Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance’s (R-Ohio) public profile has changed tremendously since his now-running mate former President Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016. Vance, then a venture capitalist and author of the successful memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was a harsh critic of Trump and used to openly describe him as an “idiot,” wondering whether he might be “America’s Hitler” in a Facebook conversation with a friend.

As Vance radicalized over the course of a successful Ohio Senate campaign, he reconciled with Trump while becoming a fixture of MAGA politics in his own right.

“I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration,” Vance told the New York Times’ Ross Douthat in June this year.

Along the way, his personal style also shifted, going from the baby-faced blogger of yore to a sitting senator. Vance grew a beard, got sharper haircuts, and settled into a professional suit and tie.

Some people think he hasn’t stopped there though, and are speculating that he’s also wearing eyeliner.

Is JD Vance wearing eyeliner?

On TikTok, the theories have been swirling since Trump announced the pick.

“This is unserious political commentary but I can’t stop thinking about it,” @mamasissiesays said in one video posted on June 19. “Is JD Vance wearing eyeliner?”

The TikToker, who goes by Casey, compared stylized photos of Vance with his official Senate portrait, as well as how he looked on TV appearances.

“No eyeliner to see here … that’s very much a man not wearing eyeliner,” Casey said about his Senate portrait, then contrasted it with a TV appearance. “Obviously something’s going on here,” she commented, “along with some contour, I’d love to know his shade.”

“That is a bold line just a few millimeters over and he’ll have a proper cat-eye on his hands,” she added, zooming in on one shot of Vance’s eye.

“We’re fine with men who wear makeup,” she specified. “What we’re not fine with is hypocrites who make … harmful policies against men who wear makeup.”

She also claimed to have found Vance’s shade, a “deep taupe-gray matte” glide-on eye pencil called “Urban Decay Desperation.”

It's a fitting color for a man who chucked his liberal values to latch on to a candidate decrying crime-riddled American metropolises.

Casey wasn’t the only TikToker who noticed the eyeliner. @skyeleight55, who goes by Skye Dawn on the platform, reacted to Casey’s video with a screenshot of Vance she said she’d taken because she had the exact same thought

“You cannot tell me he’s not sitting there … [with] foundation, eye liner, and filler,” Skye Dawn said.

Another TikToker offered the full JD Vance makeup tutorial for his national debut at the Republican National Convention.

In the post, they draw on a really “tight” eyeliner, both above and “under your eye like you are a 14-year-old girl in 2006," that, along with mascara "makes our eyes look sunken and like we're worried for America."

The Trump-Vance campaign didn’t answer questions about whether they were employing a makeup artist for Vance. Multiple people who worked for Vance in the Senate also didn’t answer questions about his makeup regime. Plenty of politicians wear makeup today on the campaign trail and under the glare of stage and television lights.

Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon blamed his loss in 1960 against John F. Kennedy at least partially on the fact that he refused to wear makeup during their televised debate. Polling before the TV faceoff had Nixon six points up, but his haggard appearance turned voters off.

Kriss Blevens, who’s done campaign makeup for dozens of presidential candidates over the years, also didn’t respond to questions about whether Vance was sporting eyeliner.

But this wouldn't be the first aesthetic secret of a politician outed by TikTok.

Online theories about the footwear of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) did him no favors in a brutal Republican primary campaign against Trump. TikTokers speculated that DeSantis was wearing a wedge shoe to increase his height, something he denied but which led to numerous awkward questions about the boots, and even an attack from Trump, who accused him of wearing high heels.

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The Heritage Foundation, the juggernaut right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, an ambitious uber-conservative policy platform to implement if former President Donald Trump is reelected this year, is on a crusade to solve the assassination attempt against him.

This week, it revealed it purchased location data from the address of Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks to pinpoint his travel.

And they've unearthed some very, very, very dubious ties to the FBI.

“We found the assassin’s connections through our in-depth analysis of mobile ad data to track movements of Crooks and his associates,” the think tank's Oversight Project wrote to open a thread they posted on Monday.

