PRO-TRUMP INFLUENCER RYAN FOURNIER and a friend, Jordan Daley, last Friday set out for a night at Ned’s—the $5,000-a-year Washington member’s club frequented by Trump cabinet officials.

They never made it.

As the pair stepped out of the lobby of their shared home in CityCenterDC—the high-end enclave in the heart of the capital—armed Secret Service agents, lying in wait, surrounded them and slapped them into handcuffs.

Both men were under arrest—but for different reasons. Fournier had allegedly broken a court order by texting his ex-girlfriend, having been arrested on May 26 for allegedly pummeling the woman in a drunken rage and threatening to cave her head in with a lamp.

Daley’s alleged crime was less brutal but a lot weirder—and, for the officers on scene, more personal. Days before, a tipster had warned them that Daley had, with Fournier’s help, been using a fake Secret Service badge to pose as an agent. The officers were warned that Daley was so committed to the ruse that he had boasted about a plan to bring guns into the Freedom250 Ultimate Fighting Championship event that would take place forty-eight hours later on the South Lawn of the White House.

“They are going to be attending the UFC event with guns,” the tipster warned agents, according to a summary of the warning in Daley’s arrest warrant.

By that point, the Secret Service had already been investigating Daley’s alleged attempts to pose as a Secret Service agent for months. According to court documents, text messages, and interviews with those with knowledge of the investigation, the pair had been perpetuating the fiction that Daley was an agent assigned to protect Fournier in an effort to impress or intimidate D.C. denizens, from Uber drivers to strip-club employees and even other right-wing influencers. It was all part of an effort to make both men look more important than they were. It all came crashing down when the Secret Service showed up at CityCenterDC, putting an end to the charade.

“The badge is upstairs,” Daley blurted out, as he was being cuffed. Sure enough, the agents found the fake badge in Fournier and Daley’s apartment.

But that was just the start of the saga. As I found out through a search of court documents, direct correspondence with Daley and Fournier, and interviews with their friends and associates, there were more alleged crimes, more insane shenanigans, plenty of backstabbing and betrayal, and even a dicey strip-club get-together.

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The Meth-Tied GOP Operative Behind Bovino 2028

Just five months after being fired from his leadership role in Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, former U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino is eyeing a run for president. He made his interest formally known earlier this week, after having just returned from a racist convention in Portugal in which he appeared alongside literal neo-Nazis.

“If running for President is what it takes to actually get it done, then all options are on the table,” Bovino wrote in a post on X endorsing the exploratory bid.

This post raised a lot of questions. Does terrorizing a major American city for weeks on end really serve as a strong platform for a run for office? Are there height restrictions for presidential candidates? And who, exactly, is behind this effort?

After all, to most observers, you’d have to be on meth to think that Bovino could actually prevail in a 2028 GOP primary against the likes of Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Right?

Well, maybe!

Bovino’s 2028 exploratory run is the brainchild of Jacob Engels, a former protégé of notorious dirty trickster Roger Stone and a Laura Loomer pal who has since turned on them and the rest of Trump world.

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Engels put out a video announcing this effort back on May 31. Walking across a bridge in a suit and sunglasses, sporting a tightly cropped haircut, Engels extolled Bovino’s tough leadership and blasted White House chief of staff Susie Wiles for “86”-ing the former border commander from the administration. Engels then hawked a Cash App link to help fund the nascent effort and pledged to send Bovino back to Minneapolis for a “hero’s welcome.” Engels also launched a website for the campaign, now promoted by Bovino himself, that features weird fascist imagery and a picture of Bovino under the Game of Thrones-style name “House Bovino”:

In an interview with me, Engels confirmed his involvement and said he thinks Bovino could offer “true leadership.”

It’s quite a come-up for Engels. He has no obvious campaign experience at this level. And if this one actually does take off, he could have several distractions while spearheading it. Because just a few weeks ago, Engels was being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by police outside a motel, allegedly with meth in his pocket.

According to a police incident report obtained by False Flag, sheriff’s deputies in the small Wisconsin town of River Falls were called to a budget motel around 1 p.m. on May 20. Engels must have been starting to catch the notice of law enforcement, because the night before, he and his mother had been arguing so loudly that police had been called to separate them. When the cops showed up again the next afternoon, Engels was refusing to check out of the motel.

Staff initially gave him extra time to leave. But Engels still wouldn’t budge—allegedly calling the receptionist a “special bitch.” When officers did eventually make it into the room, they found it strewn with empty liquor bottles. According to the report, Engels himself was “highly intoxicated” and “reeked of intoxicants.”

“His speech was repetitive, vulgar, confrontational, argumentative and he was overall incredibly uncooperative,” one officer noted.

Engels allegedly waved around a wooden paddle in a threatening manner, and boasted about having once played football.

“I could scoop you both!” Engels purportedly declared to the deputies, a boast they took to mean that he could body-slam them.

Having met Engels myself, I doubt the diminutive Gen Z’er could body-slam one police officer, much less two. Making matters worse, deputies claim the ornery Engels launched into explicit rants, spouting such words and phrases as “motherfucker,” “queer,” and the evocative “double-jointed pussy.”

After Engels allegedly refused to leave the room, deputies wrestled him down to the ground and forcibly handcuffed him, according to the report. Deputies claimed a dollar-bill with traces of methamphetamine on it fell out of Engel’s pockets. They also allegedly found muscle relaxant pills and Xanax in his other belongings.

The incident raises obvious questions about whether Engels is capable of managing a motel bill—let alone Bovino’s political ambitions. The report notes this was actually the second motel Engels was banned from in the area in just one week.

It’s quite a fall for someone once considered a leading henchman of Stone. Engels had a starring role in “Stop the Steal” protests in Florida in 2018, and joined Loomer and fellow mischief-maker Jacob Wohl on a bizarre trip to Minneapolis to investigate whether Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had married her brother.

Once, Engels’s upward climb in the world of cut-throat ratfuckery seemed destined to result in some role in the Trump administration or D.C.’s extended universe of far-right rabble. But that promotion never came. Instead, Engels has been out in the cold, nursing various grievances in Wisconsin and resenting old MAGA friends amid a feeling he’d been shut out of the Trump world career he deserved. Among other claims he’s made in a series of strange right-wing media appearances is his insistence that Loomer is transgender.

Maybe Bovino is Engels’s ticket out of this dumpster. But if this is the ride, he’s taking it while facing a felony meth charge, as well as four misdemeanors related to resisting arrest and possessing the pills. Engels claims he told Bovino about the dustups, and the “commander had no concerns.”

Instead, in our interview, Engels asked why other right-wing media figures like Clavicular were able to use meth without facing similar public blowback. And he suggested that he’s the victim of some conspiracy, saying he was targeted only after accusing Stone himself of being a meth user.

“I just find it curious that, out of nowhere, I’m the meth-head,” he told me.

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The Gravest Insult in the MAGA Womanosphere

For right-wing men, the worst insult you can lob at your opponent is calling them a federal informant or “fed.” But for conservative women, the jab that sticks the hardest is accusing your MAGA foe of having a gay husband.

Consider the plight of Alex Clark, a former reality-TV contestant who has reinvented herself as a MAHA podcaster for Turning Point USA.

Clark has long been dogged by the fact that she’s preaching a sort of traditional housewife lifestyle without being married or having kids herself. At just 33, Clark would hardly be doomed to be a “femcel,” or female incel, in the regular world. But by TPUSA standards, she’s practically a spinster.

So it was a big deal last weekend when Clark, speaking at TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Summit, unveiled her new fiancé: champion fiddle player and wellness blogger Vance Voetberg.

Clark’s detractors remained unconvinced, pointing to a video of Voetberg adopting a sort of effeminate accent while working in a coffee shop as proof that he’s gay. Candace Owens, a longtime foe of both Clark and TPUSA, played clips of Clark calling for a return to American masculinity on her show and contrasting them with videos of Voetberg.

“He is, without question, objectively effeminate,” Owens said.

There’s no evidence that Voetberg is gay. And since he’s engaged to a woman, I think it’s fair for our purposes to assume he’s not! Even if he were, God bless.

But in the den of vipers that is women’s MAGA media, this was no small matter. Things got so bad that Voetberg was forced to put out a video statement, released on Clark’s own X account, saying, in effect, that he’s not gay and that Owens would definitely not be invited to the wedding. Clark herself retweeted a post saying her fiancé “sounds completely normal.”

Accusations of “lavender marriages” are frequently lobbed in MAGA’s civil wars—so often, in fact, that it’s become a trope. Laura Loomer and others have speculated about whether Owens’s own husband is gay. Amy Dangerfield, the “groypette” who organized a controversial America First conference earlier this year, has faced allegations that her husband is transgender, only because he’s a slight fellow.

And of course, podcaster Benny Johnson and his wife threatened to sue Milo Yiannopoulos last year for his insistence that Johnson is gay. (No lawsuit has been filed as of this writing.)

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Corrections (1:45 p.m. EDT June 11 2026): The originally published version of this story incorrectly stated that during the arrest at the motel, police claim to have found Xanax and muscle relaxant pills on Engels’s person; the pills were allegedly found in his other belongings. The story has also been updated to clarify that Engels does have some lower-level campaign experience.

FBI wades into the MAGA civil war

Trump world has been roiled for nearly a year with internal divisions—over Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, the Charlie Kirk assassination, and on and on.

But now, the Trump loyalists appear to have realized something: They control the world’s leading law enforcement agency and can use it to settle these meddlesome internal squabbles!

Last week, the FBI promised to investigate one of the players in the ongoing MAGA fight over Candace Owens, providing the strongest indication to date that the bureau will start going after right-wing influencers who are critical of Trump.

What stood out was not just that the FBI announced the investigation on X, but

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YEARS BEFORE PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP nominated him to be the acting director of national intelligence for the government of the United States of America, Bill Pulte was spending his time circling a gullible group of investors trading shares in a dead company.

The year was 2023 and Bed Bath & Beyond, after prolonged death throes, finally stumbled into bankruptcy in April; its stock (“BBBY”) was delisted from Nasdaq in early May. But a portion of the shareholders went on believing a resurrection was possible. Over the previous year, the retail chain had become a prominent “memestock”—the subject of intense speculation and rumor—and after the company shut down they refused to accept that their investments were worthless. Many of these diehards kept trading shares “over the counter” (as “BBBYQ”).

Pulte claimed in the summer of 2023 that he was “captivated” by the “incredible BBBY community.” And he went to extraordinary, often ridiculous lengths to promote it. On a livestream in September 2023, Pulte donned a jacket with astronaut patches, implying that the bankrupt company’s stock would somehow still go “to the moon.” At some events, Pulte would wear a bulletproof vest for fear that an unnamed cabal acting against the home-goods store might try to kill him.

In the fall of 2023, the BBBYQ shares were finally eliminated—but even that didn’t convince the lingering true believers, and Pulte kept stoking their baseless excitement. He even organized a December 2023 event in a Florida hangar that was, as journalist Paris Martineau put it, “dedicated to the conspiracy that Bed Bath and Beyond never actually went bankrupt.” With Pulte sitting onstage, one promoter slapped a grateful supporter in the face with a green dildo, apparently a powerful symbol in their inscrutable online subculture.

