Social media influencers on pols payroll and phony investigations | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the peak calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. It's Tuesday, it's noon, and that means we chat with Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of Longleaf Politics. Longleafpol.com is the website there. You can get the podcast also, get the newsletter, and also a contributing columnist over at the Charlotte Observer. And he's also the author of the book, The Change Agent, Pat McCrory's Rise, Reckoning, and Legacy. Andrew, how are you this week, sir? Oh, I am doing fantastic, though I am still kind of drying out from a very rainy camping trip over this weekend. Oh, no. Yikes. But, you know, when I tell the kids, I was with the Cub Scouts, I tell the kids, you don't remember the camping trips when the weather was great. You remember the ones when the weather is crummy, and that's what you look back on fondly. That is true. I have been on several camping trips and the ones where the elements were the most severe. were the ones that like, they really test you, you know, it's like, and you realize that you are at the mercy of the elements and it really does make you feel like very, very small in the, in nature. Yeah. Um, you know, that's important for kids to get a sense of. Yeah. Yeah. It kind of, uh, it, it, it sort of recenters, you know, your place in the world. And a lot of people, I think nowadays, uh, they centered themselves in the world. And so, yeah, I think that's a, it's probably a good lesson for the kids. I mean, as long as there's no lightning strikes. Right. Well, sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. So let's talk a little bit about social media. And I have seen a couple of these over, I don't know, probably the last year. And mainly I see these these clips of people and it's usually in sort of like a montage kind of or. Like a Brady Bunch, you know, grid where. You've got all of the different influencers and they're all saying the same thing. And that is not I know this is going to surprise people. That is not organic. Right. So apparently, right, this this idea, this is a growing business model for influencers. Right. But also this. It's a campaign strategy, as you write about at The Observer. Exactly. So I don't do TikTok, but I got a tip from some people who do that they'd come across an increasing number of kind of suspicious new accounts that are posting videos that all generally look the same. It's usually, you know, a youngish person, early 20s. In their apartment with a whole big wall of white text over their face complaining about high energy prices or high rents, things like that. And basically they all follow the same script. And as I dug into it, I can't prove it, but what it seems to be is kind of a digital astroturfing campaign where political organizations will essentially pay people to post complaints about affordability. It's essentially trying to lay the groundwork for Their candidates to then have a message to kind of stir up discontent among the population. And what's interesting about this is, you know, kind of influencer marketing has been around now for a couple years. You know, President Trump was going on the Joe Rogan show because they had this massive audience. But what's interesting here is that now you don't even need to have much of a following at all. You know, the play is to just flood the zone and hope the algorithm will get your content in the right place. Well, yeah, and that is the key there is that these programs, these platforms, they recognize even if you scroll past something and you just pause for a second or two, then it captures that information and it starts feeding you more information or more content that algorithmically shares the same data sets, right? So if you see some clip of somebody complaining about unaffordability, and let's say you're a dude and you're in your 20s and it happens to be an attractive female, and so you stop momentarily to watch that clip because there's an attractive female, now all of a sudden you're going to start getting more and more and more of those of those videos pumped into your feed. Um, and so you have this sort of, uh, this force multiplier effect that the campaigns are enjoying by doing this sort of operation, even if it is among some small users, right? Like you don't, like you said, you don't need to be a massive account in order to juice the algorithm. Exactly. And once you start getting all those posts in your feed, it starts to feel like there's this overwhelming discontent that the economy is terrible, that there's a groundswell of momentum behind this movement. And that's what the political campaigns are going for. I'm kind of a two minds of this. I mean, obviously, you don't want to have any restrictions on people being able to say what they think. campaign ads. And our state does require a ton of disclosure about campaign ads. And this is kind of the new frontier wild west of political campaign ads. Yeah, I will tell you, as one who works in this space, except FCC regulated, there are a bunch of rules that we have to abide by. And I would think that some of those should probably carry over to this, the digital space as well. Like if you're getting If you're getting a check from a campaign in order to read a script in support of a politician, that seems to me like you're doing the exact same thing that like I would not be allowed to do without full disclosure. And that's really I think all that matters is like if you disclose the fact that you're being paid to say this, then people can make an assessment based on that. Yeah, you're exactly right. And yeah. micro-influencer