Dominick McGee was walking into the White House in April and couldn’t believe his luck. He was a self-proclaimed “nobody” just three years ago when he started working alone from his apartment, posting right-wing content and conspiracy theories to his X account. Now he was invited into the very center of American power.
Mr. McGee, 31, was there to ask questions at a press briefing for new media — a move by President Trump to welcome more people outside traditional news organizations.
“Is there any possibility,” he asked, “for names such as Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to ever, just possibly, get investigated?”
Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, called the question “refreshing.”
Mr. McGee is one of the most prominent right-wing influencers on X, with 1.5 million followers and billions of views. He was ranked the third-most-influential user on the platform in January last year by one analytics firm, behind Elon Musk, the site’s owner, and Andrew Tate, a notorious right-wing misogynist.
Mr. McGee is a longtime Trump supporter who thrives on X because he is a master of outrage: He uses viral videos to incite furious debate, posts misleading political attacks against prominent Democrats to rile up MAGA devotees and curries favor with the online right by trading in the kinds of antisemitism that has infused some online communities. Though he was barred from the platform in 2023 and kicked from its revenue program in 2024 over some of his posts, neither punishment lasted very long and he quickly bounced back.
Most prominent online creators keep their finances a secret and their lives hidden from public view. Mr. McGee opened up his life, and his books, to The New York Times, shining a rare light on the world of right-wing influence.
“I was a nobody. I wasn’t a creator, I wasn’t no one famous, I ain’t have no clout, no followers, no nothing, no money,” he told his followers in a video while walking the White House grounds. “And look what’s able to be created in the land of the free.”
Mr. 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 Mr. McGee’s job: he starts posting around 9 a.m. and continues until 8 p.m. 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 $55,000 a year from X, amounting to less than minimum wage given his hours. He has rubbed elbows with Trump allies, though he has yet to wield any real influence in Washington or at Mar-a-Lago. His trip to the White House offered a boost of attention online, but he ultimately lost money on the flights and rushed back home to his one-bedroom apartment in Miami.
Mr. 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?”
‘The First Goal Is to Be Seen’
Mr. McGee didn’t see a lot of options growing up in North Augusta, S.C., a small city on the northern bank of the Savannah River.
“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 honorably 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.
Mr. Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign in November 2020 introduced Mr. 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. He became a registered Republican, donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign and voted for him in the last election.
The attention brought Mr. McGee scores of fans who adored his dedication and his style: Mr. 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. His followers showered him with attention that offered a glimpse of the fame and fortune he was searching for.
He started posting on X, then known as Twitter, after Mr. Musk bought the platform in 2022. He had hundreds of thousands of followers by the time Mr. Musk decided to start paying creators. (X did not respond to a request for comment.)
Critics sounded the alarm about the misinformation Mr. McGee spread. But he quickly realized 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.”
A Day in the Life
Mr. McGee’s first target on a recent Wednesday morning was Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star who was briefly imprisoned in Russia.
A video had circulated that morning, and right-wing users zeroed in on her deep voice, which has drawn abusive remarks for years.
Mr. McGee started swiping and poking on his iPhone, rapidly downloading the video, adding his watermark, exporting the video and tapping out some words in just a few minutes. Then he pressed send.
“WNBA star Brittney Griner is going viral on the internet after fans discovered what she sounds like for the first time after releasing this video,” the post read.
This was his “jump starter,” as he called it: a post sent early in the morning aimed at juicing the algorithm in his favor. He believes that if a post performs well, the algorithm will reward his subsequent posts with more reach. Since X’s algorithm is largely a black box, creators rely on these kinds of intuitions and speculations to guide their decisions.
The post also had what he called an “alley-oop” — a phrase that encourages users to post a comment. He made sure to phrase the post so he could call Ms. Griner “she,” baiting commenters to call her the wrong gender.
“I know for a fact that Brittney Griner will go viral, and it’s a great post to start the day,” he said.
His plan worked. The views ticked higher: a few thousand at first, then tens of thousands. Comments filled with harassment flooded in, as he’d expected.
It didn’t matter to Mr. McGee what they wrote, as long as they wrote something. Each time a premium user — who pays at least $8 per month for special features — interacted with his posts, he earned a little bit of money under X’s revised revenue program.
“Honestly, Brittney Griner should be proud, because of the fact that Brittney Griner can get 500 comments in an hour,” Mr. McGee said. “I could post about many people, not everyone can get even 20 comments, because they’re not famous enough for people to care. It validates her position, if anything. It validates that she’s big.”
He later wrote a post about Ms. Clinton, who had posted on X that Qatar expected something in return for donating a jet worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Mr. Trump. Mr. McGee called her post “a radical and unhinged conspiracy theory.” Commenters swarmed the post, calling her a “serial criminal” and “evil.”
