I Tried To Tell You: Matt Yglesias Is a Shameless Liar
From gambling to Gaza, Matt Yglesias and the Democratic elite have engaged in a shameless lying campaign to protect their pockets and prestige. And they'll only getting worse as we approach 2028.
If you’re a returning JoeWrote reader, you know I frequently write about high-profile media figures, such as Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, Christopher Rufo, Ana Kasparian, Bari Weiss, and other prominent political voices. I focus on individuals because they are proxies for political ideologies and tendencies. By analyzing someone’s statements, actions, and maneuvers, we can better understand major political projects, which, by nature, are decentralized movements and therefore hard to pin down. For example, I could write “The Abundance movement uses progressive language and a harmless-sounding goal of cutting bureaucratic red tape to empower billionaires and worsen American oligarchy,” but that’s a vague claim with faceless actors. It gives us a sense of what’s happening but no details, leaving us unequipped to push back. However, by breaking down Ezra Klein’s media tour, his rhetorical deception, and the Trump-allies paying him, we can see specifically how corporations are repackaging neoliberalism to further enrich themselves and maintain control of the Democratic Party from its insurgent left flank. The same goes for someone like Ana Kasparian, whose “Why I Left The Left” gimmick shows how political operators are lured into reactionary beliefs by attention, clicks, and money.
This is why I’ve written repeatedly about Matthew Yglesias, the proprietor of Slow Boring , one of the most lucrative publications here on Substack. A longtime ideological ally of the Democratic establishment, Yglesias has led the campaign to attack the left and preserve the Democratic Party as a pro-capital, pro-Israel, pro-enshitification organization. To do this, Yglesias has been the foremost voice pushing the mind-numbing claim that the Democratic Party lost the presidency and both houses of Congress because it was controlled by left-wing organizations, making it “too progressive.” This, of course, is a lie. Yglesias knows it’s a lie, because he was heavily involved in the Biden Administration and praised the Harris campaign for ignoring the left and running to the center. The Biden team regularly read Yglesias’s Substack for policy suggestions, specifically on navigating the Build Back Better legislation, which was eventually neutered by Joe Manchin. He also boasted about exchanging monetary policy ideas with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, a particularly embarrassing admission given inflation, which is downstream of monetary policy, was a leading issue that prompted voters to elect Trump. Extremely fond of the Kamala Harris campaign, Yglesias said his only issue with the 2024 DNC was that he “liked it too much.” If a Christian ever returned from Heaven, I doubt their tales of the afterlife would equal Yglesias’s gushing description of the convention that refuted progressive ideology. Matt was so over-confident in a Harris victory that he predicted the anti-left centrism would dominate the “Kamala Harris Era.”
“You saw very clearly, in their analytical moments, that the leaders of the Democratic Party know that the American people are not obsessed with the specter of warmer weather, worry that Dems might be too left wing, do not want to overthrow neoliberalism, think that Donald Trump is a really bad guy, and would like Democrats to be chill and normal so they can vote for them and freeze out MAGA psychos, without worrying that this means big changes to their personal lives. Political revolution? Probably not. Keeping Social Security and Medicare on track while reducing the cost of widely used prescription drugs? Absolutely.
Democrats draped themselves in the flag, in the actually existing nature of the American people, and in mainstream values. It was great.
So why mixed feelings? Mostly because I want Democrats to be like this all the time.” -Matt Yglesias, “Riding the vibes to victory,” August 23, 2024
Then, on November 4th, 2024, Yglesias’s entire political theory crumbled before his eyes. Voters chose the right-wing extremist Donald Trump over the centrist moderate Kamala Harris. Scrambling to save face, Yglesias scribbled a post-election “analysis” into his iPhone notes and posted it to Twitter, calling it the principles of Common Sense Democrats. As expected, Yglesias’s babblings blamed progressives and the left for Harris’s loss. It goes without saying that hastily unthought-out points in an iPhone screenshot are not serious political analysis. But that wasn’t Yglesias’s goal. The Common Sense Democrats note wasn’t trying to provide a path to defeating Republican fascism. Its purpose was to give Democratic establishment mouthpieces a framework to set the narrative and push back against the millions of Americans screaming at them for choosing ideological purity over increasing their chance to victory. It was, and remains, a lie; a suplicitious attempt to retcon the truth to protect the finances, stature, and egos of Matt Yglesias and the political establishment he represents.
