The Pentagon’s New Right-Wing Influencer Press Corps Isn’t Reporting on the Maduro Raid — It’s Pushing Pro-Administration Propaganda
In the immediate aftermath of the detention of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the newly assembled cohort of right-wing influencers in the Pentagon’s official press corps did not produce original reporting on the cross-border operation. Instead, they have served as enforcers of pro-administration loyalty, mirroring the exact playbook used by pro-invasion Iraq War bloggers in the early 2000s.
As breaking news of Maduro’s arrest spread over the weekend, right-wing influencer and Pentagon press corps member Cam Higby posted Saturday morning on X writing, “The White House account better be cooking up a sick edit.” The following Monday, far-right commentator Laura Loomer launched a crowdsourced effort to identify Pentagon press officials suspected of sharing details about the operation with mainstream outlets. Turning Point USA reporter Monica Paige pivoted to attacking the former Biden administration, reposting a 2020 social media post from Joe Biden criticizing Donald Trump for praising dictators, paired with the now-viral image of a blindfolded Maduro. Even X influencer Joey Mannarino, who boasts more than 650,000 followers on the platform, spent the entire Sunday after Maduro’s capture distracted by intra-GOP 2028 speculation, debating whether to back Vice President JD Vance or Marco Rubio for the Republican presidential nomination.
All of these creators were granted official Pentagon press credentials last November, after the department rolled out a controversial new press policy that bars journalists from accessing any information the Defense Department — rebranded by the current administration as the “War Department” — does not proactively make public. Nearly every major mainstream outlet, including ABC, CBS, NBC, and even Fox News, refused to accept the new terms, triggering a mass exit of veteran military correspondents from the Pentagon’s official press pool. Just weeks later, the Pentagon filled those empty spots with pro-Trump aligned influencers from groups like Turning Point USA, plus independent right-wing creators including popular conservative political commentator Tim Pool.
To date, the new press cohort has only attended one official on-the-record briefing led by Defense Department press secretary Kingsley Wilson, who used the occasion to openly criticize the veteran journalists who left over the new policy. Before joining the Pentagon’s leadership team, Wilson led digital media operations for the Center for Renewing America, a prominent pro-Trump conservative think tank.
“Legacy media chose to self-deport from this building,” Wilson said at the briefing. “We’re not going to beg these old gatekeepers to come back, and we’re not rebuilding a broken model to appease them. Instead, we’re welcoming new media outlets that actually reach Americans.”
From its launch, this new press model was never designed to support independent journalism or expand public access to government information. To date, none of the Pentagon’s right-wing influencer press corps have published any original, new reporting related to the Venezuela raid. Several members of the group, including Higby, have instead shifted their focus to unproven claims of childcare fraud in Minnesota, chasing a story that right-wing creator Nick Shirley claimed to uncover in a viral YouTube video posted last week — even though local Minnesota news outlets have been reporting on the issue for years.
The current dynamic draws clear parallels to the early days of the Iraq War, when pro-invasion bloggers positioned themselves as an unfiltered alternative to what they dismissed as biased mainstream coverage. These early war bloggers built large audiences specifically by attacking mainstream writers and independent bloggers that opposed the U.S. invasion, pushing only pro-war narratives that aligned with the U.S. government’s position. That same dynamic is playing out today: Lancevideos, a creator who is part of the Pentagon’s new official press corps, has labeled congressional critics of the Venezuela operation like Representative Thomas Massie “libtards” for their opposition. He has also publicly called for additional cross-border raids, writing on X: “Could Iran be next? USA kidnapping spree must continue.”
To date, there is no evidence that any of the newly credentialed Pentagon press members have produced any substantive original reporting on the Venezuela raid, and none appear to have received a single official briefing on the operation from Pentagon leadership. Instead, they have flooded social media with endless memes and posts that blindly back the raid — an outcome that experts say is exactly what the Pentagon intended when it recruited the cohort. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the press corps’ role covering the operation.
“These influencers sound exactly like the armchair warriors who wrote pro-war blogs from their homes two decades ago, just parroting whatever the military put out,” says Melissa Wall, a journalism professor at California State University, Northridge, who has published extensive research on the 2000s warblogging movement. “Are they actually getting any real, non-public information? Or are they just repackaging press releases and whatever official content is handed to them?”
Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched what the Pentagon is calling the “Arsenal of Freedom Tour.” According to reporting from Status News, during the tour’s first stop at a Virginia shipyard on Monday, Hegseth was only accompanied by one major mainstream outlet (CNN) alongside a large group of right-wing media figures. One of those figures, John Konrad, was overheard trying to secure an autograph from Hegseth for a book Konrad wrote. (Konrad told Status News the autograph was “not for me.”)
Wall argues that flooding public discourse with pro-administration content is the explicit goal of the new Pentagon press model. “They can just flood the zone,” Wall said. “They can just put out so much content you can't really find the truth.”
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