If you had told me when I was a teenager that “Fox News pundit” would be one of my future roles, I would have been horrified. But here we are. In the last month, I have appeared on right-wing cable news four times, twice on NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich Show and twice on Fox’s The Will Cain Show. Getting invited back strikes me as a sign that I must have failed, but I’m fairly satisfied with how these appearances have gone. And while I don’t think the Fox audience will hear my words and sign up for DSA memberships, I do think that we on the left can actually use these forums in a way that advances our political project. In fact, I think we would be foolish not to try to use these opportunities as best we can.

Of course, it’s a totally rigged medium. The segments last about four or five minutes if you’re lucky, your answers have to be about 30 seconds long, the interviewers cut you off, and the questions are things like: “Why are you pretending you’re not a communist?” We might assume that because of this, it is impossible to get across a message coherently. It’s certainly impossible to go into any detail—the last time I went on Fox, the host’s whole premise was that the math behind left policies (such as California’s billionaire tax, the New York City pied-a-terre tax, and Medicare For All) doesn’t add up, but there was no time afforded for me to actually explain the basic math behind these proposals. Fox is a right-wing propaganda network, conditioning its viewers to think that democratic socialism is evil. Of course they’re not interested in a real, serious discourse, where you go through the exact costs and savings of Medicare For All. Every question is badly framed at best and always hostile, and every word you say can and will be clipped against you.

But once you release yourself from the hope that a substantive discussion can occur, and accept the constraints of the medium, it’s possible to do something productive with it. After all, they only give you 30 seconds to answer, but you can also look at it another way: you have 30 seconds in front of nearly 2 million people, and because it’s live you can fill that airtime with whatever words you like. Thirty-second political ads, if well-crafted, are effective, and so if Fox is going to let socialism have a series of 30-second political ads, I say we take advantage of it and make the best “ads” we can.

Some leftists would make the argument that if you could do anything to undermine Fox News on Fox News, they wouldn’t have you on. But I am not so sure about that. Fox is interested in making sure pro-capitalist messages get to its audience, sure. But it’s also interested in ratings, and its producers know that having socialists on and berating them is good for ratings, so they find it irresistible. Our task is to make sure that between the punches we sound as credible, competent, and persuasive as it is possible to sound.

The fact is that Fox News is going to find leftists to have on. Someone will be willing to do it. And we can either go in prepared, knowing the questions likely to be asked and having good answers to them ready, or we can go in there clueless, looking foolish when the host stumps us with a question we haven’t thought of a good answer to.

My strategy with these hosts is to know what they’re probably going to ask before they ask it. I write up a document with likely questions and write down what I would say in response to each. Of course, in practice, once you get live in front of millions of people, there is absolutely no way to stick to your talking points entirely. I’m reminded of the famous Mike Tysonism “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The last time I went on the Will Cain show, Cain confronted me with a question he hoped would stump me: could I name one government program in the U.S. that had intervened in the market and successfully lowered costs? The trap here is that the moment you’re asked such a question, your mind may well go blank—even if you take a few seconds to think, you can be clipped to look completely foolish, because, after all, if you’re so committed to the belief that the government can help lower costs, why would you have to think? Fortunately, I had a persuasive answer ready: Medicare, which dramatically reduces the cost of healthcare to individuals and produces a higher rate of satisfaction than private insurance plans.

 

 

Now, I try to go into these things with a set of points I want to convey, and usually they’re some variation on: Here are the values socialists stand for, here are the policies being proposed or enacted by socialists, here are the reasons why these values and policies are reasonable, and here is why fearmongering about these positions is silly. But usually you’re not going to be given questions to which these points are a direct answer, so you have to work them in where you can. For example, in my first appearance on Fox, I was frustrated because the segment was framed as a kind of “electoral horse race” discussion about which candidates socialists would support in the midterms and 2028. I don’t really want to use my brief time on television to talk about which candidates socialists will support, but want to pivot to those key points above. So, for example, Will Cain wanted to ask me what socialists think of Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris. (We do not think very highly of them.)

 

I answered that question initially, but I looked for an opportunity to pivot to discussing the issues that socialists care about:

 

CAIN:

Nathan, look, I know because I've got notes here that say you don't want to endorse a candidate, but look, you're a socialist. You've got a fancy accent which suggests you're not necessarily, at least originally, an American. You are also ascendant, the socialists. You're ascendant. Would you? How would you feel about Kamala leading the party in 2028?

