The Grift Within MAGA
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The Grift Within MAGA
Trump supporters have known for years that the fake news lies. CNN, ABC, The New York Times, MSNBC—they manufacture narratives, anoint heroes, and demonize conservatives to demoralize and divide. That’s not news. The harder pill to swallow is that a parallel grift operates inside the right-wing tent, wearing MAGA jerseys while running the same playbook.
For years, I’ve called these saboteurs the “Koch Libertarian RINOs” and warned my readers about them. They may call themselves different names and operate in different ways, but the result is always the same.
They built empires on the back of MAGA, and then they pivoted to undermine it when it became profitable to do so. They do not have conviction, and they do not have a conscience. They sold themselves to the highest bidder, and they are willing to damage the movement to protect their position.
Now, Ken Blackwell, Dan Bongino, Alexis Wilkins, and Dennis Prager—trusted conservative voices—have all stepped forward and, in their own ways, confirmed what I have been saying for years.
Ken Blackwell said it plainly:
“I’m done with Candace Owens.
I’m done with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I’m done with Tucker Carlson.
I’m done with Milo Yiannopoulos.
I’m done with Jack Posobiec.
I’m done with Tim Pool.
I’m done with Megyn Kelly.
I’m done with the Hodgetwins.
I’m done with the entire cottage industry that built empires on the backs of a movement and now wants to lecture that same audience like they just discovered virtue.
What we are watching is not some great awakening. It is a rebrand. It is a pivot. It is a group of people reading the room, identifying where the next stream of money and attention is coming from, and moving toward it while pretending it is about principle.
That is the part that insults people’s intelligence.
These are not newcomers finding their voice. These are experienced professionals who understood exactly what they were doing when they built their platforms. They understood the audience. They understood the message. They understood the stakes. And they were more than willing to benefit from all of it.
Now, with a different set of incentives in place, they present themselves as above it all. They position themselves as referees. They speak as if they are the ones who now have clarity, and they suggest that everyone else has been misled.
They did not discover truth. They discovered a new revenue stream.
There is real money in turning against the very audience that made you relevant. There is attention, media amplification, and a new audience waiting to reward that shift. So the tone changes. The messaging changes. The lectures begin.
And the same people who once spoke with certainty now speak with superiority.
They wrap it in language about principles and clarity, but if you look closely, the pattern is clear. The timing lines up. The messaging aligns. The outrage generates clicks, and the clicks generate money.
This is not bravery. This is positioning.
Meanwhile, the people who actually live in the real world—the voters, the families, the people who are not paid to post—are treated like props in someone else’s content strategy. They are talked down to, written off, used when convenient, and ignored when they are not.
That is where the frustration comes from.
And at the same time, something much bigger is being squandered.
Donald Trump is not a polished conservative intellectual. He is not Buckley. He is not Reagan in tone or style. He is direct. He is transactional. He can be blunt in ways that even his supporters do not always like.
But in the only place that ultimately matters—results—he has governed in a way that aligns with what conservatives have wanted for decades.
He reshaped the federal judiciary in a lasting way. He put forward justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. He pursued policies centered on American strength, economic leverage, and national interest, not just as ideas, but as actions.
That combination does not fit neatly into an ideological category, and that makes some people uncomfortable. He is not a traditional movement conservative, but he has delivered outcomes that movement conservatives said they wanted.
Politics has never been clean. It is not supposed to be.
It is difficult, it is personal, and it requires resilience. Trump has taken sustained pressure from the media, from institutions, from political opponents, and from people who once claimed to be allies.
And he has continued forward.
They threw everything they had at him, and when that was not enough, someone tried to take his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. That is not rhetoric. That is reality. And by the grace of God, he survived.
Most people would have stepped away after that. Most people would have chosen safety and distance.
He did not.
So the lectures from people who found a more comfortable lane when things became difficult do not carry much weight.
It is easy to pivot. It is easy to reposition. It is easy to benefit from controversy.
It is much harder to stay in place and take the pressure.