Mr. McGee’s pursuit of outrage online has occasionally come to haunt him. In July 2023, just as his X account broke more than 500,000 followers, Mr. McGee posted an update about a convicted pedophile — and included a blurred image from a news article depicting child sexual abuse. (Mr. McGee said he had downloaded the image from a news website based in Indonesia.)
People were furious that he had shared the image, and his critics pounced, calling him a pedophile and demanding that his account be deleted. He was barred from X for a few days before Mr. Musk had ” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>his post deleted and his account restored.
Mainstream news sites wrote about the ordeal, but Mr. McGee complained that they had omitted his side of the story — that he was trying to “save the kids,” he wrote on X, by drawing attention to sexual abuse — tarnishing his name and subjecting him to ridicule.
“So no one in the media, no journalist thought for a second, ‘Man, this dude, does he have a family?’” he said.
He did not seem to wonder about the people he targeted in his own posts. At that moment, his video about Ms. Griner — who had canceled a speaking engagement in February after finding a disturbing note in her hotel room — had more than 200,000 views. By the next day, it had more than 11 million.
‘One of the Poor Creators’
Mr. Musk imagined that his revenue program would support creators while incentivizing 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 Mr. McGee about $157,000 since the program started in 2023, according to payment records reviewed by The Times. He made $67,000 in his first year and just $12,000 last year after he was kicked from the advertising program. After X overhauled its payment program last October, Mr. McGee complained to Mr. Musk that he still wasn’t being paid. Mr. Musk replied: “Will fix.” Mr. McGee has collected about $16,000 since.
He has also earned about $62,000 directly from his X subscribers since 2023, who pay $10 monthly for insider content. He has separately earned a little money from YouTube and TikTok, though he said it hadn’t amounted to much. His posts to Facebook and Instagram earn minimal views, and those platforms don’t pay most creators.
Unlike YouTube and TikTok, X provides no tools for creators to see how much money they earn from each post. The amount that Mr. McGee gets from X every two weeks is a complete mystery until it arrives in his bank account.
“I can’t keep depending on X because I don’t like having a system where I don’t know what I’m going to get till I get it,” he said. “And that’s insane. That’s insane for any adult to have to live their life that way.”
X’s decision to remove Mr. 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 memecoin — 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 $150,000 worth of cryptocurrency. The memecoin’s value plummeted more than 90 percent in the months that followed.
Most of the money Mr. McGee had earned is now gone, spent on rent, groceries, food for his dog (a 2-year-old AmStaff named Sirus), and the occasional splurge on jewelry or clothes.
He recently had about $7 in his checking account and some credit card debt. His savings — a cryptocurrency wallet with about $35,000 in it — were slowly disappearing as he used them to pay bills.
“Maybe $150,000 is a lot compared to my broke ass in the past,” Mr. 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.”
‘These Clips Are Going to Get Millions of Views’
Mr. 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.
“These clips are going to get millions of views,” one of Mr. McGee’s co-hosts said during a podcast taping one Thursday night, inside a livestream studio that was actually a condo living room. “That’s what we do all this for.”
The show was Mr. McGee’s latest moneymaking venture and one of the main reasons he moved to Miami this year from Nashville, where he had lived since 2022. While his new podcast and livestream will get a smattering of downloads, the real purpose, he said, was “clip farming,” or creating 30-second clips that could spark debate on social media like TikTok, driving attention to his brand.
Mr. McGee is betting big on the pivot to pop culture, what he also called “brain-dead content,” in a bid to reach more Americans.
“OK, we won the election — what’s the goal now?” he said. “To convince the normies, the regular masses.”
He intends to lure a wider set of users to his “brand” with posts about celebrities and viral videos before exposing them to his right-wing politics, a method he called a “bait and switch.” The strategy has been used successfully by other right-wing influencers, including Candace Owens, a podcaster who gained millions of followers on YouTube since last year by focusing on celebrity news with a starkly conservative bent.
Mr. 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.”
On his podcast one Thursday night, he welcomed into the studio a young creator who had gained more than 90,000 followers on Instagram by posting interviews with random people on the street. During the podcast, the guest shared a homophobic slur before describing his own white nationalist views. Mr. McGee grew frustrated and launched into a lecture about the history of Black oppression in the United States.
“I try not to take stuff personal but …,” Mr. McGee said outside the condo building after the taping ended, letting out a long sigh. “He’s young. I think, honestly, social media has radicalized him a little bit. But that’s what happens when you first get into this.”
Stuart A. Thompson writes about how false and misleading information spreads online and how it affects people around the world. He focuses on misinformation, disinformation and other misleading content.
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