#Active-Duty Military Personnel

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Infiltrating The Far Right

The Threat From Domestic Terrorism Is Rising, But, With Republicans Decrying The “Deep State,” The F.B.I. Is Cautious About Investigating Far-Right Groups. Vigilantes Are Leaping Into The Fray.

— By David D. Kirkpatrick | August 18, 2024 | The Infiltrators

The disclosures produced by Undercover Vigilantes have furnished evidence for Civil Lawsuits that have crippled several White-Nationalist Groups. Experts say that their information has also led to the discharge of dozens of Active-Duty Military Personnel. Illustration by Ben Wiseman

Colton Brown, who lived with his father and stepmother in a single-story house outside Seattle, earned about fifty thousand dollars a year as an assistant electrician—but his real passion was fascism. In recordings of his private conversations, he argued that an “international cabal” of “hook-nosed bankers” was conspiring to replace white Americans like him with people of non-European descent, and he expressed alarm that the U.S. population would soon be less than half “ethnic American.” This so-called “great replacement” may have felt personal: his stepmother was Vietnamese. Brown, who has blue eyes and short, wavy blond hair, wore clothing with Nazi iconography, believed that white people deserved their own ethnostate, and told his dad that other races could “go to hell.”

In 2021, when Brown was twenty-two, he became a regional director of Patriot Front—one of the most active of the white-nationalist, neo-fascist, and anti-government organizations that academic researchers collectively characterize as the modern far right. (Such groups lie beyond even the fringes of the Republican Party.) Patriot Front’s leaders routinely summoned members to travel across the country, on short notice, for demonstrations: hundreds of young white men marched in identical uniforms, with protective helmets disguised as baseball caps, and neck gaiters pulled over their faces. At some rallies, Brown shouldered one of the tall metal shields that Patriot Front members were trained to use in street battles. The members frequently marched through racially diverse neighborhoods, almost baiting residents into fights (while maintaining that marchers would never throw a first punch).

The organization placed Brown in charge of a crew of a dozen men. He led them on nocturnal expeditions around Seattle, to plaster public spaces with Patriot Front propaganda. They stole Black Lives Matter and gay-pride signs, and spray-painted white-nationalist slogans and symbols over public art promoting tolerance or racial justice. His crew posed, masked, for photographs while on long hikes together, and they trained for street brawls by sparring with one another in boxing gloves. Sometimes they were invited to participate in “fight club” competitions with other white nationalists.

Like a pyramid scheme, Patriot Front effectively paid for its operations by amassing new members. Brown required his team to buy all sorts of supplies—badges, banners, posters, stickers, graffiti stencils—exclusively from the organization. An order of stickers was forty-five dollars, a rectangular badge was five, a round one was ten. Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau—a twenty-five-year-old from an affluent suburb of Dallas, whose manifesto for the group maintains that the only true Americans are “descendants of Europeans”—told members that, without their repeated expenditures, “I can’t pay rent anymore. And then I have to get a job.”

Brown’s crew often tried to enlist men from other far-right groups, such as the Proud Boys. But he was always on the lookout for undercover F.B.I. agents. He was aware that Patriot Front’s vandalism (and occasional street fighting) broke the law, and could be met with increased penalties under civil-rights statutes. “Rule No. 1 is don’t get caught,” he often told his crew. “No face, no case. Nobody talks, everybody walks.” Yet he couldn’t be that picky in his vetting process; after all, he was under pressure to increase membership. Nor could the movement expect every new member to be already “fashed out”—fully fascist. One of Patriot Front’s goals was to lure more mainstream maga types into the far right. Brown assessed applicants by quizzing them about their political evolution and influences, and about what future they foresaw for white people. As a “pro-white” organization, of course, the group required recruits to be Caucasian themselves. After a teen-age applicant admitted that he was a quarter Filipino, others in the Seattle crew recommended rejecting him. (“His phenotypes are wack as fuck,” one complained.) But the recruit responded that Hitler’s Nuremberg race laws would have allowed him to have sex with an Aryan woman. What could they say? He’d out-Nazi-ed the neo-Nazis. The teen was let in.

Another recruit, whom they code-named Vincent Washington, was a much easier call. He had read Patriot Front’s manifesto and understood the need for a white homeland; at six feet four and about two hundred and twenty pounds, and trained in martial arts, he could also fight well. After Vincent joined Patriot Front, in July, 2021, he threw himself into even mundane chores, such as making banners. (At Halloween, he proposed carving “very fascist” jack-o’-lanterns.) He also turned out to be a skilled photographer, and used a high-end camera to take pictures of the group’s rallies and vandalism. Thanks to his skill and utility, Brown and Rousseau quickly began including Vincent in private online meetings that Patriot Front held for planning and coördination. One member recently told me, in an e-mail, that Vincent’s “nice camera and good experience” had likely sped his ascent in the group, and that Vincent had displayed a remarkable enthusiasm “to take part in any and all activism.”

Early that December, Rousseau summoned every available member to Washington, D.C., where the group planned to march without a permit on the National Mall. The Seattle contingent met at the airport. But Vincent didn’t show up. Although initially surprised, the crew soon learned why: Vincent wasn’t actually their ally. He’d made off with a huge cache of internal information, which documented everything from their bigoted and misogynistic rants to their recruitment methods and vandalistic exploits.

Vincent wasn’t a Fed, though. He was one of a growing number of far-left vigilantes who are infiltrating the far right. Sometimes such impostors adopt false online personas in order to gain entrance to chat groups or private servers. Others, like Vincent, go undercover in the real world, posing as white nationalists to attend meetings and demonstrations. Some even participate in low-level crimes in order to establish their credibility—almost like undercover F.B.I. agents do, though they lack any of the protections, training, or restraints that come with a badge.

Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism for the New York Police Department, told me that “part of the complexity of today’s Internet-driven threat environment is that law enforcement doesn’t have a monopoly on intelligence gathering anymore.” Amateur spies such as Vincent have become common enough that they pose “operational challenges.” She went on, “Government agencies collecting human intelligence have systems to deconflict with each other, but it muddies the waters considerably when you have civilians impersonating bad guys.” Such vigilantes can place themselves in life-threatening danger, Weiner said, and their ruthless exposure of far-right groups “can certainly ruin lives,” by getting members fired from their jobs or shunned by their communities. Still, she acknowledged, the disclosures could be useful. “The spectre of infiltration by Antifa is, in some ways, as inhibiting for far-right extremists as concern about infiltration by law enforcement,” Weiner said. “In fact, sometimes they are even more worried about their adversaries than they are about cops.”

Patriot Front Has Just A Few Hundred Members, and scholars who study the far right say that only about a hundred thousand Americans actively participate in organized white-nationalist groups. But the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—and the deadly riot in Charlottesville before that—proved that even just a few hundred organized men can spearhead a devastating, history-making mob. Moreover, the far right’s online promotion of the great-replacement theory to countless sympathizers is accumulating an ominous death toll. In the past decade, lone gunmen inspired by far-right propaganda have killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston (2015), eleven Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh (2018), twenty-three Walmart shoppers in El Paso (2019), and ten Black residents of Buffalo (2022). Inside Patriot Front and across the far right, these mass murderers are venerated with the title of “saint”—as in “Saint Dylann Roof,” who carried out the Charleston massacre. (Roof’s name was chanted at the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, in 2017.) Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University who studies extremist violence and sometimes advises the White House and the F.B.I., told me that Patriot Front’s marches and vandalism—even if they appear merely performative—“are intended to normalize these ideas, to help mobilize other people, to make them think that there’s a groundswell, to inspire violent action. And it’s effective.”

This year’s Presidential campaign drew its first blood with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13th, which resulted in the death of one attendee. F.B.I. officials have said that the shooter apparently maintained a social-media account, active in 2019 and 2020, in which he endorsed political violence and expressed antisemitic and anti-immigrant rhetoric that was “extreme in nature.” The shooting itself, however, does not appear to have been ideologically motivated—before Trump’s rally, the shooter evidently searched for targets in both parties. The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security have since warned of potential “follow-on or retaliatory acts of violence,” noting that “individuals in some online communities” are threatening or encouraging revenge attacks. Rousseau, of Patriot Front, has portrayed the assassination attempt as a sign that white maga supporters should do more than simply vote for Trump. “You’ve done that twice already and Our People are worse off than we were before,” he wrote on Telegram. “You must organize outside the system with others of Our People. Tribe & Train, build power, start to resist or cease to exist.” (He placed triple parentheses around “system”—a notation that is far-right code for “Jewish.”)

Trump has thrilled white nationalists from the moment he entered national politics—sowing doubt about Barack Obama’s birthplace, denigrating immigrants as criminals and rapists, bemoaning “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean. Rousseau once told a journalist that although he understood why Trump could support white nationalism only indirectly, his rhetoric was nonetheless “encouraging,” adding, “Sometimes he even utters some truth about the Jew.” Trump recently complained to Time that the United States suffers from “a definite anti-white feeling” and “a bias against white,” which he vowed to end if he returned to the White House.

The F.B.I., which has worked to protect Americans from extremist violence since the nineteen-twenties, when it took on the Ku Klux Klan, has warned of a resurgence of the far right. Near the end of Trump’s term in office, the Department of Homeland Security declared for the first time that domestic violent extremists, rather than foreign terrorists, were “the most persistent and lethal threat” to the nation, primarily in the form of “lone offenders and small groups.” Christopher Wray, the F.B.I.’s director, clarified to a congressional committee that the threat was largely from adherents to “some kind of white-supremacist-type ideology.” Then came the storming of the Capitol. President Joe Biden, on his first day in office, commissioned White House staff to draft the first-ever “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” The document, issued in June, 2021, promised “a comprehensive approach to addressing the threat while safeguarding bedrock American civil rights and civil liberties.”

This past spring, I visited the headquarters of the F.B.I., a brutalist hulk of a building in Washington, D.C. Four F.B.I. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition that I not name them, joined me in a small office. I expected to hear about the Bureau’s accomplishments under that strategy, but the first thing I learned was the F.B.I.’s special vocabulary for political violence. The officials explained that the F.B.I. avoids using the term “far right.” They insisted that we instead talk about a more neutral category: “domestic violent extremism,” or D.V.E. Nor does the agency track violence by white nationalists as a category. The F.B.I. favors the broader rubric of “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” or remve, which can include militant chauvinists of any race. (For a time during the Trump Administration, the Bureau referred to “Black-identity extremists,” as if such militants were regularly shooting up predominantly white churches and supermarkets.) Far-right militias fall under the category of “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism,” or agaave, which could also include, for example, the leftists protesting Cop City, outside Atlanta. The officials acknowledged that their codifications could be confusing.

Liberal critics of the F.B.I. complain that its laboriously nonpartisan terminology hides the disproportionately greater size and lethality of the current threat from the right. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, at the University of Maryland, between 2012 and 2022 far-right extremists killed two hundred and nine people; the far left killed thirty-seven. (Most of that violence took place after Trump’s election, including a hundred and fifty of the killings by the far right.) Yet the F.B.I.’s odd taxonomy serves a purpose: it avoids any hint that the agency is basing investigative choices on an antipathy toward certain political beliefs. The officials repeatedly reminded me that the First Amendment protects even the most abhorrent bigotry. One of them noted, “We will not investigate people for being antisemitic, because it is not illegal.” And ever since the Senate’s Church Committee revealed, in 1975, that the F.B.I. had conducted politically motivated surveillance of civil-rights leaders, environmentalists, and others on the left, agency bureaucrats have feared the wrath they would face from Congress and the public if they were again caught crossing that line.

Once I had mastered the lingo, one of the officials, a senior intelligence analyst, told me that around 2018 the F.B.I. began seeing an increase in racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists—in particular, “individuals espousing the superiority of the white race.” The toll from domestic terrorism continued to rise: the year 2019 was the deadliest since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. By 2021, the F.B.I. had more than doubled the number of analysts at its headquarters who focussed primarily on domestic violent extremism.

But if I thought that the Biden Administration’s national strategy signified a crackdown, the officials told me, I was mistaken. The strategy focussed on prevention, especially on enlisting local authorities and the public to look out for telltale signs that an individual—on either the left or the right—was moving toward extremist violence. Federal law-enforcement agencies distributed forty thousand copies of a previously published booklet enumerating “violent extremism mobilization indicators,” including “disseminating one’s own martyrdom or last will video or statement” and “conducting a dry run of an attack or assault.” But the F.B.I. officials told me that the agency’s fundamental approach to the problem “didn’t change” under the Biden Administration.

In fact, the officials said, the First Amendment meant that there was little more that law enforcement could do to stop extremist violence. One of the officials told me that respecting constitutional rights is “probably the hardest part of the job on the domestic-terrorism front,” in part because it requires understanding that “rhetoric and intent are two different things.” Glorifying violence against a minority—even wishing aloud for it—is free speech: “Only when that moves to, say, plotting to kill Jewish people and planning to burn down a synagogue—that is when the F.B.I. can open an investigation.”

The officials refused to discuss specific far-right organizations known for engaging in property crime or street fighting, such as Patriot Front and the Proud Boys. The U.S. designates numerous foreign organizations, including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, as terrorists, and many other countries, including the U.K., ban domestic groups that promote or glorify terrorism. Canada and New Zealand both classify the Proud Boys as a terrorist organization. But the First Amendment precludes criminalizing support for any domestic political group—even the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, the F.B.I. maintains that it focusses on individual offenders, not on the groups to which they may belong.

The case of Robert Rundo, a founder of the Rise Above Movement, a white-nationalist group based in Southern California, illustrates the difficulty of the F.B.I.’s job. Rundo, a thirty-four-year-old who once travelled to Germany to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, served twenty months in prison in New York for stabbing a Latino gang member in 2009. (Rundo belonged to a rival gang.) By 2017, the Rise Above Movement claimed to have more than fifty members. The group boasted online of “smashing commies,” and posted videos of Rundo and a small army of white street fighters attacking counter-demonstrators at far-right and pro-Trump rallies in California. The next year, four Rise Above Movement members pleaded guilty to conspiring to riot at the Unite the Right rally. Afterward, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles arrested Rundo on similar charges for his brawling at the California rallies.

But Judge Cormac J. Carney, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, has repeatedly held that those charges impermissibly violate Rundo’s constitutional right “to spread vitriolic and hateful ideas.” Carney has also faulted the prosecutors for selectively targeting Rundo without bringing charges against any of the Antifa counter-demonstrators who clashed with Rise Above Movement fighters. Meanwhile, as the trial and appeals dragged on, Rundo used a fake passport to escape to Eastern Europe, where he met with other neo-fascists; last year, Romania extradited him back to the U.S., and he was imprisoned in Los Angeles. “Free Rundo” stickers, graffiti, and videos have spread around the world. Now a hero to the far right, Rundo has expanded his white-nationalist movement to include an online media arm, a Web site selling merchandise and apparel, and a fast-growing network of at least thirty fight clubs—known as Active Clubs. (His media outlet promotes Patriot Front, and members of the two movements often hike, train, and spar together.) Adam S. Lee, a former F.B.I. special agent who was in charge of a Virginia field office, told me, “If we start targeting extremists for their speech, we can create martyrs, so we risk making them even more dangerous.”

Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have repeatedly claimed that the “deep state” has weaponized federal law enforcement against Trump and his supporters; this conspiracy theory has made it even more treacherous for the F.B.I. to investigate Americans on the far right. In 2022, for example, the F.B.I. ramped up its monitoring of a figure who had triggered concern: Xavier Lopez, an unemployed twenty-three-year-old who lived with his aunt outside Richmond, Virginia. As a younger man, the Bureau knew, Lopez had posted online about killing politicians. Once, while buying assault rifles, he’d been overheard talking avidly about political violence. Lopez had served a year in prison, for vandalizing a car, and prison authorities had recorded him having phone discussions about amassing weapons to kill abortion-rights advocates, L.G.B.T. people, and Jews.

Several months after his release, Lopez joined a house of worship belonging to the Society of St. Pius X, a sect that broke away from the Catholic Church in opposition to Vatican II reforms. The Anti-Defamation League, citing the sect’s long history of statements about Jews and Judaism, has called it “mired in antisemitism.” (The society’s Web page denies that it espouses “racial hatred” toward Jews.) On social media, Lopez posted that he was delighted to have found a church that wasn’t “totally kiked.”

The F.B.I. placed an informant in the church, who reported that Lopez was attempting to enlist congregants in violent schemes. That November, Lopez bought a truck, declared online that he planned to use it in an attack, and posted a photograph of a mass shooter. Only then did agents raid his bedroom. They found firearm components, a stockpile of ammunition, and eight Molotov cocktails mixed using a form of napalm. A crucifix and a rosary hung over a Nazi flag on his wall. Lopez pleaded guilty to possession of a destructive device and has been sentenced to eighteen months in prison. In all likelihood, the F.B.I. averted a massacre.

House Republicans, though, seized on an internal memo from the Richmond field office which noted that agents in Oregon and California had found other violent members of “the far-right white nationalist movement” trying to network in the Society of St. Pius X. Cultivating sources in such churches, the memo proposed, could help counter future threats. House Republicans decried the memo as evidence that the Biden Administration had weaponized the F.B.I. “against traditional Catholics,” and accused the Bureau of proposing “to infiltrate Catholic churches.”

Wray, the F.B.I. director, repudiated the memo, testifying to Congress that he’d felt “aghast” when he saw it. An internal review later concluded that the memo’s authors had failed to use proper F.B.I. terminology for discussing extremism, and had wrongly suggested that the agency might scrutinize religious beliefs. Uproars of this type have had a chastening effect on F.B.I. agents and analysts, according to Elizabeth Neumann, who was a senior Department of Homeland Security official in the George W. Bush and Trump Administrations. She told me that she has “watched people in multiple agencies with responsibility for law enforcement or intelligence gathering err on the side of not getting their hand slapped.” When it comes to First Amendment questions, she added, “there is a gray space where even the lawyers inside the agencies can’t agree what the line is. People are trying to stay away from that gray area, and, yes, that might mean that things are getting missed.”

As I Sat In The F.B.I. office, I was feeling increasingly secure in my freedom to espouse bigoted violence (were I so inclined) but less sure of my personal safety from extremist attacks. Then the conversation turned scarier. The four officials described how digital technology had both further diffused and compounded the threat. In retrospect, the terrorists of the analog era—whether Al Qaeda, from abroad, or the Ku Klux Klan, at home—now looked like easy targets. These were physical organizations with leaders, hierarchies, telephone calls, face-to-face meetings. One of the F.B.I. officials told me, “The United States government got pretty good at stopping that kind of attack.” The Internet has given extremist groups new ways to recruit and organize that make it virtually impossible to contain their menace. The official told me that domestic violent extremists appeared to have learned from the success of their foreign counterparts in leveraging social media and online chats “to build a horrific lone-actor threat.” The official continued, “Someone can essentially self-radicalize ‘on their own’—‘on their own’ in quotation marks, because there’s always somebody on the other side of the keyboard.”

The F.B.I.’s achievements in thwarting these lone actors often go unnoticed. When I asked the officials to describe some of the Bureau’s recent accomplishments, they handed me a stack of press releases: a year in jail for a Michigan man who had threatened synagogues; eighty months for an incel who had obtained firearms for an intended mass shooting at an Ohio State University sorority; the arrest of three white nationalists from different parts of the country who met in Columbus, Ohio, and conspired to start a race war by shooting rifles at electrical substations. On March 3, 2022, a soldier entering Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, was caught with a 3-D-printed handgun; at his home, authorities found a short-barrelled rifle, neo-Nazi patches and flags, and notes for an “operation” to rid the area of Black, Latino, and Jewish people. (He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.) Experts at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism say that the F.B.I. now thwarts about forty domestic extremist plots a year.

One official explained that many Americans suspected of moving toward domestic terrorism end up being arrested on other, sometimes unrelated, charges: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that every week one of our field offices briefs us that they are going to arrest someone on, you know, felon in possession of a firearm, or domestic violence—a local sheriff may even make the arrest—but in actuality we had a very meticulous investigation, starting with a lead that some source picked up, showing that this was an individual going down a pathway to shooting up a synagogue or a church or something else.” The Bureau seemed to want to have it both ways. The officials thought that they deserved credit for respecting civil liberties by waiting for clear evidence of a threat to start an investigation. But they also wanted credit for getting volatile extremists off the streets by arresting them on charges that some might call pretexts. (F.B.I. officials say that they adhere to consistent standards for both opening investigations and bringing charges.)

Where the F.B.I. has hesitated, civilians such as “Vincent Washington”—the vigilante spy who penetrated Patriot Front—have entered the breach. Just as technology has opened new doors for extremists, it has also opened new doors for amateur surveillance and infiltration. Alarmed at what they see as the failings of law enforcement, left-leaning “antifascist researchers” have formed their own elaborate networks. They often adopt such anodyne names as the SoCal Research Club or Stumptown Research Collective, and together they form a kind of intelligence counterpart to Antifa street fighters. The vigilantes’ primary weapon is the Internet, which they deploy to track and sometimes expose the activities, identities, addresses, and employers of supporters of the far right—in other words, to dox them. The disclosures produced by amateur infiltrators have furnished evidence for civil lawsuits that have crippled several white-nationalist groups. Experts say that information from antifascists has also led to the discharge of dozens of active-duty military personnel, not to mention a handful of police and government officials. Some vigilante research has even spurred criminal prosecutions led by the F.B.I.—most notably, against participants in the Capitol attack. According to Michael Loadenthal, an expert in domestic extremism at the University of Cincinnati, the charging documents in nearly a fifth of January 6th cases explicitly acknowledge information from civilian “sedition hunters.” The four F.B.I. officials told me that they welcomed the help. “We’ll take tips from whoever gives them to us,” one said.

It seems stinting to describe Vincent Washington’s intel as “tips”; it was more of a trove. According to court records, his birth name was David Alan Capito, Jr., although in 2017, possibly in connection with his infiltration work, he renamed himself Avenir David Capito; he then became Vyacheslav Arkadyevich Arkangelskiy, and more recently he changed his name to Ryan Smith. (I attempted to reach him through multiple intermediaries, but he didn’t respond.) He belonged for a time to the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, which declared in a manifesto that its members “work to counter the rise of fascist and far-right groups” and “don’t rely on the state to do our work for us.” In 2019, a longtime member of the club, Willem van Spronsen, attempted to firebomb an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Tacoma; the police shot and killed him. Vincent carried a banner at a memorial march in Spronsen’s honor, and sometimes wore a bullet that once belonged to Spronsen on a necklace. Antifascist activists like Vincent take a dim view of the police, and he was not about to hand over information to the F.B.I. Instead, he transmitted the results of his sting to an online publication called Unicorn Riot.

The Headquarters of Unicorn Riot is a duplex loft carved out of a former bottling plant in Fishtown, a trendy neighborhood of Philadelphia. The loft is also the home of Dan Feidt, one of Unicorn Riot’s founders, a forty-one-year-old with a boyish mane of wild curls. He got his start in journalism in Minneapolis, working for a local alternative-news Web site. During the 2008 Republican Convention, which was held in the Twin Cities, his height—he is six feet eight—helped him record unobstructed footage of a sweeping crackdown on protesters outside the event. He then worked on a film, “Terrorizing Dissent,” and helped document crackdowns on protests at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, in 2009; Occupy Wall Street, in 2011; and a series of protests in the West over pipeline and mining projects. Among the people he worked with was Chris Schiano, a skinny thirty-four-year-old with deep-set eyes. I met with both men in the loft. Feidt, a self-described “homebody,” told me that he usually ran the video control room; Schiano, who was raised as a Quaker and graduated from Naropa University, a beatnik-Buddhist institution in Boulder, Colorado, dodged police batons in a helmet and body armor. After a while, Schiano told me, “it started to feel like ‘We work well together, let’s start something.’ ” With a handful of others, they set up a nonprofit and released a grand mission statement: to report “underrepresented stories” and illuminate “alternative perspectives.” The name Unicorn Riot, I was told, was the result of an online brainstorming session in which marijuana may have played a role.

The group’s coverage of the far right was shaped, in part, by a police killing. In November, 2015, an officer in Minneapolis fatally shot Jamar Clark, an unarmed Black man. Unicorn Riot live-streamed eighteen days of protests outside the officer’s station. During this period, Feidt and Schiano were surprised to see racist slurs surfacing in an online chat on their Web site. Many of the comments used the argot of the online far right. Schiano was at his computer one night, deleting the slurs, when two masked white men appeared in the live stream. Both wore armbands labelled “/K/”—for a gun-enthusiast forum on 4chan, a bastion of far-right extremism. A few nights later, three of the gun enthusiasts, who called themselves Kommandos, returned to the protests; this time, a handful of demonstrators began escorting them away—until one of the Kommandos pulled out a handgun and fired seven shots, severely wounding five protesters. Unicorn Riot recorded the scene.

All the victims survived, though some were permanently disabled. The shooter, Allen Scarsella, a West Point dropout, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. On the drive to the protest, he and another Kommando had live-streamed themselves brandishing a pistol and bandying far-right memes. (A favorite was “make the fire rise,” an allusion to the catchphrase of a Batman villain.) Feidt said to himself, “Wow, this is more than just shitposting. They are coming off the Internet.” The battle lines, he realized, were no longer only between protesters and police: “People who are not the government are coming out, too.”

Unicorn Riot’s connection to undercover antifascist espionage began in 2017, shortly after Scarsella’s trial ended. Schiano got a call from an antifascist contact: a comrade in Seattle had infiltrated the online chats of people planning the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, which was scheduled for the next day. Was Schiano interested?

The full ramifications of this call have only recently become clear, thanks to a series of court cases that culminated, this past July, in the federal appeals court in Richmond. The infiltrator, who asked me to withhold his name, has never before spoken publicly about his role. In a telephone interview, he told me that his politics could be fairly described as anarchist, “although I cringe at the term.” On the night of Trump’s Inauguration, he said, a friend had been shot and severely wounded during a melee around the appearance of a far-right speaker at the University of Washington. In the months that followed, the infiltrator became increasingly involved in attempts to dox members of neo-Nazi and white-nationalist groups. He took surreptitious photographs at demonstrations in the Pacific Northwest where street fighters from far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer rumbled against leftists. A few times, he crawled under parked cars and planted magnetized G.P.S. devices, to track targets. He told me that he’d helped expose the identities of at least two members of the Atomwaffen Division, a particularly violent neo-Nazi group, causing one to lose his job and the other to move from Washington to Texas.

That spring, the infiltrator saw posters around Seattle advertising a group that called itself Anti-Communist Action; the posters included the address of a Discord chat for new members. Thinking that he might be able to dox some members, he adopted the online handle Einsatz—a reference to Hitler’s paramilitary death squads—and applied to join. His code name was evidently credential enough: Einsatz was admitted to a series of online chats that eventually included about twelve hundred far-right extremists across the country.

Anti-Communist Action publicly described itself as “physically resisting leftist terrorists and rioters.” But in the private chats its users insisted that “Hitler did nothing wrong”; disparaged immigrants and Jewish, Muslim, and Black people; and predicted a coming “civil war” that might be “more of a massacre.” “Death to all non whites,” one wrote. “Let’s bomb a major federal building,” urged another. Some members shared detailed instructions for building bombs and booby traps. “Do it Boston bomber style,” one suggested.

That July, after Einsatz had been lurking for months, he saw a link inviting members to the Unite the Right rally. Clicking on it introduced him to another Discord chat, for the people planning the event, including the leaders of several far-right groups. They talked openly of their desire for “a race war,” for the extermination of Jews and nonwhites, and for hand-to-hand combat at “the battle of Charlottesville.”

Rousseau, Patriot Front’s founder, who was then helping lead a group called Vanguard America, said that he wanted to see “jackboots on commie skulls, blood on the pavement.” Robert Ray, a.k.a. Azzmador, who edited the neo-Nazi Web site the Daily Stormer, said that he was even more excited to fight Black Lives Matter activists than to square off against Antifa, adding, “Blacks are the easiest people on earth to trigger.”

Jason Kessler, a Proud Boy who first conceived of the rally, wrote, “Can you guys conceal carry? I don’t want to scare antifa off from throwing the first punch.” Planners discussed which flagpoles would most effectively double as clubs or spears. One organizer noted that “impaling people is always the best option.” The conversation returned repeatedly to using vehicles as weapons by driving them into counter-demonstrators.

Einsatz told me, “It was nothing but race hate and genocide, but the purpose was planning and coördination for violence.” Still, he never thought of warning the F.B.I. “I don’t talk to cops,” he explained. Instead, on a mass Signal chat of antifascists, he shared details of Airbnb rentals that far-right leaders had reserved around Charlottesville. Activists besieged Airbnb with complaints, and the company cancelled reservations for many of the rally-goers—hundreds, according to the rally’s organizers.

Then one of the activists put Einsatz in touch with Schiano. At the time, Schiano was with two colleagues in a rental car, headed for Charlottesville. Einsatz told Schiano about plans for an unauthorized torch march that night through the University of Virginia campus—a deliberate evocation of the Klan. The tip enabled Schiano to be one of the few journalists in a position to cover the march, which culminated with hundreds of far-right protesters assaulting a few dozen counter-protesters. Later that weekend, a neo-Nazi named James Fields plowed his Dodge Challenger into counter-protesters, injuring dozens and killing Heather Heyer, a waitress and paralegal. “For all it’s worth, we fucking killed someone,” a member of the Discord chat posted. Kessler, the rally’s organizer, called Heyer “a fat, disgusting Communist.” Rousseau used a white-nationalist meme intended to mock Black people who complained of false arrest or police abuse: “Fields dindu nuffin tbh.”

