THERE’S A NEW MAGA PERSONALITY on the scene: Savanna Cannon.

Parroting talking points about wacko liberals and often wearing a Charlie Kirk–style “Freedom” shirt, Cannon looks and sounds like she came straight out of the Turning Point USA or PragerU conservative influencer pipelines.

“People who don’t like what I say are, more than likely, braindead,” Cannon declared in one video last week that sums up her facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings style.

But Cannon has one big advantage over her rival conservative commentators: she sits in an unusual way.

Cannon typically records her videos leaning back in a chair while wearing yoga pants, with her legs pulled up on either side of her. It’s a pose that highlights everything a more prurient viewer might hope to see: her bare feet and—forgive me, I am only reporting the facts here—the faint outline of her genitals.1

Cannon’s recumbent poses put her groin right in the center of the vertical-video frame.

“This person sits like this every time,” one Instagram commenter wrote this week. “It’s really weird.”

Cannon isn’t subtle about it. Scroll through her Instagram page and a good 80 percent of the posts are her sitting in that pose, wearing yoga pants, often pulling them up to make them fit tighter. “My videos are for straight men,” she explained.

And lest you have any lingering doubt about the audience Cannon is cultivating, it is probably settled by knowledge of Cannon’s other career: She also posts sexual photos of herself on the subscriber site OnlyFans.

The OnlyFans gig actually came first for Cannon. She tried to grow her presence on the site by, among other things, posting videos of herself working out in the gym. But it can be tough out there for an OnlyFans girl. In search of a large, particularly male audience with a track record of falling for a pretty face, she made a play to become a MAGA influencer. It was a smart call. Pro-Trump social media is a rich field for finding new, smitten subscribers—or, in the language of the industry, “simps”—who could end up following you on OnlyFans, too. While Cannon’s gym page has 42,000 followers on Instagram, her political Instagram page has 285,000. (The number of followers she has on her OnlyFans accounts is not publicly listed.)

Politically, Cannon is offering the kind of unremarkable conservative opinions you might hear on Fox News or Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, such as saying that being transgender is a mental illness, or that Democrats are the real racists.

“It’s probably an AI script, go in, talentless, there’s nothing being contributed,” podcaster Steven Crowder said of Cannon’s videos on his show Wednesday. “There’s nothing of value.”

CANNON’S UNSUBTLE APPROACH to combining politics with sex appeal is just the latest in the symbiotic relationship developing between right-wing commentators eager to grow their male audiences and aspiring OnlyFans models hoping to grow subscriber bases through any form of online attention. The Venn diagram of their potential audiences is almost a circle, including even those spaces where pro-Trump commentators claim to want a return to more traditional values.

Take the short-form video content produced by manospheric dating podcasts like “Whatever” or “Fresh and Fit.” Those podcasts typically feature one or two conservatives, usually men, facing off around a gigantic semicircle table with numerous scantily clad women. The conservatives ask the women titillating, often rude questions, like how many men they’ve slept with. Firing Line this is not!

What kind of woman would subject themselves to that kind of treatment? Often, the answer is OnlyFans models looking to gain monetizable internet infamy, even from “trad” men. In a 2023 video, the hosts of the Miami-based Fresh and Fit—whose podcast has featured figures like Candace Owens and Milo Yiannopoulos in the designated conservative role—defended themselves from a viewer asking why they hosted so many OnlyFans models hoping to get rich off of their audiences.

“To get the most eyeballs. Unfortunately, sex sells,” host Amrou Fudl (aka Myron Gaines) said. “There is a method to the madness, and to get eyeballs on us, sometimes we have to bring in certain girls, whatever it may be.”

Fudl argued that their fight for traditional values was still being accomplished if they could draw in “simps and suckers” and direct even a fraction of them toward the less-sexualized media products they put out. Products like “Money Monday” and, I kid you not, “Womanizer Wednesday.”

The Los Angeles-based Whatever podcast runs on a similar model, featuring conservative commentators like the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles facing off against OnlyFans models eager to promote their accounts. In 2024, YouTube commentator Daniel Keem described the podcast’s business model as “line up some only fans sluts to roast.”

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WHAT CANNON’S BEEN DOING seems to be working for her: She appears to have built a successful customer funnel for her OnlyFans by getting political. After posting conservative videos for just a few months, she now regularly gets tens of thousands of views on every short video on Instagram, as well as adoring comments and thousands of likes on each.

But not everyone on the right has been thrilled by her success.

“Conservative female talking heads are just a bunch of shallow, disgusting skanks spewing low-IQ takes,” complained far-right commentator Lauren Witzke on Tuesday, posting a video of Cannon’s legs-akimbo pose.

Crowder, displaying his usual respect for women, said Cannon’s pelvis-centric posing was merely a matter of degrees difference from female TPUSA influencer “ambassadors” or Fox News hosts.

“This is the sex appeal nuclear arms race,” Crowder said.

Cannon didn’t respond to a request for comment.

You could write dozens of dissertations on the gender politics going on here. But clearly the growing symbiosis between OnlyFans models and conservative activists—many of them ostensibly opposed to OnlyFans on religious grounds—has proven successful for all parties involved. Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate James Fishback saw his first major burst of attention when he called for a 50 percent tax on OnlyFans models’ income. That started a “feud” with OnlyFans star Sophie Rain (a Florida resident) and a debate between her and Fishback on Piers Morgan’s show. It was a win-win. Fishback was platformed on a popular news program. Rain got more exposure to atypical audiences.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes—not incidentally, a regular guest on Fresh and Fit—has also benefited from a largely one-way association with Rain. On his show, Fuentes frequently talks about how hot he finds Rain.

“Dude, she was bad as fuck. Did you see her at the fashion show?” Fuentes asked his fans.

When Fuentes’s incel-heavy fanbase revolted over his “simping,” he persisted.

“It’s like, dude, if she spit in your direction, you’d be all over that,” Fuentes told his followers.

After a viewer named “Miami Groypette” gave him $10,000, Fuentes speculated that it could be Rain.

“Who is this mystery woman?” Fuentes said. “Chat, is it Sophie Rain? Dude, that would be crazy.”

In return, Rain has courted Fuentes’s groypers. She reposted a photoshopped picture of herself in groyper merchandise that praised her as hotter than the usual “chopped groypettes,” and thanked Fuentes for the compliments.

“Can someone explain to me what a groyp is and what’s going on here 😭,” Rain wrote on X.

