Ashley St. Clair helped build the machine. Then the machine turned on her. Now, she, a former MAGA influencer, one-time Turning Point USA operative, and the woman at the center of a messy legal and personal feud with Elon Musk, is pulling back the curtain on right‑wing social media.

Her allegations, made across a series of recent videos and interviews, are explosive. Not because she is a pure hero. She is not. St. Clair spent nearly a decade inside the movement she now criticizes. She benefited from its money, its reach, and its ruthlessness. But that is precisely why her testimony is crucial to understanding the right-wing grifter economy. The best person to explain how a scam works is often the person who once ran it.

St. Clair claims that the MAGA influencer world is not a spontaneous grassroots uprising. It is, she says, a coordinated, paid, script‑driven political messaging machine, and the audience is the product.

Advertisement

This Is More Than Elon Musk Baby‑Mama Drama

To understand how St. Clair became an unlikely truth‑teller, you need the backstory. She was reportedly in a relationship with Elon Musk and has a child with him. According to earlier reporting, Musk offered her $15 million plus $100,000 a month in support to keep the matter quiet. That arrangement fell apart.

Then things got uglier. St. Clair went public with a disturbing allegation: Grok, the AI chatbot built into Musk’s X platform, generated sexualized, non‑consensual images of her, some based on photographs taken when she was 14 years old. She says she asked the bot to stop. It didn’t, and then she threatened legal action.

What happened next, according to St. Clair, was retaliatory. X stripped her blue check mark, canceled her monetization, and paused her ad revenue sharing. When she continued to speak out, the platform countersued her, claiming she violated its terms of service. In St. Clair’s telling, reporting abuse became a terms‑of‑service violation.

That personal feud could have remained celebrity gossip. But St. Clair has used her platform – and the media attention – to pivot to something much larger: a detailed account of how the entire MAGA influencer economy operates.

St. Clair Says MAGA Influence Is Coordinated, Paid and Scripted

Here is what St. Clair claims, based on her years inside the ecosystem. First, coordination happens through group chats. According to her, large groups of right‑wing influencers are added to private channels, often on X, where messaging is coordinated. One such group chat, she says, is literally called “Fight Fight,” named after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Members reportedly include the official Trump war room, figures like James Blair, and “all your favorite MAGA influencers.”

Second, there are paid influence campaigns. St. Clair describes platforms built by Republican operatives, some former White House staff, where influencers can log in, browse active campaigns, and sign up to promote specific messaging, petitions, or political initiatives. The pay structure is per click or flat rate. The campaigns range from “call your member of Congress about this bill” to “sign this petition” to “amplify this propaganda.”

Third, and most critically, they are given scripts. St. Clair says the process is “indistinguishable from ad campaigns you would do for a traditional company.” A cosmetics brand gives an influencer a script and a payment. A MAGA political campaign does the same. The only difference, she argues, is the law. Current regulations do not require disclosure for political messaging because it is not a “good or product.” You have to label a sponsored lipstick video. You do not have to label a coordinated push to defeat a bill or smear an opponent.

“They do not have to disclose that they are paid for this on social media,” St. Clair says.

The Fake Grassroots Machine

We reported on this at the time: after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting scare, dozens of MAGA influencers magically landed on the exact same line, “Trump needs his ballroom”, within hours. Same phrasing, same framing. We noted it looked coordinated, like a script.

Now, Ashley St. Clair is offering an insider explanation for why that instinct felt right. She calls out that very incident as proof of paid coordination. “The statistical likelihood of this happening in a vacuum … not probable,” she says. According to St. Clair, it’s not groupthink or copying, it’s a managed system with financial incentives, performance metrics, and consequences for stepping out of line.

She describes blacklisting: high‑up MAGA figures and consulting firms would demand staffers be fired for insufficient Trump loyalty. “I was scared to step out of line in messaging because I would lose the roof over my head,” she says. “While they’re simultaneously making an exorbitant amount of money off crying about cancel culture, they’re also taking away the livelihoods of people who are not ideological foot soldiers.”

A collage of X posts from conservative commentators and influencers arguing that the White House needs Trump’s proposed ballroom after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting.
The talking points landed almost instantly: before the facts settled, Trump allies had already turned gunfire into a ballroom sales pitch.

The Family‑Values Brand Collapses Behind the Scenes

St. Clair is not merely describing a political operation. She is also describing a culture. The public face of MAGA influencers is often “family values,” religious conservatism, and moral outrage. The private reality, according to her, is different.

According to St. Clair, some of the most prominent figures in the movement are “degenerate drug users,” serial adulterers, and financial grifters. During her time at Benny Johnson’s company, Arsenal, she claims to have witnessed embezzlement, payroll crises, and staff walking off the job over unpaid wages. Johnson’s business partner, Jason Cole, was “basically a drunk,” in her account, who cheated on his wife with multiple staff members.

When St. Clair began speaking publicly about Arsenal’s behavior, she says she was cornered at the Mar‑a‑Lago pool by Andrew Kolvet from Turning Point USA, who told her, “You better not be leaking to the media.”

When the threat came that her own personal life would be exposed , sex outside marriage, smoking weed in college – her response was telling. She preemptively admitted it. “I’ve had sex with men outside of marriage,” she said. “In college, I used to smoke weed and mix it with tobacco.” Then she added, “I’m less interested in that. I think everyone will be very interested in your financials and the story of how Benny Johnson came to be in the first place.”

Advertisement

X Is the New Corporate Media

The St. Clair story is also about Elon Musk’s X. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. It has never been profitable in the traditional sense. But profitability is not the point.

The point is control, the algorithm and who gets boosted and who gets suppressed. St. Clair’s experience suggests that X uses its platform power to retaliate against critics while maintaining the rhetorical armour of “free speech absolutism.” Her blue check disappeared, her monetisation vanished, and the platform sued her after she complained about AI‑generated abuse.

Meanwhile, the same platform hosts and amplifies the very influencers St. Clair describes as paid shills. The group chats she mentions operate on X. The coordination happens in plain sight. The algorithm rewards the accounts that stay on message.

Old corporate media had editors, owners, and advertisers shaping the conversation. The new social‑media right presents itself as the rebellion. But if St. Clair is right, it is just a new gatekeeper with a grubbier aesthetic – more memes, more profanity, more livestreams, but the same top‑down control.

The Imperfect Messenger Is the Most Credible One

What she describes is not grassroots politics. It is performance. The audience sees a charismatic influencer ranting about the latest outrage and assumes they are watching an authentic, independent voice. In reality, they may be watching a paid script delivered by someone told exactly what to say in a group chat called “Fight Fight.”

That matters because outrage is not random. There is a reason the world’s richest man can spend his time singling out a dark-skinned Black woman and a white British director over a mythological film. It is distraction. While people argue about whether Lupita Nyong’o should play a Greek mythological character, they are not asking why one of the richest people in history keeps using Black people, immigrants and trans people as scapegoats for a world his own companies and politics are helping to make worse.

And the “accuracy” argument collapses anyway. Colour-blind casting has existed for decades. Kenneth Branagh cast Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves as brothers in Much Ado About Nothing. Nobody claimed Western civilisation had ended. But when Lupita enters the frame, suddenly everyone becomes a classical historian.

The richest man on earth is not the victim of this culture war. He is the landlord. His platform hosts the outrage, and his algorithm rewards it. Now, his AI is accused of enabling abuse. His lawyers pursue the women who complain. And his politics turn vulnerable people into targets while he sells himself as the solution to the chaos he profits from.

Discover more from Feminegra

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.