"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Monetizing extremism is easy on X for conspiracy theorist platformer Nawfal
Mario Nawfal is a Kremlin mouthpiece and crypto ‘entrepreneur’ whose conspiracy-peddling anti-western content is relentlessly pushed by Elon Musk on X. The black-clad 30 year-old podcaster is best known for hosting his eponymous ‘Roundtable’ show on X. He interviews fellow extremist influencers and anti-democratic political figures from Romania, Russia and the Middle East, broadcasting to his 2.1 million followers.
Born in Lebanon, Nawfal holds Australian citizenship and is based in Dubai. He styles himself as a ‘citizen journalist’ yet is the opposite of an objective reporter. Nawfal is a shrewd disinformation merchant and democracy destabilizer who amplifies false and hateful narratives about Ukraine, Romania, Europe and the West, Jews and Israel, as well bogus theories about vaccines and the 'population crisis'.
The adoring acolyte and promoter of Musk, whom he has interviewed several times, also lionizes Vladimir Putin. He has intervened repeatedly to try to influence electoral politics in Romania and interviewed disbarred pro-Nazi TikTok ex-presidential candidate Calin Georgescu.
Nawfal naturally lauds Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement. He monetizes extremism by platforming Maga and Moscow’s most polarizing figures and its authoritarian idols on his regular X Spaces ‘Roundtable’ program, which he claims is the most watched on the platform.
Nawfal travels the world speaking to virulent conspiracy theorists or does virtual roundtables from his skyscraper offices in Dubai. The monies he receives for such interviews including travel expenses remain opaque. He denies doing paid promotions of extremists and has produced no evidence to counter credible allegations he is being funded to do so by Kremlin ideologues and far right groups in places like Romania, and by Musk himself.
His subjects include:
There is hardly a Maga-world Moscow-sycophantic politician such as the new head of US national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard or far right influencer like Alex Jones that Nawfal has not interviewed and promoted. With a purported staff of hundreds and so-called blockchain and crypto-coin businesses to sell, Nawfal uses AI-generated visuals and videos to popularize discontent with the so-called ‘Deep State’ and democratic elections.
He also trafficks deliberately in anti-Jewish conspiracies. Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel, Nawfal has emerged as one of the most viral influencers to circulate and profit from the terrorist group’s antisemitic propaganda, including denial of the assaults and the rapes of women.
The Australian-raised Nawfal is also a juice blender company founder who has been investigated and fined for false advertising by Australian authorities and accused of murky business practices and non-payment by former associates. In the US he has been forced to deny accusations of embezzling investors and associates, and tax evasion, complaints that were examined by US regulatory authorities including the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Frequently described as a protégé of Musk’s, Nawfal is constantly approvingly reposted by the world’s richest man to his 219 million followers on the X platform he purchased in 2022. In 2023 during the Wagner Group attempted overthrow of Putin, Musk encouraged his followers to follow Nawfal. “Best coverage of the situation I’ve seen so far is from Mario,” he wrote glowingly. More recently, Nawfal has taken to trying to influence and interfere in negotiations about ending the Russian war against Ukraine and the conflict over Russian interference in the Romanian elections.
After a soft-ball chat with Lukashenko at his palace in Minsk on February 27, 2025, Nawfal showed up in Moscow on March 11. His goal? To conduct an obsequious sit-down ‘interview’ with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The full recording was quickly given the Kremlin imprimatur and posted on the Russia Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ online channels. Unsurprisingly the deferential ‘roundtable’ consisted of very few questions and plenty of agreeing nods and use of the honorific ‘Sir’ to address Lavrov. Nawfal was joined at the interview by pro-Russia conspiracist blogger and disgraced former Fox News host Andrew Napolitano, who was fired from the network over multiple sexual harassment claims. Former CIA staffer-turned Kremlin-adulating blogger Larry Johnson was also at the table.
After a couple of soft-serve prompts Nawfal and Napolitano (who asked a leading question about Vladimir Putin’s condemnation of the “genocide in Gaza”) allowed Lavrov to drone on for an hour and a half. Unchallenged Lavrov libels included: describing Ukrainians as Nazis and denial that the Putin regime was behind the death of Russian dissidents and Putin critics like opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2024, the 2018 UK poisonings of the former Russian military agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, and the 2022 Bucha massacre in which hundreds of civilians were murdered by the Russian army in Ukraine.
Nawfal also let Lavrov expound unquestioned about Iran’s right to continue its nuclear program and continue to finance foreign actors (in other words terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and others) in Iraq, Lebanon and across the Middle East.
