A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another—all this is common knowledge.

Vladimir Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder

Sweater Lady is back, this time quoting Jamelle Bouie from The New York Times as if legacy journalists were neutral observers rather than petty‑bourgeois functionaries of the ideological state. Lenin warned that the petty bourgeois “driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism” oscillates between radical affect and bourgeois submission, always chasing the next respectable fad. It’s fitting, then, that she inadvertently defines soft power with perfect clarity: seduction, co‑optation, the gentle pull toward alignment. I usually focus on how USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy operate overseas, but their domestic initiatives make her admission even funnier. She’s not exposing soft power — she’s modeling it.

She doesn’t have to mention the National Endowment for Democracy or USAID, of course — and even when she does name USAID in passing, she never connects it to the institutional machinery of soft power. Yet the definition she offers is indistinguishable from their mandate: persuasion, narrative management, and cultural alignment rather than force. That’s the part that lands. She describes the machinery without naming it, as if soft power were a vibe instead of an institutional architecture with budgets, grant cycles, and strategic objectives. She’s not critiquing the system; she’s reproducing its language.

She spells it out plainly: “Soft power is about attracting, almost seducing people to come to your side. You get their acquiescence. You gain their support not through coercion but through seduction.” It’s a remarkably literal definition, and it reveals the frame she’s operating in. For her, soft power is interpersonal — a matter of charm, appeal, emotional pull. What disappears is the institutional machinery that turns seduction into policy: the budgets, grant cycles, NGO networks, media partnerships, and “civil society” scaffolding that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy deploy as a matter of routine.

She insists the Trump regime sees soft power as “soft and feminine and gay,” which only makes their domestic use of it more revealing. If they truly believed persuasion was effeminate, they wouldn’t be streamlining it. And while she talks as if soft power were a matter of personal charm, the real machinery is institutional: networks like the Atlas Network shaping Gen Z protests, think tanks like the Heritage Foundation extending their influence into Europe and even Greenland, and the National Endowment for Democracy continuing to support organizations even as its public disclosures grow thinner. She talks about soft power as a cultural mood; the state treats it as an infrastructure.

I call her the Sweater Lady for a reason. It’s not just that she films every video wrapped in a sweater; it’s the whole aesthetic lineage she’s drawing from. She used to teach permaculture and sustainability, and the vibe is pure soft‑austerity — the cozy moralism of “do your part.” It echoes Jimmy Carter’s famous “sweater speech,” where he told Americans to turn down their thermostats to reduce dependence on foreign oil. The sweater becomes a symbol of virtue, restraint, and civic responsibility, even as the politics underneath it are anything but simple.