FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, made a series of unsubstantiated allegations on Tuesday, suggesting that several top right-wing figures are spies working to undermine the Trump administration.
A sign of deepening the fractures among MAGA influencers, Wilkins’ claims were threaded across a string of social media posts that framed influencers, including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Michael Flynn, as agents in a Russian-backed plot to bring down Trump. Wilkins also alleged that former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent, who resigned over his opposition to Trump’s war with Iran, is involved in the purported scheme.
I advise you not to break your brain trying to follow the thread’s attempted logic. The most important facts here are that Wilkins has been fighting accusations by some right-wing conspiracy theorists that she’s an Israeli spy and that she’s now responding to those claims with spying allegations of her own — or what’s known in foreign intelligence circles as the “I know you are but what am I?” defense.
The mudslinging highlights growing divisions in the MAGA movement over the administration’s support for Israel. And those growing divisions are what have led to the rather childish exchanges such as the one below, in which Owens is trying to implicate Wilkins in a conspiracy theory for calling Owens and other MAGA talking heads spies.
Patel has received some fierce rebukes from MAGA influencers since being confirmed to his position. Some of that has been overtly racist, and some has been rooted in his job performance, such as his handling of the shooting death of Charlie Kirk. That has coincided with broader criticism of his costly, taxpayer-funded dalliances with Wilkins. Wilkins’ latest dispute with some of the most prominent conservative voices speaks to a level of disunity that’s destabilizing the movement at a truly inopportune time — with the midterms bearing down on a deeply unpopular administration.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
