The right’s anti-Candace coalition is finally here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither Clavicular nor Waknine responded to requests for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does that really mean? Who knows?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not the FBI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Groypers Ground Up by Their Hero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“DO IT !!!” declared Mr. Turd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trouble in the House of Taibbi

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

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

Things have not gone well since.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Blaze Reporter Steaming Over Firing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His fans weren’t mollified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Keeperman has run into problems with that mission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MIKE CERNOVICH IS NOT JUST ONE of the original MAGA influencers, he’s arguably a paradigm case—the ever-active operative/influencer who just won’t stop coming up with crazy new ideas.

After rising in the nascent manosphere of the early 2010s with his blog “Danger and Play”—the idea being that a real man needs both danger and play—Cernovich became one of Trump’s most ardent Twitter boosters in the 2016 campaign. Then he got his big break a few months before that election by becoming an early embracer of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

Cernovich advocated what he called the “Gorilla Mindset,” which was essentially that you should act and think more like our great-ape cousins. He self-published a book by that name in 2015 and started marketing lifestyle products under that brand; he even sold brain pills with worrying names like “Gorilla Mind Smooth.”

Not that he needed the money. That’s because, as the New Yorker revealed at the time, Cernovich—one of neo-masculinity’s leading advocates—was, in fact living off a divorce settlement from his wealthy ex-wife. You couldn’t make this guy up if you tried!

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Cernovich’s influence isn’t what it was in the very first days of the first Trump administration, when he organized a “DeploraBall” inauguration party for the new White House hangers-on. But he’s still on X, and over the last few months he has made an interesting turn: Like a growing number of MAGA influencers, he is openly talking about how he’s fed up with Trump. But what stands out is the issues that have made him so uneasy with the administration—a mix of policy disappointments along with disillusionment over just how corrupt he believes the administration is.

Cernovich’s frustration with the second Trump administration first became clear in November, when he

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First: Country music sensation Alexis Wilkins, perhaps better known as FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, is bothered that so many Republicans think she’s a Mossad asset. The result: a thirteen-tweet thread arguing that everyone from Candace Owens to Michael Flynn to Tucker Carlson is part of a foreign influence operation, with Wilkins herself as one of their main targets.

Wilkins’s thread is interesting not because she actually found anything but because it suggests the MAGA civil war has descended to a place where everyone is accusing one another of being a foreign intelligence asset. If only Wilkins knew a senior law enforcement official who could investigate her claims.

Meanwhile, the Blaze isn’t giving up its hunt for the January 6th pipe bomber, even after an actual suspect was arrested (and, according to prosecutors, confessed) and the Glenn Beck–founded outlet retracted its prior claim that a Capitol Police officer planted the bombs. The site is out this week with another round of “gait analysis”—drawing grand conclusions based on how the bomber walked in surveillance videos.

This time they have a new theory: Brian J. Cole, the suspect arrested in December, is simply too autistic to match the bomber’s gait.

Speaking of crimes many on the right see as unsolved mysteries despite mountains of evidence, in today’s newsletter we’re talking about the murder of Charlie Kirk. The effort to find Kirk’s “real” killer has won over former Trump administration official Joe Kent, whose musings about the real culprit could end up complicating the prosecution. What a mess.

Plus: The groypers have a new word. Who else is going to keep track of the groypers for you? Sign up for a Bulwark+ membership now!

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–Will

Joe Kent Bolsters Defense for Alleged Kirk Killer

WHEN JOE KENT, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned from the Trump administration last week over the Iran war, it stirred up no shortage of debate among conservatives over how the war was going. But Kent wasn’t done. Since then, he has sparked an additional, more explosive feud over an even hotter issue in the MAGA civil war: the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Kent kicked things off with an interview on Tucker Carlson’s show, saying he was prevented while in the government from completing an investigation into whether there was a “foreign nexus” behind Kirk’s assassination.

But things really got going on Tuesday when Kent told conservative writer (and two-time failed California gubernatorial candidate) Michael Shellenberger he’d be willing to testify in accused Kirk murderer Tyler Robinson’s defense that the FBI botched the investigation. Kent told Shellenberger he was warned his own inquiry into Kirk’s murder—which he operated from his government post, separately from the FBI—could hurt the prosecution against Robinson.1

“I was definitely warned of that over and over again,” said Kent. “If I end up having to [be called as a witness], then I’ll do it. It’s not something I’m seeking.”

When Shellenberger asked Kent if he was fine with the prospect of aiding Robinson’s case, Kent told him “so be it.”

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The idea that a major Trump administration official would not only publicly push alternative explanations for Kirk’s assassination but undermine Robinson’s prosecution has stunned Turning Point USA officials, who have already been besieged by conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death pushed by Candace Owens and her acolytes.

Minutes after Shellenberger published his interview with Kent on Tuesday, the next episode of Kirk’s former show came out. The TPUSA staffers who now host the show, Blake Neff and Andrew Kolvet, were visibly angry at the prospect of Kent helping Robinson.

“They care more about their conspiracy theories than about the person who murdered my friend facing justice,” Neff said. “I am fed up with it.”

Kolvet said Kent’s offer crossed a “giant red line,” warning that even if Robinson isn’t acquitted outright, it could taint the jury pool or prompt prosecutors to drop the death penalty.

“The level of betrayal that I currently feel is dramatic and extreme,” he said.

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KENT IS NOW A PUBLIC PLAYER in the Kirk debate. But for months as a government employee, he quietly looked into Kirk’s assassination on his own—so much so that the New York Times reported in October that Kent’s parallel case had alarmed FBI Director Kash Patel.

Kent’s recent theorizing about the case has raised questions about how Owens got her hands on group-chat messages Kirk sent just a few days before his death. Speculation that Kent was her source is now rampant. Those text messages, which Owens published last October, featured Kirk complaining to friends that Jewish donors were pressing him to support Israel in various ways, including banning Tucker Carlson from a TPUSA conference. They provided Owens with evidence for her earliest allegations that Kirk was killed by Israel.

