Q&A: Grant Stern | Occupy Democrats’ Relentless Fact Smuggler
If you have watched a liberal challenge far-right narratives on Newsmax, it may have been Grant Stern. As Executive Editor of Occupy Democrats and a former Miami radio host, Stern has become a familiar presence in conservative media spaces, where he brings a clear strategy and a willingness to confront misinformation at its source.
His approach is deliberate. “If Newsmax viewers are going to hear anything true, it has to come from someone willing to show up and speak their language,” he says. Stern is not just defending facts. He is actively working to pull the Overton window back toward reality.
Trained in formal debate and grounded in deep research, Stern focuses less on rhetorical flourishes and more on disassembling falsehoods. “You take their lies apart one dumb idea at a time,” he says. “Learn to recognize the spin and you can take control of the narrative.”
At Occupy Democrats, Stern helped grow one of the most influential progressive platforms online. His work is rooted in the mission of Occupy Wall Street, challenging concentrated power and giving voice to the overlooked. From viral memes to large scale digital campaigns, the goal remains the same: counter right wing propaganda with fact based, effective messaging.
“What if Democrats had their own Fox News,” he asks, “but told the truth?” That question drives much of his work.
In this issue of the issue., I speak with Grant about the media landscape, the structure of political messaging, and how disinformation is confronted in real time. When we hop on the phone to connect and chat, these are the conversations we have. I am bringing them to you now with the same focus and urgency. Grant is not only a sharp political strategist and relentless truth teller. He is also a trusted friend whose work reflects a deep commitment to justice and accountability.
Q. Grant, why do you go on these far right “news” shows like Newsmax?
A. How else will Newsmax viewers face an encounter with the facts that will impact their lives if I can’t smuggle the news into the venues they are watching? For example, there are $800 billion in proposed healthcare cuts to Medicare. When you talk about things in politics over time on a network like that, before they happen and can later point to the negative consequences after they happen, a viewer can begin to trust you. At the very least, I’m pushing the Overton window in the correct direction by going on Newsmax.
Q. What’s your method of tearing down right-wing media’s truth, and the lies they tell their viewers?
A. It’s not easy. My method is a combination of experience in formal debate, intense study, and personally living in Miami, so I’m engaging in these discussions with friends who are not reliable Democratic voters, some who are real MAGAs, others who are former MAGA. But by going in there and hashing it out, we grind out their false ideas and false narratives that they transform into fact and all the angry feels that they consider facts and boil things down to what are the actual facts
“We took apart their narratives, one dumb idea at a time”
Not to mention, my six years hosting live radio programming, which was my first podcast, the Only in Miami Show. When you do it live on the air, it’s not just these 5-15 minute segments, we’re talking hours.
All of which has led me to the recognition that bad ideology often springs from reliance on false or distorted facts. The rest is from convincing arguments they internalize based on illogical reasoning.
That’s why the first part of my method is the part anyone can replicate at home. Learn about red herrings, ad hominem attacks, or logical fallacies like the no true Scotsman logical fallacy. Within a short amount of time, you may realize that some of the most forceful arguments you hear from the right are nothing more than verbal sleight of hand.
If you recognize the spin, then you can turn it around.
Case in point: After Trump passed his “Big Beautiful Bill”, Grant took to Newsmax and owned the show. I’m particularly fond of .44 seconds in, above:
ORIGINS & MISSION
Q. What was the spark that led to the creation of Occupy Democrats? Are you the sole creator? What is your position there?
A. I’m the Executive Editor of Occupy Democrats, which means that I’m in charge of the business and editorial side of our journalistic products. I also play a major role in managing our relationship with Facebook, and after the post fact-checking, when someone raises an issue.
I’m not the founder. Omar Rivero was the sole original creator; he brought in his twin brother to help with memes and me, and another person, early on, to write the news. That’s how I published my first story with Occupy Democrats in 2015. By the summer of 2017, our news website was regularly reaching 30 million unique viewers in a month.
Q. How did the Occupy Wall Street movement influence your identity and name?
A. I mean, obviously, the entire idea of Occupy Democrats is eponymously tied to the OWS movement. We have some actual friends who were those occupiers to this day. Personally, I interacted with the OWS crew more when I got involved in the national police accountability space.
The major triumph of the Occupy Wall Street movement was two ideas, one that you could communicate through memes (we figured that out) and the other of the meme about the 99% and the 1% which has permeated political discourse since then.
Q. What gap in political discourse were you aiming to fill when you launched?
A. The basic idea of Occupy Democrats was: what if Democrats had their own Fox News, but everything is factual, it’s all real, but it has to highlight the 1% versus the rest of Americans in a genuine and true way.
