This post examines how elites control influencers, ensuring they follow approved narratives or face consequences. It discusses examples like Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan, and how movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were co-opted or suppressed. The central idea is that elites manage the influence of various groups by regulating their reach, ensuring they align with the desired narrative direction.
This is a continuation of my previous post, which analyzed how societal influencers in the Cold War were widely controlled by the elites, particularly through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Here, we will explore how such control has been updated to apply to opinion leadership via social media influencers in the internet era.
Under the two-step flow of communication, most people form their opinions under the influence of opinion leaders, who in turn are influenced by the mass media zeitgeist and by their funding – if one wants to be highlighted on social media, one must tow the party line or face consequences. Let’s start with some stories.
- In mid/late 2022, at the height of their popularity due to dominating the TikTok platform, criminal charges were brought against Andrew and Tristan Tate, sons of a CIA agent, in Romania. Romania had no interest in prosecuting them but assented due to international pressure. After some sort of deal was reached behind the scenes, in February 2025 the Tate brothers were allowed to leave the country to America, where they promptly traveled to Florida. Andrew Tate then recklessly commented on the unusual Jewish influence in America, which he noted would get him in trouble. Immediately afterwards the Florida Attorney General opened up an investigation against him.
- In 2016 Breitbart.com was one of the deciding factors that allowed Trump to win the election. Its populist influence was enormous and Steve Bannon deserves credit for it. After the election Bannon was sidelined from the administration and Breitbart, under poor leadership and advertising boycotts, faded into obscurity. Per a Harvard study, below is the network map based on Twitter media sharing from May 1, 2015 – November 7, 2016 with nodes sized by number of Twitter shares, showing how dominant Breitbart was (much more than Fox) through the election:In January 2017 the site recorded approximately 17.3 million unique visits. By June 2019, however, this number had dropped by 72% to 4.9 million. More recently, in January 2024, Breitbart’s traffic was reported to have fallen by 87% compared to January 2020. The collapse of the public’s interest in the website is massive, and the advertising boycott organized by leftists – later applied with mixed results to Musk’s Twitter – didn’t help either. The Mercers would beg Bannon to come back if reach and power was their intent, but ratings are not the primary goal – pushing West Coast Straussian Zionism is.
- After Trump’s surprise win the Daily Mail editor, who was seen as too Trump-friendly and too pro-Brexit, was forced to resign in 2018. He had been editor of the newspaper for 26 years.
- The highly influential Twitter user Rickey Vaughn / Douglass Mackey was criminally charged for shitposting and silenced.
- In 2019 Matt Drudge secretly sold his website to elite interests who started posting far-leftist content, ultimately tanking the readership (via here and here). Skinsuiting existing organizations (i.e. taking them over with radically different ideologies from what the organization was founded on while not informing the public so they can be screwed over) is a common elite tactic.1
- In 2022 Joe Rogan, who had the largest podcast on the internet, started interviewing politically incorrect subjects, people who were against the COVID vaccine and other elite-disapproved topics. There was an intense media campaign launched against him and Rogan publicly apologized, quietly deleted the controversial episodes from his archives and thereafter stuck to boring and basic interviews, resulting in a much tamer and less engaging experience.
- In 2020 CIA asset Tucker Carlson, who had the most popular show on television for politics, was abruptly terminated and has not found, whether due to his own decision or otherwise, another network to host him. He continues to do interviews but he is much less influential to a much smaller audience than before.
- In 2024 Alex Jones had a billion dollar judgment leveled against him for his exercising freedom of speech; his website was seized and he got divorced. After a brief period of silence he emerged with a brand new look and started desperately shilling pro-Trump talking points in a panicked frenzy:Geopolitics & EmpireMar 4, 2025I marvel at the Pied Piper this guy has become. Really. Kudos. He had me fooled for a while. 🍻1084320
- The Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Alt-Right movement and the 2023-2024 Palestine protests on university campuses were all undermined into irrelevance when they gained too much in popularity.
