David Sirota has a new demographic he’s been talking about: “brunch liberals.”
“I think there’s a segment of the population and democratic voters who want elections to happen every four years, get somebody who’s a charismatic speaker, and they win, and then everybody can just go back to sleep,” Sirota explained.
The “brunch” part comes from a series of viral protest signs displayed at demonstrations since 2016 with the message “If Hillary had won, we’d be at brunch right now.” It’s been a meme on the left ever since, a perfect distillation of liberal complacency over an untenable status quo with which an unsettling number of Democrats are perfectly comfortable. For Sirota, a longtime journalist and political staffer who served as a speechwriter and advisor to Bernie Sanders in 2020, there can be no going back.
“The problem with that attitude is, first of all, the pre-Trump normal was not fine,” Sirota told Blue Tent from his home in Denver.
If brunch liberals are the people who heave a sigh of relief and slip back into a warm bath after Biden is sworn in, then Sirota is their opposite. He’s the guy who worked for a socialist congressman in the days when privatizing Social Security was all the rage, and whose aggressive, adversarial journalism is at its best when he’s flaying Democrats in power.
Even after a devastating 2020 loss for the Sanders campaign, Sirota has shown no intention of letting up, launching a Substack newsletter and blog called The Daily Poster, where he’s already publishing missives aimed at the establishment. It’s Sirota’s latest attempt to use his journalism to break brunch liberals out of their stupor, whether they like it or not. And spoiler alert: If someone falls into the “brunch liberal” category, the odds of them liking Sirota aren’t very high—at least not for now.
“A weird career” and being hated by the “right people”
Sirota, 45, grew up in Montgomery County just outside of Philadelphia, and after earning his journalism degree at Northwestern, began work in politics, making his way into the press offices of Democratic House members and groups. Eventually, he was hired as the press secretary for a peacenik, socialist senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders.
Now based in Colorado, Sirota first moved west to work for Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. When he and his wife made the move to Denver, Sirota turned to writing books, hosting drivetime radio and authoring a syndicated column before immersing himself fully in the conventional news world.
“It’s been a weird career,” Sirota said, reflecting on his early days in politics before returning to journalism.
But Sirota isn’t just a bomb-throwing pundit. As an investigative reporter for Pando Daily and then IBT/Newsweek, Sirota won awards for stories about Wall Street, pension funds, and Republican tax policy—not the kind of stuff you usually see pugilistic take artists debating on Twitter.
“David is hyper-focused on things that actually matter—people’s finances, their health, or whether some esoteric policy change means they are going to get scammed,” said Andrew Perez, Daily Poster’s editor and a longtime Sirota collaborator.
Sirota recruited Perez to IBT during the 2016 elections, and the two worked together to break stories on the campaign. Perez was laid off a year later, and Sirota soon left, as well, but the two remained close, with Perez joining Sirota this year to edit Daily Poster. For Perez, who also runs Democratic Policy Center, a progressive war room, Sirota’s combative, take-no-prisoners style is all part of the appeal.
“David hates the right people,” Perez told Blue Tent via email. “The right people in Washington hate him too, because he spent the Bush and Obama years calling them out for taking sleazy jobs or for pushing corporate-approved policies that were actively harmful, or compromise measures that were never good enough. They hate David because he’s almost always right.”
Sirota is an intense person, and unlike many keyboard warriors, it’s not an act performed only while sitting at a computer. Driven by righteous indignation, his aggressive language online translates even over the phone, where his passion is evident even when he’s merely explaining his views to a reporter.
His willingness to both scrutinize Democrats and work for Sanders, the party’s chief critic, has irked many of his peers in both politics and journalism. Sirota was writing for The Guardian and Capital & Main before he joined the Sanders campaign in 2019, often publishing pieces critical of other potential Democratic presidential candidates. The timing of his hiring led some journalists, most notably The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, to accuse him of campaign staff work while working as a journalist. But there’s scant evidence for this claim (Sirota denies overlapping his journalistic and political work) and the accusation further collapses for one simple reason: Sirota has never needed a paycheck from a political campaign to criticize establishment Democrats.
