On Influence

CONTACT YOUR STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL

Bottom Line Up Front for Activists: contact your AG and ask them what they intend to do about a sitting president with documented, extensive personal ties to the largest child sex trafficking operation in American history. The DOJ and FBI are clearly politicized and covering up crimes. What is their plan? Because if their answer is “not my job” or “wait until next election” then they are failing the victims and their state by not investigating potential state-level sex trafficking, conspiracy, and racketeering charges that are out of reach from federal coverups. After writing it, post a screenshot and link on social media to encourage others to do the same.

What if I told you that you, personally, could fix all of this mess.

What about half of it. What about one specific thing. What about stopping a tragedy five years from now, one you don’t even know the details of yet, because of something you took 5 minutes to do every day for a year.

Thomas Paine wrote that inside every person there exists “a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave.” Some of us have already excited that mass of sense into action. Some of us have been acting for years, calling and writing and showing up and organizing, and wondering whether any of it makes a difference. Some of us have been trying to get the people around us to care and running into a wall every single time. This piece is for all of us.

Influence is a capacity every person carries. It does nothing until someone uses it. For those who haven’t started, that’s the starting line: you have this, and it’s waiting.

For those already in the fight, you already have influence. You’re already using it. What matters now is whether we’re using it as effectively as we could be, and whether we’ve figured out how to unlock it in other people.

The mistake that burns the most effort for the least return is confusing influence with expression. Venting feels like action. Posting something angry to an audience that already agrees feels like reaching people. The choir nods. Everyone goes to bed. Nothing moved.

Influence only counts when it reaches somewhere new: a conversation with someone who doesn’t already agree, a message to someone with actual authority, a presence in a room where decisions get made. Plenty of us already know this. We’ve been doing it. And it can feel like shouting into a void that never answers back.

Anyone who’s been doing this work knows that feeling. And the answer is not to stop.

The answer is compound interest. I first learned this from Warren Buffett’s investment strategy: he didn’t build his fortune by timing the market. He built it by staying in. Decade after decade. Letting time do what time does. Paine knew this too: “Time makes more converts than reason.”

Once I saw that principle, I started seeing it everywhere in politics. Look at who actually holds power in this country. Seniors. Some of that is generational luck, being born into an economy that let them accumulate wealth in ways later generations can’t replicate. But wealth is only part of it. Influence itself aggregates. Decades of participation means decades of relationships: people who pick up your calls, owe you a favor, trust your judgment because you’ve been around long enough to have earned it. They vote every single time, donate every cycle, show up to every town hall. They’ve absorbed decades of news cycles, campaign pitches, and policy debates. All of that participation compounds into an outsized voice, and politicians know it.

At the local level the same thing plays out with even less money involved. The people with the most power in any community are the ones who kept showing up. The person who’s been delivering yard signs and knocking on doors every campaign season for twenty years. The PTA member who never missed a meeting for fifteen years. The woman who organized the neighborhood cleanup so many years running that the city council member returns her calls personally. None of them are wealthy or famous. Try to build a highway through their neighborhood and watch what happens.

Time in market wins. The best time to start was twenty years ago. The second best time is right now. For those who’ve been at it and feel like nothing’s working: it is. Compound interest is invisible right up until it isn’t.

Part of growing influence is being scientific about it. You try something. Did you see an observable result? You try another thing. Let me try this. Let me try that. What got a reaction? What got a politician to answer your call with a substantive response instead of a form letter? What got a rep so rattled they yelled at you while you laughed? The person who stays curious about what works will always outperform the person who shouts the same thing louder and wonders why nobody’s listening.

You tend to your influence and it grows, because it’s alive. And not every action produces a visible result. Just because something doesn’t instantly or obviously make a change doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an influence. Maybe the biggest contribution any of us ever makes is inspiring the person who changes everything, and we never find out.

Mary Wollstonecraft understood this when she wrote that “men of abilities scatter seeds that grow up, and have a great influence on the forming opinion; and when once the public opinion preponderates, through the exertion of reason, the overthrow of arbitrary power is not very distant.” Seeds don’t come with tracking numbers. We scatter them anyway.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from Birmingham that “the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will.” Religions and authoritarian movements recruit relentlessly. A missionary will take a thousand doors slammed in their face to save one soul and call it a good day. They train their people. They hand them scripts and talking points and a sense of mission and send them into the world.

We have a blind spot, and it comes from something we should be proud of. We respect individual autonomy so deeply that we hesitate to knock on doors at scale to influence others. Maybe we do for candidates every election cycle, but not for starting unions, not for universal healthcare, not for democracy, and as a result not for our values. Wollstonecraft identified this tendency two centuries ago, the impulse that “makes many men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves.” We can close that gap.

Many of us have felt the particular frustration of trying to bring people in and watching them nod along and do nothing. So we get better at it. We treat recruitment as a skill that can be developed the same way we develop every other form of influence.

Frederick Douglass put it plainly in 1857: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

The highest use of influence is multiplication. We do the thing, and then we encourage someone else to do it. We lead by doing, visibly, consistently, until others follow. That’s how one person becomes ten, and ten becomes a movement.

If you want to save the world, you have to invite others.

Here are the principles.

1. Everyone has influence available to them. A capacity that does nothing until you use it, and goes to the grave with you if you let it.

2. Influence is not expression. Venting and preaching to the converted change nothing.

3. There are more and less effective ways to wield influence. It has to reach somewhere new.

4. Intensity, duration, and frequency determine whether influence moves anything.

5. Influence compounds over time. Time in market wins.

6. Influence can be deliberately developed and grown. Tend to it.

7. Not every action produces a visible result. Be scientific: test, observe, adjust, try again.

8. The highest use of influence is multiplication. Do the thing, then invite others to do it with you. If you want to save the world, you have to bring people in.

9. The other side already figured this out. Authoritarian movements recruit relentlessly. We can match that discipline without abandoning our values.

CONTACT YOUR STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL

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Free resources at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER.

The Introduction to Soft Secession booklet explains the framework.

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare shows how states can use fiscal policy as leverage.

The Educate Activate Recruit Repeat Method lays out how you can be a solo activist and a movement builder.

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism is the 400-page book. Free download at the link above, physical copies at TheExistentialistRepublic.com.

Oppositional Federalism and You outlines the comprehensive three-tier concurrent framework of Uncooperative Federalism, Soft Secession, and Oppositional Federalism.

There’s a printable trifold pamphlet you can hand to anyone who needs a primer on soft secession in five minutes.

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, the full-length book I co-authored with Dr. D. Carl Brown, explains the psychology driving all of this.

If you want merch or physical copies, you can find those at TheExistentialistRepublic.com.