The Paid Shill Smear Is the Last Refuge of the Losing Candidate
Chip Roy, Cornyn, Thune: Three Politicians, One Pathetic Excuse
There is a particular tell a politician displays when he has lost an argument and refuses to admit it. He stops engaging the argument. He starts auditing the people making it. The argument, in his telling, ceases to be a real argument at all. It becomes a paid operation, a manufactured pressure campaign, an artificial cloud of voices on social media whose sincerity can be doubted simply by suggesting that someone, somewhere, is writing checks. The politician does not name the payer. He does not name the payee. He does not name the amount. He does not produce a Federal Election Commission filing. He just gestures vaguely at the ecosystem and trusts that the gesture will do the work that the argument cannot.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune supplied a textbook specimen of this move on March 9, 2026, when NBC News reporter Brennan Leach asked him about mounting pressure to advance the SAVE America Act. Thune’s answer, transcribed faithfully, was this: “A lot of that is, it’s in that kind of, you know, paid influencer ecosystem.” Read that sentence twice. Read the verbal stumbles. Read the conditional drift of the syntax. This is not a leader who has investigated a paid operation and surfaced its receipts. This is a leader reaching for a phrase he has heard others use, hoping it will float long enough to get him out of an interview.
The phrase did not float. It sank on contact with the actual polling. The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, conducted February 25 and 26, 2026, found that 71% of registered voters support the SAVE America Act, including 91% of Republicans, 69% of independents, and 50% of Democrats. The proof of citizenship requirement at the heart of the bill drew 75% support. Voter ID drew 81%. Removing non-citizens from voter rolls drew 80%. A Pew Research Center poll from August 2025 found 83% of US adults support photo ID at the polls, including 71% of Democrats and 76% of black voters. Gallup measured photo ID at 84%. To accept Thune’s framing, one must believe that a paid influencer ecosystem is manufacturing the very same opinion that already commands two thirds to four fifths of every demographic group in the country, including half of the Democratic Party that Thune ostensibly thinks is being deceived by mercenary conservatives on 𝕏. The proposition is funny on its face. A paid influencer ecosystem that successfully persuaded 50% of Democrats to agree with the Republican voter integrity position would not be a scandal. It would be the most cost-effective political operation in American history, and Thune would be wise to find it and fund it.
The CNN data analyst Harry Enten, working for a network that has spent a decade describing voter ID as racially suspect, surrendered the point on air earlier this year. “The bottom line is this,” Enten said, “Voter ID is NOT controversial in this country. A photo ID to vote is NOT controversial in this country.” Charles Stewart, who runs the MIT Election Lab and is nobody’s idea of a partisan, added that voter support for photo ID is “kind of a no-brainer for a large swath of the American public, including most Democrats.” When even CNN’s numbers guy and MIT’s election lab concede the point, the Senate Majority Leader cannot credibly attribute it to bots.
Senator Mike Lee said the rest of it cleanly on the Senate floor. “Over the last few months, tens of millions of Americans have jumped on the cause of supporting the SAVE America Act, and using the talking filibuster to advance it. I regret that some in Washington tonight are dismissing all those who feel this way, and who have weighed in, as somehow paid influencers or the product of paid influencers.” Lee’s point is the moral one. The Thune smear is not principally an insult to the commentators. It is an insult to the citizens, tens of millions of them, who are told their views are not their own, that someone bought them, that they are too credulous to know they have been played. That is what the political class has always said about Americans who refuse to defer to it. The 2026 phrasing differs from the 2016 phrasing only in vocabulary. The contempt is identical.
John Cornyn produced an even cleaner specimen on March 12, 2026, in the now-televised exchange with LindellTV reporter Alison Steinberg. Confronted with substantive questions about amnesty and red flag laws, Cornyn did not answer them. He interrupted. “Are you being paid by the Paxton campaign? I think you’re a paid influencer. Because none of that’s true, and you know it.” The accusation arrived in lieu of the answers. The accusation was the answer. And the accusation, in true Cornyn fashion, was directed at a reporter employed by the network whose name was printed on her microphone. The senator did not bother to check.
