Meet liberals’ right-wing media listening club

In progressive political spaces, right-wing media is often discussed as both all-powerful and fringe, able to warp public opinion while remaining outside the bounds of seriousness or respectability. But for all the hand-wringing about “the conservative media ecosystem,” relatively few people on the left actually engage with what millions of right-leaning Americans consume each day. That gap in firsthand understanding is what a growing number of liberals are now trying to close, one podcast episode and YouTube video at a time.

After the 2024 election, Nina Harris and Jordan Silver were caught off guard by Trump’s victory. As a Gen Z’er and millennial working in and around politics, they knew there was a real chance Trump could win—but like many on the Left, they felt like they had a few blind spots when it came to how some Americans were getting information online.

“In October of 2024, I remember Hasan Piker posting a screenshot of the top podcasts on Spotify at the time, with all or most of them being right-wing, and the caption said in all caps “WE ARE COOKED,” Silver told me. “But I remember vividly thinking to myself, no, this is just one platform…and kind of pretended that wasn’t happening. After the election, Nina and I were talking, and realized how wrong I was. It was not just one platform, and neither of us had ever truly engaged with this content. We didn’t really know who the key players were, beyond clips and headlines. We just saw right-wing media personalities as boogeymen. So we wanted to hold ourselves accountable and actually listen to what’s being said to better understand it all.

So, in January of last year, they started what is essentially a book club for left-leaning individuals to watch or listen to right-wing media content in order to better understand the messaging and online engagement tactics used by the biggest personalities on the right.

“I used to do organizing work on campaigns. After November 2024, I kept thinking about traditional direct voter contact, and the idea of calling a stranger (phone banking) who listens to Tucker Carlson every day and getting them to vote for Kamala Harris after one conversation was pretty hard to imagine,” says Harris. “There's just no way to have a stranger convince you of something when you're having a parasocial relationship with all these right-wing creators and podcasters every day or every week. So for me, the goal was to know what these people are saying, and I wanted a way to hold ourselves accountable to it—that’s why it’s kind of like a book club.”

Over the past year, their virtual club, cleverly named “Unfortunately Not A Sound Bath,” has grown significantly. What began as a casual Zoom chat with about 50 of Silver and Harris’ friends is now a twice-monthly convening with breakout sessions and volunteer facilitators. Membership has grown to more than 600 people, with most finding out about the group through word of mouth or posts on LinkedIn. Some members even publish their thoughts and takeaways via a group Substack newsletter. 

While you might assume most club members work in politics, that’s not exactly the case. The group does include plenty of high-level campaign operatives, progressive nonprofit staffers, and Hill aides, but there are just as many participants from outside politics. Some are retired, and others are students. All are trying to make sense of the strange and often bewildering world of right-wing media.

Unfortunately Not A Sound Bath operates much like any other book club. Before each meeting, participants receive a few pieces of media to consume, usually right-wing podcast episodes or YouTube shows from figures like Ben Shapiro, Benny Johnson, Tucker Carlson, and others, along with a list of questions to guide discussion. After a short opening with several hundred attendees, participants are sorted into breakout rooms of about a dozen people to talk about what they watched or heard.

According to Harris and Silver, the goal is not necessarily to empathize with far-right content creators or dunk on how extreme they may sound, but instead its to understand how they speak to their audiences and the messaging tactics they use, in hopes of better countering them. "This is not about how we get Ben Shapiro to be a Democrat, or about sanitizing arguments that we feel are extreme. This is about the people that are consuming his content—voters—what is it that is making them have the views that they have? It's in large part this content. The best thing that we can do is learn from this type of content and try to basically dismantle it one-on-one."

Especially after a year when the Trump administration’s chaotic news cycle felt impossible to keep up with, this type of group has served as a creative coping mechanism for some members, channeling political energy into something productive, and has offered them a sense of community. 

"I think one of the most rewarding parts about doing this has been the response we get from the members,” says Silver. “Not only do they feel like they're building a community with people in a productive space for these conversations, but there have been at least a dozen people who have told us that this club has given them hope in politics for the first time in a long time. That was definitely not what we thought we were gonna achieve with this."

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