the new influence stack

 

How Modern Influence Operations Work, Part 1: The New Influence Stack

Tuesday, Apr 07, 2026 - 05:25 AM

Authored by Charles Davis via The Epoch Times,

On a Tuesday night in a dorm room, a student opens TikTok for a “five-minute break.”

The first clip is a montage of rubble and sirens.

The second is a professor-style explainer, neatly captioned, delivering a single moral conclusion.

The third is a shaky phone video of a confrontation on another campus—shouts, police lights, a crowd surging like weather.

The student doesn’t search for any of it.

They don’t even follow the accounts.

The feed arrives already confident about what matters.

This is the political technology of our moment: the system that decides—thousands of times a day—what you see next.

The Influence Stack

For most of the past century, influence meant broadcasting. You bought a newspaper, aired a radio spot, printed leaflets, argued in the town square. Feedback was slow, indirect, and expensive.

Today, influence runs on a different stack. It is microtargeting—figuring out which slice of the population to target. It is recommender distribution—determining what to place in front of the target group and in what sequence. It is measurement of effects—watch time, rewatches, scroll-hesitation, comments, shares. And it is iteration—rapidly adjusting what works and discarding what doesn’t.

Once those pieces lock together, persuasion stops looking like a party debate. It takes on the appearance of a thermostat: sense the room, nudge the temperature, sense again.

Microtargeting Didn’t Begin With TikTok

Microtargeting is older than the smartphone feed. 

Campaigns have long merged voter files with consumer and demographic data, then tailored appeals to specific segments. What changed, especially by the early 2010s, was tempo: the ability to see what’s working while the moment is still unfolding.

The Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation offers a useful bridge between the older world and the current one. Their teams watched web behavior in near real time and used it for rapid response. During a presidential debate, when then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said “binders full of women,” the campaign immediately bought search ads keyed to the phrase and linked to a fact sheet; the campaign’s digital lead described an “immediate uptick in both traffic and engagement” from users searching that term.

That isn’t TikTok. It’s still the open web—search, ads, landing pages. But the shift shows a new logic: observe behavior as it happens, then redirect attention before the story cools. Strike while the iron is hot.

Algorithmic platforms industrialize that loop. Microtargeting is not about “who gets which mailer.” It becomes a live system, stitched to distribution and feedback. Different demographics can be shown targeted versions of the same reality, and the system learns—at scale—how each group responds.

And “response” doesn’t require explicit agreement. It can be attention, arousal, and volatility: two extra seconds of watch time, a rewatch, a comment typed in anger and posted, a share to a group chat.

Ranking Systems Don’t Just Reflect Preference. They Shape It.

We don’t have to guess whether ranking changes what people see. Researchers have tested it inside platforms.

A large-scale study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) drew on a “massive-scale randomized experiment” on X, then known as Twitter, that assigned a randomized control group—nearly two million daily active accounts—to a reverse-chronological feed “free of algorithmic personalization,” precisely so the effects of ranking could be measured. The authors reported measurable differences in “algorithmic amplification” across political actors in multiple countries.

That’s the key: ranking is an intervention. When a system orders content, it decides what becomes salient, what feels common to particular groups, what appears urgent, and what fades. Political power can emerge even when nobody writes a manifesto inside the company. The feed trains the user. It is an environment, and environments shape behavior.

This is also why the public debate so often misses the point.

People argue as if the only question is whether a platform “censors” a viewpoint or “pushes propaganda.” Those concerns matter. They just sit on top of a deeper mechanism: the simple act of ranking, repeated billions of times, changes what societies talk about.

Measurement: The Hidden Power Is the Dashboard

The influence stack is powered by dashboards.

A broadcaster might learn weeks later whether a message landed. A platform learns in minutes whether a clip increased retention among 19-year-olds in a specific place, at a given hour, after a strategically set sequence of prior videos.

This creates a persuasion capability that older institutions weren’t built to match: rapid experimentation on human attention. Content becomes a hypothesis. The audience becomes a living lab. The system keeps what works.

Universities update policy once a semester. Newsrooms adjust framing over days. Legislatures move over months. The feed scope and focus can pivot before lunch.

Why Anger Wins Inside the Loop

A hard truth about the influence stack is that not all emotions travel equally well through it. High-arousal emotions move faster because they prompt action.