Since then, the progressive faction of the Democratic Party has only gained steam. The left has defeated the center in elections, leads them in polls, and has won the ideological argument against both Yglesian Democrats and Trumpian Republicans. Rather than adjust his political positions to take in new information and devise a strategy to maximize the chances of ending Republican fascism, Yglesias continues his zealotry, shamelessly lying about his record and reality. I’ve dispelled his false narratives extensively (here, here, and here), so I won’t repeat them in this article. But there are two recent examples of Yglesias’s chronic dishonesty worth our consideration. The first pertains to the most pressing political issue of our time, the Gaza Genocide. As I know many will read this who are fans of Yglesias and closer to his establishment politics than mine, I hope the second, apolitical example, shows how the Slow Boring author and his political have no concern for your wellbeing, only their personal enrichment and egotistical elevation.
Last week, top Democratic officials who worked on the still-sealed post-2024 Democratic autopsy leaked to Axios their findings that Kamala Harris’s support for Israel cost her a “significant” number of votes and possibly the White House. The political cost of Harris’s failure to break with Biden over Gaza is a near-universal conclusion, shared across the international political spectrum. It’s been acknowledged by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, the Ultra-Zionist editorial board of The Jerusalem Post, Harris’s battleground-state digital strategy coordinator, and even Kamala Harris herself, who admitted, “We should have done more as an administration. We should have spoken publicly about our criticism." This is backed up by common sense and quantitative data. Gallup recently found more Americans sympathize with Palestinians (41%) than Israelis (36%) for the first time ever. Palestinians draw more sympathy from Independents (41% to 30%) and Democrats (65% to 17%). The number of Democrats who support Israel is only 3 points more than those who support outlawing abortion (14%).
Despite this overwhelming evidence that Zionism is a political loser, Matt Yglesias, who maintained backing Israel’s genocide wasn’t hurting the Biden-Harris administration, is still claiming that Harris lost because she was “too left-wing,” not because she pledged to continue arming Israel. After the Democrats' report leaked, Matt tried to refute it with a single exit poll published a few days after the election from Reid Hoffman’s Blueprint Research, which claims voters didn’t trust Harris because she was “too liberal.” Matt knows very well that the argument that Gaza cost Harris votes doesn’t just include voters who voted for someone other than Harris, but also includes voters who stayed home. So, his entire argument, which runs counter to the Democratic Party’s autopsy report, Harris's 2024 swing-state strategists, even Benjamin Neyenyahu’s favorite newspaper, and Kamala Harris herself, is an incomplete exit poll put out by a billionaire Democratic donor using a methodology that Matt fully knows is a misrepresentation of the question at hand. For all my criticisms of Yglesias, he’s not dumb. He knows full well that he’s lying. He just doesn’t care.
There is an unspoken rule in the professional pundit world (a.k.a. the commentariat) that everyone is supposed to take every other pundit at 100% good faith, all the time. I reject that. Many, if not most, members of the political media class hold personal beliefs, financial interests, and even delusions of grandeur that compel them to operate in bad faith. They lie, cheat, and steal to ensure they remain atop the political hierarchy, where praise and profit come easily. While he is certainly not the only nefarious actor, I’m focusing on Matt Yglesias because he is both the most shameless liar in left-of-right politics and a manifestation of the broader effort by the Democratic establishment to blame their failings on the political left. If you search the work of Neera Tanden, The Argument, WelcomePAC, and any other donor-funded outlet or mouthpiece, you will hear the same falsehood about the need to “moderate,” i.e., protect the wealth of the billionaires who fund them from political threats. I hope my analysis of Yglesias’s disproven political claims, past and present, will show you that he and his ideological allies have no genuine commitment to defeating Republicans, protecting Americans from state violence, or even moderately improving their lives. Their goal is to protect the political status quo, which has made them rich and famous while giving them a sense of self-importance that I suspect they’ve struggled to find in other aspects of life.
Now, I know many are likely to say I’m only criticizing Matt because my progressive socialism and his liberal corporatism are battling for control of the Democratic Party. That is a fair concern, and I wouldn’t persuade you by pinky-promising I’m a more trustworthy commentator. So, I’m going to show you how easily Matt Yglesias lies and discards his convictions by pointing out his complete heel-turn on online gambling.