Among Lavrov’s litany of lies and conspiracy-mongering about Ukraine was the notion that Russia was framed as the proven instigator of the MH17 Malaysian jet crash that was deliberately shot down by Moscow over Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people. Lavrov also repeatedly made false accusations of “the West having waged war against Russia” via the “Nazi regime” and “SS” of Ukraine. He engaged in flagrant denialist narratives about Moscow’s role in the poisoning and subsequent death in Kremlin prison custody of Navalny, saying he had simply “died in prison serving his term” and had been “made a martyr by the west who made the Russian federation evil”. He also contested the 2018 poisoning by Kremlin agents of former military operative and British citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom: “UK authorities raised hell - they accused us and they used this to increase sanctions,” Lavrov fumed.
Continuing throughout the interview with never an interruption from the lead questioner Nawfal, Lavrov raised suspicions of a set-up in the Bucha massacre and spun negationist lines that the “corpses had been laid out neatly”. He repeated his demands to know the names of the people whose bodies were filmed, before attacking the BBC journalists who reported on and filmed the aftermath of the massacre, as complicit in the blaming of Moscow. Lavrov repeated Putin preferred talking points falsely attacking Ukraine for “the extermination of the Russian language, media culture, prohibition of opposition parties, murder and disappearance of journalists, not to mention the military crimes war crimes against the people in Donbas” before savaging the UN and NATO and repeating the fake assertion that the organization’s expansion was what caused the conflict.
Aleksandr Dugin, one of the most influential figures in Putin’s orbit was given the opportunity to spew his traditionalist Russian Orthodox Christian hatred of the “degenerated West” and “globalist liberal ideology” on Nawfal’s program on March 4. In his typical style, Nawfal promoted and presented the interview as an objective and balanced discussion about “. In reality, however he just handed over his roundtable platform and audience to Dugin to spread his radical reactionary ideas about “our war against the West” without any countervailing interventions or questions about his wildest claims regarding the “glories” of Russian history, the coming downfall of the west, his smears of Ukraine and Vladimir Zelensky and his adoration of Putin.
According to a Romanian newspaper Nawfal received 800,000 USD from the pro-Kremlin Alliance for the Union of Romanians party to back now banned pro-Russia candidate Călin Georgescu in the since invalidated presidential elections. Nawfal has denied the reports. When Georgescu and his associates was arrested in February 2025, with weapons and cash found in their residences, Nawfal rushed to film a video interview with him. In conspiratorial terms he decried the so-called attacks on democracy in Romania, Europe and the world by election authorities and police cracking down on Russian electoral interference. “This is a man who should be leading his country, yet instead, he’s been silenced by a system that seems determined to crush democracy rather than uphold it,” Nawfal posted on X.
Romania, which shares a border with Ukraine and is under relentless destabilization and interference attacks from Russia, is an obsession of Nawfal’s. Just as it is for Musk and the Trump Administration. Vice President JD Vance condemned the so-called undemocratic cancellation of tampered elections when he went to the Munich Security Conference in January. At the same gathering, Richard Grenell the Trump special envoy successfully pressured the Romanian Justice Minister to lift travel restrictions on indicted American-British rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate, under house arrest in Bucharest since 2022. The pressure led to Tate and his brother Tristan triumphantly returning to the US. Nawfal had already been in Romania during the detention to interview Tate, giving him open slather to spread more of his pro-Hamas hate about Jews and denial of October 7 which he said was resistance. “I was right on Covid and I was right on October 8th I said this was a genocide,” Tate claimed in the video interview available on YouTube with Nawfal. “There are so many scenarios in which I would murder.”
According to a study by online antisemitism monitoring site CyberWell, Nawfal emerged as one of the top alternative stars on X after the Hamas assaults of 2023 and “echoed numerous October 7 denial theories, which were frequently supported and justified by citing confidential Hamas sources”.
Nawfal has emphasized the need to protect his sources but has consistently refused to provide any verification. He has repeatedly relied on the tactic of citing "confidential sources," using it to deny events such as the beheading of babies on October 11 and mass rape, narratives that frequently appear in his content. He also argued that a Hamas document found by the IDF, which included instructions on assaulting Israeli women, was not about rape but rather about undressing male soldiers. Additionally, Nawfal promoted the claim that testimonies from Israeli women regarding Hamas sexual violence were fabricated.
CyberWell found that “his approach to denial is subtle, often framed with sympathetic language such as “My heart goes out to every woman harmed on October 7,” yet the underlying message of his content discredits victims, labels them as liars, and ultimately defends their abusers. A post by pro-Israel lobbyist Jay Engelmayer on October 9 accused Sulaiman Ahmed of using Nawfal’s platform to spread misinformation about Hamas’s atrocities, “highlighting the reciprocal influence that fuels the phenomenon of October 7 denial”.
In 2023 Musk reposted Nawfal’s attacks on the Anti-Defamation League and defence of Twitter as a space that did not promote and enable antisemitism, describing them as "accurate".
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