t rooted in any actual inspirational left-wing politics that I think will actually galvanize anybody in future elections, which I think is very concerning.

Robinson

John, just one thing. I believe we had mentioned that when you were at Pakman, the Biden campaign, actually, at one point, explicitly got you to join a campaign group chat—an invitation only where the Biden campaign could coordinate with the staff of the Pakman show. Is that right?

Ross

Yes, so David made me join a group chat on Signal called the Biden Rapid Amplifiers group chat, and there were a number of other content creators on it. I basically served as the emissary of the show. I would join calls for him and report back to him on what they talked about. The purpose of the amplifiers’ group chat was that if Kamala Harris made a really good point during the debate that really embarrassed Trump, they could put a link to that in the group chat and be like, hey, we want all of you to amplify this—retweet it and post about it. And they also gave us messaging guidance as well. To be fair, though, you must keep in mind that this is the Biden-Harris campaign we’re talking about. So the messaging was incredibly bland and horrible, so we never used any of the messaging that they gave us on the show. In fact, I feel like our propaganda was much better than what they were giving us. But I always thought it was very unseemly that, again, these are people from independent, progressive media, and yet, we’re being invited to join essentially campaign group chats, where I joined calls with senior staffers for the Biden and Harris campaigns. I recognized Harry Sisson on a couple of the calls. How can these people so well connected with the party establishment possibly claim to be independent in any way? Even if they’re not taking money, they’re still participating in strategic messaging calls with the campaign itself.

Robinson  

Now, Taylor, I want to conclude by asking you about the responses to your reporting. Because I mentioned at the outset that you’ve really managed to get under the skin of the people that you wrote about. A lot of them came out in an almost weirdly coordinated way—some of the messages were very similar to one another, in a way that suggested that maybe Chorus put out an email that was like, Just say the story’s been debunked. Could you tell us a little bit about how people like Pakman and Brian Tyler Cohen responded to your reporting here?

Lorenz

Yes, their response just shocked me. It’s like straight out of the MAGA playbook that these people lament all the time. They didn’t engage substantively with the facts of my reporting at all. The story’s been up for over a week. There’s not a single correction on the story. They didn’t release the contracts or show any material to show that anything I reported was false. Instead, they all got up and, just sort of exactly like you said, promoted this very similar script, which looked like some sort of ChatGPT-written script, that the story’s been debunked, there’s nothing to see here, and Taylor’s a liar. And then they went on this super aggressive attack where they quite literally accused me of being racist for using the term "dark money"—I kid you not, that was an entire thing—and said that I’m a secret MAGA shill, I’m best friends with Tucker Carlson, or whatever Brian Tyler Cohen put in that video. Just absurd claims. And then they also claim that Wired lies and is lying, which I think is incredibly corrosive and damaging. For Wired specifically, the reason I wanted to work with them on this story is because of their stellar reputation covering things like DOGE and just the intersection of the internet and politics in such a great way. And so, yes, it’s crazy that they’re just doing the Trump fake news thing, and they just attacked me personally for a week, saying that I’m a discredited, failed journalist and promoting fantasies about me.

Robinson

It was really extraordinary to me, because I looked through those trying to understand, what are they saying has been debunked? They say the story is false, but then they deny things that you didn’t say. David Pakman came out and said, "I’m not being paid by AIPAC or ’I-PAC’ or whatever it is. I don’t even know how it’s pronounced."

Although, you know he clearly has, because he pronounced it correctly before. It was just such nonsense. But you didn’t say he was being paid by AIPAC.

Lorenz

They’re just doing straw men. They’re debunking things that I never claimed. Or, as you mentioned, that other girl put up a section of the contract that validates exactly what we reported. And it’s like, See, this is why it’s false, and actually, it’s good that we were funneling our bookings through their system. Actually, that’s good.

Robinson

It’s false, and also it’s good if it’s true.

Lorenz

Right. It’s false, but also if it is true, then it was good. And I just—it’s so silly. I don’t even know what to say to these people.

Robinson

I suppose the most substantive thing they might have claimed as a response is, Yes, we did disclose it. We do have a broad range of discussions. We are independent. And there’s no—

Lorenz

Where did they disclose it? 

Robinson

Well....

Lorenz

I would love for one of them to point me to one video where they disclose that they were part of a paid program, much less a paid program from the Sixteen Thirty Fund. None of them have been able to provide a single—what they do is they put up the Chorus website. Again, Chorus has always been public. So they’re like, Guys, I always talked about being part of Chorus. Yes, you talked about being part of Chorus. You’ve not talked about being part of a dark money funding scheme, which is the whole point of the story.

Robinson 

And I suppose I would be interested if they directly answered some questions like, what interactions do you have with Chorus? Do you get guest approval? Let’s go through this contract.

Lorenz

What are the messaging sessions like? That’s what I’m curious about, these daily messaging sessions. What’s being said? There’s just a lack of transparency. I wish they would still put the full roster of all 90 creators. There are creators out there who are in the program, who have not come forward and are still likely accepting payment that we still don’t know, and that leads to total erosion of trust across our political system.

Robinson

Well, I did want to ask you about that, because you were able to sort of pry this open, but there were still a lot of unknowns at the end of this story. So what is it that you now still kind of wish you could find out about what’s going on behind closed doors here?

Lorenz

So the response definitely set off alarm bells, and I’ve been talking to other journalists about this. The fact that they didn’t preempt our story and just announce the program themselves on their own terms in some sort of splashy PR piece is weird. It makes me think that they really don’t want people asking questions about their funding. And so that makes me want to kind of dig deeper. Overall, I think we just need more transparency as a whole. Who’s getting paid? I think they should post the contracts publicly. I think that they should have a lot more accountability and transparency in the whole way that they ran this program, and they have done the opposite of all of that.

Robinson

John, did you have any other questions for Taylor before we wrap?

Ross 

No other questions. I guess I would just say one thing I do think that we can sort of learn from this is that these sort of establishment centrist-y creators all have so much solidarity with one another. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a group chat with Pakman, Brian Tyler Cohen, and the MeidasTouch people. These people are in regular contact with one another. They’re constantly promoting one another’s content. In part, that’s easier to do because it’s all the same slop about Trump, and they don’t cover anything else. But I think that we on the actual independent left often have very substantive disagreements with one another, and we need to hash those out. But I also think that we could have more solidarity. We could sort of look at this model and uplift one another’s work, especially when it’s concerning Gaza coverage, since this big monolith completely ignores it, and also actual independent on-the-ground journalism, which is often incredibly expensive to produce and doesn’t generate as much interest as videos about Trump with big yellow arrows pointing at him. I thought that was something really good that you said in a recent YouTube video you put out, Taylor.

"If the Democrats really want to become relevant again, dumping tens of millions of dollars into these secret influencer programs isn’t going to do it instead of spending millions funding lame pro-Democrat centrists online who ultimately have no cultural impact and only exist to feed a steady stream of chum to Blue MAGA, MSNBC moms. These organizations should put that money toward backing labor reporters, climate investigators, housing organizers, tech accountability advocates, all of whom command enormous trust."

I think that we need that spirit of solidarity on the left, since we’re facing so much, not just Trump, but these massive creators who are actively trying to shut out the left at every turn, who refuse to talk about Gaza, even though it is the moral issue of our time. And quite frankly, I don’t think history is going to look back on them kindly. So we have to do what we can do to actually sustain the actual independent left media ecosystem.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.