#i feel like there was a south american who did it but i could be making that up idk

[cleolinda]

So last night at the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris pulled off, in my opinion, the most glorious flex in all of American politics. It was petty as fuck and I am here for it:

Harris, in a Show of Force, Holds a Large Rally 80 Miles From Her Convention

Choosing Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee [the smaller venue used for the Republican National Convention] as the venue for Ms. Harris’s rally also served as an intentional rejoinder to Mr. Trump, who has fumed over the size of her crowds since she replaced Mr. Biden on the Democratic ticket. The campaign said about 15,000 people attended the rally in Milwaukee, and the 23,500-person convention hall in Chicago was packed.

Someone on Reddit then linked to the Kamala HQ video of her brief Coming To You Live From My Rival’s Venue acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination. And Redditors pointed out that you could actually see the juxtaposition, and the sold-out crowds could see each other, and it was beautiful.

Posters on r/politics constantly say to any positive discussion, “None of this matters if you don’t vote.” While this is true, the constant doomer nihilism of “None of this matters” pisses me off. I know they’re afraid people will get complacent. They’re afraid people will see, for example, pictures of these massive crowds and think, I don’t have to leave the house. I don’t have to vote. Everyone else will get this. But that’s not what I think when I see news like this. It DOES matter. I was always going to drag my carcass out to my polling station in a blood-red state, whether I have to use a cane or not, whether the Electoral College even gives a shit about my vote or not, but this is exciting. Whenever I see Kamala’s packed, enthusiastic crowds, I think, This is a movement forward and I get to be part of it. We are gonna run up the popular vote as a statement that will make bad-faith actors think twice before meddling, and we are gonna flip some battleground states. We are gonna nail down the electoral votes, and I am going to sit there and watch on TV as they certify the electors in December, and then I am going to sit there and watch them officially count it out like they did on January 6, 2021, and I am going to know that I was part of that.

It’s not about getting complacent. It’s about feeling the agency and possibility that we can actually get this done. It’s about saying, I get to do this, even if it’s just one ballot, one I Voted sticker, one day. We’re gonna get our first female, first South Asian American, and second Black president into that office. The enthusiasm is our running rebuke to that fucking guy, and we’re gonna get the numbers as even Republican politicians turn on him and support Kamala Harris. And any time someone tells you that being hopeful is getting complacent, come back and look at those crowds. Or better yet, get hyped up by Michelle Obama:

Hope is energy, not complacency. We can do this.

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Eartha Kitt (Anna Lucasta, St. Louis Blues)—My friend and I have a saying: NOBODY is Eartha Kitt. A thousand have tried, and they've all come up empty and will continue to do so. Everyone knows her for something: from "Santa Baby" to Yzma in Emperor's New Groove to Catwoman to making Lady Bird Johnson cry for the Vietnam War. She was a master of comedy and sex, an extremely vocal activist, and she aged like fine wine... I honestly don't know what I can say about her that hasn't already been said, so I'll stick to linking all my propaganda. Like what else do you want from me. She was iconic at everything she ever did. Literally name another. How can anyone even think of her and not want to absolutely drown?

Hedy Lamarr (Samson and Delilah, Ziegfeld Girl)—Look. I'm sure someone has already submitted Hedy Lamarr because she was spectacularly beautiful, and a very strong lady too: she fled both an abusive marriage AND nazi persecution at a very young age and rebuilt a life for herself pursuing her love for acting all on her own!! Her career as an actress was stellar; while she began acting outside of Hollywood (her very first movie, Ecstasy, won a prize at the Venice Film Festival), she conquered American hearts very quickly with her first movie in the US, Algiers, and then just kept getting better and better. If all this isn't enough, she was also an inventor: her invention of the frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio transmission technique forms the base of bluetooth and has a lot of applications in all kinds of communication technologies. I think that deserves a prize, don't you?

This is the final poll of the Hot & Vintage Movie Women Tournament. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

THIS POLL LASTS FOR 24 HOURS.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Eartha Kitt:

"A hot vintage woman who was not just known for her voice, beauty, poise, and presence, but also her unapologetic ways of speaking about how she was mistreated in the show business as a girl who grew up on cotton fields in South Carolina in the 1930s through the 1940s coming to Broadway first and then Hollywood."

"Have you watched her sing?? Have you seen her face?? Have you heard her talk?? How could you not fall instantly in love. She makes me incoherent with how hot she is."

"She can ACT she can SING she can speak FOUR LANGUAGES she is a GODDESS!!! Although she is (rightfully) remembered for her singing, TV appearances (Catwoman my beloved), and later film roles, her early appearances in film are no less impressive or noteworthy!! She’s an amazing actress with so much charisma in every role. She was also blacklisted from Hollywood for 10 years for criticizing the Johnson administration/Vietnam War, so. Iconic. Also Orson Welles apparently called her “the most exciting woman in the world.”

"She had such a stunning, remarkable appearance, like she could tear you to shreds with just a glance- but the most undeniable part of her hotness was her voice, and it makes sense that it's what most people nowadays know her for. Nothing encapsulates the sheer magnetism of her singing better than this clip of her and Nat King Cole in St. Louis Blues, she pops in at 2:49. Also I know it's post-1970 but her song that was cut from Emperor's New Groove is likely to make you feel Feelings."

"Even with as racist as Hollywood was in the 1950s and 60s, Eartha Kitt STILL managed to have a thriving career. She also once had a threesome with Paul Newman and James Dean, and called out LBJ over the Vietnam War so hard that it made First Lady Johnson cry. Eartha Kitt was talented, sexy, and a total badass activist."