“To do this, we tracked devices that regularly visited both Crooks’s home and place of work and followed them.”

The thread highlights those devices—which could be tied to Crooks, his parents, or other people in the vicinity of his home—traveling to places Project Oversight says looks fishy.

Most concerning to them, one device went somewhere near FBI headquarters once.

"Someone who regularly visited Crooks home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place. This is in the same vicinity of an @FBI office on June 26, 2023," it wrote. “Who’s device is this?” it added darkly.

The map shared shows downtown Washington, D.C. with two blue circles, indicating they visited a building in Gallery Place between 7th Street Northwest and 6th Street Northwest on June 26, 2023.

The FBI main office is within a half mile of the dots. However, the location is right next to the Capital One Arena, where the Washinton Capitals and Wizards play.

Also on the block are numerous restaurants and chain eateries. One of the blue circles on Project Oversight’s map looks like it’s in the Gallery Place complex, which includes a Haagen Daaz and a Regal Cinema.

"Imagine doing this level of research but not bothering to note it appears this person just ate at Clyde's lol," joked one person on X.

The project also highlighted a device “linked to Crooks” visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts in early March, and a device “linked to Crook’s work” traveling from his home in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania to Butler, Pennsylvania two times on July 4 and July 8. 

Crooks worked at a nursing home and rehab center in Bethel Park, about a 50-mile drive from Butler, where Crooks opened fire on the rally Trump was speaking at on July 13, killing one and seriously injuring two others. According to a map the Oversight Project posted, the device stopped off at a Home Depot in Butler, and all activity on the device ended on July 12.

The Oversight Project also linked a device they say is linked to Crooks to Allegheny Arms & Gun Works on Aug 30, 2023.

That was the gun store in Butler where Crooks bought 50 rounds of ammunition just hours before he opened fire on the rally, reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

A conspiratorial strain runs through a lot of the Oversight Project’s thread. They end it by saying that they wouldn’t be sharing the information congressional task force charged with investigating the assassination attempt because of the “connective tissue between that entity and FBI, USSS, and other entities.”

Plenty of posters picked up on that speculative angle.

“Democrats and FBI were in on it!” claimed @_BruceBane in one post.

“I strongly recommend bringing in total outsiders, such as a retired military inspector general, and providing them with the necessary authority to root out this corrupt branch of government,” suggested 8chan owner Jim Watkins. “Competent and loyal outsiders still exist and could effectively address these urgent issues.”

“They need to completely hand it off to Pennsylvania State Police,” proposed @Distress99. “Any federal agency would be absurd—these potential allegations create a clear conflict of interest.”

Other posters were baffled by just how the organization got access to the granular level of data needed to pinpoint what might be Crooks’ movements.

“How did you get access to this type of data?” asked @zephyr_wild, with plenty of posters lining up to explain that it comes from advertisers which businesses sell to other businesses.

“It's generic aggregated commercial tower data.  It is used in targeted advertising and is pretty granular,” wrote @admiral_nemo. “It is likely ‘scrubbed’.  Meaning, the devices are trackable... but identity of device holder is unknown.”

“This is why flashlight apps want your location and contacts and why you can't disable the stock weather app,” added @Jimerican2.

People present at the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot were tracked by similar advertising data, which included 100,000 locations pings distributed across thousands of smartphones. The New York Times described how ostensibly anonymized data can actually be cross-referenced across multiple databases using a unique identifier called a Mobile Ad ID. That ID can be matched with a wealth of other data in other, non-anonymous databases. These include information like first and last names, home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and even precise locations.

That level of tracking capability had some people impressed, but it also made them uneasy about the power that sort of data could have for think tanks like Heritage.

“The amount of information gathered by digital ADVERTISING is wild, looks to be what this OSINT account used to pull data,” posted @WeaponOutfitter in reaction to the Project Oversight thread.

Others were less sanguine about the capabilities on display.

“yo this is fucking terrifying. this data should not be accessible. what the fuck,” posted @daysnotlived succinctly. 

“Feels like the real takeaway here is ‘The Heritage Foundation has unrestricted surveillance powers,” added @ebeggin1.