Einsatz had given Unicorn Riot a password for the Discord chats, and Schiano logged on. He told me he couldn’t believe that the organizers “were this stupid”: they’d laid out explicit plans, in writing, for instigating violence. Anarchist computer programmers eventually helped replicate the entire cache, which Unicorn Riot published online, in searchable form.

The leaks became the basis of a landmark lawsuit, Sines v. Kessler, which concluded this past July, when the court in Richmond approved a verdict awarding a group of Charlottesville residents more than nine million dollars in punitive damages and legal fees, from a roster of far-right groups and their leaders. Prosecutors used the leaks to help convict Fields of the killing—he was given a life sentence—and to win plea agreements from four members of Rundo’s Rise Above Movement, who had been charged as “serial rioters.” The suit also led to the implosion of several white-supremacist groups, including Vanguard America. (Afterward, Rousseau led hundreds of the group’s members to form Patriot Front.) In addition, the leaks caused the dishonorable discharge of two U.S. marines who had participated. One of them, Lance Corporal Vasillios G. Pistolis, a member of the Atomwaffen Division, had boasted on Discord that during the rally he had “cracked 3 skulls together.” Sergeant Michael Joseph Chesny had asked in a Discord chat, “Is it legal to run over protesters blocking roadways?”

If federal law enforcement had been paying as much attention to the planning for the rally as Einsatz had, could the involvement of “serial rioters,” or organizers with a record of provoking street fights, have justified an investigation? Could the F.B.I. have prevented the bloodshed? In December, 2018, months after Unicorn Riot published the chat archive, the Bureau cited it in a search warrant seeking its own copies of the digital files, in order to determine whether the rally planners “had been aware of the potential for violence and may have encouraged or incited individuals to violence.” There is no indication, though, that this inquiry led to further charges, or to any charges against the Anti-Communist Action members who shared instructions for bomb-making.

After Charlottesville, Schiano told me, Unicorn Riot “got this new reputation as a clearing house” for data dumps on far-right groups: “People who had done other infiltrations started sending us stuff.” Sorting through stolen troves of far-right communications became a virtually full-time occupation. “I was, like, ‘O.K., this is what I do now,’ ” he said. By 2022, Unicorn Riot had published at least fifteen major leaks delivered by antifascist infiltrators or hackers, in addition to two smaller leaks from Patriot Front. (Unicorn Riot enjoyed a wave of critical praise for its unfiltered coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis, generating a flood of donations.)

It’s not the only operation publishing such leaks. Two years ago, for example, the Anti-Defamation League published the membership records of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia; the files had been stolen by a hacking collective called Distributed Denial of Secrets. The Oath Keepers roster included nearly four hundred law-enforcement officers, among them ten police chiefs and eleven sheriffs, in addition to a hundred and seventeen active-duty service members, eleven reservists, and eighty-one people who either held or were seeking public office.

In 2022, the antifascist veterans’ group Task Force Butler, founded by Kristofer Goldsmith, an Army veteran of the Iraq War, obtained Telegram messages from inside a group called Nationalist Social Club-131, which is led in part by a former Patriot Front member; Goldsmith’s disclosures prompted the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to file civil-rights lawsuits against the group. (The Massachusetts complaint accuses N.S.C.-131 of, among other things, unlawful intimidation of hotels offering emergency shelter to immigrants; a lawyer for the group told me that prosecutors were contorting statutes “to apply to political protests.”)

But Michael Loadenthal, the University of Cincinnati scholar, who runs a project tracking prosecutions involving domestic political violence, told me that Unicorn Riot has taken on a unique role as a “data launderer.” It repackages leaks obtained by antifascist researchers—most of whom insist on anonymity and use deception, hacking, or other unsavory tactics—into forms that journalists, advocacy groups, civil-rights lawyers, and prosecutors can trust and exploit. “On-the-ground activists are delivering actionable intelligence to challenge and destabilize these networks, while law enforcement is often ineffective,” Loadenthal told me.

“Virtually every single data dump and leak,” he noted, has exposed members of the military, the National Guard, and the police as part of the far right, confirming what he said was a worrisome overlap. For example, in 2019 Unicorn Riot published hundreds of text messages and dozens of audio recordings from Identity Evropa, the neo-Nazi group that coined the slogan “You Will Not Replace Us.” Journalists studying the leaks identified at least ten active members who were serving in the U.S. military or the National Guard. (A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on how many of these service members had been discharged.)

The leaks also revealed a concerted effort to draw maga Republicans into unvarnished white nationalism. In the leaked Identity Evropa recordings, Patrick Casey, the organization’s leader at the time, stressed that it sought to reach “the average conservative white person.” He recommended that the group’s members set up front organizations like “a San Diego maga group,” or attend conferences “with your college Republicans.” (Casey was subsequently present at the Capitol on January 6th, but has not been charged with any crime in relation to the storming.) In an Identity Evropa seminar about political activism, Alex Witoslawski, then a Republican consultant, instructed members to avoid explicitly defending Nazism or denying the Holocaust. “You are essentially allowing the opposition to define you,” he explained. Instead of saying that “diversity is bad,” he advised, “say, ‘We want a unified, cohesive society.’ ” This, he argued, amounted to the same thing, because “when you have a more homogenous society, your society is more cohesive.” (Witoslawski, whose Gmail profile picture shows him making a white-nationalist hand gesture, told me, in an e-mail, that this “strange seminar” was his final involvement with Identity Evropa.) Soon after the leaks, the group collapsed.

Several years ago, Sam Bishop, a Boston-based freelance journalist and a contributor to Unicorn Riot, was browsing a public far-right message board, Fascist Forge, when he stumbled across an archive of private user data from a larger and more influential forum called Iron March. Founded in 2011 by a Russian neo-Nazi, Iron March had become an influential gathering place for roughly twelve hundred far-right extremists from around the world. It helped incubate major white-nationalist and neo-fascist groups in at least seven countries, and it was the online birthplace of the Atomwaffen Division, the American neo-Nazi organization, whose members have been linked to five murders and to a plot to blow up synagogues and a Miami-area nuclear power plant. (Atomwaffen’s founder belonged to the Florida National Guard.)

Bishop assumed that he was not the first person to notice the Iron March cache. He told me, “If it was that easy to do it, you would think that law enforcement would have done it.” But, just in case, he shared the files with a Unicorn Riot chat group, and it soon became clear that he’d made a discovery. The database spread from the chat: other Web sites published its contents, and journalists and researchers soon confirmed that among the Iron March users were at least eight active-duty American service members. (At least six members of Atomwaffen were in the military or the reserves.) Bishop, whose role in the leak has not previously been exposed, told me, “They could have been fired from those jobs a lot earlier—if the F.B.I. had known.”

Other Than The No-Show of Vincent Washington, Patriot Front’s demonstration in Washington, D.C., on December 4, 2021, started out as planned. After the Seattle crew landed, they drove to a park in suburban Maryland, where more than two hundred members of the group soon gathered. When it was time for the march, all of them squeezed into the back of several U-Haul trucks, which dropped them off in downtown D.C. Sock-puppet social-media accounts reported sightings of the Patriot Front march and posted video clips; the Rise Above Movement’s online media arm was on hand to film it. Outside the Capitol, Thomas Rousseau delivered a speech about “we the people born to a nation of the European race.”

Kevin Lowy, a Patriot Front member from New York with a short beard and glasses, stayed behind at the park in Maryland to watch over the group’s vehicles. As night fell, he later told police, he was working on his laptop inside his Dodge Ram when a masked figure splattered paint across his windshield. Lowy called the police as he drove off in a panic, but his tires had been slashed. He met a patrol car outside the parking lot. “It scared the shit out of me,” he told an officer.

By the time the U-Hauls returned and began disgorging hundreds of identically dressed men wearing Patriot Front gear, several other officers—most of them Black and Latino—were at the lot. When some of the men dissembled about their purpose, an officer told them, “We are not stupid, O.K.?” Another officer used his phone to Google “Patriot Front”: “That’s a hate—nationalist—group.” But, after consulting the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, the police let the marchers go on their way. (One of them, Nathaniel Noyce, was later arrested for participating in the January 6th riot.)

The Patriot Front members had little to celebrate, though. Someone—presumably Vincent—had shared the location of the parking lot with allied activists in the D.C. area, who had slashed the members’ tires, smashed their windshields and mirrors, covered their windows in paint, and scrawled “patriot fail,” in bright red, across the side of a white van. Colton Brown, the Seattle-area director, later complained to Rousseau that a rental-car company had charged his credit card $1,975.54 for vehicle damage. He also lamented that his “fav flannel” had been stolen from one of the cars, in addition to a special pillow. “That’s a $100 pillow bro,” he informed Rousseau, who told him that the parking-lot damage had cost more than nineteen thousand dollars in total.

Vincent, with the position of trust he’d earned, had found his way deep into Patriot Front’s internal communications, which were conducted on the online platforms Rocket.Chat and Mumble. Patriot Front members later asserted that Vincent had conspired with hackers to further penetrate the group’s electronic files. One way or another, membership names and details of internal messages soon surfaced online, along with audio recordings of private conversations and meetings. In Seattle, members of Patriot Front found their neighborhoods plastered with posters identifying them as racists, and antifascists around the country exposed dozens of other members online, linking some to specific acts of bigotry or vandalism. The doxing was sometimes pointedly belittling. A “Nazi Watch” Web site reported that a Seattle-area Patriot Front member was “known for his extreme social awkwardness” and “incel-like behaviors” and was “so subservient to his Network Director”—Colton Brown—“that he would, and has, peed in a bottle on the highway rather than be a mere few minutes late to a meeting.” The site also declared that Brown “is unashamed to hold neo-Nazi beliefs and should not be welcomed in our community.”

By May, 2022, Unicorn Riot had released audio files documenting at least seventeen hours’ worth of internal Patriot Front meetings and calls, in addition to nearly a hundred thousand lines from internal chats. (Feidt and Schiano refused to talk about their source.) The chats revealed that Rousseau and other members had privately described the U.S. as a “Zionist Occupied Government.” Recordings captured members discussing the need to ban homosexuality and to make women subservient, and fantasizing about how “rape gangs” could exert control over women in their future ethnostate. In one recording, a Florida network director of Patriot Front advised members to enlist their girlfriends in racist vandalism; then the members could blackmail their girlfriends, insuring their loyalty. The director mused in another recording that Patriot Front was, in some ways, “a criminal organization.”

Patriot Front officially disavowed violence. It also prohibited members from bringing firearms to events. But the leaks revealed that some members had a keen interest in guns. Photographs showed 3-D-printed “ghost guns” inside the home of a Seattle-area member. A video captured someone in Brown’s crew firing a rifle at a stolen Black Lives Matter sign, and chats indicated that another member brought two loaded handguns to the Washington march. (At least two people linked to Patriot Front in other areas have been arrested for illegal gun possession.)

The leaks also provided detailed evidence of coördination to carry out dozens of acts of vandalism intended to intimidate minority groups. These acts included defacing a statue in Portland, Oregon, that honored George Floyd; a mural in Olympia, Washington, that celebrated gay pride; and a mural in Richmond, Virginia, commemorating the tennis star Arthur Ashe. Rousseau, it was revealed, insisted on personally approving all major vandalism operations, in addition to some detailed schemes to evade arrest. (While defacing the mural in Olympia, members distracted police with a bogus 911 call.) Private photographs showed Patriot Front members posing in front of stolen signs about diversity, L.G.B.T. dignity, and racial justice. At one meeting, Rousseau ordered members to steal “a duffelbag-full” of American flags, so that they could be flown upside down, Alito style, at demonstrations.

Some prosecutors took action: a district attorney in Olympia brought charges against members for graffiti. Police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, received a tip about “a little army” of some thirty masked men with shields climbing into the back of a U-Haul. Among the men were Rousseau and Brown. A physical search revealed that Rousseau was in possession of a document describing plans to establish a “confrontational dynamic” by marching into a local L.G.B.T.-pride rally; prosecutors charged Rousseau, Brown, and dozens of others with conspiracy to riot. (The charges against Rousseau were later dismissed on technical grounds; Brown pleaded guilty to parading without a permit.) Several civil-rights advocates, meanwhile, drew on the leaks when suing Rousseau and Patriot Front under the Ku Klux Klan Act, passed in 1871, which prohibits conspiring to intimidate on the basis of race or to deprive citizens of their civil rights.

A Black teacher and musician in Boston is suing Patriot Front over a clash at a demonstration which sent him to the hospital for stitches, and several Richmond residents are suing the group over the defacement of the Arthur Ashe mural. Arthur Ago, an attorney who helped file some of these lawsuits while working at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told me that Patriot Front’s vandalism was “a twenty-first-century equivalent of cross-burning,” intended to make vulnerable communities “live in fear.” Ago, who is now at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning advocacy group that tracks the far right, added, “We don’t see the F.B.I. involved at all.”

Phone campaigns and other pressure from antifascist activists cost many of the exposed Patriot Front members their jobs. Among those fired were a civil engineer, a real-estate broker, an H.V.A.C. technician, and an analyst at a tech company. Colton Brown, who lost his electrician job, moved to Utah. (A lawyer representing Brown told me that Brown’s views have since changed, but declined to say how.)

In e-mails, members of Brown’s crew told me that they quickly unearthed Vincent Washington’s history as David Alan Capito. On social media, the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club had posted photographs of him marching in a demonstration, and one Patriot Front member claimed to me that he had seen security-camera footage of Vincent’s “face and fat ass” as he slashed the tires of Patriot Front members’ cars in Seattle. In 2019, the men on Brown’s crew noted, Vincent had been the subject of a temporary restraining order, for alleged harassment of an ex-girlfriend. In retaliation for his leaks, a Web site called Antifa Watch labelled him “a politically motivated violent extremist” with a history of “stalkerish behavior including hacking, vandalism of people’s property, trespassing on people’s homes, and just being a general creep.”

The Exposed Patriot Front members were furious at Vincent. To strike back, they appear to have enlisted an unlikely ally: the F.B.I. A former friend of his told me about receiving a phone call, in the spring of 2023, from an agent investigating whether Vincent was a dangerous left-wing extremist with access to ghost guns.

Other members turned to Glen Allen, a lawyer who has emerged as a kind of one-man far-right legal-defense team. On behalf of Brown and four others who lost their jobs, Allen has filed a novel lawsuit against Vincent which, if successful, could set a precedent for severely penalizing vigilante infiltrators, and help end the leaks that have bedevilled the far right.

