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 June (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.
When I was the age that St Clair was when she began writing for the Babylon Bee, that would have been my dream job. (After I shifted more liberal I would up writing, instead, for Cracked). But, when I was that age, very early 20s, social media wasn’t a thing, at least nothing remotely like what it has been since the start of the Trump era in the mid 2010s, when Ashley came of age.
In her interview with Lorenz, St Clair details how she became political during Trump’s first presidential campaign, favoring him slightly over the contrary opinions of her college peers. Feeling like her thoughts weren’t very popular on campus, she took to social media instead, where she experienced massive positive reinforcement from algorithms that would deliver her message to a much more receptive audience.
As she admits, to receive this “validation, and feel like you were right, even if you were wrong,” is incredibly alluring. It’s very likely, I think, that I would have followed the same trajectory if, at the same age and given the same chance, I had access to something like Twitter. The fact that I never slipped into that pipeline at a vulnerable age is something that I’m thankful for, and I shiver at the alternate universe version of myself as a Drew Pavlou or a Catturd.
From what I can tell, Ashley never got too far down that pipeline either, but in her case, it’s not because she lacked the will, motive, and opportunities to become further radicalized. Ashley St Clair’s story differs from mine in one major key aspect: She is a woman. While I’m certain that the leaders of the far right recognize the tactical necessity of getting women on board, their biggest hurdle is that the MAGA base are not so receptive. So much of that engine is driven by toxic masculinity that, for women, the ideology just isn’t as ‘sticky.’
St Clair’s tweets during her formative years as an influencer came off more radical than she ever appeared in interviews, for the most part. The reason is no mystery—she thrived on Twitter engagement, and short, pithy, controversial, or strongly ideological statements are how you get that. In interviews, where she’s not playing any kind of character or driven for strong immediate reactions, her views were usually much more measured.
There were aspects of her interviews in which she comes off as fairly radical—in her appearance on the center-right/libertarian podcast TriggerNometry (Christ that name is cringe) she argues to the right of the hosts on the topic of immigration (she prefers no immigration, which they push back on, citing cases of genuine persecution). I don’t know what her views are on that topic today, but the episode where she made those comments aired in June 2024. (Unless the show filmed much earlier, she would have been secretly pregnant with Musk’s child at this time).
But there is one aspect of the right that she has consistently found very abrasive, and that is its treatment of women, which she has correctly noticed has been getting steadily worse as the right has been growing more extreme.
There’s a really fascinating example of her ideological journey in the TriggerNometry episode, before she broke with the right, in which she details her frustration about right wing misogyny, but she still thinks that nobody among the MAGA crowd truly thinks this way, and that it is an illusion generated by a deliberate large scale leftist conspiracy to make the right look bad. The two male hosts, who know very well that the far right is driven by male resentment (they are, though not extreme, a part of it) and try to educate her. They are closer to correct than she is, and her conspiracy theory relies on the mistaken impression that big tech is left wing (we would all be relieved of this misconception very shortly after this interview took place).
We have no way of knowing what St Clair’s intentions were when she conceived a child with Elon Musk, but if it was to knit herself more closely within the MAGA movement, this was a very severe miscalculation.
Elon Musk’s fanbase despise every one of Musk’s exes even more than Musk does, and this is simply inbuilt within the far-right ideologies. Even when these ideologies quibble amongst themselves, they are united on the topic of women, especially women having sex: To the traditionalists, you are a whore for having sex out of wedlock; to the incels and red-pillers, you are a whore for having sex at all; to the pronatalists, you are the incubation chamber and nobody wants used equipment speaking out of turn; to the groypers… well, that’s partly an incel thing, but also Ashley is Jewish so you can figure the rest out.
The instant that Ashley St Clair revealed that she had mothered Musk’s child, the spigot of positive Twitter reinforcement shut off completely. The spigot of hatred opened and snapped off. This was encouraged by her baby son’s famous father.
