The ‘nobody’ who became a leading right-wing influencer

Musk set up a program in 2023 to pay creators for their content — one that inevitably rewards incendiary and offensive posts because they garner the most engagement. Now, stoking outrage is effectively McGee’s job: he starts posting around 9am and continues until 8pm nearly every day.

What he gets in return is less clear. Publicly, he has boasted about owning designer gear, investing in real estate and receiving huge payouts from X. In reality, he has earned an average of about $US55,000 ($84,000) a year from X.

McGee aspires to be rich and famous like Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who runs Infowars. But for now, he toils on a lower tier, poisoning the online conversation by speaking to enormous right-wing audiences online — and still having very little to show for it beyond the attention he earns on X, good and bad.

“You got people that’s worth millions and millions of dollars taking 12 seconds out their day to say that they don’t like you?” he said. “That’s more than I had years ago, right?”

McGee didn’t see a lot of options growing up in North Augusta, South Carolina.

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“Maybe I got to break the law, maybe I got to sell drugs, I might have to join a gang,” he said while slouching over the kitchen island that doubles as his home office. “It was a lot of things in a narrow point of view that I had.”

He tried everything else instead. He enlisted in the Army, where he stayed for three years before he was honourably discharged. He enrolled at Pennsylvania State University for business, through a program for veterans, but never graduated. He promoted rap music with an independent label and dabbled in fashion design. He even started a credit repair company after his credit score went almost as low as it can go.

Then social media changed his life.

Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign in November 2020 introduced McGee to a career as a right-wing influencer. He was already a vocal Trump supporter, having identified as a conservative since his mother told him, at 6 years old, that Christians should support the Republican Party. But it wasn’t until he promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud that his political beliefs became a career. His follower count exploded, and he created “Win the Win,” one of the largest Facebook groups devoted to election fraud conspiracy theories, which had more than 61,000 followers before Facebook banned it as part of a sweeping crackdown on election falsehoods.

The attention brought McGee scores of fans: McGee, who is Black and said he speaks and dresses “like a rapper,” stands out in a sea of red MAGA hats and right-wing creators who are mostly white.

He started posting on X, then known as Twitter, after Musk bought the platform in 2022. He had hundreds of thousands of followers by the time Musk decided to start paying creators. (X did not respond to a request for comment.)

Critics sounded the alarm about the misinformation McGee spread. But he quickly realised the backlash was key to becoming relevant online and growing an audience. Rather than shy away from it, he embraced it, and saw social media algorithms expand his reach.

“You know, the first goal is to be seen,” he said. “And they give you that.”

Musk imagined that his revenue program would support creators while incentivising high-quality content that kept users engaged on X. What resulted instead was an explosive new industry for professional attention-getters, who started posting constantly and stoking fury to earn more money.

In total, X has paid McGee about $US157,000 since the program started in 2023, according to payment records reviewed by the Times. He made $US67,000 in his first year and just $US12,000 last year after he was kicked from the advertising program. After X overhauled its payment program last October, McGee complained to Musk that he still wasn’t being paid. Musk replied: “Will fix.” McGee has collected about $US16,000 since.

X’s decision to remove McGee from its revenue program without warning in 2024 sent him into a financial tailspin. He was rescued by an advertising deal that landed in his inbox from a popular MAGA meme coin — a type of cryptocurrency whose value is tied to a brand or mascot. He promoted it to his followers on X in exchange for more than $US150,000 worth of cryptocurrency. The meme coin’s value plummeted more than 90 per cent in the months that followed.

Most of the money McGee had earned is now gone.

He recently had about $US7 in his checking account and some credit card debt. His savings — a cryptocurrency wallet with about $US35,000 in it — were slowly disappearing as he used them to pay bills.

‘It’s not what I started off as originally. It’s a survival mechanism. I’m doing it to survive. That’s what it takes.’

Dominick McGee

“Maybe $US150,000 is a lot compared to my broke ass in the past,” McGee said of the money X had paid him. “But when it comes to creators, I’m actually pretty poor. I’m one of the poor creators.”

McGee said his personal goal this year was to buy his first Lamborghini. To get anywhere close to that, he intends to travel even deeper into the “manosphere” content universe, where stars get famous for sharing hot takes about celebrities, women and business. It could also mean rubbing elbows with more misogynists and bigots who increasingly populate that scene.

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McGee often justifies his decisions as a right-wing influencer by where they will lead him next. His political content was toxic, but it brought him notoriety and opened doors to the White House and parties at Mar-a-Lago. His focus on “brain-dead content” seems frivolous, but was necessary to gain more prominence, lucrative ad deals and subscribers.

“It’s not what I started off as originally. It’s a survival mechanism,” he said. “I’m doing it to survive. That’s what it takes.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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