According to Kolvet, he gave those text messages to Kent soon after the assassination, believing they would help investigators trace every possible lead.

Kolvet claims that Kent urged him to make the text messages public. Kolvet refused. But, as he said on Kirk’s podcast Monday, Owens herself received the text messages soon after—the implication being that Kent leaked them to Owens.

“Yes he did suggest I make it public,” Kolvet posted on X. “I declined. A few weeks later the screengrab was leaked anyway.”

Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, who was on the nine-person text chain at the center of this controversy, dropped the insinuation, making clear that he blamed Kent for the leak.

“You made them public!” Wolicki said in an online interview this week, addressing Kent.

For her part, Owens denied that Kent leaked the text messages to her. But she did so in a very specific, suggestive way.

“Joe Kent did not leak me anything for the purpose of attacking Erika Kirk,” she said on her show Monday.

Kent has not addressed the leak allegations. But they are especially interesting, given that he is reportedly under FBI investigation for leaking classified information.

It would be interesting to know for sure what role the nation’s former top counterterrorism official has played in fanning the conspiracy theories. But stepping back, the controversy itself signals that the right’s divide over Kirk’s death isn’t going away. In fact, the fissures could become completely unbridgeable if Kent’s comments about Kirk’s killing end up materially impacting the Robinson trial.

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Groyper Neologism Watch: WANGHAF

IN 2026, EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT GROYPERS, the Nick Fuentes followers who take their name from an obese cartoon toad. Fuentes sells a $40 midriff-baring shirt for female “groypettes,” featuring a Bratz-doll-like illustration. Being a poseur groyper is even considered a solid accusation to level in a Republican primary.

Precisely because it’s becoming mainstreamed in GOP politics, the groypers need a new code. And, well, they’ve found it: “WANGHAF.” I’ve been seeing this acronym more and more: on Fuentes’s show, in the X name of a groyper who played a key role in the Jake Lang To Catch a Predator saga, and yes, on the James Fishback campaign.

On his online store, Fuentes sells a shirt bearing his face, a mob of toad groypers, and the term “WANGHAF.”

What’s going on here? WANGHAF, as it turns out, stands for “White ass n*ggas going hard as fuck.” After picking up steam last year, thanks to a song by the same name and Fuentes’s endorsements, the acronym has become a sort of catchall phrase for groypers acting rowdy.

For example, when he asked recently on X why he was hanging out so much with a suspiciously young-looking man, right-wing pundit Elijah Schaffer responded: “WANGHAF.”

Your neighborhood False Flag correspondent doesn’t personally approve of this. But, it appears, the phrase does have some currency for a certain kind of person.

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HOW MUCH WOULD IT COST to bribe a Daily Caller writer for positive coverage? It could be cheaper than you think.

According to a newly unearthed ledger kept by a Washington lobbyist who tracked his payments to conservative bloggers, it took only $500 to buy a story in the publication, which was one of a handful caught in the latest payola scandal. And though the story appeared under the byline of the Caller’s managing editor, prosecutors who unearthed the ledger say it was actually ghostwritten by the company that effectively bought the coverage.

The spreadsheet listing these transactions was seized by the FBI as part of a 2020 investigation into a fraudulent cryptocurrency promoted by infamous Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It offers a glimpse into how money circulates in conservative media, where it’s not that unusual for celebrity commentators to suddenly champion causes they haven’t seemed interested in before, creating suspicion that they’re on the dole.

In July 2017 Abramoff and his business partner Marcus Andrade began raising money to launch a cryptocurrency called “AML BitCoin,” which, ironically, stood for “Anti-Money Laundering.” To drum up investor interest, the duo effectively purchased free positive press by making undisclosed payments to journalists in conservative and financial media. Many of the payments were organized by Brian Darling, a former staffer for Sen. Rand Paul who now works as a lobbyist at a firm he founded called Liberty Government Affairs.

To keep track of the money, Darling created a spreadsheet that listed the names of writers, the payoffs they received, and the articles that resulted from those payoffs.

In June 2020, Andrade and Abramoff were indicted by the Department of Justice for making “false and misleading statements to potential purchasers” of their AML cryptocurrency. Darling’s spreadsheet was introduced as evidence in Andrade’s criminal trial. It was made public in a court filing last July, but hasn’t been reported on until now.

In all, Darling spent $12,800 through his lobbying shop to buy positive press for the coin, according to the spreadsheet. Among the recipients were financial publications like Forbes and TheStreet and conservative outlets like RedState and the American Spectator.

But among those publications that received the cash, the Daily Caller stood out. That’s because

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THE FACTION OF MAGA PERSONALITIES angry about Donald Trump’s war with Iran now has a martyr, and he’s one of their own.

The resignation of National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent this week—and the ensuing Trump administration attacks on him—have lent a new prestige to Iran-war critics like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Kent cited his disagreement with the war as the reason for his resignation (along with some wink-wink antisemitism about the war’s origins, too). In doing so, he gave likeminded allies a vessel onto which they could attach their own grievances.

He also did something those allies had been unable to do to this point: put real pressure on figures within the administration to make difficult calculations about their own political careers. If Kent could resign over the war—they might be asked in the not-too-distant future—why couldn’t they, too?

It’s fair to say, even at this early juncture, that Kent’s resignation is producing the biggest fissure on the right since Trump pushed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene out of Congress in November.

Kent is set to be interviewed by Owens Thursday night, at a banquet for MAGA group Catholics for Catholics. But first, he stopped by Carlson’s show on Wednesday, where Carlson sought to position Kent as an aggrieved patriot attempting to save the country from “certain disaster.”

“Is this the kind of person that makes me proud to be a fellow American?” Carlson asked his audience to consider.

