The Problem with Scott McMahan & Bigger Truth Media
Personal Experience Reveals Reasons for Suspicion and Concern
So without going into too much personal detail, I have a personal experience run-in with Scott McMahan of Bigger Truth Media.
I actually like his reports and his writing. I was a non-paying subscriber to his Substack until this week.
But I’ve noticed that his writing tends to validate the GOP Establishment’s view of things. McMahan is basically the Lincoln Project minus the pedophilia and with half as much snark.
I’ve come to see him as placed within the social power structure as someone delegitimizing both people worthy of suspicion but also those who don’t warrant his skepticism or, frankly, even much of his attention. The former might be laudable but it seems the latter might be his real agenda.
So here’s what happened:
I was working in a small group with an individual who was a bit of a public figure.
This public figure ran into some controversy.
That controversy allowed the public figure a potential public or private resolution to the conflict. The person chose to go public, against my advice.
In the process of going public, they said multiple contradictory things. Things that, frankly, made little to no sense. To some outlets, he said that he was too conservative, causing the conflict. In other outlets, he said he was too liberal. He was transparently telling everyone what he thought they wanted to hear, regardless of any duty of consistency and overall narrative coherence.
Seeing this, Scott McMahan interviewed this person. The person told McMahan what he wanted to hear, he said things that fit McMahan’s agenda. McMahan did zero independent investigation of the matter. If he had, he would have easily found many contradictory statements and interviews online that this subject has given. McMahan simply reported what the individual said and presented it as accurate with no apparent due diligence.
What this person said on the show lightly defamed me, and some people I work with. It was uncouth. The defamation involved allegations of professional misconduct, claims which are demonstrably and provably false. My choice in these situations is just to take the slings and arrows and stay quiet because trying to remedy these things almost always goes sideways.
A colleague who did not share that tactical opinion, who was also involved in this controversy, reached out to McMahan and offered to privately set the record straight. This colleague gave McMahan facts and links to sources that proved McMahan’s interview with this person was filled with lies and errors.
McMahan’s response was, thusly: that he would refuse to correct the record unless the person came on his show as a named guest, and revealed explosive details about unrelated other topics and individuals. In essence, he said that the person had to doxx himself, and give him clicks via major information reveals, and put himself at risk with his employment, in order to correct the record and set the truth straight.
Let’s state a blanket rule for operating in the real-world: the truth should never come at a price. There should never be conditions for doing the right thing, which is telling the truth.
And when you’re casting aspersions about people’s motives, you owe it to your audience and your subject to at least give the other side of the story. When you’re reporting facts, there aren’t always a competing set of facts or opinions about the facts. But when you’re using analysis to dive into people’s motives, obviously the people you’re making assumptions about probably have a different take.
McMahan’s niche is diving into motives and making widespread bad faith assumptions about the motives of certain political actors.
That kind of writing can be important and impactful, if done responsibly. And certainly it requires a very finely-tuned sense of ethics and responsibility to the task at hand.
Social media has empowered and supercharged smear campaigns. It has made it easy to smear and slime people.
The information age has proven itself to also be the defamation age. There seems to be no limit to the kind of shit people will say about one another, with very little regard for the truth. It’s exhausting to be even a low-level public figure and take the kind of scrutiny and criticism that keyboard warriors feel empowered to engage in these days.
Disproving lies takes hours of careful and precise writing, hours of patient research and comparing statements, evidence, videos.
It takes mere seconds to bloviate about your supposed opinion as to people’s motives.
Defamation lawsuits are complex and costly to bring. Courts are loathe to grant any relief to complaining parties. The system, as they say, is rigged, and in this case rigged against people who genuinely care about their reputation. You’re supposed to just accept people spreading lies about you because of the first amendment.
Personally I believe the U.S. military and the far-left non-profit industrial complex utilizes well-trained bots to tone police and monitor social media for crimethink. The government is the worst offender in this whole smear campaign complex.
And I’ve also come to believe that, since at least 2020, the U.S. military is engaged in divide and conquer tactics on the political right. They have used intelligence operatives, sometimes out in the open, to ensure that there is no cohesive movement and no collected leadership on the right. In the early 2010’s they developed the science and methodology behind how ideas percolate and spread. They then weaponized this to ensure they could smear with ease. In time, that technology was employed to gain an upper hand in American politics.
