Bulwark Takes - Is This GOP “Electoral Genius” Actually a Fraud?

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

Will Sommer joins Sonny Bunch to discuss the latest edition of False Flag. Will breaks down the messy, petty feud between MAGA influencers Scott Presler and Brandon Straka. From bogus Amish voter drives and Elon Musk’s $1 million donation to sex scandals, cosplay jail cells, and January 6 fallout, they dive into the clout battles and chaos fracturing the GOP’s influencer class.

Rural communities are being squeezed from every side. From rising health care costs to crumbling hospitals, from attacks on public schools to the fight for paid family and medical leave, farmers and small businesses are reeling from the trade war. And now, Project 2025 is back with a plan to finish what Elon Musk started. Trump and the Republicans won rural votes, then turned their backs on us. Join the One Country Project for the Rural Progress Summit, July 8th through the 10th.

This free virtual event brings together leaders like Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Governor Andy Beshear, and others for real talk and real solutions. Together we'll tackle the most urgent issues facing rural America. Register today or learn more at ruralprogress.com. Welcome back to the Bullwork.

We have a very special edition of False Flag to discuss today because it's about a bunch of people I've never heard of. Will usually, usually in your newsletters, I recognize the names. I'm familiar enough with this ecosystem that I can navigate a lot of it just by, just by kind of skimming. But I, I had to read very closely because I have no idea who any of these people we're talking about today are. What is going on in the world of Republican vote getting? Because that seems to be what we're discussing.

Yes. So this, I mean, this is what I'm here for. So this centers around this guy named Scott Pressler. People, he's also known as the persistence. So he's kind of like the opposite of the resistance. And he is a, I've described him, he's extremely tall, he's like six foot three. He has, I was saying, shoulder-length or excuse me, chest-length hair, but it's almost like, like ab-length hair. He's gay, which kind of is part of his persona in the Republican Party. And his big thing is that he, whenever there's a big election, he goes out and he kind of talks to the blue collar people or the Amish in the case of Pennsylvania. And he gets them to register as Republicans. And so there's kind of this myth around him that he's like the guy who saves all these elections or whenever the RNC chairmanship is open, his fans go like, you got to put Scott in charge. Like, you know, he's this electoral genius. So, and he was one of the guys who was out there registering the Amish.

That story I remember. I remember there was a big, there was a lot of buzz in MAGA world in 2024 about the Amish. The Amish were gonna turn it around Pennsylvania for Donald Trump, right? That was him. Yes, exactly. And he kind of led the charge on like Amish

are gonna save, are gonna win this battleground state for Trump. You know, in a way it kind of reminds me of like when the Juggalos came to DC, maybe a decade ago, people were like, the Juggalos are gonna like overthrow the Trump administration. You have these kinds of disconnected groups that people like put all their hopes into. And in this case, people got really excited and Scott Pratt sort of

leaned into that. Now, his fans, you know, he never quite said this himself, but his fans would say things like, he's registered 180,000 Amish to vote. When the reality is, at like at most within Pennsylvania, there was like 100,000 Amish. So, you know, that was impossible. Yeah so this so this this gentleman is now being attacked by another gentleman who also does his own you know kind of he's got his own voter registration thing going on what's what's the deal with that guy? Yeah so there's a guy named Brandon Straka he's he's a former, also gay, and that's relevant because his pitch is that he's going to lead these sort of non-traditionally Republican constituencies like racial minorities or

women or LGBT people, and he's going to make them Republicans. It's called the walk away movement, so they're going to walk away from the Democratic Party. And so he had it. It's kind of a very similar thing, although he's obviously not famous for getting Amish people or anything like that. But him and Preser were really close or they were friends. And then and now just just in the past few months, Straka, as well as some other sort of some sort of Pennsylvania grassroots activists and some other right-wing figures have come out and said Have really gone on the attack against Scott Pressler saying he's you know Exaggerating his importance and he's getting all this money He got a million dollars from Elon Musk in a way that isn't benefiting the Republican Party

And I I do think we should emphasize just how like personal and catty and silly this whole feud is, how it started, because my understanding, again from reading your newsletter here, is that the falling out basically occurred because there was a mutual reinforcement pact that was ignored by Mr. Pressler during the most recent campaign. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, it sort of gives you a glimpse into how these kind of clout shark right-wing influencers work. In this case, Brandon Stracca and his allies, they have what I think are some substantive critiques about how much did the vote change, really change in this county or whatever. But then a lot of it is just like this guy was rude to me. I mean, really rude.

And so as you mentioned, a bunch of right wing influencers, including the two of them, made this alliance to sort of promote their their election efforts in 2020 altogether and say, you know, you repost my content. It's kind of like a hype house situation. But in Straka's telling, Scott Pressler kind of took all the clout from everyone else and then refused to repost their content. And so as a result, it made him look like a much bigger figure in the GOP than everyone else. And then there was this kind of fight over, you know, you used my seat, you got closer, or you use your connection with me to take my seat at the Trump rally before January 6th. And the reason I bring up January 6th is it gets

interesting because these two guys have had very similar paths up until then. They're kind of these nontraditional, such as it is, Republican voters. They register new voters. They get people excited about Trump. But then on January 6th, Scott Pressler, for the most part, appears to have kind of just walked around in the streets of D.C. amongst all the ellipse crowd, high-fiving people, whatever. And then Brandon Straca, he went to the Capitol and he encouraged the mob. He was saying, to paraphrase here, but he was encouraging someone to wrestle up a police officer's shield away, all this kind of stuff. So he, as a