The answer Carlson was looking for, of course, was “Yes!” Summing up the flurry of leaks aimed at Kent since his resignation—the latest being that, prior to his resignation, he was put under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information—Carlson said the Trump administration’s new ethos was “Joe Kent was right, therefore Joe Kent must be destroyed.”

Supporters of the Iran war outside the administration have also tried their hands at discrediting Kent. Mark Levin, perhaps the right’s most prominent war supporter, called Kent a “rogue staffer.” Glenn Beck and others pointed to an article critical of American aid to Ukraine that Kent’s wife coauthored for the Grayzone, a publication that has frequently run cover for Vladimir Putin. Beck, who erroneously called the site “the Graystone,” suggested that Kent, through his wife, has somehow fallen under the thrall of pro-Putin forces.

“The man may be the head, but the wife is the neck and she turns the head,” Beck said.

But Kent’s resignation is attracting some unusual supporters too, suggesting his criticisms of the war could get more support than those offered by more polarizing figures like Owens. While Breitbart has attacked him, the Daily Caller called his critics “neocon chicken hawks.”

Kent’s resignation is important not just because it’s forcing conservative publications to weigh in on the merits. It’s important because he isn’t a faceless bureaucrat. Kent is a known figure in right-wing media, with friendships with people like Carlson to draw on.

As a congressional candidate, he became a frenemy of antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes, first talking to Fuentes on the phone in an apparent bid for his support, then infuriating the groypers when he disowned their leader. Kent even employed a Proud Boy. And he embraces some of the dissident right’s more outlandish beliefs, saying in his appearance on Carlson’s show that he was blocked from investigating whether Charlie Kirk was really killed by a lone gunman.

Maybe someone like that should never have been in an administration, let alone in a prominent role in the national security apparatus. But Kent was given that job. And his decision to leave it on the terms he did effectively puts an end to the notion that this administration is all onboard Trump’s Iran policy. It also raises real questions about whether the isolationist America Firsters can coexist in the now war-hungry president’s coalition.

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JOE KENT’S DECISION TO QUIT will hasten and heighten the showdown between Donald Trump and his right-wing critics. In a way, this current moment has echoes of Democratic factionalism in the runup to the Iraq War, or the grassroots conservative revolt to the George W. Bush administration’s push for a legal pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

In each case, a vocal group of activists in the party was unhappy with the pursuits of the party’s leadership. But the leadership went ahead anyway, wrongly convinced they knew better than the neophytes which way the political winds were blowing.

In a few years, the Iran war will probably be unpopular on the right, read through the same anti-Israel lens through which they came to see the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

For anyone in the administration with political ambitions who might believe this is where things are heading—and who might want to get there more quickly—Kent has raised the stakes for what it will take to do so convincingly: a loud resignation. JD Vance and Marco Rubio will likely be stuck on the wrong side of that debate in 2028. But Kent and Carlson won’t be.

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Over the weekend, Kelly repeatedly charged Levin, with whom she’s been feuding over the war with Iran, of having a “micropenis.” She did not offer evidence to corroborate her claim.

The schlong and the short of it: While not specifically addressing the size of Levin’s tallywacker, Trump stepped in to praise the conservative commentator, stressing that he was “somewhat under siege” by critics. On Monday, Kelly responded, saying that Levin had essentially tattled to the teacher. She promptly delivered another penis jab.

“As you know, the only people who act like they have the ‘big swinging’ are the ones that don’t,” Kelly said on her podcast.

All of this fighting is making fellow conservative pundits a little nervous. In a fit of desperation, Glenn Beck and others endorsed an essay posted by right-wing pundit Matt Van Swol on Monday arguing, essentially, that it’s not good to have your party’s leading media figures tearing each other’s heads off eight months before the midterms.

Unfortunately for Beck, playing nice is not the economic incentive that prevails in the MAGA media hothouse! Fortunately for you, I’ve got my eyes squarely on that hothouse, including for today’s newsletter, which looks at Laura Loomer’s travels abroad. The Trumpist firebrand decided to meet with some of the targets of her hate only to find out—shockingly!—they don’t like her much.

If you want more of this reporting, consider becoming a Bulwark+ member. Join today for 20 percent off the regular annual price:

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–Will

Loomer flops in India

FAR-RIGHT ACTIVIST AND DONALD TRUMP ADVISER Laura Loomer has hit the global stage. Over the weekend, she traveled to New Delhi with her new fiancé to relay a message from Trump to India’s 1.43 billion people.

“I love India! Please let them know I love India,” Loomer said on stage at the India Today Conclave, reading a message she said the president had given to her.

Unfortunately, many of those in attendance did not seem to reciprocate the sentiment—at least not toward Loomer. That’s because they have access to the internet, and could easily look up the speaker’s many attacks on their country and its people, like the time she said Kamala Harris would make the White House smell like curry.

“India does have running water,” Loomer wrote in another particularly vulgar example from December 2024. “It just runs out of people’s asses.”

That specific insult didn’t come up during the nearly fifty-minute session featuring Loomer. But both the moderators and a journalist in the audience did push her on her outward bigotry toward Indians.

“I think you should do more than just express regret!” said reporter Rajdeep Sardesai, as Loomer looked on impassively. “From what I can see, you’re brazenly racist and Islamophobic.”

Loomer appears to have thought she could make common cause with Hindu nationalists in India over a shared hatred for Muslims, and peppered her speech with attacks on both Muslims and Muslim-majority Pakistan.

“Pakistan is not sending their best!” Loomer said at one point, to applause and approving looks from the audience.

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The session was a reminder that the ultra-MAGA shtick that has provided people like Loomer with an immense amount of power in the United States doesn’t always play so well with international audiences. And, to be clear, she does have immense power.

