Ashley & I

1,481 words ^[1]

Ashley St. Clair is a difficult subject for me to discuss objectively. Yes, she’s gold digging Jewish e-girl who just got knocked up by Elon Musk but, in a way, I have to admit that if I am “on the map,” Ashley St. Clair played a big part in putting me there.

In 2019, I wrote an article about the Ashley St. Clair/sexlaptop scandal entitled “Coal Burning Point USA: The Fast Life and Short Career of Ashley St. ^[2]” Clair and it became one of the Top 10 most read articles in the history of Counter-Currents, and Counter-Currents has published thousands of articles.

The sexlaptop scandal went as follows: Ashley St. Clair was a college age e-girl who seemingly came out of nowhere and was being heavily promoted by TPUSA. At the time, she was feuding with Nick Fuentes and was pushing neo-con and anti-identitarian talking points, most famously that people should stop caring about illegal immigration or building a wall as such things are “identity politics”.

However, as Ashley St. Clair’s reputation grew, people from her past began to recognize her from her previous internet persona @sexlaptop. Under her “sexlaptop” alias, she engaged in whorish behavior and posted sexually graphic tweets. There were also allegations that she was selling nudes of herself while underaged. The scandal called into question many things: Ashley’s sincerity and conservative credentials, TPUSA’s vetting process and the absurdity that good-optics-era Nick Fuentes was not allowed to so much as even step a foot inside TPUSA event but complete degenerates were allowed to speak on the stage. ^[3]

Fun fact: The title of my old article was an homage to Bob Woodward’s book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi which was quite scandalous in its day for blowing the lid on the rampant drug use at Saturday Night Live. In response to the book, Saturday Night Live started requiring cast members to pledge not to take drugs. I thought this article was a similar blowing the lid on Con Inc and perhaps conservative e-girls in general.

I had no idea my article would become as big as it did. For one, it was kind of old news by the time it came out. Everyone had been talking about the scandal all week. I thought everyone already knew about it. Secondly, Counter-Currents is a fairly niche outlet and the audience was a fraction of the size it is now. Going viral for Counter-Currents usually meant everyone in the white nationalist scene read it or maybe a thread about it on 4chan, but the day my article dropped, it instantly went viral across “the sector.” White nationalists read it. Normie conservatives read it. It caught on the with the Kiwi Farms crowd. I’m sure a lot of lefties read it for oppo research. The article contained the perfect mix of sex, politics, and drama involving a girl who is not at all painful to look at, it had something for everyone and went absolutely viral. Then it got re-published at Unz. As it turned out, everyone had not heard about the sexlaptop scandal. Other Dissident Right outlets followed up with their own articles on the fiasco.

Now, I did have one moral qualm about writing that article, and it was about making fun of someone for things they did when they were a dumb kid and being quite mean about it. How would you like to be held accountable for every stupid thing you said when you were 15? That did cross my mind but my justification at the time is that TPUSA was the de facto youth wing of the Republican Party. Essentially, Ashley was being used as a deradicalizing agent by the establishment. I would not write such an article about a random conservative YouTuber, but if she is being promoted by the establishment, then she’s fair game. ^[4]

As it turned out, a few short months after the sexlaptop scandal, Charlie Kirk would unceremoniously dismiss St. Clair for appearing in a photo with Nick Fuentes and Charlottesville veteran Baked Alaska. The firing of Ashley St. Clair highlighted the draconian levels TPUSA was willing to go to gatekeep pro-whites: you can not so much as even appear in the same photograph as one if you want to be part of TPUSA. It is a strange irony that Ashley St. Clair, an e-girl of all people, become one of the main casus belli behind what become known as “the groyper wars” where pro-whites attended TPUSA events and asked Charlie Kirk uncomfortable questions during the Q&A session, including questions surrounding St. Clair’s firing which Kirk refused to answer.

By appearing in a photo with Nick Fuentes, Ashley St. Clair symbolically made peace with the identitarians and at this point, she began a sort of redemption arc. But while Ashley St. Clair’s association with TPUSA had ended, my article lived on. For years after its publication, I would see people posting my article in the replies of Ashley St. Clair’s tweets. Moreover, many of the YouTubers who had previous done videos about sexlaptop got banned, so my article ended up being the go-to source about the sexlaptop scandal. Counter-Currents used to publish the Top 20 most read articles of the month and for a few years, whenever Ashley St. Clair was in the news, my article would jump back in the CC Top 20 from all the people spamming it in replies and posting it on the message boards.

On one hand, there are a lot of people who know who I am because of that one article I wrote about Ashley St. Clair’s unladylike behavior at age 15. I’ve encountered people who have told me that my Ashley St. Clair article is how they discovered me, and they’ve read everything I’ve done since. On the other hand, my article was originally intended as a weapon against the establishment and yet people continued using my article as a weapon against her personally years after she had been fired from her gatekeeping role at TPUSA. I’m not a cruel person. If I had I known that my article would haunt her for the rest of her life, as a matter of human compassion, I probably wouldn’t have written it. I thought that article would be read by 10,000 people and then forgotten about.

So when I hear that Ashley St. Clair just had Elon Musk’s child, what are my thoughts? Well, kid, you’ve come a long way from the University of Colorado. I can’t begrudge Ashley St. Clair. She kind of gave me my big break and so in a way, I’m happy to see her get her big break. You don’t have to agree with me. My reasons are entirely personal and sentimental.

But on a deeper level, what else can you say about the news that Ashley St. Clair is the mother of Elon Musk’s child? Well, you can say that the distance between us and power is shrinking. It’s crazy to think that I personally know two or three people who are on speaking terms with the richest man in the world. There are people who are a lot more successful in life than me who cannot say that.

On a broader scope, what we are seeing is the internetification of politics. Elon Musk’s last baby mama was the pop singer Grimes but this time, Elon selected an e-celeb to bear his children. Perhaps e-celebs are the rock stars of our age. For Gen X, your favorite band was your entire world when you were growing up. With few exceptions like Taylor Swift, people don’t have the same deep connection to artists like they used to. Rather, everyone has their favorite e-celeb that they follow religiously. In a way, the parasocial attachment is deeper because a music artist can’t give you something new every day like an e-celeb can.

The downside of the internetification of politics is that you are going to see Internet-style drama enter mainstream politics. Ashley St. Clair made her name on the Internet and Musk is a child of the Internet as well, albeit a tourist. Put the two together and lo and behold, some Kiwi Farms shit happens. The influence of right-wing Internet culture on the mainstream discourse is becoming impossible not to notice. It’s great to see but as the influence of the Internet grows on the GOP and as people who are products of the Internet take power, Internet shit is going to happen.

I personally feel a sense of relief over the matter. I once wrote a pretty mean article about Ashley St. Clair that I’ve had some tinges of regret about but knowing that the story ends with her having the child of the world’s richest man, it takes some of the pressure off. If I had the kind of money that Ashley has coming her way, you could say whatever you wanted about me.