We knew the “mainstream,” better known to me as the corporate press, was no “liberal media” even back then, and eventually aimed to fill the niche of a genuine partisan news outlet. Ever wonder why newspapers like the Arizona Republic or Tallahassee Democrat are out there? In the past, it was the political parties that made these publications and ran their editorial boards.
Q. Has your mission evolved since day one, and if so, how?
A. The basic mission remains the same: to inform people so they have the language to discuss democratic politics and share their knowledge with others. We are still informing Democrats, still making memes on Facebook, but also on other platforms like YouTube.
STRATEGY & CONTENT
Q. How do you decide which headlines or stories make the cut?
A. We are not a hierarchical organization. It’s a small group of people who really care about Democratic politics and operate independently, but in our style to create a national outlet.
Q. Do you consider yourself journalism, activism, or something in between?
A. As an advocacy journalist, there is bound to be some blurring of the lines. But newsflash! Journalists are involved, we are on the stage, and we are players. This is the kind of transparency we offer to our readers. You know where we stand. You know why. You know why I’m not busy reporting on Hunter’s laptop, but I am busy exposing the President of the NRA settling an election interference lawsuit. —Selection bias, it’s inherent in partisan news outlets and advocacy journalism, deciding what to cover and what not to cover.
So that’s it, I’m transparent. You know I’m an “admitted partisan” as the CJR likes to call me.
Outspoken’s note: Trump’s Press Strategist, Jason Miller called Occupy Democrats “admittedly a partisan site”, but still—a “worthless sack of blogger shit” and a loser (seven times!) while telling him he looks like he lives “under a bridge and eat[s] goats.” Grant asked Miller for an interview, Miller TACO’d, as in “Trump always chickens out”, as do those around him.
Q. How much of your content is original reporting versus commentary or curation?
A. Producing original news takes a lot of time, which precludes my day job from paying my bills. Sadly, there is not enough money in original reporting to sustain the levels of activity I used to undertake, so right now we’re mostly doing commentary. However, that’s also where I think my time is most effective these days, so it’s not a big deal. Moving the Overton window is a major necessity these days, as right-wingers have consumed pretty much our entire “mainstream” media eco-verse.
During the 2020 election, I focused on political messaging with The Democratic Coalition and our many partners over original reporting, and I feel like our guidance really paid off. We trended 80 national hashtags from mid-August through the end of the campaign.
Q. What role does outrage play in your storytelling strategy?
A. If people don’t feel something because there is a problem, they will not do something because there is a problem. And the feeling of outrage is central to people’s reasons for engaging in political activity.
It is outrageous when the President breaks the law. It is outrageous when even one person is denied their rights, illegally deported without due process, and the government refuses to bring them home. This is why there will be a reaction to Trump’s inglorious first term at the polls next November.
Unfortunately, too many people have channeled this outrage in the wrong direction. Some, like Team MAGA, use inexpensive lies to drive this outrage and channel it in self-destructive directions for their voters. On the far left, we see this outrage channeled at Democrats for not stopping Republicans, then a withholding of votes that causes Republicans to do outrageous things.
You can also sense a real outrage-burnout in a lot of good Americans who love their country. I don’t blame them.
IMPACT & REACH
Q. How do you measure impact: engagement, vitality, legislation, or cultural shift?
A. When I started writing about police officers assaulting people for recording them with cellphone cameras back in 2014, along with a vast group of associates, we all helped raise the issue to the national forefront. We exposed police beating people up, making false arrests, lying to their superiors, saying horrific things to citizens, and trashing the Constitution.
It was a daily flow of horrific police behavior. As advocacy journalists, we backed a solution: body cameras.
Nowadays? There is a societal change. Cops expect to be recorded (mostly). A huge percentage of cops wear body cameras, which unions bitterly oppose, until reminded that a camera can exonerate a cop too.
Q. Has Facebook’s algorithm affected how you reach your audience?
A. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Lately, it seems better.
Q. How have you managed to maintain relevance in a chaotic media landscape?
A. When you work your ass off in a really smart way, eventually you stand out for whatever you do whenever you do it. Everyone at Occupy Democrats devotes a lot of their time to what they do; they really get our core ideas, and that’s why the organization remains relevant today.
Q. Do you think you’ve helped shift the Democratic Party left, or just amplified it?
A. Our page had a major role in amplifying really important economic ideas that are considered “left” here but are considered the bedrock of the industrialized world everywhere else. Universal healthcare exists everywhere but in America.
Let’s talk about the fact that ONE PERCENT of Americans hold an outsized share of wealth (actually, the 0.01% is even wealthier)— the top 1% are even richer, and much of that wealth has been built with help from the government. Meanwhile, the other 99% are told they should expect little to no support when facing systemic problems. From 2008 through 2019, pointing this out was considered left wing. Then COVID hit, and suddenly we saw direct aid sent to every American along with massive corporate welfare that was completely absent in 2008.
