Fred Aykin

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

[Fred Aykin @fredaykin]

@stuartbuck1 @cremieuxrecueil Nailed it.

[Stuart Buck @stuartbuck1]

@TECleveland @cremieuxrecueil Despite some bogus grants, a lot of government is like this cartoon. I bet this "small team" would find a line item for "screwworm sterilization" and delete it, not knowing that they just devastated American farming: https://t.co/OAnAkxDSEK

[Fred Aykin @fredaykin]

@WordsMustFlow I love how gullible you guys are.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

How did the Times miss this?

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

The NYT said that @lyndseyfifield has been out of politics and isn’t doing anything with the conservative dark money group Independent Women’s Forum anymore but here she is getting quoted at a Republican congressional event in mid-April of 2026, a few weeks ago, with IWF as her ID

[Lindsay Ballant @lindsayballant]

This is one of the two reporters bylined on the Platner story, fwiw

[Joe Wrote @joewrote]

@AaronRegunberg People are missing the Times' admission that they read all her texts and messages from this time, and they found no corroboration. They even read her diary. Nothing. All they found was a text saying she wanted to campaign for Collins.

[Aaron Regunberg @AaronRegunberg]

Seems relevant that, unlike the standard I’ve seen in most of these kinds of stories, the Times has zero corroboration of any of the only actually disturbing behavior alleged. So it’s literally just the word of a former Heritage Foundation staffer. Does not 100% mean it’s not true…but I genuinely don’t think that this story even gets close to being written in a world where Platner is less explicitly anti-oligarchy.

[22 U.S.C. § 2304 @RefrmDemocracy]

Graham Platner should have instead said "Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that's only because the cloud would hurt Israelis" and then the media class would deem him acceptable.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This was apparent but good of Mandel to confirm it: the previous anonymous claim about the tattoo was from the GOP operative, according to her friend Bethany Mandel.

So this new claim is not backing up another previous claim, it’s the same one from the same person. Bethany says she was trying to tank his campaign and thought it would work, but it didn’t, so now she is doing this.

[Jasper Craven @Jasper_Craven]

Why are people casting Platner’s misdeeds as individual aberrations rather than a collective problem of military conditioning? Military has outsize rates of drinking, divorce, hate, violence. etc.

America claims deep empathy for vets, but it ends right when the truth get dark.

[Nathan Bernard @nathanTbernard]

NYT couldn't corroborate the claims their GOP operative source made about Platner from when they dated in college, but printed them anyways.

[Fred Aykin @fredaykin]

@DougJBalloon It's time for Conor to do a searching and fearless moral inventory of his work over the last decade.

[Hend Amry @LibyaLiberty]

Less than 25 years apart

[Fred Aykin @fredaykin]

@joewrote It does seem convenient. We've seen the feds deport international students for being critical of Israel, and Trump go to war with Iran at Netanyahu's urging. It makes sense that the same people would smear a candidate who is openly critical of Israel to protect themselves.

[Igor Bobic @igorbobic]

Dem Sen. Whitehouse says he’s “not impressed” by the allegations against Graham Platner in the latest NYT report.

“Seems like a lot of nothing. I mean, the only one who had anything to say that seemed ‘unsettling’ was a woman who works for right-wing political operations.”

[john brown’s buddy @_gothlorien]

Lyndsey Fifield, the woman with the most provocative accusations in the Graham Platner piece, is an ardent Zionist.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Platner's primary accuser, beyond constantly lying for Israel, also boasted of defending Brett Kavanaugh from similar accusations by giving Susan Collins the rationale to confirm him.

Unproven #MeToo accusations like this are so cynically weaponized:

https://t.co/hR8qLJ9LaZ

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Graham Platner's primary accuser, Lyndsey Fifield, is a pathological liar (see below) whose main cause is Israel.

Make of that what what you will. I know one's views of the #BelieveWomen framework radically shifts based on the politics of the accused, but it's clearly relevant:

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

It's kind of wild to find out that the Republican in the NYT story that says she had a toxic relationship with Graham Platner is Lyndsey Fifield. Having been in DC for too long, I know a decent number of people who know her quite well. For a long time she was the co-host of a podcast with her best friend Bethany Mandel, called Ladybrains, though she has also worked for multiple super PACs, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Heritage Foundation.

Some background, presented without judgment: In 2014, Fifield began work as digital director for American Action Network, a Republican Super PAC that oversees House races. The next year she became social media manager for the Heritage Foundation, where she stayed for the next seven years.

In 2022, she joined the Super PAC backing Nikki Haley for president, switching to the official campaign side the next year, and staying until the campaign flamed out. She now lists herself as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a prominent dark money group that is best known for helping usher Brett Kavanaugh on to the Supreme Court and giving Susan Collins the talking points she needed to make her decisive speech in his favor.

The NYT breezed past all this, saying she was "a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns."

In an interview for a news outlet called Red Alert Politics that named her to a “30 under 30” list back in 2016, she said that she wanted to “emulate the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s approach to online activism.” Breitbart, known for pushing the boundaries when it came to political combat, is perhaps best remembered for having exposed Anthony Weiner’s penchant for sending nudes to young girls, and for his work elevating James O’Keefe.

That she worked for Independent Women's Forum recently is even wilder since IWF played a critical role in Kavanaugh's confirmation and in persuading Collins to support it.

Heather Higgins, chair of IWF, laid out the group’s role in a talk several years ago. “We wrote a memo. It was used by a lot of members of the Senate and the House, Fox News, and elsewhere. Most important, Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she would not see how to support him,” Higgins said. “And if you look at the speech she gave on the Senate floor, it’s entirely the playing out and architecture of how we said to structure the argument — what to say and how to say it, which is just so gratifying. We’re watching TV and we’re like, ‘That’s ours! That’s ours!’”

Meanwhile, the timeline Fifield gives of their relationship is confusing, because during at least some of that time she was actually dating a different person, her longterm boyfriend who became her fiancee before she called off the wedding in 2018. We all know this because she and Mandel did a podcast episode on it that went mega-viral in Republican circles back then. Apparently this is the kind of thing the NYT thinks is important now, so I guess it requires more reporting. I'll report back.

Here is Heather Higgins celebrating IWF's role in getting Susan Collins to confirm Kavanaugh: