“The Right Nurtures Its Young People. The Left Burns Them Out.”

Inside the Democrats’ cultural crisis and the scramble to build something that can compete.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

This piece was reported by Abi Baker and edited by me. I’m excited to be working with new talent as we expand our reporting. We’re making it free but if you want more reporting like this, you know what to do.

The Democratic Party isn’t losing elections. It’s losing the culture.

And culture, not policy, is what’s driving the next generation of voters. While Democrats refine talking points and wait for the political pendulum to swing back, the right has built a sprawling media ecosystem designed to shape how young people think, talk, and vote. Now, a 28-year-old influencer thinks he knows how to fight back.

Carlos Calzadilla-Palacio is trying to build something Democrats don’t really have: a cultural machine.

His project, Disrupt PAC, is pitched as a post-partisan, grassroots counterweight to the right’s youth ecosystem—something akin to Turning Point USA. Targeting college campuses much like Charlie Kirk did, he staged an “Epstein Egg Hunt” at Washington Square Park near New York University this month, sending participants on a $200 scavenger hunt to “uncover who in NYC needs to be held accountable for their part in the Epstein files.”

It resulted in a police summons. But it’s exactly the kind of edgy, viral political theater he’s using to lure students back to a party that’s come to feel less like a movement and more like the hall monitor.

A former president of the Young Brooklyn Dems and onetime staffer to New York State Sen. Andrew Gounardes, Calzadilla-Palacio now hosts a podcast and crisscrosses the country showing up at ICE protests in Los Angeles and speaking on conservative campuses like Arizona State.

“The problem isn’t that Democrats need better messaging,” he told me. “It’s that the message itself doesn’t resonate.”

That diagnosis leads somewhere uncomfortable. Calzadilla-Palacio doesn’t believe voters disillusioned with Trump are naturally drifting left. If anything, he worries they’re drifting further right, into a fragmented but increasingly radicalized ecosystem already competing to define the future of conservatism.

“There’s no guarantee people turned off by Trump on the right, just go left,” he said. “They could go further right.”

Instead, he sees the right splintering into competing factions—America First versus MAGA, populists versus nihilists, establishment conservatives versus a more online, more extreme right.

And while that battle plays out in real time, Democrats are still searching for a coherent response.

“We could get Tucker Carlson as the next president,” he warned. “Nick Fuentes could be the natural next leader of the Republican Party.”

That’s not just alarmism, it’s a reflection of how he sees the right evolving faster than the left can react.

He believes Turning Point’s evolution from a youth-driven grassroots movement into something more tightly aligned with Trump’s political machine has created an opening. The organization’s growing proximity to power, and its enforcement of ideological purity, risks alienating younger voters.

But Calzadilla-Palacio’s critique of the right quickly turns inward. He argues Democrats fundamentally misunderstand loyalty and it’s costing them.

“There is a huge problem in politics where political parties think voters need to be loyal to them,” he said. “Young people didn’t want to vote for the Democratic party, because the brand was so bad.”

So why can’t they win them back?

“People notice that they have to toe these rhetorical lines on positions that make no sense to the average person,” he said.

That frustration leads to an even harsher conclusion: what, exactly, are Democrats offering right now?

“Nothing,” he said flatly.

He also believes the party failed a basic political test after losing in 2024—learning from defeat.

“After Kamala [Harris] lost, I really humbled myself,” he said. “And surprisingly, a lot of people did not humble themselves,”

In his framing, the difference between the two parties isn’t just ideological, it’s cultural.

“The right is always looking for converts,” he said. “The left is always looking for traitors.”

That instinct, he argues, shrank the Democratic coalition at precisely the moment it needed to expand.

His answer is Disrupt Politics, built around three deliberately broad pillars: restoring freedom, making life affordable, and ending corporate control. The vagueness isn’t accidental—it’s designed to function as a cultural umbrella, not a rigid policy platform.

So far, the group has raised about $400,000, with an average donation of $17—roughly 16,000 small donors across all 50 states. He contrasts that with what he sees as billionaire-backed influence operations on the right like Turning Point.

But when it comes to leadership, his answers are less concrete.

He points to figures like Ro Khanna, Jon Ossoff, and James Talarico as Democrats who “get it.” But he’s far more comfortable talking about culture than candidates.

Asked about polarizing figures like streamer Hasan Piker, who has become toxic among some Democrats, he shrugs.

“Hasan is a streamer,” he said. “He makes culture.” That distinction matters.

Calzadilla-Palacio believes Democrats are losing not because they lack policies, but because they’ve failed to produce singular cultural figures who can compete with Carlson, Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens.

“You don’t build a cultural movement by focusing on politics first,” he said.

Instead, he argues, the right invests in its ecosystem, while the left exhausts its own.

“The right nurtures its young people,” he said. “The left burns them out.”

That dynamic, he believes, explains why Trump can still be perceived as “honest” by voters—even when he isn’t.

“Trump isn’t honest on the facts,” he said. “But he’s honest with his feelings.”

In a political environment where authenticity often outweighs accuracy, that distinction has proven powerful.

He points to Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign as a missed opportunity—one that began with more populist, culturally resonant messaging around affordability and corporate power, before softening over time.

In his view, donor pressure and a lagging approach to new media pulled it back toward the familiar.

By the time Democrats fully embraced podcasts and online platforms, he said, they were a decade late.

Now, as Democrats search for a path forward, Calzadilla-Palacio sees a narrow but real opening.

The right may be ascendant culturally, but it’s also fracturing internally, pulled between competing visions of power and identity.

Meanwhile, Trump is governing under the weight of the Epstein files, an escalating conflict with Iran, and declining public support, with approval ratings dipping into the 30s.

Whether Disrupt can capitalize on that moment is far from certain.

But in Calzadilla-Palacio’s view, the opportunity is already there.

“If you want to install an authoritarian dictatorship,” he said, “you don’t blink.”

“And he blinked.”