The Cornyn case rewards a closer look, because Cornyn has been in the United States Senate for 24 years and Texans know what he has done with the time. They expressed their opinion at the ballot box. A majority of Texas Republicans voted against him in the March primary. Cornyn finished first only because the opposition was split, and he was forced into a runoff by his own base, which has had nearly a quarter century to evaluate his performance and concluded, in numerical majority, that it would prefer almost anyone else. When a senator cannot win his own primary outright after 24 years in office, the most parsimonious explanation is not that paid influencers fooled the voters. The most parsimonious explanation is that the voters have read the record. The amnesty votes are on the record. The gun control deal is on the record. The leadership maneuvering is on the record. Texans have receipts. Cornyn, finding himself behind in the room, did the only thing left to do, which was to accuse the room of being bought.
Congressman Chip Roy, running in the Texas attorney general primary against Mayes Middleton, supplied the freshest entry in the genre this week. Responding to my post reporting that the White House has been briefed that Roy, if elected, intends to weaponize the attorney general’s office against Ken Paxton by hiring as many as seven of the former Paxton employees who falsely reported him to the FBI and engineered his impeachment, Roy wrote on 𝕏: “The only folks lying more than Mayes Middleton are the pay-for-play online fraudsters panicked they are losing. This is laughably false, like every other lie you’ve told, which would be obvious if Mayes had the nerve to debate rather than hide while I do my job.” The phrase to circle is “pay-for-play online fraudsters.” Roy named no payer, no payee, no amount, no date, no FEC entry. He did not deny the substance of the reporting, which is that he intends to staff the attorney general’s office with the very employees whose perjurious complaints triggered the impeachment Paxton ultimately survived. He audited the messenger. He called the messenger a fraudster. He used the word “lying” twice in two sentences and provided not a single corrected fact. That is what a candidate does when his hiring plan is the story and he cannot defend the hiring plan. He attacks the reporter. The pattern, Thune to Cornyn to Roy, is identical in form. Only the vocabulary varies.
I have a personal interest in this column, and the reader should know it. I am routinely accused of being paid by Ken Paxton. I have said publicly, and will repeat here, that I would gladly accept financial support from his campaign if it were offered, and that if I took it, I would disclose it precisely as I disclose every other sponsorship deal I have. I would not, however, agree to change a single opinion or position in exchange for the money. The sponsorship, if it ever existed, would underwrite the work I already do, not redirect it. That is the offer on the table. Anyone with a checkbook is welcome to it.
Ken Paxton has never offered to pay me. He has never paid me. No one has ever paid me on his behalf. He does not need to. I support him for free, because I have read his record on election integrity, sanctuary cities, lawfare against the Biden administration, and the defense of Texas sovereignty, and I find it persuasive on the merits. My business model is straightforward and disclosed. I produce graphic headline posts on 𝕏 and longform op-eds on 𝕏, Substack, and my email newsletter. I generate revenue through 𝕏’s creator revenue share, Google AdSense, sponsorship deals with companies like Polymarket, and a growing base of paid subscribers on both 𝕏 and Substack. The numbers are not hard to find. Substack reported $45 million in annualized revenue in 2025 and roughly $450 million in writer gross revenue, with more than 50 creators earning over $1 million per year on the platform. The independent journalism economy is real, and it is funded by readers.
This is where the economics of the smear collapse. The Influenceable LLC operation that the Texas Tribune used as the predicate for years of insinuation paid Gen Z influencers $50 per post. The Priorities USA program on the Democratic side paid roughly $6.67 per post on average across 150 creators. The standard commercial rate for a mid-tier 𝕏 sponsorship is $500 to $5,000 per post according to Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 rate report, with macro tiers running $5,000 to $10,000 and mega tiers above $10,000. A single commentator with 250,000 to 500,000 followers generating millions of weekly impressions can clear $10,000 to $50,000 monthly through disclosed commercial sponsorships alone. No rational independent journalist trades a monthly $20,000 disclosed Polymarket or Incogni read for a $50 covert political payment. The math forecloses the smear before any of the political facts come into view, and any reporter who spent ten minutes with a rate card would see it.