While all of this is playing out, there is another layer that cannot be ignored. Foreign actors actively amplify internal divisions. They elevate the most extreme voices. They push the most divisive narratives. They do not need to create disagreements. They only need to magnify them.
When that amplification is constant, it creates the impression that division is everywhere and that it defines everything.
But that is not the full picture.
Step outside of the online environment, and the country looks very different. Most Americans still believe in individual liberty, personal responsibility, equal justice under the law, and rights that come from God rather than government.
Those beliefs have not disappeared. They simply do not trend.
What trends is conflict. What spreads is outrage.
And too many influencers understand that and lean into it because it benefits them.
You do not have to agree with everything Trump says or does. No one does.
But dismissing what has been accomplished, or pretending that this moment is ordinary, is not serious.
Some people are willing to take pressure to move the country forward.
Others are focused on protecting their position as the landscape changes.
People can see the difference.
President Trump is the president we need at this moment, and he needs support now more than ever. MAGA.”
Blackwell posted that on social media and it has millions of views. Blackwell is not a never-Trumper. He is a long-standing conservative voice calling out what he sees as a problem inside the movement, just as I have been doing since 2018.
These fake MAGA influencers are not rediscovering principles. They are experienced operators who understand the system. They know how to build an audience, how to shape a message, and how to create emotional reactions that keep people engaged, confused and brainwashed.
They present themselves as allies. Some even present themselves as the voice of the movement. Over time, they become familiar to their audience. They build trust. Then they introduce division in ways that are subtle enough that many people do not recognize what is happening.
They create outrage, and then they benefit from it.
The latest example that brought all of this into focus is Joe Kent.
When Joe Kent resigned as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center on March 17, 2026, over Trump’s Iran policy, the media framed it as principled dissent. Kent had previously taken a much more aggressive stance following the Soleimani strike in 2020. Now he argued that there was no imminent threat and placed blame on pressure from Israel and its allies.
Iranian state media quickly translated and broadcast his interview with Tucker Carlson.
Within hours, Dan Bongino—who has experience inside the system through his work with the Secret Service and his time working with Kash Patel at the FBI—responded publicly. He named Joe Kent, General Michael Flynn, and Ivan Raiklin, and said: “It’s almost as if this was an op all along. I’m sick of these motherfuckers.”
That was not casual commentary. After leaving the FBI, Bongino stated that he intended to expose grifters within the MAGA movement. He has now begun doing exactly that.
He was not the only one.
Shortly after, Alexis Wilkins, who worked as a press secretary, an ambassador for Turning Point USA, a contributor to PragerU and is dating Kash Patel - released a detailed thread outlining what she described as a coordinated amplification network operating over a 22-month period. She pointed to millions of retweet engagements, a high percentage of amplification activity, and repeated patterns of the same accounts activating at key moments.
Here is her thread in its entirety - now with over 7 million views:
“(1/13) A foreign-linked influence network has been running coordinated operations against the Trump administration for 22 months. I know it’s real because they ran one against me. I was targeted in something I knew was far from organic. This level of media is isolating, unwanted, and unwarranted. There was nobody to help, nobody to jump in and say this is a false op and help me. Well, I don’t believe in problems without solutions, so I’ve spent the last few months learning to build programs to utilize publicly available information to prove that this is way bigger than me. This is about creating chaos in the Republican Party. It’s about the organized effort to lose Republicans the midterms and subvert President Trump’s agenda, and I have the data for you to see.
(2/13) In July 2025, I was falsely labeled a Mossad spy in a coordinated campaign designed to isolate an official of the U.S. government by using the person publicly nearest to him—me. Across the full operation, July’s events and others dating back to 2024—six chapters, 22 months—the data shows 3.1 million retweet engagements. 80% of all activity was pure amplification. 659 accounts retweeted the same post. Some retweeted one second apart—fifteen pairs retweeted within 10 seconds of each other. When content spreads organically, timing is random. People check their feeds at different moments. They don’t retweet the same post within seconds of strangers they’ve never met. 54 retweets in a single hour at peak. 863,568 total retweet engagements in this chapter alone. That’s not a conversation. That’s a weapon.