In a landmark study of sharing, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman found that virality is linked to physiological arousal: content that evokes high-arousal emotions, including anger and anxiety, is more likely to spread than content that evokes low-arousal emotions like sadness.

Politics adds another accelerant: moral emotion. A PNAS study analyzing large datasets of social media debate found that moral-emotional language increases diffusion; in their sample, each additional moral-emotional word in a message was associated with a substantial increase in sharing.

And anger has particular advantages in networked environments. A computational analysis of Weibo found anger to be more “contagious” than joy and more able to travel along weaker social ties—meaning it can move beyond a tight-knit group and spill into wider communities.

Put those together and the targeting logic becomes almost mechanical. Anger keeps people watching. It increases the odds they’ll share. It tends to bridge out of local clusters into broader networks. In an engagement-optimized system, anger is not just a feeling. It’s a distribution advantage.

Iteration: How Talking Points Come Back as Optimized Themes

And then there is the old broadcast trick—the repeated phrase, the tagline, the talking point—reappearing in new clothes.

In television news, theming worked because repetition makes ideas feel common. In the influence stack, the system tests variations. It monitors the retention curve, watches share velocity and comment intensity. The phrases that survive are the ones that travel and harden into slogans that feel “everywhere,” because the platform has learned exactly where “everywhere” is.

This is how a moral frame becomes a transport mechanism. A short phrase is easy to caption, easy to hashtag, easy to stitch and remix. It is also easy for the system to recognize and route toward audiences that have historically responded to that emotional key.

The Verification Problem

A second political fact of the influence stack is that outsiders struggle to verify what’s happening in real time.

Platforms point to transparency and researcher access. While those programs are meaningful; sometimes they lag the speed of events. The influence stack’s advantage is velocity in a world of slow oversight. When you can’t see the full system—distribution weights, downranking rules, recommendation pathways, enforcement decisions—you can’t reliably separate organic waves from algorithmically amplified waves, or evaluate whether interventions were neutral or asymmetrical.

What This Series Will Do

Over the next installments, we’ll walk up the stack.

We’ll examine emotion recognition and why even flawed affect inference can be dangerous when institutions treat outputs as truth. We’ll look at China’s operational model—identity resolution plus sensor coverage plus data fusion—and why architecture matters more than any single sensor. We’ll treat TikTok as a distribution layer where iteration is fast and verification is hard. Then we’ll apply the framework to a test case Americans lived through: the surge of campus protest dynamics during the Gaza war, what we can measure, and what we cannot responsibly claim.

The point isn’t to reduce genuine political conviction to “the algorithm did it.” People protest for real reasons. Institutions fail for real reasons. But in a world where attention is programmable, it becomes reckless to pretend the feed is only entertainment.

The influence stack doesn’t replace politics. It changes the temperature at which politics happens.

And once you see it, the question stops being whether a single video “caused” anything.

The question becomes: who controls the thermostat—and who gets to audit it?

David Stockman on stagflation

Stockman is always a pessimist. We'll see what happens.

Stockman Warns This Is Not Your Grandfather's Stagflation

by Tyler Durden

Monday, Apr 06, 2026 - 03:50 PM

Authored by David Stockman via The Brownstone Institute,

It was pretty obvious even before February 28th that the US economy was grinding to a halt, even as inflation was already working up a head of steam. But then came war. 

We are going to get a globe-shaking economic conflagration erupting from the void that was the Persian Gulf commodity fountain. That includes between 20% and 50% of all the basic commodities that drive global GDP, including crude oil, LPGs, LNG, ammonia, urea, sulfur, helium, and sundry more.

Accordingly, the global share of crucial industrial commodities that now stand in harm’s way. This includes both those directly transiting the Strait of Hormuz and also the share of supply from the wider Middle Eastern region that is also exposed to the current Iranian War disruptions but is delivered by pipeline, train, or alternative waterways like the Red Sea/Suez Canal route.

This ballooning dislocation of daily global commodity flows will have a double whammy effect: It will both cause production and output to fall immediately in response to soaring input costs or limited availability... even as it encourages the central banks to “help” by printing more inflationary money.

This all adds up to a bout of classic stagflation, but it is not going to be merely the mildly painful type that unfolded during the 1970s. After all, despite a 120% rise in the price level during the decade, it wasn’t a total wipeout when measured from the vantage point of real median family income.

