loading . . . MAGA insider blows lid off a $120 million right-wing racket For decades, many Democrats have suspected whatâs now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair â the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elonâs 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGAâs most visible young women â has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.
In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, sheâs describing in detail how the Republican right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that âroughly 99 percentâ of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they canât afford.
According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.
Thereâs no disclosure requirement because the content is âpoliticalâ rather than âcommercialâ and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (âspeechâ) are protected in ways that wouldnât be the case for lies told to simply make money.
Sheâs shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and sheâs detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trumpâs team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.
Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume itâs an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for right--wing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.
It isnât. As she put it: âThere is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.â
If any of this sounds familiar, itâs because we already saw a version of it in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department unsealed an indictment revealing that Putinâs people had funneled almost $10 million through a Tennessee shell company, Tenet Media, to bankroll a group of right-wing influencers including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin who podcast to millions daily.
One right-wing influencer was reportedly paid $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus to produce videos that just happened to riff on topics serving Trumpâs and the Kremlinâs interests. (The influencers all swore they were victims who didnât know the money was Russian, if you can believe that, but they sure were happy to take and keep it.)
And the broader point stands: the entire ecosystem of right-wing media is so saturated with covert money that a foreign adversary could plug straight into it without anyone even noticing, and did!
Iâve been around long enough to remember when this stuff was happening to radio hosts, before podcasting took off. Back in the early 2000s, I had a friend who was a nationally syndicated right-wing talk show host, and he told me how every time he gave a speech to a high school audience, a right-wing foundation would cut him a $20,000 check as a âspeakerâs feeâ to supplement his income. He did a dozen or more a year. That was the level of subsidy on offer just for keeping kidsâ minds tilted in the right direction, and it was, he said, available to hundreds of right-wing radio hosts across the country.
None of this came out of nowhere.
It started with the Powell Memo of August 1971, when corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member Lewis Powell (about to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) sent a confidential blueprint to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling American business it had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.
Joseph Coors took that memo and used it to seed the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with $250,000. Richard Mellon Scaife followed with tens of millions. The Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Seid family fortunes joined the party.
Today that same network of six billionaire family fortunes has been joined by other right-wing billionaires to put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone, and dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and Leonard Leoâs network have funneled additional hundreds of millions more into Heritage, the Federalist Society, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, the Cato Institute, ALEC, and the rest of the Powell ecosystem.
Then thereâs Rupert Murdoch, who brought his Australian poison to America with a little help from Ronald Reagan, built Fox âNewsâ into the propaganda flagship for the GOP, and then had to write a $787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly broadcasting lies about the 2020 election.
And letâs not forget Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature and the Queensland University of Technology study, tilted the X algorithm in mid-July 2024 to dramatically boost his own posts and Republican-leaning accounts. After that change, views on Muskâs posts surged 138 percent, and right-wing accounts saw engagement leaps that progressive accounts simply never get any more on billionaire-run social media.
So, step back and look at what all that money buys. It buys a constant drumbeat telling:
â Working-class white people that they should be afraid of Black and Hispanic neighbors,
â Women in the workplace are stealing their jobs,
â Gay and trans people are coming for their kids,
â Low or no taxes on billionaires will âtrickle downâ somehow despite forty-five years of evidence to the contrary,
â Deregulation will lower prices instead of raising them,
â Fossil fuels are essential and climate science is a hoax, and that
â Russia and Israel are our friends while Canada, Germany, and France are our enemies.
Itâs a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.
And the scale of that robbery is genuinely staggering. The most recent RAND Corporation working paper by Carter Price, updated in 2025, calculates that since 1975 a cumulative $79 trillion has been âredistributed upwardâ from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.
In 2023 alone, the transfer to the morbidly rich was $3.9 trillion, enough to give every working American a $32,000/year raise. Meanwhile, weâre still the only developed country on earth without a national health care system, our kids go into a lifetime of debt to attend college, our infrastructure is crumbling, and weâre falling further behind Europe and China every year on the clean-energy transition that climate science says we have maybe a decade to get right.
Republicans donât have any real answers for any of the crises weâre creating, because their actual policy agenda (more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists, more handouts to fossil fuels) both caused most of these problems and is also wildly unpopular when stated plainly.
So they manufacture the rage, pay the influencers, bias the algorithms, fund the think tanks, bankroll right-wing podcasts, radio and TV, and then coordinate and pay for the talking points in private group chats.
They have to do it this way because if American working people ever stopped to add up whatâs actually been done to them over the past forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution, the political landscape would shift overnight.
This should be a national scandal. It should be the lead story on every progressive show, in every Democratic stump speech, in every union newsletter, and on every front page. http://dlvr.it/TSTRQt
