At the end of December 2025, a right-wing influencer posted a YouTube video claiming to show Somali-American-run daycares in Minneapolis defrauding the federal government. The video offered no verified evidence. It got millions of views anyway.
Within days, the Trump administration froze childcare funding in Minnesota. A week later it froze over $10 billion in funding across five states—California, Colorado, Illinois, New York—none of which were even subject to the fraud allegations.
Despite broad bipartisan support—a January poll found even 75% of Republicans believe childcare funding should be increased or kept at current levels — the Right was able to manufacture consent for gutting a wildly popular public good in a matter of days. With one video, an amplification network already in place, and an administration ready to act, the narrative landed—and stuck.
People didn’t just see one video about childcare fraud. They saw it in Facebook groups, elected officials’ posts, and on TV news, and it started to feel true. People began repeating it to friends, coworkers, family. The Right turned the working class into narrative foot soldiers.
Slow media for fast times. Sign up for our newsletter.
The Left isn’t losing the information war because our ideas are unpopular. We’re losing because we haven’t built the infrastructure to be everywhere at once.
I’ve spent the last several years building communications programs for the tenant movement in New York. I call what I’ve built “surround sound communications: the same message reaching people from every direction—in the news and from their cousin in a WhatsApp, on Instagram and from a canvasser at their door—until it starts to feel like common sense.
Still using tactics from the 1990s
The dominant model for progressive communications is top-down: craft the message, push it through institutional media, hope it lands. That model depended on trust in institutions and strong local news ecosystems. Both have eroded. Fox News commentator Jesse Watters said it plainly: “[The Right] is waging a 21st century information warfare campaign against the Left, and they are using tactics from the 1990s.”
The Left’s response has largely been to invest in better messaging. As strategist Ravi Mangla has written, this misdiagnoses the problem: “An imperfect narrative heard many times, from many directions, will always beat out a stronger narrative heard only once or twice.” The Left is increasingly recognizing this, and more organizations are turning to creators and short-form video. That’s not wrong. But a great video without an amplification network is a flash in the pan.
People trust friends, family and coworkers more than institutions and that trust travels through group chats, influencer videos, and neighborhood pages.
Viewing digital as supplementary to “real” organizing means we only reach people in half the places they actually are, as Dizzy Zaba has written. The same tenant is in her building’s WhatsApp group and at their tenants’ union meeting. The same young canvasser is knocking doors in the afternoon and checking three Discords that evening.
Narratives move through networks shaped by language, culture, shared interests, and geography—spaces centralized communications can’t fully see or reach. Treating these as separate from organizing leaves that terrain uncontested.
How repetition wins
The more people hear the same thing from different sources, the more it feels like reality, and the more they repeat it to others. Our goal isn’t just persuasion—it’s shaping how people interpret their own lives: why their rent is so high, who’s responsible, and how we could change it.
People don’t hold fixed beliefs. The same tenant who’s heard that migrants are driving up rents has also felt the rage of watching their landlord raise the rent while refusing to fix the heat. Which story sticks more depends on what they hear more often, from more sources, in more places.
That’s an infrastructure problem. A single press hit, a single viral post, a single canvass conversation doesn’t shift how people understand their world. What does is encountering the same frame across contexts—at their door, in a group chat, in a news story, from a neighbor—until it stops feeling like an argument and starts feeling like common sense. People will start to act on it, not because they were persuaded but because it’s become part of how they understand themselves.
Through repetition, we can win the ideological tug of war with the Right. Surround sound communications is how we make that repetition happen at scale.
Building a surround sound to freeze the rent
Last year, Housing Justice for All and the NYS Tenant Bloc set out to organize tenants to vote only for a mayor who would freeze the rent in the New York City primary, ultimately endorsing Zohran Mamdani and mobilizing over 22,000 tenants to vote for him.
The messages, translated across four languages, were simple and consistent: tenants are the majority in New York, and we have the power to elect a mayor who will freeze the rent.
Every post, email, rally sign, and phone bank script said the same thing. Spokespeople returned to it in every interview. Members carried it to neighbors and coworkers. “Freeze the rent” posters and stickers went up across the city. When landlords dropped $2.5 million to back Mamdani’s opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo, that became a topline too, seeded into volunteer chats and phone banks through the final month of the primary.
This was a deliberate shift from previous traditional advocacy campaigns that centered tenant victimhood, crisis and urgency, and political maneuvering—messaging designed for press and politicians rather than mass political identity.
Underlying it was a single bet: that tenants, once they understood themselves as a majority with power, would act like one.
And we were right. Renter-heavy districts swung decisively to Mamdani, turnout spiked in tenant-majority areas, and he won seven of the ten districts with the most rent-stabilized units.
But the goal was never just to win an election. It was to build a united bloc and a new political identity—to get tenants to understand themselves not as struggling individuals but as a powerful class with the ability to change the conditions of their lives. As Joanne Grell, a Puerto Rican rent stabilized tenant in the Bronx and co-chair of the Freeze the Rent campaign, put it, “I never felt so powerful in my life. I felt like a majority for the first time. I’ve always felt like a minority—but now I feel like a majority.”
New York’s tenant majority helped elect a mayor who will freeze the rent—and in June, the Rent Guidelines Board is expected to deliver on that promise for over 2.4 million tenants. But as real estate interests and their allies ratchet up attacks against the rent freeze—trying to turn working people against a policy that directly benefits them—continuing to build out a surround sound communications program becomes more urgent.
