Jay Kuo is the head of Team Takei. We’ve been friends going on 16 years now. In that time I’ve known him as an accomplished lawyer; as the composer and lyricist of my Broadway musical, Allegiance; as a social media maven; as a prolific writer and published author; as an activist with the Human Rights Campaign; as a popular Substack writer; and now as a soon-to-be father!
I sat down with Jay to talk about his work, his thoughts on the coming election, and what lies ahead for our politics and for digital media. - George
Congratulations to you and the team on one year of The Big Picture! It's been an exciting project and I'm thrilled with the reception it's gotten and the growth we’ve seen. You've also had incredible success with your own Substack, The Status Kuo. Can you talk about your inspiration for starting these newsletters and why you felt there was a void we could fill?
My own journey into political and legal reporting and writing began on Election Night of 2020. Prior to that pivotal moment, I had taken a strong interest in, of all things, mail-in ballots. This was a relatively new form of voting for many people. Several states, including key swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, had adopted mail-in voting during the pandemic. As you may recall, Trump had begun a long campaign against mail-in voting, which he falsely claimed was rife with fraud, so the adoption rates on mail-in ballots differed sharply between Democrats and Republicans.
I knew from reading an unhealthy number of political blogs and even attending Zoom calls with Democratic Secretaries of State (nerd alert!) that a key issue with the mail-in ballots was this: They would be counted after the Election Day in-person votes. This would happen in critical battleground states like Pennsylvania.
I also knew that big urban counties that were largely blue would report their numbers much later than the smaller, rural ones that were mostly red. Combined, these phenomena would create what’s become known as the “red mirage.” Trump would appear to be leading early on Election Night, and I worried he might use that occasion to call a halt to the ballot counting, even while millions of mail-in ballots and large vote “dumps” from major cities remained to be tallied.
This all came true, of course. The vote counts several hours after the polls had closed in key battleground states showed that Trump was ahead, sometimes by tens of thousands of votes. This didn’t bother me, however, because I knew how many mail-in votes and big county vote dumps were still to come. But what I didn’t realize was that many liberals and progressives did not understand that these votes were still out there. Many of my friends were horrified, some even crying, that Trump was going to be re-elected.
”Oh, don’t worry, we’ve won this,” I told them. And they all looked at me like I was a crazy person.
I then did the back-of-napkin math for them. “Look. Here’s how many mail-in ballots remain uncounted in Pennsylvania. Here’s the party break down, as best as we can figure it, of those outstanding votes. You multiply these, add them to the current totals, and boom! Biden wins. By like 70K votes or so.
They were dumbfounded and told me that I needed to put that out there for people to understand. So I did a Facebook post about Pennsylvania and how we were going to win. I think you even shared it, George! All of a sudden, that went super viral, and people asked me about Michigan and Wisconsin, and then Georgia and Arizona. I was less certain about the last three, but I was really certain about PA and MI. Overnight I gained something like 5,000 followers, which at the time seemed insane.
I began taking what I knew about the election results and explaining them as best I could, without jargon and only using basic math concepts. It relieved a lot of anxiety to see the numbers laid out plainly. Those predictions all proved correct, but it was only the beginning of my new line of work.
After Biden won, there were dozens of legal challenges in courts across the country. People started asking me to comment on those. I was a constitutional law and voting rights geek back in my early law school and lawyer years, so I began to explain all of that, too, avoiding as much legal jargon as I could and trying to make it fun and accessible.
I started my Substack in February, 2021 after Mark Zuckerberg announced he would be limiting reach on political posts on Facebook. I wanted a way to be sure I could reach people without any big platform intermediation. Three years later, here we are!
Here we are, indeed! What a tumultuous time. We were horrified, of course, when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, but his actual presidency was worse than we had even feared. I think many of us thought once he was defeated in 2020, the threat was vanquished, but we were quite naive. What do you feel is the biggest threat Donald poses to our nation right now, that he didn’t either in 2016 or 2020?
When Trump came into office in 2016, he was probably as surprised as everyone else that he had actually been elected. There was no plan, and he had zero experience. So he bumbled his way through, often getting blocked by career civil servants (what he and his acolytes have dubbed the “Deep State”) or by the courts. Trump Round 1 could have been so much worse, but he was supremely incompetent, which of course was a sort of blessing until we hit a real crisis in the form of the pandemic.
Trump Round 2 won’t be anything like that. First of all, he is running to stay out of prison, and to keep the grift going with his followers. If he wins, he has promised to be their “retribution” and to pardon criminals like the January 6 defendants. He is campaigning now on a platform for grievance and vengeance, using fear, hate and the language of fascism to achieve power. That is terrifying.
There are forces far greater than Trump that want to use the occasion of his reelection, should it occur, to put in place extremist, Christo-nationalist policies. We’ve written about Project 2025, backed by the Heritage Foundation, in various pieces in The Big Picture. One of the key facets of this project is the replacement of over 50,000 government workers who are long time experts in their fields with people who are selected for their loyalty to the president and his party. That is straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and it would forever change our country.