If anything, Cannon stands out because she merges the two roles. Rather than being an OnlyFans model subject to the whims of a dating podcast host or a feud with a far-right pundit, she is creating the MAGA content on her own. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before some enterprising ingénue tapped this particular market.

And apparently, she’s pleased with how it’s going for her. After critics accused her of taking money from Israel this week, Cannon responded in a video that she didn’t need foreign money to state her opinions.

“I do OnlyFans,” she explained.

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RIGHT-WING ACTIVIST LAURA LOOMER has been on a surprise whirlwind tour of Ukraine to drum up positive press about the country, meeting soldiers, visiting bomb sites, and even sitting for a friendly interview with Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky.

All of this has her erstwhile allies in the traditionally anti-Ukraine MAGA movement wondering: What is Loomer up to and, more importantly, who’s paying her off?

“You’ve got to ask yourself what in the name of sweet holy hell is going on here?” asked right-wing commenter David Freiheit, who goes by the name “Viva Frei.”

Alex Jones, who once frequently hosted Loomer on InfoWars, quipped that Loomer should stay out of global politics and go back to eating dog food. Loomer retorted that Jones should pay the Sandy Hook families the money he owes them.

But if Loomer’s embrace of the Ukrainian war effort hasn’t impressed the MAGAverse, it has earned positive mentions from one key figure: Donald Trump. The president reposted a video of Loomer interviewing Zelensky with the caption: “Very Good!!!”

Loomer herself has acknowledged that she has made a complete 180 when it comes to Zelensky and Ukraine.

“I’ll admit, I’ve said some pretty terrible things about Ukraine, and terrible things about you as well!” she told Zelensky during their interview.

All of which has further confused former allies and longtime Loomerologists. As someone who’s devoted a good portion of his professional life to mulling over Loomer’s unique psychology, I too have been curious. What should we make of it? I have a few theories.

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Can MAGA Fight the Charges Against Andrew Tate?

PROMINENT MANOSPHERE INFLUENCERS and accused sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested by U.S. marshals in Miami last weekend, as they were set to host—what else?—a bare-knuckle boxing match.

Video of their arrest, which quickly went viral, showed Andrew Tate dressed in clamdigger pants and an unusual purple shirt unbuttoned down almost to his navel. But maybe the most surprising thing is that it happened on American soil at all.

That’s because, despite years of accusations involving rape and sex trafficking, the Tates have enjoyed a strangely close relationship with Trump world that seems to have extended to preferential treatment from the government. Andrew Tate has had numerous friendly conversations with Barron Trump and Donald Trump Jr., according to the New York Times. With the influencer brothers unable to leave Romania for years as the investigation went on, prominent Trump world figure Ric Grenell reportedly spoke to Romanian officials about their case. Soon after those conversations, the Tates were allowed to leave Romania.

Another time, after the troubled pair had their phones seized last year, Trump official Paul Ingrassia reportedly intervened to help them.1 And just days before their arrest last weekend, the Tates were partying in Washington with Trump administration luminaries.

Incredibly, nearly all of the MAGA movement’s embrace of the brothers has come after they were first accused of sex trafficking in 2022. That seemed pretty crazy for a bunch of people who claim their biggest issue is child sex trafficking. But it seemed the friendly feelings for the Tates might have reached their limits last week after they were arrested to be extradited to the United Kingdom, where they face new charges related to allegedly choking women unconscious and raping them.

And yet, despite the seriousness of the crimes, there is still a growing movement on the right urging the Trump administration to intervene and prevent the extradition.

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Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.) has become one of the Tates’ most prominent defenders in the aftermath of the extradition, claiming in a tweet that they’re victims of politicized “lawfare” in both the U.K. and Romania. He doesn’t specify why he thinks the brothers would be targets of lawfare—what political reasons these countries would have for taking down the Tates. Nevertheless, Hamadeh said the Trump administration should refuse to extradite the brothers, who are dual American and British citizens.

“There should be no extradition of American citizens when the charges are unclear and political,” Hamadeh wrote.

Right-wing influencers and media figures are also supporting the Tates. White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes said their extradition would be a “national humiliation.” Far-right influencers the “Hodge Twins” compared the Tates to pro-Trump comedian Russell Brand, himself facing rape charges in the U.K., ostensibly to imply both were being unfairly targeted. And hustle-bro podcaster Patrick Bet-David went so far as to say the Tates were an inspiration to fatherless children.

“I think they’re doing more good for society than bad, if you ask me,” he said on his podcast following the extradition, though he admitted that the Tates were “very complicated human beings.”

THE RALLYING AROUND THE TATES has put meaningful pressure on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has the power to block their extradition or see it go through. While both Rubio and Trump are reportedly unwilling to intervene to help the influencers, Rubio didn’t entirely foreclose the possibility at a press conference Wednesday, saying he didn’t see a role for the State Department “at this moment.”

“I’m not going to opine on something that’s still working through a legal process,” Rubio said.

That’s a fairly neutral stance to take on two men accused of being prolific international sex criminals! And given the Trump administration’s willingness to drop investigations into political allies or give them pardons and commutations, it doesn’t seem impossible that a pro-Tate pressure campaign could end up winning the brothers their freedom.

Tate lawyer Joseph D. McBride, a MAGA figure who has also represented January 6th defendants, appears to be courting administration support. When Ingrassia, now acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, tweeted on Sunday that the American system must protect “the presumption of innocence” in an apparent reference to the Tates, McBride retweeted him and other prominent Tate supporters.2

The online defense of the Tates is congealing around the idea that the brothers simply can’t receive a fair trial in a British court. Pointing to news stories and an exaggerated report on the British government’s slow response to immigrant “grooming gangs”—combined with its enforcement of laws that would violate American free speech standards—many on the right are convinced that the British justice system is essentially illegitimate.

But there is a secondary element to MAGA’s continued Tate brothers embrace that can’t be ignored. This movement has become instinctively distrustful of these types of allegations—at least when directed against one of their own.

Donald Trump himself has faced numerous rape and sexual assault allegations that he claimed they were politically targeted against him. While Trump blamed his legal woes on the “deep state,” Tate has adopted a similar concept, saying he’s being punished by operatives from an unspecified social control scheme he calls “The Matrix.” Per his telling, Tate is not facing legitimate criminal investigations because of his misdeeds, but, like Keanu Reeves’s Neo in The Matrix, is being punished by Mr. Smith-type “agents” for attempting to pull the rest of humanity into the real world.

That argument hasn’t always landed. In a 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, Tate grew frustrated after his attempt at explaining away his criminal charges foundered when Carlson said he had not actually seen The Matrix.

