Ashley St. Clair Returns to TikTok, Says Whistleblowers “From Very Consequential Positions” Have Been Coming to Her

Ashley St. Clair, the former conservative influencer who spent months posting near-daily videos about the Trump administration before abruptly going quiet, said in a new TikTok video that trauma, intimidation, litigation, and the start of law school kept her offline.

“Get ready with me while I talk about how I came on here every day for several months and told you guys the most diabolical, piping hot MAGA White House tea,” she said. “And then I disappeared suddenly for months, and then half of the internet thought I was. Where do I even begin?”

St. Clair, who described herself as “a MAGA influencer involved in MAGA politics for almost a decade,” said some of the reasons were mundane. “I know there are the boring answers to where I’ve been, such as, I’ve started law school. My children were. It was summertime. They were out of school, um, which is busy. I’m a single mom of two young kids.”

Other reasons, she said, were harder to explain. “I have shared and spoken about things that are really heavy. Uh, many of these things are traumatic,” she said, adding that her mother had advised her to slow down. “She said, Ashley, you need to treat yourself as if all of these things just happened again, because speaking about it can be re. Traumatizing. And so I have been. I’ve been taking that time.”

St. Clair, who said she is Gen Z and has “been on the internet my entire life,” said she also worried about being pulled back into old habits as her videos gained traction.

“My entire life, I have never had a healthy relationship with the internet nor the public,” she said. She said the opinions she now holds were formed away from the platform, during what she called an “almost year-long hiatus,” and that she feared “audience capture from this negative and destructive toxic feedback loop that I had been used to my entire life with social media.”

“As my content here started blowing up, I became anxious that I was going to fall back into that feedback loop,” she said. “There were so many inputs about what people wanted me to be, who I was perceived to be by them. There were all of these assumptions. And I don’t ever want to fall back into the same toxic behaviors that clouded my judgment for almost 10 years.”

She said her views “on capitalism, on social programs, on all of these things didn’t come from me scrolling endlessly on TikTok or Twitter. It came from me taking a break and evaluating myself, doing introspection, and reading.” She added that she does not think “social media is ever going to be a spawn point for ethics or morality.”

St. Clair also said law school has changed what she can say publicly. “Now that I started law school, I took an oath of professionalism, uh, so gotta be a little bit more careful,” she said. She said advocacy, not influence, is her goal. “I don’t think the best way for me to be an advocate is to be a TikTok influencer, though I do enjoy doing this stuff and speaking to you guys and speaking about things that I find important.”

Addressing rumors that circulated during her absence, St. Clair said, “The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.” She rejected claims that she had profited or been paid off.

“There is no grifting to be done on the left, okay? I am not making. You know, I. I don’t know what you guys think is happening here,” she said. “There’s other people saying that I took hush money or I was silenced, and none of that is true either. Um, I have not signed anything. There has been no hush money.”

She said she has instead faced “intimidation, uh, from various fronts.”

“Me personally, I’m not afraid, but I do have two young children that I also have to look out for,” she said. “So there is a bit of a chilling effect that happens when you speak, because there is retaliation when you speak from multiple fronts.”

St. Clair said she manages her own inbox and had no staff to handle a surge of media requests. “I am the one who manages my inbox. Again, I don’t know how many times to tell you guys, I’m not miss money bags over here. I handle everything myself. I don’t have help.”

One live event in particular set her back, she said. She said she agreed to appear with “this slimy, sweaty piece of s*** named Brian Reid,” who reached out “through someone I knew at Washington Post, saying that he wanted to speak about my ex A I. Lawsuit.”

“And then when I get there, it is basically just a slideshow of all of my old tweets when I was in MAGA,” she said. She said she does not mind discussing her past posts, noting she had done so before on the podcast “A Bit Fruity” with Matt Bernstein. “However, I was, like, completely ambushed.”

St. Clair said the more damaging moment came when the host raised the sexualized images generated of her. She said xAI’s Grok “had undressed me, including as a child, and there were these horrific images of myself and other people and other children that I will never be able to get out of my head.”

She said the host asked “if I was asking for this,” and added, “It was traumatic to have this individual asking me if I was asking for this. Sort of like, humiliation, uh, including me being undressed as a child. It was a lot.”

She said her public comments routinely draw legal threats. “Everything I say turns into some legal letter with all these attorneys, uh, whining and complaining about literally everything I say,” she said. “They don’t have any valid claims. In my opinion, however, it’s just a lot to deal with.” She described “this onslaught of high-profile attorneys constantly trying to bring claims against you.”