Allen, a seventy-three-year-old with a short white beard and a slender, athletic build, lives in a modest brick house in Baltimore. He told me that, in 2022, he was contacted by Paul Gancarz, an exposed Patriot Front member who had been fired from his job as a civil engineer in Virginia. Gancarz needed a lawyer to negotiate his severance. But when Allen heard about Vincent’s sting, he told me, “I said, ‘This guy’s going to get away with this?’ ” After enlisting Colton Brown and other exposed members as additional clients, Allen filed a suit for damages and lost wages under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits the use of computer systems for unauthorized purposes. Vincent has now disappeared, and Allen is petitioning a judge to allow the publication of a summons in lieu of hand delivery.

Allen has personal experience with being exposed. Forty years ago, he became close to William Pierce, the leader of a far-right group called the National Alliance; Pierce is also the pseudonymous author of “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about a coming race war, which has inspired generations of white nationalists. Allen told me that he eventually broke with Pierce over his violent rhetoric and views on women. But Allen attended an Alliance conference that questioned the Holocaust, and he contributed five hundred dollars to the group after Pierce died.

Allen kept all that to himself. He worked for twenty-seven years as a litigator at the law firm DLA Piper, and when he retired, in 2015, he took a job for the city of Baltimore. Soon afterward, the Southern Poverty Law Center unearthed and publicized his ties to Pierce, calling Allen a “neo-Nazi lawyer.” The city immediately fired him. Allen told me, “I never talked politics at work. I was doing good work for the city. And none of that mattered.”

Antifascist doxing, Allen argued, was unfair, extrajudicial suppression of controversial speech. He has set up a nonprofit, the Free Expression Foundation, to defend what he called “victims of the thought police.” A lawsuit on his own behalf against the Southern Poverty Law Center failed, but it helped him garner numerous clients from across the far right. He is currently representing a dozen Patriot Front members, including the defendants in the Arthur Ashe mural case—Gancarz, the civil engineer, is one of them. Allen has asserted in court filings that civil-rights statutes don’t apply to the incident, because a Patriot Front logo does not convey the same threat of violence that a burning cross or a swastika does. In every case, his central argument is a First Amendment claim: that courts and prosecutors are unconstitutionally targeting his clients because of their views.

Allen, who told me that he would represent left-wing dissidents, too, if they came to him, said that he sees his role as safeguarding the singular American tradition of free speech—the same tradition that F.B.I. officials told me constrains their ability to investigate the far right. He noted that in Brandenburg v. Ohio, a 1969 case involving a Ku Klux Klan leader, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects more than criticizing the government, urging its overthrow, or deprecating a racial minority. Calls for violence or even genocide are also protected—unless those calls entail “inciting or producing imminent lawless action.” Allen told me, “It’s an amazing doctrine, when you think about it—only in America, I would think.” Antifascist spies like Vincent, Allen argues, are conspiring to deprive Americans of their civil liberties.

But some scholars, and some members of Congress, argue that Allen and the F.B.I. present a false choice between policing the far right and respecting free speech. They say that a clear-eyed, empirical assessment of crime data could cut through claims of bias by showing that some organizations on the far right can be fairly classified as street gangs or criminal enterprises, rather than as political movements merely expressing unpopular ideas. Mike German, a researcher at N.Y.U.’s Brennan Center for Justice and a former F.B.I. agent who worked undercover among far-right groups, told me, “The First Amendment issue is resolved if the F.B.I., and law enforcement in general, just focus on the criminal activity, rather than on the ideology.” The problem, he said, is “the F.B.I.’s positioning of far-right violence as political activity protected by the First Amendment,” because it deters law enforcement from cracking down on organized criminality—from brawling by the Proud Boys to property crimes by Patriot Front.

Goldsmith, the Iraq veteran who has been involved in vigilante infiltrations, told me that he has provided the F.B.I. with damning information about several far-right groups, including a militia that was preparing for violence on January 6th. He thinks that racial bias partially explains the Bureau’s caution about initiating investigations of far-right groups. Law-enforcement officers “see white people and think, Oh, that can’t be a gang member,” Goldsmith said. “But if law enforcement just examined these groups through the lens of criminal street gangs and organized crime, they have got all the predicate they need to at least start investigations.”

Congress, in defense-spending legislation passed in 2020, required the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security to collect and share more comprehensive data on domestic violent-extremist crimes. But this isn’t happening. In a follow-up report, issued in November, 2022, Senator Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, expressed frustration over the fact that the federal government still has not “systematically tracked and reported this data itself.”

German, the Brennan Center scholar, told me that the failure to collect accurate domestic-terrorism-incident data—“actual crimes committed by various people for a political purpose”—has also made it needlessly difficult for the government to settle the question of “whether prosecutors are acting in a biased manner.” In the case of Robert Rundo, the Rise Above Movement founder, reliable data collection could have helped prosecutors allay the judge’s concerns about selective prosecution—for example, by documenting the over-all frequency and severity of violence from both the left and the right, and by keeping track of who got arrested after clashes between the two sides. Such data could also have shown how Rundo’s pattern of aggression stood out from, say, the actions of counter-protesters who engaged in violence at one heated event. (In July, a federal appeals court overturned the district court’s dismissal of the charges against Rundo and ordered a new trial, ruling that Rundo and company—whatever their politics—“behaved like leaders of an organized-crime group.”)

Despite all the Republican talk in recent years about the deep state, academic experts have frequently asserted that the F.B.I. devotes disproportionate resources to policing radical environmentalist and anarchist groups, which may threaten property but do less bodily harm than the far right does. In the tumult after George Floyd’s killing, these critics have noted, police forces often conducted mass arrests at racial-justice protests but let far-right rioters walk away—including many of the people who later stormed the Capitol.

Trump is now promising to pardon people convicted of crimes related to January 6th. German said, “What the far right is hearing is ‘Violence against our political opponents is not something that should be criminalized.’ It absolutely invites more violence.” He added, “So many people felt that they could mass and engage in violent criminal conduct at the Capitol on January 6th because a sense of impunity had developed over years of engaging in similar violence at various rallies and protests—including at Charlottesville—without law-enforcement interference. They were conditioned to believe that their violence was sanctioned by law enforcement.” When Trump has been asked about the potential for violence if he loses again, he has done little to discourage it. He told Time, “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”

Antifascist Vigilantes, of course, can never match the scope of U.S. law enforcement. But they are determined to keep showing up both the police and the F.B.I., in part by building on Vincent’s leaks to Unicorn Riot. Last summer, about a week after the filing of the lawsuit against Vincent, a far-right Telegram account calling itself Appalachian Archives posted his supposed address. And last year Appalachian Archives attempted to dox nearly two dozen other people, including community leaders who had denounced antisemitism. Appalachian Archives threatened a Nashville television correspondent, Phil Williams, saying that “the day of the rope” was approaching, and also targeted another journalist, Jordan Green, who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and writes for the left-leaning Web site Raw Story.

At the time, Green was reporting on the 2119 Crew, a neo-Nazi gang linked to brick-through-the-window attacks against a synagogue and a Jewish center, in addition to vandalism targeting Muslim and Black people. (“2119” is alphanumeric code for “Blood and Soil.”) Appalachian Archives posted a head shot of Green and wrote, “The bastard above had been found out to be harassing our boys.”

One afternoon this past January, Green’s doorbell rang: a pizza that he hadn’t ordered was being delivered. The next day, Appalachian Archives posted a photograph of Green answering the door. A few weeks later, half a dozen men—many wearing skull masks, a neo-Nazi hallmark—gathered outside his house. Some gave straight-armed Roman salutes, and one carried a sign warning of a “consequence” for Green’s reporting. Appalachian Archives posted a picture of the stunt, as well as a photograph of the same contingent standing next to a marker commemorating the Greensboro massacre, where, in 1979, white supremacists shot and killed five labor organizers.

But an antifascist collective called Appalachia Research Club, which was working with Green, had obtained a photograph of the vehicle driven by the stealth photographer at the pizza delivery. Armed with the license-plate number, they were able to identify the car’s owner: Kai Liam Nix, a twenty-year-old from North Carolina. Having scoured social media and Unicorn Riot’s database of leaks, they were able to match his face and birthday with a Patriot Front member operating under the pseudonym Patrick North Carolina. It seemed likely that Nix either ran the Appalachian Archives account or was closely linked to it. With the help of Jeff Tischauser, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the researchers discovered that Nix is also an active-duty soldier in the Army, serving in the 82nd Airborne Division and stationed at Fort Liberty, in North Carolina. Tischauser told me, “These antifascist researchers may not be up to the ethical standards of professional journalists, but some of them get quality information.”

I reached Nix by phone, and he denied any involvement in the Appalachian Archives account or with Patriot Front. He told me, “That is a hate group, and you can’t be in the military and a hate group at the same time.” Nix pleaded with me not to publish the allegations, which, he said, would hinder an application he’d made to become a police detective after leaving the military, “to stop criminals.” We agreed to discuss the matter the next day, at a Starbucks near Fort Liberty. Before we hung up, I asked him for his license-plate number—the key detail linking him to Appalachian Archives—and he claimed not to remember it. The next morning, he backed out of our meeting and stopped responding to my messages. On August 16th, a few days after I called the Army, a government official told me that the previous day federal agents had arrested Nix for illicit sales of firearms and lying on a background check. (Spokespeople for the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina declined to comment.)

The online war between the far right and the far left continues. After recent marches in Nashville by Patriot Front and a neo-Nazi group, some antifascist researchers launched a campaign called Name the Bozo, which aims to publicly identify as many neo-Nazis as possible. About twenty “bozos” have been exposed so far. One member of the Appalachia Research Club told me that members of far-right groups “have a First Amendment right to be assholes and voice their opinions—but I have a First Amendment right to call them out on that, and if that results in repercussions where they lose their jobs or go to jail, that’s on them, not me.” He continued, “It doesn’t seem like the authorities are interested. I don’t know if they are just turning a blind eye, or if there is something else. But I think this is important work, and I am going to keep doing it, because I think some of these guys are legitimately dangerous.” ♦

— Published in the New Yorker’s Print Edition of the August 26, 2024, Issue, With the Headline “The Infiltrators.”

[simply-ivanka]

Very Serious Charges:

Veterans have accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of “embellishing” his military career and abandoning his National Guard battalion.

“On May 16th, 2005, [Walz] quit, betraying his country, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war,” Behrends and Herr wrote.

Retired Command Sergeants Major Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr said Walz retired from his 24-year tenure in the National Guard after learning that his battalion would be deployed to Iraq, despite allegedly assuring his fellow troops he would join them.”

August 6, 2024 | Ashe Schow

Vice President Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, and will likely emphasize his military service as part of their campaign.

But when Walz was running for governor in 2018, former members of the National Guard spoke out about his service, with a retired command sergeant major saying he “embellished and selectively omitted facts of his military career for years.”

In an open letter posted to Facebook that year, retired Command Sergeants Major Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr wrote that Walz retired just a few months after receiving a warning order that his battalion would be deployed to Iraq – even though he told military personnel he would be going on the mission.

“On May 16th, 2005, [Walz] quit, betraying his country, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war,” Behrends and Herr wrote.

The pair wrote that Walz said he needed to retire to run for Congress, but this was untrue. Walz could have run for Congress and requested permission from the Secretary of Defense before he entered active duty, the pair claimed.

“If he had retired normally and respectfully, you would think he would have ensured his retirement documents were correctly filled out and signed, and that he would have ensured he was reduced to Master Sergeant for dropping out of the academy,” the two wrote. “Instead he slithered out the door and waited for the paperwork to catch up to him.”

They noted that his official retirement document says “soldier not available for signature.”

Walz’s sudden retirement complicated his selection to the United States Army Sergeants Major Academy, Behrends and Herr wrote. Once someone accepts enrollment, they agree to three stipulations: to serve two years after graduation from the academy or promotion, that failing the course could result in being kicked out of the military, and that they will be reduced to Master Sergeant if they don’t complete the course.

Walz wasn’t promoted to Command Sergeant Major until September 17, 2004. A month earlier, he was photographed holding a protest sign outside a rally for President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, though it doesn’t seem as though the military noticed or disciplined him.

Less than a year after his promotion, Walz retired, meaning his promotion was nullified since he broke the agreement he signed when entering the academy.

On September 10, 2005, Walz was reduced to Master Sergeant. As Behrends and Herr wrote, “It took a while for the system to catch up to him as it was uncharted territory, literally no one quits in the position he was in, or drops out of the academy.”

In November 2005, Walz reached out to his former battalion as it was preparing for war. He offered to hold a fundraiser for their bus trip home over Christmas. “The same Soldiers he had abandoned just months before, trying to buy their votes,” Behrends and Herr wrote.

These are not the only two to call out Walz’s service. According to Behrends and Herr, Tom Hagen, an Iraq war veteran, wrote a letter to the Winona Daily News calling Walz’s retirement “disturbing”.

“But even more disturbing is the fact that Walz quickly retired after learning that his unit —southern Minnesota’s 1-125 FA Battalion — would be sent to Iraq,” Hagen wrote in the letter, according to Behrends and Herr. “For Tim Walz to abandon his fellow soldiers and quit when they needed experienced leadership most is disheartening. It dishonors those brave American men and women who did answer their nation’s call and who continue to serve, fight and unfortunately die in harm’s way for us.”

The letter prompted a scathing response from Walz, who defended his service record.

“After completing 20 years of service in 2001, I re-enlisted to serve our country for an additional four years following Sept. 11 and retired the year before my battalion was deployed to Iraq in order to run for Congress,” Walz said. “I’m proud of the 24 years I served our country in the Army National Guard. There’s a code of honor among those who’ve served, and normally this type of partisan political attack comes only from one who’s never worn a uniform.”

Behrends and Herr note that Walz’s official Report of Separation and Record of Service state that Walz re-enlisted on September 18, 2001, for six years. Walz said in his response to Hagen that he only re-enlisted for four years, which would have made his retirement date September 18, 2005 – four months later than when he actually retired.

“The bottom line in all of this is gut wrenching and sad to explain,” Behrends and Herr concluded. “When the nation called, he quit.”

By Caitlin Doornbos and Josh Christenson

Published Aug. 6, 2024, 1:00 p.m. ET

[thexsilentxwordsmith]

I'll Crawl Home To Her

Simon "Ghost" Riley x Fem!reader

Summary: Simon is away on a mission and you are on his mind. Having to extend his stay, he is going to miss Valentine's day, but coming across a recent trend on TikTok, he may have a way to say just how much you mean to him.

***So, this came from the TikTok trend I came across of military guys posting pics of their girlfriends/wives/fiancees/etc. to the song Work Song by Hozier and I wanted Simon to do it too for you. So here it is! Just a little something extra***

***Pictures are made by me***

Simon can’t sleep, again. 

