Something is Seriously Rotten in the World of Political Influencers
It represents a major threat to the integrity of the marketplace of ideas
Recently, the US Department of Justice alleged,in an unsealed indictment, that Russia has been paying an online media company based in Tennessee nearly 10 million dollars to spread Russian propaganda. The indictment states that the company recruited several prominent right-wing influencers, offering them huge amounts of money to make videos. It describes in detail that two of the influencers were offered $2 million a year, but they successfully negotiated to raise that figure to about $5 million.
The focus of the mainstream media’s reporting on this matter have largely focused on Russia’s attempt at election interference. This, of course, is a serious matter. However, what has been largely missed is the circumstances surrounding this case, and what they imply about the world of political influencers. Think about this: if somebody offered to give you $2 million just to make videos, wouldn’t you be a bit suspicious? I mean, if someone made that offer to me, I might even be suspicious enough to call the police. The fact that the influencers in question just accepted it as normal, and even sought to negotiate a better deal, implies something very important: paying people huge sums of money to push certain talking points is likely a ‘normal’ thing in the world of political influencers. It is likely to be something that happens regularly. Russia didn’t start this. They just saw an opening that they could exploit.
Just a few days after the news broke of Russia’s attempt to pay political influencers to promote their messages, it was reported that a right-wing influencer network that was organized over emails and Zoom calls sought to promote certain talking points about President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, including sexual smears of Harris in late July, around the time she became the presumptive Democratic nominee. It was reported that one participant was paid more than $20,000 for several weeks of boosting the assigned messages. This is further evidence that paying ridiculously large sums of money to political influencers, in exchange for pushing certain talking points, is indeed a ‘normal’, regular thing.
I have long felt that the world of political influencers seemed, at some level, inauthentic. During the pandemic, I started noticing that they were pushing the same talking points, in a coordinated way. For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, there were a wide variety of views on what should be done across the political spectrum, including a lot of diversity of opinion within the right. However, right-wing influencers generally promoted the same few talking points, meaning that they weren’t even reflecting the right, or the Republican Party as a whole, but just the ideas coming from one faction of the right. (I can’t say anything about left-wing influencers on this topic, because they didn’t seem to care much about the pandemic as a whole.) Later on, I noticed that influencers would cluster to promote certain talking points creating a sense of consensus within their own sphere, even when such consensus didn’t exist in the real world. They would also cluster to promote certain personalities and certain books, for example, to create a sense of hype around them, when the real world didn’t even know they existed, or didn’t care much about them. After seeing these things happen again and again, I started to get the feeling that, perhaps, what is happening here isn’t entirely organic. I mean, these people claim to be independent thinkers, fearlessly speaking truth to power, yet they all hold the same opinions on a wide variety of issues, and they all happen to be interested in the same things at about the same time?
The journalists at WIRED actually did an analysis on the topics covered by the media company at the center of the US Department of Justice indictment, before their channel was terminated by YouTube. They found that many of the videos covered the same things over and over again. Besides ‘Ukraine’ (no surprises there, given the Russian influence), ‘Christianity’, ‘Clinton’, ‘transgender’, ‘white people’, ‘Black people’ and ‘civil war’ were also frequently mentioned, despite these things generally not being among the top priorities of voters during the relevant time (2023–2024, so not during BLM or Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for example). However, these topics appears to be particular long-running obsessions in right-wing influencer circles, for some reason. For example, most people don’t think politics and religion should mix, but right-wing political influencers have been strongly promoting the idea that the West is suffering from a crisis of meaning because it is not religious enough, a sentiment that I believe most people out there don’t share. Right-wing influencers have also been talking up the possibility of a second American civil war, which is certainly not something that is on the mind of ‘normie’ people, generally speaking. Another example is how more and more people are saying that they are sick and tired of trans issues, but right-wing influencers keep talking about it. This level of obsession, coming from people who aren’t trans themselves, is actually very weird, given that trans people make up less than 1% of the population. Again, I can’t help but think that there is a coordinated agenda going on here. And remember, the aforementioned analysis was conducted on a channel known to be paid to push selected talking points. Yet many other channels and influencers out there also share the same weird mix of topics and obsessions. I will leave you to think about what this could imply. But it is an important thing to think about.
The important thing here is that, if influencers are paid ridiculously huge amounts of money to push certain pre-assigned talking points to their audiences, without clearly telling their audiences that they are receiving money, this would represent a serious distortion of the marketplace of ideas. If influencers are coordinated to say things in a way that creates a false sense of consensus, collective panic or hype, this would create an even more dangerous distortion of the marketplace of ideas, given that some people have a tendency to join bandwagons, or would feel pressured to agree with certain views they saw many people supporting. The effects of political influencer culture thus could create an even larger distortion in the marketplace of ideas than cancel culture. For those of us who have been seriously worried about the rise of cancel culture, the loss of free speech and free debate, and the resulting distortions to the marketplace of ideas, I think we should be paying more attention to what political influencer culture is doing.
I believe that oversimplifying things, dumbing things down, is a major contributor to the toxicity of our culture and politics. When you oversimplify complex things, you often end up with a picture that unjustifiably paints one side as right and the other side as wrong, when the reality is actually more like both sides are right to some extent, and wrong to some extent.
These oversimplified narratives serve the interests of partisan political players, who want people to blindly believe that their own side is right all the time. It leads to polarization, tribalism, and loss of independent thinking. This is why, I believe it’s important to acknowledge the complexity that’s actually there in a lot of hot button issues. Dumbing things down don’t do it justice, and will only lead to more bias, more divisiveness and more polarization. Which is why, whenever I see an issue being deliberately presented in an oversimplistic way, it always raises a red flag for me. If the dumbed down picture is attached to some emotionally charged rhetoric, then it raises even more red flags.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