Scott McMahan documents this trend by correctly identifying likely agents in this operation chaos like Gen. Mike Flynn.
However, I suspect that McMahan is also part of this operation. Because he is a figurehead that has come out of relative obscurity to become the self-appointed arbiter of who is true and who is unclean. This is a position only sought by petty tyrants.
Let’s put it another way: one of the best axioms in politics was taught to me by Mike Rothfeld. It goes like this:
“Always ask yourself, when assessing any advice or counsel in politics: ‘who benefits if I believe this?’”
So if we apply the Rothfeld standard against Scott McMahan, what do we find?
If I believe Scott McMahan, I am tacitly endorsing the basic-bitch establishment GOP take on things.
If I believe Scott McMahan, the GOP consultant class is the path to victory.
If I believe Scott McMahan, Ronna Romney is probably the best we’re ever going to get as the RNC Chair.
If I believe Scott McMahan, lots of NeverTrump types across the country in interest groups and campaign consultants, get to keep the gravy train humming right along. After all, they have the keys to victory.
Now this might seem unfair. It might seem uncharitable. It might seem extreme. But is it true?
Let’s take a basic rundown of McMahan’s recent programming:
It’s all just policing the grassroots MAGA right.
McMahan might be right about Flynn, but he’s clearly wrong about a lot of other people.
McMahan is currently picking fights with some journalists and attorneys whom I lightly know and know to have done great work on voter fraud, election integrity, corruption, etc. - are they all “deep state” operatives?
The more you think about it, the more you can see the contours of McMahan’s key grift: endlessly attack and defame the grassroots right with pseudo-psychology and anti-cultish terms and phrases. Everything is a ‘psyop’ and activists are all ‘operatives’ who are running secret plans behind the scenes.
Everything is taken out of context.
Journalist Rachel Alexander of Arizona said election integrity was critical, because ‘nothing else matters.’ Even if she really said that, it’s understandable because if the elections are fake and filled with voter fraud, then doing a few more doorknocks isn’t going to overcome the problem. If you can win the popular vote in Michigan, but the 3:30AM Biden Ballot Dump happens again and overwrites your victory with fake ballots, then better campaigning isn’t the solution.
McMahan put her on blast, saying that she wants Republicans to lose.
What little I know of McMahan is that he was a realtor who was engaged in a few business ventures that failed, and then comes out of nowhere to say that he’s a journalist covering this unique beat. He’s from Lapeer County, but has no known political involvement there. He’s not a precinct delegate for the Michigan Republican Party. He regularly has state-level major players on his show. He laughs that people accuse him of doing the bidding of Michigan consultant John Yob. He doesn’t attack the two former House Intelligence Chairs who are now reappearing in Michigan politics: Pete Hoekstra and Mike Rogers. None of his targets, the subjects he focuses on, covers the actual funding families of Michigan politics, such as the DeVos, Parfet, or Jandernoa families. He seems completely disinterested in the way Michigan politics works. He doesn’t have any obvious mainstream media connections, but the MSM also doesn’t demonize him or spotlight him as an evil person.
Others who have followed him more closely claim that he’s a NeverTrumper, a DeSantis supporter, doesn’t believe in systemic voter fraud in the 2020 election, and goes after conservative legislators with a special glee.
Gosh, this all sounds awfully familiar.
Just from understanding these power dynamics, we can say that he’s almost certainly within the Betsy DeVos orbit.
That group:
Has the money to blow on projects and operations like this
Are notably absent from his target list for scrutiny
Ape the same conclusions and talking points
Support the same candidates and individuals
Hates the same people: the small minority of the grassroots who threatened to take control of the Michigan Republican Party
Others have done deeper dives into McMahan. I can’t speak for their accuracy, but the claims are serious and disturbing. Here’s someone named Brian Ference making claims on Twitter. Ference then wrote this web page documenting his problems with McMahan.
I just don’t want to take the time to dig into this person who is clearly such a RINO enabler and grifter. When you meet enough of these people, their trends seem a little more obvious.
Starting in politics the honest and real way is demanding. You sit through a hundred Lincoln Day dinners. You patiently listen to the aged and mostly irrelevant conversations about politicians from decades ago, whose names you promptly forget. It’s a huge, irrational, time investment because you want to help the country and you want good policy.
