Yet ANOTHER Right-Wing Payola Media Scandal!

This time, the allegations involve paying influencers to post positively about India, a country increasingly in MAGA’s crosshairs.

Welcome back to False Flag! A few years ago, heterodox conservative professor Jordan Peterson vowed to launch Peterson Academy, an online, accredited college that would offer “a high-level, university-quality equivalent” degree for just $2,000.

Last week, a YouTube investigation into the Peterson Academy was published. It revealed price increases, nonexistent exams, and disappointed students starting to suspect that they had paid the annual $399 fee just to watch a couple videotaped lectures.

With Peterson’s daughter now in charge of the “school” and Peterson himself taking a break from public life, I think traditional academia can rest safely—well, however safe they can feel in the Trump 2.0 era.

This week, we’re taking a look at the machinations inside a different institution than academia—this one more right-leaning. We’re looking at the MAGA movement’s X power users and whether they’re for sale. Also on tap: Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and the Stalinesque disappearance of its once highly visible CEO. Let’s go.

(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: Shutterstock)

C’mon. Not Again!

RIGHT-WING MEDIA HAS BEEN ROCKED—yet again—by allegations of a payola scheme on X.

This time, the posts alleged to have been part of a pay-for-play operation were meant to improve how Trump supporters view India. They came as Donald Trump and his supporters started to take an increasingly hostile turn towards the country.

The scandal broke into public view last week when a popular, anonymous right-wing account called “Aesthetica” noted that a number of right-wing influencers—including pundit Chuck Callesto and right-wing meme account “Defiant L’s”—had posted suspiciously similar messages on X defending India and warning that MAGA criticism of the country would only push it closer to China.

“India isn’t the problem,” read one from the account @iAnonPatriot. “Pushing them toward China’s alliance is!”

The “Aesthetica” post highlighting these tweets raised suspicions that the MAGA influencers posting them were on the take. That’s because, while India is traditionally viewed as an American ally, the country has lately become incredibly unpopular among the very online right. In fact, anti-Indian racism has been surging on X, fueled by anger over the belief that H-1B tech visas are fueling unemployment for Americans, as well as Trump’s increasingly hostile tone toward the country over its government’s refusal to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

While the “Aesthetica” post merely raised the prospect of the screenshotted accounts being part of a “paid propaganda” campaign, it didn’t actually deliver the literal receipts. Yet at least one of the influencers called out ended up apologizing, albeit in vague terms.

“The L is on me this time,” said the anonymous operator of “Defiant L’s,” a meme account that scours X for liberals they feel should admit defeat, adding that they had made “an honest mistake.”

Others, however, denied wrongdoing. Rogan O’Handley, an influencer who uses the handle “DC_Draino” and regularly visits the Trump White House, said he was eager for Trump to deal harshly with India.

“I fully support Trump bringing the hammer down on India,” O’Handley wrote in a follow-up post on X. “For the record, I have never and would never take a dime from the Indian government or anyone connected to them or any other government.”

Curiously, others who were accused of participating in the payola scheme phrased their denials very specifically. Similarly to DC_Draino, David Freeman, the operator of the popular MAGA meme account “Gunther Eagleman,” wrote that he “never took a penny from India or any other foreign entity.” That leaves open the possibility that a third-party entity working on an issue related to India may have been involved.

When I asked Freeman via DM whether I could send him questions about the controversy, he replied: “hit me up with any questions.” When I asked him who was involved in the alleged pay-for campaign and whether he was paid, though, he never responded. Days later, I’m now asking: Gunther, where are you?

This isn’t the first time MAGA accounts have found themselves in a payola scandal. Back in March, several popular pro-Trump X users were involved in a scheme to oppose Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort to stop people from using food stamps to buy soda and other junk food.

Influenceable, the social media startup allegedly involved in the soda campaign, didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether it organized the pro-India posts. But Aesthetica claimed to have the goods on who did: Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier.

Fournier, who is an avid social media poster, didn’t respond to my requests for comment. And there’s no clear proof that he’s behind the posts—or, if he was, who he was working for.

However, he has recently gone public about his desire to see improved India relations.

“India has always had President Trump’s back,” he wrote in one post.