- The Tea Party movement was co-opted by politicians such as Mitch McConnell and organizations like the Koch brothers. They provided funding, organizational support, and media backing to their opponents, either within the party or without – they would rather Democrats win than Tea Party members. This ultimately diluted its broader appeal and made it more aligned with the Republican Party.
- Occupy Wall Street was fragmented, making it hard to sustain momentum. Elites responded by framing the movement as chaotic or ineffective in mainstream media, while law enforcement agencies were used to break up encampments and protests. The lack of a unified agenda, combined with the negative media portrayal and forceful physical suppression led to its eventual decline, as did the media’s pivot to divide-and-conquer tactics with the Great Awokening.
- The elites crushed the alt-right movement in 2017 through a combination of media vilification, social media censorship, legal actions, and public disavowals by mainstream political figures. After the events in Charlottesville where white nationalist groups clashed with counter-protesters, the media painted the alt-right as a dangerous and extremist movement. This intense media scrutiny led to widespread condemnation, with many mainstream conservative figures distanced themselves from the movement.Simultaneously, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube began aggressively deplatforming key alt-right figures, removing their ability to spread their messages. Legal actions such as lawsuits and financial restrictions (e.g., payment processors cutting ties with alt-right groups) further weakened the movement. These actions, coupled with pressure from corporate donors and political figures, fragmented and marginalized the alt-right, effectively neutering its influence and ability to organize. The following is a sample of how an “alternative influence network” was mapped by elites, which made them easy to decapitate and destroy, from here:
- In 2023-2024, elites undermined pro-Palestine protests on university campuses through a combination of media campaigns, legal measures, and administrative pressure. Mainstream media framed the protests as anti-semitic, delegitimizing the movement, while university administrations faced pressure from donors and political figures to restrict or condemn such actions. Campuses enacted policies that limited protests or disciplined students involved, and legal actions were used to deter activism. Additionally, pro-Palestinian student leaders were sometimes forced under pressure to moderate their stances, weakening the broader movement. These tactics collectively suppressed and fragmented the protests.
The Connecting Factor
The connecting factor between these movements and figures that I see – which is circumstantial and based on pattern recognition – is that our elites have a fantastic understanding both of social networks as well as network effects. They understand that a population is made up of widely disparate perspectives based on certain underlying personality factors, and so they allow select influencers to dominate each of their particular spaces, many of which contradict and hate each other – but each and every mainstream influencer is controlled either by funding, algorithm manipulation (who is highlighted or who is not), or, if any group “breaks out” and gets out of line, they can be reigned in through a combination of intimidation, lawfare, censorship, or worse.
For example, Zerohedge covers economic-focused pessimists who distrust the system. Tate covers relationship-focused young men looking for a father figure, as does mentally ill crybaby Jordan Peterson. Russell Brand covers drug addicted ex-liberal Gen-Xers. Tucker Carlson covers middle-aged and older economic and slightly racial populists. Rogan covered millennial moderate-right types. Logan Paul has some audience overlap but from a dumber, more athletic, more social media angle. Alex Jones covered conspiratorial-minded political types. Mike Benz covers those who want to get lost in the weeds of government corruption. Breitbart under Bannon covered a big-tent populist type. Fuentes covered young Christian racists. Gab covered older Christian dissidents. Drudge covered independent internet-minded news junkies who wanted breaking stories, etc. Musk covers tech bro cultists. There was a whole crew dedicated to the Russian/Ukraine war for awhile.2 Each of these influencers covered a specific niche based upon the specific underlying personality profile of the target audience. The left have all these figures, too, although I don’t follow any of them. Per Wired, the following is a visual guide toward the size of influencers for both the right and the left leading up to the 2024 election:
The specific information disseminated varies significantly between each group, resulting in echo chambers where each one lives in a separate reality from others. The acceleration of echo chambers is discussed in this research article, this one and by John Carter here, and our elites have carefully studied the “alt-right pipeline” and algorithmic radicalization in order to better control it. Still, there is some overlap as these factions loosely ally into larger factions within the umbrella of the “right” and “left”. For example, as Erik Wikström points out Musk/Rogan/Trump have allied in order to increase their faction’s power via pushing an ascendant technocracy:
It’s an ecosystem where different species have evolved mutually beneficial relationships:
- Trump gives Musk access to U.S. government power (like appointing him to run DOGE where Musk now has his hands deep in the Treasury).
