For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.

In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican’s right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.

According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.

There’s no disclosure requirement because the content is “political” rather than “commercial” and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (“speech”) are protected in ways that wouldn’t be the case for lies told to simply make money.

She’s shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and she’s detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trump’s team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.

Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume it’s an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for rightwing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.

It isn’t. As she put it: “There is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we already saw a version of it in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department unsealed an indictment revealing that Putin’s people had funneled almost $10 million through a Tennessee shell company, Tenet Media, to bankroll a group of right-wing influencers including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin who podcast to millions daily.

One right-wing influencer was reportedly paid $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus to produce videos that just happened to riff on topics serving Trump’s and the Kremlin’s interests. (The influencers all swore they were victims who didn’t know the money was Russian, if you can believe that, but they sure were happy to take and keep it.)

And the broader point stands: the entire ecosystem of right-wing media is so saturated with covert money that a foreign adversary could plug straight into it without anyone even noticing, and did!

I’ve been around long enough to remember when this stuff was happening to radio hosts, before podcasting took off. Back in the early 2000s, I had a friend who was a nationally syndicated right-wing talk show host, and he told me how every time he gave a speech to a high school audience, a right-wing foundation would cut him a $20,000 check as a “speaker’s fee” to supplement his income. He did a dozen or more a year. That was the level of subsidy on offer just for keeping kids’ minds tilted in the right direction, and it was, he said, available to hundreds of right-wing radio hosts across the country.

None of this came out of nowhere.

It started with the Powell Memo of August 1971, when corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member Lewis Powell (about to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) sent a confidential blueprint to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling American business it had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.

Joseph Coors took that memo and used it to seed the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with $250,000. Richard Mellon Scaife followed with tens of millions. The Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Seid family fortunes joined the party.

Today that same network of six billionaire family fortunes has been joined by other right-wing billionaires to put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone, and dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and Leonard Leo’s network have funneled........

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