MAGA Influencers May Have Been Paid to Break With RFK
Do we have another payola scandal on the right? Plus, the fallout from that Atlantic story—you know the one.
Secret cash flies in the MAGA soda wars
IF YOU’VE EVER BEEN READING YOUR social media feed and suddenly noticed that conservative personalities have latched on to some obscure issue they’ve never cared about before, it may well be that they’re secretly getting paid to do it.
Back in 2013, a host of writers—including future Federalist cofounder Ben Domenech—suddenly all became passionate about rival Malaysian political factions. Surprise: they were receiving hefty payoffs from the Malaysian government.
Last year, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and some of the right’s other big-time YouTubers kept pumping out glossy videos for a new site called Tenet Media. It turned out to be a Kremlin operation. They were on the payroll to the tune of millions of dollars each, though they insisted they didn’t know where the money was coming from.
So I watched with interest last week when a host of MAGA types, including comedian Chad Prather, prolific X user Ian Miles Cheong, and Florida pro-Trump personality Eric Daugherty all started, seemingly at random, to defend the right of food-stamp recipients to buy soda.
The posts appeared to be in response to the movement under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” banner to get legislatures in states like Idaho and Arizona to pass bills that would ban food-stamp recipients from spending that money on soft drinks or other junk foods. The movement has been received well on the right, where the idea of restricting poor people from buying junk food with welfare benefits is an easy sell.
But then, last week, a wave of MAGA types started to take the pro-soda position. In similarly worded posts, Cheong, Prather, Daugherty, popular MAGA meme account “Clown World,” and other X users with big followings said it was unfair for the government to tell recipients how to spend their food-stamp money.
“Is Mountain Dew nutritious and life-giving?” posted Kevin Posobiec, a pro-Trump figure best known for being the brother of pundit Jack Posobiec, in a since-deleted post on X. “No. But freedom of choice is.”
A number of the posts focused on the fact that Donald Trump himself drinks Diet Coke—the implicit suggestion being that it would be horribly wrong to tell the president that he can’t drink his soda.
“President Trump literally has a Diet Coke button in his Oval Office,” wrote Daugherty.
This all seemed odd, since MAHA is gaining steam on the right, where the drive is to not just open people’s eyes to the dangers of sugary fizzy water but to purge our foods of seed oils.
It’s not like these people were previously big soda fans, either. Cheong—a Malaysian citizen who has become fluent in inane American culture war issues through fights in video-game forums—said just a few years ago that Coca-Cola wants Americans “fat and addicted to sugar.”
But there Cheong was, on Thursday, writing on X that he opposed the government “curbing Diet Coke purchases.” For emphasis, he attached a picture of Trump guzzling Diet Coke on a golf course.
The first indication that something was afoot came on Friday, when Blake Marnell, an online pro-Trump anchor who goes by “Brick Suit” (he wears a suit that looks like border-wall bricks), posted comparisons of the pro-soda tweets authored by MAGA influencers, illustrating what appeared to be some sort of coordinated campaign. The attention grew after Turning Point USA’s Riley Gaines claimed on X that she’d been offered money to oppose the soda bills that had earned praise from RFK Jr. She said that she’d turned the cash down.
Conservative sleuths claimed the campaign came from Influenceable, a social-media startup aimed at getting Gen-Z influencers to promote companies’ messaging. One sleuth, Nick Sortor, posted documents purporting to be from Influenceable that laid out talking points for the pro-soda campaign and how influencers could claim money for posting the messages. The documents encouraged influencers to use the picture of Trump drinking Diet Coke.
Influenceable did not respond to my requests for comment as to whether they were involved in the posts and, if so, which company had hired them to undertake the campaign.
But this is not the first time Influenceable has found itself playing a bogeyman role in the right’s internal factional disputes. Back in 2023, white nationalist Nick Fuentes posted documents that purported to be part of an Influenceable campaign called “#FedFuentes” that was, he claimed, designed to paint him as a federal provocateur. On his show, Fuentes described Influenceable as a secret power in MAGA world that few wanted to acknowledge.
“Is it because people aren’t supposed to know that influencers are getting paid by God-knows-who to literally follow instructions like animals?” Fuentes said.