- Musk gives Trump money and tech clout (helping pump his campaign, his meme-coin and helping him normalize a unique brand of techno-fascism).
- Rogan gives them both a microphone where nothing is ever questioned (making sure their garbage spreads unfiltered to millions of listeners).
Tree of Woe sees the result of these alliances as the start of a new age, an approach I am skeptical of. Rather, it is shaping up to be a descent into neoliberal feudal technocrat hell, discussed here.
The Perks
Influencers backed by the elites will receive various perks; they may be boosted on social media, receive lots of bot account follows, receive payments for services rendered, they may be able to network with larger accounts and bigger players and to parlay their platform to bigger opportunities. Various pro-Trump substackers feeding into the current ruling elite Zionist/skinsuited populism, led by the West Coast Straussian movement previously discussed here, have too small of an audience to receive big benefits, but they key into larger networks especially on Twitter who boost them and perhaps they’re invited to in-real-life network and speaking events. Rumble is another platform where a controlled right-wing network is developed (it received investments from venture capitalists Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance in May 2021). The emergence of new popular influencers may be the result of grassroots efforts but is often related to a existing establishment asset given prominence and appearing out of nowhere, such as Lex Fridman, Richard Hanania, Andrew Huberman, Ben Shapiro, or the latest, the hilariously astroturfed Brilyn Hollyhand, which just feels like an elite joke on the masses.
Reaching Higher Levels
To reach a higher level of influence it seems that the elites require blackmail material over an individual (Epstein played a role in this, but it also involves the Mossad, CIA, NSA and FBI), whether that just means economic blackmail from corruption or otherwise – anyone past a certain point of influence or power is controlled. Lenin allegedly said, “When the people need a leader, one will be provided for them” (although attribution for this quote is unclear). Under normal times a controlled influencer is expected to build up trust in their audience until they are told to cash in that trust in order to screw over their followers on behalf of the elites. Tucker Carlson did this during the 2020 election fraud when he was told to keep silent and he did, Nick Fuentes did on 1/6 when he told his followers to storm the capital building and then disowned them, Alex Jones as we are seeing now with his flip-flopping into a paid, sweating shill, Andrew Torba apparently deliberately destroyed Gab functionality to ghettoize the site, Zerohedge by calling for a crash every year since 2008 and now pivoting to endless Trump cheerleading, etc.
If an influencer gets too big without pre-approval (like Tate was getting because of Tiktok, or Rogan with his incredibly influential podcast), or if the influencer starts focusing on disapproved topics (such as Current Thing criticism, or COVID denial during the height of the hysteria), then the rug will be pulled out from under them. Charlie Kirk may have been assassinated because he was starting to go off the reservation, and as Rurik Skywalker states it is a jarring reminder to everyone else to stay in line – or else. Alternatively, influencers may be artificially boosted if they are part of the approved coalition, such as the Zionist pro-Trump voices today. Regarding cancellation for disapproved topics, a couple that come to mind include Kanye West (close to bankrupted while his Tavistock-educated Zionist handler Harley Pasternak (who “trained” i.e. managed Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Halle Berry, Katy Perry, Megan Fox, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Pattinson and others) threatened to institutionalize him and take away his children in a text exchange Kanye posted3), Andrew Anglin (banned and driven off the internet after a brief period of rising and mainstreaming popularity in 2017), and Owen Benjamin (banned for breaching red lines of allowed comedy). I could also discuss Michael Jackson (sued into oblivion after “They Don’t Care About Us”), Nick Cannon (discussed Jewish power briefly, issued a groveling and sustained apology4), and Kyrie Irving (same, apologized and shut up). The elites sometimes accept apologies depending on the kind of offense, how much it has been repeated, and how much the elites need the figure, but they never forget. Historically Kennedy, Nixon and the Shah of Iran also come to mind, with negative outcomes for each.