So, I think we’ve had a role in shifting America’s entire political discourse to the left in certain areas, and the Democratic Party is part of America, too.
CRITICISM & TRANSPARENCY
Q. How do you respond to critics who call your work divisive or hyper-partisan?
A. When I spoke with Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed news who created the term “hyper-partisan” the first thing he did was apologize for using a false equivalency (a logical fallacy) in his article’s basic premise comparing Occupy Democrats, a partisan news website, to a bunch of obvious lie factories that existed to either confuse people or make money, or do one to get the other. Unfortunately for us, the term traveled around the globe instantly and it’s a pejorative. Later, I became a source for Craig, where he distinguished that Occupy Democrats was a partisan news outlet and those other guys just making stuff up are the hyper-partisans.
Does anyone care? Nope! But Craig knows, I know Craig knows, so that’s good enough for me for now.
For years our flagship news website carried a 100/100 rating from NewsGuard Technologies for our journalism practices, transparency and factualness, something we worked hard to earn. That’s what counts to me.
Q. What do you say to progressives who think you oversimplify complex issues?
A. The next time someone reads your doctoral dissertation on a bumper sticker, let me know. #ShorterIsBetter.
Q. Have you ever published something you regretted, and how did you address it?
A. Happens all the time if you’re in publishing, and we issue a correction, clarification, update or retraction appropriately.
If I had one major regret it would be a post I made about Jimmy Carter’s brother who did not receive a pardon. I googled it, the result came from an AI search, and I did not realize how much it biased me. It was very late at night, I had trouble finding the DOJ website with Donald Trump’s pardons outside of the Pardon Office, and I couldn’t find Jimmy Carter’s either. Combined with the AI misinformation and the Hindustan Times or something?!?, plus a very early morning news hit, I blew it.
I published a correction and report update right below it, but kept the post up to show that yes, even I can make a big mistake here or there. Better to admit it, talk about it, be transparent and move on. I spoke with both USA Today and The Verge about it.
Q. What safeguards do you have in place for accuracy and integrity?
A. Well, for starters we use NOTHING from AI. The rest, I mean, no more late night research, so more rest is key. Other than that, we’ve asked everyone who publishes to ask themselves if this story is too good to be true, because maybe it is. . .
Keep in mind, we don’t have a million monumental mistakes and we have no uncorrected mistakes.
Even when we are completely literal and use a quote, sometimes fact checkers would come after us. My favorite was this time when USA Today covered a meme about a Maine Republican state lawmaker asking what the Nazis ever did that was illegal.
USA Today claimed our post lacked context and then quoted my response while omitting the second sentence I provided, which explained the meme. In that light, our safeguards hold up well.
THE MOVEMENT & THE FUTURE
Q. How do you keep volunteers, contributors, and followers motivated long-term?
A. We keep informing them one day at a time, ten to 40 times a day, across a lot of social channels. An informed public is a voting public is an active public.
Q. Do you see a future where Occupy Democrats partners with political candidates, or stays independent?
A. There is an Occupy Democrats Election Fund Political Action Committee which is a hybrid PAC, that I am not involved in in any daily or managerial capacity, that does donate some of its funds directly to Democratic candidates.
Q. What does “winning” look like for you in today’s political climate?
A. The fact you have to ask such a question says how difficult a time we live in. Normally, winning would be so easy to define, flip the House, win the White House and Senate back, get America’s government back in the fact business and the helping people business and out of the war & tariff business.
Nowadays, it’s hard to define winning, but I’d say it will start with flipping the House —but from there who can say.
I think we’re in a moment that transcends politics in that our need to win is more on a cultural level. And what we’re seeing today is creating the kind of backlash and betrayal within MAGA country that is going to make that a possibility.
America wants change, hence the whipsawing from party to party by swing voters.
So if we’re going to win, we need to win the information war in a broader way that helps people use their outrage to assign some blame on the actual culprits for their problems, and elect some people who are more interested in helping every American rather than inflicting pain on their enemies.
Grant’s Socials: Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | SoundCloud | Website | Substack
In Closing: I would love to hear from you! So please don’t just sit with this in your inbox. Click through to leave me a comment and to start a conversation. Engage and share away.
Raise the volume with me! Outspoken
Coming soon: More Q&A’s with some of the most fascinating people you think you already know.
Solid Q&A. Grant nails what too many miss - this isn’t just dysfunction, it’s design. Appreciate the clarity.
Also, it’s refreshing to read a Q&A in general. Not everything needs to be video! Love these and hope to see more. Wellman and Stern so far? Incredible.
Informative post. Thanks.
I don't know how many Newsmax viewers minds get changed by listening to Grant, but glad he is trying. To Newsmax's credit, they let him speak, without constantly interrupting him (like Fox does to Jessica Tarlov).