At the beginning of her event, Loomer broke some news about her relationship with Trump, saying that she had spoken on the phone with the president just an hour before the event—and not only that, but three times last week alone. That’s quite a lot of access for someone considered too hot to touch for almost every other politician in America.

But Loomer also revealed that she has designs on a job inside the White House (she said she’s currently being blacklisted by some staff), and she even hinted that she would like to succeed Karoline Leavitt in the role of press secretary. As for her current work, she said she’s looking to get more “jihadist sympathizers” fired from the administration.

After the conference, Loomer posed for photos at the Taj Mahal—a “monument of love,” as she put it. For some reason, she did not note in her caption that it was built by Muslims.

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Elijah Schaffer returns post–sex scandal

TRADITIONAL FAMILY VALUES manfluencer Elijah Schaffer saw his career implode in early February amid revelations that he had filed for divorce after an alleged affair with fellow conservative pundit Sarah Stock. But now Schaffer is trying to bounce back, this time remaking himself as a sort of cool, philandering type.

“The worst they could find was the fact that my dick works,” Schaffer said of his critics. “Oops!”

In a late February livestream marking his post-affair return to the internet after a brief absence, Schaffer fumed about his sex life becoming the stuff of online gossip.1 He also accused a member of his now estranged wife’s family of sending the allegations in an email to his detractors, including right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

Schaffer complained that his fair-weather fans had abandoned him for a “gay Jew” (Yiannopoulos) instead of believing the word of “a brand-new Christian” (Schaffer himself).

Already facing a restraining order from his wife, Schaffer seemed to be taking serious precautions not to get sued. The broadcast was heavily edited. And partway through, he made a strange pronouncement that everything he was saying was satirical and that none of it could be used in court—a disclaimer of questionable legality.

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The comments from the broadcast’s viewers suggested that Schaffer’s credibility had indeed taken a hit.

“Career over,” declared one, with another writing “bro sucks.”

Schaffer also used the broadcast to address the allegations that he’s on a cocktail of hazily sourced Chinese peptides, including one that makes his skin orange (see picture above). Schaffer confirmed that he was on several peptides, though he didn’t specify if they were Chinese in origin. He suggested that he was doing it to try and look hot.

“Now looksmaxxing is a crime?” Schaffer said.

At the culmination of the broadcast, Schaffer tried to rip up a printed version of the email “dossier” his wife’s family had supposedly circulated about his sexual peccadilloes. But he wasn’t quite strong enough to do it, so he began ripping individual pages and then smaller groupings of them.

“You know what I think of this dossier?” he said, trying and failing to tear the papers. “I don’t even know! Can I even get this?”

Fortunately, he had an explanation for why he was struggling to tear the thin stack of pages: He hadn’t had his peptides in a while.

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As it turns out, she would!

“I would happily become a CNN contributor if CNN is controlled by new leadership following a Paramount acquisition of WBD,” Loomer told me in a text message.

Watch out, Scott Jennings—you may have some competition.

This week, we’ve got a wild one. It’s a story that involves a fake 15-year-old, some age-inappropriately steamy text messages, and one of the right’s most hateful figures.

You can’t get this reporting and context anywhere else. If you’re not already a Bulwark+ member, please consider signing up today at 20 percent off the annual price:

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–Will

ONE OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS HATEMONGERS on the far right appears to have finally stepped in it after being caught texting flirtatiously with what he assumed to be a 15-year-old girl.

Jake Lang has for years been a minor celebrity in the most noxious corners of the conservative movement. He burst onto the scene as a bat-wielding January 6th defendant, then was one of a handful of defendants who took their cases to the Supreme Court, arguing that some of the charges did not apply. Last year, he launched a failed Senate bid in Florida. He has kept himself in the spotlight by holding provocative demonstrations across the country aimed at whipping up hatred for both Jews and Muslims. This past January alone, Lang tossed out Hitler salutes outside of AIPAC’s headquarters and organized an anti-Muslim rally in Minneapolis that saw him attacked by counterprotesters.

Such acts would normally turn off one’s contemporaries. But Lang’s influence has steadily grown. He got what seemed like it would be a big break last Saturday as he led a small protest outside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home, during which he accused Muslims of being “pedophiles.”

The already dicey situation took an even more serious turn when two Muslim counterprotesters, purportedly inspired by ISIS, allegedly threw a bomb at Lang and his fellow “crusaders.” The incident elevated Lang further, as fellow right-wing figures, including those who had previously been critical of his chaotic protest stunts, came to see him as a victim.

But the triumph, such as it was, was short-lived. Just days after the Mamdani rally, a video emerged revealing that Lang had been texting flirtatiously with someone he thought was a 15-year-old girl.

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The video was the product of another attention-hungry faction of the right: pedophile-hunters who stage amateur To Catch a Predator–style stings. On Monday, one of those pedophile-hunters, who goes by the name “The Zerggg,” posted on Instagram that he had been texting Lang while posing as an underage girl who described herself as a high school student.

“What Jake doesn’t tell you is he was chatting up with my 15-year-old decoy,” the Zerggg, a mustachioed young man in a UFC hoodie, said in the post, titled “🚨 JAKE LANG FILES DROP 🚨.”

Though Lang didn’t respond to a request for comment for this newsletter, he has acknowledged that the conversation with the fake 15-year-old girl was real—though unconvincingly insisted it was someone on his “team” who did it.

According to the shared screenshots, the conversation between Lang and the fake girl—whom he referred to as “baby” and “sweetie”—dated back to at least November. But it began to accelerate in early February as Lang tried to nail down the girl’s exact age.

“I might be too young for u lol,” the decoy wrote.

“How old are you bby?” Lang responded, adding “unless you are under 18 I don’t care haha.”

“i’m 15 lol,” the underage persona wrote back, adding a clothed picture of her body.

Having just set his age minimum at 18, Lang, age 30, responded: “When do you turn 16?”