As it happened, the 1970s stagflation came on the heels of what had been an actual Golden Age by the standards of history between 1954 and 1969. During that period, real median family incomes rose from $39,700 to $66,870 or by a robust 3.53% per annum.

Of course, that uphill march of Main Street prosperity slowed sharply during the inflationary 1970s, but the blue line in the chart below did at least keep drifting higher. So between 1969 and 1980, real median family incomes grew by a not very impressive 0.61% per annum, but the direction of travel was still higher.

Real Median Family Income, 1954 to 1980

But here’s the thing. The US economy of the 1970s was able to cope with the pressures of high inflation, oil, and other commodity shocks and the stop-and-go disruptions of a Federal Reserve that had been newly released from the disciplinary effects of the Bretton Woods gold standard. In large part that was because the aggregate level of debt on the US economy was relatively modest.

Total public and private debt in 1970 stood at $1.5 trillion, representing just 147% of GDP, as shown in the graph below. Moreover, the latter was the long-time national leverage ratio (total debt divided by national income) through historic times of thick and thin, going all the way back to 1870.

Moreover, even after the large government deficits of the 1970s and a surge of inflation-driven private borrowing during the decade, total US debt stood at $4.6 trillion by 1980. That was just 162% of GDP.

In a word, the US economy during this decade of stagflation was battered by unprecedented peacetime inflation, but it was not yet smothered by crushing debt. As shown by the graph, the soaring national leverage ratio did not really leap skyward until after the mid-1980s, when Alan Greenspan took the helm at the Fed and launched the US (and the world) into a four-decade spree of money-printing and what amounts to Keynesian central banking.

As a consequence, total public and private debt is in a wholly different zip code today. Debt outstanding now totals nearly $108 trillion and weighs in at 343% of national income (GDP). That is to say, as we head into the next stagflationary era, the US economy will be carrying two turns of extra debt relative to income than was the case in 1970.

That does make a difference. The national leverage ratio during the 1970s averaged about 153% of GDP, meaning that had it been maintained since then total debt outstanding would now be $48 trillion. As it is, however, the actual leverage ratio currently stands at 342% of GDP and outstanding debt totals nearly $108 trillion.

So the math tells you all you need to know. The US economy is now lugging $60 trillion more debt than would be the case if the 1970s average national leverage ratio had been maintained. And even at a weighted average 5% interest rate across all sectors of the economy, that’s $3 trillion per year of more interest expense and therefore less cash flow available for investment and discretionary spending.

US Total Leverage Ratio: Debt-to-GDP, 1954 to 2025

Of course, Keynesian money printers and statists say “No sweat,” and view debt as a growth elixir rather than a burden on commerce and supply side output. But we beg to disagree, and strenuously so.

The empirical results tell you otherwise. For instance, real economic growth (final sales of domestic product) averaged 3.92% per annum during the 1954 to 1970 era when the national leverage rate was at or below its historical 150% norm. By contrast, since the pre-crisis peak in Q4 2007, real growth has slowed to just 1.97%.

That’s right. The trend growth rate has been reduced by fully 50% after the economy-wide leverage ratio shot the moon during the last 35 years.

Moreover, in the case of the industrial core of the US economy, the growth rate has not just slowed; it has actually come to a screeching halt.

Thus, between 1954 and 1969, the industrial production index rose by a robust 4.5% per annum. During the years since the debt-fueled financial crisis of 2008, however, there has been no growth at all in the industrial sector of the US economy.

On a net basis, the combined output of the manufacturing, utilities, mining, and energy sectors has amounted to one big fat goose egg.

Industrial Production Index, 1953 to 2025

So the question recurs. Why did we get so much debt and so little real growth after the Fed went full-on Keynesian under Greenspan and his heirs and assigns?

The answer is actually not that mysterious. The explosion of debt from $1.5 trillion to $108 trillion during the 55 years since 1970 happened not because consumers, businesses, and government suddenly became infected with a voracious appetite for debt, but because the central bank falsified its price via endless financial repression and pegging yields far below their natural free market clearing levels.

At the same time, the “cheap” debt that landed on US balance sheets did not go into a huge surge in productive investment, but instead fueled decades of financial asset inflation, leveraged speculation, and financial engineering in the corporate sector. The net result was malinvestment and wasted capital, labor, and other economic resources on an epic scale.