Until recently, Matt Yglesias’s Slow Boring strongly opposed online gambling. In 2022, Yglesias ran an article by current The Argument fellow Milan Singh, “The Case Against Legal Gambling,” in which Singh called all gambling a “net negative for society.” In January of 2024, Slow Boring contributor Ben Krauss said digital sportsbooks, “driven by profit motives, exploit psychological triggers to encourage habitual and hazardous betting practices among their customers.” Krauss argued for serious restrictions on gaming to “diminish its accessibility and cultural salience.” A few months later, Singh returned to Slow Boring to co-author a piece with Krauss that extensively outlined the social harms of online gambling, which further impoverished the most vulnerable members of our society. Krauss and Singh wrote:
“The story here is clear. In states with legalized online gambling, aggregate debt loads increase, and this, in turn, drives increases in bankruptcy, decreased credit scores, and more credit card delinquencies. And some of the most financially at-risk people are the ones who are being hurt the most.”
The two also proposed a drastic, but I would argue necessary, solution to end this exploitation: a complete outlawing of gambling on apps and websites, returning gambling to its pre-2018 form of only being legal at permitted, regulated locations.
“Our ‘holy grail’ for legal sports gambling is to limit wagering to actual physical locations, whether that’s a bar or a casino. This will reduce the accessibility of sports gambling, and hopefully tone down its overall cultural salience.”
In addition to running these articles in his publication, Matt himself has supported his writers’ anti-legal sports gambling conclusions. In 2023, he stated he thought the gambling industry was nefariously targeting addicted gamblers (which is true), and suggested people read Singh’s piece mentioned above. Yglesias wrote:
“There’s nothing wrong with a little gambling every now and then, but as with many things in life, the guy who gambles very occasionally with money he can easily afford to lose is not the profitable customer. A large, legal gambling industry makes its money by marketing to problem gamblers. And it’s especially unfortunate because it’s not like if you go back in time to 1993 we were dealing with some huge downside of anti-gambling laws — prisons weren’t teeming with blackjack dealers and we didn’t have rival poker crews gunning each other down over territory. I recommend Milan’s good piece about this from last year.”
These words were written a few years ago, but the problems Yglesias and the Slow Boring crew were concerned about have only gotten worse, not better. Matt has also been publicly opposed to gambling recently. A few months ago, Yglesias denied Basel Musharbash’s claim that Matt was warming to legalized sports betting, asserting he still thought it should be illegal. And on December 5th, 2025, Yglesias wrote about how the predatory nature of online gambling was making him doubt “free markets more than ever,” saying, “We shouldn’t be organizing our society around getting more people to spend more time gambling.”
Taking all this as a whole, one would believe Matt Yglesias was strongly opposed to the proliferation of gambling, especially the more predatory digital betting that, according to him and his writers, is “a net-negative to society” that should be “diminished in cultural salience” and outlawed. As these statements were spread over the last four years, one could believe they were genuinely held beliefs, ones I agreed with. Well, I’m saddened but not surprised to learn that Matt Yglesias is no longer opposed to predatory gambling companies and now thinks they are good for society. Much like his politics, Matt Yglesias’s thoughts on gambling changed as soon as he began financially benefiting from the predatory sportsbooks he had spent the last four years railing against.
In a February 12th post entitled “Americans Think Everyone Is Corrupt,” Matt bemoans the uneducated, lazy, slothful peasants (i.e., you, me, and most normal Americans) for unfairly demonizing the genius, virtuous, unimpeachable polite elite (i.e., Matt and his friends) as “corrupt.” He writes:
“That’s the sympathetic view: Voters are angry because of the systemic levels of corruption in the American government. I think a less generous but more accurate take would be that because voters do not bother to inform themselves about the actual difficulties involved in assessing policy problems, they wrongly conclude that everything they don’t like reflects corruption or self-interested behavior from elected officials.”
In a chef’s kiss of Matt Yglesias fashion, he put a footnote in this article saying, “Polymarket is sponsoring this post.” Please, Matt! Tell us more about how the mouthbreathing hordes who don’t realize your genius think members of the elite are motivated by personal enrichment!
I quickly pointed out Matt’s hypocrisy on social media, but I wasn’t the only one. Slow Boring readers immediately flocked to the comments to call out Matt’s heel-turn, given his long-standing stance against online gambling.