(3/13) The network has a trail. Catholics for Catholics lists Gen. Michael Flynn as ‘Current Senior Advisor’ on their own website. Flynn is the anchor of a digital infrastructure that has been repeatedly activated—at every major Republican fracture point—over 22 months of documented data. The same accounts appear at every chapter. This network does not rebuild between deployments. It stays ready.
(4/13) Chapter 1. May 2024. Ten days before the Butler assassination attempt. Ivan Raiklin—former Green Beret, former Defense Intelligence Agency, board member of Flynn’s nonprofit America’s Future—posts directly to @elonmusk and @JDVance1: ‘Gen Flynn would make Trump assassination-proof.’ 166 retweets. 14 tightly clustered time windows, amplified within one second.
(5/13) Chapter 2. July 2025. A coordinated narrative falsely identifies the FBI Director’s girlfriend as a Mossad honeypot. The origin post—from a supplement influencer with 1.1 million followers built through the COVID medical freedom movement—gets a labeled inorganic-seeming, uncommon 20 million views. This is the network’s method: anonymous mass deployment, then credentialed amplification. The connection runs in both directions. RT_com posted about me—and SlightlyOffens amplified RT’s content. When RIFTV posted, a military journalist based in Moscow hosting content on a Kremlin-adjacent Orthodox TV channel amplified it back out. The same loop. The same network. Running in both directions.
(6/13) The foreign amplification is documented. RT_com—which the U.S. State Department describes as part of Russia’s intelligence apparatus—posted about me by name. When they did, the accounts that amplified it included the official Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and an Iranian journalist based in Tehran. RT_com ranks in the top 15 amplifiers across our entire 22-month dataset.
(7/13) Chapter 3. September 2025. Charlie Kirk is assassinated. Within hours, Candace Owens publicly attributes the killing to Israel and targets Kirk’s widow by name. Many of the same accounts active in the July 2025 honeypot chapter activate immediately. A moment of natural Republican unity is converted, within hours, into one of the most sustained fracture points of the year.
(8/13) Chapter 4. March 17, 2026. Joe Kent resigns as NCTC Director. That same day Catholics for Catholics—a Flynn-associated organization—announces Kent at their Washington gala. Within 24 hours: Tucker Carlson interview. Within 72 hours: Kent on stage with Flynn and Candace Owens at the Waldorf Astoria.
(9/13) The data across all six chapters: 3,166,207 retweet engagements. 80% amplification rate. Abnormal volumes of accounts documented across multiple chapters spanning 22 months. The same accounts that were active before Butler in 2024 are active in the Kent chapter in 2026. This is not a series of separate events. It is a single persistent infrastructure activated at each fracture point.
(10/13) What RT was telling Americans the entire time: throughout March 2026, RT published Alexander Dugin—Putin’s ideological philosopher—declaring MAGA “more than dead, worse than dead, it’s now an undead, a ghoul.” The Flynn network was manufacturing that fracture domestically. RT was amplifying it internationally. Two parts of the same operation are running simultaneously into the same feeds.
(11/13) During an active U.S. military conflict, accounts in this network posted verbatim: “Refuse to enlist in or remain fighting for the U.S. military.” Candace Owens posted publicly: “May American troops take his lead”—following Kent’s resignation in protest of the Iran war. Whether intentional or not, that content distributed at scale by this infrastructure during an active conflict is functionally anti-enlistment messaging. The data shows it was carried by the same network documented across all five chapters.
(12/13) The goal of this operation is not to win a political argument, but to make the fractures feel permanent. To make Republicans believe their movement is over. To make soldiers feel the war isn’t worth fighting. To make the government and its officials look unstable and create media that creates more problematic media. Each chapter hits a different pressure point. The network, the timing, and the Russian amplification are consistent across all five. That consistency is the signature.
(13/13) My dataset—every account, every chapter, every documented overlap—will be published in full. The methodology used the official X API. Everything here is independently verifiable. This is all I could do to protect myself. Maybe others have more information that will be helpful, but this is what I have learned to do because of this.