For instance, if the dramatic increase in the national leverage ratio since the heyday of prosperity during the 1950s and 1960s had actually gone into productive uses, it would necessarily have shown up in its counterpart—the national investment rate.

But no cigar there, of course. In fact, the 8% of GDP investment ratio (business capex and housing) has now dropped to just 4%. That is to say, all of the incremental borrowing went into government spending, current consumption, and financial asset inflation, not productive assets capable of generating future contributions to growth and living standards.

Net Investment % of GDP: 1947 to 2025

This brings us to the impending stagflation. As it was prior to February 28th, real output growth had already stalled. According to the real GDP statistics, growth between Q4 2025 and Q4 2025 posted at just 1.78%. But virtually all of that was due to the AI bubble-driven massive increase in spending for data centers and other AI infrastructure.

This massive diversion of capital was not owing to an overpowering use case for AI or the fact of superior returns on AI investments. In fact, there has been virtually no return on AI assets at all, with the surge of capital spending amounting essentially to a new version of “Build it and they will come.”

But after February 28th and Trump’s initiation of a war in the Persian Gulf that can’t be won and which will send the global economy into a tailspin like nothing seen since the mid-1970s, we are truly off to the stagflationary races.

Energy and fuel costs have already soared. Most importantly, the workhorse hydrocarbon of the US economy—diesel fuels used by the nation’s massive fleet of trucks, rail, and farm tractors—is already above its 2022 level at $5.40 per gallon and still climbing.

Likewise, on the very eve of the planting season fertilizer costs have already doubled, meaning that application rates will be cut back, yields will fall, and food prices will be soaring by the 4th of July when the USDA crop condition reports pretty much forecast the fall production levels.

And, of course, no one took into account that the natural gas processing plants of Qatar were fastened at the hip to the semiconductor plants in South Korea and Taiwan and from there to the entire manufacturing sector of the world. All of this through the life line of helium gas extracted from natural processing plants.

In short, these soaring commodity prices are going to push the inflation indices higher, even as industrial output contracts owing to rising costs and limited availability. Labor markets are frozen as much as they were in the depth of lockdowns from April 2020, while new home sales are evaporating. 

That’s stagflation by any other name, but this time the Fed will not be in a position to do much about either inflation or recessionary pressures.

The inflation genie is now out of the bottle but the Fed can not really slam on the brakes ala Volcker because the US economy is staggering under $60 trillion of incremental debt.

At the same time, the war and the erupting commodity inflation cycle it has engendered means that it can’t turn on the printing presses to “stimulate,” either.

So, as we said: This is not your grandfather’s Stagflation. Not by a long shot. 

spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints

 Outstanding observations by the best writer for the WSJ.

I Give Up on These Defeatists

From ‘No Kings’ and Iran to data centers, too many Americans are fighting progress.

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By 

Andy Kessler

April 5, 2026 3:50 pm ET

709

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President Trump in Washington, April 1. Alex Brandon/Pool/Getty Images

I can’t stand all the defeatism. After a few short weeks, multiple New York Times columnists used the word “quagmire” to describe Iran. Really? No navy, few launchers, dwindling missiles and drones, plus nukes under rubble, yet the Guardian writes that the president “has lost his Iran war.”

Who does this remind you of? Oh yeah, “Baghdad Bob,” Iraq’s lying former information minister: “Today, the tide has turned, we are destroying them.” Now the media appears to be taking on his role.

Late capitalism, postcapitalism, “America is in decline” pronouncers, partisan professors, socialist mayors, “ICE out”-screaming celebrities—I’m tired of those rooting against us. Add the Tucker Carlson wing of isolationists and defeatists who would leave terror-funding despots in power. Don’t give up on democracy.

Last month saw more civics-mangling “No Kings” rallies—at least 3,300 of them in all 50 states. Even one in London, where it had to be branded “No Tyrants” since they have an actual king. According to the permit for the march in St. Paul, Minn. (why do so many weird things happen in Minnesota?), Indivisible, a George Soros-funded political advocacy group, was the lead coordinator. Other rallies were funded by socialist and communist revolutionary organizations, according to Fox News Digital. Classic astroturf. Be careful who you march for.

I’m all for protests, it’s our right as Americans. But nailing down the reason for No Kings is more like spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints. Signs noted fascism, wars, school funding, billionaires, LGBT issues, allowing illegal immigration, even the Epstein files. And really, the rallies are mostly about Donald Trump’s winning the election. Forget protests, they’re more of a massive primal scream therapy session.

