I had been wondering what the Sydney Sweeney thing was … in truth, this old lady was wondering who Sydney Sweeney is, mostly for the reason Rob Flaherty addresses in this column. In recent days, the right wing had used some dumb dogwhistle to distract from the thing — Russia Russia Russia — they had used to distract from Trump’s Epstein scandal.

Whatever it was, whoever she is, I knew, it was another demonstration of how well the right can distract and focus attention.

You might be wondering why anybody cares about this. But here’s the thing: The fact that this moment became a thing at all — that a stupid pun could metastasize into a full-blown political moment — says something real about the media ecosystem we’re all trapped in. And it says even more about why Democrats keep losing the culture war, and with it, the narrative war that inevitably shapes who wins elections.

The Sweeney thing is an example of how memes can arise from some randos and filter up to elected politicians, including Trump and JD Vance, and once they do, dominate the online ecosystem.

On the left, we start with a set of messages we’d like for people to believe. We then test (like, wow, do we test) messages for their persuasive impact. We use paid media to get those messages in front of people, at which point we meet public perception for the first time, and fight against it. We treat politics as the slicing and dicing of issues, not the formation of perceptions.

The right understands that virality is as much of a barometer for success as whether an argument is seen as persuasive. Conservatives use the internet as a testing ground for what has heat, and they work it up the ladder. Organic media wags the dog. Campaigns simply add kerosene to what people are already telling them they find resonant. In a world where voters don’t trust institutions, messaging that feels native to their own conversations will be significantly more effective than what’s being pushed to them in ads.

This isn’t to say that campaigns don’t matter, or that ads don’t work (in fact, another lesson from 2024 ought to be that they do). But they’re the last mile. If all you’ve got are ads after years of withering cultural definition, you’re going to be playing from behind. Our space is just optimized for return on campaign investment, not shaping the narrative terrain on which they’re fought. Republicans have an always-on machine that shows — not tells — people a story about cultural values. And that’s where real political resonance comes from.

Caroline Orr Bueno had a great piece on the danger posed because of the left’s inability to do this — in significant part because the right has stacked the algorithmic deck against them.

[T]he left typically uses this tactic reactively — responding to narratives that the right has already established. Trump’s ecosystem uses it proactively, often launching narratives from scratch to get ahead of potential negative stories coming down the pipeline.

This is what LOLGOP and I have tried to address in our Cat Turd Deficit videos.

The left, giddy with the brief (but very real) success of their recent focus on Epstein (which piggybacked on that right wing ecosystem and required cooperation with Thomas Massie), often thinks of this solely in terms of attention, and as a result does little more than claim one after another thing is a distraction of the thing.

But it’s not. It’s more than that. It’s the ability to test and reinforce on the fly.

Yesterday was an example of the stakes. There were several Epstein developments:

• A judge called out Todd Blanche’s obvious diversion in his request for grand jury materials
• After Sheldon Whitehouse focused some attention on the Ghislaine Maxwell transfer to comfier digs by sending a letter, Allison Gill published actual details of it, including that the sex predator may have the same privilege to leave the facility to “work” that Jeffrey Epstein had
• Ghislaine’s former cellmate revealed that Ghislaine had tried to pitch the Biden Administration on dirt she had on Trump, but they ignored her

All that was drowned out by Trump’s announcement he will invade DC because a boy named Big Balls was assaulted by unarmed teenagers. That happened, by chance or perhaps not (because Trump is really more tactical on these legal assaults than people credit), on the first day of the California trial over Trump’s invasion of Los Angeles. Indeed, during the trial, the two DOD witnesses admitted they had absolutely no advance notice of the DC deployment or Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s public comments on it, and DOJ desperately tried to keep the comments Hegseth made at the presser out of evidence, even though he is a named defendant. (Politico has a good report on the trial and the split screen it created with the DC announcement, including how a major general was accused of disloyalty for objecting to a stunt in MacArthur Park.)

A lot of Dems responded by claiming that the invasion of DC was an intentional distraction from Epstein. That gets things entirely reversed: the invasion of a second blue city is another step in a mostly pre-planned map for fascism, and Trump’s brief inability to redirect his online mob’s focus on Epstein merely created a speed bump in that march of fascism, one Sydney Sweeney seems to have corrected.