So, how did Matt respond? Did he apologize, call the sponsorship a lapse in judgment, and promise not to take money from gambling companies in the future? Of course not! That would have cost him money, required him to adhere to his principles, and, most importantly, made him admit he was wrong — something Matt is allergic to doing. Instead, Matt Yglesias doubled down, claiming that everyone else but him was wrong, just as he did when he claimed everyone but him was wrong, that Gaza cost Kamala Harris much-needed votes. So weird that this keeps happening!
Last week, Yglesias published the mother of all bullshit. Erroneously titled “Legal sports gambling has gone way too far,” he used the article to claim “some kinds of gambling are better than others.” This is essentially PR for Matt’s ego, allowing him to say prediction market gambling, i.e., Polymarket, is different from FanDuel or DraftKings, so it’s not hypocritical for him to go back on his longstanding opposition to online gambling in exchange for a Polymarket payout. As someone who is far more experienced with online gambling than the entire Slow Boring crew combined, I’m here to tell you that this is a lie. As I wrote when Substack announced its Polymarket sponsorship, a “prediction market” is just an unregulated sportsbook. “Prediction market” is a term created by sportsbooks like Polymarket and Kalshi to get around state gambling laws. There’s nothing new or novel about them.
It’s debatable whether Matt knows the truth about Polymarket and is comfortable lying to his readership that it’s somehow better than a sportsbook, or if he is uninformed and can’t be bothered to learn. Either way, his article is filled with falsehoods and a jaw-dropping admission that he now thinks problem gambling — which he condemned ten weeks before he wrote this — is now “constructive.” Matt writes:
“Prediction markets, in theory, generate useful information externalities for the whole world by aggregating guesses and information about Hungarian politics and diplomacy with Iran and other things that matter.
For that to happen, though, you need smart money participating in them to take advantage of suckers and reckless gamblers. So even though reckless gambling per se is not good, channeling some of that impulse into prediction markets can be constructive.”
Again, this is not how oddsmaking works. Matt repeats Polymarket’s claim that these markets generate “useful information” by having people bet money on expected outcomes. If we take Matt’s view of Polymarket, this means that there is actually a 4% chance that Jesus Christ returns within the next nine months. If you believe that… yikes.
More importantly than his misunderstanding/misrepresentation of how odds are made, Yglesias is admitting that the Polymarket model requires “suckers and reckless gamblers” to provide “useful information.” He’s quite literally saying he thinks it's okay for him to push his readers towards problem gambling on Polymarket exchange for the social benefit of having an accurate probability of world events, which, again, doesn’t even exist. Remember, last December Matt wrote, “We shouldn’t be organizing our society around getting more people to spend more time gambling.” Not even half a year later, he’s saying we should encourage people to spend more time gambling, for the nonexistent tradeoff of “useful information.” So, what changed? He was paid, of course.
Yglesias also posits a nonsensical attempt to differentiate between “prediction markets” and “gambling on sports.”
“I thought a lot about how to distinguish between ‘a prediction market’ and ‘gambling on sports,’ but probably the simplest way is this: Create a federal regulatory status for prediction markets that is exempt from state regulation, then say that to qualify as such a market, sports-related contracts cannot exceed a certain relatively small share of revenue.”
He clearly has not thought a lot about it, because this is nonsensical. There is no difference between “prediction markets” and “sportsbooks.” The prediction market industry likes to pretend that gambling on real-world events, such as politics, entertainment, and anything else, is some new invention they just came up with. It’s not. Sportsbooks have been offering bets on all this stuff since the birth of the internet. Here’s a link to the politics section on BetOnline. Pretty much all the political bets you can find on Polymarket are on there. And the same for BetUS. You can bet on anything from “Who will win the 2028 U.S. Presidential election?” to “Total International Waterboat Strikes by US Military During 2026.” (The Over 33.5 is at -130, while Under 33.5 sits at -110.) Everything Polymarket claims to provide already exists. If Polymarket’s online gambling site closed today, as Slow Boring previously argued was a “net-negative to society,” you could still get all this information on any of the dozens of offshore sportsbooks operating. You don’t even need an account!
The only reason traditional sportsbooks such as DraftKings don’t offer political and real-life bets is because it’s illegal. Getting around this law is the entire reason Polymarket and Kalshi label themselves “prediction markets.” It’s also why Yglesias is saying we should create a unique regulatory status that effectively exempts them from gambling regulations if they keep a certain percentage of their betting volume below a certain number. He is quite literally doing Polymarket’s work for them, encouraging the creation of a unique legal cutout for the company paying him. The term “prediction market” is already a legal loophole that allows companies to get around state gambling laws. Now, Yglesias is arguing we should give his employers another legal exemption if they pinky-promise to limit sports betting to an unspecified amount, which they will inevitably lobby to raise higher and higher. And who will they be lobbying? Well, if Matt Yglesias has his way, his friends in the Democratic establishment who, just like him, will turn on their long-standing beliefs for the right price.
