A right-wing manosphere influencer network, with direct ties to Donald Trump infiltrated Mexico’s national team training facilities, prior to their World Cup match against Ecuador last week to present the players with Rolex watches worth $1 million. The gift, ostensibly offered as a reward for the benefactor’s multimillion-dollar sports wager on the game that had yet to take place, violates FIFA’s code of ethics and carries with it a potential for disqualification and several thousands of dollars in fines.
Mexico’s soccer federation issued a statement on social media this Friday announcing that the luxury watches would be returned. According to Mexican sports lawyer Luis Jiménez, it would be “absurd” to think that FIFA would interpret the gift as an attempt to manipulate the outcome of the game or some kind of bribe. But, given FIFA’s long history of corruption and the peculiar history of the characters involved, this seemingly innocuous incident should raise alarm bells ahead of Mexico’s round of 16 game against England this Sunday.
Frat Boy Summer
Stephen Deleonardis, a prank streamer who goes by the name SteveWillDoit, had just over a thousand followers on Instagram in 2019, when John and Sam Shahidi discovered him. Born to an Iranian Kurdish family in Southern California, the Shahidi brothers got their start in the music industry, but soon exited that milieu to focus on viral content creation.
In 2013, they founded Shots Studios, a San Francisco-based startup that revolved around a selfie app designed to compete with Instagram and similar platforms. The venture failed, but not before building relationships with big emerging digital creators like Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and Jake Paul. These connections would dovetail perfectly with ones they’d made before in the relatively new world of MMA and Dana White’s Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), when they designed an app for one of White’s biggest clients, Floyd Mayweather Jr.
By the time the 2015 presidential election rolled around, they started to gravitate towards the incipient MAGA movement for its viral potential, and within a couple of years would form a partnership with NELK Boys co-founder Kyle Forgeard to capitalize on the right-wing culture wars with Shots Podcast Network. Deleonardis, a.k.a. SteveWillDoit, was brought on to the NELK Boys team as another member of the crass frat-boy humor ensemble.
After 2020, Deleonardis’ following exploded, making him one of the top YouTubers in the world before he was deplatformed in 2022 for promoting dodgy offshore gambling companies. Born and raised in Orlando, Florida, Deleonardis moved to Los Angeles in 2019 after his big break with the Shahidi brothers, and became a popular fixture among young male viewers, often referred to as involuntary celibates or “incels”, that consume the content of manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate, Adin Ross and Joe Rogan.
John Shahidi’s relationship with Dana White was rekindled by Kyle Forgeard, as the NELK boys podcast host began to merge much of its content with UFC events and MMA-related media. White’s own relationship with Donald Trump began to solidify around this time, as well, in the lead up to the 2024 presidential run, and which has been covered in depth by MMA commentator and journalist Luke Thomas. By 2022, the Shahidi’s and Kyle Forgeard have been folded into Trump’s far-right propaganda machine through none other than Elon Musk, who was in the process of buying Twitter, and befriending John Shahidi.
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Advised by Musk, then candidate Trump went on the NELK Boys podcast, where Forgeard made a direct appeal to the soon-to-be president of the United States for Deleonardis’ YouTube channel to be reinstated. Deleonardis himself publicly asked Trump to intervene on his behalf, and in December of 2025, SteveWillDoit’s YouTube channel was restored.
Performing Lesser Masculinity
In late June, the Prosecutor’s Office in Tehran announced charges against Reza Pahlavi, Maryland resident and former Crown Prince of Iran, for taking part in an internal destabilization operation orchestrated by the United States and Israel. At the center of the case, is U.S. President Trump’s own admission that he was trying to funnel weapons to opposition forces inside Iran through Kurdish-Iranian groups.
Kurdish leaders have denied the allegations, which they attribute to “psychological warfare” by the United States, but Pahlavi’s role in the January protests that resulted in the death of at least 3,000 people at the hands of the Iranian government is not exactly a secret. The eldest son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, openly called for Trump to intervene during the winter protests.
While opponents of the Islamic Republic of Iran and most of the Western media have dismissed the charges as politically-motivated, there has been a clear change in the exiled prince’s usual appeals to democratic transition and tame acts of civil disobedience, to his recent calls for direct action by Iranians to “seize city centers”, and “hold them” in preparation for his imminent return in a video post on Elon Musk’s X.
John Shahidi was born in Los Angeles, California, in the same year that Reza Pahlavi’s father was expelled from Iran by rebel forces. Reza himself was only 19 years old and training at Reese Air Force Base in Texas, where he was being groomed to take over leadership of the regime that had been imposed on the Iranian people by the CIA after Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had nationalized the assets of the Anglo-Persian oil company (British Petroleum), in 1951.