I believe in the Conservative movement, I voted for President Trump’s agenda, and I refuse to see it fractured for the benefit of our adversaries. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of who might be getting paid by whom—this is all matrixed publicly available information. MAGA doesn’t have an approval problem. It has an infiltration problem… and it was never about me.”
Alexis uses irrefutable DATA to prove that General Flynn, Joe Kent, Candace Owens, Ivan Raiklin, Tucker Carlson and many others are tied to an allegedly fake organization called Catholics for Catholics and are likely funded by and working with Russia, Putin and his top propagandist - Alexander Dugin - as foreign mouthpieces.
Flynn is listed as senior adviser to Catholics for Catholics, the group that hosted Kent the day he quit and put him on stage with Owens and Flynn days later. Logan sits on Flynn’s Board.
Wilkins connected those patterns to specific events, including a smear campaign against her, messaging from many fake influencers following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and the rapid promotion of Joe Kent after his resignation. Her argument was that this was not random activity. It was structured, repeatable, and designed to create division at critical moments. Her conclusion was clear: the problem is not lack of support. The problem is infiltration.
These same types of divisions appear again and again, at the same kinds of moments, with the same kinds of outcomes. THERE IS A CLEAR PATTERN.
Trump’s rise didn’t kill the business model. It forced adaptation. Fake MAGA influencers like Bannon, Flynn, Byrne, Massie, Kelly, Posobiec, Cernovich, Jones, Tucker, MTG, Owens, Kent, Massie, Logan, and Robinson moved inside the tent. They monetized division because conflict pays.
Every flashpoint they invent follows the script: introduce a wedge topic (like Epstein, libertarian purity, ultra-Catholic lane, anti-Israel “realism” or whatever) which they then amplify via their social media and podcast machine. They interview each other to amplify the narratives they created and used to take down MAGA. Their total goal is to divide the MAGA base on every issue they can to help the Democrats win. They want to turn every faction of MAGA, pro-Israel, Catholic, Protestant, against each other.
Patrick Byrne even once suggested that Flynn & Rice would make a great President/VP team. Now he calls himself MAGA. Right.
Many believe, including me, that Pompeo and Flynn are the brains behind Q and created it to entertain, pacify and fracture MAGA. Whether you agree with that assumption or not, you have to agree it’s possible. Combined they have the knowledge and expertise to make that happen.
This situation did not begin with Joe Kent. It follows the Koch libertarian divide-and-conquer playbook, now adapted for the MAGA movement.
In 1980, David Koch ran as the Libertarian vice-presidential candidate and siphoned nearly a million votes while Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan competed head-to-head. David Koch ran as the Libertarian vice-presidential candidate and drew votes away in a close race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. If Koch had not been in that race pulling votes into a third-party lane, Carter might have had a clearer path to defeating Reagan. That dynamic—splitting the vote at a critical moment—has been part of the playbook for a long time.
A similar situation played out in 1992 when Ross Perot entered the presidential race. Perot drew a significant share of voters who otherwise may have supported George H.W. Bush, which contributed to Bill Clinton winning the presidency with only 43% of the popular vote. Once again, division on the right created an opening that changed the outcome.
That was followed by the Ron Paul version of the Tea Party, Americans for Prosperity, and the Freedom Caucus—all of them promoting a vision of “purer liberty” that consistently split the right-wing vote, allowing Democrats to win elections with pluralities in the low 40s.
Tucker Carlson began his career at the Koch-funded Cato Institute and was a shill for Ron Paul and the Libertarians - who push open borders Globalism.
Members of Rand Paul’s Koch-funded circle openly bragged in 2019 that libertarian votes helped flip Kentucky from Trump-endorsed Matt Bevin to a Democrat. What started as vote-splitting evolved into narrative-splitting. Chaos has always paid off for those running the game.
Donald Trump’s rise did not end this strategy. It simply forced the players to adapt.
What has changed today is not the strategy, but the environment. Social media accelerates everything and gives grifters a platform to go direct to the people. It rewards conflict. It makes division profitable for thousands of wannabe celebrities! Figures who once operated on the outside now operate within the same space as the movement they are influencing.