“In 6 months,” she replied.

At this point, the pedophile-hunter, posing as the teenager, attempted to assure Lang.

“I won’t get u introuble [sic] if that’s what u r worried about I can keep a secret,” the decoy wrote back.

Lang “hearted” the message.

“What state do you live in?” he asked. “I can’t see you til your 16.”

If you need a break (or a shower) at this point, we understand. But, let me just say, it gets crazier.

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Fishback Staff Wish He’d Just Return His Luxury Watch Already

NO ONE EXPECTED James Fishback to get this far.

As the leading groyper politician in America, he has gone from weirdo outsider to registering in the mid-single digits in GOP primary polls for Florida’s gubernatorial race. But polls tell only part of the story. Fishback also regularly draws hundreds of fired-up college students to his events, some of them even melting down in tears upon meeting him. The favored candidate in the governor’s race, Trump-endorsed frontrunner Rep. Byron Donalds, is concerned enough that he denounced Fishback as not a real “groyper.”1

Meanwhile, white nationalist podcaster (and groyper icon) Nick Fuentes has hailed Fishback as “really smart” and “very impressive,” noting that he laughed at a racist comment Fishback made about Donalds. These comments would be a kiss of death for many, but it’s a badge of honor for those on the increasingly influential far-right wing of the conservative movement.

Yet even as he’s ascended to previously unimaginable political heights, Fishback has quietly been beset by a big problem in his personal life. He’s deep in debt, owing more than $200,000 to his former hedge-fund employer as a result of some machinations against his old boss. That number could balloon to over $2 million once legal fees are calculated, according to an affidavit filed by the hedge fund’s lawyers in October. And the repo men are closing in.

Last week, the hedge fund, Greenlight Capital, asked a judge to rule that the Tesla Model 3 Fishback drives on the campaign trail really does belong to him, despite being registered in his father’s name. It could pave the way for it to be seized. Fishback also has to appear in court on April 1 to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt after failing to provide documents that would help creditors seize his assets.

The dissonance between Fishback’s social media success and his disastrous personal finances hasn’t been lost on his campaign staffers. According to text messages I’ve obtained, those staffers privately bemoaned their candidate’s money problems, fretted over what the problems could mean for his gubernatorial bid, and wondered openly if his property was already being seized.

The text messages were provided to The Bulwark by Bryant Fulgham, a disillusioned former Fishback campaign worker who served as the candidate’s county outreach chair. Fulgham provided the messages and talked about his experiences on the campaign because, he said, he’s concerned Fishback is misleading his passionate young followers about how much he could actually accomplish if elected.

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In one early February exchange, Fishback’s campaign manager, Emma Wright, claimed that his couch had been repossessed.

“Did they legit take it?” Fulgham asked Wright. “Or was he joking.”

“I think they did man,” Wright replied, adding a sad face emoji.

“Oh my god shit,” Fulgham wrote back. “We’re gonna be sleeping on the floor soon up there,” he added, with two weeping emojis.

Wright replied by joking about Fishback’s Tesla offering the couch moral support while also being repossessed.

“Telsa (also being seized): STAY STRONG COUCH,” she wrote, adding a black fist-up emoji.

Fishback did not dispute the veracity of the texts. But he did broadly dismiss the messages, and he insisted that none of his couches have ever been repossessed.

“This is silly,” Fishback wrote in an email to The Bulwark. “My couch is sitting in my living room.”

Fulgham ultimately quit the Fishback campaign, and not because he didn’t have a couch to sleep on. Instead, he says his departure came because he ran afoul of a veterans group for sailors on USS Liberty—a ship Israel accidentally attacked during the Six-Day War in 1967.2 The ship has become a rallying cry for groypers, who are heavily critical of the U.S.–Israel alliance (to say nothing of their embrace of antisemitism). Fulgham claims he clashed with one of the veterans over how much of their expenses the campaign would cover for an event, after which Liberty crew members complained to Fishback.

“James was pissed that I supposedly upset the USS Liberty vets,” Fulgham said.

In Fulgham’s telling, Fishback offered him another position that Fulgham viewed as a demotion, prompting him to quit on February 18. Nearly a month after his departure, Fulgham now insists that Fishback is misleading his supporters. He compares the campaign to the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

“James is a con artist at the end of the day,” he said.

Asked about Fulgham’s criticism and account of his exit from the campaign, Fishback claimed Fulgham never held the “county outreach chair” position. Fulgham provided me with an organizational chart that listed him holding the role, as well as internal campaign documents that showed him coordinating the campaign’s county chairs. Additionally, Fulgham sent me several pictures that showed him speaking closely with Fishback or in prominent positions at campaign events.

“Jesus Christ,” Fulgham said, “I’ve created Frankenstein.”3

WHETHER OR NOT Fulgham is disgruntled over how his time on the campaign ended, it is indisputable that Fishback is dealing with financial issues stemming from his past employment as a junior “research analyst” at Greenlight Capitol. When Fishback quit the hedge fund to launch his own, he allegedly began describing his past role as “head of macro” in an apparent effort to lure investors. The folks at Greenlight weren’t impressed. They also accused Fishback of taking confidential company information and trying to direct money from the firm’s charity gift-matching program to a nonprofit that he had started to encourage debating on college campuses.

According to court filings, Greenlight moved to seize a number of Fishback’s possessions, including the Tesla.

Some of Fishback’s campaign staffers even worried that the firm would come for the candidate’s watch, a luxury Cartier that lawyers for Fishback’s creditors claimed he wore to a deposition.

In February messages with Fulgham, Wright expressed her wish for Fishback to turn over the watch in order to help satisfy his debts.

“Like bro just give them the Rolex and call it a day,” Wright wrote, apparently mistaking the watch brand.

She also appeared to have doubts about whether Fishback was really unable to hand the watch over.

