Matthew Sheffield

🟦 Editing Flux (npub1rq3…rj7q)
🟦 Writer, web developer, and former political pollster
🟦 Host, Theory of Change podcast  
🟦 Words in Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Daily Beast, and elsewhere
🟦 Posts about politics, science, religion, media, and technology with occasional memes 

New book: "What Republicans Know"
https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/what-republicans-know

Signal: matthewsheffield.01

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Podcast: https://flux.community/podcasts/theory-of-change
Book: What Republicans Know: https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/what-republicans-know
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/matthewsheffield

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Last Notes

2025-09-19 20:30:56 UTC

Trump's poll numbers are the lowest ever. Even Republicans are admitting the obvious now that the country is on the wrong track.
He's killed the economy, killed our respect around the world, and declared war on freedom of speech.
2026 looking like a blue wave. Never stop attacking and stay vigilant.
https://apnorc.org/projects/pessimism-about-the-direction-of-the-country-is-growing-among-republicans/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/232/858/106/547/142/original/0734996b3eb66b0d.png

2025-09-14 16:53:48 UTC

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Murder is wrong. Capital punishment is wrong. No one has the right to take another human being's life.
But Charlie Kirk didn't care about human life. He was cavalier about people being shot in public settings. Said it was just breaking some eggs to make an omelet:
"I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment."
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. But he was a terrible person.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/203/685/345/806/374/original/11b866789a3866a0.mp4

2025-09-11 22:22:12 UTC

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And of course, we cannot forget that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who tried to shoot Donald Trump, was also a registered Republican https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-republican/

2025-09-11 22:08:43 UTC

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Steven Carrillo, another boogaloo boi, pleaded guilty to murdering an Oakland security guard at a BLM protest in 2020.
He had posted on Facebook about wanting to start an anti-government revolution.
The right loves committing violence and pinning it on the left https://apnews.com/article/us-air-force-san-francisco-oakland-police-government-and-politics-54ee0fa4316354d893b691c5f8d44023

2025-09-11 20:28:57 UTC

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This reflects a pattern of behavior by far-right activists. They have been trying to terrify their fellow Republicans to believe that trans people or liberals were trying to kill them.
Fox News almost every week for the past 20 years has exaggerated crime incidents in Democratic-voting cities. This is what Trump is drawing upon when he illegally sends soldiers into civilian areas. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/study-fox-prime-time-hosts-turn-crime-political-weapon-against-democrats

2025-09-11 20:21:54 UTC

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One of the prominent leaders of this group of Republicans is the neo-Nazi activist Nick Fuentes. He became famous within the ultra-right for organizing followers to show up at Kirk events in order to intimidate and embarrass Kirk.
I wrote about it in 2019.
They never stopped trying to harass Kirk.
https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2019/11/conservative-establishments-nightmare-only-just-beginning

2025-09-11 20:16:37 UTC

🧵 Since the shooting of #CharlieKirk, radical Republicans have been pushing violence-inciting claims about the shooter. The police have not apprehended the person and don't know his name.
We don't know what the motive is, however, I think given the miasma of claims that "of course" a left-winger or trans person did it, it's worth exploring why the shooter very easily could be a right-wing extremist.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/187/496/558/226/044/original/1310b86dfa39e17e.png

2025-09-05 23:52:40 UTC

🧵Tech oligarchs took over the Republican Party and now they are using Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson to take over the Democrats by co-opting progressive YIMBY movements.
Please read and share: https://newintermag.com/abundance-big-techs-bid-for-the-democratic-party/

2025-08-08 01:19:06 UTC

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9/ In his second term, Trump has been far more censorial than any modern American president.
He signed executive orders banning "improper ideology" from museums. He's removed thousands of web pages honoring historical figures--simply because they were not European Americans.
Republicans love censorship. It's their primary intellectual vehicle. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-targets-improper-ideology-smithsonian-museums-executive-order-rcna198503

2025-08-08 01:02:31 UTC

🧵/ 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…
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/990/441/238/030/276/original/ff0461655634b5e7.png

2025-07-19 19:52:07 UTC

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.
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 can't control it 🧵
https://plus.flux.community/p/epstein-grok-and-the-rights-epistemic

2025-07-16 18:45:43 UTC

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3/ People don't watch TV ads anymore. They fast-forward, mute, or just skip them. Everyone hates ads, especially from politicians.
Meanwhile, Republicans are creating memes, culture, & micro-influencers who shape perception. Trump and his people aren't campaigning, they're building a reality for fans.

