What is an "influencer" these days?

Tiny Moldova may be the second-poorest country in Europe (Britannica) but they have fast internet speeds, a wine industry, and a strong drink museum.

And "influencers", apparently. More on that below, along with some other examples of "influencers". Culture and politics have always involved influencing people. Why, today, do we think in terms of "influencers"?

Influencer Studios International

Walter Kirn, commenting on Nick Fuentes:

Told you.

Just another products of Influencer Studios Int'l.

Colin Wright:

A new report from @ncri_io shows that Nick Fuentes's sudden mainstream visibility reflects a coordinated illusion instead of a grassroots surge.

According to NCRI, Fuentes's rise was driven by synchronized amplification networks, anonymous booster accounts, foreign engagement farms, and a media ecosystem that mistook manufactured noise for genuine political momentum.

Details below:

🚨BREAKING: A new report from @ncri_io shows that Nick Fuentes's sudden mainstream visibility reflects a coordinated illusion instead of a grassroots surge.

According to NCRI, Fuentes's rise was driven by synchronized amplification networks, anonymous booster accounts, foreign… pic.twitter.com/eLCff8y1hG

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) December 8, 2025

Influencing Politics and Culture in Moldova

Interesting conversation centered on little Moldova, a country of fewer than two and a half million people (according to Britannica), blessed with good soils and rivers (one named after a drowned hunting dog). Agriculture and a lot of other things were messed up during the Soviet era.

My first instinct when I see a politically-motivated arrest in a country is to see if USAID has set up a "Rule of Law" program there to capture its judges and prosecutors, and so far my instinct has never been wrong https://t.co/ut24inPfv5 pic.twitter.com/ZnjReysynO

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) December 8, 2025

Who are "influencers" mentioned in this conversation? Should we call them "influencers" or something else? I kind of hate that word.

I imagine that a little money does go a long way in Moldova.

Was Lenin an "Influencer"?

Can we think of some better words?

Why Lenin Won

The Red Wheel
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Reviewed by Gary Saul Morson

A newly translated volume in Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel series illustrates how revolutionaries seized control of Russia.

April 1917, Book 1, the seventh of eight novels in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s story of the Russian Revolution, entitled The Red Wheel, portrays three crucial weeks that show why Lenin, with only a handful of followers, triumphed over his rivals. As the novel opens, Tsar Nicholas II has abdicated, and a Provisional Government appointed by the Duma has assumed nominal power. Everything it does must be approved by the Executive Committee (EC) of the Petrograd Soviet (or Council), a group of self-appointed intellectual representatives of the lower classes who can summon intimidating mobs.

Meanwhile, the Russian army, still at war with Imperial Germany, is disintegrating, in part because the Soviet has issued orders eliminating all discipline. Notwithstanding the impossibility of doing so, the Provisional Government, to honor Russia’s alliance with France and Britain, has promised an offensive. Solzhenitsyn portrays the Provisional Government ministers as hopelessly impractical poseurs, who rely on stirring words and dramatic gestures. He quotes a Russian proverb: “A fine gait won’t help a lame chicken.”

Why is the Provisional Government so helpless? . . .

Well, there is not one simple reason, but:

Reasoning that free people don’t require force, the Provisional Government, believe it or not, abolished the police! It also released criminals on condition that they promise to behave, and so initiated a wave of murders and robberies. “Some ask: How do you govern the country?, You don’t even have any police,” Minister of Justice Aleksandr Kerensky paraphrases the obvious question. “But, comrades, we have no need of police, because the people are with us!”

With no means of enforcement, the Provisional Government had to implore people to pay their taxes. Nobody did. Solzhenitsyn quoted one appeal after another—soldiers, don’t desert! sailors, refrain from killing your officers! peasants, please do not seize land!—but the utter failure of rule by uplifting speeches and empty reports only leads to more speeches and more reports. “We have decided to take the most stringent measures,” one minister explains. “I shall appoint a committee of inquiry.”

When the patriotic general Lavr Kornilov at last offers to put his loyal soldiers at the government’s disposal, it reacts with horror. Even while a mob was besieging the unprotected ministers, one of them proudly declares: “No! Even if armed men were to find their way into this room, we should not apply military force to defend ourselves!” Another finds still finer words: “We’d rather sacrifice our own lives than spill a single drop of others’ blood!”