“He claims he lost it or something idk,” Wright wrote.

“Oh ffs,” Fulgham replied.

“Yeeeeeeah,” she wrote.

“Yeah I lost it in my safety deposit box,” Fulgham wrote.

“Basically lmfao,” Wright wrote.

Asked about the exchange, Fishback—perhaps seizing on Wright’s brand confusion—told me: “I have never owned a Rolex.”

Fishback doesn’t exactly come across as a great boss in the texts reviewed by The Bulwark. In messages to Fulgham, Wright complained twice that Fishback had given her an “ass blasting” about various campaign plans.

The campaign chats are also filled with what you’d expect from a group of groypers. Twice, staffers refer to Fishback or his supporters as “YNs”—a slang term involving the n-word. At one point, Alex Munguia—a Fishback associate who, while still in college, participated in many of his hedge-fund antics and is now a senior adviser to his campaign—expressed enthusiasm for Fuentes’s view that heterosexual sex is actually, well, gay.

“Only thing straighter than straight sex is actually gay sex,” Munguia wrote in a chatroom for top Fishback staffers.

Wright also tried to distance Fishback from the college events that have become his specialty. After Fulgham proposed holding a fundraiser to raise money from college students, Wright said they needed to focus on older backers.

“College kids are broke and we already have their vote, so a gala for campuses isn’t the best use of resources,” Wright wrote. “The goal is to get away from just hyping up the younger crowd and moving into the older crowds and donors.”

These days, Fishback is having enough trouble finding even more downmarket venues. Last week, he claimed Waffle House banned him from holding events there. Then Fishback posted a screenshot implying he was invited via a direct message on Instagram to hold events at IHOP instead—a claim that restaurant chain disputed as fake.

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HIJACKERS IN CALIFORNIA late last month made off with a truck filled with nearly 400,000 limited-edition tins of Alp, the nicotine pouch brand founded by Tucker Carlson.

The theft may have left Carlson fans jonesing for their tropical-flavored, extra-high dose of nicotine. But it pleased at least one luminary of the MAGAsphere.

After TMZ broke the news of the hijacking, right-wing activist and longtime Carlson foe Laura Loomer entered the fray on the side of the hijackers.

“Tucker Qatarlson is having a bad week,” Loomer wrote on X on Wednesday. “Gee, what a shame.”

There is no love lost between Carlson and Loomer. The latter is an ardent supporter of Israel who has tried to influence the Trump administration by systematically targeting officials within it who don’t adhere to her worldview. The former has argued that Israel is manipulating Donald Trump into war and welcomed anti-Jewish figures like Nick Fuentes into the conservative movement.

The stakes have been raised significantly with the buildup and launch of the Iran war. And as Carlson and Loomer have each sought to exert influence over the foreign policy direction of the MAGA movement and the president himself, they have resorted to increasingly aggressive tactics—including targeting some of the financial lifelines of their respective businesses and the commercial pillars of conservative media itself:

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DESPITE HIS PRESIDENTIAL campaign promises to put America first, Donald Trump didn’t seem to upset his media allies too much when he bombed Iran last June, or when he sent Delta Force to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.

But those engagements were limited, free of American fatalities, and didn’t appear to produce much in the way of immediate consequences for Trump or the country. Even white nationalist Nick Fuentes became an old-school Monroe Doctrine imperialist.

Trump’s latest attacks on Iran this weekend, however, have given rise to a much more negative reaction in right-wing media.

After a quick flurry of support for the initial strikes (with even some self-professed America-firsters reversing themselves and supporting the attacks), the mood became much more dour.

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Megyn Kelly, on her Monday show, said she had “serious doubts” about what the White House was doing in Iran. Appearing on Kelly’s show, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested Trump has gone insane—adding that Trump’s oft-repeated statement about not knowing if he’ll get into heaven raises questions about his state of mind and competency.

“We need to have a serious conversation about what the fuck is happening to this country, and who in the hell are these decisions being made for, and who is making these decisions,” Greene said.

Recent White House visitor Tucker Carlson, arguably the most outspoken war opponent still in Trump circles, announced on his show Monday that Trump had been duped into the war by Israel.

“This happened because Israel wanted it to happen,” Carlson said in a video Monday slamming the attacks. “This is Israel’s war.”

Curiously, Carlson barely mentioned Trump by name in his video, perhaps hoping to preserve his relationship with the administration. After Trump alluded to reported Iranian attempts to kill him, Carlson wondered whether Israel had faked that intelligence to draw Trump into an attack.

“Maybe it doesn’t show that, because this country has certainly been manipulated a lot by Israeli intelligence—and other foreign countries’ intelligence, but certainly by Israeli intelligence,” Carlson said.

Carlson wasn’t alone on the right in speculating about—or outright leveling accusations about—whether Trump went to war for Israel. And amid the recriminations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio decided to confirm exactly that, saying on Monday afternoon that the United States attacked because an impending Israeli strike on Iran would have precipitated Iranian attacks on American bases. This was met with groans by right-wing pundits.

“So we are at war for Israel,” wrote the Hodge Twins, a pair of twin brothers who are popular MAGA influencers. “Thanks for confirming.”

FOR SOME RIGHT-WING CRITICS of the operation in Iran, such as Carlson, their skepticism is in keeping with longstanding opposition to military adventurism abroad. But it also could have been informed by news events. By Sunday, it had become clear that the administration was expecting the Iran bombing to continue for weeks, and that at least three U.S. service members had already died (today, that count rose to six). After a New York Times poll found just 21 percent of Americans supported the attack, Steve Bannon declared the results “brutal.”

That left even reliable Trump boosters to try and find innovative ways to continue to support the president while signaling concerns about his Iran policy. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles limply declared that Trump would be like George W. Bush, but somehow better.

“Initially it was, ‘Bush had the wrong idea,’” Knowles said on his show. “Now the argument would be, ‘Well, Bush might have had the right idea, but he did it poorly.’”