Here is the part that is, frankly, funny. Many of the loudest accusers of “paid shills” are themselves on someone’s payroll. I know one independent journalist who has made a cottage industry of accusing other commentators of being secretly compensated, and who himself accepts money from political consultants and at least one billionaire to cover his travel and expenses. At the very moment he was publicly accusing me of being paid to support Paxton, he was guilty of precisely what he claimed I was doing, with the added embarrassment that his arrangement was real and mine was imaginary. The ninth commandment has a phrase for this. So does the Texas Ethics Commission, which adopted a 7-0 rule change in 2024 requiring disclosure of paid political posts above $100, a rule the loudest accusers of phantom paid shills are now obliged to obey themselves. One waits, in vain, for the disclosures.
The structural picture is worse than the individual cases. The Brennan Center, citing OpenSecrets, found that online political spending had exceeded $619 million on Google and Meta alone by late August 2024, with roughly $1.9 billion in dark money across the 2024 cycle. The actual paid influencer operations are documented, disclosed, and large. Priorities USA paid $1 million across 150 creators in 2024. The DNC paid Palette $200,000 in 2022. The Harris campaign and DNC paid Village Marketing nearly $4 million since March 2023. WIRED reported in 2025 on Chorus, a Sixteen Thirty Fund-linked Democratic program offering creators up to $8,000 per month to push party messaging while keeping the funding arrangement secret. On the Republican side, the NRCC paid Creator Grid nearly $500,000, and the NRSC paid Urban Legend more than $500,000 through a partner firm. Every one of these operations is documented. Every one of them is in the public record. None of them, anywhere, names me. None of them names the commentators Thune dismissed. None of them names the reporter Cornyn smeared on camera. None of them names the journalists Roy is now calling fraudsters.
This is the test that Oliver Meredith Cox proposed for accusations of this kind. “If one accuses a politician of being an oil shill, one should state also which oil companies or lobbyists are involved, thereby making it possible to see if that person had been paid.” It is a fair standard. It is the standard the accusers cannot meet. They name no payer, no payee, no amount, no date, no FEC entry. The smear works only in a system where the accuser cannot be made to prove the charge and the accused cannot be made whole by the absence of evidence.
Edmund Burke, in his 1791 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, wrote that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.” The contemporary smear inverts the standard. It tells citizens that the counsels they have chosen to listen to are by definition the flattery of knaves, simply because those counsels disagree with the establishment. It tells the Texas Republican primary voter who rejected Cornyn that he was confused by mercenaries. It tells the 71% of voters who back the SAVE Act that they are the dupes of an ecosystem. It tells the 50% of Democrats who agree with proof of citizenship that they have been deceived by paid influencers they have never heard of, working for funders nobody can name, for amounts nobody can produce. It tells the Texas Republican voter weighing the attorney general runoff that a report about Chip Roy’s hiring plans is a fraud, because the alternative, that the report is accurate, is one Roy cannot afford to engage on the merits.
The paid shill smear is what a candidate says when he has run out of arguments and run out of voters and run out of time. Thune cannot answer why two thirds of America agrees with the bill he is slow-walking. Cornyn cannot answer why a majority of his own primary voters chose someone else after 24 years. Roy cannot answer why his rumored staffing plan for the attorney general’s office reads like a personal vendetta against the man Texas Republicans are about to send to the US Senate. So they audit the citizens. They audit the reporters. They audit the commentators. They audit everyone except themselves. The audit is a tell. The audit is a confession. The audit is what losing sounds like when the loser still has a microphone.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly.
Stop being so ethical and logical. That must mean you’re being paid by someone. The absence of evidence is most concerning.
Excellent summary of why these establishment RINOs need replaced. I’m definitely voting again for Paxton and also voting for Middleton. Thune is a worthless majority leader and his continuing to not allow recess appointments is infuriating. He has done as little as possible to get appointees voted on and uses every excuse to not push the talking filibuster and get the SAVE Act on the floor.