Launched in 2022, Influenceable was created by Camron and Liam Rafizadeh, two brothers with a history in Republican social-media content. Liam Rafizadeh, for example, once ran the successful “Republican Hype House” TikTok group, which pooled various GOP influencers’ efforts on the platform. The young company has well-connected friends, too. At a 2023 event aimed at winning over young influencers, former Trump digital strategist Brad Parscale appeared, according to a Texas Tribune report. So did Tim Dunn, a major Republican donor in the state. On its website, Influenceable claims to have a partnership with a company Parscale launched.
The company’s emergence underscores the degree to which conservatives have come to recognize the importance of social media conversations in impacting both political debates and the news coverage of them. But it also raises questions as to how much of what gets pushed on social media platforms is organic and how much is astroturf-generated discussion.
This is not a problem strictly on the right. A few weeks ago, Democratic lawmakers came under withering criticism for posting similarly scripted “that ain’t true” videos going after Donald Trump. But there is a distinction between coordinated political messaging and non-elected pundits getting paid to push specific content.
In 2023, right-wing website Current Revolt posted documents claiming to show Influenceable payment offers in exchange for social-media posts backing embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
And last week brought us another difficult-to-decipher episode when Cheong, “Clown World,” and other right-wing influencers got inexplicably passionate about opposing a Texas Senate electric-grid regulation bill that otherwise received little coverage.
Some of the participants in the soda campaign acknowledged that they had messed up, even as they seemed to take rather lightly the idea that they were secretly accepting cash to influence their fans.
“That was dumb of me,” Daugherty posted. “Massive egg on my face. In all seriousness, it won’t happen again.”
But not everyone has admitted taking part in a coordinated campaign. In an email, Prather told me, “I did NOT take money for sharing that article.”
But Prather did delete his pro-soda tweets, meaning he would probably be ineligible for any payment anyway. When I asked him if he was just splitting hairs by saying he didn’t take any money, he stopped responding.
Yemen War Chat Aftermath
Republicans are scrambling to explain why National Security Advisor Mike Waltz invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, to a top-secret Signal chat about planned military strikes in Yemen.
So far, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is going with the classic “it’s a hoax” defense. But the right’s messaging is bound to get more convoluted, since Goldberg seems to be clearly telling the truth. One popular theory, put forward by “Cynical Publius,” a guy with a robust X account and a Roman statue as his avatar, holds that Waltz deliberately invited Goldberg to the chat to dupe him into publishing the messages, which include agita within the administration over whether Europe should be handling the Houthi attacks themselves.
“The minute I read the chat my very first thought was that Goldberg was specifically and deliberately included so that he would leak what he saw to the public,” Cynical Publius wrote. “The idea was to let Europe know just how unhappy American leadership is with Europe’s unwillingness to pull its weight militarily.”
Pro-Trump personality Joey Mannarino echoed the idea that it was all an elaborate plan, saying no one in the cabinet would be “stupid enough” to invite a reporter to a war-planning group chat. Instead, it had to be a deliberate leak orchestrated by Trump.
“This is called misdirection,” he said in an X post, “this is called strategy.”
Still, the administration’s shifting explanations have put some pressure on their allies in conservative media. Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft initially declared that the texts revealed nothing more than a “masterclass in leadership.” But after Hegseth suggested Goldberg’s article was a hoax, Hoft changed his tune. In a follow-up blog post, he said the journalist had merely “cooked up a wild tale.”
Here’s the False Flag promise: I will never take money to promote soda or any other treats. In the meantime, hit me at sommer@thebulwark.com with your thoughts, and thanks for reading!
Yemen War Chat Aftermath - As the mother of a brave young sailor serving right now on one of those ships in Yemen, I am horrified and dismayed at both the level of incompetence and self-serving responses of those involved. These are real people putting their lives on the line, not a game. Each day when I watch the news I am horrified, but never more so when I see stories where the brave men and women of the miltary are put at risk like this. Please pray for our brave men and women and hold these so-called leaders accountable.
Reading through this, all I could think of is "boy how dumb we've become".
Who the fuck are Ian Miles Chong, Posobiec, Brick Suit, etc. and why do they have such a media following? They are the c- students at high school, illiterate, inarticulate, amoral, lazy, etc. This is what people follow today?