Most pathetic of all is the kindly Prime Minister, Prince Georgi Lvov, who attributes the prevailing chaos “to a single cause. The impossibility of meeting everyone personally, meeting their eyes with a kindly smile.” Using “the quietest of voices … and with one of his most bewitching smiles,” he asks: “Why the drama? Why make relations worse? … Everything will come right in the end.” When it becomes apparent that Lenin’s followers, who have already shot unarmed soldiers, plan to seize power by force, Lvov explains in “dulcet tones” to Minister of Defense Aleksandr Guchkov: “Where Lenin was concerned, the government should not precipitate events, for that might give rise to conflict.”

Anybody find anything in the short segments above that reminds you of anything recent? There's much more at the link that might make some people feel uncomfortable if they were sensible.

Beyond Counter-Ideology

Gary Saul Morson

Dostoevsky understood that people who defined themselves by ideology were capable of a unique form of evil.

Do today's Marxist college professors like being called "influencers"?

Ideological influences on America

A well-written essay by Michael Smith to consider this weekend. Read the whole thing at the link.

The Entitlement Machine

Don't stop at the Fantasy Football Analogy

How modern progressivism caters to the worst in human behavior by cultivating outrage, infantilization, and permanent reliance.

Republicans need to recognize that they will always start any election, contest or debate from behind the sticks. It will always be first and fifteen because Democrats have a built-in advantage in elections. Their policies cater to the worst in human nature. They reward the short term, punish the prudent, and erode the cultural preconditions of a functioning republic: responsibility, restraint, and reciprocity. Policies that indulge negative traits may feel humane in the moment but generate long-term civic fragility—and while the consequences may not be immediate, they are unavoidable.

We can debate whether it is fair or foul to have a federal income tax—and one so steeply progressive that 47 percent of income-earning Americans carry no income-tax liability. But the consequences of such a system are no longer theoretical. When nearly half the population contributes nothing to the cost of federal activity, the incentives shift in ways economists have long understood. People behave differently when they bear no financial stake in the outcomes they support. This is moral hazard dressed up as compassionate governance. . . .

Progressive policy design increasingly caters to four deeply rooted but negative human tendencies: dependency, risk displacement, infantilization, and grievance incentives. These traits are not partisan inventions—they are part of human nature. The divide exists because one side has learned to weaponize them.

Consider the latest fights over health-care subsidies. During COVID, Democrats enacted temporarily enhanced Obamacare subsidies, sold as emergency measures. But once installed, they immediately triggered predictable behavioral dynamics. What critics call “government generosity,” the public experiences as an upgrade in lifestyle. When the pre-COVID baseline was about to be restored, the reaction was not gratitude for the windfall but outrage at its removal.

This is the cycle of hedonic adaptation—people normalize benefits almost instantly—and loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than equivalent gains. Withdraw something that was never permanent, and the emotional response is sharper than the pleasure felt when it arrived. These tendencies feed entitlement, the belief that a conditional benefit has become an irrevocable right. The envy that follows—resentment toward anyone perceived to have “more”—becomes political jet fuel.

Of course, during the period of subsidies, health care costs also creep up, making the loss of subsidies scary for lots of folks.

But subsidies are only the surface expression of a deeper architecture of dependency. When government benefits become the central organizing principle of economic life, personal agency contracts. Systems designed to help people end up trapping them, not through malice but through structure: welfare cliffs that punish earnings, housing programs that penalize marriage, college-aid formulas that reward borrowing rather than saving. A constituency stabilized by reliance reliably votes to preserve the system that sustains it. Layered atop dependency is risk displacement. As the state assumes responsibility for ever more dimensions of life—health care, debt burdens, housing, childcare—individuals rationally outsource decision-making to government. . .

Have the Repulicans got any better ideas?

Music

Sydney Opera House

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, December 6, Why THIS Story NOW?

Related, h/t J.J. Sefton: To save America, support the American Revolution

Amy Comey Barrett's book, Listening to the Law. 14:30 on the video.

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posted by K.T. at 11:14 AM

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