It’s been a while that his team has been in the field on their current mission and though he knows he should focus on the task at hand, there is so much on his mind tonight. Even though he is tired, he cannot seem to get himself to drift off. There is something missing, or more like someone, that he wishes to be beside right now and that is you.

He feels guilty about still being gone as he should be in by now, just in time for Valentine's day, but that isn’t happening anymore. Things on this latest mission are taking longer than expected and instead of packing up to come home to you, he had to have that hard phone call to tell you that he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In that call he heard it there in your voice: that twinge of sadness that you always try to mask through hopeful and kind words, holding back the crackle in your voice as you choke back the tears in hopes that he won't hear it, but he does. He always does.

As much as he loves his job he is ready to be back with you again and hearing that does not make it any easier. 

The dark surrounds him as Simon lays in his cot, trying to numb his mind with his phone propped up in his hand, hopeful that with enough distraction sleep will eventually take him. He knows there is no better way to keep his mind from wandering back to those things he cannot change than by idly watching short content videos and he knows just where to go for that. He clicks on the TikTok app and begins to watch. 

Scrolling through the drivel and waste, past people spewing their nonsense, a video comes across his feed that instantly brings you right back to the forefront of his thoughts. The first slide is a picture of a young man in his fatigues and tactical gear smiling at the camera. He is clearly in the field on active duty and there is text across him that repeats the lyrics of the song playing. His picture is followed by a slide with what Simon assumes is his wife with the next bit of lyrics over her. It looks like a new trend amongst military personnel on the app, a tribute to the ones they are going to come home to in the future: children, pets, significant others, family. 

The song tugs at his heartstrings from the moment it begins; it's one he hasn't heard before, but the lyrics make his heart ache and his arms feel so incredibly empty without the weight of your body filling them as the singer speaks about how even in death they would find their way home to the one they love.

And fuck if that isn't something he thinks about a lot. 

It is a burden of this type of job, leaving all part of his heart behind back home every time he has to go out. He knows this lifestyle isn’t easy on either of you, that even though you’ve been together for a couple years now, having him constantly be pulled across the world and away from you still has a certain bite to it. Yet with all that stacked against your relationship, not once have you ever been anything other than supportive. Standing beside him through it all, constantly choosing to give him your heart no matter how hard this gets, loving him through the all the shit that gets thrown his way; if there is anyone his soul would seek out even in death, it would be you. 

He clicks on the sound at the bottom of the screen with a lump welling in his throat and starts to watch more videos of the same. One video turns into two and then three and now his heart is aching something fierce, like a physical burning in the center of his hardened chest that he tries to rub away with his hand, but he knows it's not going to go until he's near you again.

This longing is worse than it has ever been before. He misses your touch, all that soft, warm skin under his hardened hands; he misses your laugh, that sweet sound that can make the sunshine come out even on a rainy day; he yearns for your mouth, those full lips that he can lose himself in. It's almost too much to bear being away from you at that moment.

Simon was never one for big displays of sentimentality. No one ever seemed worth breaking down those walls that he had built up to allow himself to be vulnerable in such a public way like that. It never seemed worth the sacrifice. And for a long time, no matter who he met, that was true…until you.

You broke the mold when you came into his life. Now his heart can't help but burst at the seams whenever you pop into his head. He could be a thousand miles away from you, stuck in some hot, miserable shithole in the middle of nowhere, like he is right now, and yet the moment he thinks of you it doesn't seem quite so bad. 

Because he knows there is a piece of heaven waiting for him, something wonderful that is all his that the struggle of his other life will not touch, not if he has anything to do with it.

Simon may have to miss being there on the day when people show their loved ones how much they care, but that doesn’t mean he can do nothing. As the videos continue to play, he gets an idea, one that will hopefully show you just how much he really does care. 

As much as you go on the app, he is sure you have seen a video or two like this come across your scrolling. You have probably sat there and watched just as he did, thinking about him being so far away, missing him something terrible. Maybe you would like to see him make a video like that for you. Either way, this is something he wants to do, needs to do.

Simon has no pictures of just himself on his phone, none without you in them, and so that’s his first order if he wants to do this right. He tries to do the easy thing the next day and take a selfie, but he can’t get one that looks good enough for him to keep. The more he takes, the worse he thinks they look and that means he is going to have to get help whether he wants to or not, otherwise he is going to back out of doing this and he’s not going to let that happen. 

This is for you after all, he needs it to be perfect. You deserve that.

He decides his best bet is wrangling Soap into doing this for him; at least he is the most comfortable asking the sergeant. “Johnny, I need ya to do somethin’ for me,” Simon says as the team stands around awaiting transport into the designated location. “Don’t ask any fuckin’ questions, but I need ya to take a picture a me real quick.”

“Wanna do a beauty shoot here, L.T.? Seems a bit of a strange location,” Johnny jokes as Simon pulls out his phone from his pocket and shoves it into the sergeant’s open hand. Johnny watches him for a moment, taking a guess at what this is all really about. “Or is it for yer lass back home? Gonna send her somethin’ nice?”

Shaking his head, Simon laughs sarcastically. “Just take the damn picture, yeah? An’ make it look good. I want it ta look natural.”

This isn’t something the masked officer has much experience in and so posing is out; he instead goes for something where it looks like he is caught unaware that he’s being photographed. He’s looking off in the distance, his hand wrapped around his gun so they don’t just hang awkwardly at his side. Johnny quickly snaps the pic and hands the phone back to Simon to check. 

“That’ll do,” he says under his breath, satisfied enough with how it looks.

That night as he lays down for bed, he quickly pieces the video together: first his photo and then he needs one of you. He opens his camera roll and it is absurd how many different ones he has saved. There are so many to choose from that he has a hard time picking the perfect one, but settles on something recent. 

It’s one of you in the bathroom of your apartment, all cozy in the striped jumper he got you for your birthday. Your hair is pulled down out of the bun you keep it in for work, a bit messy from just getting in after you got off. Never has he seen someone more beautiful in such a simple state; you always could look like a dream without even trying. And even through your exhaustion you still give the camera and him the biggest, brightest smile. 

Yeah, it has to be this one. This is the beauty he does all this for.

Luckily it is a rather simple video to put together, he doesn’t have too much trouble getting it to look exactly like the others. He has to watch and rewatch it several times just to be sure he is happy with the product before he hits upload to his followers only. Being that you are the only person that follows him, that is exactly what he wants; he may have to be a bit secretive for work, but that doesn’t mean he can’t try and give you some normalcy.

To him you deserve the world and fuck if he isn’t going to try and give it to you.

He presses the button, the uploading dial in the upper hand corner spinning until it reaches 100%, and waits to see if you get it, hoping that it has the effect he wants in saying all he needs to for you to know how special you are to him.

Across the country, your phone buzzes with a random notification as you lay in bed. It's from Simon's account on TikTok saying he's made a new post. You can’t help how strange you think it is… He never posts anything on his account because he really only made one for you to send him stupid videos to watch whenever he needs to unwind and so it takes you by surprise to see that he has posted something. Opening the app curiously you go straight to check out what it is.

You are not prepared for the emotion that hits you the moment the video starts to play. It’s one of those military posts you have come across a couple of times while scrolling late at night, the ones that you have to quickly scroll past or risk crying at how sweet they are and how much they make you miss Simon. Now the heartfelt Hozier song is blasting through the speakers and it is for you.  

The sentiment behind the lyrics of the song mixed with the picture of him on his latest mission is almost too much. And of course he has picked the picture of you looking all natural, it’s like he can’t get enough of you when you don’t even try at all. You know better than anyone how Simon despises having his picture taken if it isn’t with you, so this a huge sign of just how deeply he cares. Instantly there is a stinging around the rims of your eyes as your vision shimmers. You let the video replay several times as the stray tears are let loose and stream heavily down your face.

Simon did this all for you.

Quickly you pull up your texting app and send him a message, hoping he’s still up to at least answer. You have to rub your eyes with the back of your hand to see the screen, but you type out your message as best you can.

I want you to know I'm crying right now because of you. Is that what you wanted? Make me something that has me crying?

A few minutes pass before your phone buzzes with a text from him, just as you finish wiping away more of the tears collecting on your cheeks. 

Guess you saw the video, yeah? I hope I did it right, sweetheart. Cause I fucking mean it.

You chuckle, swallowing down the lump of feelings that have lodged themselves in your throat, struggling not to start sobbing at how his sweet affection. Of all the things that could be said about Simon Riley, one that could never was that he didn't try his hardest when it came to loving you.

The emotion makes your hands quiver, but you text him back.

It is perfect, Simon. I love it. Really, you did so good.

Simon smiles to himself, glad that your deep connection allows him to share things like this with you. There is no one else that can see him like this, that he can allow his guard down around, and it feels nice to be this tender for the first time in his life. He truly feels as if he can be vulnerable, let himself love with his whole heart, and it is all because of you.

Maybe I'm going soft, but I wanted you to know that I am missing you like mad and that I hate I’m not there with you right now. Fuck, it's getting hard. Can't wait till you're back in my arms again, darling.

You close your eyes and press your lips to the screen as if he can feel your kiss through the screen.

Love you.

Not even a minute passes and the phone vibrates.

Love you too, my beautiful girl. I promise I'll be home soon.

[vultures-and-scavengers]

cullen is 100% unqualified.

cullen is unqualified for the role he ends up playing, but also there is NO ONE in thedas who would be qualified.

he is creating an entirely new military and on a massive scale. he is not taking a place in an already established structure. you can be a general who spent their life in the military, but if that military has been around, then you are not creating a power structure, you are taking your place in one. much of this has been organized for you.

and militaries are not just infantry. you need to set up A LOT.

you need construction. you need to be able to house your people. you need fortifications to project your objectives. you need storage space because you will need a fuck ton of supplies. you might need bridges and you might need walls and you need to be able to be flexible with what you have the ability to build.

you need acquisitions. you need to know appropriate amounts of supplies you need. you need to be able to outfit your soldiers with the gear they need, which can change depending on their assignment. you need to know the supplies you're acquiring come from reputable sources and are not sabotaged in any way. you need to have redundancies within your supply chain.

you need transportation. you need to be able to move people. you need to be able to move food. you need to be able to move weapons and armor. you need these transports to be secure and well guarded. you need to (probably) vary their routes so you don't risk predictable convoys being seized. you need animals to provide transportation. you need stablehands who also need housing and pay and food and supplies. you need to feed the animals. you need to fulfill your animals' needs adequately. you need medical care for your animals.

you need personnel management. you need to feed them. you need to manage morale and you need to manage pay. you need to know how to encourage cohesion within units while making sure those units can work with others. you need to assign differing specialties and duties appropriately and you need to provide guidance for how each role should be filled.

you need to train them. this is not just swinging a sword; this is enemy recognition, this is how to work within a rank structure, this is how to operate within a highly regulated environment. you need your people to be educated enough to handle what tasks they need to carry out. you need exercises and wargaming so your people know what to expect from the field.

you need coherent rank structure. you need uniforms so your people know who they are and who those around them. you need to plan units with different capabilities that also fall within a coherent rank structure. you need to have emblems for ranks that are easy to read. you need guidelines and standards for what is expected of different ranks because different ranks have vastly different responsibilities. you need to have standards for promotion and demotion.

you need regulation. you need to ban criminal activity. you need standards for discipline. you need to write all the guidelines and be able to provide them to your units. you need one set of rules that all your units adhere to. you need to balance the needs of the people serving with the regulations that need to be written. you need appropriate ways to alter regulations and then publicize these changes.

you need doctrine. you need to plan out how you fight and why. how do you strategize. how do your larger tactics filter down to the smallest fighting units. how centralized or how flexible is your command structure. how are you appropriately using the resources you have. how do you work with allies. why are your units set up the way they are.

you need health services. you need pest management. you need disease control. you need battlefield medicine. you need standard guidelines for triage and care that all your healers understand so they're not doing wildly different things. you need care for long term issues like broken bones. you need to consider what to do with people who are in long-term care. you need to consider what happens to those who are injured and no longer able to serve.

you need security. you need to know your communications are encrypted, obfuscated, or otherwise made difficult to intercept. you need counterintelligence. you need to have guards on patrol. you need to secure your food and water sources. you need to secure incoming shipments.

this is not at all a complete list. but cullen has to find people who can organize all of this, or he has to organize it himself. he is starting from scratch. the inquisition has nothing at the beginning. there is not a single person in thedas who knows how to come up with all this on the scale that the inquisition will require of cullen and with haste.

the inquisition's army must respond to multiple unprecedented threats: hole in the sky raining demons, tears in reality all over ferelden and orlais, red templars, a tevinter cult led by a returned darkspawn magister with a quasi-archdemon, and an army of mind-controlled wardens and demons.

respond. not plan for. they have to pivot and face these things, which all present different challenges and require different tools and methods to fix.

so yes. he is unqualified. fucking find me someone who isn't.

[jung-koook]

230708 - hoseok on weverse: Army!! How are you doing??? 🫡❤️‍🔥 It's a lovely weekend.💜 After completing my assistant research lectures at the 36th Division White Tiger Training Brigade, I was appointed as a diligent platoon sergeant in the reconnaissance unit. I've been serving in this role with dedication. I've been so busy with my duties that I haven't had time to share updates… I've come here briefly through this message to convey my greetings to you all. During this scorching July while performing military duties, I couldn't help but remember the hot days when I was active as J-Hope around the same time last year. Although our individual appearances may be completely different, I believe that our passionate aspirations for the future are still the same!!!! I wanted to share the news that I'm living as both Jung Hoseok and J-Hope, unchanged no matter when, where, or what circumstances. Haha🫡 Please take care of yourselves, ARMY Be careful of the heat And also be careful of the rain~~~ To all the military personnel and trainees!!!!!! I wish you all good health. Salute!! ❤️‍🔥🫡 (trans. cr. hourlyseokseok)

[thatlovinfeelin]

The Way Home - Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw

In which you meet Bradley during a wedding and your relationship evolves over the years into something more than just fwb.

The Virginian sun was warm against your bare skin as you sat at Buckroe Beach in Hampton Virginia. You were home for an old friend’s wedding taking place at Fort Monroe, just a quick drive away. She was marrying some military boy, which didn’t come as a big surprise considering where you were. The Tidewater area of Virginia was more or less filled to the brim with military, thanks to the multiple bases nearby. 

You wiggled your toes in the sand, smiling softly at the feeling. You lived too far inland now, nowhere near the beach, which normally didn’t bother you. But every time you managed to make it home, you’re always reminded about how much you missed it.

Shade suddenly fell on you, blocking the warm sun.You propped yourself up on an elbow before tipping your sunglasses down, “Hey, Gigantor, could you move? You’re blocking the sun.”