An hour and a half later, Pulte himself would be presented with an award: a small, circular trophy base with a little blue T. Rex on top of it. He accepted the gift, saying “That looks pretty badass.”

None of this had any effect on the defunct company. Bed Bath & Beyond did not arise like Lazarus from the grave, and the shareholders did not make back their money. But Pulte himself never slowed down. Just over two years after the dildo incident, he was rocketing upward in Trump world, entrusted to be the nation’s top housing regulator and—more to the point—one of the president’s primary henchmen.

Indeed, it is Pulte’s relentless pursuit of the president’s enemies that appears now to have earned him his DNI nod. With the same shamelessness he brought to pimping BBBY, he has dug up mortgage-fraud allegations against Trump critics like Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.

And like those earlier Bed Bath & Beyond ventures, the more recent investigations have ended in failure. So too have Pulte’s non-vengeance government endeavors. His Trump-endorsed proposal to solve the housing crisis with fifty-year mortgages flopped. It was Pulte who also reportedly provided Trump with the AI-generated picture of the president as Jesus that enraged Christians this past April.

Critics of Pulte have pointed to this record of futility—in addition to the complete absence of any experience in the intelligence community—to show why he should not be getting the acting DNI post. But it’s also worth considering Pulte’s pre-government background as a sort of internet clown in the memestock community when considering just how wild his selection truly is. Because it was there that Pulte distinguished himself through a terrible sense of judgment and a willingness to say whatever people wanted to hear.

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PULTE’S RISE IN POLITICS has been fueled by his inherited wealth. He is the grandson and namesake of homebuilding magnate William J. Pulte, and was appointed to the board of construction giant Pulte Homes in 2016 as part of his grandfather’s corporate maneuvering.

In 2019, Pulte started to give away large amounts of money on Twitter to random people in what he called “Twitter Philanthropy.” The giveaways boosted his social media accounts, since people had to follow him so that he could send them money. As I write this, Pulte has a whopping 2.9 million followers on X.

Unhappy with Pulte’s rising profile and how it was deluging the company with misdirected pleas for money, the Pulte Homes board removed him in 2020, according to the New York Times. Bill Pulte didn’t take it easily. He launched a years-long lawsuit in 2022 by suing an executive at his family’s company, accusing them of creating a “Ghost of Bill Pulte” account on Twitter that posed as Pulte’s now-dead grandfather to criticize his grandson.

In the meantime, Pulte also started getting in on the memestock mania, in which investors tried to strategically reap profits off the unexpected price spikes in unlikely stocks, such as GameStop and AMC Theatres. Bed Bath & Beyond was one of his first major ventures.

In 2022, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen had bought a large stake in Bed Bath & Beyond, and his memestock reputation caused the struggling home-goods chain’s stock price to rise.

Retail investors hoping to make a quick killing followed Cohen into the stock. But when Cohen sold his shares five months later for a $60 million profit, the price collapsed. Rather than accept that they had been left holding the bag, some investors clung to the stock in the hopes that Cohen somehow had a secret plan to salvage the price.1

They coalesced into online communities, where Pulte became an object of interest. Cohen had exchanged some tweets unrelated to Bed Bath & Beyond stock with Pulte, prompting shareholders to believe Pulte knew of the supposed secret plan to salvage the company. Pulte didn’t dispel the chatter. Instead, he leaned into it. He appeared on podcasts promoting the stock, and embraced his role as a Bed Bath & Beyond sage.2

“I’m the biggest degenerate you ever met,” Pulte said on the show where he wore the astronaut jacket, using a popular term to describe a hardcore memestock investor.

Pulte began to reference the 2020 Taylor Swift track “Only the Young” in his tweets, and used it as an intro song in his public appearances. BBBYQ shareholders became convinced, QAnon-style, that the song had a hidden message about how Pulte and Cohen would rescue their fortunes.

In the exuberant, male-heavy memestock world, “Only the Young” soon came to be referred to as “Only the Hung.” At the Florida hangar event, Pulte was given a case of helicopter gunship ammo that had been inscribed with the more sexualized song title. And on the livestream where he put on the astronaut jacket, Pulte sat in front of a whiteboard with “ONLY THE HUNG!” written on it.

Despite their adoration, the shareholders clearly grated on Pulte. At one point during the livestream with the astronaut jacket, a prominent BBBYQ investor grew tearful talking about his hopes for the stock’s revival. An unimpressed Pulte listened to him while eating ice cream from a pint.

Like other failed memestock online groups, the BBBYQ subculture was filled with paranoia about shadowy forces out to keep the stock down, which is apparently why Pulte started going out in public to shareholder gatherings wearing a bulletproof vest and accompanied by a security detail.

Whether Pulte had legitimate reasons to fear for his safety is impossible fully to know. But the investors clearly were deluded.

In fact, to attend the Florida event in December 2023, they paid $500 each, believing Pulte was some sort of oracle who could recover their lost investments. But instead of answers, they were left with dildo humor and treated with cases of Coors Light and bottled water.

Even the trophy Pulte received bore a regrettable inscription, a combination of the millennial compliment “This guy fucks” and his supposedly secret-meaning slogan “Only the Young.” Put together, it read: “Bill Pulte fucks only the young.”

Pulte seemed at least entertained by it all. He was very much in on the gag. He arrived at the Florida event in a helicopter but flight data showed that it had taken off from the same airfield, circled the site, then returned for a climactic landing.

Why would Pulte subject himself to this? A clue came late in the night, as one of his associates, Kais Maalej (shown standing next to Pulte in the bulletproof-vest photo above), announced that attendees at the Florida event would each receive one share of Pulte Homes as part of the $500 ticket fee for attendance. In order to get the share, though, they had to sign an agreement to hold the stock long-term—as well as to sign their shareholder rights over to one of Pulte’s friends, according to a letter filed in the Bed Bath & Beyond bankruptcy case.

“We are in a family that I see is very very good family, it’s a great family,” Maalej told the crowd. “It’s the Pulte family.”

It appears that Pulte may have been trying to harness the restless energy of memestock investors to settle scores with the Pulte Homes executives. But if that was Pulte’s plan, it failed too. He never made it back to the company. Instead, he entered Trump’s orbit through the usual means, according to the New York Times: getting retweets from Trump and buying membership at Mar-a-Lago. It changed the course of Pulte’s life and, in turn, U.S. history. The supposed Bed Bath & Beyond oracle who watched a dildo get slapped across a man’s face is now set to have access to the country’s most sensitive intelligence matters. His old denizens in the memestock world can hardly believe it.

On Tuesday, commenters in a subreddit devoted to tracking and mocking the antics of this world reacted in disbelief to Pulte’s appointment. How, they wondered, could this man keep failing upward?

“If I was American I’d be crying,” wrote one.

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THE CONSERVATIVE INFLUENCERS have spoken: Harley-Davidson—whose motorcycles helped create the paradigm of American masculinity—is in fact woke and gay.

The past week has seen wave after wave of MAGA personalities and meme accounts decide, seemingly out of nowhere, that Harley-Davidson was company non grata. MAGA influencer Priya Patel declared the manufacturer “fundamentally anti-American,” while Hercules actor-turned-tweeter Kevin Sorbo said his friends were abandoning Harley-Davidson en masse.

Conservative meme account “Prison Mitch” told his more than 100,000 followers that Harley-Davidson is “woke and gay” then posted a picture of a man in a biker’s vest having gay sex (jarring but basically SFW), quipping that Harley-Davidson riders rode a very different kind of “hog.”

Right-wing attacks on supposedly liberal corporations aren’t new. But, beyond the confrontational imagery, this campaign against the motorcycle giant stands out for the fact that Harley-Davidson doesn’t appear to have done anything terribly “woke.”

Instead, the effort seems designed squarely just to benefit Indian Motorcycle, a Harley rival. How can you tell? Because basically every influencer throwing a grenade at Harley is also simultaneously boosting its competitor. Prison Mitch, for example, posted a Marco Rubio meme with the secretary of state in an Indian biker’s vest.

“Harley Davidson spent years pandering to activists and corporate DEI politics,” complained pro-Trump personality Isabella Maria DeLuca, who is not a noted motorcycle enthusiast. “Indian Motorcycle spent years building motorcycles and honoring American heritage.”

The curious operation against Harley-Davidson appears to be just the latest example of pay-for-play coverage on the right, in which undisclosed payments wash through MAGA media with the apparent aim of whipping up a social media frenzy against a “woke” business or political foe.

It’s not clear who, if anyone, organized the latest attacks. And neither Harley-Davidson nor Indian responded to requests for comment. But the arrangement seemed obvious enough that Trump adviser and digital political consultant Alex Bruesewitz, openly blurted out that it had to be the end product of a paid campaign.

“Here is an example of a coordinated influencer campaign on X,” Bruesewitz tweeted last week, attaching a screenshot of one post from the apparent campaign. “Copy and paste talking points about a random issue. And yes, foreign countries also pay influencers for certain campaigns like this. We need stronger disclosure laws!”

Bruesewitz quickly deleted the tweet, and hasn’t commented on the matter since.

The bizarre storm began on Wednesday, when mixed martial arts fighter Sean Strickland posted that he was ditching Harley-Davidson motorcycles for the, in his view, substantially less woke Indian Motorcycle.

“Officially made the switch to Indian Motorcycle,” Strickland wrote. “What does Indian stand for? No fucking clue, the way it should be. Everytime I got on my harley I was indirectly supporting radical idealogy [sic] that actually pushing radical idealogy [sic] on children.

“There is no going back from that,” he concluded.

Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time Strickland has ditched Harley-Davidson. Back in 2024, when Harley-Davidson came under fire from the right for its DEI initiatives, Strickland posted a video saying he was selling his current hog and would never buy another from the company. He didn’t mention Indian Motorcycle at the time.

In the meantime, Harley-Davidson has switched CEOs and rolled back its diversity policies. Still, Strickland’s announcement last week that he was giving up on Harley-Davidson—this time for real—won a suspicious amount of support in the pro-Trump corners of the internet, where motorcycle culture typically isn’t a big topic of discussion.

“Everyone should dump their Harleys and ride bikes that are actually made in the United States,” the MAGA megaphone “Jack Unheard” wrote to his 198,000 followers. “Indian Motorcycles is doing it right.”

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Further raising questions about the authenticity of the MAGA influencerverse’s newfound affection for Indian Motorcycle is their striking knowledge of its corporate talking points. Many of the posts attacking Harley-Davidson remember to mention that Indian’s 125th anniversary is coming up, and awkwardly shoehorn the date into the upcoming celebrations of America’s 250th birthday.

“With America’s 250th birthday approaching, we should be celebrating American heritage, not corporate activism,” meme account “Clown World” wrote in a now-deleted post praising Strickland. “Indian turns 125 this year.”

“Coincidentally, 2026 marks 125 years since the company was founded, dovetailing nicely with celebrations of 250 years of US independence this year,” wrote far-right X user “Captive Dreamer” in an unusually corporate register.