campaigns, you know, there's different levels of abstraction. You might have a candidate who works with a PAC, who. Hires a vendor, who hires. A subcontractor that's actually paying the folks to post this. So I don't know. There's no easy solution, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Along those lines, I did notice you heard that Ukraine took out a bunch of Russian data centers. Have you heard this? And I missed that. Yeah. So they apparently. Hit they use drones to to strike some Russian data centers. And surprisingly, people are monitoring traffic now after the attacks and the words genocide, free Palestine. They've dropped completely off the radar. AIPAC is gone. Oh, my gosh. Zelensky, though, has increased. And there are people that are saying like they're looking at various YouTubers audiences right now. over the last 48 hours, and their audiences are dropping off. This is what China calls the smokeless battlefield. I tell people this all the time. When you get online, you are entering a digital battle space. There is, not to get all Alex Jones-y, but there is a war for your mind. So all the content that you're seeing is being pumped from somewhere. So you should always keep that in mind. And to your point there about these quote-unquote grassroots groups you know, organic, uh, uh, opinions usually are anything but, um, so, all right. And we're seeing with the data centers as well. Uh, let me, uh, yeah, let me shift gears over to Roy Cooper. Um, because, uh, speaking of phony, uh, former governor Roy Cooper, you write over at longleafpol.com. Uh, he's worried now about politicians using criminal investigations against their political opponents, uh, And we just saw yesterday Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman, she had her house raided as part of some FBI investigation. Not sure what all the details on that are about even now. And Cooper has accused Republicans in what this was some fundraising material that he sent out. He's accusing the Republicans of weaponizing the courts and the DOJ, targeting political opponents for persecution. And anybody who lived through the 2016 campaign remembers what you describe. I don't think he is in a in a in a house that's not made of anything other than glass for this charge, you know. Exactly. I continue to be amazed how nothing seems to stick to Teflon Roy over there. I've been following his career for more than a decade now as a political observer and journalist. And as this campaign, his latest campaign for U.S. Senate comes along, I just continue to get reminded about email where Cooper, well, I mean, I know Cooper's not writing this email himself, but his campaign is complaining about weaponizing the justice system. It reminded me of the 2016 debate between Cooper and then Governor Pat McCrory, where in the middle of the last debate, Cooper just kind of comes out with this unfounded claim, basically accusing McCrory of being under active criminal investigation by the FBI. And it's not true. I mean, what he's purportedly referring to, and of course, he'll tie himself in knots trying to say why this was a legitimate form of attack, but there was a an investigation months before that into a state contractor who I guess at one point had donated to McCrory's campaign. And there were some questions about that. But McCrory himself was never the target of the investigation. And what stood out to me about that was it seems like it was very clearly– Cooper using his position as attorney general to insert some doubt falsely in the closing days of that campaign. So it's kind of rich hearing him complain about weaponizing the Justice Department today. Yeah. What was the old anecdote? I don't even I think it was true, actually. I think it was LBJ when he was running for a congressional seat and he told his campaign manager to start spreading rumors that his opponent was sleeping with farm animals. And The the campaign manager was like, we can't say that. That's like it's clearly a lie. And he says, I know it's a lie. I just want to hear him. I just want to hear him defend himself. Right. Like that's the point of the allegation. And as you mentioned, he drops this thing late in the campaign cycle. And of course, North Carolina media, they all rush out. with sort of a baseline, I would argue, a baseline assumption that Roy Cooper would never lie about something like that, even though he fought for a decade for the ability to lie about his political opponents in campaigns. Yet they approached it from this assumption that he wasn't lying and that there must be something going on. And, of course, by the time you sort it all out, the election's over and the damage was done. Yeah, exactly right. It's the Cooper playbook and it is in full effect today. Yeah. But to quote Harry Reid, right, the late U.S. senator who lied about Mitt Romney not paying his taxes, well, he didn't win, did he? And that's the point. So, Andrew Dunn, we appreciate your time. As always, check out Andrew's website, longleafpol.com, Longleaf Politics. You can also see him. He's a contributing columnist over at the Charlotte Observer as well. He's also the author of that book, as I mentioned, Change Agent. Is this story in the book, too, about Cooper and the debate? It sure is. There you go. Yes, sir. The change agent, Pat McCrory's Rise, Reckoning, and Legacy. Andrew, thanks for your time, buddy. Appreciate it. Thank you. The holidays will be here before you know it, and so now is the time to create precious and priceless family heirlooms that will last for generations. Take your old photos, slides, films, and tapes to create a video in Mint Hill. There, they'll turn those memories into the story of your lives, memories from past family events captured forever to pass down to future generations. Creative Video's skilled team will professionally transfer your family's stories onto easy-to-use USB drives or DVDs that won't deteriorate over time like the old photos and tapes are doing right now. They will create a keepsake video that you can share and copy and keep forever. I can see it now. 