“There’s a bunch of other similarities, which are difficult for me to explain because you haven’t watched the movie,” Tate said.

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PROMOTERS OF QANON and other lurid pro-Trump conspiracy theories will head to California next month to visit a women’s prison. But unlike other QAnon believers who have been incarcerated for crimes like murder, kidnapping, and storming the U.S. Capitol, these conspiracy theorists won’t be inmates—they’ll be in charge!

Thanks to $1.6 million in donations so far, the Leo Chesney Correctional Facility—a decommissioned minimum security prison in the town of Live Oak, north of Sacramento—is set to become “Peace of Heaven,” a sanctuary for children rescued from supposed child sex-trafficking operations.

“We could transform that from a women’s prison to a children’s paradise!” Pastor David Bryan, the far-right mastermind behind the prison takeover, said about the prison in a June 2025 interview.

From August 28 to August 30, conspiracy theorists like former CBS News reporter Lara Logan, QAnon promoter Ann Vandersteel, and recently freed Colorado election clerk Tina Peters will appear at the “Rev17 2.0” conference at Bryan’s church, located near the prison in Live Oak, California, to raise money for the prison overhaul. While Rev17 2.0 might sound like the kind of alphanumeric string you might use in a password, it actually signals the apocalyptic vision of the organizers: The name is an allusion to chapter 17 in the Book of Revelation—the one about the Whore of Babylon and the Beast. (The 2.0, meanwhile, is a bit more pedestrian: It just means it’s the second annual conference of this kind.)

The proceeds from tickets, which range from $99 for general admission to $299 for VIPs, will go to funding the reno. VIP tickets include a tour of the prison, which became inactive in 2011 after state budget cuts.

But the Peace of Heaven children’s sanctuary faces long odds before it can come to fruition, including

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DONALD TRUMP’S PRIMETIME ADDRESS Thursday is shaping up to be a grab bag of conspiracy theories, all of them intended to help Republicans take control of the midterms. He might declare that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are somehow fake senators; or announce a national emergency on voter fraud. The latest reporting suggests Trump will claim China tried to steal the 2020 election.

Whatever Trump does, it’ll be because of John Solomon—a star conservative reporter who is, somehow, also a White House staffer. For nearly a decade, Solomon has had a hand in the creation of nearly every major MAGA grievance narrative, from the Russia investigation to Ukraine to 2020 election fraud. Solomon has a pretty clear M.O.: He’ll spin a story that seems like a massive exposé, getting it trumpeted on Fox News and throughout the right-wing media ecosystem before it has a chance to deflate under scrutiny, as it usually does.

Now in his gig as a short-term White House staffer, Solomon has been digging up the raw material necessary for both prosecuting Trump’s enemies and the expected attempt at electoral chicanery.

Yet this narrative impresario and his brand of quasi-journalism remain largely unknown outside the world of right-wing media.

In 2007, when Solomon was an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review was already complaining that his stories amounted to the “John Solomon special”: front-page revelations that, when scrutinized, turned out to be little more than a “steady stream of mediocrity.”

Now, thanks to his role in the Trump administration, Solomon has a chance to work that magic on a much larger scale.

Typically, MAGA muckrakers are liars or crackpots, like Mike Lindell, or that one rogue falconer (but not the one you’re thinking of). Compared to these folks, Solomon is a veritable Walter Cronkite. He has a serious journalistic background after working for Post and the Associated Press, and he dresses in ties and navy suits. His veneer of seriousness provides a valuable service for the MAGAverse. Watching him can almost feel like watching a grizzled mainstream investigative journalist who just happens to validate Trump’s obsessions.

A story from the final days of the first Trump administration shows how much Solomon lives in the Trumpworld pocket. The day before Joe Biden’s inauguration, then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows called Solomon to the White House to review a binder of newly declassified files from the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia—just the kind of document handout Solomon loves.

Meadows wanted Solomon to publish the contents of the binder on Inauguration Day. Solomon’s staffers at his website, Just The News, scrambled to scan them all. Then a new envelope arrived for Solomon, with new files “he was permitted to write about,” according to a lawsuit Solomon later filed against the Justice Department.

Unfortunately for Solomon, the whole plan got botched when a White House staffer recalled the files for further redaction. The binder disappeared back into the new Biden administration. Solomon’s fervor for getting access to them again led to a special favor from Trump, who named Solomon as one of his personal representatives at the National Archives, where he would have the freedom to again pursue the story (to give you a sense of Solomon’s perceived reliability to the ex-president, the only other person designated as Trump’s representative at the time was Kash Patel). It was a decision intended to redound to mutual benefit, and sure enough, Solomon eventually published the files in April 2025.

HOW DID SOLOMON WIND UP as Trump’s favorite journo? After leaving the Post in 2008, Solomon moved between journalism nonprofits and conservative media for a while, powered by a personality once described as “charming and garrulous and brimming with swagger.”

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He reached a new level of prominence on the right when he became an executive at The Hill in 2017. His portfolio there was superhuman: simultaneously launching a TV channel, drumming up ad business, and filing news and opinion articles. As you might expect, it was a situation rife with conflicts of interest, with one staffer warning that Solomon was up to “reputation-killing stuff.”1

Solomon’s first big moment at The Hill came with his coverage of the Uranium One faux-scandal, during which he heavily insinuated—but did not come close to proving—that Hillary Clinton had approved the sale of rights to a key American uranium reserve to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. At the time, Republican anxieties about Trump’s own Russia ties were in overdrive, so Solomon’s articles gave them the tantalizing feeling that the “real” Russia scandal was that Clinton was the true Putin patsy.

In March 2019, Solomon waded into even murkier waters: the bizarre series of events that led to Trump’s impeachment over efforts to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Solomon inexplicably began to target American ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in articles for The Hill, portraying her as disloyal to Trump and weak on corruption. A month after Solomon’s series began, Trump fired Yovanovitch.

House Democrats later alleged that Solomon’s columns were part of a smear campaign run by Rudy Giuliani and a web of right-leaning Ukrainians and Americans, in a complex deal meant to convince Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens.

Solomon met regularly with figures involved in digging up dirt on the Bidens. The group became known as the BLT Team, named after the BLT Prime restaurant in the Trump International Hotel in Washington where they met. The gang included Giuliani, the prolific Ukrainian-American schemer Lev Parnas, and husband-and-wife legal team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. He even shared a draft of a story with the group before publication—a major journalistic taboo.