When Musk equipped his AI image generator Grok with the publicly accessible ability to undress women (including underage girls) on command, his enemies, including Ashley, were the primary targets. The fact that the entirety of MAGA gleefully relished this said everything she needed to know about misogyny on the far right. Less than two years after her appearance on TriggerNometry, she was appearing on leftist LGBT podcasts sounding like an outright Marxist (taken from her appearance on Matt Bernstein’s podcast A Bit Fruity.)
She didn’t come to this position from being indoctrinated in the woke college system, as many on the right purport is the only way people are liberalized. She came to it through the right’s inability to disguise itself, and a year of touching grass.
The journey might have been eased for her, had she heeded the depressing tale of Lauren Southern.
Southern was further to the right than St Clair ever was, and she was a prominent influencer during Trump’s first term. An avowed Christian nationalist and clearly, though she’d probably shy from the term, white nationalist, became a star of the alt-right back when that term was in common use.
Unlike Ashley St Clair, Southern never tried to marry her rightist views with feminist ideas. She was a misogynist herself. But this just led to different contradictions: How does a woman make a living as a public figure within an ideology that purports strongly that a woman should be neither seen nor heard?
Her efforts to appeal to the far right as one of their token propagandists against women’s lib absolutely did not protect her from attacks from within that movement. Having women like her positioned prominently in the movement to talk other women out of the workforce was good strategy, but the bulk of MAGA being unable to contain their hatred was the strategy’s inevitable failure. As she continued to age past 20 without a husband and children, her own base became increasingly furious.
She didn’t want to marry someone she wasn’t in love with, she pleaded. The alt-right didn’t give a shit. They called her a “tradthot”—a woman who talks the talk of a tradwife but fails ever more conspicuously to walk the walk.
So, she started shopping around for a husband to get MAGA off her back about it, but of course, she was dating within the alt-right and so every suitor turned out to be some flavor of neo-Nazi. She was being constantly and explicitly sexually harassed by leaders of the alt-right, most prominently Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, who were desperate to bed her.
Somewhere around this time she was invited to Romania by Andrew Tate, who ostensibly wanted to help out her flailing media enterprise. You can guess how that went, but to remove all doubt, Southern alleges that he immediately drugged and raped her.
Lauren Southern hasn’t made a public leftist turn, but she has been aggressively driven out of the MAGA movement, not because she didn’t say all of the right things. She didn’t commit any of the crimes that Ashley St Clair did—she didn’t defect from the party line on women’s issues. She didn’t even have sex. Lauren Southern was driven from the movement due to who and what she was, which is female.
As an epilogue to her story, it’s now clear that she can never return to the movement even if she wanted to, because it turns out, in her eagerness to obey that movement, she hurriedly found a husband and birthed a child. But that husband quickly left her. She is now, just like Ashley St Clair, the absolute worst thing that you can possibly be in the eyes of the MAGA movement—a single mother.
This happens time and time again. The women of the right consistently have a very brief half-life. Who gets away with being a woman in Trumpworld? Even Erika Kirk, who rose from the ashes of her Charlie’s murder as the superstar new leader of the Christian nationalist wing of MAGA is being increasingly scrutinized and attacked from the right about the extent to which she is or isn’t mourning her husband.
Who else is there? MAGA loyalists have for some time considered Pamela Bondi a weak link in the Trump Administration, and every time she says something that she thinks the base will enjoy (like making it illegal to insult Charlie Kirk) she is buried under waves of gendered insults and demands for an Attorney General with a Y chromosome.
For whatever reason that women get caught up in this movement, the outcome is usually the same: Your presence is only tolerated in so far as the men who vastly outnumber you in both its leadership and fanbase permit you to speak. Those who are strong, like Ashley St Clair, might renounce the movement and push against it. Those who aren’t will meekly vanish. And everyone who remains in the movement will continue to insist that there is no such thing as a patriarchy.
I’m writing a book that goes into detail about how toxic masculinity took over the world in a single generation via the internet. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
I know it's hardly unique in history to have a powerful man's child to secure one's position but goddamn, the idea that it's STILL a thing blows my mind. Those poor kids.
Gee, being treated like a sex slave that cooks and cleans is not the business, after all.