75 years later, the world continues to be held captive by the voracious appetite for control and domination of the United States and their insatiable thirst for oil. But, things have changed. The war in Iran has made clear that American might is not what it once was, and the leverage they used to enjoy over the rest of the world as a result of petrodollar hegemony, is all but finished. As the planet moves on to alternative sources of energy, the Leviathan is desperate to hold on to whatever scraps it can.
Things have indeed changed, when your main propaganda outlets are dominated by a cohort of infantile man-children performing masculinity through gaudy displays of wealth, misogyny, and cage fights on the White House lawn. Less than a year ago, the NELK Boys infamously platformed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on their podcast, where the butcher of Gaza claimed that Iran had put a bounty on Donald Trump’s head.
During the interview, Netanyahu was given free rein to unleash a torrent of lies and Israeli propaganda to whitewash the genocide that was then – and is still now –, taking place in the Gaza Strip. The backlash on the NELK Boys by their fans was severe, and probably caught them by surprise. John Shahidi tried to distance himself from the controversial interview by stating that “Netanyahu’s team [had] reached out” to schedule the appearance, while Forgeard who actually conducted the interview, copped an ignorance plea.
Rich Victims
The right-wing, manosphere podcast bros that helped Trump get re-elected were all present at his inauguration the second time around. John Shahidi attended as an honored guest and VIP, alongside Dana White, Jake Paul, Theo Von and Joe Rogan. Of all of them, Shahidi has managed to stay out of the spotlight for the most part, but he may be the most helpful to the Trump administration for his technical skills, in addition to being among the most politically incentivized of the bunch.
In August 1979, John and Sam Shahidi’s uncles were executed in Sanandaj, a city in the Kurdistan province of Iran just a few miles from the border with Iraq. They were accused of collaborating with the counterrevolutionary forces of the Shah, who had already fled the country. The heart-wrenching moment was actually captured on film, photographed by Iranian photojournalist Jahangir Razmi.
Razmi’s photograph would win the Pulitzer Prize and become etched in the Shahidi family’s memory. Last February after the fatal protests in Iran, John Shahidi saw fit to remind everyone of his family tragedy, when he posted the historic image on X, along with some of the context. Missing from Shahidi’s ode to his mother’s two brothers was the story of how that fateful moment came to be, and the forces that had led to it.
During the January protests themselves, Shahidi took the opportunity to use the suffering of the Iranian people to promote X. “While most platforms and media stay silent,” he wrote, “X is showing the truth.” The flattery wasn’t gratuitous. After all, Shahidi was among the investors who helped Elon Musk come up with the $13 Billion he needed to take over the social media company back in 2022. And without a hint of irony, he highlighted how luck his “mom and grandma” were to have escaped so that he and his brother “could be born free in America”.
It could be forgiven if he wasn’t actively involved in the far-right takeover of the United States, which has literally taken freedom away from moms and grandmas all over the country, and disenfranchised millions more with favors to the billionaire class he so desperately wants to be a part of. It could be forgiven if he wasn’t directly promoting and profiting off of the toxic manosphere wasteland, that is rotting young mens brains and raising a generation of frustrated sexual predators.
It won’t be forgiven. So, John and Sam Shahidi should try to undue the damage they have already caused, and pull back on any more antics that might extend it, although it might be too late.
And Now Back to the Game
After Mexico’s dominant victory over Ecuador last week, millions of people flooded the streets of Mexico City to celebrate. Scenes of ecstatic fans packed along Reforma avenue circled the globe, putting Mexico’s passion for the sport on full display, and creating a security nightmare for the city. Four people lost their lives during the evening’s revelry, adding to a growing list of victims across the country, that include a man who was lynched by a mob in Los Cabos after Mexico’s group stage win over Czechia, and a Colombian tourist beaten to death outside a bar in host city Guadalajara just as the tournament was getting underway.
Mexico City implemented an alcohol sales ban that went into effect at midnight on July 5th, hoping to mitigate some of the damage and safety issues that are sure to erupt no matter the result of the Mexico vs England contest. Unlike dry laws implemented in previous match days, this one will cover more parts of the city and count with special law enforcement deployments to catch vendors trying to circumvent the measure.
Mexico’s game against England kicks off in a couple of hours, and a lot of people are predicting an upset. If Mexico wins, the city will have its hands full again with millions of enraptured Mexican soccer fans. As difficult as that can be, FIFA can make matters so much worse thanks to the stunt pulled by John Shahidi’s employee, Stephen Deleonardis.
So far, FIFA has not pronounced itself one way or the other on the Rolex watches incident. If Mexico loses tonight, they may never mention it. However, if Mexico wins, FIFA can drop a metaphorical nuclear bomb in Mexico by disqualifying the team from the World Cup, unleashing a furious reaction from fans that would inevitably lead to pacification measures by the state, and a perfect excuse for SteveWillDoit’s best friend Donald Trump to stage an intervention of his own.