Incredibly, the campaign appears to have even secured an actual Trump official: self-proclaimed “alpha male” Nick Adams, now working as the “Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values,” a consolation role after his bid to become ambassador to Malaysia was pulled.

“Harley Davidson is a woke company that has repeatedly supported leftist causes and bragged about it to their shareholders,” Adams remarked in one post agreeing with Strickland’s decision to get an Indian bike. “Indian Motorcycles are 100% pro-America and have been for 125 years.”

The Australian-born Adams kept up the attacks, as well as the trademark 125th anniversary language, in yet another post.

“Unlike Harley Davidson, Indian Motorcycles are 100% pro-America,” he wrote. “125 years of greatness. Make the switch.”

Neither Adams nor Strickland responded to requests for comment.

THE APPARENT CAMPAIGN to trash Harley-Davidson is extra awkward in part because many conservative politicians enjoy their Harleys. Among prominent Republicans, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) drives his Harley around Washington. (It even has a sidecar.) Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) rides, as does former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whose state is home to Harley-Davidson’s headquarters. President Trump himself has had an up-and-down relationship with the company, praising it as an American icon early in his first term before angrily tweeting about its decision to move some production overseas in 2018. He went on to support a boycott of the company before running to its defense amid trade strife with Europe in 2019.

The White House has not weighed in on the current tiff. But, perhaps not surprisingly, the influencers’ posts attacking Harley have been filled with replies from Sons of Anarchy types unhappy that MAGA figures are attacking their road hogs in favor of the lesser-known Indian bikes.

“I will never own an Indian motorcycle,” one die-hard Harley owner replied to Sorbo. “When my Harley won’t run anymore, I’m done riding.”

There’s another flaw in using MAGA world to sell Indian Motorcycle. It’s pitching a company called “Indian” at a time when the American right has been consumed with hate for people from the country of India. In an apparent effort to get around that problem, the operator of pro-Trump meme account “Wall Street Mavericks” made sure his followers knew it definitely wasn’t that India.

“Sean has switched to ‘Indian Motorcycles,’” the account posted. “I know nothing about them, other than it is not a reference to the country of India.”

Glad they cleared that up.

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FAR-RIGHT FLORIDA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE James Fishback tried his boldest campaign gambit yet on Saturday: getting married in a Catholic church to a mystery woman he met just a few months ago.

By Wednesday, the honeymoon already appeared to be over. At a press conference, Fishback urged his new wife to take the stage to answer questions, saying he expected one about her perfume. But when he realized instead that the question was about education policy, he told his bride to step away.

“Stand there and look good,” Fishback said, nudging his wife to back off. Who says romance is dead?

The surprise marriage has been one of the stranger twists in the saga of Fishback’s campaign—a campaign that doesn’t appear destined for the governor’s mansion but that has polled surprisingly well against Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds (R) and has offered a glimpse into the kind of extreme politics that can succeed with young conservatives.

The new wedding also raises a question: What would possess a woman to rush to the altar with the racist, scheming, heavily indebted Fishback?

In an email, Fishback told me he met his wife at a Miami bookstore. They started dating three months ago, he said, adding that they connected in part over a desire to marry quickly instead of slogging through “the modern culture of mindless dating.”

The most striking thing about the news of the wedding was that Fishback wasn’t marrying the woman whom he introduced for months as his girlfriend. Since December, Fishback had been showing up at campaign events with a woman named Francesca “Frankie” Raine. Though Raine also seemed to appear out of nowhere, the couple was moving fast towards a nuptial. In a January appearance on pro-Trump personality Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, a panelist asked Fishback if Raine was his “wife.” He replied succinctly: “Yeah.”

Yet sometime around February, Raine was out of the picture, replaced by the new Valeria Fishback—maiden name Valeria Quimby-Moro.

The reaction on the right has been mixed. While one devoted Fishback acolyte praised the marriage, which took place in front of roughly two dozen people, as the biggest political wedding since John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette tied the knot, groyper-world commentator “Chad Champion” fumed that Fishback had married “just some e-girl.”

“A month before your election, you just swap out your wife,” complained the buff pundit, who appears shirtless except for a balaclava.

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THE NEW MRS. FISHBACK has one clear advantage over her jilted rival: Her internet presence was locked down before their marriage became public. As far-right activist and Fishback foe Laura Loomer relished in pointing out back in January, Raine had a previous life as a sort of cryptocurrency babe named “Crypto Barbie,” who sold burlesque, scantily clad NFTs of herself.

How would that play in Tallahassee?

As Fishback’s wedding loomed, Raine appeared to freak out on X, posting pictures of herself in a wedding dress and claiming Fishback dumped her because of political pressure. On Wednesday, she quipped that Valeria would become the “first lady of Rumble”—the right’s second-tier alternative to YouTube. Later that day, she vowed to “spill all the tea,” presumably about how things ended with Fishback.

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Despite Valeria Fishback’s attempts to make her social media history private, there are a couple clues to what might lead a woman to rush into a wedding with a gubernatorial hopeful. A 2020 article in a Miami Catholic publication notes that Valeria attended an online high school because of “depression and difficulties at school”—pre-pandemic. As the Miami New Times notes, Valeria Fishback’s Pinterest page has been filled with wedding imagery, along with a plantation-style house that somewhat resembles a governor’s mansion.

Valeria has also been palling around with the kinds of extremists who are attracted to Fishback’s campaign. While her Instagram account has been locked, back on March 1 she was shooting guns off with the owner of a popular far-right aesthetics account.

Whatever the merits of Fishback’s new relationship, given his history it’s a notable (and a relief) that his bride appears to be in her mid-twenties. Fishback previously faced accusations of having had a sexual relationship with an underage girl while she participated in his anti-woke high school debate program. Fishback, who later had a failed engagement with that woman when she became an adult, has never been criminally charged in that case.

ONE MORE THOUGHT on the candidate’s connubial complications: Any jewelry Fishback gives his new wife could wind up in one of his many court cases. With Fishback owing his former hedge fund employer enormous debts related to various unsuccessful schemes he tried to pull, his creditors have been zeroing in on whatever assets—like cars and jewelry—that he may have left. That includes a Cartier watch he wore to a deposition in one of the cases, which corresponds to a watch-sized purchase in his credit card history at a Cartier dealer. Asked about the watch’s whereabouts, Fishback insisted in a recent court filing that he was just borrowing the watch from a friend.

Raine didn’t respond to a request for comment about Fishback, and she hasn’t yet followed through on her repeated threats to reveal some secret about him. But watching from the sidelines as anti-Fishback accounts on X circulated the video of the candidate nudging his new bride to step aside and hush up, Raine got in one more jab.

“Dude I am so glad that is not me,” she wrote.

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BEFORE HIS DOUBLE-DIGIT PRIMARY DEFEAT on Tuesday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) spent the final days of his campaign dogged by an ex-girlfriend’s revelations about their sex life.

In an appearance on Laura Loomer’s online show, Republican activist Cynthia West revealed that Massie called his penis “pine cone,” and claimed he slept with Rep. Lauren Boebert just weeks after his wife’s death in 2024. Over the course of two hours, West spilled numerous details about the dirty talk going down in Massie’s boudoir. What emerged is a portrait of a man with just the kind of rich fantasy life you might expect from a libertarian once described as the “godfather of ‘dildonics.’” (For his part, Massie has acknowledged the relationship but not addressed West’s specific claims.)

I couldn’t understand what on earth West was thinking. Why would an apparently sane person—who is herself running for office—publicly expose the most private details of her intimate life to Laura Loomer, of all people?

Of course, we can’t rule out the hidden hand of Trumpworld. Trump, who promoted Loomer’s interview with West, clearly disliked Massie and helped drive him out of office. And for her part, West first publicized her salacious claims with the help of a Kentucky lawyer she described as meeting through a mutual friend “in political circles,” though she insists she isn’t getting paid. In January, West posted a picture of herself driving to what she said was Mar-a-Lago.

Still, if it was always this easy to convince the ex-lovers of Trump critics to kiss and tell for no clear personal gain, I have to think we’d know a lot more about other politicians’ pine cones.

I think part of the answer to the strange question of West’s motivations lies in a very different type of dirty deeds. I’m talking about West’s affiliation with a cult-like group of memestock investors known as “MMTLP,” who dream of attaining untold riches—and resent lawmakers like Massie who won’t help them.

While Massie would have almost certainly lost Tuesday’s primary even without the revelations about his sex life, his, ahem, passionate collision with West and her conspiracy theories offers a glimpse into how smear campaigns come together in right-wing media—and a cautionary tale for libidinous congressmen everywhere.

As West’s jilted-lover revenge-tour began in earnest this week, she offered several clues to her “MMTLP” affiliations that were barely noticed by the national media. For instance, she shared an X post that linked Massie with Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates and argued he had betrayed members of the MMTLP movement, despite dating “MMTLP shareholder/advocate” West.

“Interesting,” West wrote.

She didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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So just what the heck is MMTLP?

Well, back in June 2021, a gaggle of retail investors enchanted with the recent explosion of memestocks (like Gamestop and AMC) became convinced that a little-known company called Meta Materials was about to go “to the moon.” They piled money into an offering that combined Meta Materials’s stock with that of a stripper pole manufacturer. The Frankenstein stock that emerged was identified by the ticker “MMTLP.”

Investors felt sure that the stock was facing the type of “short squeeze” that would cause its price to skyrocket—the very thing that had propelled Gamestop to extraordinary heights just months earlier.

This fantasy, according to a 2024 SEC complaint, was exactly what executives at the combined companies wanted investors to believe. The SEC alleged that, in an effort to hold on to oil leases and prop up their sagging businesses, the heads of the combined companies colluded to fool small investors into believing the price would explode in a short squeeze. The scheme worked—investors pumped $137.5 million into the MMTLP stock in the frenzy, almost tripling its share price when it reached a high of $11.65.

Sensing something sketchy, federal regulators halted trading right before the company went private—cutting off any chance at a lucrative short squeeze, and leaving retail MMTLP investors stuck with a bag of worthless, untradeable stocks.

Rather than blaming the companies that hatched the scheme, angry MMTLP holders tried to convince the government to bail them out and punish the regulatory bodies they claim rigged the game in favor of short-sellers. Even now, years later, they still bemoan their substantial losses in live X spaces, or dress up in bird costumes to demand justice. Inevitably, the bagholders have concocted conspiracy theories that blame their misfortunes on interference from a cabal that stretches from Epstein to meddling federal regulators.

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West herself became a minor but controversial celebrity in the MMTLP community for alternately predicting that investors “are gonna be freaking rich” and complaining about the dire state of her own finances after the trading halt.

Under the name “Cyntax Queen of the Metaverse,” she posted pictures of herself dressed up as the Statue of Liberty, attended at least one MMTLP protest, and claimed in one video that both her own marriage and that of a friend had been destroyed as a result of their investments in MMTLP.

“My marriage is done,” West said. Others, she said, had lost their lives.

