Taylor Lorenz Has the Goods (Really) on the Left’s Paid Online Influencers

By Jeffrey Blehar

Monday, September 01, 2025

 

Readers, a warning up front: The people you will encounter in this story range from ridiculous to repulsive, all without a single one of them rising to the level of actually being important. We are about to turn over a damp, muddy rock and see what kinds of multi-legged creatures are slithering around underneath, out of sight from civilized eyes. Yes, it’s time to talk about “online influencers” again. (Before we do so, let us pause here to pour one out in remembrance of my boy, the O.G. himself, David Hogg. We shall not look upon his like again anytime soon.)

 

Specifically, let’s talk about the truly sick amounts of money some of these Twitter/X, TikTok, and podcast influencers have been revealed to be making — as much as $8,000 per month, if Wired is to be believed. And all they have to do is submit all of their content to a shady progressive organization named Chorus for preclearance and “message approval,” while employing the appointed talking points of the day and funneling all bookings through their secret paymasters.

 

The contracts reviewed by WIRED prohibit standard partnership disclosures, declaring that creators will “not publicize” their relationship with Chorus or tell others that they’re members of the program “without Chorus’s prior express consent.” (A screenshot from a slideshow was shared with WIRED following this article’s publication by Graham Wilson, a lawyer working with Chorus, that offers several talking points if a member of the cohort wanted to discuss Chorus publicly.) They also forbid creators from “disclos[ing] the identity of any Funder” and give Chorus the ability to force creators to remove or correct content based solely on the organization’s discretion if that content was made at a Chorus-organized event.

 

“There are some real great advantages to … housing this program in a nonprofit,” Wilson said to creators on a Zoom call reviewed by WIRED. “It gives us the ability to raise money from donors. It also, with this structure, it avoids a lot of the public disclosure or public disclaimers—you know, ‘Paid for by blah blah blah blah’—that you see on political ads. We don’t need to deal with any of that. Your names aren’t showing up on, like, reports filed with the FEC.”

 

You, perhaps, might scoff at the secrecy, corruption, and rank hypocrisy of it all — from America’s self-appointed moral scolds, no less. I say it’s nice work if you can get it, and also have no sense of dignity whatsoever. But it’s Labor Day weekend, after all, so why not celebrate some true heroes of socialist labor?

 

The provenance of the reporting has become a flashpoint for those named in the piece. The big scoop was written by none other than a freelancing Taylor Lorenz, the notorious progressive lunatic whose downwardly mobile career arc from the Washington Post to her present state summons images of the fate of the Titan submersible. This explains why the defenders of these influencers — who have been caught red-handed selling out their political souls to Mammon — have sought to personalize the issue and make it about Lorenz, who to be fair seems like a thoroughly abhorrent person.

 

But she has the goods in this case. You may have noticed that I haven’t named any of the influencers outed by Lorenz as being on the take from the professional Democratic message machine. The reason for this is simple: I haven’t heard of a single one of them. Feel free to click on the link already provided to see if you recognize any of them (all named in one long paragraph), but I didn’t, and it made me realize that one of two things must be true: Either I am wildly out of touch with the personalities that move political minds on the progressive left these days — very possible! — or these guys don’t have the same reach as Dave Smith or Theo Von or even Darryl Cooper for that matter.

 

What prevents me from having much more to say about this obviously embarrassing Democratic attempt to recruit paid influencers and then muzzle them with NDAs and strict message control is my complete ignorance of similar things on the right. Because I can promise you this: There is more dirty money (and foreign money, I’d wager) coursing through the online right at the present moment than ever before, and likely at a scale that utterly dwarfs progressive outlays. After all, Donald Trump is president, and has shown himself remarkably amenable to both flattery and bribery in his own right — it’s obvious where the lobbying action is going to be for the next few years with an imperial president. Anyone reading this story and laughing about left-wing influencers having been revealed as cynical grifters on the corporate progressive payroll ought to ask themselves what exactly it is they think a hundred MAGA-coded influencers on Twitter and elsewhere are doing, and how many side-deals they’ve cut.

 

Readers, there is an invisible world out there, a hidden hand, and it is driven by money — the dark matter of politics. We caught a fleeting glimpse of how foreign money is spent on the right at least once over the last few years, with the Tenet scandal: Recall that there, Russian intelligence used Canadian cutouts to recruit Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, and moral horror-show Benny Johnson (among others) to record commentary pieces about topics that the Russians selected and scripted — to advance Russia’s geostrategic interests among the MAGA right. That was but one scandal, discovered due to the carelessness of its practitioners. Let’s stick to the sort of unpleasant insectoid analogy that began this piece, and therefore recall the rule of pests: if you see one inside your house, rest assured he brought company with him. There is far more, and worse, that you can’t see, lurking hidden within your walls or your floors — a world going on underground.

 

It would be easy enough to laugh at Democrats, to dismiss this humiliation as yet more evidence that they are an unpopular group of sad frauds who need to pay for their online influencers the way maladjusted losers frequent brothels. But then I ask myself where all that Qatari and Chinese money goes. And I ponder the message coordination of so many rightoid influencers. And I begin to wonder. I wonder who on my side — or anyone I’ve taken on good faith — in fact secretly practices the world’s oldest profession.