“I think my views about what a journalist should be doing are clear,” Sirota said. “It’s to be challenging the powerful, scrutinizing the powerful. And that’s the consistent thread through what I do, and so that doesn’t mean that I’m going to carry water for one or the other political party all or most of the time.”
A small team, already making waves (and enemies)
After Sanders conceded in April, Sirota began writing a Substack newsletter for disenchanted lefties called TMI, hoping to “make a little sense of this garbage fire of an era.” It morphed into The Daily Poster in September, taking on an identity as a grassroots-funded progressive newsletter and blog. They take no foundation or corporate money, they have no big donors, and they don’t want any. Aside from a syndication agreement with the socialist magazine Jacobin, for which The Daily Poster is paid a small sum, all of their funding comes from readers.
Like other aspects of Sirota’s work, the name of the publication itself contains some tongue-in-cheek resentment toward legacy media.
“There’s this effort to say that what happens on the internet… is ridiculous, and anybody who doesn’t have some big brand behind them somehow shouldn’t be taken seriously,” Sirota said.
To the contrary, Sirota says, now, basically all journalism is “posting.” And despite the common refrain from many big names in media and Democratic politics that “Twitter isn’t real life,” when news breaks, it’s usually an online post, sometimes just a tweet, that minutes or hours later finds itself repeated by a square-jawed newsman or laid out above the fold in the New York Times.
In their short run, Sirota, Perez and their small team have written stories attacking Democrats and Republicans alike. Daily Poster writer Walker Bragman has gone after Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, Biden’s choice to run the Office of Management and Budget, for her past comments indicating support for cutting Social Security. Sirota and Perez piled on, tarring Tanden for accepting corporate and foreign donations and accusing her of union busting for shuttering CAP’s independent publication ThinkProgress in 2019.
When asked for comment, a CAP spokesperson disputed Daily Poster’s characterization of Tanden and the organization’s recent work. The spokesperson pointed out that corporate donations make up only 2.5% of the think tank’s annual budget, and denied that the closing of ThinkProgress was an attempt at union busting, pointing out that some ThinkProgress staffers were hired into other unionized positions at the organization.
“CAP has also repeatedly called for strengthening Social Security, expanding benefits and increasing taxes on the wealthy to do so,” the spokesperson wrote to Blue Tent. “Pulling an out-of-context clip from almost a decade ago while ignoring more recent work is dishonest at best.”
In early December, Perez and Daily Poster reporter Julie Rock reported that Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, then a leading candidate for Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, had signed an executive order shielding nursing homes and other healthcare companies from COVID-related lawsuits a day after industry lobbyists requested she do so. Within days, Raimondo removed herself from consideration for the post (it was later announced that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra would be Biden’s nominee to run HHS) and Sirota immediately took a victory lap, heaping credit on his scrappy publication.
As for Republicans, Daily Poster has published scoops about now-Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s fossil fuel ties, drawing responses from Capitol Hill during her confirmation battle. They’ve also excoriated the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump Republican super PAC, for failing to decrease Trump’s share of Republican votes in 2020 despite raising tens of millions from Democratic donors.
“‘Do you care what Sirota said?’ asked no one, ever,” tweeted Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson in response to The Daily Poster’s stories.
A return to form, in more ways than one
But despite Wilson’s taunting, it appears quite a few people do actually want to hear from Sirota. At the time of writing, Daily Poster was ranked as the No. 19 paid publication on Substack, with paid subscribers somewhere in the multi-thousand range (the website does not publish exact numbers of paid subscribers, only indications like “thousands” or “tens of thousands”). Sirota, who also reaches some 230,000 followers on Twitter, declined to share internal financial or subscriber figures with Blue Tent. It’s still early days, and as the Biden transition team continues rolling out cabinet appointments and policy plans, Daily Poster’s sure-to-be-critical coverage will likely draw even more eyeballs—but this won’t be the first time Sirota has helmed a massive newsletter.