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Democrats focused their messaging upon the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 program in recent weeks, with mentions of the over 900-page uber-conservative policy document tripling since the beginning of June, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. 

That push has some Republicans distancing themselves from the project, including their 2024 nominee former President Donald Trump. But despite Trump’s attempts to back away from the policy proposal, he may have a hard time pretending his ticket doesn’t endorse it. His vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to a book by the architect of the agenda, which is coming out in September.

An Amazon presale page for "Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America” has been circulating online, tagging Vance as the man behind the foreword. 

The "Dawn's Early Light" sales copy explicitly references Project 2025.

"Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 head Kevin Roberts outlines a peaceful 'Second American Revolution' for voters looking to shift the power back into the hands of the people," it reads.

Vance, prior to his selection as Trump's vice presidential pick, tweeted about his eagerness to endorse the book.

Roberts, who is the president of the Heritage Foundation, said at the beginning of July that the project was part of a “Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Vance's own words in his blurb for the book are a nod to violent revolution.

“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism ... We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote. 

But its stark vision shocked those on the left and is being used to galvanize Democrats.

“It is really important that voters understand that Donald Trump in a second term would be far worse, far more dangerous and far more extreme than he was even in his first term,” TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser to the then-Biden campaign, told the Post in the first week of July. “That is a core argument that we are making and must continue to make to voters, and Project 2025 is one of the most effective ways we can make that point.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, has also made Project 2025 an early focus in her campaign, evoking the threat of it at a rally at the Indiana Convention Center on Wednesday.

“We must also recognize there are those who are trying to take us backward," Harris said in her speech. "Can you believe they put that in writing? This represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future. These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back."

The Daily Dot has not reviewed the full text of the book’s foreword by Vance but has reached out to HarperCollins.

Trump made opposition to the plan part of his campaign speech over the brewing public backlash.

At the beginning of July, Trump posted on Truth Social saying that he “know[s] nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

“They read some of the things, and they are extreme,” Trump said about the project during his speech at his first rally with Vance in Georgia this week. “They’re seriously extreme.”

“But I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said standing in front of a Trump-Vance 2024 podium. “I don’t want to know anything about it.”

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Andrew Torba, the founder of alt-social media site Gab, claimed on Wednesday that the site "learned" that the attempted Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks posted on his site.

Where’d they find him? In Catturd’s mentions, of course.

The Daily Dot couldn’t immediately confirm if the posts Torba shared in a post on X actually are Crooks.

However, an account the Daily Dot found that matches up with the images shared by Torba appears to have been removed from the site.

Torba later confirmed the account's name matched the one the Daily Dot identified as @epicmicrowave. It's since been put back up.

Torba said in a statement on X that Gab saved the account data and are ready to turn it over pending a search warrant.

In an email to supporters later, Torba revealed that they learned of the account "after receiving an emergency disclosure request from a law enforcement agency."

“Approximately 30 minutes ago, Gab learned that Thomas Crooks, the deranged Joe Biden supporter who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump, may have had an account on our platform. We are unable to confirm that the account in question actually belonged to him,” Torba wrote at 2:34pm on Wednesday. “The account was last active on the site in 2021. As far as we are aware, the account did not use the site to send any direct messages. He posted on the site nine (9) times total.”

Torba shared two screenshots of pro-Biden comments, with the handle blacked out.

“While the account made very few posts on the site, the majority of them were in support of President Biden,” Torba claimed. “A number of posts in particular expressed support for President Biden's COVID lockdowns, border policies and executive orders.”

In one, the poster replied to Catturd, mocking his election forecasting skills.

“Didn’t you also think Biden would lose in a landslide yeah I would not be very confident in your election predictions,” the account wrote on Feb 4, 2021.

In the other post, the poster defends Biden’s border policy by pointing to a study comparing crime stats for undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas.

“Biden executive orders don’t incentivize human trafficking as human traffickers aren’t interested in citizenships (sic), likewise the majority of illegal immigrants are not criminals and in fact some studies (such as the one linked below) show lower rates of crime committed by these individuals,” the poster wrote. “It is also unclear if the extensive path to citizenship is in fact effective at routing out potential bad actors hence why there is a review of that system.”

