If influencer corruption is inevitable, what exactly should Dems & the Left do, Leo?

[Joshe]

On 9/2/2025 at 7:24 PM, Hardkill said:

My stance: Don’t abstain. Fight fire with clean fire—run an influencer program with hard rules so audiences can calibrate trust instead of losing it.

Calibrate implies assessment. The majority of the U.S is not thinking about politics - they are monkey-see monkey-do. And you know this, which is why you keep bouncing back and forth between sticking to your values or fighting fire with fire.

If you're going to fight fire with fire, don't trick yourself that your fire is clean. Because in this case, the fire is memetic warfare. And you know that's not clean. 

It's getting a bit late in the game to be wishy washy about which strategy to choose. You can either hold to your values, try to sell them, and hope the other side self-destructs, or you join the manipulation game. 

Edited September 3 by Joshe

[Joel3102]

https://youtu.be/tScUUFKqBp4

[Bjorn K Holmstrom]

This is a crystallized version of a critical dilemma. Leo and Hardkill are both right, which points to the real issue.

23 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I focus on truth-seeking and sense-making, which is different from political activism.

This is key. The ultimate foundation is individual integrity. "Fighting fire with fire" in a propaganda war, even with better guardrails, means you're still playing a game that fundamentally corrupts the sense-making we need. The point about the authenticity problem is fatal:

23 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

These kind of programs feed into the view that Dems are fake.

The audience's intuition that they're being played is correct, even if the intentions are better.

On 9/3/2025 at 1:24 AM, Hardkill said:

But if the Left refuses to build a competitive creator operation while the Right scales theirs, we’re unilaterally disarming

Hardkill is completely right here. Unilateral disarmament isn't a viable option. It cedes the narrative battlefield, leading to worse outcomes. The question of "what's the workable alternative?" is the essential one.

The synthesis isn't to choose a side. It's to see that the current game's rules, its economics and incentives, make ethical guardrails incredibly difficult to sustain and pure integrity a niche outlier.

So maybe the only workable alternative is to change the game itself.

What would that look like? You'd need to design systems where the incentives are structurally aligned with integrity, not in conflict with it. For example:

• What if there was a transparent, independent funding pool (from philanthropic trusts, not political ops) that creators could access only by adhering to radical transparency protocols? The money is clean, and that cleanliness becomes the brand.
• That model itself becomes the advantage, "Here's who funds me, in real-time. Can they say the same?" It's a way to operationalize the idea of "fighting fire with clean fire."
• The goal shifts from creating a "left-wing Joe Rogan" to fostering a new class of media entity whose credibility is verifiably built into its structure.

This doesn't win the propaganda war. It aims to build a new information environment where propaganda struggles to survive. Just a thought.

[Joshe]

20 minutes ago, Bjorn K Holmstrom said:

This is a crystallized version of a critical dilemma. Leo and Hardkill are both right, which points to the real issue.

This is key. The ultimate foundation is individual integrity. "Fighting fire with fire" in a propaganda war, even with better guardrails, means you're still playing a game that fundamentally corrupts the sense-making we need. The point about the authenticity problem is fatal:

The audience's intuition that they're being played is correct, even if the intentions are better.

Hardkill is completely right here. Unilateral disarmament isn't a viable option. It cedes the narrative battlefield, leading to worse outcomes. The question of "what's the workable alternative?" is the essential one.

The synthesis isn't to choose a side. It's to see that the current game's rules, its economics and incentives, make ethical guardrails incredibly difficult to sustain and pure integrity a niche outlier.

So maybe the only workable alternative is to change the game itself.

What would that look like? You'd need to design systems where the incentives are structurally aligned with integrity, not in conflict with it. For example:

• What if there was a transparent, independent funding pool (from philanthropic trusts, not political ops) that creators could access only by adhering to radical transparency protocols? The money is clean, and that cleanliness becomes the brand.
• That model itself becomes the advantage, "Here's who funds me, in real-time. Can they say the same?" It's a way to operationalize the idea of "fighting fire with clean fire."
• The goal shifts from creating a "left-wing Joe Rogan" to fostering a new class of media entity whose credibility is verifiably built into its structure.

