Fyre Festival's McFarland courts MAGA ahead of new business launch
Convicted fraudster Billy McFarland is heading to MAGA-friendly television to pitch his next eyebrow-raising business. And curiously, the disgraced former owner of the Fyre Festival brand isn't offering many details about what it is.
McFarland teased his next dubious product during the first episode of a brand new show, Real America's Pop Culture, a project of the MAGA-friendly Real America's Voice (RAV) hosted by Adrienne Gray. McFarland described his forthcoming venture as one that 'has more viability and fits better with [his] skill set than trying to do a festival.' 'We've built a new tech product,' he said.
After the disaster of the first Fyre Festival, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018 for defrauding investors out of $26 million along with over $100,000 in additional fraudulent ticket-selling schemes. McFarland agreed to pay back his victims. Along with jail time he was ordered to forfeit the cash. After serving under four years of his six-year sentence, he was released to a halfway house, and was under house arrest until September 2022.
Real America's Pop Culture debuts on RAV Saturday at 7:00 PM EST, and the maiden episode was reviewed exclusively by the Daily Mail. Some of RAV's current big-name broadcasts include Steve Bannon's War Room, Jack Posobiec's Human Events Daily, and The Charlie Kirk Show. McFarland sold the intellectual property rights to Fyre Festival brand on ebay this week for a measly $245k, which he described as 'so low' while live-streaming the internet auction. The Fyre Festival founder described the sale to Gray as a way to put a 'bow on the chapter of Fyre' which would then allow him to 'move on' and reveal his next move that he's been 'working on' which he will be 'announcing this summer.'
Gray, a 36 year old mother of two young boys who lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area, told the Daily Mail that her vision is to 'create a show where we have an intersection of politics and pop culture.' Covering popular culture is a new venture for the conservative RAV network, and Real America's Pop Culture is planned to be the first show in an entirely new division called Real America's Music. 'I think about the show as ... my girlfriends group chat. It's the top headlines of the day in politics and the top, you know, headlines in pop culture,' Gray told the Daily Mail.
The show aims to bridge the gap between diverse personalities in American pop culture while engaging conservative audiences who care about music, movies, and entertainment as much as their liberal counterparts but have been abandoned by the left. Asked by the Daily Mail who her dream show guest is, Gray replied, 'obviously Trump. He's the pop culture president.'
Back in July of 2024, Rolling Stone reported that the Fyre Festival founder was acting as an intermediary between rappers and the Trump campaign, adding that 'McFarland has helped connect rappers with Trump at least twice.' McFarland also posted a photo with Trump on President's birthday in 2024. As the former host of The Apprentice for its first 14 seasons, Trump has spent more time in the pop culture spotlight than the political one.
Gray told the Daily Mail that the Trump era seems like the ideal time for conservatives to reclaim pop culture, and that the creation of content such as her show may even help the right politically in bridging the gap the problematic demographics, including suburban women and young voters in Generation Z. The show is not explicitly political despite it's home at RAV, and Gray plans to interview progressives and liberals as well as MAGA friendly celebrities. Real America's Pop Culture can be viewed on streaming platforms including Rumble, YouTube, and Roku TV starting Saturday evening.
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