Responding to critics who ask why she has not done more, St. Clair said, “What power do you think I have to do anything except speak, which I’m willing to do.” She said she has spoken with lawmakers. “There are some democratic representatives who have been working with me, but again, there is the confines of this administration and. And what can happen right now.”

“The best thing people can do is vote in the midterms and vote these f***ing people out,” she said.

She urged patience. “Despite all of this, I remain optimistic about the future of this country and the future of democracy, and that change can happen,” she said. “The only thing I ask is that people reframe this concept of change and the time associated with it, okay? Things are not instantaneous, and everybody has to play their part in voting, in spending less time on social media and more time in your local communities to get these votes out.”

She said her knowledge of recommendation systems fuels what she called “this very, like, meta existential dread” when she spends too long online. “These algorithms are bastardizing your consciousness and the things that you care about,” she said, adding that “the general public retains so much more power than they want you to believe.”

St. Clair said she is not aiming at the left, but said Democrats should abandon the political center. “I genuinely think that if you’re going to go out and vote at this point, you need to go vote for Democrats as opposed to Republicans,” she said. “However, the Democrats need to stop with this centrist bulls***, okay? It’s not gonna work. People are suffering. People want healthcare, people want housing, people want basic human rights for anyone on our soil.”

“Stop with the unity bulls***. Stop with the. The centristism. Like, people don’t want it, and what’s gonna happen is people are gonna start taking s*** into their own hands, okay? And that’s not gonna be good for anyone,” she said.

She called for disclosure rules covering paid political messaging, citing a New York Times report on Democratic influencers being paid. “I will say it is much worse on the right than the left. However, the issue is that they don’t have to make these disclosures at all. Like, hello, what are we doing? Someone passed something so that they have to disclose if they’re paid for literally any sort of messaging.”

She also called on Republicans to reverse the Supreme Court’s campaign finance ruling. “Overturn the f*** out of Citizens United. Okay, MAGA and Republicans ran on overturning Roe v. Wade overtaking away rights run on overturning Citizens United, but they won’t do that because the fact of the matter is, this runs deep.”

St. Clair said her future videos will focus on federal agencies. “As for my next target, we will be focusing almost exclusively on people at the State Department and at DOJ,” she said. “Who’s really pulling the strings? How f***ing weird and dysfunctional these people are and how much time the people who are supposed to be running this country are wasting and what they are doing to line their pockets.”

She said she was sorry to have missed commenting on what she called “the Natalie Harper situation,” adding, “If I was posting during the Natalie Harper situation, I would have been nominated for awards. Okay, but I told you guys, these people are f***ing weird.”

The debate over Flock license plate cameras prompted her to reconsider her past positions, she said. The cameras “are being utilized and abused by police to create a surveillance state,” she said.

“I was like, oh, this is because we didn’t listen to black people when they were telling us all of this stuff was happening and would happen during BLM. And I was one of the people who contributed to invalidating, uh, those very valid concerns that are now materializing for all of us,” she said.

She said she sees a parallel in immigration enforcement. “The technologies they are deploying to detain and find these people is not only obviously, their actions are completely inhumane, but this is wildly concerning for everybody.”

St. Clair said she has continued working out of public view, including with people coming forward from inside the government.

“Behind the scenes, there have been a lot of whistleblowers coming to me from very consequential positions,” she said. “So I have been working to try to place them with the right people, with the right journalist, with attorneys, if need be.”

She said she does not intend to stay quiet. “My first inclination whenever I’m told I’m not supposed to say something is to say it twice and 10 times louder, which is a great personality trait for the internet. Uh, not so much for a litigation,” she said. “Nonetheless, these people found me yapping. They are going to die knowing I’m yapping. Okay, I do not plan on shutting up or taking any deals or self-censoring, um, unless absolutely necessary. For safety purposes.”

Summing up her time away, she said: “Sometimes I was quiet because I was processing things that I wasn’t ready to talk about. Sometimes I was quiet just because I was busy. Uh, and sometimes I was quiet because there is a chilling effect. Um, and there are two little people who did not choose this life.”

“The internet rewards the worst possible relationship with it,” she said. “That you need to respond to everything immediately, that you need to comment on this immediately, that everything in your life becomes content-worthy immediately. And I just don’t want to live like that.”

“The reality is, the only people that I owe that obligation to is my children and myself,” she said. “And again, I’m still figuring out who Ashley is, and I’m happy to have you guys come on that journey with me.”

@ashstc

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♬ original sound – ashley st. clair