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That somebody is being paid to promote a message. Now, I can tell you, I am not paid by campaigns or politicians to promote their campaigns or or themselves or their positions on anything. Okay. I am, I am paid by WBT radio. And if I have any, uh, customers, any businesses, I will get an endorsement fee for that, but that's it. And everybody understands this relationship. This is not the case in podcast to Stan. Okay. Um, he goes on to say there is political demand for this work was, uh, two organizations, one called Wisconsin watch. and another called Sunlight Research Desk, documented similar videos, these affordability videos that have popped up across several different states, including posts about Charlotte. They found a listing from Project Bullhorn, is the name of it, Project Bullhorn, and it lists, it offers for creators to, of $ 1, 500 a month to discuss affordability ahead of the 2026 midterms, which is outrageous to me. $ 1, 500. I've been talking about this topic all the time. Why, why has nobody reached out to me on this? Not that I could take it. And if I did take any money, I would have to disclose it. But like, that's the point is if I'm promoting a message on lack of affordability or everything is affordable, whatever it may be, um, If I'm being paid for that, I should disclose that. I'm required to in my job, as is everybody that is working for an FCC-licensed enterprise. So I also find it kind of interesting. We were talking about. This the other night on the WBT Talktoberfest event when I was on with Nick Craig, in that there were all these words that you're not allowed to use on TV. social media platforms which is kind of ironic right because the whole point of you know broadcast yourself as youtube claims the instagram reels the tiktok videos right the shorts like all of these little clips all these platforms the whole point was like you know we're gonna you know break through the gates no more gatekeepers we'll be able to tell you what's really going on and i'm going to give you my you know unvarnished uncensored opinion and all of this And you got people on these platforms though, they can't say certain words. If like, for example, they can't say the word murder. If you say that word, then the algorithm, the AI catches it. And if, and I don't know if it's like you say it too many times or whatever, but once you say certain words like that, then you, the algorithm throttles your reach and So it doesn't spread your video as far and wide. So people find other ways to say. These things that they're not allowed to say because they are in fact being censored by these algorithms, by these platforms. So instead of murder, they say unalived. And I'm sure at some point that word will become verboten and then they're gonna have to come up with another word for it. They use acronyms, they use emojis, right? So it's kind of ironic that everybody ran over to the digital space with this promise of content freedom only to now be essentially censored or they engage in self-censorship because they don't want the algorithm to throttle their reach. So you got Project Bullhorn. There's another one called Next Generation Action Pack. They've reported. a $ 300, 000 donation to Project Bullhorn Action Fund. That filing does not connect the money to these North Carolina accounts, Andrews says. But the election connection is right there in the job description. He says, my read is that if you get people thinking about how much worse their lives have become, you've done useful campaign work before a candidate ever asks for their vote. Right. That's why like these these universally adopted opinions like, oh, my gosh, nobody can afford anything. They're not it's not true, but people hear it so often that it becomes true. Right. When the legend becomes truth, print the legend. All right. Real quick. Every government number gets revised. Right. Every projection gets walked back. Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax-advantaged gold IRA. It's real, it's in your name, and 10 minutes tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to Calendarmetals.com. That's Calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. Or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3030. me jump over to the text line. This is from Joe. Sorry, I'm not sure this is getting through. You mean the text? Oh, there's another text here before it. Okay. Ultimately, the fault lies with the Republican Party. Again, Joe, I don't understand this mentality. I understand saying we want to see a. Reaction. We want to see a counteroffensive. We want to see other stuff happen. But the fault of Democrats or the blame for Democrats using These these nonprofits and super PACs and whatever to plant campaign ads, basically surreptitiously through influencers without disclosing that they're paying people for these videos. That's not the fault of Republicans. They didn't do that. The people who did that would be the Democrats in this case. Now, are Republicans doing it as well? I'm not aware of it, but I would not be surprised. If they were doing it. But I blame the people who do the thing. OK, so I just I don't understand this reflexive need to just crap on the people. I'm assuming of your own party to say, oh, it's our