Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Okay, we have Mr. Fruity, Miss Onion, and Miss Former Fox News.
This is starting off great.
Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity. In February 2025, I made an episode of this podcast called The Incoherent Sexual Politics of the Right, which centered largely around a then 26-year-old conservative influencer named Ashley St. Clair.
Ashley had spent years building an online audience of over 1 million conservatives who followed her for her hot takes on transgender people, building the wall, single mothers, the erosion of the traditional family, and all manner of right-wing slop. Sorry, Ashley. I gotta keep it real.
It's honest.
In 2021, Ashley wrote a transphobic children's book called Elephants Are Not Birds. You can kind of guess what that's about. Her conservative media career was ascendant. Last February, though, Ashley's life had just taken a wild turn. She'd announced to the world that she had just had a baby and that the father was Elon Musk.
At the time, Elon had essentially ghosted her, and Ashley took to Twitter to plead, Elon, we've been trying to communicate for the past several days, and you have not responded. When are you going to reply to us? My guest on that episode, Moira Donegan, said that Ashley made what was called a patriarchal bargain.
She offered her career and her body to a movement that promised her a secure place within its ranks. But then it didn't.
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Chapter 2: How did Ashley St. Clair's conservative influencer career begin?
As Moira said, we can sort of assume that somebody in Ashley St. Claire's position thought that being with Elon Musk and by extension having a child with Elon Musk, you know, which we know that he very much wants, would grant her a degree of security and status. You know, she thought that she was making a deal. Right.
And what we see with Elon Musk is that he immediately did not hold up his end of the bargain. Right. Like she sold her soul and didn't get paid for it.
In the years since then, things have taken turns that I personally did not expect. Ashley went completely offline to raise her child and avoid harassment from Elon's legion of fanboys, amidst a custody battle that she is still fighting. At the request of her harassers, Grok, Elon's generative AI toy, posted fake images of Ashley undressed in front of her children's school backpack.
She's in court trying to get such images banned. And Ashley's also pivoted heavily in her politics, notably trying to make amends with the trans community, which we'll talk about at length today. She wrote on Twitter last week. Wait, actually, Ashley, do you want to read this?
I feel immense guilt for my role and even more guilt that the things I have said in the past may have caused my son's sister more pain. I don't really know how to make amends for many of these things, but I've been trying incredibly hard privately to learn and advocate for those within the trans community that I've hurt.
I also haven't said much on this because I've gone back and forth over whether or not my voice would be helpful on the issue, since it will be framed as disingenuous or just turning because I'm scorned. Even this reply will become right-wing hysteria, but yeah, I am sorry. Let me know how I can help.
Today, we'll interrogate all of this together. I could not have imagined saying this one year ago, but welcome to the show, Ashley St. Clair.
Hi, thank you for having me too.
And to help us do this today, I'm also so excited to be joined by the one and only June, who you might know as Juniper or Onion Person or at Can't Ever Die or Pudding Person or any of the online names she's used to avoid Elon's continuous attempt to ban her from his website. On her Wikipedia page, she is labeled as being known for... Twitter shitposting, which is absolutely awesome.
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Chapter 3: What was Ashley's reaction to becoming a single mother with Elon Musk's child?
So there's been this narrative that I'm doing it to grift or whatever, but everyone hates me after that response. I will let you know. So it's not been advantageous.
The right hates you because you're not transphobic anymore, and a lot of people on the left don't believe you. Understandably. Which, totally fair, yeah.
Yeah, and I was well aware that this would not be advantageous to me whatsoever. But I also think becoming a mother, I've just... I've really wanted to take public accountability for anything that I feel I've done that's unempathetic or wrong or what role I played in it. And there's certainly a lot more eyeballs on me, whether I like it or not.
And I feel like an immense obligation to use that responsibly and show some humility. So that's why I'm here.
I think this episode is important to make because ultimately I want to believe that people can change. If I didn't believe that, then what's the point of any of this? And I want to give people space to reflect and grow and maybe see themselves in you. And at the same time, many of the listeners of the show are queer.
And the turn that this country has taken on queer issues over the last few years is not a thought exercise for us, especially those of us who live in red states, especially those of us who are kids who don't have like legal autonomy. It's a lived experience with consequences. And those listeners are going to have varied reactions to what you say. And I hope that you understand that.
And I think that you do.
And that's totally understandable, and I don't blame anyone. I'm not going to get upset if people have some vitriolic reaction towards what I'm saying right now. That's understandable, and I get it.
Matt, you and I, if I had to guess, this is the first time we're talking, but I think you and I are both optimists in a sense that we assume that if people see the harm that they cause people, which let's be real, a lot of conservatives, including you in the past, have caused a lot of damage to people, that there is like... that room to reflect.
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Chapter 4: How did Ashley's online presence change after her relationship with Elon Musk?
I mean, it strikes me because, like, so many young people who are isolated for any number of reasons resort to the Internet.
Yeah.
To find community. Like, I... I had more than 200 people in the town that I grew up in in New Jersey, but because I was gay and because I knew that I was gay so young, like, and I don't know if this is relatable to you, June, but, like, I took to, like, gay parts of the internet really early.