And there is also some anecdotal evidence to suggest Fournier is not above trying to pay people to post a certain way. QAnon account “MJTruthUltra” recently posted a direct-message exchange that purported to show Fournier offering him $250 to participate in another social media campaign.

How widespread the recent slate of pro-India posting has been is difficult to comprehensively know. But several of the posters did use language similar to an August 26 post on the Gateway Pundit by far-right personality Elijah Schaffer, which ran right around when the first posts on X began. Entitled “Exposed: The Shocking Truth About Who’s Really Cashing In on Russian Oil!,” the piece positions Schaffer as, somehow, an expert on Indian oil economics:

Russia’s share of India’s oil imports rose dramatically—from under 2% in 2021 to about 33% in 2024. But Gross Refining Margins (GRMs) for Indian refiners between FY22 and FY25 actually fell. By FY25, GRMs were lower than when the conflict began—hardly proof of windfall profits.

Do I believe that Schaffer—best known outside of the right for getting ousted from the Blaze after allegedly sexually assaulting a coworker—really cares that much about Indian oil refining? Absolutely not!

I’ve written before about the trend of right-wing influencers who suspiciously get very into niche policy issues in ways that are suspiciously beneficial to big businesses, as with Laura Loomer’s sudden embrace of the intricacies of Venezuelan oil sanctions policy. But Schaffer’s is on another level.

For starters, he could certainly use some cash. On August 24, Schaffer claimed that he had been carjacked at gunpoint in the driveway of his Florida home, with the robbers making off with his high-end BMW. Disastrously for the far-right pundit, Schaffer said he hadn’t noticed that his insurance company had canceled his auto insurance a month before, and he later said he was now out $104,000.

Gateway Pundit owner Jim Hoft didn’t respond to my questions about whether Schaffer’s blog post about the Indian oil industry was a paid promotion.

The Daily Wire’s CEO mystery deepens

Remember Jeremy Boreing? For years, the Daily Wire’s trash-talking CEO was almost as big of a presence for the conservative media outlet as his cofounder, pundit Ben Shapiro.

Boreing, the company’s self-proclaimed “god king,” enjoyed a reputation as a sort of budding Rupert Murdoch of the Trumpian digital age. He even launched his own brand of razors after Harry’s Razors dropped its ads at the outlet.

But then, in March of this year, Boreing was abruptly demoted and essentially vanished from public view. Even as Boreing’s rivals on the right went wild with speculation about what went wrong, the Daily Wire insisted that all was well, and Boreing merely stepped down “to focus on creative projects for the company.” (Several of those projects, like a children’s show about a family of chinchillas, were soon obliterated through layoffs.)

As if to signal that Boreing was still in good standing with the company he once ran, the Daily Wire also said Boreing would continue to host Daily Wire Backstage, a macho video series where Boreing moderated a panel of Daily Wire stars—Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan—as they talked politics, smoked stogies, and munched on big bowls of candy.

Mysteriously, Backstage never aired another episode after Boreing’s ouster. But late last month, the Daily Wire announced that it was effectively bringing back Backstage under a new name, Friendly Fire. The cast is the same, except now Boreing has vanished.

The ad promoting the new show appears to take some jabs at Boreing’s old position as Backstage’s moderator, declaring the show will have “no safe words, no moderator!” At one point in the ad, Walsh jokes that, perhaps, “we do need a moderator.”

The references to the Daily Wire’s vanished CEO don’t end there. In a promotional spot for Friendly Fire, Walsh said that the Daily Wire would mark its tenth anniversary “not by looking back, but by launching what’s next.”

The Friendly Fire announcement comes amid another Daily Wire campaign to get an immediate payout from its biggest fans. Late last month, the company debuted a $1,500 “lifetime membership” that offers “unlimited access” to its premium content—which works out to roughly six years of all-access Daily Wire subscriptions at the normal price.

That premium content will apparently include access to Boreing’s passion project: a long-delayed streaming TV show called the Pendragon Cycle—a fantasy adaptation of the King Arthur story.

I say that because the lifetime membership page contains a single image teasing a new show, now dubbed Rise of The Merlin: The Pendragon Cycle. As I wrote earlier this year, production videos of the show’s Game of Thrones–style medieval battles made the show look comically expensive, so I’m sure the Daily Wire wants to sell those lifetime memberships as quickly as possible.