The Circus of Influence: How Grifters Hijacked Our Culture

From false prophets to podcast prophets—why the smartest thing you can do today is turn your head.

There’s a difference between power, fame, and influence. Just like there’s a difference between heroin, crack, and coke. Each delivers its own flavour of oblivion. One kills the body, the other two kill reason, truth, and maybe even the soul.

Power sedates you—makes you believe you're untouchable. Fame hits like coke—fast, manic, euphoric, and gone before you’ve blinked. Influence? That’s crack. Addictive, messy, and worst of all—it spreads. It doesn’t just burn the user, it singes everything it touches. When influence infects a system, a culture, or a platform, the rules change. Substance gives way to spectacle.

And just like drugs, once you’ve tasted them, you’ll burn everything down to feel it again. There’s no rehab for public validation.

We like to separate power, fame, and influence like they’re clean, distinct forces. Like academic categories. But the people who wield them? They don’t draw those lines. They guzzle all three from the same poisoned cup. Not because they need to—but because they can.

Each one is a drug. A real, limb-twitching, dopamine-drenched addiction. History is a graveyard of junkies chasing their next hit of control, reverence, or reach. You can track it from the Roman Emperors to reality TV contestants. The crown, the camera, the algorithm. The tools change. The hunger stays the same.

In my upcoming book Bampot to Belter ™, I wrote that Scotland was an idea cooked up by a class of men who needed a nation to rule. That’s still true. Modern governance isn’t about solutions—it’s about the appearance of solutions. It doesn’t hold power—it performs it. And we, the audience, clap or boo on cue. It’s all theatre. If they believe they’re in charge, and we believe they are too, then power becomes self-sustaining. A fantasy kept alive by mutual delusion.

Now step into the influencer era. We’re no longer ruled by monarchs or ministers. We’re ruled by metrics. Algorithms. Watch time. Shares. Engagement. Influence used to be earned through scars, experience, legacy, dare i say- talent. Now it’s a byproduct of lighting, lip fillers, and punchy soundbites cut for TikTok. We live beneath the soft tyranny of the Algorithmic Oracle—where charisma has replaced credibility and reach has replaced reason.

Truth isn’t a virtue anymore. It’s a strategy. A niche. A branding angle. And if you’re smart—or shameless—you know how to bend it into content. Narcissism isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system. Studies show social media platforms disproportionately reward narcissistic traits. So what happens when the most self-absorbed, manipulative voices rise to the top? What happens when visibility itself becomes the highest good?

You get comedians masquerading as political thinkers. Lifestyle influencers doling out psychological advice. Failed reality stars reinvented as spiritual gurus. And let’s be honest—many of them aren’t completely daft. Some are clever. But clever like pickpockets. Like con artists. They don’t sell truth. They steal it, recondition it, and sell back engagement dressed as revelation.

Influence without integrity is a loaded gun in a toddler’s hand. But we don’t just hand it to them. We subscribe. We like. We share.

And here’s where it gets worse. Social media doesn’t just amplify individuals—it stitches them together. Person A with a million followers appears on a podcast with Person B who has half a million. Now they’ve both inflated their reach, piggybacking off each other’s borrowed audiences. No one asks whether either is authentic, talented, or even honest—only how big their following looks on paper.

And here’s the kicker: it might not even be real. It’s estimated that up to 80% of online engagement is bots. Bad actors—China, Russia, state-backed bot farms—can juice the numbers of a controversial figure overnight, making their message look viral, credible, inevitable. The crowd falls for the ostensible following. Popularity becomes proof. But it’s a hall of mirrors. Manufactured reach is now mistaken for genuine relevance. And too many people are buying what was never real in the first place.

And once the crowd buys it—so does the performer. Just as politicians come to believe they hold true power because the public continues to behave as though they do, so too do influencers come to believe their own hype. Their message, no matter how hollow or malicious, starts to feel authentic to them—because it moves numbers. Because the illusion is reflected back to them in likes and followers and podcast invites. The machine tells them: you matter. You’re right. Double down. And they do. They radicalise themselves in response to the reaction they engineered.

It’s a feedback loop of false confidence—grifters gaslit by their own metrics.

And then there’s the cult of shock. Not a new trick, but now more potent than ever. Controversy has always had marketing value. But it used to be tethered to meaning—provocation with purpose. Think of the Sex Pistols screaming "God Save the Queen." It was rage with context. Punk as class warfare. Now? Provocation is the product. It’s content.

Take the rise of weaponised vulgarity. OnlyFans creators breaking records for sexual endurance, broadcasting it for revenue and brand-building. Not as protest. Not even as kink. As marketing. Or Irish rap group Kneecap declaring support for Hamas and Hezbollah while chanting "Kill your MP." Maybe they mean it. Maybe they don’t. But does it matter when the attention pays the bills? When the outrage guarantees airtime?

That’s the sickness. The attention becomes the validation. The act itself doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to provoke. And if it provokes, it earns. The backlash becomes the metric. The controversy is the campaign.

We’ve turned the moral compass into a branding tool. The more outrageous you are, the more rewarded you become. And when backlash comes? Even better. Now you’ve got your next clip. Your next post. Your next hit.

This isn’t protest. This isn’t art. It’s career strategy. Meaningless noise posing as radicalism. We’ve replaced intent with impressions. Art has been hollowed out and restuffed with hashtags.