2025-07-16 18:41:27 UTC

🧵1/ Social media permanently changed American political campaigning, but only Republicans have changed with it.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election, not because people liked him, but because his party understands network marketing in the social media age.
https://plus.flux.community/p/republicans-treat-politics-like-viral

2025-06-20 19:15:32 UTC

Incredible data work!
Someone has gone through and run the numbers on molestation crimes against children.
67% of politicians accused or convicted of child abuse nationwide were Republicans.
QAnon needs to look in the mirror.
Out of nearly 11,000 USA cases examined, just 1 offender was a drag queen. Only 5 were trans. 846 were religious figures. 301 were police.
Date range: February 10, 2023 through May 23, 2024
Source: https://www.whoismakingnews.com/#who-are-the-real-predators
#notadragqueen #lgbtqia #trans #TransRights
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/717/264/030/986/876/original/34d2912f32e94351.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/717/281/681/870/676/original/c6742f8e84b8f00b.png

2025-06-09 17:18:54 UTC

🧵Donald Trump just federalized the National Guard in California—the first time a president has done so against a governor’s will since 1965. But what’s even more alarming is how he's promising much worse.
"The bar is what I think it is," he said when asked about his threat standard for deploying active-duty troops.
America is in deep Schmitt. Trump is trying to enact the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt's philosophy of dictatorship.
Continue here or click through... https://plus.flux.community/p/donald-trumps-state-of-exception

2025-04-05 01:54:44 UTC

1/2 Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admits that he wants robots to replace manufacturing jobs.
The last lie that Trump was selling to his supporters was that trashing the US economy would somehow bring back manufacturing jobs to Americans.
The oligarchs don't want this though. Instead, they're having Trump tank stocks and other assets so they can scrap America.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/282/860/523/863/732/original/0b0cb4965e3f7590.mp4

2025-03-25 04:36:30 UTC

Strength is the ability to bend but not break, to change while cohering.
#philosophy

2025-02-20 04:05:17 UTC

Nikki Haley just accused Donald Trump of spouting "classic Russian talking points. Exactly what Putin wants."
She should have listened to Trump's favorite poem, "The Snake" from during his 2024 campaign.
Lots of comparatively more moderate independents and Republicans lied to themselves about Democrats being "extreme." We're paying the price now.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/034/230/949/937/120/original/1dc12c34813c6a57.mp4

2025-02-01 15:02:27 UTC

Besides the recrudescence of reaction, the second-biggest problem of our times is that too many of the smart people just want to watch documentaries on Netflix, laughing sardonically while fascists pillage.
They'd rather be saying "can you believe this guy" on the way to the gas chamber than actually organize and engage in politics.

2024-12-20 20:47:06 UTC

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They certainly do not. And if you listen to this video, you can see that Thiel is not particularly intelligent at all. He's got viewpoints no different than your average lunatic parading around with a sandwich board sign that the world is ending

2024-08-31 16:13:01 UTC

After lying that he'd be "great for women and their reproductive rights” and pretending to favor free IVF, Donald Trump says he won't vote to overturn Florida's extreme 6 week abortion ban.
This is why you can't trust his Project 2025 denials. He'll say anything to win. No denial or promise he makes can be believed.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/057/514/219/560/469/original/b208f48b1a2083a6.mp4

2024-08-05 14:35:23 UTC

This is a wild story that says a lot about right-wing evangelicalism:
1) Matt Bevin, the Republican former Kentucky governor, adopted a boy from Ethiopia for PR purposes
2) Bevin and his wife decided they don't like the boy so they ship him off to an abusive "troubled teen" facility in Jamaica
3) Jamaican government shuts down the horrible group
4) Bevin family abandoned the boy in Jamaica after the facility was closed
https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/08/04/former-ky-gov-matt-bevins-adopted-son-reportedly-removed-from-abusive-facility-in-jamaica/