The tall man seemed to flinch before looking down at you. His cheeks were red, you couldn’t tell if it was a blush, sunburn, or if they just stayed that way. He ran a hand through his short hair before mumbling an apology and stepping out of the way. 

Everything about him screamed military, you spent enough time around them to know. You surveyed the way he was built and the way he was standing. Definitely not Air Force, and somehow you guessed he wasn’t one of the Army boys either. 

“Hey, big guy, have we met before?” You questioned sitting up fully before taking your sunglasses off. 

“Pre-wedding brunch yesterday,” He replied after looking at you for a minute, “I’m one of the groomsmen.”

“Ah,” You nodded, “So you are military then.”

He scratched the back of his neck, “Yeah, guilty I guess.”

You moved over on your towel before patting the empty space. The man glanced around the beach, like he was making sure no one was watching, before he carefully sat down next to you. Now that he was next to you, he seemed even bigger. He had to be young, like the same age as you, maybe a year or two older, but he was solid. His shoulders were broad, and muscles.. Oh god, his muscles. They were defined without being like meat-head gym-rat defined. Like he got them just from day to day work and not spending hours and hours in the gym.

“So, what branch?” 

“How did you even guess I was military?” He questioned you. 

You shrugged, a small smirk forming, “My dad is a Marine. Not active duty of course, but he still works as a contractor. So, correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m guessing you aren't in the Air Force, and you don’t seem like a soldier. So that leaves the Navy or Marines.”

He nodded along before sticking out his hand, “Bradley Bradshaw, United States Navy.”

“Ah, a sailor then,” You shook his hand back, “Y/N Y/L/N, total civilian. Nice to meet you Bradley.”

He grinned, you almost swore your stomach tightened a little. You liked that smile. His smile was a hell of a lot better than some of the guys you tried to go out with in the last few months. But you only had the weekend, you were only here for the wedding and then you’d go right back home. 

“So, are you stationed here?” You asked him. 

“Over in Virginia Beach. They have me at Oceana.”

“Personnel or are you one of the flyboys?” You questioned.

He let out a little laugh, “Guilty, I’m an aviator.”

You leaned back to look at him fully, “Damn, that’s impressive. Alex is just a mechanic. But you actually get to fly the things?”

The two of you fell into an easy conversation. You weren’t entirely sure what it was about him that made him so easy to talk to, but you liked it none the less. He seemed so comfortable sitting on the beach with you. 

Part of you began hoping you would be able to dance with him at the wedding. You wanted to spend just a little more time with him before you left, probably never to see him again. 

“Are you hungry?” You asked some time later. 

He shrugged, “I could eat.”

“Great, c’mon, I know a great Italian place just down the road. They have the best subs and I’ve been craving one for months.”

He laughed and followed her as she nearly ran down the road. He soon found himself in a dimly lit italian restaurant, tucking into a big sub. You were right, the sandwich was amazing. The conversation seemed to flow easily. You chatted about your upbringing in Virginia. He told you all about his army of uncles, who also doubled as his father’s old flying buddies. The both of you laughed about certain things the Navy did that just didn’t make sense, and the list was long to be sure. 

Before you knew it, you had to leave to meet your friend to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. Admittedly though, you weren’t ready to leave your little one on one with the pilot across from you. Somehow you were quite drawn to him, and you liked it. 

“See you around, Bradshaw,” You gave him a little salute with a wink before hopping in your car. 

The next day you didn’t get a chance to see him until everyone was lining up for the processional. He looked good in his dress uniform, too good in fact. You found yourself licking your lips a little as you stood beside him. He was the best man, as it turned out. Which meant you were able to stand side by side with him the whole time. 

He didn’t make eye contact with you, however you caught him glance down at you and smiling a little. You looked damn good, if you had to say so yourself. As many times as you’d been a bridesmaid, you never loved a dress as much as you loved this one. Your friend did a damn good job picking them. 

The ceremony was beautiful. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t shed a tear or two. Truthfully, you were just so happy your best friend finally found her Prince Charming. Even if he was a Naval mechanic. She loved him more than anything, and that was enough for you. 

So when it came time for their first dance, you held your glass of champagne close to your chest and wondered if one day you’d be able to have the same thing. You had no boyfriend, no one to call your own, and certainly no prospects. Any of the dates you went on recently were horrible and you wished you could forget them. Hookups weren’t in the cards either since no one seemed to know how to actually give you what you needed. Bottom line, you were all alone. 

“They look good together,” You glanced over your shoulder to see Bradley standing just behind you, the same wistful look in his eyes. 

“They really do,” You agreed, “She made a beautiful bride. Alex is definitely a lucky guy.”

Bradley nodded in agreement and took a long sip from his glass of what looked like whiskey. His tie was gone, along with his suit jacket. He also unbuttoned a couple of his shirt as well. He looked even better now, it made your mouth water just enough. 

“You wanna dance?” He asked you, finishing his drink, “I promise not to step on your toes.”

“I can’t promise the same thing, I’ve been told I have two left feet,” You admitted, drinking more champagne. 

He looked down at his feet, kicking his toe, “The shoes are sturdy, I think I could handle it.”

So you danced, and danced, and then danced some more. Both of you took breaks to get another drink, and then it was right back to the dance floor. Somehow, you wandered off, finding yourselves outside of the reception venue. 

You weren’t sure how his lips ended up on yours, or how your hands tangled into his hair. Or how you managed to find yourself in his bed with his cock burried impossibly deep within you, but you weren’t going to question any of it, or complain. 

But the next morning as you were both getting dressed, he was kind enough to lend you a shirt and a pair of sweats so you didn’t have to do a total walk of shame back to your own hotel room. You felt a tug somewhere deep within your chest, like you were getting ready to walk out on something important. So instead you turned back around, dress balled up in your arms, you heels dangling from your fingers. 

“How about we make a deal?” You questioned, stepping back towards him. 

“A deal?”

“Well, you’re here, and I come home every now and again…” You explained, “And well, I really, really enjoyed last night. Seemed like you did too.”

He nodded, “Go on.”

“How about we call anytime we’re near each other, maybe grab dinner and uh, you know?”

Bradley couldn’t help but smile a little bit. He didn’t want you to walk out anymore than you did. The thought of being able to see and talk to you again made his heart seem to skip a beat. 

“Yeah, I think I’d like that,” He replied, trying to sound as calm as possible. 

“Cool, well, uh- I guess I should give you my number.”

That’s how you found yourself in the same situation a handful of times over the next couple of years. You’d call and text any time something major happened, for some reason Bradley was one of the first people you wanted to tell. He did the same. Slowly, you built a relationship with Bradley, a friendship. 

You spent several nights in bed with him when he came to see you one month when he had leave. The light kisses and soft touches were enough to make you feel incredibly safe and almost loved. 

You found yourself missing Bradley Bradshaw when you weren’t with him. You didn’t call him Rooster like everyone else in his life, except for when you were joking with him. He told you that he loved the way you used his first name. While you loved the way he said your name. You loved the warmth that spread throughout your chest. You wanted to hate it, but you couldn’t. 

“I’m being moved again,” He told you over the phone one day, “They’re sending me overseas this time.”

“For how long?” You questioned, feeling your throat close up. 

You could almost picture him shrugging, “I don’t know. As long as they need me, I guess?”

“Can I see you before you leave?” You questioned, unable to stop the small amount of hope. 

“Not this time,” He replied regretfully, “I ship out in twelve hours. You wouldn’t be able to get here in time. Not from New York, plus you have that conference.”

“Fuck the conference,” You mumbled, “You’re getting ready to leave the country.”

“I know,” He sighed, “I’m sorry. I would’ve told you if I knew sooner. I wish I could see you.”

“Just-just be safe, okay? I won’t make you promise me anything but that,” You swore. 

You were glad the way he couldn’t see you clutching your chest. Or the way your eyes were burning with tears. After all, you were just hookups, nothing more. Right? Friends with benefits. You only saw him once or twice a year, if that. You had no claim to him, no right to him. Any type of call you got you savored, even if it threatened to break your heart into a million pieces. 

“I’ll do my best, I promise.”

You hated the fact that you were so far away. You hated that you didn’t even live in Virginia. Every part of you somehow ached to be back with him. You missed him even if you didn’t have the right to. Sporadic nights in bed with him just weren’t enough anymore. You wanted more, so much more, but you didn’t know how to ask for it. Or if Bradley even wanted it. 

“I’ll try to call you when I can,” He promised you, “But I normally give away my phonetime to the guys with families, but I’ll keep one or two for you.”

You felt empty and hollow when you hung up with him. You wanted to call him back and tell him how you felt, but you knew you couldn’t, he needed to focus on what he was about to do. Not some girl that he hooked up with whenever he was in town. 

So you went about your normal life. The meetings and phone calls. Slowly unpacking boxes that were stacked almost to the ceiling of your studio apartment in Raleigh, NC. You went out to a couple of bars, met some friends. But you always lunged for your phone when it rang, no matter the time of night. You never wanted to miss a call from Bradley. 

Only, the last time you talked to him, you ended up fighting. It was stupid really, but you were stubborn and didn’t want to apologize or admit he was right. So when you were on a date and your phone rang, you simply silenced it. 

“Do you need to get that?” Your date asked you, pointing to your purse. 

“No, it’s no one important.”

Even the words seemed to hurt you. He was important, so important that you wanted to move back to Virginia to be close to him. That’s what the whole fight was about. You wanted to uproot and he kept telling you how stupid that would be. You didn’t listen, or maybe you didn’t want to listen. Bottom line it ended with you screaming at him before hanging up. 

“Who is it?”

You just shrugged and took a sip from your cocktail, “Someone I used to hook up with. He’s deployed right now, but I’m really the only friend not in the military that he has. But he can wait, I can email him later.”

It was almost halloween, the fall air outside was chilly enough for you to need a jacket as you left the restaurant more than an hour later. You pulled your phone out from your bag before playing Bradley’s voicemail, expecting to hear him begging you to just talk to him again. 

“Hey, it’s uh- it’s me. Look, I don’t have much time okay, so I need to make this quick. But I’m kind of glad you ignored my call, because I’m not sure I could say all of this with you on the other end of the line.” He took a deep breath, so loud even you could hear it through the recording, “I was stateside, but not for long. They called me back for some special mission, and I’m not sure I’m gonna make it back for this one. We’re on the boat right now, I’m gonna be getting in my plane here in a few minutes. I already told someone how to get in touch with you if something happens to me, okay? They’ll call you, because you’re all I’ve got.”

You clutched the phone, starting to hate yourself for not picking up. The tears that ran down your cheeks were even colder thanks to the fall air. Why did you have to be so mad at him for not letting you ask for a transfer to be closer to him when he came back? He was right, you couldn’t uproot everything just on the off chance that he was going to stay in Oceana. 

 “I need you to listen to me, okay? Really listen to me,” He said sternly, “I love you. I know it’s a really fucking bad time. And I know this wasn’t part of the deal, we were just supposed to fuck and have fun and not catch feelings. But I caught them. Because I really fucking love you. And I hope I get the chance to actually say it to you. I hope the next time you get a phone call I’ll be the one calling, not someone with bad news. But I couldn’t do this without you knowing. I wish I could tell you where I was, or what we were doing. Just know….I’m gonna do my best to come home to you. But…between you and me, I’m a little scared. So I’m just gonna remember what it felt like when you held me that one time after I had that shitty nightmare. Because that’s what I need.”

There was a loud sound somewhere on the boat, “I have to go….I love you, okay? I know you’re mad at me, but I hope you understand why I said what I said…but I love you.”

The line went dead. And over the next few days you listened to that voicemail again and again. You went through the motions, but truthfully you were too worried to really focus on work or your friends or the second date you somehow agreed to even though you didn’t want to go. You just wanted Bradley. But you didn’t even know if he was okay. You didn’t know how long this mission was going to take. You knew nothing.

So you tried and tried and tried. You went as far as to dig out the old college shirt you stole from Bradley the last time you were at his place. He probably didn’t even know you had it. You hoped he didn’t, because you didn’t want to give it back. 

Just like you didn’t want to be on this stupid date. But you didn’t know how to get out of it. He was so nice, almost too nice, and you didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But you felt nothing towards him. Maybe you could ghost him after this was over? Pretend it never happened and keep wishing Bradley would call you, because that would mean he was safe. 

“You know what?” You mumbled, “Fuck this. This isn’t working. You’re a great guy, but I’m sorry. I can’t be here. I need to go.”

You put down some money on the table and rushed out of the restaurant, pulling your jacket even closer to your body. Normally you wouldn’t walk alone in downtown Raleigh, but you wanted the cold air. 

Only, you stopped dead in your tracks when your phone started ringing. You fished it out, taking a deep breath before answering. His voice filled your ear, rough and a little broken as he said your name. But it was him, it was Bradley. He was safe and alive and that’s all you could think about. People pushed past you, jostling you a little as you stood in the middle of the sidewalk. You were sure your eyes were blown wide open as tears started to fill them. He was okay.

“I love you too,” You forced out before he could say anything else, “I really fucking love you too.”

“I’m in Raleigh, I flew in as soon as they let me go,” He told you, “Where are you? I need to see you. I need to hear you say it in person.”

You quickly looked around to find the street signs, because your brain seemed to forget everything else. He was okay, and he was here. He wanted to see you. And you wanted to love him until nothing else mattered. 

“I’m only a couple blocks away. I’ll be there in a minute,” He promised, “I look a little rough, had a bit of trouble during everything, but I couldn’t wait.”

“I love you,” You repeated again, because that’s all that mattered. 

“I love you. I’ll be right there.”

But all you could hear was him saying that he loved you. All you could feel was the warmth in your chest despite the cold outside, because you loved him and he loved you in return. He was here and coming for you. You could be together for a while, maybe more than just a night. 

“Look up.”

You could see him smiling in a rented pickup truck just in front of you. You hung up your phone, nearly squealing as you launched yourself into the front seat. There wasn’t time to look over the cuts on his face and neck. No time to comment on how he looked, because instead you kissed him. Hard. Like there was no time in the world for being soft and sweet.

“I love you.”

He smiled against your mouth and pulled back just a little, tucking a stray bit of hair behind your ear, “I love you, so so much. I should’ve said it sooner.”

“No,” you shook your head, kissing his hand, “This is perfect. You’re perfect.”

“No more just fucking then?”

You laughed and kissed him again before cars started honking behind you, “Oh honey, we’re long passed just fucking. But if you don’t take me back to my apartment and fuck me there, I’m going to explode.”

He laughed, pulling away from the curb, his smile big enough to make your heart squeeze a little, “Well, we can’t have that. Show me the way home, honey.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 10, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 11, 2024

“In 1949, when leaders of 12 countries, including President Truman, came together in this very room, history was watching,” President Joe Biden said yesterday evening at the opening of the 2024 NATO Summit, being held from July 9 through July 12, in Washington, D.C. 

