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 an appearance at a rally in Detroit,” the post said.

It was a juicy scoop, which was quickly picked up by conservative commentators. Clay Travis mocked the revelation in your program. Sean Spicer called him “pretty desperate.” Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent for the Federalistlaughed at Harris for paid entertainers appear on your behalf.

The publication was fiction. The account that “broke” the story was “Bad Hombre”, one of the most disastrous posters of the cycle in X. With 115,000 followers, Bad Hombre has gained influence and visibility on the right for being a prolific source of tweets that use journalistic information . language and framing to create the impression of real reporting even though the posts are nothing more than MAGA fanfic. It is literally fake news.

Much of Bad Hombre’s content is based on stories and snippets of information from other publications. But occasionally, a post will give the impression that Bad Hombre has privileged access to people in Harris’s close orbit (or in the Washington Post newsroom) and is just happily spilling the tea.

Days before her post about Lizzo, the account, whose bio reads “Political commentary. Catholic. Populist.”—issued the next post:

Big drama within the Kamala Harris campaign this morning. A source reveals that Harris angrily yelled and berated her campaign manager, Julie Chavez, for more than 30 minutes on the phone this morning. . . . Chavez was crying during the phone call while Kamala ripped her to shreds, calling her an idiot, inept, horrible at her damn job, and telling her that her stupid advice would be the reason she would lose.

Actual Harris campaign sources, unsurprisingly, were totally stumped.

It’s impossible to know the extent of Bad Hombre’s reach. But according to the basic metrics that X makes publicly visible in posts, Chavez’s fabricated story alone garnered seven million views.

From time to time, Bad Hombre will publish some “news” based on real public information. But these fragments of reported facts are presented in a way that fundamentally distorts the story. On October 22, Gwen Walz canceled a talk on reproductive rights in Maine without offering an explanation. Bad Hombre heard the news, posting that The wife of the vice presidential candidate had canceled the event “angry” because “Kamala spoke to Tim Walz to tell him that his wife’s authoritarian attitude was hurting her with male voters.” That post got 1.8 million views.

One of his most infamous posts—falsely accusing a Republican couple who supported Harris in Pennsylvania of being paid actors and left-wing film producers—incited Sky News Australia make a whole segment about it as if it were true. (“This was great investigative journalism by the journalist who went and discovered that,” says a Sky News contributor). The couple said their life became chaos, although since then they have hugged each other their role as Harris surrogates.

Rumors, innuendo and made-up 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 ability there is to protect against it. This is especially true in the Wild West of social media, Elon Musk’s X, where content moderation on factual issues has been almost entirely outsourced to community notes. Because the placement of community notes depends on a Reddit-style upvote to rate “usefulness,” the feature seems open to bad-faith manipulation, as long as you can coordinate a sufficient number of app users . User verification has also been revised so that anyone who pays can get a blue check mark, meaning there are fewer reliable indicators to help people determine at a glance which sources of information are most trustworthy. The result has been an ever-increasing stream of fake shit being pumped into a sewer whose algorithm often sends the worst through millions of people’s phones.

But what stood out during the close of the campaign is how that shit is presented: not just as hostile, speculative, bad faith readings of stories to which everyone has access, but as scoops, news or privileged information to which the poster You have exclusive access.

This specific type of content may seem obvious to seasoned political observers who come across it. But most people who use . And sometimes even experts get confused.

Tuesday, bad man aware that “veteran Democratic strategist James Carville is telling campaign aides 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, calling Bad Hombre an “ass wipe” and offering to pay the Trump campaign $100 if “a credible person” came forward to say they had heard him say it.

I reached out to Carville shortly after to ask him how he had found out about the offending post.

“Al Hunt called me,” he said, referring to 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 provider in X of this type of MAGA fanfic. Ryan Fournier, president of the group Students for Trump, he tweeted last week that a “source in DC” had told him: “Her (Kamala) internal polls are horrible… she is going to lose Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump has a VERY good chance of winning this election. I don’t care, but I’m starting to see that it’s the best option.” For good measure, Fournier added “Holy Shi*t” (smarmy asterisk in the original). That post got 889,000 views.

Days before, “some sources” he told Fournier that Harris “destroyed her campaign manager, Julie Chavez, in a call that lasted about 30 minutes,” telling her that “she’s horrible at her job and it would be the reason she loses.” Somehow, no one covering the campaign received a similar reading. Just Bad Hombre, who posted about Chávez on a hour before Fournier.

Sometimes fake news posts are easy to spot because they involve real-life events.

On October 23, Naperville Politics Guy posted on Twitter: “My sources tell me Harris will be trailing in both Michigan and Wisconsin in the Quinnipiac poll.” Hours later, the survey came out with Harris ahead in Michigan and tied in Wisconsin.

On October 24, an account with the handle @akafacehots aware that “In a surprising leak, emails from Kamala Harris’ campaign manager to all campaign staff warn that anyone who speaks to the press will be fired.” Miraculously, the leak managed to be plugged right after that hot piece of information hit that person’s inbox. More than 814,000 people saw that post.

On October 26, the account @ProudElephantUS aware that “Kamala’s campaign posted a photo of her dressed at McDonald’s in an attempt to prove she actually worked there.” The account added that there was a problem with the photo: it was “a photoshopped image of a white woman’s face (sic).” There was another problem, though: Harris’ campaign had never released any photos. @ProudElephantUS had made it up.

These cases may seem like minor events in the broader media environment, hardly the kind of episodes that could skew the election or sour potential Harris voters on her candidacy. The much bigger problem is the greater sense of unreality they help create on X and related platforms, exhausting users and fostering their cynicism about politics in general. But every once in a while, made-up things are shouted from the biggest megaphone of them all.

Last week, musk he himself shared a screenshot of a story published by the Atlantic with the headline: “TRUMP IS LITERALLY HITLER.” The screenshot was an invention; Nothing similar to the alleged 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 valid to this day.