MAGA, Israel and the Social Media Influencer Grift

MAGA and Israel’s hasbara apparatus have glommed on to a new internet phenomenon: influencers. They promote brands, they promote themselves, they have millions of followers.

Often, their promotion is no more legitimate than old-fashioned infomercials: selling a pig in a poke. What better way to promote a rancid product than buy off someone who will sell the hell out of it. In the Israeli instance, it pays $7,000 per post to a network of influencers eager to take the cash in return for pro-Israel messaging.

The Israeli diaspora affairs ministry–led by the homophobic, transphobic, Diaspora-hating Amichai Chikli–flew a group of them to Gaza, where they dutifully mouthed hasbara talking points based on genocide and starvation denial:

It was framed as a showcase of “the mechanism of [Israeli] humanitarian aid delivery in Gaza” to “refute Hamas’ lies that are distributed by foreign media,” a ministry statement read. “The tour took place as part of the fight against Hamas’ campaign to discredit [Israel] – the ‘hunger campaign’ – which is meant to damage Israel’s image in the international arena…

There you have it. What matters is not actual starvation, but the stain it leaves on Israel’s reputation. With the implication Israel should be permitted to continue its genocide without any reputational cost. Israel’s policies are not are self-evidently just. The problem lies with the troublemakers who make it into something it isn’t.

As for the real victims: there is no hunger. There is no genocide. Why? Because we say there isn’t, and we pay these shills to confirm it. It’s a nasty business. But where there’s money to be made there’s a greedy sucker is born every minute.

The 2026 foreign ministry budget has tripled its hasbara budget to $750-million to defend the indefensible. This is, in part, a response to recent polls confirming the incontrovertible decline in support for Israel. 80% of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Israel. For the first time, more Americans favor Palestinians over Israel. Nor is this a one-off phenomenon. It follows a pattern of gradual decline in such support accelerated after Israel began its Gaza genocide.

Many nations guilty of such crimes don’t care how they are viewed. You will not hear North Korea or Belarus paying for ads or influencers to promote their cause. Israel, on the other hand, depends on foreign export markets and diplomatic cover from the US and EU allies. So it needs to retain at least some level of goodwill.

It must, therefore maintain the illusion that such crimes can be massaged into a positive narrative: if they hear us and our branding message enough times, we will change their minds. If we spend more, pump out more content, that could win the day. At the very least, we can assuage our guilty conscience by saying we did our best to win hearts and minds. If we fail, it’s their fault, not ours.

As any brand marketers will tell you–you cannot sell a defective product; one that your audience knows is defective even before it opens the box. When your audience sees every day evidence of genocide, no amount of “marketing” will convince them otherwise. No matter what you say, how you craft your message–you have nothing to sell but lies masquerading as fact.

Here’s what the 2025 budget’s $150-million bought:

A $50 million international social-media ad buy was split across Google, YouTube, X and Outbrain. Roughly $40 million went to hosting 400 foreign delegations — lawmakers, pastors, influencers, university presidents. A “media war room” was erected to monitor 250 outlets and 10,000 daily Israel-related items.

The Foreign Ministry also signed a $1.5-million-a-month contract with former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale’s firm to deploy AI tools against antisemitism online, a $4.1 million campaign aimed at evangelical churches, and the “Esther Project,” a paid influencer network running up to $900,000 through a PR firm called Bridges Partners.

Responsible Statecraft originally broke much of this story:

Being paid by Israel to post on social media is…very lucrative…These influencers are likely being paid around $7,000 per post on social media such as Tik Tok and Instagram on behalf of Israel.

Bridges Partners, a firm working for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sent a series of invoices for its “Influencer Campaign” to Havas Media Group Germany, an international media group working for Israel. The invoices detailed a sum of $900,000…for a cohort of 14-18 influencers to create content.

The Israeli consul general in Los Angeles expanded on the logistics of the initiative:

“We flew a lot of delegations to the country — whether it’s pastors, whether it’s politicians, universities,” Bachar said. “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.”

This Haaretz story offers further background on the origins of the effort and the role of a messianic pro-Israel group, Israel365 in the propaganda campaign. Once again, it is based on the discredited notion that throwing money at young people can open their eyes and persuade them that Israel really is golden:

The initiative will bring 16 U.S.-based influencers under the age of 30, each with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, to counter what the ministry sees as a decline in pro-Israel sentiment among younger Americans.

According to ministry officials, “while older Republicans and American conservatives still hold pro-Israel views, positive perspectives towards Israel are falling across all younger age groups.”

Here is a profile of one of the most prominent and influential of these brand ambassador-propagandists, Lizzy Savetsky.

MAGA influencers

It’s difficult to know whether MAGAworld or Bibiworld came up with this idea of ideological brand ambassadors. One thing is for sure, the former have not let grass grow under their feet. They’ve spread their net wider and showered more cash on more influencers than you can shake a stick at.

While the Israeli government has undoubtedly offered scripts for their influencers, the MAGA version seems even more closely scripted, as documented by former Trump influencer turned “whistleblower,” Ashley St. Clair:

…She alleges that top MAGA internet personalities, some of whom have portrayed themselves as grassroots activists, depended on talking points delivered to them by administration officials and congressional Republicans in group chats…

After…the White House correspondents’ dinner [shooting]…St. Clair remarked…that many influencers had posted strikingly similar comments about how the incident reaffirmed Trump’s need for a White House ballroom….In the…24 hours after the shooting, more than 100 right-wing influencers, politicians and commentators posted about the importance of a White House ballroom

…Some of the influencers, she said, further benefited from signing onto undisclosed digital-marketing campaigns that paid them based on how many views they could get on X posts boosting conservative candidates or policy goals.

Here are multiple examples of the coordinated messaging mentioned above.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the Israeli government has contracted with Bridges, which is also being used in the MAGA campaign. Additionally Brad Pascale, who was hired by Netanyahu, was Trump’s political strategist and ran his social media messaging in the 2016 election. This indicates a campaign with a shared strategy and overlap of ideology and political goals. They each represent forms of fascism, having in common the its strategy of control of media messaging to deceive and manipulate their publics.

St. Clair documents the synergistic relationship between the two camps in the above video:

…Some of the biggest private [political marketing] companies within the right, particularly the right wing media, they will be reached out to by people who want particular messaging. I was aware of this several times in regards to Israel, where Republican companies, right wing companies were offered millions of dollars to promote pro-Israel messaging

Social media scammers have taken to TikTok and other platforms using AI to generate fake content promoting Trump. According to Twitter, many of them are based in Russia, India and Nigeria. Many of the hundreds of fake accounts seem designed to sell products (along with the pro-Trump content). They’re earning millions in aggregate from this grift. Such activity mirrors Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Then, it used similar tactics to sow dissension amidst the electorate and suppress the Democratic vote.

These influencers debase political discourse just as their paymasters do. They say “democracy dies in darkness” (a once meaningful slogan popularized by the Washington Post, before it’s owner turned it into a right-wing media clown-show). But it also dies in dollars.