The Ex-MAGA Influencer Who Now Hates All Things MAGA—and Herself Too | The New Republic
By: Virginia Heffernan (The New Republic)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Get ready with me while we talk about Ashley St. Clair.
Ashley St. Clair is a gonzo MAGA influencer turned gonzo ex-MAGA influencer who is also known for having mothered a child with Elon Musk in 2023. She is a college student. She is 27.
For the last few months, St. Clair has been posting to TikTok about her escape or exile from the MAGA carnies. She sums it up this way: "I became a cringe MAGA influencer for 8 years before I found my brain." Now she is ready to "talk about my experience within this machine of MAGA" and "speak about the inside of a system that nobody else is."
Though she makes serious reference to having renounced her previous creed and making earnest amends, St. Clair is mostly conducting her multipart expose with Catskills-style comedy. She's well suited to it, as she resembles a young Fran Drescher, and has something of Drescher's manner, manicures, and nasality.
In this costume, St. Clair delivers MAGA lore and tea to an increasingly intrigued audience. You might call this a redemption tour, except that her shtick is that she's way, way beyond redemption.
And lately she's been drawing viewers in with the four words that have become a favorite opener on the app: "Get ready with me."
To her following, this curtain-raiser signals that St. Clair will put on a millefeuille of makeup in a sublimely expert way, transforming herself from girlish smart aleck to indomitable broad, all while dishing about the women of Mar-a-Lago, the right-wing media group Arsenal, "the rack on Kristi Noem's husband," the "Stop the Steal" hoax, the former North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn, Benny Johnson, Alex Jones, and how MAGA influence campaigns work.
Why is this at all compelling? I think it comes through in the makeup application itself, as this exhausted and broken-hearted young woman, who has both engineered suffering and suffered herself, self-consciously masks her extreme fragility with extreme bravado. St. Clair is clearly experiencing a form of how-did-I-get-here despair that mirrors the nation's. In one video (now unfindable) she contrasted images of her heavily made-up self with her private one—raw, red-faced, sobbing.
I find her both insightful and untrustworthy. "Bitch, I'm at rock bottom," she posted. "There's not an embarrassed bone in my body. I care about literally nothing."
So here's the rock bottom she's referring to. In 2023, St. Clair's relationship with Musk rocketed from their D.M.s to her pregnancy to his madness. "To reach legion-level before the apocalypse," Musk texted St. Clair about his breeding plan for her, according to The Wall Street Journal, "we will need to use surrogates."
Not long after, St. Clair announced the birth of their son Romulus on X, and named Musk as the father. He had evidently hoped to keep this quiet. A beef ensued. "You withdrew most of [the child support] to maintain control and punish me for 'disobedience,'" St. Clair tweeted at Musk, saying she was facing eviction.
Musk then decided St. Clair had somehow entrapped him, and went insane. A tsunami of horrific, pornographic, xAI-generated images of St. Clair as a minor hit X. St. Clair sued xAI. Now xAI has bashed back. Or rather, as she puts it, "my ex's fuck-ass racist robot company is suing me."
For a new mother in precarious circumstances to go toe-to-toe with Musk, the RMITW, took cojones. To do so on Musk's own Satan-site, and in the presence of his zillion bloodthirsty acolytes—this gives you a sense of St. Clair's risk nonaversion.
So she took her rock bottom to TikTok. When she arrived, she mostly lip-synched to internet memes. These videos are surprisingly funny, and she still does them. But only last August when she warned about Palantir, and the dangers of "simping for the military-industrial complex," did she get true engagement. These days, some 70,000 of us are following.
The tea is hot, as they say. The apparent debauchery, recklessness, and casual brutality of some of the nation's leading conservatives is really something. St. Clair chips off jokes about everything she did and had done to her in her early twenties, and her tough-as-nails posture is, by design, only half-persuasive.
Then St. Clair can also turn downright somber, as in a video last week. In this one (now removed), St. Clair addressed Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie who had just released a weird video of her own. St. Clair urged Kirk to log off the internet for a time and get better people to advise her. St. Clair then thought better of the post and took it down. "As a mother," she said in the next video, she didn't want to encourage people to "dogpile" on Kirk.
Once a "brand ambassador" for Turning Point USA, St. Clair also wanted to underscore in this follow-up video that she vehemently opposes the ideology of the Kirks—and the whole movement she once embraced. To this end, she has taken her name off an anti-trans children's book she published a few years ago. She further aims to take responsibility for having, as she says, dehumanized the trans community—and so many others.