In a follow-up post Torba shared additional screenshots of the account replying to former Inforwars correspondent Paul Joseph Watson and Bill Mitchell.

The account also appeared to respond to Torba once.

Not everybody was buying that the poster was Crooks though.

“He wrote '’hence'????? Oh, c'mon. How many 20 year-olds use the word HENCE?” asked @IllinoisMomm.

Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper after firing into the crowd at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was 20 years old when he died.

If he is the Gab poster, he would have been 17 at the time the posts were made. Initial reports claim that while Crooks registered as a Republican, he made one donation to Democrats.

An email to Gab bounced back.

In a follow-up post, Torba said that he was disclosing the information "at significant personal and business risk. If the past is any guide, defying the D.C. consensus by publishing the first definitive evidence that the shooter was a Biden supporter" would lead to government harassment against the site, which Torba said it faced after the Jan. 6 2021 Capitol riot.

This post has been updated.

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Vice President Kamala Harris is all but officially the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee for president. After just a day of campaigning, she was backed by more than 1,976 pledged delegates. That’s enough for her to win the nomination outright on the Democratic National Convention’s first ballot.

Ever since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race over the weekend and effectively turned the party’s nomination over to Harris, the internet has been flooded with Harris discourse, memes, and discussion, from coconut riffs to Brat-inspired rebrands, unburdened by what has been.

On Reddit, there’s been no shortage of discussion either, with posts about Kamala and memes about Kamala hitting the front page of r/all daily.

But some people on Reddit have had enough of what they’re calling ‘Kamala spam,” especially in subreddits where they say posts about the vice president are wildly out of theme or irrelevant. Some posters even suspect astroturfing bots to be behind the flood of Kamala posts. Many posters, it seems, are feeling burdened by what is.

“I’ve been seeing Kamala Harris being posted on literally every subreddit, even apolitical ones. What’s going on? Is Reddit under attack by bots or something?” posted u/bowlis in /r/OutOfTheLoop on Tuesday, pointing to a couple of posts on r/GenZ, r/Pennsylvania, and r/pics.

And while r/Genz or r/Pennsylvania might seem like a more natural place to discuss politics, r/Pics posters in particular have been complaining about the flood of political posts in recent days.

“Why is this sub ‘Us politics’ now?” commented u/rhett_ad under a since-deleted post of Harris at the Mexican border titled ‘VP Kamala Harris at the US Mexico Border. Trump claims she’s never been to before.’

But they’re not the only redditor to complain about the flood of Kamala posts.

“When did this turn into a political subreddit?” asked u/bucky133. “That's all I see from it for weeks now.”

“It's just bots and Karma farming,” explained u/ilaym712 referencing the points accumulated from Reddit’s upvote system.

“*Kamala farming,” u/nate6259 corrected jokingly.

Off-theme Kamala posting also filled up non-politics subreddits like r/Interestingasfuck, where a post to a news article about Harris securing enough delegates to win the nomination was received frostily by redditors wondering what about the news merited its inclusion on the subreddit.

“As an American, this isn't ‘Interesting as fuck,’” commented u/Yolectroda in response to an explanation attributing the flood of Kamala posts to Reddit being a website used primarily by Americans. “Sure, it's good that she got it done, but it was expected once Biden and a bunch of others gave her their endorsements.”

“this place has been political posts for the past few weeks,” commented u/BTSherman. 

In recent weeks some smaller subreddits have also lost patience with all the politics posting.

On r/LostGeneration, where posters lament the sorry state of the economy and the feeling among many that they’re part of a lost generation who won’t ever make the same income as their parents, the mods pinned a post a couple of weeks ago warning about “DNC bots.” They pointed to “a frequency with the number of bots trying to push an agenda” as the election gets closer.

And on Tuesday, the mods pinned another post saying that posting in support of Kamala is a violation of the subreddit’s rules against justifying “genocide or genocidal policies.”

