I built this map as a solar system for understanding right-wing American political influence. Four ideological galaxies, faction sub-stars inside each one, and 85 figures orbiting as planets, moons, or figure-8s between factions. Last updated 15 August 2026.
I designed the system and defined what every visual element means. The AI generated the numbers, so I built a scoring rubric with concrete criteria, ran the whole dataset past two other AI models, and corrected what they caught — repeatedly. The first pass turned out to be roughly two years out of date and to rate podcasters above the Speaker of the House. Both were fixed.
Size is influence. Colour is ideological alignment. Blue rings are current party-line reliability — not extremism. Orbit shape reflects whether someone belongs to one faction or bridges two. Violet dashed rings mark dead or retired figures, red flickering lines mark documented recent feuds, and black holes are political events: turn one on to see which factions it attracts and which it repels. Where someone sits within a galaxy is only label spacing and carries no meaning.
The bridge system overuses MAGA–Libertarian pairings. Events are scored by faction as a default, with individual positions recorded for 43 of the 85 figures — coverage is uneven, so someone without a recorded position isn't necessarily faction-aligned. "Neocon" combines foreign-policy hawks with institutional Republicans, which are not the same thing. Donor networks are absent entirely, and they are probably the strongest real force in this system. The partisanship scale has never been tested outside the right, so there's no way to know whether it means the same thing anywhere else.
Use it to explore who is central, who bridges factions, and how major events might reorganise the right. Not as an objective ranking, and not as an automatically updating research model — nothing here is scraped or live.
It looks precise. It isn't. Have fun with it anyway.
System design, visual grammar, and every encoding rule: Alex Robson. Scores: generated by an AI model, then audited against a written rubric by two further AI models and corrected across several rounds.
The first pass was roughly two years stale and rated commentators above officeholders — the Speaker of the House scored 60 against a commentator at 59. Both corrected. Event response resolves in three steps: the figure's own recorded position where one exists, otherwise the mean of a bridge's two factions, otherwise the faction default.
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