“It had been four years since the surrender of the Axis powers and the end of the most devastating world war the world had ever, ever known,” Biden continued.

“Here, these 12 leaders gathered to make a sacred pledge to defend each other against aggression, provide their collective security, and to answer threats as one, because they knew to prevent future wars, to protect democracies, to lay the groundwork for a lasting peace and prosperity, they needed a new approach. They needed to combine their strengths. They needed an alliance.”

That alliance was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the “single greatest, most effective defensive alliance in the history of the world,” as Biden said. 

The NATO collective defense agreement has stabilized the world for the past 75 years thanks to its provision in Article 5 that each of the NATO allies will consider an attack on one as an attack on all, and respond accordingly. 

Biden looked back at the alliance’s 75 years. “Together, we rebuilt Europe from the ruins of war, held high the torch of liberty during long decades of the Cold War,” he said. “When former adversaries became fellow democracies, we welcomed them into the Alliance. When war broke out in the Balkans, we intervened to restore peace and stop ethnic cleansing. And when the United States was attacked on September 11th, our NATO Allies—all of you—stood with us, invoking Article 5 for the first time in NATO history, treating an attack on us as an attack on all of us—a breathtaking display of friendship that the American people will never ever, ever forget.”

Biden celebrated that the alliance has continually adapted to a changing world and noted that it has changed its strategies to stay ahead of threats and reached out to new partners to become more effective. Biden noted that leaders from countries in the Indo-Pacific region had joined the leaders of the 32 NATO countries at this year’s summit. So did the leaders of NATO’s partner countries, including Ukraine, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and the European Union. “They’re here because they have a stake in our success and we have a stake in theirs,” Biden said.

The promise of collective defense was daunting for opponents in 1949, when the treaty had 12 signatories: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. It is even more daunting now that there are 32, with both Finland and Sweden having joined the alliance after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Together, the NATO countries can marshal about 3,370,000 active-duty military personnel and have a collective defense budget of more than $1.2 trillion. 

In addition, as Jim Garamone of Department of Defense News noted, the NATO countries share intelligence, training, tactics, and equipment, as well as agreements for permitting the use of airspace and bases. “[O]ur commitment is broad and deep,” Biden said. “[W]e’re willing, and we’re able to deter aggression and defend every inch of NATO territory across every domain: land, air, sea, cyber, and space.”

When NATO formed, the main concern of the countries backing it was resisting Soviet aggression, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO turned to resisting Russian aggression. “[H]istory calls for our collective strength,” Biden said. “Autocrats want to overturn global order, which has by and large kept for nearly 80 years and counting.”

Biden called out Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and recalled that NATO had built a global coalition to stand behind Ukraine, providing weapons and aid while also moving troops into the surrounding NATO countries. He announced that the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, and Italy are donating more air defense equipment. 

“All the Allies knew that before this war, Putin thought NATO would break,” Biden said. “Today, NATO is stronger than it’s ever been in its history.” Biden noted that the world is in a pivotal moment, and reminded his listeners: “The fact that NATO remains the bulwark of global security did not happen by accident. It wasn’t inevitable. Again and again, at critical moments, we chose unity over disunion, progress over retreat, freedom over tyranny, and hope over fear.

Again and again, we stood behind our shared vision of a peaceful and prosperous transatlantic community.”

He assured the attendees that an “overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans understand that NATO makes us all safer…. The American people know that all the progress we’ve made in the past 75 years has happened behind the shield of NATO,” understanding that without it, we would face “another war in Europe, American troops fighting and dying, dictators spreading chaos, economic collapse, catastrophe.” He assured allies that Americans understand our “sacred obligation” to NATO, and quoted Republican president Ronald Reagan, who said: “If our fellow democracies are not secure, we cannot be secure. If you are threatened, we are threatened. And if you are not at peace, we cannot be at peace.”

And then Biden surprised NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, the former Norwegian prime minister who is stepping down from his NATO position after serving since 2014, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “Today, NATO is stronger, smarter, and more energized than when you began,” Biden said. “And a billion people across Europe and North America and, indeed, the whole world will reap the rewards of your labor for years to come in the form of security, opportunity, and greater freedoms.”

Today, Biden reiterated the theme that alliances happen not “by chance but by choice.” Before the attendees got to work, he explained that the NATO countries must strengthen their home industrial bases and capacity in order to produce critical defense equipment more quickly, a deficiency made clear in the struggle to get armaments to Ukraine. Such readiness will strengthen security, he said, as well as creating “stronger supply chains, a stronger economy, stronger military, and a stronger nation.” 

The Washington Summit Declaration released today reaffirms NATO as “the unique, essential, and indispensable transatlantic forum to consult, coordinate, and act on all matters related to our individual and collective security,” saying “[o]ur commitment to defend one another and every inch of Allied territory at all times, as enshrined in Article 5…is iron-clad.” 

It warns that “Russia remains the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security” and pledges “unwavering solidarity” with Ukraine. It says that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO” and calls out Belarus, North Korea, Iran, and China for enabling Putin’s war. Indeed, the declaration calls out China even more directly, warning that it “continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security,” especially by flooding other countries with disinformation. 

Russian aggression is a deep concern for NATO countries; so is Trump, who worked to take the U.S. out of NATO when he was in office, vowed he will accomplish that in a second term, and in February 2024 told an audience that if he thought NATO countries weren’t contributing enough to their own defense he would tell Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.” (Biden noted yesterday that when he took office, only nine NATO countries met their target goal of spending 2% of their gross domestic product on their defense, while this year, 23 will.) 

Biden was key to rebuilding the NATO alliance after Trump weakened it, and the leaders at the NATO summit told foreign policy journalist for The Daily Beast David Rothkopf that they were “not concerned with Biden’s ability to play a leading role in NATO during his second term.” They “express confidence in his judgment” and “have a great deal of confidence in the foreign policy team around him.” But they worry about Trump. 

Shortly after Biden gave his powerful speech opening the summit, Trump had his first public event since the June 27 CNN event, at his Doral golf club. It was a wandering rant packed, as usual, with wild lies, but he did touch on the topic of NATO. “I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out, like about two minutes,” he said. Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton told a reporter that Trump’s willingness to undermine NATO is “a demonstration of the lack of seriousness of the way Trump treats the alliance, because he doesn't understand it."

Following the NATO summit, Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who remains an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, will visit former president Trump at Mar-a-Lago, just days after meeting with Putin in Moscow and with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. There is speculation that Orbán is acting as an intermediary between Trump and Putin, for whom the destruction of NATO is a key goal.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[jeonscatalyst]

sorry your blog crashed but I hope you get it back! ! My Q would be, do you think, in theory if jikook are together and stay together for more years to come, it would be a problem if it came out they were a couple and they entered the military together?

I had been thinking they might have .. “separated” in some ways at the beginning of ch2, at least Jimin seemed to be putting some space between them (from what we saw outwardly ig) and perhaps they’d been practicing some distance before the ms service, and then after military they could decide where to go from there. BUT then I saw the ep 1&2 of AYS and perhaps decided that wasn’t the case 😂 as you wouldn’t cuddle and play about like that with someone you’re trying to put a bit of space between ahaha - and also I think Sapporo (if it’s what we hope for) might also not go along with that ^ theory ahaha.

but the buddy system is so good for jikook and so happy for them and that it got approved, because of course during AYS they didn’t know either, just wasn’t sure if it could cause problems down the line?:’s

Hey anon, thank you😊

“ do you think, in theory if jikook are together and stay together for more years to come, it would be a problem if it came out they were a couple and they entered the military together?”

I don’t think it would be a problem at all. The korean military doesn’t care about two men being in a romantic relationship or atleast that is not what they have said their issue is. Their issue is, they do not want two men having sexual intercourse in the military. While this is definitely because Korea as a country is still very homophobic, that isn’t the only reason. Some of the reasons why article 92-6 was put in place were:

Regulation of Sexual Conduct: The primary intent behind Article 92-6 was to regulate sexual behavior in the military, particularly same-sex sexual activity, which was viewed as inappropriate within the context of the conservative, hierarchical military culture. The law criminalized consensual same-sex sexual activity among military personnel, regardless of whether it occurs on or off duty, and regardless of consent. This law has since been revised since consensual acts that happen off base while off duty are no longer considered the military’s business hence the couple cannot be penalized.

Discipline and Order: The law was framed as a measure to preserve military discipline and morale. The idea was that any sexual activity perceived as non-normative could disrupt the cohesion and operational effectiveness of military units. However, this rationale has been heavily criticized for being based on prejudice rather than on evidence of actual harm to military order.

There was also a third reason which is that the law was put into place to curb sexual abuse which happened in the military that was filled with mostly men. Some men used to get sexually assaulted by superiors and sometimes even after the assaulted men reported what happened, the abusers claimed that it was consensual so that is why the military doesn’t care if the anal sex was consensual or not.

Jimin and Jungkook wouldn’t face any issues with the military after their discharge even if the military knows that Jimin and Jungkook were a couple while enlisted because the law doesn’t criminalize the idea of two men being a couple but just two men engaging into indecent sexual activity on duty, while on base.

Under Article 92-6 of South Korea’s Military Criminal Act, the law specifically criminalizes “indecent acts” between military personnel of the same sex, which typically refers to sexual activity. However, the law has been applied in a way that focuses primarily on consensual sexual acts, rather than simply on the existence of a same-sex relationship.

The law is explicitly concerned with “indecent acts,” meaning that if two gay men are found to have engaged in consensual sexual activity, they could be prosecuted under Article 92-6. If two men are merely in a relationship without any sexual activity, the law itself does not criminalize the relationship. The nature of their relationship could still attract scrutiny and even accusations of sexual relations even if none have occurred but the good things here is, Jimin and Jungkook have never come out as a same sex couple so as far as everyone is concerned, they are just two band mates, friends and bros from the same town, so as long as they are not caught engaging in any indecent sexual activity, then there is no risk to them now or after they are discharged.

So anon, no, Jimin and Jungkook won’t get into any kind of trouble even if everyone finds out they were enlisted as buddies while being in a relationship. This is clear when when you read article 92-6 and see that the military doesn’t explicitly have an issue with same sex romantic relationships. They only have an issue with indecent sexual activity that happens in and around their premises by men in the military. I don’t think any gay couple would want to admit that they are a couple before getting enlisted mostly because there is bound to be scrutiny but anybody who tells you that they would stop themselves from enlisting together just because of that fear is wrong.

I don’t really think the “distance” between them at the beginning of the year had anything to do with the military and I don’t think them seemingly intentionally putting a distance between each other was about their military either because if that was the case, they wouldn’t have enlisted together. I think it was something else that we may or may not ever find out about. I also think at some point Jimin and Jungkook were just operating on very different wavelengths and at some point Jimin seemed to have needed others more than he needed Jungkook. I have my thoughts on what could be the reasons but i’ll wait to see how things turn out on AYS (the Sapporo episodes) to know for sure.

[opencommunion]

"The US Air Force has been sending unmarked planes from Britain’s base on Cyprus to Israel since it began bombing Gaza, it can be revealed. The planes are all C-295 and CN-235 aircraft, which are believed to be used by American special forces. Declassified has found 18 of these aircraft which have gone from the sprawling British air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, to Israel’s coastal city Tel Aviv since October 7. Akrotiri is the key node in the international effort to arm and provide logistical support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. But the UK government has always refused to divulge any information about US activities at Akrotiri, which is known to include transporting weapons to Israel.

Asked in May how many US Air Force (USAF) flights had taken off from the base since October 7, defence minister Leo Docherty said: 'The Ministry of Defence does not comment on the operations of our Allies.' But Declassified discovered the unmarked planes that flew from Akrotiri to Israel from November to June have a serial number showing they are operated by the USAF. Most of these journeys had the flight number GONZO62. Six more unmarked C-130 planes have gone from Akrotiri to Tel Aviv since the bombing of Gaza began, which are believed to be USAF, but it was not possible for Declassified to locate their operator. The C-130 can carry 128 combat troops and almost 20 tonnes of cargo.

The new information could further implicate British ministers in war crimes in Gaza. In November 2023, a US military official revealed that American special forces were stationed in Israel and 'actively helping the Israelis.' ... Most of the unmarked planes show that they were recently at Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is home to Fort Liberty, the largest US Army base by population with nearly 50,000 active-duty soldiers. Formerly called Fort Bragg, it is home to the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) which 'assigns, equips, trains, certifies, and validates [Army Special Operations Forces] Soldiers and units to conduct global operations.' The Pentagon says this unit is 'the most adaptable and capable enabling force in the United States military.' The planes, the C-295 and CN-235, are produced by Airbus and believed to be used by 427th Special Operations Squadron which has been described as USAF’s 'most secretive squadron' and is based at Fort Liberty.

... Declassified has also found 26 marked USAF planes have arrived at RAF Akrotiri since the bombing of Gaza began. These have included 16 huge C-17 military transport aircraft from US bases in Germany, Spain and Kuwait. The C-17 is capable of transporting 134 personnel and many types of military equipment, including Abrams tanks and three Black Hawk helicopters. The US military notes that its role is to 'rapidly project and sustain an effective combat force close to a potential battle area.'"

[phoenixyfriend]

Possible verbiage for calls to senators and representatives, emails to the same, and public calls to action:

This past weekend, an American service member, active duty, self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. We are told that this man, Aaron Bushnell, age 25, truly believed in the ideals espoused by the US military, that he truly believed in liberty for all and a person's right to self-determination. What he did was not an act of mental illness, but rather an act of protest. It was premeditated. It was clearly stated. It was public, and recorded, and he has died making a statement, and it is truly inappropriate to try and dismiss it as simply a matter of mental illness.

It's a tragedy, but he is someone who has made choice to follow in the footsteps of many who have come before. Self-immolation is, after all, a protest tactic that has been in use for centuries, including in the US. If you have any true care for military personnel and veterans, as you and so many other politicians claim to, then you should be asking yourself, "What it is about this war that has caused such a choice in someone who really and truly believes in the ideals that the US claims to uphold? What it means that someone in this military, in this country, cannot stand to continue being part of that institution, in light of what the United States is enabling with aid packages to Israel, and refusal to enact any kind of censure?"

What caused the death of Aaron Bushnell was not a mental health crisis. It was a humanitarian one.

If you claim to care about protecting children, Israel must be censured. Israel must be sanctioned. Israel must be stopped.