This idea that the Trump administration, not generally known for its competence, will succeed in a domain where past American administrations have failed has caught on. Pundit Will Chamberlain said conservatives worried about a forever war in Iran should just realize Trump won’t fall into that trap, somehow:

At this point, the best-case scenario for Trump is that his supporters aren’t really concerned about Iran and want Trump to go back to focusing on economic issues. Breitbart’s Matt Boyle, perhaps the most diehard Trump sycophant in the entirety of MAGA media, posted on X that callers to his radio show didn’t care about Iran. Boyle even noted that he was trying really hard to highlight the Iranian strikes for his audience. And yet, nothing.

“Just no energy on the Iran issue at all,” Boyle wrote.

That’s not to say the war doesn’t have its backers. Conservative pundits who have closely aligned themselves with American support for Israel, like Laura Loomer and Fox News host Mark Levin, have been supportive.

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But other Trump allies find their energy for the war already starting to flag. One challenge is that the administration isn’t giving them much to work with.

Boosters of the 2003 Iraq invasion had months of talking points to draw on. By comparison, this administration hasn’t explained—at least coherently—exactly why the war is necessary or what its goals are. Charlie Kirk lieutenant Andrew Kolvet, for example, said he had heard Iran was working on dirty bombs—but, he wondered, why hadn’t the Trump administration bothered to say that?

Federalist cofounder Sean Davis, typically a doctrinaire Trump supporter, similarly griped on X that the White House hadn’t done anything to explain the war.

“The lack of any coherent message seems to suggest the lack of any coherent objective,” Davis wrote.

Daily Wire host Matt Walsh has been one of the right’s most outspoken critics of the war, saying Trump’s allies who are still backing the attacks are blindly placing their faith in the man.

“They [the administration] could have reasons for doing what they’re doing that I don’t know about or understand. But that is also the exact argument we heard during COVID,” Walsh wrote on X, putting it in terms that must sting for the Trump team.

In perhaps the most alarming sign of all for the Pentagon and White House, the war’s biggest fan is none other than Pizzagate promoter Mike Cernovich. With even podcast host Benny Johnson waffling on the war, Cernovich appeared on Johnson’s show Monday to cheer him up. And he had good news: The United States can avoid blowback for its military adventures, Cernovich said, because its weapons are so good they’re essentially “alien technology.”

“We have tech, people call it the alien technology,” Cernovich, an enthusiast of the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca, said. “We have alien technology, and we could pull things off that we couldn’t pull off twenty years ago.”

There you have it—once you know the aliens are on Trump’s side, it all makes sense.

Although even Cernovich’s spirits apparently sank after Rubio’s Monday remarks saying the United States went to war because of Israel. Cernovich gave just a one-word reply:

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FOR WEEKS NOW, CANDACE OWENS has been insinuating that Erika Kirk had something to do with her husband Charlie Kirk’s murder last year. Most recently, she began teasing a new series all about Erika Kirk that promised to reveal new insights into her rise, marriage and—perhaps—what really happened in the lead-up to her husband’s assassination.

And in the hotly anticipated debut episode, she delivered the goo… Who am I kidding? It was nonsense. It took forty minutes for Owens to lay out her most damning evidence, and it very much underwhelmed. To wit:

• The divorce paperwork for Erika Kirk’s parents slightly misstated the year they were married.

• One of Erika’s ancestors was arrested for working in an illegal numbers racket 85 years ago.

• Erika Kirk was born in a civilian hospital that was started by the military in the Civil War.

• Erika Kirk once dressed as a bee in a photo taken of her while she was in daycare.

It didn’t add up to much. It certainly didn’t support Owens’s insinuation about Erika’s involvement in Charlie’s murder. And it just got crazier. Further into the inaugural episode, Owens built to what she was really getting at: Might Erika Kirk be Jewish?

“Why does her onetime roommate Nicole Rothstein allege that half of their family, referring to her and Erika’s family, is Jewish?” Owens said, adding later that Erika Kirk went to an elementary school where “the teachers are all Jewish.”

It was, in short,

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Would it surprise you to learn that his new videos are already being debunked?

Watching Shirley’s first video in California, which claims to uncover fake voter registrations at California businesses, you get the sense that he is not really playing it straight. He’s careful to make it hard to identify the buildings where he claims the people are fraudulently registering to vote, and the people he “confronts” mostly just don’t understand what’s going on.

Cracks are already starting to appear in Shirley’s claims. In one video, he insisted that a lot of voters were listing their addresses as a UPS Store location. But, in fact, the UPS Store is in the same building as an actual apartment complex—meaning the voters are almost certainly legitimate. Not so sinister after all! Still, Shirley got a Don Jr. retweet, which makes it all worth it.

In happier news, Sam Stein and I kicked off our new MAGA Monday livestream this morning. You can check out that first episode here, and tune in next Monday at 10 a.m. Eastern for the next episode. Support this and everything else we do at The Bulwark by signing up for Bulwark+!

Come ride with us

–Will

The White House Can’t Quit Tucker “Qatarlson”

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a tough week for Tucker Carlson’s standing in Trump world. The former Fox News host flew to Israel to interview another former Fox News host, Mike Huckabee, after the latter, now the U.S. ambassador to Israel, challenged him to an interview. Following some squabbles over Carlson’s security, the pair filmed a contentious face-off in an Israeli airport terminal, with Huckabee even sparking a diplomatic incident by antagonizing a number of Arab countries.

With the United States possibly on the verge of war with Iran, Israel’s greatest enemy, you’d think Carlson—a staunch critic of American support for Israel—would be on the outs with the administration. Instead, on Monday, he was reportedly back in the White House, a month after he visited to have lunch with Trump and attended a meeting with oil company CEOs.