Fed up, West took her campaign for MMTLP justice into the real world, where she met with Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) and tried and failed to meet with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

MMTLP’s defrauded investors certainly aren’t the first stock-market participants to fall into conspiracy theories and dreams of a government bailout after seeing a big bet fail. The people who years ago bought essentially worthless Iraqi dinars in the hopes that the American government would “revalue” the currency (and make them rich) can still be seen online asking Trump to make them whole. Back in the 1990s, investors in a scam called Omega became convinced that a government conspiracy had stopped them, too, from becoming wealthy. That movement later grew into part of QAnon.

Incredibly, though, MMTLP activists have actually gotten some traction. Both Bill Pulte, a top Trump henchman and housing official, and Andrew Bailey, now a co-deputy FBI director, endorsed the MMTLP investors’ theories before taking office.

“The people are fucking livid about this,” Pulte told right-wing influencer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate in 2024, emphasizing that the MMTLP cause had gained something of a “cult-like following.”

In 2023, seventy-four members of Congress signed a letter demanding more answers about MMTLP. Massie, notably, didn’t sign—making him an enemy and a target for angry MMTLP bagholders awaiting their cash.

After Massie and West split in early 2025, West appears to have carried a grudge against her former paramour for not embracing the shareholders’ conspiracy theories. In a 2025 X post, she claimed that dating Massie had taught her how rigged the system was against small investors and the American republic itself. When a MMTLP shareholder on X asked Massie to help their cause, West cut in.

“He doesn’t care,” she replied. “Your [sic] wasting your time.”

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In her moment of newfound notoriety, West has made other references back to her status as a sort of niche celebrity in the MMTLP world. On Loomer’s show, she said Massie made her delete her pro-MMTLP account on X when they were dating. (This isn’t Loomer’s first MMTLP rodeo: She previously featured another MMTLP activist who goes by the investing alias “Drew Diligence” on her show.)

Investors stuck with the worthless stock have reacted with both excitement and embarrassment to West’s new prominence. Many seem to hope that her intervention to help Trump’s campaign against Massie might inspire the president to somehow unlock their lost gains.

As for Massie, they think he got what he deserved for ignoring their plight.

“You should have helped MMTLP and respect [sic] Cynthia,” crowed one jilted investor to Massie after Loomer posted about West’s story. “Now instead you got MMTLPed.”

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IN APRIL, LAWYER MARK MCCLOSKEY bowed out of his quixotic quest to win reparations for January 6th rioters.

Denizens of the internet may remember McCloskey from a widely debated (and even more widely memed) incident from six years ago, when he and his wife brandished guns in front of their St. Louis mansion as Black Lives Matters protesters walked by. More recently, in his day job, McCloskey spent over a year working with fellow lawyer Peter Ticktin, a high school classmate of Donald Trump, attempting to win some kind of payment for the J6ers who fought Capitol Police officers and trashed Congress.

But last month, sick with what he would later describe as a terminal lung disease, McCloskey said the effort to make the rioters whole would have to go on without him.

“Due to personal reasons, I am unable to continue the fight at this time,” McCloskey wrote to his clients on April 10.

Then something miraculous happened. On May 14, ABC News reported that Trump would drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and instead accept a settlement for $1.7 billion to create a fund to pay victims of what his administration has called Justice Department “weaponization.” That money could very well go to former January 6th defendants, perhaps with a cut to their lawyer along the way. Who’s to say?

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Well, wouldn’t you know it, just a day after news of the settlement broke, McCloskey announced that he had started to feel a lot better, telling clients in another letter I obtained that his “personal prognosis is not as bleak” as suspected. Divine intervention at its most miraculous: He could work on their cases once again.

“With God’s help and your prayers, we can prevail!” McCloskey declared.

The convenient timing of McCloskey’s return to health has not gone unnoticed in the fractious world of January 6th participants, with some reparations-hungry rioters mocking him for coming back right when the money looks set to start flowing. Meanwhile, according to a series of bitter emails from the two lawyers that I reviewed,

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There’s a truly villainous new livestreamer who’s become a cause célèbre on the right—a guy so bad he makes Clavicular’s videos about drug overdoses and the Israeli mafia look like an episode of Bluey.

Meet “Chud the Builder,” a mustachioed, cowboy hat–wearing 28-year-old Tennessee man whose real name is Dalton Eatherly. His internet alias combines the insult “chud”—basically slang for a low-brow right-winger—and a play on both Eatherly’s profession as a construction worker and the children’s show Bob the Builder.

Eatherly’s gimmick is that he films himself walking around calling black people the n-word or accusing them of “chimping out”—a racial slur comparing black people to monkeys. When the people he’s accosting get understandably mad, he encourages them to attack him so he’ll have an excuse to defend himself with mace or a gun.

You can probably guess where this is headed. On Wednesday, Eatherly shot someone in the Nashville suburb of Clarksville, according to police, apparently after the man punched him. Eatherly also shot himself during the incident, sustaining a minor injury. Eatherly has been charged with attempted murder by the Montgomery County district attorney.

“Everybody knew this was going to happen,” popular streamer Asmongold said Wednesday after the shooting, describing the event as a “huge, huge aura loss.”

Clearly, Eatherly is acting in this vile way for attention. He’s been on my radar for a few months, but his shtick is so depressing I was reluctant to give it any more coverage. At the point where a rising online star is shooting people, though, I think it’s worth considering how the economics of livestreaming and the right’s embrace of even the most despicable people could allow a figure like “Chud the Builder” to exist, let alone get a serious following.

Eatherly’s rise has been fueled by “clipping” accounts on social media, which take the hours of streaming he produces and repackage his most incendiary moments into shorter videos. He’s appeared on InfoWars and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’s online show to make his case that he’s defending free speech by trying to reclaim the n-word for white people. His videos have also, understandably, been heavily commented on by black YouTubers, some of whom have raised the specter of violently confronting him.

“Somebody might have to just do it,” hip-hop podcaster DJ Akademiks said recently, calling for Eatherly to be assassinated in the same way Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was.

This sort of boomerang effect—in which Eatherly says the most provocative thing possible to get attention, which, in turn, gets a provocative response that also gets attention—is the fuel of the modern internet. And it’s lucrative.

The videos have made Eatherly a notorious figure in Clarksville, where he lives. He’s also raised $65,000 in a crowdfunding campaign, and sells a memecoin called, naturally, “$CHUD.”

Eatherly’s journey into commercialized racism began sometime in 2024 or early 2025, when he got into a road rage incident with a black woman. The woman’s daughter posted a picture of him, claiming he had called her family the n-word, which set off a series of events Eatherly claims lost him his job in construction. In response, Eatherly began filming himself berating black people in public.

It’s a strange way to make a living, even in 2026. But it’s not unique to Eatherly. Last year, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix made more than $800,000 from a crowdfunding campaign after she was filmed calling a five-year-old boy the n-word. Hendrix wasn’t a livestreamer, just an organic racist. But Chud’s obnoxious, confrontational style has been echoed by other livestreamers, like an American internet personality named Johnny Somali, who was just sentenced to six months in a South Korean labor prison for harassing Koreans as part of his content creation strategy.

Intriguingly, the FBI appears to have shown interest in Eatherly and his associates even before Wednesday’s shooting. Last week, Eatherly was arrested in an unrelated case for allegedly refusing to pay his bill at a restaurant after being kicked out for livestreaming and making racial attacks. While in custody, Eatherly claimed, he was interviewed by an FBI counterterrorism agent about any ties he could have to an extremist antisemitic group called the Goyim Defense League.

This all seems to have taken a bit of a toll on Eatherly’s private life. Shortly before this week’s shooting, he claimed that his son’s mother was changing their child’s name so the boy wouldn’t be associated with his racist father.

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Whatever’s going on in Eatherly’s personal life, it’s indisputable that his public profile has only grown. His racist content is, unfortunately, the perfect type of ammunition for the online culture war. While the image-conscious white nationalist Nick Fuentes has rejected Eatherly’s tactics of “antagonizing people in public,” the former-ESPN personality turned conservative sports figure Jason Whitlock said the black men Eatherly targets need to behave better themselves.

“Chud the Builder’s rise is a sign of weakness among black men,” Whitlock, who is himself black, wrote on X last month.

The dissection of Eatherly’s content has continued even after he shot someone. Eatherly’s defenders have argued that the shooting should be legal, assuming he was physically attacked first. Yet Eatherly’s defense will almost certainly be undermined by the fact that, before the shooting, he sent numerous violent, racist tweets laying out how he planned to provoke a black person into attacking him so that he could shoot him, a plan he hoped would ratchet up racial tension nationally.

“Series finale is dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free,” Eatherly wrote menacingly in a May post on X. “Stay tuned.”

“The day one of you [slur] make me take your life is the day the White man takes this country back,” Eatherly wrote in December.

It might be hard to muster up a self-defense argument with a social media trail like that. As of the publishing of this newsletter, Eatherly’s lawyer has not commented publicly on the case.

But in an ominous sign about the economics of the worst corners of the livestreaming world, the price of the $CHUD memecoin shot to a new level in the immediate aftermath of the shooting—with buyers appearing to bet that all the controversy about “Chud the Builder” would turn into a windfall.

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NICK FUENTES HAS MADE A CAREER out of harassing more moderate, non-openly racist Republicans, pushing Turning Point USA to the right on immigration by encouraging groypers to crash their events, and pulling Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation into an uncomfortable bear-hug last year.

But now, Fuentes himself has received a challenge from his own, even more deranged right flank. The internet’s preeminent groyper is facing off with a gun-toting playboy heir and a coterie of disillusioned followers.

Fuentes’s trouble started last Thursday, when storied social-media villain Dan Bilzerian—now extremely antisemitic and running a stunt campaign for the Florida congressional district held by pro-Israel Republican Rep. Randy Fine—accused Fuentes of being a federal agent or informant.

“I think Nick Fuentes is a fed,” Bilzerian wrote on X, accusing Fuentes of creating “constant division” and “endless infighting.”

This prompted a cascade of other attacks on Fuentes from racist and antisemitic figures who have previously called him an ally. To wit . . .

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WITH DONALD TRUMP INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR, and with fewer woke Democratic initiatives to bemoan, right-wing media figures have united around a cause seemingly every faction of their audiences can get behind: targeting minority communities for alleged fraud.

Twenty-four-year-old MAGA influencer Nick Shirley became a star doing this early this year when he posted videos of himself visiting Somali-American daycares in Minnesota. In January, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Oz visited Los Angeles to do his own fraud hunt. Vice President JD Vance has embraced the title of fraud czar even as the rest of his portfolio appears to have narrowed. And just this week, the Daily Wire published a multi-part investigation of home-care fraud.

Yet at the same time as this fraud focus has grown nearly monomaniacal, MAGA influencers have rallied behind a fraudster of their own. In what appears to be a coordinated effort on X, MAGA influencers as varied as a pro-Trump rapper and a Gateway Pundit editor are calling for leniency for Utah businessman Andrew McCubbins, arguing that his conviction for looting $89 million in Medicare money isn’t really that big of a deal, all things considered.

