On June 14, millions of people across the country took to the streets to protest the corruption and autocracy of the second Trump administration. When they went home, many didn’t turn on MSNBC, which for years has styled itself as the nation’s leading cable news hub for liberals. When it comes to political news and commentary, many younger viewers these days aren’t turning on the TV at all. Instead, they’re going online to watch YouTube shows: The Young Turks, a progressive news and talk show with a pugilist streak; The Majority Report With Sam Seder, a commentary and call-in program with a sly sensibility; and the seemingly endless, chatty dispatches of the socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

MSNBC’s struggles during Donald Trump’s second term—its total viewership is down by about 15 percent compared to a year ago—stem from some familiar problems, including cord-cutting, the bane of all cable outfits. They can also be traced to unique missteps, such as the decision to send the hosts of the network’s flagship Morning Joe program to visit Trump’s Mar-a-Lago clubhouse shortly after his 2024 victory to cozy up to a man they had spent much of the year decrying as a fascist—a decision that rightfully attracted the ire of Morning Joe viewers. But now the network is facing something it never has before: competition.

The network’s bread-and-butter anti-Trump coverage hasn’t disappeared. But similar coverage now exists online, too, and the younger viewers that advertisers covet have migrated there, where they have found an abundance of progressive commentary, much of it more strident and unabashedly left-wing than what MSNBC has typically proffered.

Younger viewers aren’t tuning into cable—they’re logging on to streaming platforms. Piker now commands over 35,000 average concurrent viewers on Twitch, while The Young Turks’ viewership rose by 26 percent on YouTube and 135 percent on Facebook. The Majority Report has seen its viewership rise by 18 percent on YouTube from last year and has seen a 48 percent increase in its subscribers. By contrast, MSNBC had an average of 57,000 viewers in the 25–54 age demographic during the second quarter of 2025.

Part of the shift may come from viewers’ anger not just at Trump but at the Democratic Party that failed to stop his return. By the same measure, these often idealistic viewers feel let down by an establishment media apparatus surrounding the Democrats that they saw as too eager to prop up the visibly declining President Joe Biden and too reluctant to ask whether his decision to run for reelection might be a disaster, or whether his unwavering support of Benjamin Netanyahu would be morally and politically toxic. “There is an audience that was looking for people to express the outrage and anger that they were feeling, seeing Trump’s actions and also the Democratic Party’s, and, by extension, some of the media that’s more closely associated with the party,” said Emma Vigeland, the co-host of The Majority Report. Now, online progressives are building the next generation of left media—and fighting over what it will stand for.

The online leftist video space is the latest permutation of an alternative-media movement that began during George W. Bush’s first administration as an attempt to counter the influence of Fox News and right-wing talk radio. One of the central voices in that space has been attorney Cenk Uygur, who founded The Young Turks Network in 2002, alongside fellow progressives Ben Mankiewicz and Dave Koller, and who continues to co-host The Young Turks alongside Ana Kasparian. TYT and its flagship program went through a variety of phases, at one point airing on Al Gore’s Current TV. Today, it exists as a largely advertiser- and user-supported livestreaming platform. (Uygur also had a brief stint at MSNBC in 2010 and never misses an opportunity to bash his former employers. “They are pure propaganda for corporate establishment Democrats,” he said, “which are indistinguishable from corporate establishment Republicans.”)

The Majority Report, another leading platform that got its start in the early aughts, began on the Air America radio network as a policy-heavy talk show hosted by two comedians—Sam Seder and Janeane Garofalo—before migrating (sans Garofalo) to TYT Network. Like TYT, it currently has its own platform—but many of its fans have found it through YouTube clips and Facebook videos. Both shows were supercharged by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and Trump’s subsequent victory.

Around this time, a number of other key players began entering the picture, including Uygur’s nephew Hasan Piker, who started interning at TYT while attending Rutgers and eventually began hosting The Breakdown, a short-form Facebook video show that premiered in 2016.Two years later, he began hosting marathon streams on Twitch, a platform mostly used by gamers; he left TYT in 2020 to go solo. The tall, handsome, and charismatic Piker was quickly termed a “woke bae” by BuzzFeed as he built an audience by livestreaming every day, often for eight hours or more. He’s been profiled by The New York Times and appeared on The Daily Show and is held up by some as the left’s answer to Joe Rogan: a broadcaster who can reach young men more interested in video games than politics.

With his caustic wit, bro-y vernacular, and barely obscured bleeding heart, Piker stands out in an online sphere where progressives are outnumbered by well-funded and often young right-wing personalities like Ben Shapiro, who co-founded the media network The Daily Wire. But Piker’s success will be hard to replicate, as much as Democratic investors might try, partly because natural charisma and deeply felt convictions about potentially divisive subjects are difficult to reverse engineer, and also partly because Piker endears himself to his young audience with a naughty, often boundary-pushing sense of humor that would likely make the adults in the room skittish. “The same institutional investors of the Republican Party happen to be investors of The Daily Wire, and they understand the value of propaganda,” Piker told me. “They flood the market…. Their propaganda is not inherently against the interest of the party.”