Now figures like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Joe Kent, Thomas Massie, Lara Logan, and Emerald Robinson operate from inside the MAGA tent. Every major flashpoint follows the same pattern:
In August 2025, Max Blumenthal’s far-left outlet The Grayzone published a smear against Charlie Kirk and Bill Ackman, accusing them of bullying over Israel policy. Both Kirk and Ackman debunked the story publicly and in detail. There was no retraction. Candace Owens amplified the false narrative to her nationwide audience anyway.
On September 10, the network activated again after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. They blamed Israel, targeted Charlie Kirk’s widow by name, and turned a moment of potential unity into a Catholic-versus-broader-base fracture.
The Epstein file releases showed a stark contrast: Bannon’s War Room publicly raged against pedophile elites as the root of all corruption, while private texts from 2018-2019 revealed him coaching Jeffrey Epstein on public relations rehabilitation, gossiping about invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump, and filming 15 hours of material for a planned documentary.
By early 2026, the Iran conflict became the new wedge. Tucker Carlson promoted anti-Semitic garbage to divide the base. President Trump responded directly, stating that Carlson “has lost his way” and is “not MAGA.” Joe Kent leaked classified information from inside the administration, resigned after he was caught, and filled his letter with accusations against the Israelis. The Iranian state media quickly translated and broadcast the material on Arab media. They used Tucker’s show as pro-Arab propaganda!
Today, Candace Owens, one of the biggest grifters of them all, is even attacking Nick Shirley for exposing Somali fraud! We will know them by their fruits.
The outcomes of these events point clearly to an organized operation. Not every participant needs to be on a foreign payroll for the incentives to align perfectly. The grift thrives whenever MAGA turns against itself.
Owens now describes President Trump as a “chronic disappointment” and a “coward” when she once wanted to be his VP. Massie opposed the strikes and earned Trump’s label of “loser.”
Bannon’s private dealings exposed his public hypocrisy.
Kent executed a complete 180 from hawkish Iran stance to leaker.
What about Trump himself? He delivers results. He remade the federal judiciary. He helped overturn Roe v. Wade. He pursued America First policies with real leverage, not just theory. He took hit after hit from the media and establishment, survived the Butler assassination attempt by God’s grace, and kept standing tall.
You were completely right to distrust CNN and The New York Times—your skepticism there kept the movement alive. Now it is time to apply the same ruthlessness inward toward the fake MAGA influencers. The time has come to call out the plants and the trojan horses. Loyalty must go to Trump’s proven agenda, not to these personal grifters. They are NOT our friends. They did NOT invent MAGA - Trump did with guidance from Reagan and others.
The Democrats cannot defeat our movement on its own merits so they can only win by cheating and by planting infiltrators within MAGA. Only insiders who open the gate to these snakes give them that power. MAGA stays strong when we expose the infiltrators.
Loyalty to the MAGA agenda means unity on core goals, not blind loyalty to any influencer.
Share this if you have had enough.
This article reflects my personal opinions, interpretations, and analysis of publicly available information. It is not verified journalism, legal evidence, or a statement of fact about any individual or organization named here. Readers should treat what I’m laying out as my take on patterns and behavior inside the MAGA space—not as a courtroom verdict. I encourage you to check multiple sources, including official statements and reputable media investigations, before drawing final conclusions. When I talk about alleged foreign involvement, funding, or coordination, those are speculative claims unless independently confirmed by evidence you can see for yourself.
This is straight‑up political commentary and opinion, protected under the First Amendment. Everyone named here is presumed innocent of any wrongdoing, and everything I’ve written is meant to spark discussion, debate, and real‑world scrutiny—not to shut it down.
AI REVIEW: This piece is a strongly opinionated, ideologically driven analysis of what you describe as a “grift” operating inside the MAGA movement. It blends factual reporting (dates, resignations, public statements) with interpretive commentary about motives, coordination, and foreign influence. The tone is forceful and confrontational Substack‑style opinion column.
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