DiGenova and Toensing seem to have made something of a cottage industry out of this. They represented at least one Ukrainian involved in the scheme. They had also, perhaps not coincidentally, represented a key Uranium One “whistleblower.” And they were also Solomon’s own lawyers, even though he used them and their clients as sources in his articles without disclosing that relationship. Once again, all of this flies in the face of journalistic standards.

Conflicts of interest aside, much of Solomon’s reporting on Ukraine was simply wrong, according to experts on the byzantine world of Ukrainian politics. Even as Solomon became a regular on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show (and used that relationship to make himself valuable to the BLT Team, according to Parnas), an internal Fox News research document I reported on at the time acknowledged that Solomon was involved in a Ukrainian “disinformation campaign.”

“It was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs,” one State Department noted of Solomon’s reporting during the first Trump impeachment investigation.

Solomon left The Hill in October 2019. The newspaper skewered him in an internal review, with some of the editor’s notes added to his Ukraine’s articles running nearly as long as the articles themselves.

DESPITE QUESTIONS ABOUT SOLOMON’S credibility during his run at the Hill, his star on the right continued to rise. In 2020, he launched Just The News, a conservative news outlet where he has run pro-Trump stories without even the thin layers of editorial oversight he faced at prior media outlets.

Solomon is also becoming a right-wing media mogul, adding minor conservative brands The Post Millennial and (the historically significant) Human Events to his holdings in November. In June 2025, the publisher of RealClearPolitics accused Solomon of convincing some of that website’s donors to withdraw their support in an attempt to soften it up for a takeover, too.

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Solomon also helped launch and continues to provide office space to a foundation that doles out millions of dollars to a network of conservative media outlets and think tanks, including his own site. As Mother Jones reported, few if any of those funding connections are disclosed in Solomon’s journalism when he cites groups that have benefited from the nonprofit’s largesse. Mother Jones describes the sort of ideologically driven news sites in the foundation’s network as “pink slime,” a name that comes from “by-products added as filler to ground beef.”

But Solomon’s biggest honor came this summer, when Trump made him a special government employee tasked with helping “identify some documents, some secrets” to be declassified and released to the public. He is eligible to serve in the role for up to 130 days. Solomon, who said he’s not being paid for the White House declassification work, announced in June that he was stepping down as Just The News’s editor-in-chief, although he continues to host his show and publish articles on the Just The News website.

Solomon isn’t the only member of the BLT Team joining the administration. In April, diGenova was sworn in as a counselor to the Justice Department operating out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, where he’s reportedly working with a grand jury to indict Trump critics like former CIA director John Brennan. The judge overseeing the proceedings—and making decisions on whether to approve things like subpoenas for witness testimony or documents—is infamous Trump loyalist Aileen Cannon, who ran interference for the president during special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation between Trump’s terms in office. Earlier this spring, Cannon blocked the release of Smith’s final report on his investigation’s findings.

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Toensing came out of retirement in May to be sworn in as a “deputy chief for civil rights in the criminal section” in the same prosecutor’s office, according to a statement filed in court by District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

“Ms. Toensing has extensive obligations in that [Florida] District related to a grand jury proceeding,” Pirro wrote, suggesting that Toensing too is working on some kind of urgent grand jury case against perceived Trump enemies.

Solomon has openly admitted that his role declassifying government documents is central to helping that same grand jury, suggesting the once-ridiculed group involved in crafting the anti-Biden Ukraine narrative is now helping Trump pursue his enemies through the Justice Department.

Referring to the administration’s push to declassify files about investigations into the president, Solomon told Benny Johnson in April that “those documents will help this prosecutorial team in Miami” by taking away the need for the sorts of secret and time-intensive processes that would otherwise be needed to make use of them in court.

But Solomon’s decades-old reputation for letting down his audience is starting to reach conservatives, too. Popular conspiracy theory blog Conservative Treehouse has grown skeptical of Solomon’s promises, even adding a bolded warning label of sorts to a preview of Trump’s Thursday speech so readers wouldn’t get too excited.

“Caution should be noted as newly appointed Special Government Employee John Solomon is responsible for the content,” the post read.

Emerald Robinson, an anchor at Mike Lindell’s online channel, wasn’t excited either.

“LOL why would anybody trust John Solomon based on his record?” she wrote on X.

When you’ve lost Lindell’s crew…

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A PROMINENT 71-YEAR-OLD can’t just die of cardiovascular disease these days. Instead, judging by some people’s reactions to the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), there has to be a hidden hand at play.

“Was Lindsey Graham assassinated by Russia or Iran?” asked right-wing activist Laura Loomer, adding that Vladimir Putin–friendly American podcaster Tucker Carlson should be investigated by the FBI just to be sure.

“Lindsey Graham dying out of the blue like this doesn’t make any sense at all,” wrote conservative activist Matt Van Swol, in a message reposted by former Trump spokesman Sean Spicer.

And on it went. Conservative columnist Marc Thiessen suggested that Graham, who recently visited Ukraine, might be just the latest Putin foe to fall victim to an assassination. (Graham apparently died of an aortic dissection, and Thiessen was commenting on a post noting that “Graham has dealt with blood pressure issues since his 40s. His father also died of cardiac arrest at age 69.”) Former CBS News reporter-turned-conspiracy theorist Lara Logan, meanwhile, is dabbling in numerology, scrutinizing the timing of Donald Trump’s posts about Graham’s death to see if they hold clues.

“This doesn’t look like a guy who would die hours later,” commented billionaire Bill Ackman on a video of a not-particularly-healthy-looking Graham. Ackman—who, like the other people quoted above, is not a physician—later deleted the tweet.

The rush to avoid the obvious explanation for Graham’s death—that Graham died of heart disease, as 71-year-old men with busy schedules sometimes do—offers a glimpse into the dynamics of the MAGA internet in 2026. It’s a place where nothing is as it seems, and even something as simple as an older man dying is grist for the conspiracy theory mill.

Studying conspiracy theorists, academic Michael Barkun noted that one core tenet is their belief that nothing that happens is a coincidence. So Graham can’t just die randomly in a way that more or less fits with his actuarial table—he had to have been killed by a secret team of Russian assassins waiting around in Kyiv for an American senator to show up, or by opponents of the SAVE Act, or because he once was vaccinated for COVID.

What’s different now is that

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I was there to see Ryan Fournier, the founder of Students for Trump, who was already a defendant in multiple criminal cases, arraigned on still more new charges. Fournier faces six new counts—including his first felony—for obstructing justice, assault, contempt, and allegedly threatening to kidnap or injure. And these are separate from his recent arrest for cocaine possession, his ties to a strange fake Secret Service agent scam, and the gun investigation that prompted police to search his apartment last month.