Carlson’s continued relationship with the Trump administration has become a thorny topic for more traditional, pro-Israel conservatives, who are baffled by his seeming impunity. They see him attacking the administration while continuing to enjoy the benefits of ties to both Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

“I’m sick of Tucker attacking Trump and then running to the White House to pretend he hasn’t been bashing Trump for years!” fumed right-wing activist and Israel supporter Laura Loomer “I’m so fucking over it!”

Loomer, who enjoys some presidential connections of her own, claimed that Carlson had been told to keep his White House visit today a secret, but that he had, instead, leaked news of the meeting to Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman (there’s no indication he did).

“He called the President yesterday and begged him to be put on his schedule,” Loomer tweeted. “He was manic on the phone I’m told, completely belligerent begging to come to the White House today.” She went on to call him “Tucker Qatarlson” and a “neo Nazi Islamic agent.”

Dave Rubin, a right-wing commentator and critic of Carlson, chose—also without evidence—to see Carlson’s visit to the White House as a sign that he was in big trouble. Showing up at the White House, in Rubin’s telling, was the equivalent of being called to the principal’s office.

“Trump sees that Tucker is obviously trying to destroy MAGA and it appears he’s finally had enough . . .” Rubin said.

Neither Loomer nor Rubin is a reliable interpreter of, well, much. There are better explanations of why Carlson spends so much time at the White House. The first is that the administration sees him as too powerful a media figure to keep far outside the tent. The second is that they kind of like the guy—even as he pursues policy goals diametrically opposite of their own.

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CARLSON’S CONTINUED PRESENCE in the top tiers of the MAGA movement has long frustrated establishment and pro-Israel Republicans. It was a key point of contention during Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s final months, and spilled over into the speeches at TPUSA’s convention in December.

But Carlson’s visit today to the White House, so soon after his combative interview with Huckabee in Israel, shows how little penalty there is for pushing storylines that not only make life tough for the administration but cause serious geopolitical drama.

Carlson claimed that he was denied an embassy escort in Israel, meaning he wouldn’t have the American government’s protection after he landed. He also insisted that the U.S. embassy staff in Israel refused to transmit his private jet’s details to the Israeli military—implying the Israeli government might shoot down the plane. Neither of these accusations appeared to be true. But they did cause headaches for Huckabee.

Ultimately, Carlson and Huckabee settled on conducting the interview in a terminal at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport—a site that Carlson, always a gentleman, would later denounce as filthy. Things got worse from there.

In response to some pressing from Carlson, a bumbling Huckabee endorsed the idea of a Greater Israel that would encompass lands across the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq. That prompted a diplomatic firestorm from numerous Muslim countries, who put out a statement condemning the remarks.

As a coup de grâce, Carlson accused Israeli President Isaac Herzog of visiting Jeffrey Epstein’s island, and pressed Huckabee on whether he knew Herzog had been to “pedo island.” That accusation appears to be based on a sloppy reading of an Epstein email release and a fake AI-generated image. On Saturday, Carlson released a rare apology prompted by a legal letter from Herzog, in which he said, “I’m sorry to imply that I knew something I didn’t know.”

Carlson’s potential legal bind delighted Loomer, who takes whatever victories she can when it comes to Carlson.

“Good luck finding a law firm that doesn’t have a Jewish partner!” she quipped.

Ultimately, Carlson’s perseverance in Trump’s orbit is a remarkable testament to his staying power. Lesser media luminaries would have been pushed to the outskirts of punditry. The question now is how long the alliance between the administration and Carlson can hold. After all, there are several major factions now tugging at Trump, including Israel supporters like Loomer and Ben Shapiro, and the Vance faction that Carlson is close to. As 2028 gets closer, expect many more fights over the White House guest list—and a whole lot more drama.

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AI Scott Adams Unsettles MAGA

WHEN DILBERT CREATOR and right-wing internet personality Scott Adams died of prostate cancer on January 13, many MAGA luminaries came out to praise his legacy and lament the void he’d left in the conservative commentariat. But this month, the pugnacious cartoonist was back—or at least videos of someone looking an awful lot like him started appearing online, offering remarks on current events that had taken place well after Adams’s death.

Dubbed “AI Scott Adams,” the synthetic creation, which first popped up on X and YouTube, looks and sounds nearly identical to the actual Adams. Its appearance has sparked a clash between the Silicon Valley wing of MAGA, which finds it all pretty remarkable, and many of Adams’s fans and family, who are horrified.

“Yes, according to parts of the internet, I’m dead,” the Adams simulacrum declared in one video, before taking a sip of coffee. “Which is interesting, because I’ve never had fewer meetings. Turns out when you remove the biological body, you also remove back pain, food decisions, and about half the reasons people make bad arguments. So overall, I’d say death has been a productivity upgrade.”

If that wasn’t unsettling enough, AI Scott Adams then segued into a Dilbert-style riff about how often printers jam.

The resemblance between AI Scott Adams and the real Adams really is striking. Just take a look at the two side-by-side:

And it’s not just a still likeness: In a testament to how far AI video-generation technology has come, the mannerisms of the two are also deeply similar. So is the shtick: Robo-Adams even reenacts a “simultaneous sip”—the moment at the start of the actual Adams’s daily live show where he and his audience would coordinate the first taste of their morning coffee.

That’s the kind of intimate gesture that connects with viewers—and is suggestive of how this technology could be exploited to profit from audiences seeking consolation or entertainment even after an online star has died. And the possibility for abuse is huge: Nearly a decade after the first deepfakes began to raise questions about fraud, impersonation, and harassment, the appearance of AI Scott Adams could be a foretaste of a new phase where AI-driven copycats are used—with or without the permission of the individuals being imitated or their families—to mislead, make money, or move the public discourse.

HANGING OVER IT ALL are a few questions—especially: Whose idea was this? And why do we need this?

The answer to the former is

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