Anthony L. Fisher: The cult of Trump is crumbling and its “thought leaders” are mostly blaming each other.
Who are the rightwing influencers filling Trump’s head with visions of antifa?
Meet the content creators whose videos from Portland and Chicago shape the president’s distorted view of reality
America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal - Dame Magazine
America’s descent into mass delusion isn’t happenstance. The demise of courageous journalism isn’t a happy accident. Its replacement with engagement-chasing infotainment and propaganda isn’t an error. It’s a global assault on reason and informed consensus, and corporations and authoritarian bullies like Donald Trump are both architects and benefactors. For decades, academics warned anybody who’d listen
Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield@mastodon.social)
🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions. There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...
The rise of American authoritarianism
A niche group of political scientists may have uncovered what’s driving Donald Trump’s ascent. What they found has implications that go well beyond 2016.
Why So Many MAGA Men Look Like Joe Rogan
The slim-fit uniform of grindset entrepreneurs and right wing podcasters can be traced back decades.
Elon Musk Is the Midterms’ Biggest Disinformation Risk
The world’s wealthiest man pours money into GOP candidates while backing a floridly fake story about a Democrat on the platform he owns.
Newsweek and the Rise of the Zombie Magazine
How a decaying legacy magazine is being used to launder right-wing ideas and conspiracy theories.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Regime Change is exceptional. It transcends its genre...the book is packed with news that will stay news...This is reporting of consequence.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker “A flabbergasting feat of political reporting.” —Tina Brown “Riveting and richly textured...What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy, and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing, and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.” —Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times A riveting, intimate, and revelatory account of the most radical and consequential presidency of our time.From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency—a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him “no” are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President’s enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history. This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds—and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America—a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.
The Pain Is the Plan
MAGA is actively seeking to immiserate the country in order to cement their power over the rest of us.
How Popular YouTubers Pushed Young Male Voters Toward Trump
How podcasters like Joe Rogan and Logan Paul turned young men, a once apolitical demographic, into a massively powerful voting bloc,
The Liar’s Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability?
This study addresses the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians "crying wolf"' over fake news. Strategic and false claims that stories are fake news or deepfakes may benefit politicians by helping them maintain support after a scandal. We posit that this benefit, known as the "liar's dividend," may be achieved through two politician strategies: by invoking informational uncertainty or by encouraging oppositional rallying of core supporters. We administer five survey experiments to over 15,000 American adults detailing hypothetical politician responses to stories describing real politician scandals. We find that claims of misinformation representing both strategies raise politician support across partisan subgroups. These strategies are effective against text-based reports of scandals, but are largely ineffective against video evidence and do not reduce general trust in media. Finally, these false claims produce greater dividends for politicians than alternative responses to scandal, such as remaining silent or apologizing.
Pluralistic: MAGA crackup (18 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's been a year since Project 2025 became national news. At the time, I cited the great Rick Perlstein, an expert on the history of the conservative movement, who said that the most important thing about the P2025 document wasn't its extreme plans, but rather, its total incoherence:
When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries
The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of misinformation. Yet, little is known of the relationship between party politics and the spread of misinformation—in part due to a dearth of cross-national empirical data needed for comparative study. This article examines which parties are more likely to spread misinformation, by drawing on a comprehensive database of 32M tweets from parliamentarians in 26 countries, spanning 6 years and several election periods. The dataset is combined with external databases such as Parlgov and V-Dem, linking the spread of misinformation to detailed information about political parties and cabinets, thus enabling a comparative politics approach to misinformation. Using multilevel analysis with random country intercepts, we find that radical-right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation. Populism, left-wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation. These results suggest that political misinformation should be understood as part and parcel of the current wave of radical right populism, and its opposition to liberal democratic institution.
It's absolutely insane how much of a completely psychopathic chameleon this guy is. *One day* after the election and he's *completely* changed the way he writes, from a snarky MAGA edgelord to a moderate Republican Ivy League analyst.
Joel Wertheimer
This Vance post. The Trump era is over.
It occurs to me that since I have unique data on the right-wing ecosystem on Facebook, I can actually tell you with data, not vibes, if there actually has been a 50% decrease (the original claim) in bot activity on here supporting MAGA, or even any kind of substantial effect at all. There isn't.