Map, seed, echo, invite
Surround sound isn’t a social media strategy. It’s an organizing program—one that treats members not as a story bank or an audience but as distributed communications infrastructure. We began building it through four practices: map, seed, echo, and invite.
Map. Relational and power mapping has to include digital spaces alongside physical ones. The neighborhood subreddit and the block association are both places where neighbors gather and update each other on what’s happening. When we mapped networks for the tenant movement, we asked, “Where do people actually get information? Who do they trust?” The answers rarely named the press release we sent or The New York Times. They pointed to group chats, local Facebook pages, a neighbor who always seemed to know what was going on. Moderators of Facebook groups and subreddits are community leaders—identifiable, reachable, organizable. Map them like anyone else with influence.
Seed. When there’s a press hit, a video, a moment that advances your narrative, put it everywhere. Not just on official accounts but on neighborhood pages, in group chats and in comment sections. The goal isn’t just reach. It’s seeding a story and starting conversations in the places people are. A single line like, “Did you see that landlords just gave Cuomo $2.5 million?” is enough to get people thinking.
Echo. When aligned content appears, amplify it whether you created it or not. Ask community leaders and influencers to amplify it. The goal is for the same message to appear to come from multiple independent sources simultaneously, because that’s what makes it feel organic and true.
Invite. Make organizing visible and desirable in every space—not just organizing spaces—and invite people in. Show them what participation in a movement looks like: the canvass, the meeting, the rally, the momentum. Some organizers call this “bounce house theory”: people look in, see people together having fun, and want to be part of it. In the Mamdani campaign, this happened organically. Volunteers didn’t just knock doors—they documented canvasses and rallies and shared them on their personal social media accounts, in group chats, and more, leading friends and family to ask how they could join too.
What we learned and what we still need to build
What we built in the Freeze the Rent campaign was real, and also imperfect. Message discipline sounds simple until you’re actually trying to build it across a coalition of tenants across race, age, language, and geography. People have to learn why it matters and then how to make the narrative their own, which sometimes means loosening the discipline. That tension doesn’t resolve; you manage the trade-offs.
Training people to treat every conversation as both an invitation to act and a shared story needs ongoing investment, real feedback loops, and a culture that treats communications as organizing itself—not a function separate from it.
And even with all of that, what we built last year primarily worked inside networks we could already reach and communications channels we controlled. The Right operates in the ones we can’t: the group chats, the local Facebook groups, the neighborhood subreddits where people form opinions far from any official channel.
We had one small glimpse of what reaching those spaces could look like. When Eric Adams’s final rent hikes went into effect on October 1, 2025—locking in increases for any lease renewed in Zohran Mamdani’s first six months in office—we knew the Right would use it: “Zohran froze the rent but your rent is going up.” Alongside press conferences, we tried something different: a forwardable WhatsApp meme, designed to travel the way things actually travel in immigrant communities. Low-res. A Tweetie bird on a sparkling background. “Buenos Dias” at the bottom and “Eric Adams nos subió la renta” at the top. One tenant in a bilingual Bronx building group chat hesitated before sending it—it felt too unofficial, too cute. After all, we’re serious organizers. But when she did, her neighbors said how cute it was but also thanked her for sharing the information. Whether it spread further, we don’t know; WhatsApp doesn’t give you that. Surround sound at the community level is mostly invisible to us. We’ll need a lot more experiments like this one.
That experimentation requires training members to map those spaces, identify the trusted voices inside them, and build the feedback loops that let us learn what’s spreading, what’s resonating, and what the opposition is saying before it calcifies into common sense. As experts on their own networks, our members could bring our narrative into places a central communications team could never reach.
This is a leadership development task. We need narrative organizers—people who don’t just repeat our messages but understand why they work, read their own communities, and shape the story as much as spread it.
What we don’t yet know is how to develop them at scale, how to give them enough shared direction without flattening what makes them effective, and how to build the feedback loops that would let us learn from what they find.
Winning the tug of war
On his eighth day in office, Zohran Mamdani—who ran on universal childcare as a core plank of his platform—stood alongside Governor Hochul to announce free childcare for two-year-olds in New York City, with a roadmap to universal care for every child under five. The announcement came two weeks after the Minnesota childcare fraud video went viral. It was proof that the politics we’re fighting for are genuinely popular, genuinely winnable. It was also a reminder of exactly what the Right will come for next.
We are in two fights simultaneously. We are trying to protect what we’ve won against a right-wing administration that can weaponize a single viral video to freeze billions in funding for a program three-quarters of the country supports. And at the same time we are trying to win a lot more—not just protecting childcare funding, but making it truly universal; not just freezing the rent, but making sure everyone has a safe and stable home.
Surround sound doesn’t guarantee we win. It gives us the capacity to move at the speed and scale this moment requires—to get our frame into group chats and Discords and conversations at the nail salon before the other side gets there first, or at least before their story calcifies. To have enough people carrying the same story in enough directions that it starts to feel like reality.
The Right built their machine over decades. We’re building ours in the middle of the fight. That’s harder. It’s also the only option we have.
Before you go...
Convergence Magazine is an independent journal of movement strategy, powered by readers like you. Your membership ensures we can remain rigorous, critical, and accountable to our movements. Become a member today.