Breaking: Sources Say the Story You’re Reading Isn’t Real
The online right has grown addicted to MAGA Fanfic. It’s tripping up seasoned political observers, too.
THREE DAYS AFTER KAMALA HARRIS campaigned alongside Lizzo at a rally in Detroit, news emerged that cast an embarrassing cloud over the much-hyped event.
“Reports that Lizzo charged the Harris-Walz campaign $2.3 Million for one appearance at a Detroit rally,” the post read.
It was a juicy scoop—one that was quickly picked up by conservative commentators. Clay Travis mocked the revelation on his show. Sean Spicer called it “pretty desperate.” Margot Cleveland, the senior legal correspondent at the Federalist, laughed at Harris for paying entertainers to show up on her behalf.
The post was fiction. The account that “broke” the story was “Bad Hombre,” one of the cycle’s more nefarious posters on X. With a following of 115,000, Bad Hombre has gained influence and visibility on the right for being a prolific source of tweets that use journalistic language and framing to create the impression of real reporting even though the posts amount to nothing more than MAGA fanfic. It’s literally fake news.
Much of Bad Hombre’s content is based on stories and bits of information from other publications. But occasionally, a post will give the impression that Bad Hombre has insider access to people in Harris’s close orbit (or in the Washington Post newsroom) and is just gleefully spilling the tea.
Days before his Lizzo post, the account—the bio for which reads “Political commentary. Catholic. Populist.”—issued the following post:
Major drama within the Kamala Harris campaign this morning. A source reveals that Harris screamed at and angrily berated her campaign manager Julie Chavez for over 30 minutes on the phone this morning. . . . Chavez was in tears during the phone call as Kamala shred her to pieces, called her an idiot, inept, horrible at your f-ing job, and told her that her stupid advice is going to be the reason she loses.
Actual Harris campaign sources, not surprisingly, were totally perplexed.
It’s impossible to know the extent of Bad Hombre’s reach. But according to the barebones metrics X makes publicly visible on posts, the made-up Chavez story alone got seven million views.
Occasionally, Bad Hombre will post a bit of “news” based on actual public information. But these morsels of reported fact are presented in a way that fundamentally distorts the story. On October 22, Gwen Walz canceled a reproductive rights talk in Maine without offering an explanation. Bad Hombre picked up on the news, posting that the vice presidential nominee’s wife had canceled the event “angrily” because “Kamala spoke to Tim Walz to tell him his wife’s overbearing attitude was hurting her with male voters.” That post got 1.8 million views.
One of his more infamous posts—falsely accusing a Harris-supporting Republican couple in Pennsylvania of being paid actors and left-wing film producers—prompted Sky News Australia to do an entire segment on it as if it were true. (“This was great investigative journalism by the journalist that went and found that out,” one Sky News contributor says.) The couple said their life was turned into chaos, although they’ve since embraced their role as Harris surrogates.
Rumor, innuendo, and fabricated stories have always been staples of politics, of course. But what stands out about the current wave of political falsehoods is how widely it can spread and how little capacity there is to guard against it. This is especially true in the Wild West of social media, Elon Musk’s X, where content moderation on matters of fact has been almost wholly outsourced to community notes. Because community note placement depends on Reddit-style upvoting to rate “helpfulness,” the feature appears open to bad-faith manipulation, provided you can coordinate a sufficient number of the app’s users. Verification for users has also been overhauled so that anyone who pays can get a blue checkmark, meaning there are fewer reliable indicators to help people determine at a glance which sources of information are more trustworthy. The result has been a steadily growing stream of fake shit being pumped into a sewer whose algorithm often sends the worst of it shooting up through millions of people’s phones.
But what’s stood out during the close of the campaign is how that shit is presented: not just as hostile, speculative, bad-faith readings of reported stories everyone has access to, but as scoops, or news, or insider information to which the poster has exclusive access.
This specific kind of content may seem obvious to seasoned political observers who come across it. But most people who use X don’t have high media literacy, don’t trust the actual media to begin with, and are willing to believe the alternative sources being promoted to them on the platform—even ones with names like Bad Hombre. And on occasion, even the experts get confused.
On Tuesday, Bad Hombre posted that “Veteran Democrat strategist James Carville is telling campaign advisors and high-level donors behind the scenes that Kamala Harris is headed for a historic blowout, telling them she will lose every swing state and probably New Hampshire and Virginia too.”
Carville responded hours later by calling Bad Hombre an “ass wipe” and offering to pay $100 to the Trump campaign if “one credible person” came forward to say they had heard him say it.
I reached Carville shortly after to ask him how he had even heard about the offending post.
“Al Hunt called me,” he said, referencing the venerable reporter. “He said three people had called him in a panic. . . . People were talking about it. If Al Hunt gets three phone calls, I can assure you he didn’t get them from MAGA people.”
Bad Hombre is far from the only purveyor on X of this kind of MAGA fanfic. Ryan Fournier, the chair of the Students for Trump group, tweeted last week that a “source in DC” had told him: “Her [Kamala] internal polling is horrible… she’s going to lose Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump has a VERY good shot at winning this election. I don’t care for him, but starting to see that he is the better choice.” For good measure, Fournier added “Holy Shi*t” (smarmy asterisk in original). That post got 889,000 views.
Days earlier, “some sources” told Fournier that Harris “tore her campaign manager Julie Chavez apart on a call that lasted around 30 minutes,” telling her “she’s horrible at her job and would be the reason she loses.” Somehow, no one covering the campaign got a similar read out. Just Bad Hombre, who posted about Chavez about an hour before Fournier.
Occasionally, the fake news posts are easy to spot because real life events happen to intervene.
On October 23, Naperville Politics Guy posted on Twitter: “My sources are telling me Harris will be trailing in both Michigan and Wisconsin in the Quinnipiac poll.” Hours later, the poll came out with Harris ahead in Michigan and tied in Wisconsin.
On October 24, an account with the handle @akafacehots posted that “In a stunning leak, emails from Kamala Harris’ campaign manager to the full campaign staff are warning they will fire anyone who talks to the press.” Miraculously, the leak managed to get plugged right after that hot info reached that person’s inbox. More than 814,000 people viewed that post.
On October 26, the account @ProudElephantUS posted that “Kamala’s campaign released a photo of her in a McDonald’s outfit in an attempt to prove she actually worked there.” The account added that there was a problem with the photo: it was “a photoshopped picture over a white womans [sic] face.” There was another problem, however: the Harris campaign had never released any photo. @ProudElephantUS had made it up.
These instances may seem like minor occurrences in the larger media environment—hardly the type of episodes that could bend the election, or sour potential Harris voters on her candidacy. The much bigger problem is the larger sense of unreality they help create on X and related platforms, exhausting users and encouraging their cynicism about politics generally. But occasionally, the made-up stuff is shouted from the biggest megaphone of all.
Last week, Musk himself shared a screenshot of a story published by the Atlantic with the headline: “TRUMP IS LITERALLY HITLER.” The screenshot was a fabrication; nothing like the purported article had ever appeared in the magazine. Readers dutifully added a community note to Musk’s tweet pointing out that the screenshot was a satirical fabrication. But it remains up to this day.