During the 2020 primaries, Sirota was tasked with running Bern Notice, the Sanders campaign’s email newsletter. In January, Sanders ally Zephyr Teachout published an op-ed accusing Joe Biden of having “a big corruption problem,” which Sirota subsequently sent out through Bern Notice. Not wanting to attack Biden, Sanders personally apologized for the column and, according to the New York Times, Sirota was grounded from travel outside of visiting campaign headquarters.
“My only comment on [those events] is that Zephyr Teachout’s op-ed was excellent, honest and completely accurate in recounting the facts,” Sirota wrote in a follow-up email with Blue Tent.
He went on to explain that, in his view, the op-ed and his decision to put it on the campaign’s mailing list was “blown up into a fake scandal by media elites” who “did not want to cover the actual substance” of Teachout’s article.
“That failure is an opportunity for The Daily Poster — we cover that substance aggressively every single day, and we are finding a large and enthusiastic audience for that coverage because people want the real story of what’s actually going on in politics,” said Sirota.
And that wasn’t the only time Sirota courted controversy through a newsletter. In 2005, Sirota was working as one the earliest employees at the Center for American Progress and writing their Progress Report newsletter. That March, he authored an email criticizing Democrats for supporting a bankruptcy reform bill backed by banks and credit card companies, noting the sizable industry contributions the lawmakers had received. The email made the rounds on the blogosphere and Capitol Hill, forcing then-CAP President John Podesta to face the wrath of the pro-business New Democrat Coalition.
“I accepted the job at CAP with the understanding that my job would be to report on issues regardless of political party,” Sirota wrote to Blue Tent. “The experience in that situation suggested that was not necessarily the case.”
Sirota described the controversy surrounding his bankruptcy bill email as “an early lesson” in understanding “ulterior motives and agendas.”
Again, CAP disputed Sirota’s framing. “We have had well-established rules that prohibit the financial interests of donors from affecting or influencing our work for many years now,” a CAP spokesperson told Blue Tent, claiming that the organization did not “capitulate to outside criticism” and questioning the relevance of the anecdote “15 years later.”
“The journalism work I do is straightforward,” Sirota wrote to Blue Tent. “It is about challenging and scrutinizing powerful forces that economically harm ordinary people. I believe my career has shown that I take seriously the idea that that work must be done regardless of which particular politicians it may offend.”
Keeping up the pressure to prevent another 2016
Now settled back into journalism, Sirota hopes The Daily Poster will be among many publications holding Biden accountable to his campaign promises, unambitious as they were in Sirota’s estimation. Sirota is also focused on preventing Democrats and the left from ceding pressure on the White House in the same manner as 2008, when Barack Obama was elected—the original “back to brunch” moment for liberals.
“What ended up happening then was that Barack Obama and the Obama Administration didn’t feel nearly enough pressure to deliver for working people,” Sirota said. “They used their power to prop up Wall Street power, prop up health insurance companies… and people who thought they had voted for change realized there wasn’t that much change.”
This failure to implement serious reforms, Sirota argues, “created the backlash conditions” for Republicans to put on a populist sheen and take back the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and eventually, the White House in 2016. A day before this year’s elections, Sirota was urging liberals and the left not to disengage once Trump goes away.
“In America, the best way to prevent a new, more dangerous Trump is to refuse to see this election as an end point,” Sirota and Perez wrote in a pre-election essay. “It has to be the beginning of longer-term, fearless engagement that makes concrete demands of every public official — even those we like.”
But after four years of seemingly endless elections and Trump fatigue, is there really much hope for liberals and the left to turn the screws on Biden?
“I think that Obama’s star power created deference to him, and I don’t think Joe Biden engenders the same kind of deference,” Sirota said. “And I think that’s actually healthy for a democracy, for the president to be seen as an administrator of the biggest bureaucracy in the country, and somebody who is not a giant celebrity, as somebody who works for us and needs to be pressured.”
