Month: September 2022

As you become more practiced in the power of positive declassifying, you will acquire the ability to declassify entire tranches of documents in a single go. At first, even one document containing the address and spouse’s and children’s names of a spy will feel like a lot. But, in time, you will be able to think of a foreign country and, just by remembering what people from there smell like, declassify all files relating to it.

The movie promises to include, among its revelations, “Sex, Prostitution, Drugs, Cronyism, Money Laundering, More Sex, a Laptop from Hell,” not to mention “Chinese Spies, Ukrainian ‘Businessmen,’ ” and “the Selling Out of America.” As they say, don’t threaten me with a good time!

“I have superhuman strength,” said McInnes, who publicly resigned from the Proud Boys in late 2018. “I’m smarter than ever before. I also crave my wife in a way that’s unprecedented.”

At a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday night, for the Republican Senate candidate J. D. Vance, Trump played background music that the Times described as “all but identical” to a song associated with the QAnon right-wing conspiracy movement. Many people in the crowd responded with a one-armed salute, with their index finger raised, that reminded some observers of Nazi rallies

I was surprised by how frightened many Americans on the far right are. I was prepared for the anger, but I hadn’t really understood the extent to which fear precedes it. I was in Nashville on Christmas when Anthony Warner, who believed that alien lizards disguised as human beings roamed the planet, blew himself up downtown. That’s an extreme example, but so many people I met at anti-lockdown protests, pro-Trump events, and Stop the Steal rallies told me that they were genuinely terrified of their fellow-citizens on the left, especially after the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

Encountering Crumb today feels like being in a staring match with an artist who’s still almost daring the culture to eject him. “The average people out there,” he tells me, “what they know of my work … either they love it because they are degenerates themselves or they hate it because they stand with the forces of political correctness.” His iconography includes every taboo imaginable: not only incest and racism but also sexual assault, castration, self-mutilation and murder.

“We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” a man yelled over him. “With a lot bigger rounds!” Another added, “If we have to tool up, it’s gonna be over! We’re coming heavy!” I also overheard a woman talking on her phone. “We need to come back with guns,” she said. “One time with guns, and then we’ll never have to do this again.”

By January, the commissioners court had voted to dissolve the library board and appointed a new one, which included those who had originally advocated for restricting the butt books. Community members and librarians began attending the new meetings, taking notes and asking to make public statements about the bans. The county then decided the meetings would no longer be open to the public.

“Second to your cell phone, the thing you actually touch the most every day is probably your keyboard.” Why shouldn’t it be perfect?

Frank told me that, after building an audience of covid skeptics with his revisionist statistics, he was invited by several politicians to examine their 2020 election results. “I noticed a pattern,” Frank said. “And the pattern enables me to go into any state and look at one county. And, once I’ve looked at one county, I can predict all of the other counties to preposterous accuracy.”

I first heard about the video from a colleague and friend at my university as we waited in line to pick up our kids after school in late September 2021. One of her students was in the video, and it had gone viral, she said. She’d posted something in support of that student, but then she also started getting attacked. Another professor at our university, Arizona State, would later call the attackers “vultures,” the kind of people who feed off moments of everyday life that morph into spectacle after an article or tweet or video goes viral. But at the time, I didn’t have that analogy. My friend told me she was scared, and I said I was sorry. By that point, she had already taken down her post.

But when the delegation tried to visit the storage room, the filing said, one of the lawyers “explicitly prohibited” officials from opening or looking into any of the other boxes there. That, the filing said, stopped them from confirming that no materials with classification markings had been left behind.