fault. The fault lies with the Republican Party for their feckless or nonexistent efforts to call out these tactics and the candidates who use them like. So they can call it out. Big whoop. They call it out. Oh, that's bad. And then, like, do they get coverage? Is their message going to be amplified by media that doesn't care to help Republicans on this front? And do you know if Republicans have been calling this stuff out? This is a fairly new phenomenon that we are witnessing. Michael Watley should be leading the campaign against this, but sadly he's letting old Roy not only get away with it, but schooling him on. This new platform. By the way, I've heard this complaint as well, that people are like, I don't see any Michael Watley ads anywhere, which is weird to me because that's all I see on my YouTube, on my. Well, that's really it, is YouTube. When I watch podcasts or programs on YouTube, I get a Michael Watley ad like every single spot break. So I don't know what you're watching. That's not giving that the algorithm is giving you Roy Cooper ads. Look, I'm a registered unaffiliated and I'm getting Michael Watley ads. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure what's going on there. No wonder the RNC and North Carolina Republicans have their backs against the wall. Look who ran both campaign committees yesterday. And who's losing the NC Senate race? So I'm not sure Michael Wadley has ever run the senatorial committee. He ran the RNC, right, for like a year and a half or something in 2024. And if I recall correctly, the Republicans won control, didn't they? He also. Worked on Trump's campaign in North Carolina in 2016, won that one. Um, he ran the Republican party in North Carolina and I believe, uh, got super majorities. Um, he, I mean, going back to 2000, he worked on the, he was down in Florida working for, uh, George W. Bush during the Bush, you know, or during the Bush v. Gore, uh, court case. Where Democrats didn't want to count all the military overseas ballots and all that and try to steal the election. So he helped prevent that. So like, so this idea that like Michael Wiley doesn't know what he's doing. I disagree with that. I mean, now that being said, I'm not sure he's, he's like a great campaigner just watching his appearances and stuff. But like, I can recognize somebody as not being a great campaigner, but also recognize that somebody would be a better vote in the Senate. And Michael Watley would be a better vote in the Senate than Roy Cooper, in my opinion, right? From my taste, I don't want to see the Democrats empowered while they're being, you know, eaten from the inside by the Marxists. I don't want to empower Marxists. And that's what voting for a Democrat does. Let me see here. Brian says, I'm a conservative. I like to read and learn from a wide spectrum of news and opinions. In the past, that has included sources like CNN, Fox News, BBC, Bloomberg, Guardian, etc. Now many news sources are going behind paywalls. If I don't want to subscribe to a bunch of news sources, could you recommend some news sites you like and that are free? Thank you. Well, you can listen to my program because I pay for some of those. But also, I have a couple of hacks that I use. There's a website, I think it's called 12 Foot Ladder. I think that's the name of it. You can use that to try to get around some paywalls. There's a print function on the Brave web browser. There's, or sorry, not print, a reader. It's called the reader view and it turns the page into text so you can more easily read it. You don't have all of the ads and everything else. And sometimes that gets around the paywalls as well. But no, I mean, you should support, you know, if you're going to be reading, if you're going to be reading sites, then you should you should pay for, you know, some of these sites that you're using. Pick a couple of them and support them so they can keep doing the journalism that you want. You shouldn't really be getting all of the content for free anyway. There's also Ground News. You can pay them and it's an aggregation type of a site. And it shows you what's getting covered from the right and the left. And it has links, but it also gives you write ups. So, all right. Mitch says, isn't it crazy that the party that brought us double digit inflation. Is campaigning on affordability? They take us for absolute fools. Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is what I say, like the same party. That has stifled energy development. They've blocked pipelines. They've over-regulated refineries. So you can't build a new one. We're closing half of them over the last 40 years, right? Can't build new nuclear plants. They want the gas prices to go up to $ 10 a gallon. So this way everybody converts over to EVs. They want solar panels everywhere. They want to subsidize all of the green energy. And they're the ones that you're going to trust to lower your gas prices. It's insane. These are the ones that did the Green New Deal, or remember what they called it, the Inflation Reduction Act. That's what they called it. And it gave us 9% inflation. It was the Inflation Production Act. That's what we got from them. And people are like, oh, but I'm paying $ 4 for gas, so let's put them back in charge. It is so absurd. But this is what I call Democrat privilege. They have the big D shield. They get that shield. Democrats have the shield of the media that don't question them, that don't ask them about this stuff. They never hold them to account for this stuff. They never say, wait a minute, you said you wanted gas prices high. Now you say that they should come down. Isn't that contradictory? They never call them to task for that stuff. That's