This doesn't win the propaganda war. It aims to build a new information environment where propaganda struggles to survive. Just a thought.

Nice! 

[Hardkill]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

How naive does one have to be to think that this money is not being paid to influence creators?

The only defense I've heard from the paid creators is that they will take the money but the money will not change their positions in any way. Which is exactly what politicians say when they take money from lobbyists.

It is quite clear to me that this is a case of lobbyists trying to capture social media influencers as they do with politicians and mainstream media.

Their contract clearly states that they are supposed to keep this influence operation hidden.

I have listened to the rebuttals of these paid creators and it sounds full of rationalizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf_X5m7u7JY

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

How naive does one have to be to think that this money is not being paid to influence creators?

The only defense I've heard from the paid creators is that they will take the money but the money will not change their positions in any way. Which is exactly what politicians say when they take money from lobbyists.

It is quite clear to me that this is a case of lobbyists trying to capture social media influencers as they do with politicians and mainstream media.

Their contract clearly states that they are supposed to keep this influence operation hidden.

I have listened to the rebuttals of these paid creators and it sounds full of rationalizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf_X5m7u7JY

You (and folks like Cenk Uygur and Dan Pfeiffer) have argued for years that mainstream media’s business model (ratings, access, advertisers, owners) warps coverage—sometimes in anti-progressive, pro-establishment ways. Given that, how do you compare MSM’s profit pressures to the new influencer funding you’re warning about?

 

Specific things I’m hoping you’ll weigh in on:

1. Risk comparison: In your view, what makes MSM’s corporate incentives less/more/equally corrupting than dark-money/party-aligned creator programs? What are the distinct failure modes of each?
2. Minimum standards (MSM vs. creators): If you won’t endorse “ops,” would you endorse a cross-arena baseline—for both MSM and influencers—like on-screen funding labels, public corrections logs, independence clauses, and annual third-party audits?
3. Consumer guidance: Practically, how should a viewer triangulate trust when both arenas are profit-driven? What signals (habits, disclosures, behavior under criticism) make an outlet or creator trustworthy enough to follow?
4. Accountability levers: What non-activist reforms would you support that raise the epistemic floor industry-wide (e.g., a public registry of political funding/contracts across MSM and creator ecosystems)?
5. On Cenk/Pfeiffer’s critique: Do you think their MSM-is-profit-first critique is directionally right, and if so, what concrete fixes (short of “don’t watch”) actually change incentives?

Not asking you to run propaganda—just trying to pin down your sense-maker’s minimum for a media environment where money is everywhere.

[TheEnigma]

On 9/2/2025 at 8:47 PM, Leo Gura said:

Because the point of being conservative is to defend corruption. But the point of being left-wing is to cure corruption.

When a conservative is corrupt he is be authentic. When a leftist is corrupt he is a hypocrite.

Trump is a pig, he acts like one, and pigs love him for it. A Dem cannot do the same because the Dems aspire to more than being pigs. At least true progressives do. The sad reality is that many Dems are also pigs.

There is all this talk about conservatives being corrupt. But then I don't see any high conscious individual talk about how liberals overspend, create all this destruction with false promises, yet fail to deliver on their projects for decades, wasting billions of dollars that will be charged to future generations or tax payers, do money laundering in all kinds of countries to wash up illegal money, bribe people and scam students/immigrants/citizens etc Liberals always tend to be blind to their irresponsible overspending problems, money wasting, massive debt and even think all these social programs are needed, and then conservatives are always blind to the fact that they want to maintain corruption. I almost never see an acknowledgment from either party of people. Don't fall for these labels like Democratic or Republican. You have to look at what the individual or politician actually does verses what they say.

I live in Canada which is a very liberal country, yet, the cost of living is just getting more and more unaffordable, and there is rampant abuse with endless planning, yet very little action is actually done to fix anything drastically. And this has always been the case since the 1960s, and there's always going to be new problems, that's what our politicians want, so that people will forget the old promises that they've made. And there's more and more drug addicts, debt, homelessness, job losses, massive inflation and sluggishness. It's not like anyone here cares about the poor either (I don't mean it literally but in terms of the rich getting richer and the powerful being able to avoid taxes, it's the same problem here). But we are living with it, paying for it, and Canada is going to be doomed in the very long run if this keeps up. Trudeau and Carney are also major hypocrites that have made many false promises, and have ran up our budget irresponsibly. They're obviously nowhere near as bad as Trump. But it seems like I never hear any liberal be able to acknowledge the problems with liberals, as much as I never hear any conservative be able to acknowledge that they just want to maintain their own corruption.

