Salon Approval Incubates Radicalism

When socially prominent people publicly adopt or aestheticize radical ideas, they make those ideas respectable and create social pathways for younger actors to turn opinion into organized action. Controlling circulation of stories and rumors (a deliberate actor in the novel spreads lies) is the mechanism that turns fashionable belief into political leverage. — This frames elite performative politics as a causal factor in political radicalization and information warfare, shifting attention from only grassroots drivers to elite-status signaling.