result, faced legal charges and ended up doing three years of probation. And so that's kind of where their paths diverge. Scott Pressler goes on to have a huge career. He has 2 million followers on X. He's getting this Elon Musk money, as I mentioned, and he's sort of seen as the the Mr. Fix It for the Republican Party. But now Brandon Brandon Straka and his buddies have emerged and said, well, if this guy's so good, why do we keep losing all these special elections? Right. The big issue here was in Wisconsin. There was the Supreme Court election. Pressler

went out there and was talking about how he's going to register enough voters to turn this thing around, and that did not work for them, isn't that right? Right. I mean, this is the election, folks may remember, where Elon Musk wore the cheesehead. In this case, in Scott Pruster's case, he said, you know, the cavalry is coming. And so this is, I think, the complaint other Republicans have with this guy is that they feel that he's saying that he's giving people kind of a false sense of confidence. Now, admittedly, they did win the presidential election,

but there's a sense that people are saying, well, Scott Pressler will deal with it. Then when he arrives, they lose. Just to give you a little more backstory, he's so well regarded in the party that when Lara Trump took over as RNC chair, people were saying, oh, make him your deputy or whatever, And she said, oh, yeah, we're going to hire him. But then his backstory emerged. And these are the colorful characters we deal with in

this field that he had had sex as a Republican activist. He had sex with someone in a Republican and RNC office, you know, nine years ago at this point, and then posted the pictures on Craigslist. And so obviously that kind of complicates it when you try to go back and work for the R.N.C. again. I just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. He was working at the R.N.C. at the time, or he was just using the office. He was a local Virginia GOP activist.

And so it was like a shared office for like a bunch of Republican organizations. Okay, and then he had sex in it, and he put the photos on Craigslist, that's right? Yes, that's correct. Why would he put the photos on Craigslist? You know, these are mysterious, often the motivations are unclear.

Brandon Strachka, folks even outside of MAGA world may remember him from, he did this thing at CPAC where he put on an orange jumpsuit. He was kind of like the imprisoned MAGA after January 6th. And then Marjorie Taylor Greene came to his prison cell and they had a very sort of emotional encounter that struck people as very odd. She was kneeling and just trying to save this martyr.

SIDDHARTHA I do remember that. He had a little set at CPAC where he was in the prison cell. That's right. Oh, yeah. Now it's all coming back to me. A bunch of weirdos. I'm glad that you brought this to our attention. And I like the description of them as the GOP hype house. Like you just have this group of insane activist influencer types all trying to get each other riled up by doing the dumbest things imaginable and not actually really getting anything done. Well, and speaking of the dumbest things imaginable,

the one other thing to mention here is on Brandon Strachka's kind of list of grievances, and this comes up with a couple other people who talk about Scott Pressler as well. They basically accused him of, I don't know if you would call it code switching or what, but changing his accent in bizarre ways. And so this is a guy who grew up generally in the South. But Brandon

Strachan makes a big deal about there's this point where he's Scott Pressler and I mean, I agree. It's a weird accent sort of adopts this and we can play the video here. But he adopts this like Midwestern. It's like a very exaggerated Fargo accent. And you know, I do think that's a bit mysterious. That is that is a little bit mysterious. You don't want to that's you don't want to come off as a phony. That's not you don't want to you don't want to be a phony to people. Yeah, I mean, that's obviously the authenticity is very key in this kind of influencer industry.

If you're if you're not authentic as a gay votegetter with shoulder length, chest length, ab length hair. What can you be in this world? You just can't do that. I just want to hit one last thing because this is kind of mentioned. It's kind of tossed off at the top of your piece, but there's an interesting little wrinkle in the Palantir story. What is going on with Alex Jones kind of shrugging his shoulders at the massive surveillance infrastructure that Peter Thiel's Palantir has built? Yeah, so this is jumping off of a New York Times story recently that said the Trump administration has hired Peter Thiel's massive defense contractor company in Palantir to build a huge surveillance

database of Americans in a way that's never been done before. And you might say, wow, this is the kind of thing that Alex Jones of Infowars would be absolutely freaked out about. This is the guy who thinks Big Brother's coming through the door at any moment. But instead, he gets on his show on Monday and says, everyone's asking me about Palantir. Palantir this, Palantir that. But I wanna say, essentially stop bugging me about Palantir. Palantir, they're so small compared to the other tech companies.

And you know what, what does it matter? And this is what he says, all the AIs are woke. So, you know, I guess, you know, when it is a Trump aligned surveillance state, Alex Jones is gonna take a pass on complaining about it. It is, that is fascinating to me because I mean look, Alex Jones is based in Austin. There's a big tech boom in Austin right now. Like that is all kind of taking place in his backyard.

You would think he would be interested in it. Is there any suggestion that Alex Jones is on the take from Peter Thiel? Is this, is there some, are there rumors that there's something going on there? Because this all seems very suspicious to me. If I'm connecting dots, if I'm connecting the dots as Alex Jones would want me to do, I see some pretty big connections here possibly. You know, that's an interesting question. I mean, I don't think we have any evidence of that, but certainly, you know, if you think of another tech billionaire Elon Musk He tried to intervene in the info worth bankruptcy settlement

Or case and so, you know, it does make you wonder I mean there appears to be a lot of money still kind of like being funneled into Alex Jones world despite these mammoth Sonny Sandy Hook judgments. So it does make you curious. It does make me curious. I'm gonna keep an eye on this. We got some dots. We're gonna connect them here. We're gonna figure it all out. With the help of False Flag and Will Sommer at The Bullwork. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Will. Thanks for having me. And of course, make sure to hit that subscribe button like this share it with your friends go sign up for false flag at the Bullwork comm and everything else there

It's a you do not want to miss this email in your inbox several times a week It is it really is like the highlight of my mind Don't tell don't tell Tim and and JVL and everybody else that I said this will but it is kind of it's become the highlight Of my week at the bulwark