Instead, the new charges relate to Fournier’s alleged attack on his ex-girlfriend and a right-wing media influencer, most of the details of which haven’t been released by prosecutors. Both women were in the courtroom on Tuesday as Fournier was brought in from the D.C. Jail, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shackled at the legs and waist.

Just a month ago, Fournier was hobnobbing with the Trump-world elite, hitting all the hot bars and living it up at a billionaire’s penthouse. He was even heading to The Ned, the private member’s club beloved of D.C.’s MAGA grandees, when Secret Service agents arrested him a few weeks ago. Now he’ll be in jail for at least another week. But don’t worry—he’s somehow still managing to post to his 1.2 million followers on X to promote the White House’s cheap gas scheme.

Today, we’ve got a story about a very strange man who could bring Candace Owens to legal ruin. Let us know in the comments what you think.

–Will

TURNING POINT USA OFFICIALS and their allies have seized on a hearing in Utah this week for alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, hoping to use newly public evidence from the case to dispel the conspiracy theories about his death promoted by onetime friend Candace Owens.

A very different drama in the Kirk saga is playing out six hundred miles away in Pasco, Washington, where a little-known Kirk assassination conspiracy theorist named Mitch Snow has been dodging U.S. marshals intent on serving him with a defamation lawsuit.

On X, Snow has been posting doorbell-camera screenshots of befuddled marshals waiting at his front door, including one that shows Snow himself driving by as the marshals look for their quarry.

After a regular process server complained to the court what was described as a “hostile” environment at Snow’s home, a judge dispatched armed marshals to do the job instead. So far, they haven’t succeeded.

Snow told me he has refused to meet any of them out of fear they’ve been sent to murder him for knowing too much. The guys at his door, Snow says, are the type who are “just sent to stalk you, harass you, kill you.”

“‘Oops, I accidentally shot him,’” Snow said, imagining the excuse the marshals would use after his execution.

Snow, 56, has been thrust into the Kirk story because of some bizarre claims he made about Erika Kirk and an Arizona military base in a December appearance on Owens’s show. Now he’s a codefendant alongside Owens in a defamation lawsuit filed by Kirk security chief Brian Harpole, meaning Owens could soon have to answer in court for her decision to platform Snow—someone who doesn’t exactly have a reputation for living in reality.

Snow isn’t just afraid of process servers. He claims he’s faced years of harassment and attempts on his life, including an apparent car bomb, ever since he found out while working for the military that the American government is colluding with Mexican drug cartels to build drug tunnels under the border.

He’s accused his own father of being the Zodiac killer. He told me he’s been targeted with rumors saying he’s “Blanco Muerte”—a rogue special forces agent dedicated to slaying cartel agents, Sicario-style.

When a beetle flew into the house where he’s been laying low since appearing on Owens’s show, he suspected it was some kind of insect-shaped surveillance drone sent by Erika Kirk, and stuffed it in a Faraday bag to review later with Owens. And he thinks Erika Kirk and Harpole might be out to murder him, too.

Now, with a defamation suit pending, Owens’s financial and legal future could hinge on

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WHILE MUCH OF THE SOCCER WORLD was aghast that Donald Trump would meddle in the World Cup—prodding FIFA to suspend the one-game ban of American striker Folarin Balogun—pro-Trump media figures were delighted. To them, this was simply a new way the president could flex his heavy-handed shakedown tactics on the world stage.

“Thank you, President Trump!” MAGA personality Benny Johnson wrote on X.

Never one to turn down a paycheck, Johnson turned his praise into a paid ad, including a link to the Polymarket odds for the game against Belgium, where, remarkably, the U.S. men’s national team was favored to win.

Well, the odds were a bit off. The U.S. lost the match in embarrassing fashion, 4–1. And the Trump movement’s interest in soccer proved to be short-lived. Quite suddenly, MAGA decided they didn’t care about soccer anymore!

After the brutal loss, popular MAGA memester “End Wokeness” was relieved that it was time to move on from the World Cup.

“The good news is that we no longer have to pretend to care about soccer,” the account’s operator wrote.

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who spent the day dunking on anyone registering discomfort with Trump pressuring FIFA—accusing all of Europe of “crying” about it—stewed about being duped about how good the U.S. team actually was.

“I feel like soccer people owe me an apology if Im being honest,” he posted. “I go and stick my neck out there for you guys and get embarrassed like this? Not good”

And Vince Dao, a MAGA commenter, took the defeat particularly poorly. “Soccer is gay and retarded again,” he posted. In fact, a lot of conservatives decided after the match that soccer was, well, gay.

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THE EPISODE WAS YET ANOTHER reminder of how eagerly the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent internet will adopt any cause Trump champions—regardless of how haphazardly he does it. And how those causes often dramatically backfire on them.

The entire episode began over the weekend, when Trump took the unprecedented step of calling FIFA’s president to complain about Balogun being suspended from playing in the Belgium game after receiving a red card in a previous game. Soon after Trump’s call, Balogun’s suspension was lifted (for a probationary period of one year).

Prominent conservative figures, normally accustomed to deriding soccer as a sport that is basically un-American, treated Trump’s call to FIFA president Gianni Infantino as another epic win for the administration. Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, declared that Americans who planned to root for Belgium at Monday’s game to protest Trump’s action should deport themselves.

A post from Loomer Unleashed, the X account for right-wing activist Laura Loomer’s podcast, declared that Trump critics were “triggered” by the president’s attempts to keep Balogun in the game.

When a liberal account criticized Trump’s call, the former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who has been embraced by the MAGA right for his criticism of vaccines and marijuana legalization, replied, “Oh, do shut up.” In case his meaning wasn’t clear enough, he added: “People like you are why the Democrats can’t get any traction no matter what @realDonaldTrump does[.] Let the guy play, he did nothing wrong and the call was a joke. Or would you rather your national team lose over it?”

Traditionally, American presidents have not been expected to use their influence to sway World Cup proceedings; as far as we know, none ever has. But after the president’s phone call, pro-Trump personalities began treating meddling in soccer games as a key White House function.

“If Kamala was President, the USA wouldn’t even have made the Top 32,” tweeted conservative influencer Ada Lluch, appearing to imply other interference from Trump before the phone call about the red card.

The conservative effort to reframe Trump’s actions as the political equivalent of playing the game itself in a more rough-shouldered way—the political equivalent of a Roy Keane-type destroyer—was striking in part because Trump admitted he only recently learned what a red card was.

