Brian Beutler gets at something important here, if depressing, about recent rightwing celebrity Riley Gaines (boldface mine):

[Republicans are] in the market, day and night, for people they can cast as heroes or victims or martyrs in the culture war. When they find those people, they take whatever steps they can to increase their profiles, and thus the reach of right-wing propaganda. Erika Kirk. Riley Gaines. Any attractive young white woman who becomes a victim of violent crime. When they can’t find people like this organically, they manufacture them, like this fail-student from the University of Oklahoma.

Democrats simply don’t play this game well, and I think it’s mostly because they aren’t set up for it.

One episode leaps to mind: Back in 2023, Texas Republican leadership intervened to prevent a woman named Kate Cox from getting a medically necessary abortion. My thought at the time was that Joe Biden should travel to Texas, invite her aboard Air Force One, and fly her to a free state to receive proper care.

He obviously didn’t do this—Democrats basically never think and act the way Republicans would. But Democrats did invite her to the State of the Union address (a perfectly fine gesture) and she appeared in a campaign ad.

But that’s it. She’s not a podcast celebrity. She doesn’t run some big Dem-aligned organization with a large grassroots membership. She isn’t on the fast track to elected office. Now of course I’m making a lot of assumptions here: Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted a ride on Air Force One. Maybe she had no interested in joining partisan political life.

My point, though, is that even if she wanted to become a fixture in liberal or progressive politics, the Democratic Party and progressive movement aren’t well suited to providing sinecures and platforms to telegenic victims of right-wing excess. They’re set up to found niche NGOs and… that’s about it. There are exceptions, like a couple of the Parkland shooting survivors, but they tend to prove the rule.

Too many Democratic donors (yes, they do matter in the world Justice John Roberts built), officials, and rank-and-file Democrats simply don’t grasp the importance of supporting people outside of the official party structure–and paying for Substacks simply won’t do it. There are a couple of large think tanks, but their influence is limited, and they like to pretend they’re ‘research oriented’, so they won’t support anyone who isn’t a Very Serious Person*.

This is an ugly part of modern politics, and there aren’t people who want to support this, even though it’s important.

*Arguably, these are holding pens paying gigs for Very Serious People ‘in-between administrations’, so supporting newbies really isn’t their purpose.