English transcript

Get ready with me while I tell you about the paid agitators in MAGA politics from

turning point to libs of TikTok. For those who don't know, my name is Ashley St. Clair. I was

a MAGA influencer involved in MAGA politics for almost a decade. I know. Now I want to talk about

this because within the right wing and MAGA, it is prolific that they are obsessed with George

Soros and calling Democrats paid activists and the radical left is all paid. But what there is not

enough attention on is how much of the MAGA influencer sphere is propped up on paid agitation.

And I'm going to focus primarily on my experiences with companies and individuals like libs of TikTok,

turning point, and my former company that Benny Johnson had co-founded. We will start off with

the company I was working out with, Benny Johnson, and my first job for this company was to go to

the DNC convention and basically be a paid agitator. I was made to hold a sign that said

creepy Joe has got to go talking about Joe Biden because I don't know, he did that weird

sniffing thing. But simultaneously this is happening and I'm made to hold a creepy Joe

has got to go sign and I'm being harassed by people. Sir, can I ask you a question?

He said nice ass as he walked away. He said nice ass? I think so.

No, no, come back, come back, come back. At the same company at which I was harassed and

grabbed by Madison Cawthorn and they kept him as a client. Now this protest content is money

in MAGA, okay? You are either going to get buku bucks from social media, from posting this content

because there's so much engagement, or a company is just straight up going to pay you to go to

protest. Turning Point does this a lot. They have their contributors fly out, all expenses paid,

to go and cover these protests, but really they are just agitators. Also this is going to be my

last time using this reformulated luminous silk because I hate it. I wore it yesterday and I hate

it. It looks too cakey. It's not the same and whoever decided this was a good idea to reformulate

it after 25 years should be fired. There is also major, major money to be made. I am talking

seven figures to be made by people who post this agitator harassment content such as

libs of tiktok and the likes. For those who don't know, libs of tiktok is a libs of tiktok LLC.

It is a company, okay? You can look this up yourself. It is a company. It is a business and

Haya, who runs libs of tiktok, would run around and send me pictures of the new designer she's

buying and she has a stylist and is buying a home. This is very lucrative and they will

pathologize this and say, well, you know, I have to because I was getting so many death threats

and now I'm independent and I'm successful. But really they just don't want real jobs. That's

the reality of it. Now this company, libs of tiktok, because of another job I had, I ended up

having to work with Haya and I don't know, for a long time I had a soft spot for Haya.

I think because she's just so stupid. Like, she's like genuinely not impressive intellectually.

But I would be getting calls. I tried to set boundaries with this woman, okay? I was like,

babe, I, my kids, I have to put my son down at a certain time. Like, you cannot be calling me

about drag queens at 9, 10 p.m. She did not respect these boundaries whatsoever.

But what's also fascinating about this is that Haya and others were also aware that I

was very uncomfortable with this trans panic and would quite often say, this is wrong. You know,

we can't just dox trans people. At one point I had to tell her, you cannot just post photos of

random minors. Like, if you're going to post children, you need to blur their face. What are

you doing? And it was just genuinely a nightmare. But again, this was a business for her. It still

is a business for her. And her and many others suffer from like this agitation content brain.

They view everything as, oh, that's going to be good content. That's going to do numbers.

And they have these like tip in boxes where people just send them the most crazy examples

of things. And then they push this out as if it is mainstream or, or this is something that you

are going to encounter in normal everyday interactions. And the other large conservative

influencers and media companies recognize the value, at least the monetary value,

they don't care about the moral value of anything of accounts like libs of TikTok,

because there were multiple offers to buy libs of TikTok to buy out this content harassment

apparatus that Haya had built. And I mean, very large figures who have millions and millions of

followers. At one point, she had wrongly posted that someone who decided to, I think it was

a school because that's America now, was trans. And this wasn't true at all. And

it took much convincing to have her take this down. She's like, wait, let me let me see if

it's true. Let me see. Let's wait, let's wait. And just left this up to induce more trans panic.

And again, my hands are not clean. Okay, I have contributed to this rhetoric. Absolutely. And I am

incredibly remorseful about my role in this. At the same time, I was really one of the only ones

saying like, hey, maybe we should slow down. Maybe we should not just dox people based on their

identity. And this was fairly common. And there were many conversations with high up

figures within the conservative movement and MAGA on how to handle me. And at one point,

it was relayed to me that they were upset about something I had posted in

um, disagreement with Charlie, because Charlie Kirk had gone on a stage at a religious event

and said that if your daughters are on birth control, it is like black tar.

And that you should get them off. Don't let your daughters be on birth control.

All of this crazy shit. Okay. And so I publicly disagreed with him. And there was allegedly a

meeting about this, in which they came to the conclusion that they don't want to punish me,

because I could still get people to vote for Trump. I believe I had tweeted at Charlie and said that

this white male jihad is not going to work. And they were not happy about that. When I got involved

in MAGA and this right wing influencer space, I think a lot of it was obviously this need for

validation and community. And there was another part of it that you think going into politics

that, Oh, I'm going to make a difference. And then there was like this disillusionment that

happens once you're in it. And you see that everyone, everything is staged. Everything

is for a dollar. Everything is about making money and for profit. Like it was just,

there was a long-term disillusionment happening within me as well during my time.

And I think we're seeing some of that disillusionment happen now, uh, in a broader

sense with the MAGA base, because everyone's like, what the fuck do you mean? We're for more wars.

What the fuck do you mean? All the people closest to you at inauguration are the tech bros and the

oligarchs that, you know, have created these awful discovery algorithms are bastardizing our

consciousness and extracting our, our souls, um, and calling it, uh, proprietary data.

So I think there's more of that disillusionment happening, but again, I encourage people to

recognize what harm and what cruelty they had to ignore to allow it to get to this point in the

first place. These groups, these influencers, these organizations, these MAGA influencers are

only able to exist because of money in politics. And if these assholes in MAGA can run on

overturning Roe v. Wade, why are the Democrats not running on overturning Citizens United,

overturning Buckley v. Vallejo to get the money out of politics? And that's because something

that is stronger than any, um, allegiance to a party is their allegiance to class, to the elite

capitalist class.