Side note — I’ve heard some people defend prediction markets on the basis that you’re “betting against other bettors, not the house.” This is neither new nor a material difference. This model is called “exchanges,” and like political bets, they’ve been around the sports betting world forever. SportsTrade is an exchange, and ProphetX is too, although it rebranded as a “prediction market” to take advantage of the looser legal laws.
Essentially, a traditional sportsbook sees you betting against the book (“House”), which pays winners with house money, which is revenue from losing bets. In an exchange, the house keeps all the money for one market in a pool, and pays the winners with the losers’ money. Exchanges became popular for books with less funding, it limit betting based on the total betting pool (handle) for that market. But there’s effectively no difference beyond that, and it certainly doesn’t lead to more accurate lines. If it didn’t, the leading sportsbooks (Circa, Pinnacle) would use the exchange model. And they don’t.
In both models, the book takes money by taking a percentage of the bet amount from the bettor. Sportsbooks call this the “vig” or “hold,” while exchanges and prediction markets call it a “fee.” Again, there is no difference.
I might be somewhat sympathetic to Yglesias’s proposal for a new legal status if Slow Boring had argued that prediction markets couldn’t take bets on sports. At least then they would be their own unique thing, though I still wouldn’t be convinced of their usefulness. It’s telling that he argues they should still be allowed to take sports bets, since he knows that’s where Polymarkets’ money is. He can’t say Polymarket shouldn’t offer athletic markets, because that would defeat the company’s entire purpose of paying him. The prediction market business strategy is to present themselves as a boost to journalism, get non-sports bettors signed up through Slow Boring sponsorships, and then turn them into addicts — the “suckers and reckless gamblers” Yglesias says are now needed for the “constructive” Polymarket lines. He finishes his essay by saying the new regulatory status he pulled from his ass will “let states start to get a handle” on online betting. Again, he is either lying to his readers or not bothering to educate himself before opining. States already have a handle on it. So far, at least twenty states have filed lawsuits disputing the classification of “prediction markets” that allows Polymarket to operate unregulated by state gambling commissions. I cannot stress this enough: blue and red states alike are hostile to prediction markets specifically because they bring the social negatives that Slow Boring previously pointed to as reasons to outlaw online gambling: bankruptcies, addiction, and even domestic violence. This legal threat is specifically why Polymarket is paying people such as Matt Yglesias to argue that they should have a new legal status. Given this, I feel comfortable saying Matt Yglesias is easily one of the most shameless liars in politics, on par with the MAGA mouthpieces currently saying Donald Trump ran on bombing Iran.
Ultimately, Matt’s gambling sponsorship is small potatoes in the grand stew of life. Sure, he’s a hypocrite. And it’s illuminating that he’s willing to throw away his morals for more money when his newsletter is literally making millions of dollars every year. And it sucks that he’ll turn a decent amount of his subscribers into gambling addicts. But the larger concern is, of course, why I write about Yglesias: politics.
Hopefully, my exposé of Matt’s gambling sheaninagns has shown you that the Vox cofounder has no moral principles, holds himself to no standards, and will throw long-held beliefs — along with his subscribers — into the garbage for a payday. I was saddened that Substack chose to take the Polymarket sponsorship, but I wasn’t surprised. They’re seeking profit, after all. But for a political commentator to do so is another thing entirely. It reveals that their politics have little to do with strongly held convictions or a dedication to improving the world. It also shows that they are duplicitous, willing to lie, and, as Yglesias put it, willing to take “advantage of suckers” — i.e., everyday Americans — to advance their own stature. Unfortunately, this dishonest contingent of the liberal elite that Matt Yglesias embodies is already scheming to sacrifice the rest of us for their own personal gratification.
Earlier this month, the pro-establishment group Third Way hosted a summit in South Carolina to kick off their anti-left campaign for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. While most of the non-Republican political spectrum is determining ways to defeat Trump in the midterms and the GOP nominee in 2028, it’s notable that the Democratic corporatists are more focused on stopping Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from reaching the White House than anyone else. This is because a J.D. Vance presidency is not an existential threat to their place in the liberal order. But an AOC presidency is.