“This is not a sub for political campaigning and canvassing, this is not a sub for white washing genocidal world leaders,” posted u/ChickenNugget267. “You have the rest of reddit to canvass for your favourite genocidal fascist. You've taken over so many good subs with your bullshit. Leave this space alone. If you don't like that, feel free to share your discontent down below and we'll be sure to ban you.”

Redditors aren’t just upset about Kamala posting though. As much of the site fills up with political discussion ahead of the presidential election in November, there’s also general backlash from redditors about any discussion about politics outside of the designated subreddits.

And while Reddit’s AutoModerator has an option to filter out all Politics posts from r/pics, all the politics are still tiring some people out.

“is this r/pics or r/politics?” asked u/bowlis under a post in r/pics of an unflattering post of Donald Trump’s hair discussing the former president’s age and impeachment history.

“Until November, you'll find even r/gangstaswithwaifus is r/politics,” commented u/CharlesIngalls_Pubes sardonically.

On r/gangstaswithwaifu, however, no recent Harris pics appear. But there is one from a month ago of Trump.

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Trump backers in Congress and online are going to great lengths to show how easy the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump was, staging detailed recreations and making visits to the scene.

While they are doing it to criticize the Secret Service’s performance and dispel myths about the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania against the former president, the effect is them bragging about how they too could have capped Trump. 

At a hearing, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle faced blistering commentary from Congress over her agency's failures, including one extended rant from a Texas representative who boasted that he popped Trump almost every single time he tried it. 

“I was lying prone on a sloped roof at 130 yards at 6:30 at night,” Fallon said, describing his efforts to replicate the conditions of the Trump assassination attempt while noting that he had no training on an AR-15 and had not fired that particular gun in six years. 

“And I didn’t know what scope [the shooter used],” Fallon added, saying he tried two options each eight times. 

“You know what the result was? 15 out of 16 killshots!” Fallon shouted, targets of his successful attempts behind him. “That’s a 94% success rate. And that shooter was a better shot than me. It is a miracle President Trump wasn’t killed … It wasn’t the roof that was dangerous, it was the nutjob on top of the roof.”

Fallon’s roof reference was a dig at Cheatle’s comments in the days after the attempt where she claimed that the Secret Service did not place anybody up on the roof gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks used because it was sloped “at its highest point,” which was a “safety factor.”

Another lawmaker went to the site of the shooting to bash Cheatle’s claim. 

“It’s not that steep at all,” said Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.). The former Navy SEAL showed himself on the rooftop of the building where Crooks took his shot. “We just had a 70-year-old man back here climb up on the roof easily.” 

Pro-Trump YouTubers are also reenacting the assassination, with some of them filming detailed recreations of the shooting, including clipping mock-ups of Trump in the ear with bullets. 

Brandon Herrera, who goes by The AK Guy, and narrowly lost a Republican primary runoff in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District this year, made a video recreating the shooting with a ballistic dummy wearing Trump's signature Make America Great Again hat. Some of Herrera’s other popular videos recreate the assassinations of historical figures like Abe Lincoln, John F. Kennedy Jr, and Martin Luther King Jr.

“A shot like this is not only difficult to stage, but given the equipment pretty damn well impossible,” Herrera said, saying that he wanted to dispel conspiracy theories that Trump had willingly been shot in the ear from 130 yards away.

Herrera replicated the ear shot on the ballistic dummy from closer in to show that an AR-15 round can clip an ear without doing more damage to the entire head.

Mike Jones, a gun Youtube who runs the Garand Thumb channel, also recreated the shooting to debunk conspiracy theories about it. 

Jones pushed back on the same idea, explaining that the type of gun Crooks used wasn’t capable of the kind of accuracy needed to take that risk.

“Your typical AR-15 … will have about a 2-3 inch circle that it can reliably fire into at a hundred yards,” Jones said. “Being that Thomas was using a [lower-grade] AR-15, that’s probably closer to the 3 inch mark … At 140 [yards], that’s going to be approximately 4.5 to 5 inches … so when we talk about a shot that’s going to be piercing the ear, that is mechanically for the weapon, going to be impossible to make that shot.”