ROBINSON:

Yeah, not good. You're not going to find much support for Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or Hillary Clinton among the Democratic Socialists because these politicians represent exactly the tendencies within the Democratic Party that, since Bernie Sanders’ run in 2016, Democratic Socialists have been arguing against. They're associated with the deeply unpopular Biden administration…

CAIN:

They're coming to you, though. They’re moving towards you. So like Pete Buttigieg talking about doing away with the electoral college and packing the Supreme Court. You're just saying it’s just not enough.

ROBINSON:

Well, Pete Buttigieg is a former McKinsey consultant who adjusts everything he says on the basis of what his poll numbers are telling him. What the democratic socialists have said since 2016 is that mainstream Democrats have neglected working people’s needs. They have said things like “the economy is good, but you just don’t appreciate it.” The democratic Socialists say: “No, actually, you're right about your economic frustrations. Let’s talk about the cost of childcare. Let's talk about healthcare. Let's talk about getting you into a union so you have better bargaining power with your boss. Let's talk about kitchen table issues that matter to working people.”

 

So I tried to hammer home a basic point: democratic socialists care about improving working people’s lives. I could have spent most of that second answer critiquing Buttigieg. I’ve certainly got plenty of negative things to say about him. But I remembered, in the moment, what my task was: wave away Pete Buttigieg, and stick to trying to explain, in 30 seconds or less, the core socialist message. I tried to do the same thing when Cain asked whether I, as a socialist, could get behind Abdul El-Sayed. Cain wanted a discussion about whether El-Sayed is a socialist:

CAIN:

So no Pete Buttigieg, no Kamala Harris, no Hillary Clinton. Not everybody who is even ascendant right now is at least in name a democratic socialist. So, like Abdul El-Sayed, he's rejecting the socialism part. We played that clip earlier. At least what he says. I mean, I think you and I might agree his actions and policies suggest something else. So, could you get behind a guy like Abdul El-Sayed, who's today in a primary in Michigan?

ROBINSON:

Well, I think he's pretty sincere about not being a socialist. He just doesn't believe in the kind of public control level of public control of the economy that socialists do. But I think the real question for Democratic socialists in 2028 is who aligns best with the priorities that we're talking about, and Abdul is running on Bernie Sanders' Medicare For All [plan]. Abdul wrote the book on Medicare For All. That's what socialists care about. They care about getting people affordable health care. They care about strengthening unions. They care about tackling the climate crisis. So the things that Abdul is prioritizing are the things that socialists value, which is why I think he'll be a very strong contender.

 

Once again, I tried to come back to that key point: here is what the socialists are standing for. I didn’t get distracted by cracks about my “fancy accent” or get sidetracked with tantalizing opportunities to crap on Pete Buttigieg, or spend the whole answer explaining Abdul El-Sayed’s relationship with capitalism and socialism. In my head at the time, I was just thinking: Unions! Medicare For All! Climate! Come back to the key points.

Now, sometimes you do get a direct question that gives you a chance to explain your worldview as clearly as you can in 30 seconds. And when you get something like that, you need to be ready. When I went on NewsNation, alongside the brilliant leftist commentator Monte Mader, host Katie Pavlich gave me a golden opportunity when she asked the question: “Why should I be a socialist?”

 

Now I’ve written a whole book called Why You Should Be a Socialist, and it’s over 300 pages, and obviously you can’t get even 1 percent of that material across while the clock is ticking down on a hostile broadcast, but I chose to focus in on a lot of the problems that were driving people toward voting socialist:

 

The rent is too high. Young people feel like they can't afford a house; they'll never buy a house. The cost of childcare is too high. They see a bloated military budget deploying our tax dollars for death and destruction. They see their jobs being replaced with AI. They feel they have no rights at their place of employment. They have no family leave. They're drowning in student debt. Billions of dollars are being spent for ICE to drag your neighbors away, throw them in a cage, or shoot them in their car. Then we have a totally out of control climate catastrophe with global warming spiraling out of control. Meanwhile, trillionaires are being minted while people are sleeping in the streets. And so a lot of young people look at that situation. They see it as crazy and unjust. They're angry and they want someone to do something about it.

 

I didn’t improvise that list, by the way. I had written it earlier in the day and memorized it. And Katie Pavlich seemed a little taken aback when she realized that both Monte and I were coming in prepared, and were able to articulate socialist ideas and respond to critical questions. And when Pavlich confronted Monte with the usual “Do you support Hamas?” question, Monte swatted her down so quickly and effectively that Pavlich quickly went to a commercial break.

