The Influencer Racket and the War for Boomer Mindshare
The surest sign of a racket is how everyone in it is controlled
You know that feeling you get, that everything in the conservative media is fake? I’m going to explain why it feels that way. We’ve all had conversations with otherwise good and decent people, who have been relentlessly propagandized with the most outlandish nonsense. To fix the damage that’s been done is going to require a lot of grace from both left and right.
I told you the Chinese-money, Israeli-aligned-moneymen problem was going to be an issue in several previous posts, and last week a controversy erupted over Steven Crowder’s contract with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. So it is. All the other conservative influencers had some sort of opinion about it, but nobody is permitted to say what’s actually going on, so it’s been an unedifying spectacle.
The Daily Wire was started with Chinese money from the Wilks Brothers’ natural gas company sale, and Ben Shapiro is a partisan of Benjamin Netanyahu—getting basic stuff about Israeli politics wrong to make Bibi look good. This makes them part of the problem.
The hallmark of a racket is how the people caught in it are controlled. Poor Crowder has realized the whole thing is a racket, but he’s too afraid to have the courage of his convictions, or he wants some other influencer marketing racket to hire him.
Crowder was offered a generous salary, but it would be docked if he ever gets strikes on any of the platforms on which his show was to be syndicated—so he’s encouraged to push the envelope, be performatively anti-woke, but then will be penalized for doing what they want him to do. One of the institutions that helps issue strikes on YouTube is the ADL, which has a documented history of espionage for Israel and South Africa. Partisans of Israel therefore control both sides of his income, so if he ever crosses them, he goes broke. And this is how it works on the ostensibly pro-free-speech side of the media.
Then there’s Lex Fridman, also known as Alexei Fedotov, who now has a popular show on YouTube where he interviews various tech people and has made himself into a sort of tastemaker. I always suspected his YouTube views were faked, because the man has no charisma. He has some big gaps in his resume and appears to have been constructed after a considerable amount of shilling for Tesla’s fraudulent self-driving capabilities, which is maybe why Elon Musk’s Twitter is so sensitive to criticism about him. When you construct a guy like that, he has the power to make or break other influencers and drive the conversation around tech. That’s the purpose of it.
Let’s look at another influencer marketing racket, at the lower end, the one surrounding Governor Ron DeSantis. They’re recruiting social media influencers, promising big boosts to their followings. The Daily Beast has some of the names of the people DeSantis has reportedly reached out to. The whole effort is being led by Christina Pushaw, a FARA registrant with odd connections to various Eastern European lobbies.
The payoff for influencers in these rackets is sometimes direct: Democratic campaigns have been known to just pay them, but for some the payoff comes in the form of increased reach and new followers. This is done with bot farms, which are very common. Both parties have bot farms, as do foreign countries: the Saudis have one, the Russians have them, the U.S. government probably does too, it sure seems like the MEK has one to boost anti-Iranian regime propaganda. They’re just a reality of the information space.
Elon Musk once said he’d get to the bottom of just how many accounts on Twitter are fake, but it looks like he opened that pandora’s box and quickly slammed it shut. He probably has a fiduciary duty not to be honest about it, frankly.
These influencer marketing ops occasionally spectacularly backfire, as with the Christian Walker situation in the recent Georgia senate race. In the infinite wisdom of some DC influencer marketing firm, someone thought it was a great idea to give Herschel Walker’s gay son a huge following to bash the LGBT movement. In the midst of an intense campaign, the personal and the political are all mixed, and he starts finding out things about his father he didn’t know. He finds out he has siblings he didn’t know about, or some rumor about a mistress’s abortion. He snapped, shot a video, and it might have tanked the whole race.
Much of the conservative Internet has devolved into these influencer marketing rackets. Paul Gottfried in a post today called the conservative movement “a carnival with its own media-driven agenda,” which is true. TPUSA is more or less an influencer marketing scheme masquerading as a youth movement—which is just as well, because they have no ideas, and at least the women are nice to look at. There’s a strong conflict between ideological definition and building a big donor base; Charlie Kirk has bet on the latter to the complete exclusion of the former, and it’s working out very well for him. CPAC made the same bet.
One consequence of this information environment is that very little goes viral by accident on the Internet these days. Put up a hot take, and some foreign government may find it in their interest to boost it with one of their bot networks. For these conservative influencers with huge followings, that’s more or less what they’ve done.
None of this is good for the country. In my opinion these influencer marketing rackets have the potential to drive a lot of political volatility, especially when everyone is incentivized to ignore certain important facts. Smart Americans who can see through the racket don’t get involved in it, so the overall quality declines, and we end up with these bizarre meme-congresspeople (not naming names, you know who I’m talking about).
Building a following in this environment doesn’t make you an information warfare expert, any more than eating nothing but cheeseburgers makes you a bodybuilder. There’s probably an inverse correlation between the size of a person’s following and the reliability of their information or the quality of their content.
These rackets also give foreign interests an immense amount of control over the mindshare of middle Americans. I was listening to an NPR interview with a lady lined up outside Bolsonaro’s exile pad in Orlando, a Brazilian version of a boomer conservative, and she described how she follows particular influencers to get what she saw as the real news. It’s more or less the same here.
Facebook is a huge problem, a platform that has every single conservative publisher over a barrel—they can’t live without it. The duo of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg more or less controlled the company until Sandberg’s departure. Because of conservatives’ dependence on this platform, they are disincentivized from discussing, for instance, WhatsApp’s various holes exploited by foreign intelligence, and Instagram’s role in driving teen suicide.
Facebook made the Daily Wire into the 500-pound gorilla of conservative online publishing by allowing them to cheat and break rules nobody else is allowed to break—giving a news website funded with Chinese cash top market position on the right. If I were a major competitor of the Daily Wire, one based in DC for instance, I would be upset about this, it’s clearly unfair competition. As far as I know none has raised the issue. Given the power of Facebook when it comes to reaching conservative audiences, they may not have a choice.
This is really no world for free-market talk. We’re talking about the behavior of a cartel, but everyone in it says they support free markets. You have to have a Soviet sense of humor about this sort of thing. At the risk of sounding cynical, I don’t care very much about COVID misinformation, but it’s nice to see the Biden administration say these platforms are killing people and appoint tough FTC nominees.
One of the great dramas of our time is how the terms of the relationship between these platforms and the government are going to be set. For now, it doesn’t seem especially ethical to send a young person into the conservative media. Benny Johnson likes to call himself the “godfather of the conservative Internet.” As Sturgill Simpson would say, “they call me King Turd up here on Shit Mountain.”
Another excellent post which deserves more eyeballs.
Ideally we'd be more worried about government influencers (i.e. the FBI thinking it can corral free speech on social media) than for-hire influencers.
The death of journalism has a price. It's pretty pathetic that the right has to rely on outfits like Revolver News and Project Veritas for scoops.