“He [Balogun] got a red card. I didn’t know what that meant, I didn’t think it meant much” Trump said Monday. “Then I started hearing that that means you can’t play in the next game.”

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BUT MAGA’S EMBRACE of the beautiful game wasn’t the only bizarro part of the story: Pro-Trump figures were rallying behind Balogun even though the striker, raised in London to parents of Nigerian descent, wouldn’t be an American citizen if not for birthright citizenship.

“We talk all . . . about birthright citizenship, we finally got a benefit from it,” Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow said on his radio show, adding that he suspected the referee who gave Balogun a red card was corrupt.

Indeed, for Republicans, the real soccer scandal of the weekend had nothing to do with Trump at all. They were fuming about Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) wearing a Mexico jersey to watch the England-Mexico game with Mexico fans at a Tucson watch party.

“Modern Democratic Party: wear another country’s jersey and post a photo of yourself taking a photo of yourself,” wrote pro-Trump commentator Scott Jennings.

Loomer also jumped on the Kelly picture, not because of the jersey he was wearing but because he was getting “handsy” with a woman in it. “A US Senator who represents a BORDER STATE wearing Mexico’s jersey is bad enough, but I thought he was ‘super loyal’ to his medically brain dead wife who was shot in the head?”

Kelly’s wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, responded with a post confirming that it was, in fact, her in the picture:

Even the Senate got in on the Balogun excitement ahead of the USMNT’s game against Belgium. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), insisted he was “not the biggest soccer fan,” but took a shot at Trump critics who couldn’t appreciate the president’s possibly untoward efforts to achieve World Cup glory for the United States.

“I wish liberals could put their country ahead of their politics just once, but I guess that’s asking too much,” Cotton posted.

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But if MAGA suddenly found itself in love with soccer thanks to Trump’s brave efforts to overturn a red card, it was a short-lived fling.

Internet curmudgeon Gunther Eagleman, who had fire alarm-emojied the news that Trump had “helped get that bogus red card reversed” was quick to dump the sport after the fiasco on the field.

“Hey @Grok,” he asked, “how many more days until the real football season starts?”

His fellow online traveler, Nick Sortor, who was nearly orgasming over Balogun starting “despite the Belgians whining about it,” was similarly quick to dismiss the sport by the time the actual game was over.

“Here’s some good news, my fellow Americans,” he posted, “We’re less than TWO MONTHS AWAY from the REAL football season.”

Perhaps this was all inevitable. Conservatives have long looked at soccer as a European sport. And they’ve long looked at Europe as an effeminate continent not on the same plane as brute America. But I can’t help but think some of this was just deeply personal. Having embraced Trumpian bullying of FIFA, they were suddenly attached to the success of the U.S. squad. And that squad’s success had, in turn, become an emblem for Trump’s ability to shape world competition in America’s favor.

When Belgium’s striker Romelu Lukaku scored the fourth and final goal in extra time and celebrated it with a “fuck you” to the crowd and a mocking Trump dance, it had to have stung on a deeper level than just patriotic pride.

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Last month, Fuentes was contacted via a paid chat on his show by “Soy Toys,” a business that sells these types of meme-themed stuffed animals. The account’s operator said he had gone long on groyper dolls only to get his Instagram storefront banned because of their affiliation with Fuentes.

“You ruined me, can u buy out the inventory?” the store owner wrote to Fuentes.

The groyper king was intrigued.

“Your groyper plushie’s pretty nice,” Fuentes said on his show. “You know what? Maybe. Get in touch.”

But Fuentes soon soured on the deal, as the man bugged him via paid chats to hurry up.

“It’s not my fault you bought all these stupid stuffed animals!” Fuentes, not exactly nice to his fans in even the best circumstances, fumed a few days later. He added several racist and homophobic insults. And, well, the deal now appears to be off.

Today, we’ve got one of the best kinds of newsletter—one about some conspiracy theorists and some surreptitiously recorded audio. Let’s dive in.

–Will

IN THE EARLY HOURS OF JUNE 8, Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin was hanging out in Venice, Florida with the niece and nephew of Trump-world hero Michael Flynn.

Venice is a locus of MAGA activity, which means it is often a prime location for intra-movement drama. And, sure enough, with White Claws and other alcoholic seltzers strewn across a living-room table, things got ugly. The Flynn siblings, Edward and Kristen Hall, accused Crokin of trying to get one over on the Flynn family. Video I obtained of the confrontation shows insults were leveled and the n-word was dropped even though all the participants were white.

Crokin, a former entertainment journalist who has promoted Pizzagate and QAnon, is one of the most prominent conspiracy theorists in the country. At the time of the argument, she was also close to the Flynn family, serving on the board of an anti-trafficking initiative housed within Michael Flynn’s nonprofit, America’s Future.

The Hall siblings play significant roles in America’s Future, as well. On LinkedIn, Kristen Hall describes herself as the organization’s director of research development. Edward Hall, a rapper, frequently speaks and performs at its events.

So the fact that this trio was clashing was yet further indication that a dramatic implosion is taking place inside Michael Flynn’s political apparatus. But why? The video offers some clues. My conversations with people in and around the situation provided others.

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TWO WEEKS AGO, Ben Shapiro announced the hiring of the Daily Wire’s explosive new star: “Mat Nuclear,” a 19-year-old internet-debating wunderkind.

“We wanted to bring him on board to be a person who just debates,” Shapiro said, promising that Nuclear (unclear if that’s his real name) would host a nightly debate livestream where he would “take on all comers.” Perhaps Shapiro wanted to get in on the Jubilee fad. Perhaps he saw something of himself in young Nuclear—a whipsmart young conservative willing to just annoy the shit out of everyone.1

Perhaps he was just out for blood. After all, Shapiro made clear that Nuclear’s main mission was to take down white nationalist Nick Fuentes. And Nuclear seemed all in. In another video last week with Daily Wire hosts, he had said Fuentes was part of an anti-Western civilization coalition with a “hyperfixation on Israel.”

The longstanding feud between Fuentes and Shapiro is clearly ideological. But some of the motivation here may also be economics. The Daily Wire has been battered by overspending and the loss of personalities like Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, both of whom have since turned on Shapiro. Most importantly, Shapiro has struggled to connect with a Gen Z conservative audience that is increasingly critical of Israel and uninterested in the now-middle-aged white conservatives who make up most of the Daily Wire cast.