"I encourage people within MAGA to really look at what's happening in this country and what you're a part of," she said in a Get Ready With Me video last Friday, with apparent anguish. She went on to say she's not a grifter or a makeup influencer. She hopes, in fact, to go to law school one day.
"I am speaking openly and honestly about my experiences. I understand that there's a lot of skepticism and critique, and I am open to that, and I am understanding that there are a lot of people that are still going to be angry at me. And I don't fault them for that because of my role in harm."
Gen Z MAGA—how will we ever understand you? The sincerity crossed with the oddball memes with the deep suffering with the mean-girl zingers. But the GRWM video was done. The makeup was done. In the captions, St. Clair had helpfully included a 15-item cosmetics product list, including Rare Blush in Wisdom, Nars Blush in Dolce Vita, and One Size Liner in Outta Line. What a mess. But maybe the list held a clue to Ashley's, MAGA's, or even America's trajectory. Dolce Vita to Outta Line to some Wisdom at last? What was I doing? I finally scrolled away.
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I wish this article would go more in depth on the inside of the system. I read something the other day that this once former MAGA influencer pushed propaganda to rile up the base and to collect more souls for Satan.
she probably got poked by charlie too ...
... and more than once. she probably has a scrapbook ...
People who play with fire and then cry about getting burned bore the fuck out of me. No pity for morons.
It is possible to make a lot of money by having a You Tube show and a podcast and a large Instagram or Tik Tok following. All these people have these dollar signs in their eyes.
It is a travesty that such shit is considered honest pay. When their appeal to idiots get shifted to the next moronic “influencer”, they’ll have no skills worthy of an actual paycheck. Perhaps she’ll be good at ensuring my food delivery is still hot when I receive it.
I don't know why it wouldn't be. To be good at it takes work and planning. I have a YouTube channel for some aquarium stuff, but the time it takes to create content, video it, edit it and respond to comments is a lot more work than I want to put into it. The people who excel at it are putting in full workdays.
Sure they do, though honestly that may depend on the individual. I understand there are a lot of people trying to do this and failing, but again not everyone does. I don't consume as much social media as some others, but I follow some very smart, knowledgeable people online who make a shit ton of money doing it.
elon figured out what she was good at ...
I just think that the intersection of social media and politics is a horrible and risky place to stake your income. Politics is no longer a place where people come together, it’s a place where people lose all sense of pragmatism for the sake of “owning” those who disagree with them. I don’t have any issues with hobbyists using social media to expand and intensify their craft, but people who spend a full day making fish faces for a camera and documenting every plate of food they stuff in their face make me want to puke. I have no dog in that fight, because I abhor social media in general.
I'm not arguing how crazy social media is these days. I'd lose that argument. I'm just saying enough people are making a lot of money doing it. There are a lot of people that fuck around and find out how hard it is to make it too. Yes, some of them are now working for Door Dash.
That is the main reason for doing whatever it is that they do.
This should be stressed.
If you are making money at it, it is not just a casual sideline. To make money, to earn the pitances that drip from the Sword of Damocles takes effort and time.
Product endorsements make money. Successful influencers often become brand sponsors.
Just to get to the level of brand sponsoreship takes real chutzpah. Ain't nothin is easy, ain't nothing goes for free.
A reminder here: Nothing good is easy. Nothing good is Free (Thanks Led Zeppelin)
they'll probably be a lot more maga mea culpas in the near future ...
I'm sorry, but this girl was an opportunist then and she's an opportunist now. I'm not doubting her account of "inside MAGA", but she clearly doesn't care about anything other than herself which is far more on brand for MAGA than for those serious about opposing the authoritarian bent and the abject loyalty to Trump of this administration and the MAGA movement. With that said, none of her revelations about inside the MAGA movement are surprising, it's what anyone with more than half a brain already suspected.
I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for her.
Anyone else?
Present actions matter more than mistakes of the past. She's young, she has the right to learn and grow. I don't know her and therefore don't judge her, but I'm not contributing to her revenue stream either.
Feeling sorry for who..?
elon's penile accessory du jour ...
a flesh light is probably worth a few hundred Billion to Elon in Musk
no child support worries with that device ...
I’m somewhat prepared to extend a little grace to MAGA supporters under 30. I figure there’s just a good chance they don’t know any better.
But if you’re over say, 40 or 50 and you voted for that POS, you deserve every terrible thing coming your way as a result.
a thirty year old today was 19 when trump first ran for office, and people under thirty today were obviously even younger. i think there is something to the idea they dont know any better - some people who vote today know no other form of politics, thats how long this nightmare has been going.
maga has kicked the door open to deport americans that are criminals, and that will come in real handy, real soon ...