I don't go near Twitter and other (anti)social media so I don't know what he gets up to there. He seems to understand the scientific method but he needs to compartmentalise his political musings and his research so they do not overlap. He wouldn't be the first physicist who is perhaps a bit of an a-hole in real life.
The warp bubble is a side effect of the Casimir effect in a real-world experiment, I believe. I might be wrong as I only have access to the article linked by the OP - it's not peer-reviewed research.
ETA: They've updated the article today to emphasise that this is a theoretical prediction -
@Ronald Held - you are correct. So probably it's just another case of poor science journalism getting ahead of itself.