My book is now out on Pre-Order with Oxford University Press!
Under the Influence:
What's Real When America
Feels Fake
An intimate account of the MAGA movement's most powerful social media influencers--their history, playbook, and performance tactics--as they shape an alternative vision for America at a moment of unwinding trust in its institutions.
We tell ourselves stories about how the world works to help us make sense of reality. When these stories don't align with our lived experiences, reality itself can feel like it is unwinding. One segment of Americans felt this dissonance when a reality television show personality and his army of sycophants won the White House. Another group of American voters believed someone was finally speaking truth to their reality. After years of crises--including financial collapse, foreign wars, and the opioid epidemic--Donald Trump crystalized an accessible narrative about how American institutions worked to benefit everyone but Americans. Yet, Trump wasn't alone.
Under the Influence is an insider account of the conservative media influencers who helped rewrite America's common sense, and, with it, its political reality. Chronicling a six-year journey through the parties, protests, social media, and minds within Steve Bannon's media milieu, Danielle Lee Tomson reveals that "the influencers" perform their roles sincerely, rendering an alternative vision of America both on- and offline. From the inside, Tomson explores how they do their work, crafting Hollywood worthy storylines and a participatory plotline replete with heroes, villains, costumes, and shibboleths that constitute an entire lifestyle--not just a politics. As Tomson shows, the influencers are not simply "disinformers" but political agents and political performers who offer followers a distinct worldview and a sense of purpose: a secular faith that promises revelation and retribution.
Drawing on her uniquely Trumpian upbringing and entrance into elite academic circles, Tomson reflects on how the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy is also a crisis of imagination. When institutions lose credibility because they lose sense of the real plot, the most carnivalesque storytellers take the stage and remake reality. The first step to national narrative recovery is admitting that the problem isn't just "them," it's all of us.
I'm Danielle. I'm a writer, scholar, and strategist.
I’m interested in studying and cultivating emerging 21st century worldviews. What is a worldview? I define it as an intuitive narrative explaining how the world currently works and how it should work.
Sometimes the work I do feels academic or like it is coming from a professional strategist—of which I am both. When I do it right, this work feels like art or poetry.
I like to push my students, colleagues, and clients to question their priors and respective epistemologies – a fancy word to describe how we know truth and reality. What do we take for granted in how we see the world? In politics? In knowledge? How do we make sense of reality? Some have described my work as intellectual or organizational acupuncture: I like mindfully poking where ideas and assumptions are so dense, they may hold us back. Hit the right spot and you may release tension, however painful or pleasurable.
I’ve come to these interests after a decade of studying and engaging online conservative media and influencers, digital subcultures, civic technology, nationalism, populism, democracy, and narrative change. Privately, my work is often informed by love for and ongoing interest in Judaism, design (especially furniture), permaculture, fashion, all things Americana, spirituality, and conversion—of any kind.
As a kid, I grew up on a horse farm in a family of scrap metal dealers very close to Butler, Pennsylvania – that Butler. After years in New York, Mexico, and Pennsylvania, I’m now mostly in Washington DC.
Okay! Cue the professional bio below for people to copy and paste.
Bio.
Danielle Lee Tomson is a writer, scholar, and strategist. She is a sought-after expert in topics related to political social media influencers, populism, online political subcultures, performative politics, nationalism, "scammers," political polarization, tech platform policy, "disinformation," propaganda, narrative change, rumors, and civic tech.
Currently, she serves as the research manager at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. She leads a team of researchers primarily studying institutional communication, as well as rumors about the processes and procedures of U.S. elections.
She defended a doctoral dissertation on conservative social media influencers at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which she is developing into a book with Oxford University Press titled Under the Influence: What's Real When America Feels Fake. During graduate school, she was a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and a graduate fellow at the Mellon Sawyer Seminar for Trust and Mistrust of Science and Experts (The Trust Collaboratory) at INCITE. She privately consults for a variety of non-profit and corporate clients. She is an affiliate at the University of North Carolina's Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, as well as at University of Washington's Society + Technology.
Danielle or her writing have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, CNBC, MSNBC, NPR, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg, Fox News, Brookings, Mother Jones, Coda, The Conversation, and The Spectator UK, in addition to a plethora of academic publications.
Previously, she was the Director of Forums @ Civic Hall, a community and education center for civic tech, where she curated events, knowledge, and people solving problems at the intersection of technology and civil society. She was also the Director of Personal Democracy Forum, a 15+ year running summit focused on tech, politics, and media that was started by the co-founders of Civic Hall.
In another life, Danielle was an innovation consultant, prototyper, and product manager for clients including Fortune 500 companies, multinational organizations, and nonprofits.
Danielle graduated with a B.A. from Yale University. She was raised on a horse farm in a family of scrap metal dealers in Western Pennsylvania.
C.V. available upon request.
Recent Writing
Danielle's writing and commentary have appeared in a variety of newspaper, magazine, and academic publications. She offers commentary on television, radio, and podcasts. Her older blogging can be found on Medium.
"In the end, CPAC did not hedge its bets by keeping relationships hot with other power players in conservatism and it is losing — in finances, numbers and appeal. They tried to mimic Trump’s populist allure and failed to do it authentically. In that process they have hurt Republicans more broadly, who no longer have a Big Tent activist event but instead have a Big Tent circus taking place on the ugly 2008-era carpeting of a cold convention center in Maryland."
"He is a populist stradling the “globalist” and the “nationalist” divide. He is a potential Jewish convert navigating support for two different Jewish leaders, supporting two very different wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. At home, he is alternately donning his economist glasses and his chainsaw. How will all this impact Argentina’s economy, Jewish population and national fabric?"
"The hard work before us is to shed outdated assumptions about how the world operates without succumbing to the easy comfort of simple scapegoats. That’s especially difficult in times of crisis, when uncertainty surges such as pandemics, political assassinations, natural disasters and economic collapse, where our impulse to make sense of chaos grows strongest. Doing this work is essential if we’re to build the political imagination, institutions and stories our century demands."
Bookings, Media Inquiries, and Contact
Danielle frequently gives talks, delivers news analysis, develops workshops adjacent to her expertise, and offers consulting services. Get in touch if this is of interest using the form.