Meanwhile the average Joe and Joanne are sitting at home, scrolling themselves into a frenzy—angrier by the swipe, convinced the world is on fire over battles that barely exist outside the echo chamber of their screens. They’re being baited into wars of words for clicks and cash, bleeding out their sanity for someone else’s engagement metrics.

Yes, social platforms have given a voice to the voiceless. They’ve broken open the gates of elitist publishing and legacy media. But the flood that came through hasn’t just been talent. It’s been grifters, frauds, hustlers, and manufactured personalities selling morality in merch bundles. The result? We no longer know who means what. Or if meaning even matters.

We’re living through a crisis of authenticity. The culture has been hijacked by theatre. Integrity has become an act. Outrage has become spectacle. Even grief is staged—captioned and filtered for impact.

And I don’t trust it. I don’t want to be part of it. I want to strip it bare. Drag it into daylight. Torch it if I have to. Because the real danger of power, fame, and influence isn’t just what they do to the people who have them. It’s what they do to the rest of us forced to live in the world they remake in their image.

History gives us warnings. Plenty of them. Empires don’t always fall to invasion or plague. Sometimes they rot from within—brought down not by their enemies, but by their own charlatans.

Look at the late Roman Empire—crippled not just by external threats, but by emperors more concerned with image than integrity, spectacle over substance. By the end, the title of Caesar was sold to the highest bidder, and the empire’s fate rested in the hands of sycophants, fools, and opportunists.

Or take the biblical story of false prophets in ancient Israel—those who flattered kings with feel-good visions while silencing the inconvenient truths of real prophets like Jeremiah. The people followed the easy lies, and the kingdom fell to Babylon. Not because of a lack of faith—but because their faith was placed in frauds.

Or the fall of the French monarchy, when Versailles became a theatre of excess and illusion. While Paris starved, the court waltzed through fantasy. And when the curtain finally dropped, heads rolled.

When grifters gain power, truth dies first. Then comes trust. Then the whole thing burns.

History doesn’t whisper this. It screams it.

And here we are again, watching it on our phones.

Even those who claim to see it—don’t. I recently watched Jordan Peterson wrestle with this very problem: what should the political 'right' do when it begins to attract the same narcissists, manipulators, and dark triad personalities that poisoned the cultural left through the channels of wokeness and virtue signalling? He admits these types go wherever power is. They don’t care about principles. They care about proximity to influence.

And yet, even as Peterson sounded the alarm, it felt like the fire had already breached the walls.

Because we’ve seen it. First-hand. We’ve watched a famously narcissistic Machiavellian shapeshift in real time. A so-called truth teller, once a socialist, vegan, Buddhist-type, spouting free love and anti-establishment rhetoric like a hack Messiah in unbuttoned silk shirts and necklaces. But when the cultural tide began to shift, so did he. A rape charge surfaces—and suddenly, he’s born again in Christ, adopting a carnivore diet and quoting scripture like it’s always been gospel. Why? Because the Peterson-Weinstein-Rogan-Musk circuit was gaining traction. Because the power shifted right—and the grifter followed the scent like a pig to a trough.

He’s not a thinker. He’s not a prophet. He’s a trickster. A salesman. A man with no roots who reinvents his moral compass depending on which ideology pays better affiliate commission that week.

This is what Peterson and his ilk must understand: it’s not enough to preach virtue and tradition if you don’t have the tools to spot the wolves in rosary beeds. If you don’t know how to screen for the narcissists who now come dressed as conservative intellectuals and stoic sages, then your castle becomes a clown car. Your movement becomes their platform.

The right is no safer from grifters than the left was. Maybe less so, because it now wears the costume of discipline, masculinity, and faith—and what better place to hide than inside values people are too afraid to question?

So yes—clean your feed. Practice content hygiene. But also: know that the enemy isn’t just out there. He’s smiling in your direction. He knows the language. And he’s already inside.

What to do?

Let’s be honest—we’re not going to destroy these false prophets. The platforms are too big. The appetite for controversy is too ravenous. The supply chain of shock content is too efficient. These people—these fame gluttons, controversy peddlers, moral exhibitionists—they're not going anywhere. If anything, they're multiplying. Because the algorithm rewards escalation. One viral hit begets another. One outrage spawns three more. There’s always a new line to cross.

And so, waiting for the world to course-correct is naïve. We can’t fix this system from the outside—not with think pieces, not with public outcries, not even with regulation. The culture of attention is now self-sustaining.

But what we can do is disinfect ourselves. Develop content hygiene. Because peace of mind will never come from gorging on outrage, endless debates, and digital theatre. It will never come from swallowing daily doses of anger, envy, and performative trauma served through a screen.

The best thing we can do is recognise what these people are really doing. They’re not offering insight. They’re not starting conversations. They’re trying to sell you something. Themselves. Their lifestyle. Their personality. Their brand. And you don’t need it. You never did.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s everywhere. The grift is the point. The spectacle is the sale. But that realisation is power. Because then you can choose to step back. To scroll past. To not engage. To deny them your time, your mind, your soul.

And in that quiet refusal, in that act of digital self-defence, you reclaim a piece of yourself.

Inner peace isn’t found in the chaos. It’s found in learning to turn your head from it.

And remember — The circus only runs if you keep buying tickets.

Ray.

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