The New York Times recently ran a 4,100-word diatribe of defeatism, beginning “We had a good run,” before taking a swan dive into the muck including this economic gem: “The benefits of globalization had been vastly oversold.” Did you type that on a MacBook or a Remington typewriter? Thought so.

After a decadeslong push for green energy, California has some of the highest electricity prices in the U.S., and now $6.50 a gallon for premium gasoline despite plenty of retrievable oil. We’ve been Gored. The same folks pushing those policies now circularly complain about affordability and the failure of capitalism. How bizarre—their defeatism was self-induced.

Remember the nail-biting that our fragile planet couldn’t handle multiple American standards of living around the world? It happened. We’re OK. The better they do, the better we do, selling them our high-value intellectual property.

If you haven’t figured it out, the main export of the U.S. is our standard of living. It isn’t in decline but the envy of the world, hence the rush to our borders. You won’t find that export in economic statistics, but it drives demand for our technology, medical practices and more. The other thing we export is freedom, which drives innovation and lifts living standards elsewhere. Global growth and productivity will be so strong that we’re rapidly inventing robots and artificial intelligence to handle logistics.

Meanwhile, many fight progress at home. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, charter members of the Socialists for Defeatism Society, want a moratorium on productivity-driving artificial-intelligence data centers. They really do hate us.

I’m mostly tired of whiners who see defeat behind every minor setback. Sure, hate the president all you want, I have my own grievances to air. But give him credit. He threw out defeatism and acted when everyone else waffled.

Mr. Trump didn’t kick the can down the road by meekly lobbing a missile or two into Iran, like Bill Clinton in Iraq or Barack Obama in Libya. Heck, Mr. Obama, along with sidekick Ben Rhodes, returned a $1.7 billion tallboy can to Iran. This in exchange for quickly ignored sanctions, making Iran the powder keg that it was before Feb. 28.

Whatever happened to Harry Truman’s “The Buck Stops Here”? Well, it’s back. Mr. Trump opened up a can of whoop gas: blowing up drug boats, arresting Nicolás Maduro and, with Israel, vaporizing terrorist-funding mullahs. All a great start. The 3-D chess match continues. Now what?

Because of defeatism, we don’t follow through—no more of Woodrow Wilson’s “making the world safe for democracy.” A shame. Maybe the Trumpian way is to “make the world safe.” I wish we’d finish the task and encourage democracy.

Democracy is worth fighting for. Maybe we can’t force it—purple fingers after voting in Iraq—but we can be ready to pounce. The Middle East is transforming. Someday, the masses in China will demand a political say now that they have an economic say. Same with a post-Vladimir Putin Russia.

Global growth will be hard to hold back, but the world needs to be safe first. And safe from defeatists.

Write to kessler@wsj.com.

Why NATO is in trouble

 

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets. The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural. Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them. That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it. After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble. The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first. Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon. American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe. We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life. Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake. Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs. We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating. So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving. We were manufacturing jealousy. And it worked. The Wall came down. But here’s what no one accounted for. When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs. And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle. An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas. And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized. So the arrogance takes root. And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening. Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude. Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated. Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass. Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar. Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity. What Europe has is culture. The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle. For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked. Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments. At every international forum. “Americans are stupid. Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.” We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more… like your conquering armies did for centuries. Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit. You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators. What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization. It isn’t. Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine. That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report. Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us” Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.

BENIWINN

@Beniwinn

·

7h

The hardest pill for Europe to swallow is that their 'sophistication' is a luxury good manufactured in Middle America. We traded our aesthetic potential to fund their social safety nets. The era of the American taxpayer subsidizing their moral superiority is ending. Reality is a cold shower

Duncan Bullivant

@DuncanBullivant

Whilst I respect your sentiment what your claim is simply not true. European contribution to NATO was immense until the moment the wall came down. Then it was open season for spending tax payer funds on social welfare. The Warsaw Pact was an existential threat to the US and Europe alike.

Dino

@hablecina86

Dont be so ignorant in your claims. In the 80 years after ww2 Europe made you by: 1. Accepting the dollar as a reserve currency 2. Giving you exclusive trade agreements and opening the European market to you. 3. Accepting you as a military defence partner and main supplyer.