McCubbins is the former head of a Utah company that was found to have ordered unnecessary genetic testing, with nurses and doctors bribed to request the tests for patients.

There isn’t a question about his guilt. In September 2020, he pleaded guilty to three charges, including conspiracy to defraud Medicare. He agreed to hand over his multi-million-dollar Utah house as part of a forfeiture, and even testified about the details of the scheme in a co-conspirator’s trial.

But he also happens to have financially supported a couple of projects dear to MAGA’s heart. McCubbins was an executive producer of Sound of Freedom, the runaway 2023 hit conservative movie about human trafficking, and participated in the undercover operations carried out by the now-embattled group that movie was based on.

With McCubbins’s sentencing on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud Medicare looming later this month, conservative influencers have launched a months-long—and what appears to be coordinated—effort to win him a pardon, or at least to get the Justice Department to drop the case.1

“The math on this case just doesn’t add up,” pro-Trump rapper Forgiato Blow, who calls himself “Trump’s nephew,” wrote on X on May 1.

Blow tagged Justice Department official Ed Martin, addressing the U.S. pardon attorney as “My nxgga” (sic).

Blow is known for songs like “I Stand With ICE” and for wearing a blinged-out Trump head on a chain, rather than his sober analysis of criminal justice cases. But he wasn’t the only unexpected MAGA-ite who suddenly was intrigued by the McCubbins case.

“Sound of Freedom showed the grit needed to save kids,” wrote Ada Lluch, a pro-Trump influencer in Spain. “Andrew McCubbins was a key operative on those missions. It is crazy that a case from the last administration is still active against him.”

Influencer Erik Finman, who was positioned as a sort of Trumpworld wunderkind a few years ago after selling a “Freedom Phone” to Trump supporters, has recently become one of McCubbins’s most frequent boosters on X. Citing Trump’s pardon of drug-trafficking former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, Finman claimed that it was time for McCubbins to get his own pardon.

“The Honduran president caught helping cartels move 500 tons of cocaine into America was recently pardoned,” Finman wrote on X. “Okay. Meanwhile this man who went into the field rescuing 100+ children from trafficking rings is staring down real prison time.”

Other influencers—from the founder of “Gays Against Groomers” to the pro-Trump “Bluesky Libs” X account—have also gotten on board.

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ONE THING THAT IS STRIKING about the push to obtain a pardon for McCubbins is the uncomfortable racial double standard it suggests: After all, the right-wing anti-fraud campaign this year has largely focused on minority and immigrant communities whose populations include many people dependent on government support for services and funding, like those Somali-American daycare providers in Minnesota.2 For right-wingers to push for leniency for a well-connected white guy who confessed to white-collar fraud has an odor of hypocrisy.

The McCubbins campaign is also striking because, outside of the posts from these conservative influencers, there is no broader groundswell on the right or anywhere else to free McCubbins. I couldn’t find any articles, podcasts, videos, or anything else suggesting there’s a real base of support for a McCubbins pardon, even among the conservative commentariat.

Yet for weeks, a coterie of pro-Trump activists have been pushing for it—often with similar language, tagging Martin or another Justice Department official, like acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. The campaign appears to have stepped up this month, as McCubbins’s long-delayed sentencing approaches on May 20.

Despite McCubbins’s guilty plea, the well-connected influencers backing him have argued that he’s somehow the victim of a deep-state frame-up. Finman has even described the prosecution as a “Biden-era case,” despite the fact that McCubbins pleaded guilty during the first Trump administration.

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None of the influencers trying to help McCubbins avoid jail time responded to my requests for comment about whether someone is coordinating this effort, if so who, and whether or not that person or entity is paying them. But the similarities in the posts are striking.

For example, many of them quote-tweeted a January post by Gateway Pundit blogger Ben Kew calling for McCubbins to receive a presidential pardon.

The MAGA influencers will also seemingly tie any—and I mean any—news event to the Free McCubbins cause.

A week after counterterrorism chief Joe Kent quit the administration over the Iran war, MAGA influencer Joey Mannarino struggled to turn Kent’s resignation into a demand that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi step in to save McCubbins.

“One guy quits and gets a media tour,” he tweeted. “The other saved kids and got a federal case. The system tells you everything about its priorities by who it rewards and who it punishes.”

If McCubbins’s family or legal team are behind this effort, I have to admit, it’s actually a pretty good idea! Despite the administration’s claims to be stamping out fraud, Trump has pardoned or commuted sentences for several people who ripped off Medicare and other government programs for hundreds of millions of dollars. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has repeatedly dropped cases against white-collar criminals and the politically connected.

McCubbins must be hoping a few positive tweets aimed at the DOJ can get him some of that action.

That said, some of these efforts are pretty ham-handed, even by the anything-goes standards of right-wing-media X accounts. After actor Chuck Norris died in March, Kew strained to somehow make the martial artist’s death about McCubbins.

“A true man of action,” Kew wrote of Norris. “Not enough of them in this world. Andrew McCubbins is a man of action as well.”

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DONALD TRUMP’S CRITICS ON THE LEFT have taken a lot of heat for suspecting that the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner two weeks ago was a false flag attack—perhaps intended to give Trump a boost in the polls or provide an excuse to build his new ballroom.

But it turns out that Trump supporters, already swimming in a sea of other conspiracy theories, don’t necessarily trust the WHCD shooting story presented by the feds, either. That’s one of the big findings of a recent focus group conducted by Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell’s Longwell Partners of nine people who voted for Trump at least twice (in 2020 and 2024). Those nine people were picked for the focus group because they all now say they disapprove of his presidency. As for the WHCD attack, six participants said they believed the assassination attempt attributed to California teacher Cole Tomas Allen was “a psyop.”

“It doesn’t make sense that somebody should be able to get that close this many times in that way to the president of the United States,” said one member of the focus group.

“I can’t even go to a baseball game and bring in a can of Diet Coke . . . or a concert without a metal detector or them emptying my pockets,” said another.

“I feel like it was a ploy to get his ballroom that he wants, and that’s his reason,” said a third.

To be clear: There’s no evidence to support the notion that the assassination attempt involved anyone besides Allen or was some kind of “false flag” attempt to get Trump his ballroom.

Like other WHCD false flag theorists, the focus group members relied mostly on a belief that too many people were trying to assassinate Trump for this attempt to be authentic—or they cited descriptions of ruthless Washington power games they had seen on TV (such as Netflix’s House of Cards).

Others focused on White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s remarks ahead of Trump’s WHCD speech that “there will be some shots fired” at the dinner (a promise, clearly, that Trump would come in guns blazing rhetorically, not a reference to actual gunfire) as proof that the White House was putting out coded messages about the assassination ahead of time.

“I think Karoline Levitt had made a comment, flippant and could be totally coincidental, ‘Shots will be fired tonight,’” one panelist said. “I mean, it’s almost like they’re toying with us or being playful in the [sense of] ‘We’re literally going to show you what we have done or what we’re about to do.’”

The ballroom, in particular, loomed large over the focus group. Some participants pointed to Trump’s tutelage under cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn as proof that he would stop at nothing to get his ballroom, while multiple members of the panel were suspicious of how rapidly conservative media moved the discussion of the assassination attempt into a pitch for the ballroom’s construction.

“He had some weird . . . manifesto or something that came out,” one focus group member said of Allen. “And all of a sudden, all the conservative pundits are talking about ballrooms.”

TRUMP HAS BEEN POLITICALLY victimized before by conspiracy theories (including those of his own making), most notably for refusing to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. But the idea that even people who voted for him think he staged the most recent attempt on his life underscores what a profound trust deficit he currently is facing among voters. It also underscores the degree to which our nation’s political discourse is now being shaped and directed by the conspiratorial mindset. We are at the point where the president’s own voters are doing QAnon-style symbol analysis of his White House. That’s a bad sign!

High-profile assassinations and assassination attempts have long fixated the conspiracist mind, and several participants in this focus group seemed to share that preoccupation. One participant expressed his belief that the WHCD assassination attempt may have been a psyop by weaving together his belief that the first assassination attempt against Trump (in Butler, Pennsylvania) and the successful assassination against John F. Kennedy also were staged. Another participant—who, again, voted at least twice for Trump—also claimed the Butler shooting was staged (“a paintball or something in his hand that he squished on his ear because I think he wanted to gain some support”), and referred to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels when explaining why he believed Trump may have staged a false flag assassination attempt against himself.

“I think this is all propaganda, just like Goebbels . . . in Germany in World War II,” he said.

A number of the participants said they saw this as a broader trend of false flags or cases where the government wasn’t giving the public the full story, citing the murder of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last year. Eight out of the nine said they believed there was more to Kirk’s assassination than the lone-gunman story promoted by federal law enforcement and the mainstream media.

“I think it’s a psyop, just like him getting shot, and the Charlie Kirk thing,” one panelist said, connecting the WHCD attack to both the Butler shooting and Kirk’s murder.

Listing the reasons she’s disappointed in Trump, a repeat Trump voter who identified herself as a Candace Owens listener gave voice to her belief that Trump was ignoring new leads or covering up evidence of a broader conspiracy in Kirk’s assassination.

“I think he thinks it’s a shut-and-dry [sic] case, but I do listen to Candace Owens,” she said. “So I’ve been following very closely along with the facts that she’s been able to produce and the people that she’s brought on, and it seems like in no way should this be a cut-and-dry closed case.”

We’re at the point in Trump’s lame duck term where his once-committed voters are preferring the ravings of someone like Candace Owens over the word of the president himself. Good luck in the midterms, Republicans!

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The right’s anti-Candace coalition is finally here

Instagram MAHA influencer and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acolyte Jessica Reed Kraus has never been a fan of Laura Loomer. Over the past year, Kraus has repeatedly told her 1.2 million Instagram followers about the top administration officials who have blocked Loomer online, mocked Loomer for not getting access to the White House, and dubbed Loomer “insane,” “reckless and lazy,” and a “clown show,” among many other epithets.

Loomer, no shrinking violet when it comes to online vitriol, once called Kraus an “insufferable cunt.”

“We had a falling out last year that prompted her to text-call me a cunt more than a dozen times,” Kraus recalled to her readers earlier this month. She went on to call her combatant one of the Trump movement’s “most brutal ruffians.”

But in the vicious factionalism of the MAGA movement—where character assassination has become both theology and an art form—there is one thing on which even bitter enemies can find common ground: the need to take down Candace Owens.

In a post on Monday, Kraus revealed that she was letting bygones be bygones and falling firmly behind Loomer’s kamikaze campaign to destroy Owens.

“Only crazy can match crazy,” Kraus wrote. “No one besides Loomer is equipped for this battle.”

The unnatural alliance is the latest illustration of how worried MAGA and MAHA influencers have become that their movements are at risk of being fractured from within—and that one person above all others is chiefly responsible.

Owens has spent months spreading conspiracy theories and antisemitic bile, targeting fellow activists (chief among them Erika Kirk) and now President Trump himself (mainly over the war in Iran). Having exhausted all prior methods for trying to stop her, a consensus is emerging that only a fellow maniac like Loomer can get it done.