By comparison, Nuclear is black, versed in internet debating bloodsports, and the rare young person willing to defend AIPAC—exactly the kind of unique character who could help Shapiro in his ceaseless online battles.

Unfortunately for the media mogul, it didn’t work out that way. On just his first stream for the Daily Wire, Nuclear accidentally

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Aggrieved QAnoners Accuse Trump of Q-Baiting

The Trump administration launched a bizarre QAnon-themed social media campaign this week, using QAnon slogans like “trust the plan” and even a fake Q post to promote Trump executive orders on “quantum computing.”

“Where we go one, we go quantum,” one Department of Defense account posted on X, a clear play on the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.”

Why would the administration play footsy with QAnon? Perhaps they’re just stirring the pot? Maybe they feel like the QAnon brand is a little less toxic, since it’s been a while since Q believers murdered their family members, kidnapped a child, or stormed Congress? Maybe they’re true believers? After all, Trump has frequently posted QAnon memes in the past, albeit not this explicitly.

The most likely reason is that it’s a troll job—more about that later—but that’s not exactly why, the posts went over so poorly with the QAnon believers (in addition, it almost goes without saying, to normies). The movement, once convinced that Trump was a messianic figure who would literally bring about heaven on earth, apparently has gotten sick of him.

“We’re done being treated like shit!” wrote QAnon promoter Liz Crokin, saying Q believers’ lives had been destroyed while Trump did nothing.

There are several reasons why QAnon believers are turning on Trump. But the main thrust boils down to this: After trying to block the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and failing to deliver deep-state arrests, some of the movement’s dissatisfied stars think it’s a bit gauche, if not insulting, that the president and his team are appropriating QAnon culture.

No one has been more vocal about this than former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once the nation’s most prominent QAnon believer. After falling out with Trump in part because of his attempts to stop the release of the Epstein files—a key part of the QAnon mythos—Greene tore into the president in a video this week.

“Well, now they’re trying to throw out the Q-slop and propaganda to get you guys sucked back in!” Greene said.

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Greene remains well versed in this world and its history. And as she lambasted Trump, she raised one of the most challenging pieces of cognitive dissonance for his devoted QAnon followers: the Trump campaign’s attempts ahead of the 2020 election to ban QAnon clothes or signs from rallies, which they did after clusters of Q believers caught on camera began spooking non-crazy voters.

“The Trump team did not want to be associated with the QAnon crowd, and they were embarrassed of the Q people,” Greene complained.

Greene’s video set off a new round of complaints from QAnon believers and other Trump-aggrieved personalities on the right. January 6th activist Trisha Hope confirmed that she saw the campaign seizing QAnon merchandise, while a QAnon personality once known as “QAnon John” seconded Greene’s remarks. He argued that the administration’s recent Q-flirty social media posts were a sign of the president’s political desperations.

“Now, [sic] that Trump’s approval is in the toilet after endless broken promises to the American people and blatantly Israel first policies, they are using Q propaganda in a last ditch desperate attempt to reel the deceived loyalists back in,” he wrote, saying his own QAnon gear had been banned at rallies. “IT’S SO FREAKING CRINGE,” he added.

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The White House hasn’t addressed these complaints about the recent posts—at least not in public. But it would be hard for officials to claim ignorance or that this was all a misunderstanding. The idea of “quantum computing” is already part of QAnon lore, suggesting that the new social media effort isn’t just a random reference to two things that start with “Q.”

In fact, the “quantum” faction of QAnon is among its craziest—embraced by a man who went by the name “Baby Q,” the leader of an off-shoot QAnon sect that once set up a romance-filled compound in Arizona. Baby Q, who claimed to be a time traveler, later pleaded guilty to a federal extortion charge and served time in jail.

No one better typifies the strange push-and-pull in Trump’s approach to QAnon than Bobby Levy, a rapid response director at the White House. Levy has been gleefully participating in the recent social media effort, posting “Activation Word: Ronald McDonald”—a QAnon catchphrase. On Wednesday, Levy wrote that “patriots are still in control,” yet another QAnon reference.

Yet Levy was not always such a fan of QAnon! Experts at online sleuthing, Q believers dug up a tweet he had sent in 2021 calling for QAnon fans to be institutionalized.

“Q people are never to be taken serious,” Levy wrote at the time. “REOPEN THE ASYLUMS!”

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Strange Coincidences in FBI Case on SPLC

The Justice Department’s prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center has already hit multiple roadblocks. First, Attorney General Todd Blanche was forced to correct a false statement he made about the case on Fox News. Then prosecutors admitted that a Justice Department staffer erred by emailing a then-confidential superseding indictment to reporters before it was unsealed in the court docket.

Now there’s another interesting wrinkle in the case: the revelation that an FBI memo that launched the investigation contains identical passages to a letter Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and other conservative groups wrote to Trump adviser Stephen Miller containing complaints about the SPLC. That letter to Miller came in September, a month before the FBI memo, raising more questions about how much conservative groups are directing the Trump administration.

On Monday, the SPLC filed a motion arguing that the case should be dropped as a vindictive prosecution. In it, they cite several similarities between the letter and the FBI memo, arguing that it’s proof the Justice Department was taking its cues from conservative activists.

For example, the letter—signed by Kirk and the founder of conservative activist group Moms for Liberty, and others—reads in part: “The SPLC places many groups on its ‘Hate Map’ as a smear tactic solely because they disagree with its radical leftwing ideology.”

The FBI memo on the case uses nearly identical language in a similar passage: “Many of the entities on the hate map are placed there as a smear tactic solely because they disagree with the ideology of the SPLC.

The FBI memo and the Turning Point letter draw on many of the same articles and specific quotes—some of which are rather unusual sources for the FBI, like lefty Current Affairs writer Nathan J. Robinson. Elsewhere, the language is copied word for word.

“The SPLC hate designation was also cited as the reason for the riot and assault of a female professor at Middlebury College in 2017,” the letter reads.

That same sentence appears verbatim in the FBI memo.

The SPLC’s lawyers argue that the letter was used as an initial basis for the investigation, with the FBI investigating whether the SPLC had somehow “defrauded” conservative groups by describing them as hateful. That argument was later abandoned, and replaced with the theory that the SPLC broke the law by paying informants in white supremacist groups.

The similarities between the letter and the FBI memo also raise questions about how the letter might make its way from a top White House adviser to the Justice Department—an institution that is, at least theoretically, supposed to be immune from political interference.

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SINCE TAKING OVER THE STORIED conservative group America’s Future in 2021, retired general Michael Flynn has turned it into a real rogue’s gallery.

