Hegseth Builds Secret MAGA Influencer Army—on Pentagon Payroll

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is secretly building an army of veterans turned influencers.

The Department of Defense has employed a number of conservative military veterans with large social media followings in civilian government roles, The Washington Post reported Sunday. It’s not exactly clear what their official roles or assignments are, but these influencers are boosting Hegseth’s pet culture war issues and attacking the Trump administration’s critics.

Among the veterans currently included on the Pentagon’s payroll are Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel with more than 135,000 followers on X, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel and columnist with nearly 620,000 followers on X, according to people familiar with the matter. Pentagon records reviewed by the Post revealed that both influencers had government emails including a “.civ” suffix as recently as this week, revealing their civilian-employee role, and both were assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.

Neither of these government-funded influencers bothered to disclose their employment status during their ceaseless cheerleading of the Trump administration. Maness and Schlichter did not respond to the Post’s request for comment, but the former posted what appeared to be his own response to the report: “Don’t forget kids, regime media is still fake news.” Big words from an apparent state propagandist.

Thomas Anderson, an attorney who writes under the pen name “Cynical Publius” to his more than 323,000 followers, also held a “.civ” email and was assigned to Tata’s office, according to people familiar with the matter and Pentagon records. He was no longer listed as an active employee in Pentagon records this past week. (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay jointly wrote under the pen name “Publius” while publishing the Federalist Papers.)

Anderson declined to comment to the Post, but wrote in a post on X that he’d been invited to serve on a special task force studying the U.S. military’s senior service colleges after publishing an article on “Making the War Colleges Great Again” in February. He claimed his stint ended in July.

“At no time have I ever received any compensation of any kind from any government source of any kind for anything I write or have ever written on X or in any magazine or other source,” Anderson wrote. “Those who claim otherwise defame me.”

Last week, The Bulwark reported that Jennica Pounds, the Utah woman behind the prominent right-wing account DataRepublican, had been listed as a “special government employee” of the Defense Department since July. Pounds launched a public tool Friday called DSA Explorer, which she described as an “interactive map of the Democratic Socialists of America and the wider anti-imperialist solidarity network.”

The question has baffled industry experts for months now: How has the Freedom Fuel Network, a pro-Trump private chain of gas stations, been able to sell fuel at decidedly lower rates than its competitors? The answer may lie in a new lawsuit against the company.

Oil supplier Mansfield Oil Company sued a company that provided gas to Freedom Fuel, KRSM Inc., for acquiring over 1.1 million gallons of fuel worth about $4 million without paying for it, according to court documents filed in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania on August 19.

According to the lawsuit, KRSM hadn’t paid for the fuel as of August 17, despite getting the fuel from Mansfield between May 21 and July 7, and Mansfield sending updated invoices on July 17. The two companies had agreed that KRSM had to pay for fuel within 10 days of receiving it, but according to the lawsuit, Mansfield’s bank said on July 28 that KRSM had “refused” draft requests for payment.

KRSM sold “a portion” of the fuel it acquired to Freedom Fuel stations, the lawsuit states. Last month, President Trump touted the gas station chain, which has 25 stations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, for prices under the national average. Freedom Fuel stations “are doing their part to answer the President’s call to lower prices at the pump,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said last month.

Mansfield alleges in the lawsuit that KRSM sold discounted fuel to Freedom Fuel and was able to “garner such publicity” because it “never paid” for it. The White House has said the stations, which have since expanded to 29 stations, are private businesses that don’t receive any federal funding.

When the White House was praising Freedom Fuel last month for its below-market prices, it wasn’t clear how it was able to afford it or who was behind the chain. Politico found that least seven of the stations are owned by affiliates of Blue Owl, a New York–based asset manager whose stock Trump has bought and sold, and which he still has significant holdings in.

The Pentagon is scrambling to contain a leak from within the military’s top brass. Defense officials were left fuming after top military leaders spoke with The Washington Post Sunday, revealing they had advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a long-term engagement in Iran could have disastrous effects for American defense systems around the world—including at home.

The warnings appeared in the August 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book, a classified internal document outlining the availability and readiness of U.S. forces stationed around the world, as understood by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as the four-star officers overseeing global operations.

Shortly after the article’s publication, Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell falsely claimed on social media that the publication of the report was not only wrong but also illegal.

“Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force,” Parnell wrote. “And much of what they’re publishing is inaccurate.”

Fact check: While it’s against the law for government employees to leak sensitive or classified government details, the Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that the press’s ability to publicize that information is protected under the First Amendment. That was the outcome of New York Times Co. v. United States, which pitted the daily newspaper against the Nixon administration after the Times published a top-secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers.

“The Secretary sees them constantly. That’s how you run a real military. We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS and PDS,” Parnell continued in his post, using acronyms as stand-ins for “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “Pete Derangement Syndrome.”

“They hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America,” he added.

Adam D’Ortona, an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel who runs the account InfantryDort, similarly used his social media presence to attack the Post, claiming that it was “fact” that the staff of one of America’s largest newspapers is working for the “enemies of the United States.”

“Worse, this isn’t gossip,” D’Ortona continued. “Revealing where senior commanders believe forces are stretched, where they perceive risk, and which commitments they consider unsustainable gives an adversary information it can immediately exploit.”

D’Ortona works in Hegseth’s office, according to a USA Today report from 2025.

The Iran war is entering its seventh month with no end in sight. For Americans, the conflict has killed at least 18 U.S. service members and taken an enormous toll on daily life across the country, inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs. Meanwhile, it has killed more than 3,500 people in Iran and injured tens of thousands more, according to data published by Al Jazeera.

As the U.S. military campaign against Iran stretches into its seventh month, President Donald Trump has taken decisive action to keep posting stupid slop generated by artificial intelligence. Trump took to Truth Social Sunday night to post an AI-generated video of Kharg Island being “blown to smithereens” by a U.S. missile strike.  

Since the beginning of the war, the president has been musing about the possibility of taking over Kharg Island, a five-mile strip of land where Iran stores nearly all its oil prior to exporting it.

Trump’s renewed threat comes as U.S. Central Command announced a series of strikes against a different island—Larak Island, where the U.S. says it hit two Iranian rocket launchers. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced that it had retaliated by targeting American forces in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. 

By Monday morning, Trump was ready to declare victory over Iran—for the umpteenth time. “Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD!” he wrote on Truth Social. 

The strikes follow the Trump administration’s vows to end the now more than six-month-long war using a series of toothless economic sanctions. 

This isn’t the first time that Trump has responded to a serious military escalation with self-aggrandizing AI slop. The president has made it clear that he’s much more interested in trolling than he is in actually leading the country. 

A federal court has dealt a serious blow to prediction markets, ruling that Kalshi can’t block the state of Nevada from regulating its platform. 

The Ninth Circuit ​Court of Appeals in San Francisco ​ruled 3–0 against Kalshi Friday, saying that federal commodity training law doesn’t block Nevada from also regulating the platform when it comes to betting on sports events. All three judges were appointed to the federal bench by President Trump.

Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson said Kalshi’s business clearly seems to be in sports betting, “a quintessential form of gambling” that would put it out of the purview of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC. He noted that Kalshi has run ads describing itself as “the first app for legal sports betting.” 

“It is difficult, then, to conclude that Congress intended to ​upend its decades of careful regulation ​of gambling based on broad definitions ⁠of the words used in a Wall Street Reform Bill,” Nelson wrote in his ruling. “The CFTC is not a national gambling regulator. No one suggested it was until over a decade after the law was passed.”

The Trump administration has fought to keep states from regulating prediction markets, arguing that the CFTC is in charge. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, told Republican state attorneys general at a meeting earlier this year to back off any action against businesses like Kalshi and Polymarket. The lack of clarity over what laws govern prediction markets, which include betting on political and international events in addition to sports, has already proven to be a major problem. 

Nevada’s win on Friday is one of several legal actions launched by both Republican and Democratic state governments against prediction markets, with 20 states in litigation over whether prediction markets fall under sports gambling laws. In July, 44 states signed a letter calling prediction markets a “new form of casino” endangering young people. In March, Arizona became the first state to criminally charge Kalshi for allowing people to bet on elections and “operating an illegal gambling business.”  

In April, the Third ​Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled against New Jersey’s attempt to regulate prediction markets, setting up conflicting rulings and increasing the likelihood that the Supreme Court will address oversight of prediction markets in the near future.