Returning JoeWrote readers will remember Third Way for its deceptive anti-Abolish ICE memo earlier this year, which uses dishonest polling questions to generate the pro-establishment result Third Way wanted. Below is the framing Third Way used to achieve its desired result: saying “only 35% of Americans want to abolish ICE.” According to honest, more respectable polls, over 50% of Americans want to abolish ICE.
“We gave these voters a choice between 1) investing in immigration enforcement that deports convicted criminals but protects eligible, law-abiding immigrants like Dreamers, and provides a path to citizenship or 2) decriminalizing the border and abolishing ICE. Democratic primary voters prefer the former 65% to 35%.”
As support for abolishing ICE has increased, Third Way has been forced to go to even more absurd lengths to create its bullshit results. Here is how the group phrased its most recent poll at the South Carolina convention. This framing is so skewed it wouldn’t be accepted by a hungover college professor, nevermind any honest political actor.
Keeping with their strategy, Third Way used this push poll to seed the media environment with their “findings,” such as this promotional piece in The Dispatch that describes Third Way as “pragmatic democrats,” implying that those they oppose are impractical. Of course, if you have to fake polls and conjure imaginary scenarios to make your politics popular, you’re neither a “centrist,” a “moderate,” nor a trustworthy actor. You are a zealous ideologue who views your role as needing to manipulate the public and political systems to get what you want — the exact philosophy that led corporate Democrats to turn away voters and lose every branch of government in the 2024 election.
Much like Yglesias saying that he’s okay with promoting gambling addiction because it creates the “social benefit” of Polymarket odds, Third Way holds the American public in such disregard that they openly admit they are planning a dishonest, behind-the-scenes manipulation of the Democratic primary to get the candidate they want — democracy be damned. Speaking to The New York Times before their convention, Third Way president Jon Cowan openly stated the group’s primary strategy is to be “the chief opponent of the left.”
NYT: Can you preview for our readers what [your primary work] could look like?
Cowan: What it means, ultimately, is influencing all of the people who will run for president who are anywhere from the kind of mushy to more moderate. Not the lefties, but everybody else.
Influencing them, and all the concentric circles around them. Not just their teams and their operatives, but all the key people in the early primary and presidential battleground states. People in media, on social media, etc. Creating a highly persuasive case that we market very widely throughout the Democratic Party, not just in Washington but around the country, so that people believe there is one way to win in ’28, and that is by nominating somebody who can win over that middle, and rejecting anybody from the far left.
What that will involve is a large amount of public opinion research that makes our case, extensive convenings like this, a lot of work behind the scenes with all of the campaigns and their circles.
We have built out a very extensive database that tracks everybody who might run for president who’s remotely in this space — none of the far-lefters, but everybody else — and all the circles around them. Their staff, their advisers, their funders, the key people who they know in their friends-and-family networks. We probably have the only database like that, of anybody in Democratic politics
NYT: Can I see it?
You cannot.
We will have a database of all of the campaigns and their huge networks around them, and then [another database of] all of the people that really matter in these early primary and battleground states. And we will be systematically making our case for years to these folks.
Another example: We’re running a series in New York in which we bring about 50 top-dollar donors together, and we give the candidates a chance to come and speak and spend an hour with those donors.
We are running a very large-scale, intensive campaign that has all of these different elements, so that by the time we get to the convention, we have succeeded…
This will be the most high-scale, expensive, sophisticated effort like this in the history of the organization.
NYT: Can you put a dollar figure on it?
It will be over a three-year period, it will be tens of millions of dollars. We will, in the end, probably spend $30 million to $50 million doing all of what we’re trying to do.
I don’t mean ads. We’re not running ads. I mean all of the operation, all the polling, all the staffing, all the convenings, all of the outreach.
Notice what Cowan does not say. He’s not saying Third Way will be making the case for more corporate establishment politics to Democratic primary voters, only to the “key people” — campaign managers, media figures, donors, political leaders, social media influencers, and other Democratic Party insiders and powerbrokers. This is the identical theory of power put forth in Abundance, which argued for influencing “deep-pocketed donors” and “the Supreme Court,” but ignored the need to convince the American people. This top-down political strategy articulated by Third Way, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and every other establishment figure masquareding as a “popularist” stands in stark contrast to the political philosophy and electoral strategy of progressive candidates such as AOC and Bernie Sanders, who view their job as needing to convince the American people to support them. It is an inherently undemocratic worldview, one that requires shameless lying to pretend it fits with the Democratic Party’s self-identity as the champions of American democracy. So, it’s no surprise Matt Yglesias is the top-billed promoter of Third Way’s agenda.