Like, I was on Tumblr, and I was also in, like, provocative, you know, like, where did Tumblr take you to, like, eating disorder and self-harm blogs? And that was really destructive and unhealthy in its own way, but, like, I wasn't on, like, you know, doing Nazi shit.
I would say I wasn't doing Nazi shit, but... Just because, you know, I am Jewish. But it was definitely a fringe part of the internet that I found myself in, unfortunately.
This is something that I am very curious in. Just how, especially these days, during COVID, but especially post-COVID, a lot of people sort of rely on
on the internet these days even more so than in the past do you think it was in part like a loneliness that drove you to these more provocative aspects because it got you attention because it got people to notice you oh definitely definitely especially when you're in that like adolescent phase and that's kind of all you want is some sort of sense of identity or attention and belonging and you know there's times where i convinced myself that some of these ideologies were you know
convictions of mine, but I think deeply there was a deep insecurity and vulnerability in me that I had to work through for many years. But absolutely, you want some sort of belonging or identity and you want to be liked. Every young teenage adolescent wants to be liked.
When did your sort of online provocateur type stuff start to align specifically with like conservative politics and like the Republican Party?
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Chapter 5: What does Ashley say about her past views on the LGBTQ+ community?
more provocative, which was right-wing adjacent and then ended up getting absorbed by that right-wing movement in 2016. But it wasn't overtly political until about 2016.
In college, you start posting a lot of conservative content online. I went back and looked at your content, Ashley. Like many right-wing influencers, a lot of it centered around posting videos of queer people or activists at protests, like protesting things like ICE. or people wearing masks in 2020 and kind of making fun of them.
You use the terms crybaby liberals, triggered liberals, and deranged liberals like hundreds of times.
Hundreds? I don't think it's funny. I really, like, I know that it's caused harm, but also it's like I'm laughing at my own psychosis that that is the reality that I posted it hundreds of times. But as you can imagine, that also wasn't very original language.
So this is actually what I wrote in my notes here, that there are so many people who post that sort of content online. It's very cruel and it's also incredible for engagement. Did you feel passionately that these people you were posting about and were making fun of, that they deserved the things that you and your followers were saying to them? Or did you just enjoy the engagement and attention?
Take me into the mind of 19-year-old Ashley.
Most of the time when you post a video of some random person at a protest, you're completely disconnected from the personal affect on that individual. I don't know what the affect was on any of the individuals I posted, and that I feel immense guilt over. You're completely disconnected.
It's just this content machine where you're pointing out things that at the time seem absurd and you're very swept up in this machine that makes things appear more radical than they are. And so I think that's what it was. I was also very, when you're being fed that content, that's your reality. And then when you see that content, you're like, oh my God, it's true. Everything they said is true.
You know, this is the way the world is. It's so crazy and everyone's losing their minds and we have to stop the radical left. And it's very much this pathology that kind of distorts your own perception of reality, I would say.
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Chapter 6: How has Ashley attempted to make amends with the trans community?
She's apologizing to me for my organization purposes.
I'm jumping ahead. But I'll just, because I feel like it's on topic, so I'll bring it up now. you're, you're sort of saying that it did feel like sort of like world ending, you know, like ever, like all of these things, it's like, Oh, corrupting the children in this like right-wing movement.
Do people actually genuinely care about like trans people or gender issues or even the, the one that in particular, I, I cannot understand are people on the right, like, especially in these radicalized spaces that,
Chapter 7: What challenges did Ashley face after publicly announcing her child?
do they really care about the word cisgender? Does that actually bother them?
Yes. They believe it's a slur, and I've repeated that at times. To me, it was also realizing that there was this hyper-fixation on the trans community, and they're always using it under the guise of, we care about women and children, and at no other point in any of their other platforms do they ever care about women and children. In fact, they're incredibly oppressive to women and children. So...
When you do realize that and you are a woman who has children, you're like, oh, wow, you guys, this is incredibly performative. And you're scapegoating one of the smallest minorities in the entire country to make something a national issue that is not an issue at all.
Mm hmm.
Ashley, like I said, I was going through some of your tweets and I have to point out, not entirely on a lighter note, but like I said, there were so many deranged liberal tweets. There's this one from July 29th, 2019. It's a selfie of you. Sorry, I know you're cringing if someone's not watching the video version of this podcast, but it is kind of funny. It's a plain selfie.
You're wearing a MAGA hat. You're beat. You're beat with real Republican makeup. You are in it, sister.
Can you tell I've changed my ways even when my makeup is better, okay?
Your makeup is better. Your makeup is better. You're sitting on this plane wearing the MAGA hat and you caption the selfie, wore my MAGA hat on the plane and made it out alive. A true accomplishment in the world of deranged liberals.
I wanted to be oppressed so bad.
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Chapter 8: How does Ashley view the influence of right-wing media on her career?
You're like, yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
That's your Vietnam hat moment.
Yeah, you have these men coming up to you who are wearing veteran hats, and they're like, you're doing great work for this country. And I'm like, thank you, sir. And so it really feeds the delusion. My stomach feels ill after that.
Okay, well, I'm not reading any tweets for a while, so you can breathe easy. As you can see, if you are watching the video version of this podcast, Kitty has taken over the hosting chair today and what she wants goes. So we will be doing the ad read from the floor. I wanted to give a shout out to this show's longest running sponsor, Blueland, for sponsoring this episode of the show.
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