Escalating tactics
As discussed elsewhere, the elites have a series of escalating tactics they use to force influencers back in line. These tactics include (1) the violator of the lines receives a warning, (2) they are smeared by the press, (3) they are cut off from social media, (4) they get boycotted or fired, (5) they get cut off from bank and credit card access, (6) they get sued, and (7) if a celebrity still insists on acting out, they may be murdered. Most influencers intuit the rules without being told explicitly by higher ups because the incentive structure is in place – jump through the right hoops and become boosted by the system, algorithms, phantom audiences, media attention, reviews and commentary from other influencers – and if you can’t figure out the carrot and stick incentive structure, you languish in obscurity. See this Note and this follow up by the great Ian Smith on this point. Twitter, for example, has adopted the ADL’s tactics of deboosting disfavored content, which is a more sophisticated technique versus banning it (the lighter the touch and the more sophisticated the technique the more it is adopted over time; crude tools are typically disfavored).5 Because dissidents are not allowed to organize, any dissident leaning organization will be subverted and skinsuited or otherwise destroyed – 4Chan, has been an Israeli honeypot as hackers revealed, per Robin Westenra. Telegram was subverted when it’s owner was arrested in France, only let go when he gave the elites whatever they wanted from the platform. There is no escape from it, and Substack will not be an exception.
This is all in line with the Eustace Mullins quote, whereby the upper elites controlling society can determine which of these disparate groups win and which ones lose simply by adjusting the size and influence of the group by impacting their funding and reach:
[the central bank owners] adopted the Hegelian dialectic, the dialectic of materialism, which regards the World as Power, and the World as Reality. It denies all other powers and all other realities. It functions on the principle of thesis, antithesis and a synthesis…Thus the World Order organizes and finances Jewish groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Jewish groups; it organizes Communist groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Communist groups. It is not necessary for the Order to throw these groups against each other; they seek each other out like heat-seeking missiles and try to destroy each other. By controlling the size and resources of each group, the World Order can always predetermine the outcome. In this technique, members of the World Order are often identified with one side or the other. John Foster Dulles arranged financing for Hitler, but he was never a Nazi. David Rockefeller may be cheered in Moscow, but he is not a Communist…a distinguishing trait of a member of the World Order, although it may not be admitted, is that he does not believe in anything but the World Order. Another distinguishing trait is his absolute contempt for anyone who actually believes in the tenets of Communism, Zionism, Christianity, or any national, religious or fraternal group…If you are a sincere Christian, Zionist or Moslem, the World Order regards you as a moron unworthy of respect. You can and will be used, but you will never be respected.
But Why Are Influencers So Important?
As discussed in a Note, the reason why our elites focus so much on curating and maintaining control over influencers is because such a tiny, tiny, oh so tiny number of people actually think for themselves. Almost everyone either gets their knowledge directly from the media or, alternatively, through an influencer that they trust, adhering to rigid ideological and thought guardrails:
One of the curious things about this reality is the difficulty of understanding and judging scope. For example, maybe there’s a hundred like-minded English language dissident writers out there, if I’m being generous and taking into account my very limited vantage point of the writers out there. From what I see it’s actually much smaller than a hundred. Political commentators are almost universally grifters surfing the wave of the Current Thing.
Yet there are billions of English speakers out there. Shouldn’t this scene – shouldn’t any of these ultra niche scenes? – be far bigger than they are? After all, the Current Thing seems to be a defining feature of this age, everyone talks about it and thinks about it and is animated by it. Yet that’s where it ends for almost everyone, pigs forcefed at the trough of shill marionetted influencers and media.
