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Pod save the Democrats

The Californian Governor Gavin Newsom wants to talk about the liberal left. Does he have anything to say?

By Freddie Hayward

The Democrats are getting into the entertainment business. During the campaign, they watched Donald Trump bypass the mainstream media by riffing for three hours in the studios of podcast kings like Lex Fridman, Theo Von and Joe Rogan. The thinking goes that young voters listened enraptured, and then bolted to the polls.

So now the party is on a tortured search for that political elixir called “authenticity”. The theory is that voters see photo ops and stage-managed speeches as scripted and artificial, whereas ad-libbing on podcasts about who killed JFK, or the merits of the North Korean shoreline for building beach villas, reveals the man behind the candidate.

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