Bulwark Takes - The Right Wing Is Tearing Itself Apart Over... Soda?

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Will Sommer and Sonny Bunch talk the drama with MAGA influencers accused of being paid off by Big Soda to counter MAHA's push for soda and candy to no longer be covered by SNAP and EBT.

Hey, this is Will Summer. Welcome to The Bulwark. We've got a great story to discuss today with Sonny Bunch. All right, Sonny, so the American right, the right-wing influencers, they've been torn apart by a war over soda, maybe payola, secret pay-to-play allegations. Have you been following this? I have been following this. It's an amazing story. I don't know. Do you want to run people through exactly the sequence of events here? Because I think we've got to lay some groundwork so people understand just how corrupt this is. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, this has been brewing for a little bit. Various states, this kind of centers on the MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement championed by RFK. There's been a push in states like Arizona and Idaho to ban people from who are on food stamps or EBT from using that money to buy soda and candy and these other things perceived as unhealthy.

And so this has been kind of an unusual tack for the right to take, given their historical opposition to things like big soda bans in New York. But nevertheless, this is sort of where the momentum is. And then it's an interesting debate, right? There is an interesting in intra conservative debate over, you know, the freedom, freedom of consumer freedom of freedom of consumption versus like, okay, well, these, these people are on food stamps anyway. So we want to make sure that the money's being spent, right? Like, I think there's, at the very least, an interesting debate to be had. And then you throw in the RFK Jr. of it all with the Make America Healthy Again stuff. And it's like, well, okay, now the right has their own Michelle Obama, who I'm pretty sure

that they were mad about for like eight years, you know, whatever, no big deal. Yeah, exactly. And so last week, curiously, all the energy, at least online, was behind this idea of, you know, banning poor people essentially from using EBT to buy soda. And then suddenly a couple influencers, someone like Malaysian, you know, sort of weirdly American power player Ian Miles Chong, someone like Chad Prather, who's also a sort of a MAGA comedian. These people start saying, wait, it's not very freedom loving to ban people from buying soda on food stamps. And so then people started wondering what's going on here. And I say a lot of the language was very similar. A lot of it kind of kind of echoed. And

then I the key talking point was the key talking point was even Donald Trump loves a Diet Coke now and again. And they'd have kind of like a picture of Trump drinking a Diet Coke. Yeah, no, the the all right. So this is the second the second level of this, right, is that they were being sent talking points. They were distributing the talking points. One of the talking points was dear leader loves soda. And we cannot we don't want to we don't want to denigrate dear leader by suggesting that the soda is bad for people. So they should still be allowed to have their diet Cokes. And again, I think there's an interesting conservative-ish argument to be made over, well, do we want to nudge people toward getting diet soda, for instance? Maybe diet soda could be EBT friendly and not full strength soda

or whatever. I don't know. There are various debates here to be had, but you can't have those debates in good faith when people are secretly getting paid to make them. I mean, that's the real scandal here. Yeah. So what comes out, and these are so, everything is phrased very similarly. So people got suspicious. And in fact, someone like Ian Miles Chong, who had previously tweeted things like, you know, big sodas out to kill kids, you know, stuff like this. And then suddenly he's like, hey, everybody needs a Dr. Pepper every now and again. Right. And so the some sort of Maha influencer types who are on RFK's side of this, they started looking into it and they got a lot of evidence that a sort of Gen Z marketing company called Influenceable, which is sort of a very sinister name, was offering money to people with sizable followings on the right and saying, you

know, you need to tweet about how great soda is and make sure to include this picture of Donald Trump drinking a Diet Coke. Exactly. And again, interesting debate to be had. Can't have that debate in good faith when somebody's getting paid and not disclosing it. But it raises the real issue here. The broader question is like, okay, what else are these guys getting paid to pitch and to flack, right? Like Ian Miles Chong was tweeting constantly about, you know, the Russian-Ukraine conflict. Is he getting a paycheck from Russia? I don't know, but maybe. It seems like a reasonable question to ask now. And that's the, you know, I am rarely surprised by the amount of grifting that is involved in this sort of stuff. The amount of

just pay for play, money that is sloshing around right now in the kind of influencer sphere. And the fact that so many people just instantly did this without disclosing it, but also just like all at the same time, very foolishly, very, very shoddily, frankly, this was a poorly conceived campaign if they weren't going to, try and hide it a little better than this. Again, what else, what else are they arguing on bad faith about? Like what else, what other issues are, are, you know, being supported for money? How, you know, are they, like, does this go all the way up to the, you know, political campaign level? Are they getting money from, you know, Republican outfits to push for candidates, push for policies, whatever. I,

I like, I would like to know who is getting paid what and when that's all just disclosure, just disclose it. I frankly, and here's the other thing. I don't care if people get paid to flack for soda. I'll do it for free. I drink diet, Dr. Pepper every day. Love diet, Dr. Pepper. I'm a Texan now for the last five years. We have to, it's in the law. But I like, I, I, but I also, if some, if somebody at Diet Dr. Pepper was like, Hey, we're going to send you, uh, we're going to send you a lifetime supply of Diet Dr. Pepper. If you tweet about it, I would try to at least let people know, at least let them know somewhere that I have received a lifetime supply of Diet Dr. Pepper.