PAVLICH:

There has been this debate too within DSA and promotion of groups that have been sanctioned by the U.S. government for terrorism—Hamas, for example. Is that a group that you support, or is that an outlier in terms of what DSA is pushing?

MADER:

There is absolutely no promotion of Hamas. There is a defense of the Palestinian people to be able to live and survive. Because what you cannot have is a war with a region that does not have a standing army. When you are attacking hospitals and schools, and you are intentionally targeting civilians, you're not defending yourself. You're also not targeting a terrorist group, you're targeting civilians.

PAVLICH:

You’re talking about Hamas?

MADER:

No. I'm talking about the nation-state of Israel doing that. There is no movement within the DSA to support Hamas, but it is to defend the civilians in Palestine, to defend their right to live and live freely, and to prevent settlement and abuse in the West Bank. It's a legal apartheid and a genocide that's going on, and that's not just my opinion, that also includes the International Criminal Court…

PAVLICH:

We can have you back to debate those facts. I think a lot of those are opinions, but we are happy to have you.

ROBINSON:

They’re the consensus of human rights groups around the world.

PAVLICH:

Thank you…

MADER:

There are reasons that there are people in Israel facing war criminal charges.

PAVLICH:

Thank you very much. We’ve got to run. Good to see you both. Thank you very much.

 

As you can see, the medium disfavored Mader. The question was hostile and loaded. But Mader knows what she is talking about, and she waved away the nonsense about being a Hamas supporter and emphasized the horrific war crimes and genocide that Israel has carried out in Gaza. Any fair-minded viewer (although I’m not sure how many of those NewsNation has) could see that Pavlich failed to achieve her objective of making Mader look like an irrational terrorist sympathizer.

 

I’ve seen other leftists do well on right-wing cable news, too. Katie Halper once gave an excellent showing on the Laura Ingraham Show, and Adam Gaffney was fantastic at defending single-payer healthcare on the Fox Business channel against a panel of antagonists. Bernie Sanders even went on Fox to do an entire town hall, and won over the live audience! On the other hand, I have seen some people go into these things unprepared, and end up providing viral clips for the right, when they look like they don’t know their facts or have persuasive answers to challenging questions.

I don’t think appearances on Fox are ever going to start a revolution. But parts of their audience may be more receptive than you think to the socialist message. A remarkable recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal warned that too many young conservatives are becoming sympathetic to socialism:

In a 2025 survey of young likely voters, 42% of conservatives said they would like to see a democratic socialist win the presidency in 2028. Among 2024 Trump voters, the figure was 35% in another poll. A March 2026 poll found 77% of all voters support raising taxes on billionaires, including 65% of Republicans, 75% of independents, and 91% of Democrats. It also found 62% of voters are more likely to back a candidate who supports an increased billionaire tax, versus 12% more likely to support a candidate who opposes it. These aren’t disciples of Karl Marx, but they believe the economy is rigged against them, and they increasingly believe the government should step in and fix it.

These numbers are so extraordinary that I am quite skeptical of them, but they turn out to come from a conservative think tank! They’re also consistent with what democratic socialists have been arguing for a long time, which is that Bernie Sanders’ politics are more likely to appeal to Trump voters than corporate liberalism, even though they are “further to the left.” (When I interviewed a literal Pinochet apologist, Joshua Lisec, I asked him what he thought of Bernie, to test my prediction that he actually wouldn’t be especially negative. Sure enough, he answered “I kind of like the old fart.”) I still think fascists are a major threat to socialists, of course, and not our allies, but I think many of the voters who are courted by far-right politicians are the type we need to (and can) win over to socialism, by giving them real solutions to their grievances rather than encouraging them to hate their immigrant neighbors.

Of course, I also think we need to be careful about not becoming unwitting tools of the right. When I was younger, Fox News used to have a host named Alan Colmes, who was the network’s token liberal, and Colmes existed mainly to prove that the network was in fact “fair and balanced.” (They have since dropped the slogan, along with any pretense of being neutral). Colmes was less telegenic than his usual antagonist, Sean Hannity, was given less airtime, and was basically a prop. Whatever he thought he was doing, his function was to help them discredit liberal politics. I want to make sure never to end up serving the Colmes role. But I don’t think we have to. Today’s socialists are smart, informed, right on the issues and proposing sound solutions. We have nothing to fear from going into these spaces and fighting to win.