Democrat privilege. You said there was a political demand for his work, for whose work. There's a political demand for these for the influencers. I thought we went over this with Andrew. Could you define political demand? Yes. Campaigns want their message to be spread all over the place, right? So if you can get everybody talking about how unaffordable every single thing is, how all is lost, take the black pills, and then you as a candidate steps in and says, I can fix those things. Now you're you basically hijack that public sentiment. And so if you can, this is why it's called astroturfing. Andrew called it this too. It's astroturfing. It's not real grassroots. It's not happening organically. It's coming from paid sponsors. All righty, back to the text line. Alan in Candler, my old stomping grounds up there. Alan says, we could call it jumping in front of the parade. And my friend, my good friend, Ray says, is the master of jumping in front of parades, yes, or BLM protests, yeah, either way, which are kind of like parades but with a lot more violence. Yeah, jumping in front of the parade, that's the political benefit of these astroturfed, online campaigns, these videos. And the reason I, you know, Andrew wrote about this and, you know, I read the piece and I was like, oh, I want to talk with him about this is because people don't realize that this stuff is happening. All of our feeds are different, right? This is when you hear people talk about the atomization of our society, people are spinning off basically as, you know, individuals and not connected to any larger community or group, right, in real life. This atomization. So your experience on a social media platform is not the same as somebody in your own household, right? And so you may be seeing these things, or you may not. And if you're not, somebody else in your household may be seeing these things, and that's what's driving their opinion. Because one of the other things, this gets into the psychology of it and why there is a political demand for this kind of astroturfing, is that when people believe that a lot of their neighbors or a lot of their fellow Americans believe a certain thing, they will get on board. It's a bandwagon effect. People don't want to be seen as, you know, the lone guy. What's the famous painting that's all over the memes all over the place, right, is the lone guy standing up voicing an opposing view at a local school board meeting, right? That takes courage. to go against the grain, to go against the crowd. When everybody in the audience seems to be in agreement on something and you stand up and say, no, I don't think that we should be doing this or whatever, that takes more courage. And there is sort of a herd mentality that kicks in. We saw it with COVID. Did we not? So if you can manufacture that fake consensus Then everybody fall more. Well, not everybody, but it's more likely that the vast majority of people will fall in line. And then, as Alan says, as the politician, you then jump in front of that parade and you say affordability, affordability. And look, they're all looking. I said this when Mamdani won in New York City and he ran on this very theme. Right. And, you know, I told I did a. Appearance at the queen city republicans and i said there's no reason why you can't run on that same message everybody can run on that that's not the if anything republicans are in a better position to run on that you just have to tie it to government spending right there in order for the democrat message on affordability to work they have to convince you that it is a separate thing than all of the freebies they're offering. I mean, think about the chutzpah, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, right? Just the hubris there, the arrogance to just be able to just say, I'm going to pay for this and that and all of the things for you. We're going to do all of these things. I promise you all of these goodies for affordability's sake. And there's a belief that either you're stupid, right, or you know they're lying. Right. Because otherwise, how do you afford all these things but for more government intervention? And that drives up the price. So that makes things less affordable. But that's their that's their messaging. And I said it after Mamdani ran on it and barely won that this is this is what all the. Democrats are going to do. They're going to look at him and they're going to say this is the playbook. His from his coalition. Right. To speeches. To his initiatives, to the campaign slogan. Gary says, I would love to see a crowdsourced fact check on political ads, like how Twitter does, yeah, the community notes. Yeah, Facebook does them too, I think now. It would kill some of these ads that are half-truths. Seth says, people like that texter are allowing themselves to be blackpilled by Democrat ops. That's right. Yeah, that is correct. That is correct. remember, there are. People that want you to believe that all is lost, that there is no hope across the political spectrum. Okay. There are people that want you to believe that for, for a variety of reasons. And that is your choice, whether to agree with them or not. Um, oh, and then there was this from Randy who says, uh, If you want to avoid ads altogether, use DuckDuckGo and YouTube. Since I switched, I don't get the annoying ads popping up in the middle of a guitar solo while I'm listening to concerts at the gym. Yeah, they're super annoying. I feel like I'm getting a YouTube ad because I don't pay for it. I'm getting YouTube ads every three minutes. It is so annoying. I'm not paying for YouTube TV because I think they have ads too. It's so stupid. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.