For weeks, Owens and Loomer have been trading insults on X. Owens has compared Loomer’s face to the malevolent puppet Jigsaw from the Saw movies. Last week, Loomer told Owens that “God hates you.”

“It’s why he gave Charlie [Kirk] to Erika and why you didn’t even get to say goodbye to him,” Loomer wrote.

Insults are par for the course for these two. But by even their venomous standards, the back and forth has been . . . a lot.

The latest twist: After weeks of Loomer and Kraus hyping up a court record in Owens’s home state of Tennessee suggesting that Owens’s husband, mega-wealthy British metals heir George Farmer, was arrested for drunk-driving in 2023, Loomer finally got the goods this week. She posted Farmer’s mug shot, a report saying his blood alcohol content was a whopping .261, and a picture of the busted-up truck Farmer allegedly plowed into a ditch. This incident came at a time when Owens was pregnant with their third child.

“We should figure out how to nominate Loomer for a Pulitzer,” tweeted Meghan McCain after Loomer’s document dump.

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FAMOUSLY HANDSOME LIVESTREAMER Clavicular appeared to overdose on drugs during a broadcast on April 14, slumping over a booth in a Miami restaurant before his security team rushed him to an SUV.

For a moment, it seemed like all of Clavicular’s frenzied “looksmaxxing”—hitting his face to shape his cheeks, smoking meth to lose weight, injecting steroids since he was 14—would come to nothing.

Instead, the 20-year-old whose antics have made him a media sensation survived to “mog” another day. In fact, he wasn’t out of commission for long: The day after the episode, Clavicular—real name Braden Peters—ripped the IV out of his arm and left the hospital against medical advice.

Why would he do that? Because he had to attend the opening that evening of his own Miami Beach nightclub, “Bacara.” And his new business partner isn’t a man to be kept waiting.

That man is Miami nightlife impresario Hai Waknine, who in addition to running Bacara operates several other clubs. Waknine lives a glamorous life: He’s married to a former model and he partied on his yacht with rapper Offset just before the rapper was shot earlier this month. Now he’s taken Clavicular under his wing, helping him sign a deal for a dating app meant to distribute women more equally to members of the incel community, and guiding him through condominium purchases.

Neither Clavicular nor Waknine responded to requests for comment.

Waknine frequently wears a chain bearing the Hebrew term “chai” (“alive” or “living,” but often loosely translated as “life”) and customarily ends his business activities before shabbos each Friday. He is a very different sort of person than Clavicular used to hang out with. Just a few months ago, Clavicular was vibing to “Heil Hitler” in a Miami nightclub with the likes of white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes.

But Waknine’s new alliance with the internet’s hottest “looksmaxxer” is notable for another reason. Waknine has a lengthy criminal record, and he has maintained close connections to some of Israel’s most feared organized crime groups, according to federal prosecutors. He has a history of terrorizing his business associates and served several years in federal prison for extortion. Just last year, prosecutors alleged that Waknine used members of the Crips and Mexican Mafia gangs as his enforcers.

Going into business with the club owner poses other kinds of risks for the appearance-minded Clavicular. Waknine has boasted, according to prosecutors, that he once cut a man’s ear after kidnapping him over an outstanding debt.

Meanwhile, Clavicular’s surprising new alliance with an Israeli-American ex-convict has enraged many of his antisemitic far-right friends and followers, who now fume in the chat whenever Waknine appears on one of Clavicular’s livestreams. For the rest of us, Clavicular’s new arrangement with Waknine offers some insight into the opportunities available in the tumultuous right-wing media world for a charismatic young man who may care deeply about his looks but evidently has little regard for his actual, physical well-being.

TO EXPLAIN JUST HOW WILD—and potentially brazen—this alliance is, I need to take you back a few years, to the height of the COVID pandemic.

During the era of lockdowns, a series of underground poker games catering to celebrities and other wealthy gamblers sprang up in houses around Los Angeles. In May 2023, someone started to target them, tossing Molotov cocktails at the luxury cars parked outside and in one case

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TO MUCH FANFARE, the Department of Justice this week announced a new indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group known for monitoring and calling out the rise and prevalence of right-wing extremism and hate groups.

In the indictment, the DOJ accused the group of bank and wire fraud as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering, arguing that SPLC’s use of paid informants to monitor extremist groups was, in actuality, a funding mechanism for those groups.

Reading through the eleven counts, however, I noticed a telling omission.

In order to make the argument that “the SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” the government listed several informants in white supremacist groups who received payoffs from the SPLC. One of them was described as an “Imperial Wizard” in a Ku Klux Klan group called the United Klans of America.

The indictment cites an SPLC article describing the United Klans of America as a “millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat.”

Yet the DOJ left out one key word from that SPLC article: “pathetic.” In the actual 2013 story, the SPLC described United Klans of America as a “pathetic millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat” (emphasis added).

That doesn’t sound like “manufacturing racism” so much as mocking it. If the SPLC were really trying to whip their donors into a frenzy over groups like United Klans of America, why would it describe the organization as “pathetic”?

And why would the DOJ leave that one word out of the indictment?

Those questions will almost assuredly be adjudicated in the courts, as the SPLC has pledged to fight the indictment. But, for now at least, they don’t seem to be causing much pause or hesitation on the right, which has seized on the indictment not just as a chance to crush a hated liberal institution, but as proof that essentially every politically unpalatable extremist on the right has been secretly funded by the SPLC.

“The supply of right-wing ‘hate’ was so low that a left-wing ‘anti-hate’ group had to subsidize it, so it could then raise money to fight it,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo tweeted.

“These extreme right-wing things that are supposedly everywhere, I swear to you, it is probably nothing but paid-off people from the SPLC and FBI informants,” Glenn Beck said Wednesday on his show.

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THE DOJ’S INDICTMENT OF THE SPLC comes, ironically, when the group is far removed from the powerful perch it occupied during its civil rights heyday, or even what it was a decade ago. The SPLC was founded in the early 1970s as a legal clinic focusing on a racial discrimination. But it gained a name for itself later in the decade by filing lawsuits against the Klan. Over the subsequent years it expanded its remit to include other hate groups.

The SPLC has long faced allegations that it has amassed far more money than it needs to fund its activities, with more than $800 million in assets as of 2024. Working at the SPLC in the early 2000s, writer Bob Moser suspected he was working at what he would later describe as a “highly profitable scam.”

But conservatives despised it not just because it was flush with cash but because they believed the group spuriously ruined the reputation of people and institutions that were not hate groups and that it chilled speech.

In his new book, Strange People on the Hill, former SPLC investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden wrote about how, in the face of this conservative pressure—which became amplified in the MAGA era—the SPLC shrank away from its aggressive reporting on the right.1

Much of the DOJ’s indictment against SPLC focuses on the group’s use of paid informants to gain information on politically marginal neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan groups. But for many on the right, the real intrigue in the indictment has been the government’s allegation that the SPLC had an informant involved in helping organize the fatal “Unite the Right” Charlottesville march in the spring of 2017.

Jack Posobiec called the revelation proof the march was “a complete hoax from top to bottom.” And conservative personality Priya Patel tweeted that the march was a “Leftist psyop.”

But here too, it’s what is not in the indictment that stands out. The mention of the informant is brief. All the government says is that the individual received $270,000 from the SPLC between 2015 and 2023 and that they participated in the march and played some ill-defined organizing role.

“[Informant] was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” the indictment reads. “[Informant] made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”

What does that really mean? Who knows?

A couple hundred hard-right demonstrators marched in Charlottesville, and this informant arranged transportation for “several attendees.” That might mean a single rental car. As for the informant’s presence in an organizing chatroom, the best-known Charlottesville organizing chat, whose Discord logs were later leaked to the antifascist group Unicorn Riot, featured more than thirty people.

THE DOJ’S INDICTMENT MAY CENTER on the legal definition of what constitutes bank and wire fraud. But the larger question it raises is whether it is useful or even smart for a group devoted to disrupting violent racist groups to have people giving them information from the inside?

While certainly grimy, it’s not always illegal to pay someone for information. Private investigators do this. And while the practice is widely frowned upon in American journalism, it’s not forbidden. TMZ pays its sources. The National Enquirer buys stories—and buys them to kill them, too.

For their part, the SPLC leaders have tried to justify the program on the grounds that it was investigating potentially violent groups, and shared that information with law enforcement.

“This use of informants was necessary, because we are no strangers to threats of violence,” interim president and CEO Bryan Fair says in a video posted on the group’s website.

Even getting the money to the sources in a way that would protect their identities appears to have exposed the SPLC to prosecution. The indictment charges the group with making false statements to banks, over the SPLC’s use of bank accounts for fictitious front businesses to handle the payments.

But much of the government’s case rests on the idea that the SPLC committed wire fraud by not telling its own donors it was paying white supremacists for information.

Here again, more information would be helpful, specifically the reaction from the donors. Are they disappointed by the use of paid informants? Given that prosecutors admit in the indictment that the information provided by paid tipsters was used to write articles critical of the groups, why would donors feel defrauded?

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WHILE THERE ARE ULTIMATELY some missing elements in the DOJ’s indictment that caught my attention, in one major respect it is the oversharing of information that stands out.

Reading the document, I was struck by how much detail the prosecutors provided about the identity of the SPLC’s alleged informants, considering that these are people who exist in a world where white supremacists are murdered with regularity.

I was able to confidently identify five of the ten informants described in the filing based only on their descriptions in the filings and some articles on the SPLC’s website. The government provided specific titles for several informants and at least one relative, and there are only so many “exalted cyclops” involved in adopt-a-highway lawsuits out there. Someone more familiar with the violent racist demimonde—like a vengeful Klansman or neo-Nazi biker—could likely figure out more.

Who would want to risk their lives to reveal the inner workings of right-wing extremist groups if they know the FBI is comfortable revealing their identities? Then again, perhaps that’s a fringe benefit of this whole case for the Trump administration.

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WHEN THE CONSERVATIVE WEBSITE the Blaze published an article last November accusing a former Capitol Police officer of being the January 6th pipe bomber based on “gait analysis,” most of the public reacted skeptically.

But not the FBI.

Instead, the nation’s foremost law enforcement agency allegedly acted on the information the Blaze had gathered and sent bomb-sniffing dogs, agents in tactical gear, and even a helicopter to that former Capitol Police officer’s home. It was dramatic, terrifying, and wildly unnecessary.

That’s according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the former officer, Shauni Kerkhoff—who had defended Congress from the January 6th rioters and later testified in court against some of them.

Kerkhoff’s lawsuit provides startling new allegations about the government’s frantic and largely futile efforts to try to close a case that had generated a wave of wild speculation on the right and befuddled the leadership of the FBI under Director Kash Patel. It also underscores the degree to which conspiracy theories have influenced official government action, even at the highest levels.

The drama actually began shortly before the Blaze published its now-infamous and since-retracted “gait analysis” article. According to Kerkhoff’s lawsuit, the reporter behind the story, Steve Baker, shared his allegations with staffers for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. His findings were based on supposed similarities between Kerkhoff’s style of walking and the bomber’s. Gabbard’s office subsequently drafted a memo identifying Kerkhoff as a possible suspect, CBS News reported.

