James Fishback Wanted a Scandal. He Got One.
Plus: The looksmaxxing woes of a former trad influencer.
Fishback Flopping
Florida’s seemingly never-ending Republican primary race for governor will finally be settled next Tuesday. With Trump pick Rep. Byron Donalds far ahead in the polls, it looks like groyper favorite James Fishback’s political ambitions are doomed—for now.
In a desperate attempt to inject some life into his campaign last week, Fishback gave a much-teased press conference accusing Donalds of being under Justice Department investigation. Feigning sorrow, Fishback, who looked like a kid playing dress-up, claimed that a whistleblower had told his campaign about the case, which supposedly centered on Donalds’s friendship with notorious Rep. Cory Mills, as well as allegations of human trafficking.
Yet even Fishback supporters didn’t buy his claims.
“They didn’t really produce any receipts,” white nationalist podcaster and onetime Fishback supporter Nick Fuentes said.
Making matters far worse, the Justice Department took the unusual step of clearing Donalds, saying in a tweet that Donalds was “not under investigation,” adding ominously for Fishback that “Falsely accusing someone of being under investigation is a dangerous form of weaponization.”
Donalds might not be in legal jeopardy, but Fishback is. In a lawsuit filed July 27 and discovered last weekend by Fishback’s many online detractors, former high-school debater Briana Whatley is suing Fishback for supposedly stiffing her on thousands of dollars in scholarship money.
Whatley claims she won a total of $11,000 from her participation in Fishback’s anti-woke debate program, “Incubate Debate.”
Whatley claims that when she was competing as a debater, Fishback often contacted her personally to encourage her to participate in his events, explicitly promising the chance to win scholarship money. Yet when Whatley won a total of $11,000 at the tournaments, Fishback was slow to cough up the cash.
While the money was supposed to be paid upon Whatley’s high school graduation in May 2025, she claims Fishback dodged her requests to pay the money for months. After the money was three months late, Whatley hired a lawyer, prompting Fishback to text her that he was “disappointed” that a lawyer had become involved.
A Fishback crony sent her $3,000 on the payment app Zelle last December, seven months after the money was initially due, reducing the debt to $8,000. Yet the rest of the money she says she was promised never arrived. In February, Whatley texted Fishback to ask him why he hadn’t paid money she had been promised on February 1—by then nine months late.
“Feb 1 was a Sunday,” Fishback responded, according to text messages attached to the lawsuit. “We don’t work on Sundays.”
Asked about the debt, Fishback claims he has paid Whatley since her lawsuit was filed.
“I dropped the ball,” Fishback told me in a statement. “Her missed payment was an oversight on my part. This has been resolved.”
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Fishback could face other problems, too. Gianna Tagliarini, a former Fishback campaign staffer who has since turned against the candidate, posted on X on Friday that she had reported Fishback to Florida’s state law enforcement agency after investigating his conduct at the anti-woke debate operation. It’s not clear whether that has resulted in a genuine investigation by FDLE, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.
For longtime Fishback watchers, the idea of Fishback owing someone money doesn’t seem outlandish. Last week, a federal judge handling a dispute between Fishback and his former employer ruled that Fishback owes $1.3 million in legal fees and other penalties to his old company, Greenlight Capital, bringing his total debt to them to about $1.5 million. The hedge fund has seized Fishback’s cars and even hunted down a luxury watch he allegedly purchased to try to recoup some of the money he owes them.
The news that he had $3,000 in cash to give to Whatley—and that he might have to come up with $8,000 more—will likely be of interest to the candidate’s former employer. Hard to believe Florida’s voters wouldn’t pick this guy!
Elijah Schaffer embroiled in weird body drama
Far-right commentator Elijah Schaffer has been in a six-month tailspin. Back in February, his family-man image, his marriage, and his website all imploded after Schaffer was revealed to have had an affair with fellow trad commentator Sarah Stock.
While Stock has disappeared from the internet, Schaffer is living out a right-wing influencer version of the Reddit advice for dumped dudes: “Delete Facebook, lawyer up, hit the gym.” Schaffer has assembled a new online show, surrounded himself with a new cast of younger men, and gotten lean.
On Saturday, Schaffer celebrated his physical success by posting two pictures comparing married Elijah (wealthy, yet goateed and flabby) with the current divorcing Elijah (leaner, blonder, and kind of mustachioed).
“Still average looking. But still chose to ascend,” Schaffer wrote in “looksmaxxing” argot, thanking guru Clavicular for advice on improving his appearance.
But not every conservative woman1 was convinced that post-divorce Schaffer was so hot or his posts so accurate. X user “Lady Nickeh,” a little-known account (with only 627 followers) that Schaffer easily could have ignored, pointed out that Schaffer looks substantially larger in a recent appearance on his own online show. In the video, Schaffer looked older and larger compared to the static picture of himself he posted to celebrate his weight loss—a photo that would have presumably been easier to manipulate than a video.
“This is a photo of your last stream and you look worse off than when you started come on now,” the account sniped.
The taunting enraged Schaffer, who published two new videos, one of them shirtless, in which he played with camera angles, stroked his jawline, and flexed his biceps to argue that he was indeed lean and mean. The studio camera, Schaffer complained, had just added an unfair ten pounds to his appearance.
“Hey stupid bitch, here’s a free lesson on how cameras work,” Schaffer says in one video, which he shared as a repost of the post by Lady Nickeh that set him off, before launching into a nearly two-minute-long rant about the challenges of filming yourself.
Yet Schaffer’s critic persisted, arguing that his marital collapse had lost him a certain joie de vivre that GLP-1s could never replace.
“Maybe if you would have kept choosing your wife and family over degeneracy you wouldn’t have been low energy, depressed and you would have had the same life in your face than in this picture,” Lady Nickeh wrote.
A tough review for one of conservative media’s most polarizing figures!
I assume. Look, they had a female profile pic, but you never really know . . .
Last week, TPM ran a couple paragraphs from this guy, Sean O'Mara (apparently a doctor, "the only physician in the world specializing in Health and Performance Optimization" sez a Google search), who advises members of the Trump cabinet on health matters, particularly eating tons of meat. The part of the interview that has made waves is his determination that his shit is perfect: “I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room and nobody would know.”
Then I read about some of the people in Will's column: people who break the bones in their faces, people who undergo various kinds of pointless plastic surgery, people who adhere to drug regimens that are more or less banned by professional sports organizations. They are almost always men, they belong to MAGA, and they have a frightening focus on their looks.
Tim Walz had it right. These people are WEIRD.
These people! God give me strength. The amazing thing about James Fishback is that his presence in the race distracts us from the fact that Byron Donalds, who will win, is blindingly awful himself, having morphed effortlessly from Tea Party loon to Maga stalwart to election denialist and warrior against that there Socialist Takeover By The Trans Communist Great Replacement Vaccinators I hear tell so much about.