🧵Right-wing extremists like Libs of Tiktok and Charlie Kirk totally concocted the Sydney Sweeney "outrage."

The supposed left-wing outrage at Sweeney never happened. Republicans made it up.

Republicans have been inventing people to rage against for decades… As @kenbensinger and Stuart A. Thompson report, the actual numbers show that almost no one was criticizing Sydney Sweeney for her American Eagle ad.

But Libs of TikTok decided to pretend that lefties were angry. A story that was nothing became huge. nytimes.com/2025/08/07/bus…

1/ Donald Trump's obsessive defensiveness about Jeffrey Epstein is causing a deep rupture within his far-right base.

It's an echo of the last time this happened, when he tried to tell MAGA to get vaccinated. They didn't listen.

Link in next post🧵 2/ This episode is also related to Elon Musk's chatbot Grok going into a "MechaHitler" rant.

Reactionaries have built an anti-epistemology and the leaders sometimes can't control it. plus.flux.community/p/epstein-grok…

🧵 Donald Trump has never been "anti-war."

He supported George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq until it became an overwhelming disaster. Then hey pretended to have always opposed it.

One of only a few things Trump has ever been consistent on was wanting to bomb Iran. Trump often criticized other presidents' foreign wars, but this was not because he opposes war and wants diplomacy.

The fact that Trump was willing to criticize other presidents for getting into ill-fated foreign wars confused some people....

Flashback lol of the day: Trump's top tariff adviser Peter Navarro made up a LARP of himself named "Ron Vara" which he repeatedly quoted in multiple books.

He even gave himself fictionalized biographical details, including being an Iraq war veteran. cnn.com/2019/10/16/pol… Peter Navarro is such a crackpot that he has to literally invent economists who agree with him because everyone thinks he's insane.

This is who Donald Trump thinks is smart.

🧵Carl Sagan wasn't religious, but he was still a prophet.

Working together, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and countless aids built the greatest diplomatic and economic structure the world has ever seen. This enraged religious fundamentalists.

Humanity was headed for the stars. But not on religious literalism's terms.

The Christian right rallied and began tearing at American greatness while blaming others for their actions.

Carl Sagan saw them coming.

🧵 Republican hatred of Democrats and of separation of church and state has significantly damaged political polling because reactionary Americans are willing to lie about their opinions if they think it helps Trump.

This fact has serious implications for Democrats... I've written about how Republican voters now evince NPC-level responses to political polls. We're seeing that in particular with how Trump followers falsely thought the economy was in recession during Joe Biden's presidency, only to drastically reverse themselves under Trump

🧵 The world is on fire. Chaos reigns.

Why is this happening? Primarily because fundamentalist Christianity has become an undead intellectual zombie.

What's even more bizarre and grotesque, however, is that Trumpian Christianity is much more about Nietzsche than Jesus. Most contemporary fundagelical Christians have never heard of Friedrich Nietzsche, the profane atheist philosopher who died at the beginning of the 20th century. But his ideas are at the epicenter of the fascist Christianity they have embraced.
plus.flux.community/p/the-apocalyp…

🧵 The election is going to be decided by people who don't like the candidates. Donald Trump always had a core of voters who don't like him but vote for him anyway.

It seems that the Harris campaign wanted to build a group of this kind for herself. But the two parties' possible voter universes are not the same and cannot be motivated with the exact same tactics.

Historically, speaking, American political parties were multi-ideological. But the right wing activists who took over the Republicans changed the party.

🧵 After 9 long years, it's starting to look like Donald Trump has become overexposed to his fans.

Democrats have been significantly more enthused since Kamala Harris entered the race than Republicans have.

In a base turnout election, Trump loses. Trump lost in 2020 because he failed to get some of his 2016 voters to come back to support him. You can slice who these people were, but demographically it was primarily white men. Trump improved his share among most other demographic groups.

🧵 CNN just removed a far-right panelist for a racist remark against progressive commentator @mehdirhasan.

This was the right decision. But as a former TV booker, what happened is part of a much bigger problem...

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1851085909435039789

Before going independent, I used to be a producer at @thehill on its "Rising" program.

Like all mainstream media shows, we were constantly trying to have balanced panel discussions. But we always had a problem: It was very difficult to find Republicans who weren't crazy.

🧵 The science behind why Donald Trump 'loves the poorly educated'

Far-right people are often obsessed w using so-called "race science" to prove that non-Europeans are less intelligent. Amusingly, the real science shows that right-wingers have lower cognitive abilities… This thread is a summary of the latest @TheoryChange episode, continue along here or click through if you just want to watch, read, or listen to the whole thing: plus.flux.community/p/the-science-…

🧵 The Republican party's specific ideas are horribly unpopular. Everywhere, it does almost nothing for its voters' economic or social interests.

