đź”’ Why the Right Keeps Losing Female Influencers
One of the most fascinating things to happen in recent political discourse, for me, has to be the question of: What changed Ashley St Clair’s mind?
For those who don’t know, St Clair was one of the midlist female figures in the world of online MAGA influencers, primarily as a writer for the Babylon Bee and an ambassador to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point organization. Then, last year, she announced that, the previous year, she’d birthed Elon Musk’s love child. His 14th, I think, if Wikipedia is up to date.
That revelation was almost twelve months ago and, since then, St Clair has seemed to go through a political transformation so rapid that people have questioned her motives and sincerity. No longer tweeting sarcastic Trumpworld jeers about gays grooming kids, railing against immigration, and the other usual talking points, she’s now joining the left-wing chorus against ICE’s public executions and writing apparently heartfelt apologies to minority groups she has wronged, the trans community in particular.
As recently as mid 2024, Ashley was a regular guest on such shows as Jesse Watters and TriggerNometry. In the past few months, she’s been seen much more often speaking to people like Taylor Lorenz and Juniper (Onion Person in the above exchange)..
It is very tempting to presume that she’s doing some sort of bit. I speculated just two weeks ago about people like Richard Hanania who pull the sudden ideological switcheroo and it’s unclear what kind of engagement game they might be playing.
For Ashley St Clair, I can only offer my own perspective: I suffer from anxiety and, in particular, confrontation anxiety. It’s not just getting in trouble, but even being in benign situations that carry the aesthetic of getting in trouble, like performance reviews and job interviews (which is why I rarely pass job interviews). There’s a conspicuous tremble, much more conspicuous in my case than Ashley’s, but I can spot it, particularly in the Taylor Lorenz interview, and I’m telling you now, it can’t be faked, and it can’t be hidden. It’s mechanically impossible to switch it either on or off. This lady, in my opinion, is legit.
Now you might think, in our current mess, facing the worldwide rise of a downright cult-like far right, we should treat the deradicalization of Ashley St Clair similar to how we’d treat someone who went into spontaneous remission from cancer or AIDS. That is, figure out how the hell it happened and how it can be replicated in a lab. In actual fact, though, St Clair’s ideological flip isn’t that uncommon. What it reveals is the difficulty that the far right has in attempting to appeal and hold on to women.
My original intention this week was to try to figure out and explain what might cause someone to switch sides like this. After all, she and I have a similar story to tell—as I’ve written before, I used to lean right myself, but never very far. I voted for mainstream conservatives until I was in my mid 20s, but I never would have been MAGA. I was more of a libertarian who voted for neocons out of necessity. I don’t think that’s an unusual story. What did seem very unusual was St Clair’s radical and sudden backflip.
Not too long into my research into Ms. St Clair, I began to realize that none of this is as mindblowing as it seemed. She was never a radical either.
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