For one, Flynn, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser in the first administration, put Lara Logan—the former CBS News reporter turned conspiracy theorist—on the nonprofit’s board.

Flynn also launched an anti–child trafficking initiative within America’s Future called “Project Defend & Protect Our Children,” which he stocked with fringe activists, including Pizzagate true believer Liz Crokin, who now serves as a Project board member. The group held events at Mar-a-Lago, where they screened QAnon-themed films and listened to a speech from Crokin, in which she promoted Pizzagate. Crokin has been joined on the advisory board by the likes of James O’Keefe-associate Brian Gamble, whose wife, Alysia Gamble, was the recent subject of a Politico story about a bizarre honeypot operation targeting low-level Democrats.

It was kook heaven!

But it was hardly paradise.

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This month, a number of prominent Project Defend & Protect Our Children figures started noisily quitting the anti-trafficking operation. On June 9, activist Lynz Piper-Loomis announced that she had resigned from the group’s advisory board a month earlier. She hasn’t offered an explanation yet, but suggested she might soon.

“I may speak more on this later,” Piper-Loomis wrote in an X post. “There is a reason I authored a book titled, ‘I Am Silent No More.’”

Piper-Loomis wasn’t alone. Two more members of the advisory board also quickly announced that they too had quit. Crokin was the first, joining Piper-Loomis in announcing her own resignation from Project Defend & Protect Our Children, claiming vaguely that she had “receipts.”

“I want to put on the record publicly that I resigned from @GenFlynn America’s Future on June 8, 2026,” Crokin wrote on X on June 11.

Crokin’s resignation appeared to catch one Flynn family member off guard, with Flynn son Michael Flynn Jr. replying “???” Asked by a fan whether the fight with Flynn’s organization was “kayfabe”—a wrestling term for a fake feud staged to draw attention—Crokin insisted it was real and hinted at something sinister going on.

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THE SECOND TRUMP TERM has been a great time for Christian nationalists seeking to make the United States into an explicitly Christian state. Their leading pastors have been embraced by administration figures like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

But behind the scenes, things haven’t been going so smoothly. The latest example came when a recent conference left members divided on a key issue: Just how racist is Christian nationalism supposed to be?

Last weekend, roughly 1,500 Christian nationalists from across the country met in Ogden, Utah, for “The War for Normal”—a gathering featuring some of far-right Christianity’s most online thinkers and posters.

Organized by Utah podcasters and pastors Eric Conn and Brian Sauvé, the conference had an undeniable macho, MAGAfied flair. Speakers were announced via nicknames like “Big Hoss,” and their almost ubiquitously bearded faces were plastered on wanted posters labeling them outlaws “For Thought Crimes.”

The organizers and attendees, in other words, were leaning into—even reveling in—a “bad boy,” edgy, naughty vibe. And the conference had the type of attractions you’d expect from an event attempting to blend Christianity with anti-woke politics. There was a single’s mixer for “based” attendees, with chaperones provided. Men could compete “in feats of strength and agility.”

Fatefully, the event also included a booth for Antelope Hill Publishing—an extremist publishing house that has made its name putting out racist books, as well as translating and reprinting old ones. To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here, Antelope Hill got its start translating the memoir of an unrepentant commander in the Nazi SS. Their current online store is offering not one but two “Third Reich Bundles”—a collection of books written by prominent Nazis for between $126.89 and $180.49.

Antelope Hill didn’t exactly clean up for the big conference. The press tweeted out a picture of its booth, showing stacks of both the SS memoir, Burning Souls, and other pro-Nazi books like The Essential Speeches of Adolf Hitler.

Making matters worse, Antelope Hill also handed out a flyer recommending other racist and weirdly esoteric websites attendees might want to check out in their spare time. One flyer lists its “heroes” as people like American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Another website endorsed by Antelope Hill praises Cosmotheism, a strange religion started by William Luther Pierce III, who was—you guessed it—an American neo-Nazi.

Another website Antelope’s flyer endorsed sold white supremacist terrorism books like The Turner Diaries. The flyer also promoted Man’s World, the bizarre men’s magazine by right-wing writer “Raw Egg Nationalist,” whose book Antelope published.

All in all, the appearance of such overtly pro-Hitler work provoked criticism among more moderate Christian nationalists. Talk-radio host Erick Erickson called it a “mess.”

“I have been going to Reformed Christian conferences of varying sizes for 33 years, and I have never been to one that was selling pro-Third Reich, Pro-Nazi books,” noted one pastor on X.

The Nazi collision was even disconcerting for some Christian nationalists who hold fairly reprehensible views of their own. Doug Wilson, a Hegseth ally and perhaps the most prominent Christian nationalist pastor in the conference, was one of them. Though Wilson has taken such retrograde stands as calling for women to lose their right to vote, he wrote on his blog that he found the Ogden conference Nazi situation to be a little extreme.

“You don’t host a conference promising to fight for normal, and then bring in Nazis,” Wilson wrote.

The conference had become such an optical disaster for Christian nationalism, Wilson wrote, that he suspected Antelope Hill was being secretly funded by the federal government or the Southern Poverty Law Center.1 But in a moment of mild introspection, he also said Christian nationalists should grapple with why the Nazi publisher thought it would be able to successfully sell books at the event.

“Vendors go to conferences because they believe that there will be a healthy market for their wares there,” wrote Wilson. “The Antelope Hill people seemed very happy with what—for them—was a fruitful trip.”

Despite the criticism, the conference’s organizers weren’t especially apologetic about turning part of their event into a Nazi confab. Responding to the criticism on their podcast—the grandly named The King’s Hall—Conn and Sauvé described Antelope Hill’s books as “varying historical works,” and said the controversy was wildly overblown.

“People would think that it was a goose-stepping SS march!” Sauvé said.

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Joel Webbon, a prominent far-right pastor and internet personality who has hosted podcasts with the likes of disgraced, libidinous far-right commentator Elijah Schaffer, agreed. As the controversy blew up, Webbon posted that he would “never” criticize the conference’s organizer.

As for Antelope Hill, they thought the entire affair was a clear success. One of the individuals who manned the company’s conference booth, himself a white supremacist podcaster who posts under the name “Mainstream Dissident,” rejoiced at having made racial solidarity among white people part of the conference’s theme.

The key, he said on a video livestream, was acting like they were just there to sell historical books.

“Dude, we’re just humble book merchants, man,” he said, laughing. “We’re just selling Third Reich literature at a Christian conference is all!”

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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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