On November 6, 2025, two days prior to the publication of the story—though one day after Baker had begun publicly teasing his findings on a podcast with the Blaze’s founder, Glenn Beck—Kerkhoff, who had left her job to work in security at the CIA, alleges that she was called in to an office at her job to meet with two FBI agents saying they were interested in “online chatter” about her role in the attempted bombings. Kerkhoff claims in her lawsuit that she was then put on administrative leave from the CIA and asked by the FBI agents to give permission for a few of them to enter the house she shared with her boyfriend to look for a pair of shoes worn by the bomber.

Kerkhoff claims she and boyfriend did not give permission to the agents, but agreed to meet them at the home.

Soon after Kerkhoff arrived at the house, she claims, a “caravan of FBI vehicles descended on their street.” The group included a bomb-disposal truck and an FBI helicopter flying overhead, as well as agents in “full tactical gear” with their guns drawn. Kerkhoff alleges the agents “swept through the house” with bomb-sniffing dogs, “rifled through drawers” and tossed the couple’s belongings on the floor.

“It suddenly occurred to Ms. Kerkhoff that they were not simply looking for a pair of shoes,” the lawsuit reads.

At one point, Kerkhoff claims, she asked a “senior FBI official” on the scene why “online chatter” had prompted the raid. The official, according to her lawsuit, said he was responding to orders from “higher up.”

A spokesperson for the FBI responded that the agency wouldn’t comment on ongoing litigation.

The hours-long search ended at 8 p.m., according to Kerkhoff’s lawsuit. But the ordeal wasn’t over yet. She claims she was then subjected to an hours-long polygraph test at an FBI office, leaving only in the early hours of November 7. A day later, the Blaze formally published its allegations that she was the bomber, prompting Kerkhoff and her boyfriend to hide in their home for fear of their lives, according to the lawsuit.

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Baker’s article was promoted by Republicans members of Congress, and prompted Beck to declare it “the biggest scandal” in a century. Yet it quickly fell apart under scrutiny, and was retracted after the FBI arrested suspect Brian Cole Jr. for the attempted bombing in December. Cole has since confessed to planting the bombs, which did not detonate on the day of the riot. His legal team has since tried to argue for his innocence by noting, among other things, that Baker has not backed off his original reporting.

But the Blaze has backed off, even to the point of firing Baker earlier this month. And while he was set to make a podcast appearance with Megyn Kelly, that too was apparently canceled amid fears of defamation suits. Baker, himself a January 6th defendant, told me that Blaze management is “in the fetal position” over the prospect of Kerkhoff’s lawsuit, saying the potentially massive judgment would amount to an “existential threat” to the site.

Kerkhoff returned to her job at the CIA a few weeks later, after establishing an alibi by showing prosecutors video of her playing with her dog at the time of the attempted bombings, according to the lawsuit.

She is now suing the Blaze and its former reporters for six counts of defamation, saying she suffered “reputational harm” and “emotional distress” over the article and related podcast appearances. Kerkhoff doesn’t specify how much money she’s suing for, asking instead for “actual damages in amounts to be proven at trial.” Kerkhoff is represented by heavyweight defamation firm Clare Locke.

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Groypers Ground Up by Their Hero

John Lawrence, a “groyper” devotee of white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, last week posted a picture of himself and another Fuentes supporter being interviewed by CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan. For Lawrence, who regularly packages clips of Fuentes for his 40,000-plus followers on Instagram, the interview should have marked a new level of prominence.

And, at that moment, he certainly seemed to feel that way. In the caption, Lawrence wrote that he and his friend were “mogging” O’Sullivan—in other words, looking stronger or more handsome than the journalist.

But by the weekend, the vibes had turned sour and popular opinion had changed; people were starting to feel it was Lawrence who had been mogged. As pictures he posted of the still-unreleased CNN interview began circulating online, none other than Fuentes himself entered the conversation—fuming that Lawrence and another of his followers were making his fanbase look slovenly.

“Can someone come kill me immediately,” Fuentes wrote in a Telegram post, zooming in on Lawrence’s clunky taupe loafers.

“Do not claim to represent me if you are dressed like that and are +25 BMI,” Fuentes added, posting a picture of the pair walking with Sullivan as they wore shirts with Fuentes’s face on them.

Fuentes concluded by posting a picture of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin jumping out of a window, presumably to his death. His followers soon joined in. One posted a cartoon of a quivering Lawrence, his belly hanging out of his shirt, preparing for the interview. A pro-Fuentes streamer who goes by the name “Beardson Beardly” declared in an online chat that he couldn’t wait for Lawrence “to be doxed and have his life ruined forever.”

None of this backlash, it’s worth repeating, resulted from what Lawrence actually said to O’Sullivan, since no one knows that yet. It was literally all about fat-shaming him and mocking his looks.

The fervor Fuentes turned on his erstwhile fans isn’t just a reflection of how nasty the internet can be, something all social media users already know very well. It rather underscores one of the central internal problems within the groyper community.

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THE WORLD OF MAGA INFLUENCERS is growing more divided over Donald Trump’s war with Iran. But so far, those influencers largely aren’t blaming the president for their divisions.

Instead, they are pointing to a new culprit: The reason conservatives are at each other’s throats, they argue, is that they’re being paid by foreign sources to, essentially, bicker.

On Wednesday, the right descended into a feeding frenzy over unsubstantiated rumors of a Justice Department investigation into whether certain conservative commentators were being paid by foreign sources to argue for and against the war.

Social media luminaries as grand as “Catturd” himself were thrilled at the idea of seeing fellow influencers arrested.

“DO IT !!!” declared Mr. Turd.

Others went even further, calling for banishments. “Influencers who take foreign money and don’t disclose it should be deported to the country they took the money from,” declared right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec, a former key booster of a Russian intelligence hack himself. He eagerly welcomed the prospect of the imagined probe.

It’s worth noting early that, while there is a rich and well-documented history of conservative influencers being on the dole, there’s so far no evidence of that happening in this particular instance. The idea of there being an investigation appears to have come from a popular anonymous right-wing account, “0H0UR,” which posted what appeared to be a news bulletin on X Wednesday morning: “United States to investigate American Influencers taking foreign money.”

In a right-wing media landscape divided between pro-Israel supporters of Trump’s war with Iran, like Mark Levin, and war critics and Israel opponents, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, each side welcomed the prospect of the Justice Department getting ready to put their ideological foes in handcuffs.

Imagining the DOJ investigation as some kind of national pundit audit, podcaster Graham Allen offered to preemptively hand his financials over to the government to prove he’s clean of foreign-funding and not one of the “grifters.” Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump associate who functions primarily as the president’s Nicki Minaj whisperer, treated the discovery of a foreign influence campaign as a fait accompli in a Wednesday morning post on X.

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BECAUSE SO MANY conservative influencers have actually engaged in pay-to-post arrangements in the past, it’s become commonplace for members of this community to accuse their intramural foes of being on the take.

Just a few weeks ago, country music sensation Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel, claimed she had uncovered a wide-ranging foreign influence network to make people think she’s a Mossad operative. And who could forget Laura Loomer’s nickname for Carlson: “Tucker Qatarlson”?

But the enthusiasm for a Justice Department probe is notable not just because it suggests influencers believe the MAGA civil war now requires federal intervention. It sticks out because many of these influencers calling for a DOJ probe have taken foreign money themselves.

Consider MAGA personality Rob Smith, for example. Smith was thrilled by the idea of a DOJ investigation, and vowed to “PERSONALLY investigate” anyone running for office who made money off the war through foreign-funded posting.

Perhaps that’s because Smith has swum in these waters.

Just four months ago, he spent Thanksgiving on a luxury MAGA influencer junket to Qatar. While Smith wouldn’t disclose how his trip was funded, he came away from it posting about the “mutually beneficial military and financial partnerships” that await the United States and Qatar.

But the most shameless of all has to be pundit Benny Johnson, who declared the nonexistent investigation “good” in a post on X. Johnson said the news of the probe would prompt right-wing influencers who were on the take to panic, revealing their true motives.

“Will be telling who crashes out over this,” Johnson wrote on X. “I welcome it.”

Left unmentioned was that Johnson himself was previously caught in the most famous right-wing media influence scandal in years, taking millions of dollars to make YouTube videos for Russian-funded Tenet Media. Perhaps Justice Department investigators could ask Johnson, who has claimed he didn’t know the money came from Russia, to send some tips about how these schemes tend to work.

Of course, the idea of a Trump Justice Department investigating foreign influence is laughable, given the foreign financial entanglements and conflicts already rife in the administration. Recently booted Attorney General Pam Bondi scaled back Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement early in her tenure at DOJ, signaling the administration’s stance on policing foreign influence in our politics.

As a sign of how seriously the White House takes foreign-media operations, the Canadian founders of Tenet Media have not only been allowed back into the United States, but attended the White House Easter egg roll this week.

Sorry, Catturd. We don’t imagine the FBI will be kicking down any pro-Trump bloggers’ doors after all.

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Trouble in the House of Taibbi

CAN FAMOUSLY CANTANKEROUS journalist Matt Taibbi round up enough of his fellow contrarians and cranks to fill a thriving Substack account? The answer, judging by the events of the past few months, appears to be no.

Taibbi bruised his reputation in 2023 by embracing Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter as a stand for free speech. That relationship, predictably, soured. And in February, Taibbi tried for a “reboot,” announcing that his Substack, “Racket News,” would become a “home for reporters,” with a focus on investigative journalism.

Things have not gone well since.

First, Taibbi announced he was hiring Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Emily Kopp—seen as a heroic but controversial figure in the COVID-19 origins community, where people argue about “gain of function” research and the lab-leak hypothesis—to retool Racket.

That appears to have infuriated Walter Kirn, the eccentric novelist, dyspeptic commentator, and frequent Gutfeld! guest who is probably best known for writing the novel-turned-movie Up in the Air. Up until Kopp was hired, Taibbi and Kern had cohosted a current-events podcast for Racket called America This Week.

But on February 9, Taibbi, wearing a hat from the magazine Kirn founded, logged in alone to announce Kirn was quitting.

“Apparently this is the last episode of this show, as I’ve just discovered,” Taibbi said, adding, “I’m sorry that Walter feels the way he does.”

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Kirn would later describe Kopp’s hiring as “the basis of the whole rift” with Taibbi, without offering further details.

But Kopp herself has offered an additional theory. According to a Substack post she published on February 13, Kirn’s beef centers around their differing takes on National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya—a hero to some in the right’s COVID-obsessive community. Kopp has criticized Bhattacharya for ducking her questions about gain-of-function research. Kirn, on the other hand, is very invested in Bhattacharya’s image. He’s working on a pandemic film entitled The Rash, which is financed by former Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running mate Nicole Shanahan and stars a Bhattacharya-type figure.

No one involved in this story responded to requests for comment. So it’s impossible to verify how big a role Bhattacharya’s honor played in the Kirn-Taibbi breakup.