I'm curious what you think of this Leo.

Edited September 4 by TheEnigma

[Bjorn K Holmstrom]

3 hours ago, TheEnigma said:

 I almost never see an acknowledgment from either party of people. Don't fall for these labels like Democratic or Republican. You have to look at what the individual or politician actually does verses what they say.

This is 100% correct. You've put your finger on the universal failure mode of modern politics. It's not a left problem or a right problem; it's a systems and incentives problem.

The left's version of corruption; bureaucratic waste, failed promises, and irresponsible spending, is indeed different from the right's version (overt graft, defending elite corruption). But the outcome is the same: a loss of public trust, wasted resources, and a failure to solve real problems like the cost-of-living crisis you described in Canada.

Leo's point about hypocrisy is key here. The system incentivizes all players to make promises they can't keep and to serve powerful interests while maintaining a public facade of ideology. The left's facade is "progress," the right's is "freedom," but the underlying engine is often the same: short-term political gain and economic extraction.

This is why the left/right debate is often a distraction. It keeps us fighting each other over which flavor of failure we prefer, while the underlying structure that guarantees failure remains unchanged.

The influencer corruption discussed earlier is just a symptom of this. They are playing the same game, just on a newer battlefield.

The real workable alternative, then, isn't to find the "right" party or the "perfect" politician. It's to finally address the root cause: designing new governance systems with incentives that reward long-term thinking, transparency, and actual results over empty promises and partisan warfare.

This is the only way to break the cycle you've perfectly described.

[Leo Gura]

20 hours ago, Joshe said:

Even if this particular instance was false, it will inevitably happen.

Yes, this is the larger point. It's not about these creators or Democrats. The larger pattern is that corporations and the ruling class will try to buy independent media as they did with mainstream media. That's the lesson here. That's why I shared the video, not because I care particularly about Chorus or these specific YouTubers. We want to understand how independent media will get corrupted in the years to come so we are not fooled by it.

Edited September 4 by Leo Gura

[Leo Gura]

13 hours ago, TheEnigma said:

There is all this talk about conservatives being corrupt. But then I don't see any high conscious individual talk about how liberals overspend, create all this destruction with false promises, yet fail to deliver on their projects for decades, wasting billions of dollars that will be charged to future generations or tax payers, do money laundering in all kinds of countries to wash up illegal money, bribe people and scam students/immigrants/citizens etc Liberals always tend to be blind to their irresponsible overspending problems

Yes, of course liberals are corrupt. And the purest leftists are corrupt.

Corruption is so deep that it touches everyone.

We are only arguing over relative differences.

What we want is to elect the least corrupt people possible. This means they will still be relatively corrupt.

There is no way to go from our current system to one free of all corruption. That takes thousands of years of development to accomplish.

[Hardkill]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes, this is the larger point. It's not about these creators or Democrats. The larger pattern is that corporations and the ruling class will try to buy independent media as they did with mainstream media. That's the lesson here. That's why I shared the video, not because I care particularly about Chorus or these specific YouTubers. We want to understand how independent media will get corrupted in the years to come so we are not fooled by it.

 

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes, of course liberals are corrupt. And the purest leftists are corrupt.

Corruption is so deep that it touches everyone.

We are only arguing over relative differences.

What we want is to elect the least corrupt people possible. This means they will still be relatively corrupt.

There is no way to go from our current system to one free of all corruption. That takes thousands of years of development to accomplish.

Yes, no one perfect. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be human. 
 

Good people have always had to pick the lesser of two or more evils on every matter since the dawn of mankind.

 

Btw, isn’t it possible that once independent media gets large enough and prevalent enough that enough people will demand new regulations, standards, and laws for them in order to sustain some semblance of order and so that they are held accountable?