Trump is a portal for the far-right to achieve its aims. The Republican Party has got to regain its traditional conservative values, which include respect for the rule of law and democracy, before Trump or the next fascist wannabe is elected. Even if Trump is defeated this year, as he must be, we have to make sure whoever seeks to take his place as the party leader isn’t beholden to the Christian Nationalist, illiberal and anti-democratic agenda.
It’s good to see people like Liz Cheney, with whom I disagree on almost every policy issue, out there campaigning against Trump. We actually need a solid, pro-democracy opposition in order for our country not to spiral into extremism. MAGA is an authoritarian party steeped in white supremacy, conspiracies, and evangelical fervor. We need to join forces with our one-time political opponents, the true conservatives who still value and respect the rule of law, to ensure we are not overrun by anti-democratic, Trumpist forces.
When we first conceived of growing an online following back in 2011, who could have imagined what we’d be up against now? Do you want to tell those of our readers who don’t know how Team Takei came to be?
I don’t know if you remember, but before I managed your social media, we had been working for two years on our Broadway musical, Allegiance. I think it was our executive producer, Lorenzo, who came to me and said that we needed a way to grow an audience for the show long before it got to Broadway. He told me you should get a Twitter, and so we went to brunch in L.A. and we talked you into it. I promised that if your tweets were too long, I would edit them down for you!
Well, that was the start of something much bigger than any of us could possibly have imagined. Every time I turned around in those early years, it seemed like there were another 100,000 fans of your social media, whether on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. So Lorenzo and I decided to create a company and hire people to help curate and later create content for your audiences.
There’s a lot of silly stuff on the internet, and before Trump came along, we were mostly in it for fun and laughs. We wound up shifting gears and becoming far more political during the Trump years, even though it lost you a chunk of your fans. It was just too important not to use the platform to help save our democracy.
With all the turmoil in digital media the last several years, you have managed to stay afloat and then some! What has been the secret to success and where do you see digital media going in the future?
Some people are incessant talkers, but I’m an incessant writer. I write one piece a week here for The Big Picture and seven pieces, one per day, for my own substack, The Status Kuo. Solid, engaging content has always been our bread and butter, no matter what platform it’s on.
In recent years, as you and I have discussed many times together, the major social media companies have become less like partners and more like quixotic masters, changing their algorithms to advance their own aims and squashing us smaller creators without a second thought. It’s been really sad to watch, and it wiped out many other teams and lots of small publishers.
That’s one big reason we made the shift to a more direct relationship with our audiences through newsletters like this one. There isn’t an algorithm that decides which piece of content our readers should see. They subscribe, so they get everything we put out there, right in their email boxes. The challenge has been in moving people off of social media and into direct channels like Substack. We’ve been fairly successful so far, though, and I expect this trend to continue.
What do you think your readers value most about the perspective you as a writer offer?
Many of our readers are coming to independent reporters, like the team here at The Big Picture or over at my own Substack, in addition to, or even as an alternative to, the mainstream media. I’ve personally been highly critical of the way major papers have failed to understand the peril we are in, especially as a fascist movement has taken root and spread in the U.S. The negative attacks by the press around Joe Biden’s age, which they have falsely equated to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism and criminality, have been particularly galling and worrisome.
Many readers prefer content that focuses on the stakes, not the contest. I’ve also been highly critical of the horserace nature of the reporting, particularly the obsession with polls that have been proven increasingly inaccurate and even harmful to informed civic discourse.
I also think that my more informal way of presenting information takes some of the hard edge off the news. I personally believe it’s good to pepper in a good dose of humor and levity in my writing. After all, we live in truly absurd times, and it would be a shame if we didn’t stop to laugh, for example, when a bunch of MAGA Republicans pile out of a clown car.
I’m adding one question, which isn’t really a question, but I just heard it’s your birthday today! Happy Birthday! Any wishes on this occasion?
I was hoping that Trump’s first criminal trial would be underway in Manhattan by my birthday, but it looks like it now starts on Tax Day. Oh well!
But seriously, if readers here want to send any birthday love, I hope that they take an action to help preserve our democracy. One way to do that is to donate to the Biden Victory Fund, and I have an ask out about that in my own Substack. Another way is to support independent reporting by becoming paid subscribers to something like The Big Picture.
We’ve had a great first year, but to truly thrive and grow we do need more support. We’ve always had a voluntary honor-system, and we truly appreciate everyone who has decided our content is worth paying a small amount each month for. So I guess my birthday wish would be for 20 more folks to become annual subscribers today! Am I allowed to ask for that?
It’s your birthday, ask away. And thanks for taking the time out on your special day to chat with me.
Anything for the team, George!
I have been following Jay on SS ever since I stumbled on one of his amazing and informative posts a year and a half ago - but I had no idea what a polymath he is! Happy b’day Jay, from a huge fan! And George Takei, I have been a fan forever ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
There is much better, informative, credible and factual news on Substack than we can ever hope to get on mainstream media. Mainstream media has failed Democracy by giving its readers shoddy journalism, with only a few exceptions. I’m calling out The NY Times especially. I’m really grateful to George, Jay and others I pay for subscriptions. 🙏🏼