And while Taibbi at least got his rebooted Racket, even that appears to be in trouble. Kopp is already apparently no longer working at the site as of late March: She removed any mention of it from her X profile and an apparently delighted Kirn announced on April 3 that she was gone.

But that doesn’t mean Kirn plans on restarting his former cohosted podcast. He reposted a message that he was “biding” his time “while all the big ‘podcasters’ wipe one another out with their bizarre rivalries,” adding that he would be “wielding a platinum scepter, in ruby slippers.”

What a great bunch to work with. I can’t imagine why it didn’t work out!

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It’s more proof that dissident and increasingly anti-Trump voices like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have the energy in right-wing media. Shapiro, by contrast, is stuck defending an unpopular war with Iran.

But at least Shapiro’s foray into movies is going well, right? Well, not so much. Deadline reports that the set of the Daily Wire’s upcoming film Run Hide Fight Infidels is in chaos, with black mold on the site, a tree branch hitting a crew member, and actor Jonathan Majors falling out of a window during a recent shoot. Undeterred by crew complaints, producers say they won’t negotiate on safety “with communists.” By communist, they mean unionized crew members.

Speaking of right-wing media outlets in trouble, do we have a False Flag for you! A newly fired reporter for the Blaze says the outlet could be easily crushed by a potential libel settlement over its off-the-wall reporting on the January 6th pipe bomber.

But first, a quick note: Here at The Bulwark, we don’t waste our members’ money putting Jonathan Majors in danger on movie sets (Jared Poland, on the other hand, we’re willing to risk). We invest, instead, in covering the stuff that matters, chiefly the threats to American democracy. If you’re already a member, thanks for your support. If not, please sign up for Bulwark+ today and join our growing community:

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–Will

Blaze Reporter Steaming Over Firing

BACK IN NOVEMBER, the conservative media outlet the Blaze claimed that reporter Steve Baker had the scoop of the century: compelling evidence that the pipe bombs planted outside Republican and Democratic headquarters on January 6th were laid by a Capitol Police officer.

Blaze founder Glenn Beck declared it would be “the biggest scandal of my lifetime, maybe in the last hundred years.” Republican members of Congress like Anna Paulina Luna and Thomas Massie championed the story, saying it was proof the deep state was behind January 6th.

The story quickly fizzled. And instead of receiving a Pulitzer, the Blaze was forced to backtrack. It retracted its story on December 4. As for Baker, he was fired on Wednesday morning, as the publication faces the possibility of a massive libel judgment over the story.

“They basically wanted to curl up in the corner in the fetal position and suck their thumbs,” Baker told me today.

Along with raising questions about the future of the Blaze, Baker’s firing lays out a conundrum that’s faced conservative media outlets dating back to Fox News’s mammoth settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over its airing of 2020 election conspiracies:

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THE READERS OF FAR-RIGHT men’s magazine Man’s World want content that is strong, virile, and politically incorrect—like they are, you might say. The magazine’s founder, an esoteric fitness guru named Charles Cornish-Dale who goes by the alias “Raw Egg Nationalist,” encourages his followers to guzzle more than a dozen uncooked eggs a day.

This cover from one issue of Man’s World should give you a sense of what we’re dealing with:

So it came as a bit of a shock to Man’s World readers back in May 2024 when they discovered that included among the glossy photos of hot ladies that had just run in an issue of the magazine was a shot featuring a transgender woman.

The offending issue was published soon after the magazine was acquired by “New Right” publishing house Passage Press. The transgender woman in question, who goes by the name “Pariah the Doll,” is a fixture of New York’s reactionary Dimes Square scene. In the photo, Pariah is smeared in mud and what appears to be white paint as another person rubs their nose on her face.

Readers were angry to have been titillated by this without knowing the context of Pariah’s identity. But as angry comments flooded in, Cornish-Dale defended the choice, saying he had just been given a stack of pictures to choose from.

“I don’t actually know who this person is. It’s a picture from a fashion show,” he said—adding that “it just looked like another ugly model to me.”

His fans weren’t mollified.

“In seriousness though you should probably issue some kind of a retraction or statement of disavowal or something, even an honest mistake like this is likely to be used against you for a while and lots of people feel betrayed,” wrote one irate reader on X.

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Running a photo of a transgender model by accident may not seem like the biggest transgression in conservative journalism. But in an age where anti-trans politics is ascendant on the right—and manosphere vibes are dominant in certain quarters—this was a major debacle for Passage and Man’s World. And yet, it was far from the only serious problem then facing the publication and causing frustration for its founder.

In a June 2025 letter to Passage executives that I obtained, Cornish-Dale complained that the publisher had botched his magazine’s rollout, run months behind schedule, and allowed its social media accounts to go dormant. He claimed he had been promised Man’s World would be distributed in “fraternities, gyms and gentlemen’s clubs,” but that such distribution never came to fruition.

“A magazine formerly read by hundreds of thousands has, in your hands, withered and died,” Cornish-Dale wrote.

One month after that letter, Passage announced that it was handing Man’s World back to Cornish-Dale, and would no longer be involved in its publication.

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LAUNCHED IN 2021 BY JONATHAN KEEPERMAN, a former lecturer at University of California, Irvine, Passage Press has become the premiere publishing house of the authoritarian New Right movement associated with Peter Thiel and Vice President JD Vance. It publishes work by a range of far-right favorites, including Silicon Valley monarchist Curtis Yarvin and Austrian extremist Martin Sellner, plus reprints of writers like German World War I veteran Ernst Jünger.

All of it, according to Keeperman, is meant to encourage conservatives to play a more active role in the arts.

“Conservatives are afraid of the artistic gesture,” Keeperman said in a podcast interview.

But Keeperman has run into problems with that mission.

For years, Passage’s founder was a right-wing commentator writing under the pseudonym “Lom3z.” He called for journalists to be publicly executed and said Republicans should boil down their arguments to one message against Democrats: “shut up fag.” After the Guardian revealed his real name in 2024, Keeperman rebranded himself as a right-wing public intellectual.

Keeperman’s publishing operation hosted a “Coronation Ball” for Donald Trump’s inauguration that GQ dubbed the “New Right Party of the Year,” featuring guests like Jack Posobiec and the hosts of the right-wing “Red Scare” podcast. In perhaps the ultimate coup for Keeperman’s own brand as a right-wing thought leader, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat interviewed him last May on a podcast about masculinity. And late last year, Keeperman launched a podcast at the Blaze with anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo.

But even as Keeperman’s personal star has risen, authors say his publishing house has struggled with basic management issues.

Passage Press didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Passage’s plans aren’t limited to the strictly political. They have also launched a science-fiction imprint, sparking drama in the world of anti-woke science fiction. And they have rapidly absorbed other right-wing publishers. In May 2025, Passage announced it had acquired Terror House Press—founded by Matt Forney, a far-right commentator and outspoken sex tourist—with plans to relaunch it as a Passage imprint.

But Terror House authors whose books were transferred to Passage were kept in the dark about how the new arrangement was going to work until November 2025, when Daniel Lisi, the chief operating officer of Passage’s parent company, told them in an email I obtained that the rights to their books would revert to them, outstanding royalties would be paid out, and Passage would stop selling copies. But that doesn’t seem to have happened: The books stayed up for sale on Amazon for months and Terror House authors griped about not having received any money.

Matt Lawrence, an author and former art director at Terror House, complained in a March 6 email I obtained that Lisi had ignored numerous emails from authors regarding the money they were owed or having their books removed from Passage’s Amazon storefront as promised. Another Passage project Lawrence said he was working on—a vinyl audiobook version of a book by sex-crazed underground writer “Delicious Tacos”—also fell through after Passage went silent.

“Lisi seems almost completely incapable of sending any updates or replying to emails,” Lawrence wrote to Keeperman in one email I obtained.

The money owed to the Terror House authors probably wasn’t enormous—Lawrence’s The Chronicles of Bronan the Barbarian, a collection of decade-old blog posts from the early manosphere, likely wasn’t flying off the Amazon shelves. Still, Lawrence estimated in his email to Keeperman that the Terror House authors together were owed a few thousand dollars and had been ignored for months.

Lawrence, who didn’t respond to my request for comment, wrote in his email to Keeperman that he was baffled by the incompetence of Passage’s management.

“I would expect more from an established publishing company,” he wrote. “It’s honestly both surprising and disappointing.”

Karen Hunt, another Terror House author, told me in an email that she’s “far from satisfied” with Keeperman’s handling of Terror House.

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But perhaps Passage’s biggest problem came from its strained relationship with Cornish-Dale, who, as “Raw Egg Nationalist,” ranked as one of the biggest stars on the publisher’s roster.

Amid the rise of similar ideologues with Hellenic aesthetics and fascist-coded politics, Cornish-Dale thought in the summer of 2025 that his moment had come. He had been featured a few years earlier in Tucker Carlson’s documentary on masculinity, which explored unorthodox practices like testicular tanning. The ascendant MAHA movement looked like his perfect chance to be lifted out of the right’s sweatiest corners and become a crossover star. In his June letter to Passage, Cornish-Dale claimed there was an “all-time high level of interest in my work.”

He planned to capitalize on it with a new book published through Passage titled The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, which argues that men as we know them may soon be a thing of the past, thanks in part to “endocrine disruptors” and overly processed foods. But with a July 2025 publication date looming, and Man’s World already languishing under Passage’s guidance, Cornish-Dale grew worried.

In late May, Cornish-Dale and Lisi met for dinner with right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at the Los Angeles mansion where Yiannopoulos lives, according to two sources familiar with the meeting. Yiannopoulos grilled Lisi over Passage’s plans to promote the book. The meeting apparently did not convince Cornish-Dale that the book wasn’t headed for disaster.

Days later, Cornish-Dale sent Passage his list of concerns: a lack of review copies, marketing plans, or live events, typographical errors in published copies, and the absence of a more expensive “patrician edition.”1

“There is no leadership, no direction and no interest in the product from Passage,” Cornish-Dale complained.

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Cornish-Dale also slammed Passage’s habit of releasing similar books by multiple authors at the same time, jumbling up the marketing strategy. His book The Last Men, for example, was set to be released around the same time as several other Passage books, including one similarly called The Last Alpha Male from 89-year-old right-wing author Taki Theodoracopulos, who had been sentenced to a suspended prison term in 2023 for attempted rape.

“I have been given equal billing with a book by a geriatric sex offender that bears a confusingly similar title to my own; a collection of essays by a fringe right-wing professor; and a book by an anonymous Twitter poster with 15,000 followers called ‘Rambo Van Halen,’” Cornish-Dale wrote.

Worst of all for Passage, though, according to Cornish-Dale’s letter, was a major procedural oversight: they had never remembered to make him sign a book contract. Without drastic changes, he planned to walk with the book—and whatever advance they had already paid him.

“We are on the brink of an avoidable disaster that can only be averted by a wholesale change in your approach to me, and to this book,” he wrote.

Apparently, Cornish-Dale was never satisfied with Passage’s response. The Last Men was eventually released last December—by a different right-wing publisher, Regnery.

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