We are seeing Israel seed the beginning of its own future devastation. It has created thousands, if not tens of thousands of orphans, and has reportedly disabled the majority of the children in Gaza, from what we are hearing. Israel has also demanded the dismantling of UNRWA, is even now blocking aid trucks and has been for weeks, despite the fact that the agency is currently the only thing that appears to be standing between the children of Palestine and death, between everyone in Palestine and a death by mass starvation. We know, have now gotten confirmation from the World Health Organization, that a famine is in progress. If you care about any power that the United Nations should have to prevent atrocities, then Israel must be stopped. Aid must get to the children, and to all the civilians of Gaza who are currently dying of bombing, and hunger, and disease.

Civilians are exiting to Egypt, a country that is already unstable, not yet having recovered from the Arab Spring. The economy of Egypt is already under strain, from the Civil War, the new administrative capital, the reduction of traffic in the Suez, and they have not yet cleared themselves of the Muslim Brotherhood. Will those orphans Israel created be found by extremists who share many of the same goals as the one that Israel claims to be trying to extinguish? Will Israel start a war with Egypt when those children they have orphaned in Gaza grow old enough to seek revenge? What of its other border, where Hezbollah has increased attacks, or the months of impact by Yemen on international trade? Israel is not extinguishing the threats to its people, but increasing them. If you care about Israeli civilians, as you claim, then Israel must be stopped.

Recently, in Russia, a political opposition member died in an arctic prison under mysterious circumstances. This was very high-profile, and the US enacted sanctions within a week. Those sanctions were deserved, yes, but it is a very poor look on behalf of the United States that we enacted sanctions on Russia for the death of one man, but nothing on Israel for the death of nearly thirty thousand, half of which are children. If you care about the reputation that the United States has on a world stage, Israel should be under censure.

And finally, if you care about your own party and your own hide, Israel must be stopped. You are losing Michigan. You are losing Georgia. You are losing Arizona. Some of these states won us the 2020 election. Some of them won on the power of the Arab-American vote. We cannot afford another four years of Trump.

Even if you don't have the heart to care for the hundreds of thousands of children that are dead or dying, you should have the brain to care about Michigan.

A member of the Air Force died to make you listen. A loyal soldier to the US decided that rather than die for his country fighting a war, he would die to stop one.

Listen to him, and to all who tell you that the US cannot be complicit in what, every day, is more likely to be remembered forever as a genocide.

(Call your reps)

(A more general post on how to talk to your reps)

This has not been proofread but I keep rolling phrases around in my mind and had to get at least something down in the page.

[laurfilijames]

Heyyyy love! Okay, Idk if you have spoken about this before but what inspired you to write Breathe? Other than Will being scrumdelicious. But how long did it take you to think up the idea of it and then get it into writing ?? 😇

I actually haven't ever been asked this and I've been so excited to answer it despite how long it's been sitting in my inbox (I'm sorrrryyyyyyyyy 😭)

Long story short; the first time I watched Triple Frontier I KNEW I needed to write for Captain William ‘Ironhead’ Miller and the moment he stepped onto that stage, he owned every part of me.

To make the story longer; Charlie once again was so captivating playing his role and added so much depth to his character and gave more than enough to embellish on.

Will Miller is seriously my idea of a perfect man.

Looks? Check.

Military personnel? Check.

Wounded Warrior (mentally and physically)? Check.

Strong and masculine? Check.

Devoted to his duty and brothers (in the literal sense as well, hi Benny 👋🏻). Check.

Able to keep his shit together (mostly, also see; Benny). Check.

I'll stop myself before I get too carried away because I can go on forever as to all the reasons why I love this man.

So after the first time I watched it, I immediately started it over and watched it again.

And then again.

And again.

It was like an epiphany. I HAD to write for Will Miller.

I'd say by the next day, I already had plans to write for him, and the main premise of Breathe was noted down in a mish-mash of thoughts in a document.

I knew Will would be suffering long-term with his PTSD and reader would be helping through it all while they fell in love (hello, hurt/comfort 🤤).

I had just started my own gym journey at the time and was obsessed with being there and feeling good and was discovering how difficult training can be. (Still to this day when I'm struggling with something at the gym I imagine the TF boys and everything they've gone through, and picturing a sweaty, pumped-up Will is all the fuel I need to push myself). To me, it all plays in with Will’s character so much and knowing Charlie is so dedicated to physical activity whether for himself or for a role, it helped to inspire this idea of reader and Will hitting it off between sets 🥵

When I wrote the first chapter I really wasn't sure if it would successfully turn into a series. I had ideas of course (and smut to fulfill!) but it was a quick 1.8k that was sort of “take it or leave it” and was my intro to writing for the Charlie fandom. Dipping my toes if you will.

And then the second chapter came. And then the third quickly after.

I was hooked.

I wrote four chapters that I was so proud of and then my muse went in other directions (Jax, Jay and Pete were lurking) and then it took me a few days shy of a year to make the next update.

I had a few encouraging friends to help that next chapter happen and now the series has exploded with interest and I am in constant awe at the response!

I've really pushed myself with expanding on plot and adding a level of angst I never have before, and I only have my friends and readers to thank for being so enthusiastic about it and helping inspire me as I go. 💗

I have plans to finish the series within a chapter or two, something I’ve never done in my writing career (the thought is so bittersweet 🥲) but most of my stand-alone Will fics can easily tie in to this story, and I know I will always write for him even after this story is ‘completed’.

I'm not sure if this is at all the answer you were looking for 😅 but I'm so grateful for you asking it and again I'll apologize for taking so long to answer! I just love this series and talking about it always breathes (lol) new life into it and keeps me motivated to keep going!

THANK YOU!! 😘💗

[liesmyth]

Further to Keeley saying yes to marrying Roy (definitely agree), how much would Roy only be asking because he thinks that's what you do. Like he's retired, he's forty, and all his former teammates are married/have kids. He's a traditional guy (kind of) - would he have waited for them to have been together for two years (or whatever) and then proposed because that's the next step?

Context: this is a follow-up to this 'unpopular opinion meme' ask where I said that (to me, etc) Keeley would've said yes if Roy ever asked her to marry him post S2.

In general, I just looove to overthink gender roles and performative heterosexuality with these characters, because the mix of sports series + juicy queer dynamics is like catnip to my brain — so thank you for this ask so I can ramble about it some more!

The thing is. I think Roy's actually not very traditional for a footballer (let alone a very famous one) simply because he's close to forty and he's never been married and doesn't have kids. Like, genuinely, that makes him a huge oddity in his set. If I were applying RL football logic to the football show that plays fast and loose with realism, I'd say that there must be a lot of speculation in-universe that Roy is gay. OR maybe he's had so many public short-term flings that there's only a little speculation — but there would still be people thinking it's strange. Just because "WAG and kids" is such a big aspect of how football stars are expected to perform masculinity, and Roy not having any of that (while at the same time performing a very specific brand of 'old school' tough guy masculinity) would make him a weird anomaly.

(When talking to non-sports fans, I usually find it useful to compare pro athletes to active-duty military personnel as two categories that on average start a family very young. It's a mix of a family providing more stability in a hectic career + expectations in those circles because everyone else is doing it + financial reasons that mean is more convenient to do it now than to wait)

(Again. Reflecting on social norms in footballers' circles makes me think a lot about what Keeley's expectations might have been pre-S1, when she kept dating footballers and moving in those same circles, whether the fact that she was with a young guy at 30 bothered her more than she let on, etc etc. This is also part of why I think she absolutely would say yes if Roy proposed — see also her reaction to Shandy saying that all their former flatmates "married footballers", which is just like "yeah, fair enough". I think pre-season 3 she just never saw her life going in a different direction, and was fine with it — at least until S3 made her consider stuff she might not have otherwise)

Anyway SORRY I went off!! Back to Roy — all that ramble was to say that, TO ME, if he wanted to be married, he absolutely would be already, way before the show started. It's something he must have considered earlier in life, just because it's a staple of the Ideal Footballer Career Path, and for whatever reason decided he wasn't keen on it. And it wasn't a one-off earlier — it's something people would have commented on it over and over, as all his teammates started families and he didn't, as the tabloid press speculated on his private life. It's not that he never had the opportunity; it's that he actively chose not to. So I'm not sure retirement would necessarily be the thing that makes him decide that "it's time" to get married. We see that in S2 he really throws himself into ~playing house~ with Keeley because he's trying to find a new life anchor after retirement, but idk if that would necessarily translate, to him, into "next step is getting married." Because, for someone in Roy's position, getting married would have been "the next step" ten years ago, and he was like, nah!

I also think that "when will Roy and Keeley get married" WAS an expectation that was very much present in the eyes of everyone who interacts with them, at least from the moment it became clear that they were serious and basically living together. Tabloid speculation, old friends of Roy who're also retired, friends and acquaintances of Keeley who also move in those 'D-list celebs / influencers / WAG' kind of circles. Their families, even; I have a very elaborate headcanon built off that one (1) throwaway line that Roy wanted to open the champagne when Keeley's mum "moved back north", that maybe Keeley's mother was a bit too happy to see her settled down with an older man for once, and they're living together, and he's very famous and very rich. My other headcanon is that Keeley dropped Shandy / her old friends after she got with Roy partly because there'd have been some wink-wink-nudge from those corners about "landing Roy Kent" (I have WAY too many thoughts about Keeley and Shandy, lol).

...Anyway. This is all to say. I think, between the two of them, Keeley might have been the one who vaguely considered that maybe marriage could be on the horizon as a next step, because she's a woman over 30 in circles where women over 30 get reminded of these things. Roy has the luxury of thinking about it less, because he decided years before the show that he wasn't going to get pressured into an early marriage just because it's The Done Thing.

I can believe Keeley and Roy never discussed marriage all through the year-odd they were dating, but I bet multiple people brought it up to Keeley unprompted, and to Roy also but to a lesser extent, and he was able to shrug it off way more easily. Keeley is probably dodging old friends who text her happy birthday and then are like "how are things going with RoyKent(TM)??" wink. babe you landed the big fish!! etc. etc.

SORRY THIS GOT SO LONG! this is like 80% headcanons that's partly inspired by me being A Sports Fan, partly by me overthinking Keeley's narrative, especially in S1 and S2 when she was still allowed to have neuroses and a meaningful friendship with Rebecca. But I'm ALWAYS thinking about Roy/Keeley not only as a ship but also in the context of the very specific gendered dynamics that exist among top-flight footballers and their partners, especially in the UK. It's just anthropologically fascinating to me, and I think S1 especially does a very good job of hinting at all the various nuances with Keeley's character.

[randomlonelymusician]

🔴Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has been calling for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine. They are an impartial humanitarian organization🔴

More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed, over 84,000 wounded, and thousands are estimated to be buried under the wreckage. Over 1.9 million people—85 percent of the entire population—have been forcibly displaced. Water and food are scarce, essential supplies like fuel and electricity are scant, and while the threat of disease and starvation grows and the bombardment continues, lifesaving health care is increasingly inaccessible. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams in Gaza are witnessing firsthand how this war has turned Gaza's chronic humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe.

MSF provides assistance to countries affected by humanitarian crisis, no matter the place. They say that without an immediate and sustained ceasefire, more and more lives will be lost.

They outline the attacks against hospitals:

The duty of treating the sick and wounded—and the correlating protection of medical personnel and facilities—is at the core of international humanitarian law. Yet, since the beginning of this war, MSF has seen a pattern of systematic attacks against medical facilities and civilian infrastructure. Our staff and patients have had to leave 13 different health structures and have endured 26 violent incidents, including airstrikes damaging hospitals, tank fire at agreed deconflicted shelters, ground offensives on medical centers, and firing at convoys. These attacks show the failure of deconfliction measures in a war fought with no rules. Among the health care workers killed since October 7 are five MSF staff members: Mohammed Al Ahel, Alaa Al Shawa, Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, Ahmad Al Sahar, and Reem Abu Lebdeh.

MSF has been saying this for a while, but this is to put it out there again so people can't try to make "excuses" for civilian death.

Everyone I know who's ever worked in healthcare in regions in crisis knows how dire and wrong this is, regardless of people's "opinions" on whatever is going on. Everyone I know who has seen active combat -- including those old white military guys -- are completely against this continued massacre.

It's not "defense". It's not "war". Please listen to people who are there and have been there.

MSF: Palestine Resources

[harryandmeghansussex]

"I was very delighted to have received in audience today, the Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry, who was in Kaduna to meet with Nigerian military veterans, soldiers wounded in action, and families of soldiers killed in action. In his remarks during the courtesy visit, the Duke of Sussex gave insights into what inspired him to create the Invictus Games and his unrelenting efforts to expand the Games internationally. After viewing the warriors games held in Quantico, Virginia, a Marine Corps Base, Prince Harry created the Invictus Games, an international athletics competition for active duty and veteran service members who have become ill or injured during, or resulting from, their service. He gave a firm commitment to sustain the Games and expand it to many countries because it holds the promise of effectively lifting the spirits of veterans and soldiers still in active service. We are grateful to Prince Harry for identifying with the Armed Forces of Nigeria, and in particular his work towards creating a Hub dedicated to the welfare of personnel of our Armed Forces. His visit will definitely lift the spirits of our brave and resilient officers and men and women of the Armed Forces. We also salute the Duke of Sussex for his exemplary humanitarian services and activism, especially in the area of wildlife conservation in Africa, and Charity for Children in Lesotho. Prince Harry's life-long pursuit of good causes aligns with my own life - long activism for improvement in the conditions of the poor, vulnerable and underserved in our society. As Governor, I have committed myself to bringing hope to the poor, weak and vulnerable in Kaduna State. Senator Uba Sani, Governor, Kaduna State. May 10th, 2024."

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Progressive candidate says it's urgent to defeat far right in Latin America's largest city elections

In an interview with Brasil de Fato, Guilherme Boulos assessed his competitors as two faces of the far right

Guilherme Boulos from the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) appeared on Brasil de Fato on Wednesday night (4) for a special edition of the Três por Quatro podcast, featuring interviews with the candidates for mayor of São Paulo in the 2024 elections.

The progressive candidate, who is ahead in the polls, began by emphasizing that “we need to understand that this year in São Paulo, we are fighting a battle similar to the one against 'bolsonarism' two years ago [when former President Jair Bolsonaro lost to Lula]. We must defeat the far right: this far right that is extremely violent, dangerous, and criminal.”

Latin America's largest city, São Paulo has an estimated population of approximately 22.8 million, and by 2023, its GDP had grown to around R$ 880 billion (over US$ 158,000). Born in the city, Boulos became prominent in the popular housing movements. A teacher and political activist, he ran for mayor of São Paulo in 2020 but was not elected. In 2022, he was the most-voted federal legislator in the state.

According to Boulos, he faces two major adversaries in his campaign: 'bolsonarism', a political ideology associated with Jair Bolsonaro, and militia banditry - refers to the criminal activities carried out by militia groups. In Brazil, these groups often consist of former or off-duty police officers and military personnel who engage in illegal activities such as extortion, protection rackets, and control over certain territories, particularly in urban areas.

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