As Rurik explains about the nature of authority in the context of the Russia/Ukraine war, but which applies just as much to any topic on which authority is relied upon,
The Ukrainians are fighting because they were told to fight. That’s it. That’s how authority works; people naturally follow orders from on high. It’s probably genetic even because following the chieftain used to be a viable strategy for survival. For most of history, there wasn’t such a huge disconnect between the ruler and the ruled. Both groups needed each other to a large extent and the captain went down with the ship if things got too bad. The interests of the ruler and ruled aligned more often than they didn’t.
Now though, a hostile shtetl rules both Ukraine and the West. Their authority is illegitimate, but, they remain the authority regardless. And so, when orders come down from on high, most people obey them. Not all people, mind you. Our little Substack community is filled with people who are suspicious of the ruling elite, for example. Some people, it seems, have a heretic gene within them that predisposes them to distrusting authority. This is probably a part of our natural design as well. Genes play out on both an individual and group level. You need the vast majority of people to be conformists, but you also need a certain percentage to challenge the status quo. Certain groups of people seem to have a slightly higher predisposition to heresy than others, but the general distribution is more-or-less the same. The majority will, despite their various viewpoints and supposedly deeply-held ideological convictions, follow orders from on high.
Point being, if Russia had control of these territories, they could just as easily have called up the people to fight NATO instead of having NATO call them up to fight Russia.
That is why the fight for these positions of authority is so important. If the power of authority wasn’t so overwhelming, these positions wouldn’t be so coveted. Heretics could just go to the people directly, convince them using the logic of their arguments, and the deed would already be done – the people would be convinced to no longer obey the authorities. But this is not what happens. This is not the observable reality that we are dealing with. Hippy-style appeals to the power of the people to organize themselves without hierarchies or appeals to authority fall flat on their face because only a certain percentage of people are capable of thinking this way. Most people are always following the leader. The only real question is: who is the leader? It doesn’t have to be the president of a country or a general, mind you. It could be a cult leader or a celebrity artist or even a boss at the company.
Ukrainian soldiers go to get shot up and bombed to pieces because their commander told them to do so.
They showed up for the draft because the police told them to do so. They fight against Russia because their president told them to do so. They hate Russia because their teachers in school told them to do so. There really isn’t much more to the riddle than that.
This should be a sobering realization for Westerners. Your countrymen, if told to do so, will be carted off to war with Russia as well. They may grumble about it and they may shirk their duties as best they can, sure. But they’ll go along with it just like they went along with the Great Reset, the Great Replacement and all the other insane agendas that have been forced by them by people in positions of authority.
Conclusions
The desired takeaway here is to help you understand how these influencers come to be well known and how they maintain their following – they have to adhere to rigid ideological guardrails and certain topics and they can’t criticize the Current Thing (unless it’s in pre-approved form as the dialectical reaction, like “COVID came from Wuhan lab leak” and “take Ivermectin”), and if they play by the rules their influence is artificially boosted by the media and illicit funding at the expense of actual dissidents. This applies as much to the far-left like Noam Chomsky as it does to the far-right like Joseph McCarthy or the John Birch Society. If a big influencer is taken out or comes under intense media pressure, ask if they’ve grown too big and/or if they’ve said anything disapproved by the elites. As Lenin stated, “The best way to control our opposition is to lead it ourselves”.
Think about which influencers you follow, what category or categories it falls under and why and how it relates to your own psychological profile – there is no way around this, we are all biased with our own presuppositions in our own way. Relying on influencers is, after all, an energy saver; they curate large amounts of information so normal people don’t have to. The best we can do is be aware of it and try to intellectually engage with our own weaknesses. My Substack, for example, appeals to philosophically pessimist political doomers with an interest in Jungian psychology and gnosticism. As far as categories go, maybe this too fills a (very small) niche that somehow benefits the elites – blackpilling as demotivating for political action – although I would like to think that I am targeting the underlying precepts that govern the elite superstructure of our society, i.e. Rothschild central bank parasitism overlying Christian-derived egalitarian ratchet effect – and encourage the reader to think for themselves and come to their own conclusion, not to rely on me (as you will be disappointed putting your faith in anyone but God and the Self within).