I don’t mind if people claim that the invasion of DC is the distraction, because the Epstein thing still has salience, but let’s at least aspire to do that effectively!

I spent much of the day on Xitter, watching and trying to contest what Flaherty and Orr Bueno describe. Over the course of several hours, the right tried several different messaging strategies.

• Responding to journalists and Democrats’ factual observation that crime in DC is actually falling quickly by pointing to the suspension of an officer last month over claims about whether MPD was bringing crime rates down by misclassifying crimes. Given how the police union — which initiated the complaint that led to the suspension — loudly backed Trump’s invasion, I don’t rule out the fight over stats being a set-up in anticipation of this invasion. In any case, this dispute ignored that Eagle Ed Martin had claimed credit for lowering crime in DC by 25% in April.
• Having women talk about their fear of walking in DC and others talk about how they’ve moved out of it.
• Accusing Democrats of being pro crime, repeating Stephen Miller’s fascist othering language, and then, ultimately, repeating Trump’s racist dogwhistle that DC and Democrats are filthy. This is eliminationist language and must be contested.

I tried a bunch of things to respond (I make no claims about whether I had any success). Even before the announcement, I did this post on how Eagle Ed, now in charge of weaponizing DOJ, had not signed a domestic violence arrest warrant MPD drew up for Cory Mills, allowing Mills to allegedly threaten a second woman with revenge porn. When elected Republicans, including Jim Jordan, spoke out in favor of the DC invasion, I RTed them, noting that then they of course would demand that Pam Bondi arrest Mills in one of the first things she does.

During the presser, I posted one after another image from the January 6 assault cases, covering just a fraction of the ones on this list. After the presser and my bleg, someone put Trump’s comments from the presser, talking about how people disrespect cops, to video from January 6.

Both of these things made me realize that the January 6 archive has degraded in searches; until I remembered my own post of the assault arrests, I was struggling to find spectacular images of Trump’s criminals. But once I had this video, I used it as a rebuttal to all the people who claimed Democrats support crime. It must have had some effect, because one of the main far right January 6 propagandists — who made her grift on January 6 — complained that Dems will never stop talking about it.

I also tried to respond to Chuck Grassley’s (and that of Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, generally) enthusiastic boosting for this invasion by pointing out that many of their states are more dangerous than DC.

This is a problematic response, I now recognize. All it serves to do is highlight how majority minority cities around the country have been neglected. Indeed, Marsha Blackburn will likely run for Governor by demonizing one of Tennessee’s great cities, Memphis. Plus, Missouri already did invade St. Louis in an effort to reverse criminal justice reforms.

Through all of this, almost no one (including me) mentioned that Congress had cut funding for DC, creating the problems Trump claims to want to fix.

But ultimately (just before bedtime my time, which is totally not a healthy use of my time), it came down to those claims of filth.

A man just moved the woman who “stole” his spa girls and turned one into a sex slave into comfier prison digs to prevent her from revealing the dirt she has on him, and we’re losing the battle over who is filth.

It is my belief that this failure of messaging — the left’s inability to remain laser-focused on not just Trump’s crimes, but the impact of them — is the real reason Trump got reelected in spite of the fact that he’s a thuggish criminal (though the fact that most lefties wanted to spread conspiracy theories about Merrick Garland instead of focusing on Trump’s crimes didn’t help). I mean, some of the voices who were most focused on Trump’s crimes — Dan Goldman and. Ryan Goodman — confessed during the transition not only that they didn’t know what had been made public before the election, much less hammer Trump on those public details, but were misinforming people about key details.

People got bored and that created a vacuum Trump exploited.

Voters didn’t factor Trump’s history of sex crimes, fraud, and fascism into their vote because Trump’s opponents failed to prosecute the issue in the public sphere on a daily basis even as Trump spun a tale of grievance that actually attracted younger voters. And unless we fix this — unless we find a message that a President who pardoned cop assailants, freed terrorists, and may soon free the sex predator who “stole” his girls is filth — we will not defeat this fascist onslaught.

Update: Fixed the description of the dispute over crime classification in DC.