In the video, while trying to hit the dummy in the ear, Jones repeatedly hits it in the head, noting he "put a round through former President Trump's head."

There are guns, Jones said, which can make that shot. But an AR-15 like the one Crooks used? 

“Absolutely not,” said his videographer. It had to have been an act of God to just miss him like that, which made sense Jones added, because Trump was going to be the next president. 

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A swarm of Trump-backing reactionary big-tech accounts on X are bathing their profile pictures in a deep-fried red hue and gleaming blue laser eye filters.

The accounts sporting the new look include big names in tech like X CEO Elon Musk, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Gab CEO Andrew Torba—and some accounts are linking the profile pictures to a new memecoin called Dark MAGA.

Musk and Andreessen are recent Trump backers. While they once cultivated a more liberal business public image, in recent years they’ve come out full-throated in favor of the Republican Party. Musk claimed he would begin donating $45 million a month to a pro-Trump Super PAC. Andreessen, who is on Facebook’s board and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, announced last week that he’d be donating to Trump this election cycle.

Torba, an antisemite who runs the right-wing social media platform Gab, is a long-time Trump backer who recently praised his vice presidential pick J.D. Vance as evidence that “the board is starting to shift in our direction.”

“Something cringe is afoot,” posted @WashletJP over a compilation of some of the accounts who shifted to the red-hue blue-eyes profile picture filter.

Included alongside Andreessen, Musk, and Torba were accounts like @Aristos_Revenge, who pinned a tweet calling the new profile picture trend “red dark Maga.”

“If you want a red dark Maga pfp, visit http://dmaga.xyz courtesy of the $dmaga coin. It has a conversion tool,” they wrote in the tweet linking to the site.

$DMAGA, a meme coin built on the Solana blockchain, is being pumped by various accounts across X and crypto-pumping blogs. It has $1 million in liquidity and has jumped in value over 130,000% since July 21.

The laser eye look is part of the crypto aesthetic. While posters online have photoshopped lasers over characters' eyes for a long time, Bitcoin boosters adopted the laser eyes during a 2021 trend to show their support for holding onto Bitcoin until its value reached $100,000 per coin. Bitcoin was valued at $50,000 in Feb. 2021, when the trend started, and is valued at around $67,428 as of Monday.

According to one account claiming to be behind the coin, Musk started using the profile picture after a member of the $DMAGA team DMed it to him.

The Dark MAGA Coin didn’t immediately respond to questions asking for any proof that Musk had adopted the profile picture to support their coin, or about the history of the token.

What is Dark MAGA?

The Dark MAGA movement is not new. It began in the aftermath of Trump's 2020 election loss, pushing for a more virulent, fascist Republican takeover.

But it lost steam thanks to the Dark Brandon rebuttal, a pro-Biden riff on the right-wing "Let's Go Brandon" chant. Dark Brandon, coined ironically by some internet leftists imagining an unapologetic, take-no-prisoners Biden who implemented his own policies with as unrestrained glee as Trump did on the right. From there, Dark Brandon was picked up by pro-Biden liberal posters as a triumphant, innocuous way to celebrate Biden and turn back the Let's Go Brandon messaging to the right.

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President Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday to drop out of the 2024 race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris set off a flurry of posts and panic regarding the new state of the presidential race.

One particularly indefatigable conservative poster concerned by Biden’s move was X CEO Elon Musk, who tweeted 151 times on Sunday, his most ever.

"Trump/Vance LFG!!" Musk repeatedly shared.

Musk’s super-active day, which included 346 likes, more than he’s ever dropped before, had people speculating that Musk is panicking now that a younger candidate will be facing off against former President Donald Trump in the election this November.

“They are worried that Harris is going to be more difficult to beat,” posted u/throwaway_12358134 in an r/EnoughMuskSpam discussion of the posting data. “The GOP put its entire campaign strategy into personally attacking Biden and they are intentionally hiding their platform because they know it's wildly unpopular and just can't compete with Bidens economic and foreign policies.”