I hope you found this helpful in your own journey. Once one understands the structure of the modern world, how official narratives are disseminated, the tactics that the spooks use to keep the masses divided and controlled (acting under orders ultimately from the central bank owners), and how the size of each group is controlled by its funding to predetermine which message and group will “win”, then the flimsiness of each new Current Thing narrative becomes almost a joke, bread and circus propaganda to entertain and titillate obese (with metabolic syndrome), bored lemmings who are too scared, brainwashed, cowardly and/or lazy to accept the scary responsibility of crafting one’s worldview without blindly following others (this is Dostoevsky’s point in The Grand Inquisitor). Following the Current Thing has basically replaced religion in this secular materialist age. As AMRX Mark II states, “The ‘magic trick’ of the Regime is not North Korea-style totalitarianism. We are allowed to complain. We won’t be arrested, much less gulaged. But only certain complaints get amplified. While others are only read by a small number on platforms like [Substack]. Algorithms have stifled freedom of reach” – and subsequently, freedom of thought. The Current Thing helps us forget our fear of the void, steeped in ubiquitous nihilism as we all are, and I will cover this further in the future.
Lastly, one may note that human influencers are are being phased out in favor of elite-controlled artificial intelligence influencers. As Michael Ginsburg explains, the use of AI to influence and shape public opinion is becoming more effective and persuasive, to the point where a recent study shows it is 6x more effective at persuasion than online experts on Reddit’s Change My View forum:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Ir4jUM0kpn4?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
The way forward that I see is only possibly through an internally directed process of listening to one’s intuition and Self via individuation – because the Self is infinite and shifts under observation like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and therefore cannot ultimately be controlled either by us or by the upper elites, while an externally derived process will always be manipulatable.
Thanks for reading.
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1 It also happened on a much larger scale to the Catholic Church after World War 2 and the later sex abuse scandals, as an example; Project Veritas ripped away from James O’Keafe and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society taken away from Paul Watson also quickly come to mind.
2 As Rurik Skywalker argues here, starting at 1:00:47, giving the Ukraine war as an example:
This idea of this grand chess game that Putin is playing to checkmate the globalists, you would never come to that conclusion if it wern’t for a multibillion dollar media industry complex matrix system that was dedicated to telling you that day in and day out and constantly referencing itself, it’s self referential, so Pepe [Escobar] will say something and [Alexander] Mercouris will say something and all the other bloggers will get their queue from them and then RT will say something and Ritter will say something and they’ll all comment on what the other said and it’ll become a self-referential circle jerk and once you’re in that thing, once you’ve taken the plunge into that cesspit whirlpool of bullshit, you’re constantly being pinged back from pole to pole as they’re referencing each other. It’s like you’re in a seminary and all the theologians are referencing other theologians it gives off the impression of intellectual activity what it is is just a self-referential circle jerk, no one’s questioning core assumptions, no one’s field testing any of their ideas, they’re just referencing one another, they’re just doing this ironic thing and it becomes a sub-culture…
4 Nick Cannon was fired by ViacomCBS in 2020 for remarks construed as “anti-semitic”. He issued a groveling apology the next day. He was then allowed to resume his career, but with the stipulation that he must do his master’s commands moving forward. In 2023 Cannon was coerced into hosting Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL to denounce Kanye West. Cannon must not enjoy being a financial terror victim/hostage, but with so many kids by so many different women, he is in no position to declare independence.
5 Musk outsourced Twitter content moderation to the ADL. “This isn’t that hard. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach” per Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL on April 5, 2022; “New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” echoed Elon Musk November 18, 2022. On April 17, 2023 it became Twitter’s new content policy.
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