Edited September 4 by Hardkill

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, Hardkill said:

people will demand new regulations, standards, and laws for them in order to sustain some semblance of order and so that they are held accountable?

Eventually, but that might take 50 years since we live in the times of libertarian fantasies.

Holding independent private actors accountable for not taking bribes is harder than holding politicians (public officials) accountable for not taking bribes. This tells you how difficult it will be. We can't even pass a law to stop a Senator from taking corporate money. Nevermind a TikToker.

[Hardkill]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Eventually, but that might take 50 years since we live in the times of libertarian fantasies.

Holding independent private actors accountable for not taking bribes is harder than holding politicians (public officials) accountable for not taking bribes. This tells you how difficult it will be. We can't even pass a law to stop a Senator from taking corporate money. Nevermind a TikToker.

So, then who will we be able to trust as new sources?

If we are stuck in these libertarian fantasies for the rest of our lives, then how will Democrats and progressives be able to effectively push their anti-oligarchy and economic populist message when independent private actors will be corrupted by such wealthy/corporate donors and dark money?

[TheEnigma]

These are good responses. The thing is how do you know these things take thousands of years and not just a few centuries? Couldn't things advance much faster from now? Now that there's more access to quick information and AI.

[Joshe]

12 hours ago, TheEnigma said:

These are good responses. The thing is how do you know these things take thousands of years and not just a few centuries? Couldn't things advance much faster from now? Now that there's more access to quick information and AI.

I think you’re right. Once the older generations die off, things are going to speed up quite a bit and new generations will be able to start off without all the falsehood holding them back. The number of open and wise people will skyrocket, or at least take a more dominant stance in society. This is already happening. It seems as if wise people are elbowing their way to the table in an attempt to usurp the fools. Intelligence is pressing for expression like never before. 

It's an error to think those raised in the Information Age will evolve at the same pace as the previous generations. Humans have only been on the internet with access to information for about 25 years. 200 years of the internet and AI is going to speed things up like never before. 

Edited September 5 by Joshe

[TheEnigma]

6 hours ago, Joshe said:

I think you’re right. Once the older generations die off, things are going to speed up quite a bit and new generations will be able to start off without all the falsehood holding them back. The number of open and wise people will skyrocket, or at least take a more dominant stance in society. This is already happening. It seems as if wise people are elbowing their way to the table in an attempt to usurp the fools. Intelligence is pressing for expression like never before. 

It's an error to think those raised in the Information Age will evolve at the same pace as the previous generations. Humans have only been on the internet with access to information for about 25 years. 200 years of the internet and AI is going to speed things up like never before. 

Yes. I also considered the fact that crime, poverty and income extremes  is still increasing in western countries. And there doesn't seem to be a way to stop this. So this will delay growth in consciousness for the poor which are also increasing. More and more people are only barely surviving now unfortunately.

[Leo Gura]

Those influencers are definitely being corrupted by that money. They are just in denial about it, as politicians are.

[Leo Gura]

 

[Elliott]

Nothing burger

 

Google Taylor Lorenz, if you don't know who she is.

Edited September 6 by Elliott

[Leo Gura]

43 minutes ago, Elliott said:

Nothing burger

It's not a nothing-burger. It's a very something-burger.

Don't discuss the Taylor Lorenz person, address her factual claims.

The YouTubers participating in this program literally have a meeting EVERY DAY where they get talking points for the day's news from this Chorus group which is funded by dark money. It's outrageously corrupt.

The dark money aspect of Chorus was NOT disclosed until Taylor broke this story. That's the story. The Chorus group was public knowledge, but the dark money funding and other details was not.

This is corruption 101. The excuses these creators have is cringe nonsense. They did not debunk Taylor in any way.

A journalist being in a photo with a right-wing talking-head is a nothing-burger.

Sagaar Enjeti is friends with JD Vance. Does this mean his reporting of stories on Gaza are false? No.

Edited September 6 by Leo Gura

[Terell Kirby]

this is depressing stuff, is there even a such thing as independent journalism anymore? There's no more incentive ..

At the bottom of the barrel of corruption lies profit motive