Identity politics are the primary reason that Republicans are a competitive political party. Democrats know this but rarely say it... Democrats have been stuck in a messaging trap for decades. They know their policies are more popular so they think they should run on them.

It doesn't work, because it doesn't answer the Republican message: Life sucks and will never get better. We'll respect you at least.

🧵 This Wall Street Journal deep dive into the Republican lies about Springfield is a must read look into JD Vance's total dishonesty.

After spreading vague rumors for days, Vance's staff provided one verified name, Anna Kilgore. Her cat was perfectly fine. Vance also lied about diseases supposedly increasing in Springfield.

They are their lowest since 2013. Vance is trashing his own state and his own constituents to help his insane orange boss.

🧵 From start to finish, Kamala Harris dominated Donald Trump.

At the beginning, she pointed out how he worsened the pandemic and destroyed the economy.

After pointing out his 1/6 treason, she then pointed out that Trump would lie constantly during the discussion. He did... Notably, when Trump responded, he deliberately refused to mention the Covid-19 vaccines. This was him being beholden to the RFK conspiracy crowd. The vaccines were literally the only pandemic action he could reasonably have claimed to have done right.

He was afraid to.

As they've done so often during the DNC, Fox is refusing to air one of the many Republicans/ex-Republicans who are speaking for Kamala Harris.

Right now, Fox commentators are talking over Adam Kinzinger. They absolutely do not want Republicans to hear a contrary speech. Update: Fox did not air a single bit of Kinzinger's speech.

Remember this, and when they censored all the Black speakers on DNC night 1 next time you hear a Foxbot complain about "cancel culture" or "media censorship."

See my earlier thread:

https://x.com/mattsheffield/status/1825746963796549644

Fox News censored every single Black speaker at the Democratic National Convention tonight except for Kamala Harris's brief welcome speech.

What a disgusting display of racism!

Fox censored:

-Karen Bass
-Laphonza Butler
-James Clyburn
-Jasmine Crockett
-Raphael Warnock Since some stray Fox viewers might stumble onto the post above, here is Jasmine Crockett's full speech.

Listen and learn, MAGA. She has a lot to teach you🤗

🧵 Trump's comment that Kamala Harris is "a very beautiful woman" was more than just a weird aside, it's an insight into his campaign strategy.

This is a summary of my latest @discoverflux piece.

Click through for the essay or continue here…plus.flux.community/p/very-beautif… At 78, Donald Trump is the oldest major party presidential nominee. Kamala Harris, at 59, represents a stark contrast with her youth and energy.

But she also has a real looks advantage on Trump. Barack Obama said she was"by far, the best looking attorney general in the country."

🧵 During my former days as a Republican media commentator, I was always frustrated that my fellow rightwingers were so lazy and biased that they routinely promoted nonsense w/o bothering to verify.

Trump did this today falsely claiming that Kamala Harris faked a crowd w/AI... On his Untruth Social site, Trump promoted a tweet from a low-grade Twitter user who accused Kamala Harris of using AI to fake a crowd photo.

The accusation is totally false and easily disproven by the many live videos shot by people there, as well as other photos.

🧵 It's really stunning how many people who claimed Democrats should "reach out to rural people" really just meant "be Paul Ryan."

Tim Walz is everything these pundits pretended to want. What they actually wanted was a conservative Democratic party. In all the countless safaris to Ohio diners that David Brooks and other conservatives-who-call-themselves-centrists made, they notably avoided talking to Clinton or Biden supporters to ever ask them: How do you think the Dems could've won your area?

🧵 Most of us are focusing our attention on the presidential race right now but there's something extremely important that isn't getting noticed: Far-right Republicans are destroying the anti-disinformation organizations.

plus.flux.community/p/how-republic… Through subpoenas and lawsuits, they're trying to block all information quality standards, as Renée DiResta & I discussed on @TheoryChange.

It's part of a decades-long war on any kind of scientific reality. To reactionaries, everything is liberally biased.

🧵 All the memes about JD Vance really boil down to that he is a deeply traumatized person who has decided to embrace the evil he experienced instead of transcending it.

His first Megyn Kelly interview revealed who he really is. He's someone who changed his name repeatedly, but hates trans people.

He called Trump "America's Hitler" but now is his chief lieutenant.

Vance seemingly wears makeup daily but hates drag shows.