Some posters on X also suspected that panic was leading Musk to suppress Harris’ official rapid response account, saying they couldn’t follow the accounts when they tried. 

“1st time this happened…I can’t follow an account for @vp @kamalaHQ because my 'limit' is reached…I am currently following roughly 2500 accounts… super shady - time seems real coincidental This doesn’t match the 'x' follow limits. Can anyone @x explain…” posted @megdoyle over a screenshot of the problem.

The screenshot shows an overlay popping up when attempting to follow the account. “Limit reached,” the window reads. “You are unable to follow more people at this time.”

The Daily Dot wasn’t able to reproduce the issue on Monday afternoon, and the @KamalaHQ account doesn’t appear to have any other obstacles to following it.

Despite a “limit reached” message, people who received it posted that it was unlikely they had reached the limit. Some said that they hadn’t followed anybody recently.

“Hey @X want to explain yourself?” commented @camrenee13. “I’ve followed 0 accounts today but for some reason I can’t follow an official Kamala Harris campaign account? Shady af.”

“Haven’t followed a new person in weeks, yet I’ve reached my limit? Keep being transparent as fuck, Space Karen,” posted @SourceRyan.

X has a technical limit of 400 new follows per day, according to a Help Center laying out platform guidelines. But the page says the actual limit for individual users can be lower, based on “additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior.”

“Is X blocking people from following a presidential candidate’s account? I follow 653 people and have been on Twitter for 14 years,” posted @Gaurav_Keswani. “I don’t believe I’ve reached any limit.”

X has mistakenly restricted accounts that have exploded in popularity, as Harris' did last night and today. In February, X briefly suspended an account for deceased Russian dissident Alexei Navalny's wife after it racked up followers

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Print-on-demand company Sticker Mule says it received a flood of death threats and hate mail after sending out emails and posts on Monday in support of former President Donald Trump in the wake of the failed assassination attempt against him last weekend that left one man dead.

But it is getting even harsher backlash for the way it is outing customers, sharing their emails in posts to its social channels. 

The company’s founder, Anthony Constantino, sent emails to customers and put up posts on the company’s social media saying that “the hate for Trump and his supporters has gone too far,” and that “people are terrified to admit they support Trump.”

Now the company says it received a flood of emails over the posts, stressing its support team.

“I gave $2500 bonuses to all 79 people on our support team because they received death threats. That must stop, but, on the bright side, we paid out $195,000 in bonuses,” Constantino posted on X above screenshots of some of the offending emails. “If people expressing hate towards us want to feel good about something, they can take credit for helping our support team earn sizable bonuses.”

Many of the screenshots of the messages Sticker Mule included in their posts included the email addresses of the senders, alongside vitriolic complaints they sent to the company.

“Fuck Trump and fuck you too, the sooner you kill yourself the better the world will be,” wrote one sender.

“Kill yourself lol never buying from you again fucking weirdo bootlickers,” wrote another.

“As much backlash as we received, it’s good for society that people learn that lots of people with BIG HEARTS support President Trump,” Constantino wrote in one of the messages, which included screenshots of bellicose complaints from some senders.

Some of the messages Constantino posted accused him of being a Nazi and lamented that Trump hadn’t been killed in the assassination attempt.

“Fuck you you fucking nazi. Eat shit and die,” read one. “I’m sorry I ever gave you any money. Ashamed in fact.”

“Eat shit and die. Never ordering from Nazis like you again,” wrote another.

Posters on X quickly warned against sending any further messages to Sticker Mule because of the doxings.

“Heads up if you reply to Sticker Mule’s email: they are publishing responses with emails and names showing and doxxing people.” posted @GoldenLassoGirl. “BE SAFE!” 

But posters defending Sticker Mule defended the doxing, saying that people deserved to be exposed if they were going to send death threats.

“Don't send death threats, problem solved,” posted @bengecartogrphy. 

“Telling someone to ‘eat shit and die’ is not a death threat, Snowflake,” replied @GoldenLassoGirl.