Matt hosted a panel at the Charleston summit, which ran the gamut of reactionary corporatist issues. The panelists complained that California’s proposed billionaire tax would be unfair and that we should bust teachers’ unions because they were responsible for school closures during COVID.
In a full-circle moment, former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina got on stage and claimed Democrats were losing young men because they are “anti-crypto, anti-gambling, and anti-prediction market.” Now, in a SHOCKING coincidence, Messina is on the board of crypto firm Blockchain and a long-time lobbyist for the online gambling industry. What a small world!
Just like Yglesias, Messina’s advertising for the gambling industry could not be more wrong. Democrats didn’t lose young male voters because they were against gambling or cryptocurrency. First, Democrats aren’t against gambling or cryptocurrency. Second, young men think gambling is bad! From 2022 to 2025, the percentage of men who think sports betting is bad for society increased from 35% to 45%, a larger increase than among women (33% to 40%). The largest increase in any age group thinking sports gambling is a negative comes from the youngest, 18 to 29-year-olds, who went from 23% in 2022 to 41% in 2025. Men think gambling is worse for society than women. The data is clear: among young American men, those who gamble the most increasingly think betting is bad.
Just like Matt Yglesias shamelessly promoting Polymarket after years of critiquing the prevalence of online gambling, Jim Messina and his Third Way hosts know young men don’t like gambling. They can easily look at this poll, or any of the dozens of others saying the same, and reach the conclusion that it would be good politics to run against gambling and crypto. But they don’t want to, as that would cost them money and embarrass them. This is the same reason they’re cooking polls to claim Americans don’t want to abolish ICE and are more focused on stopping AOC than J.D. Vance. Running on abolishing the American blackshirts would immediately cede credibility to the left, who have been calling for abolition since 2017. That would admit the corporatist Democratic establishment was wrong, and they’d all lose their million-dollar incomes, fancy conventions, and the feeling that they are the most important people on planet earth.
When most people face an uncomfortable reality, they adapt. Maybe they change their beliefs, or accept that they’re not as noble as they thought they were, and accept the job or sponsorship that forces them to compromise their morals. But that is not how Matt Yglesias, Third Way staffers, or the members of the Democratic establishment operate. Instead, they lie: Kamala Harris ran the perfect centrist campaign. No, wait, actually, she was a progressive. Liberal corporatism cannot fail. It can only be failed. Gambling is a social pariah that should be outlawed. Actually, there are multiple types of gambling, and this one is good for… reasons. As Yglesias has shown, the Democratic establishment is filled with people who will look you dead in the eye and tell you an untruth so baffling it will make your head explode. Then, they will expect you to praise them for being brave and smart enough to educate you.
I didn’t just write this long essay to dunk on Matt Yglesias. That’s easy. High school kids do it all day on Twitter. Instead, I wanted to show the character and worldview of the people comprising the Democratic establishment, who are about to launch the most cynical, duplicitous, and deceitful primary campaigns in modern American history. Matt and his ilk know that Americans want progressive change, not the tired pro-capital Zionism of Chuck Schumer. But they can’t let that happen. They’d rather reign in a losing pro-establishment Democratic party than serve in a winning progressive one. All the lies we’ve covered here today, from Gaza to ICE to gambling, are going to look minuscule compared to the lies Matt Yglesias and Third Way are going to tell over the next two years to ratfuck the left out of power, even if that means subjecting the American people to another four years of fascism.
Brace yourself. The bullshit is coming.
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In Solidarity — Joe
It boils down to that Upton Sinclair quote that you can’t make someone understand something if their paycheck depends on them misunderstanding it. Now that journalism has morphed into commentary, and social media has turned pundits into brands, their analysis is meant to cultivate and capture a certain audience. A lot of the time, it’s not even outright lying as much as it is deceptive aspirational branding, which is arguably even more insidious. There is no reasoning with these people because their POV is informed by clout, a paycheck, and career advancement.
the complexity grift from centrists is showing more and more to just be them intentionally muddying the water to avoid having any moral clarity
it is good to be strategically adaptable, but only cowards have no qualms for rapidly changing their principles