Absolutely. I mean, it's one of these things, you know, I think we can see it. We've seen how these influencers on the right can just whip up these, these, you know, I hate to say mobs, but turn these things that were previously apolitical issues into real things. For example, you know, we all suddenly USAID was famously this sinister organization, something no one had really talked about previously on the right as a main issue. And so, as you say, I mean, it's always interesting to me when these sort of the campaigns or the money behind this is exposed, because you see over and over, suddenly, you know, a dozen influencers are really passionate about something they've never cared about before. Another example, you know, with obviously much

higher stakes last year, when it turned out that people like Benny Johnson and Tim Pool were all part of this YouTube channel that was being secretly funded by Russia. They claimed they didn't know about it, but each of them was getting paid millions and millions of dollars. And so one wonders about the sort of distortionary effects that has on our public discourse. And I think it's especially true in the small fishbowl that is Twitter, right? It is not useful to overstate Twitter's influence or its use as a mirror for general public sentiment. Like Twitter is very small. The number of people who use it regularly is even smaller. And the people who do use it regularly are all deranged.

People like me. I'm an insane person and I should not be trusted on anything. But the, but the magnifying effect of Twitter is very, very real in the sense that a still lots of journalists on it, be still a lot of politicos on it and see the most important and powerful person in the country right now is arguably Elon Musk, the guy who owns Twitter and is as addicted to it as anyone I've ever seen before. I've never seen anybody with a case of Twitter brain like Elon Musk. And so he is out there and all of a sudden he's getting hit by messages like, you know, soda's not that bad. Soda's pretty good. Maybe we should like soda. And who knows what sort of ketamine-induced haze

he's in, how susceptible he is to these ideas. If you wanted to get a message to the government, it's not a bad way to do it. Flood the zone with moron influencers who will tweet whatever you tell them to tweet for $1,000. That's a fairly effective and relatively cheap, frankly, strategy. I would say the amount of bang for your buck you get on something like this is way more useful than buying ads in a congressional district. Because, again, the people at the top are people who spend way too much time on this social media service. Again, not excluding myself from this in any way. And I think, look, again, this is a real problem. Now, look, we get into the disclosure things.

If you put ad at the end of it, whatever. I'm sure there's an FTC angle to all this. If anybody at the FTC, if anybody at Trump's FTC is interested in chasing this down, I doubt it. But you never know. You point out something there. This is weirdly a government that really is willing to take submissions or ideas from Twitter. We see people tweeting at Elon Musk. He says, oh, looking into it. Here in DC, the US attorney, someone just tweeted, this pro-Palestine guy was rude to me on the streets of Georgetown. Someone tweets it at the U.S. attorney and he goes, okay, looking into it, you know, this has got to stop. So, I mean, as you say, these kind of like these sort of almost vaguely, barely veiled campaigns, I think, can be really successful. And we used to always joke like Twitter's not real life. And it's still not real life,

again, in the sense of, I don't think you get a good reflection of the general sentiment of the country from Twitter. But it is real life and that it is starting to, there are real life consequences to things that are happening on Twitter, um, in a, in a, in a different way than, you know, we used to get with the occasional, you know, Justine Sacco style cancellation. It's, it's a, it's a different ball game out there right now. Yeah. You know, the, the, the sort of the coded to this story is that it shows you how, how unseriously the people who were caught take this. A lot of them just deleted the tweets. One guy tweeted, well, that's a lot of egg on my face. You know, what an embarrassment. And I was like, well, you were, you know, you're ostensibly this kind of political

figure who has all these fans. And you just said, well, you know, I'll, I'll sort of lead my fans a certain direction for a thousand bucks. Sure. It's wild. I don't understand how any of these people can be trusted ever again. But then again, you know, the idea of trustworthiness in our current moment is very malleable. It's rubber. It's elastic. It stretches. Snaps back into place.

Who knows? Well, Sonny, it's been great talking with you. You know, I think this kind of roiling Civil War and the MAGA movement is going to continue.