While right-wing YouTube shows basically repeat Republican talking points, the left-wing shows tend to push for policies that are seen as political liabilities by much of the Democratic establishment, such as wealth taxes and Medicare for All. “My worldview is not aligned with Hakeem Jeffries,” Piker observed, whereas Ben Shapiro, “on any given day, is basically saying the exact same things that Ted Cruz is saying.”

The difference goes even deeper than that, however. “Democrats run away from their base,” Piker told me. “The Republicans run towards their base.” According to Piker, he, too, runs toward the base—and he said it’s because of this that it’s “not even a question” of whether he does better with 18- to 35-year-olds than Fox News does. He predicts that, when the 2028 election rolls around, every candidate will “try and come and talk to me.”

Another newly prominent figure who emerged during the year of Trump’s victory is Vigeland, the co-host of The Majority Report. She has a palpable, openhearted sincerity and a good-natured sense of humor that offers a much-needed ballast to a combative, all-elbows movement.

Vigeland’s career began when she interned at TYT during the 2016 election. She stayed on at the network after the election and then, in 2020, took a job at The Majority Report, following the sudden death of Seder’s beloved co-host, Michael Brooks. Vigeland has since emerged as a voice of empathic, moral outrage over ICE raids and the genocide in Gaza—subjects that are often avoided or obscured in more mainstream liberal spaces—and as a counterbalance to the more sardonic Seder.

If the progressive YouTube space is seen as being hostile to the mainstream Democratic Party, Vigeland has recently made an effort to broker peace. She has lately been appearing on “different shows that are broadly on the side of the left to bring folks together and bridge that everlasting 2016 divide between more progressive Bernie-associated people and more traditional Democratic Party voter stalwarts.” Uygur has also been doing some outreach, although it’s proved to be far more controversial. Last December, he appeared at the conservative group Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, where he talked with right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, high-fiving him near the end. “I got the crowd to boo Dick Cheney and Mitch McConnell. We disagreed in parts. We agreed in parts. We talked about how private equity is driving up home prices and how Wall Street should be banished from buying residential property,” he told me. “We still have massive disagreements with the right, but shocking agreements were breaking out.”

Vigeland and other members of the left had a different take, arguing that the audience was “just excited to have somebody who presents themselves as left-wing validating their ideas.” To her, Uygur wasn’t doing outreach, he was serving as a “tool for the ends of conservative media.” She, like many other leftists, suspected a more sinister goal: “It seems to me more like a business strategy than one that’s actually interested in building a durable movement.”

Uygur has come under particular fire by Vigeland and many others in progressive new media for suggesting that Democrats are suffering electorally by emphasizing trans rights, inclusive language, and particularly the trans athlete debate, a move that is seen by his critics as the starting point toward a slippery slope that ends with throwing a vulnerable group of people under the bus. “I believe in trans rights past the point of popularity, to be honest,” he said, pushing back on this claim and noting that he supports trans kids in sports through high school and has long advocated for trans people to use the bathroom of their choice. He asked Kirk if trans people should have constitutional protection against discrimination. For Uygur, his actual differences with his critics are “microscopic.”

“I want to talk about $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, and negotiating drug prices. Those are the places that make a giant difference in people’s lives,” he said.

Piker, acknowledging that “leftist infighting is the number one thing that people love doing,” had a polite but spirited debate over all this and more with his uncle during an annual Thanksgiving livestream dubbed “Cenkgiving.” While he’s quick to say, “I love my uncle,” Piker also acknowledged that they “argue all the time and debate all the time publicly, too.” According to Piker, they fundamentally disagree about criminal justice reform; Uygur thinks the left acts as if “crime doesn’t exist,” whereas Piker recognizes the United States as “a very reactionary, very draconian carceral state.” They also disagree about whether MAGA is a true populist uprising against the elites or just a grievance-driven personality cult. “I think it’s just hokum,” Piker told me, laughing at the idea of “maga communists.”

Uygur pioneered the online progressive commentary world that is currently thriving. He is also self-aggrandizing (he launched a quixotic campaign to primary Biden in 2023) and a bit of a blowhard (he has apologized for making boorish blog posts about women). He has also been ahead of the curve, both politically and in terms of new media. He was an early backer of Sanders; his Justice Democrats PAC helped discover Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; he predicted that Trump would win in 2016; and he said that Biden’s age would doom his reelection prospects when few, if any, on MSNBC would dare utter such a statement. It’s doubtful that the progressive ecosystem would exist without Uygur, but there are some signs in 2025 that it may be moving past him for the first time, though Uygur, of course, is going nowhere. “I think he feels wronged by a lot of people on the progressive wing, some of whom initially directly came from TYT and now shit on TYT,” Piker said. Progressive media is in danger of becoming too personality-driven: Uygur says something; his critics respond; Uygur hits back—forever and ever. When this happens, Piker said, “that conversation becomes the only thing you’re talking about. You’re no longer a news network: You’re a drama network.”

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that this is a huge moment for progressives—and the YouTubers and Twitch streamers they increasingly flock to. “The only reason we haven’t won before is because of the media ecosystem, and I’m optimistic because mainstream media has been defeated,” Uygur said. “Our side is the most popular side and the most authentic side, and the one that can’t wait to fight for the voters and deliver for the voters. So good luck to everyone else. We’re going to win.”