In the wake of the internet’s reaction to the assassination attempt against Trump, prominent online personality Libs of TikTok began doxing people who’d cracked jokes or expressed sincere wishes about the attempt. It got so severe even some of her right-wing base asked her to cool it. 

Over on Instagram, Constantino also shared the message and celebrated the bonuses he said his employees were getting.

But he also received backlash there from people arguing that he’d put his employees in danger by sending the emails in the first place and was now trying to get credit for rewarding them.

“Can I just say that you did that to your employees? Anthony, you caused this to happen when you emailed political views to your customers. Please take accountability. If you never sent that email or started this, none of your employees would be dealing with any of this,” posted @henrythecoloradodog.

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X is refusing to provide a New York court with access to accounts at the center of a legal battle between two women who say they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein. One of them is now calling for the court to force the company to comply with her discovery requests, her lawyers wrote in a letter.

The case was filed in 2021 by Rina Oh, a New York City-based artist, against Virginia Giuffre, over claims that Giuffre defamed Oh in a series of tweets, writings, and podcasts. The complaint was updated in January 2022 to include tweets published on Giuffre’s Twitter account from October to December 2021.

In one tweet, Giuffre alleged that Oh was only claiming to be a victim to try to get money from the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, which paid out around $125 million to 150 claimants. Oh applied for the program but declined to say whether she received any money from it in 2022.

Oh also cited a lightly fictionalized unpublished memoir draft Giuffre wrote titled “Billionaires Playboy’s Club.” That draft was unsealed in August 2019 by a New York Court during discovery in a defamation lawsuit Giuffre filed against Ghislaine Maxwell and portrays a woman named "Rena" as an accomplice of Epstein.

Giuffre also wrote several tweets alleging Oh was violent and assaulted her.

For her part, Oh claimed that she “never cut, sexually assaulted or sexually abused” Giuffre and that she was always a victim and not a co-conspirator of “Epstein and his gang.”

Giuffre has been defending herself against the defamation case by maintaining that her tweets are accurate, and arguing that she's entitled to make them along with other statements to protect her reputation.

Many of the tweets that Oh cited came in response to tweets by @MoonProfessor on Twitter. Giuffre’s lawyers claim that that account, along with others including @rinaohamen, @mozieamen, @forkandscissors, @twolittlebakers, and @diningwithoutlaws, belongs to Rita Oh and the Giuffre’s claims were made in response to those accounts in self-defense

Oh told the court that @forkandscissors had become @rinaohartist, and that the @rinaohamen account is the same as the @rinaohartist account. Both accounts are suspended.

She also said that she'd deactivated the @mozieamen account and wasn’t able to log into it when she tried. As for @MoonProfessor, Oh said she didn’t know the account and she wasn’t able to log into it when she attempted to with one of her email addresses. The @MoonProfessor account is also currently suspended for breaking X rules.

Giuffre’s lawyers say that without access to the data and tweets from the @MoonProfessor account their client won't be able to properly defend herself against Oh's defamation claim.

Robert Sack, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, described the right of somebody to defend themselves against defamation as “a recognized interest.”

“An individual is privileged to publish defamatory matter in response to an attack upon his or her reputation; the speaker is given more latitude in such a situation than if the statements were not provoked,” Sack wrote.

Giuffre’s lawyers also wrote in the letter filed on Wednesday that X refused to comply with subpoenas requesting access to the account data, including the most recent request filed on June 10. Because the owner of the accounts is known, X claimed that producing the data would be burdensome.

It argues that Oh can simply sign in and download the data, despite an affidavit from a forensic expert noting that Oh can't access the accounts.

X also claimed that in the case of deleted tweets, it would be unwilling to provide the data because restoring the content would constitute an “undue burden.”’

Because X refused to produce the documents, Giuffre’s lawyers asked the court for a conference ahead of a new motion to compel X to produce them.

“If [Giuffre] is not able to obtain the Twitter comments from [Oh], then she is substantially prejudiced from defending against this lawsuit,” Giuffre’s lawyer wrote.

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The post X accused of withholding critical data in Epstein defamation suit appeared first on The Daily Dot.