Most people drop out of party politics because the initiation process becomes so taxing, mentally, emotionally, and time-wise. It feels like casting pearls before swine.
So you might be thinking: well, maybe McMahan is simply skipping over the Lincoln Dinners and going straight to where he’s effective: journalism.
Yet even on that basis, he’s fighting these intense inside battles for a prize that, in the end, doesn’t really matter.
The Kristina Karamo faction of the Michigan Republican Party came in to great fanfare in 2023. She was the losing Secretary of State, and she prevailed against a Trump-endorsed Matt DePerno. The Karamo faction then proceeded to make a series of decisions over the year that were viciously fought on both sides, by elements on her side, and those against her.
There were many amusing highlights, including a state committee meeting where one participant claimed to have been maliciously kicked in the balls.
But they were fighting for control of the Michigan Republican Party. Yet they fought valiantly for a prize that was probably not worth the strife to obtain. They thought there was a building waiting for them to occupy, but the building was held in a trust controlled by the former Chairs, including Ron Weiser and Betsy DeVos. The Karamo faction thought they would easily raise millions, but they struggled to raise thousands. They felt like they had a mandate to steamroll all opposition, but their meetings were defined by endless infighting. There was tons of litigation. The Karamo folks made an ‘enemies list’ of people for the Mackinac Conference that was pretty hard to justify, in that 2020 Trump electors being prosecuted were rated as RINOs and actual RINOs who vote horribly in the legislature were rated better.
I’m not taking one side or another. I don’t know who is at fault and who is not.
Mike Labadie was blamed for much of the problems, including by McMahan. He might be the right culprit, he might be a patriot trying to do his best.
What I do know is that dozens, hundreds, of good people were involved and didn’t know which way was up. They were regularly confused by who was MAGA and who was RINO. They were told Karamo was good, and then given a litany of things that she did that were hard to defend.
Gen. Mike Flynn, while Obama’s head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, pioneered a concept called “liquid reality” where you would introduce so much informational chaos into a population that they would not know up from down, left from right, yes from no. That population would become, in time, compliant to whatever someone said.
It was peak demoralization, something straight out of Soviet population management.
But what that system requires, is pressure exerted in both directions.
It’s not a matter of managing one faction competently, it’s a matter of managing both sides of the same argument, to intellectually churn the listening audience so that their minds turn to butter.
I suspect that is the role that Scott McMahan plays in this drama, knowingly or not.
People simply don’t come into politics this way. In decades of activity, I can’t say I’ve seen a person come in so suddenly, rise to prominence so quickly, and that trajectory have been honest and authentic.
I don’t like to rely on simple supposition though. Just having a theory isn’t enough, there should be evidence to support the theory.
I’m loathe to reach out to him because of the potential for doxxing, and then other various pressure points to be applied. This person is a professional defamer, so it’s likely he’s going to react like a wounded animal when found out. This is probably a part of his stable income, the first stable money he’s gotten in a long time, it looks like.
As Dave Chappelle mentions in a great anecdote, “never get between a man and his meal.”
But doing my own quick research of McMahan shows that something doesn’t add up.
Here’s McMahan’s old YouTube page. The last content uploaded there was three years ago. His viewership and subscriber count is pretty pathetic. He clearly did a lot of work for very little return.
Several of his videos had literally zero views.
Now, I believe that YouTube plays all sorts of games with the view counts. I’m willing to believe that’s not accurate. But I also know from personal experience that you wouldn’t keep making these videos if you were being demoralized to this extent. He’s recording for hours, and likely doing many extra hours of prep and research prior to each hour of filming.
Here’s a notable video, which is probably tongue in cheek:
What status did McMahan have to be making these kind of videos? He presents himself as a ‘bible scholar’ in other contexts. Does he have a seminary degree? Has he spent years pouring over the Bible?
If he’s a grifter on Biblical analysis and interpretation, isn’t it a fair assumption that he’s similarly grifting into politics?
I’ve known people in Lapeer County who ran for office, and who were involved in grassroots work. They don’t know Scott McMahan and had never heard of him.
They didn’t know him in 2020 or 2022. That’s odd.
And you know, if he’s new to politics, then good for him for getting involved. But why would your first serious level of involvement to declare yourself the new judge and arbiter as to who is authentic and genuine in politics?
That’s not a normal transition. It’s not a normal point of engagement.
It ought to be extremely suspicious.