Hedy Lamarr:

"The only person you can find both on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in the Inventor's Hall of Fame--her radio-frequency-hopping technology forms the basis for cordless phones, wi-fi, and a dozen other aspects of modern life. She was also passionate in her efforts to aid the Allies in WWII (unsurprising for a Jewish-Austrian Emigree to America), and her name served as the backbone for one of the best running jokes in what is possibly Mel Brooks' best movie. Look, Louis B. Mayer apparently believed he could plausibly promote her as "The world's most beautiful woman". Is an entire website full of people going to be less audacious than one Louis B. Mayer? I didn't think so!"

"Described as "Hedy has the most incredible personal sophistication. She knows the peculiarly European art of being womanly; she knows what men want in a beautiful woman, what attracts them, and she forces herself to be these things. She has magnetism with warmth, something that neither Dietrich nor Garbo has managed to achieve" by Howard Sharpe, she managed to escape her controlling husband (and Nazi Germany) by a) Disguising as her maid and fleeing to Paris or b) Convincing the husband to let her wear all of her jewelry to a dinner, only to disappear afterwards. Also she was particularly clever and helped develop Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum (I can't really explain it but anyway...)"

"Her depiction of Delilah and Samson and Delilah just lives rent free in my head. The woman was gorgeous."

"One of the most beautiful women ever in film, spoken by many critics and fans. Beautiful shapely figure, deeper seductive voice, and often played femme fatale roles. She was also brilliant and an inventor. Mainly self-taught, she invested her spare time, including on set between takes, in designing and drafting inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a flavored carbonated drink, and much more."

"Gorgeous and brilliant pioneer of modern technology and the middle part."

[raymurata]

Just scroll (or go ahead and block my #dav critical tag) if you don't wanna read me whining abt Bellara's Archive choice again, but I'm not done with the salt.

What bugs me isn't that the choice to destroy the archive exists, it's that the game frames it, through its UI (which is the closest thing we have to a nonbiased narrator in this medium), as equally weighted against the opposite choice.

If they had worded it like this:

"Free the archive (the knowledge will be lost)" x "Keep the archive (the knowledge will be kept)"

With no extra commentary, then that would be better. If you got to be openly racist against the Dalish or openly in favor of the Dalish, period. Just like in previous games.

Bellara says "(the archive would help us) get back what made us who we were," and "With it, we could be that again."

Which is funny because... People don't study history to return to the past. It's fine if Bellara is idealistic and saying whatever unrealistic, grandiose dreams she and Cyrian had, but the Dalish would never (could never) become like the ancient elves again. For starters there is a Veil now. So what it would in fact do is help them understand where they come from, what they've been through, and trace the changes in their culture.

Of course our modern historians and scientists have tried to reclaim lost technology, too. They've figured out how the Romans made their extra sturdy concrete, and scientists in Brazil have long been trying to replicate the extra fertile Terra Preta from indigenous peoples that lived in the Amazon basin, and several South American historians would love to know how exactly the Inca used the quipu as a writing system aside from counting tool, etc... And that's super cool!!! And maybe (but that's a big maybe) the Archive could give the Dalish a technological edge to carve a corner of the world for themselves without the constant struggle with Tevinter trying to enslave them or Andrastians trying to subjugate them.

But I personally don't think anyone's reading Aztec accounts of human sacrifices to replicate the same practices in modern cults, or that there is an army out there utilizing Roman decimation as a method of discipline. We're using different horrific methods of control now, lol.

But let's say a modern general does decide that the best way to punish a battalion for one man's insurgence is to force every group of ten soldiers to violently murder the 10th man.... Do you really think that the fault would lie with the historian who unearthed that information and put it on Wikipedia? Or the insane general that decided to do this? Would modern morality and laws allow for that punishment to be executed? Do you think that the existence of that article online is inherently dangerous and controversial, and that it should be taken down? Do you think this general would have been a good and non-violent general if he hadn't ever read about Decimation? Or is it clear to you that violence and ingenuity are both inherent to mortals as a whole and can't be so easily blamed on the spread of knowledge?

Because it's not clear to DAV. The game (not Bellara, not Varric) words it very unambiguously as a dichotomy: The only safe way to deal with this Archive is to destroy it. Keeping it is inherently dangerous because the knowledge could fall in "the wrong hands."

What Bellara says is "Cyrian is gone because of what that thing knew," and "what about the bad side, the other things we did?" and "We stole the dwarves' dreams."

Again, she gets to say whatever she wants because she's a character and she's an anxious, idealistic mess. Love her for it. I like that she feels guilt here too because she has been established (through her way of dealing with Cyrian's first death) as someone who takes the blame for mistakes she didn't even commit (She certainly isn't responsible for Solas' actions). She's someone who drives herself sick cooking up the most horrific scenarios in her mind, and she's so compassionate she can't stand the thought of being the one perpetrating violence against innocents. Her misplaced guilt and dread are the emotions that lead her to consider destroying the Archive.

But no matter how guilty a young german may feel about the holocaust, destroying knowledge about gas chambers is not what will prevent other genocides from happening around the world. Individual guilt is barely productive.

Furthermore, Corinne Bursche says that DAV gives you a choice between "destroying" or "sharing" elven knowledge, which is not how the game worded it. But the point still stands even if the Veil Jumpers, for some condescending plot reason, completely lost control of this knowledge, or were so flippant as to put everything on Thedas' wikipedia without curing it at all.

Let's accept, too, that the Archive contains knowledge of how to build something equivalent to nuclear weapons, which one could argue is in fact truly dangerous, but... Well. Do you think it's fair that the countries that have nuclear arsenals are some of the most vocal about the dangers of other countries ever developing their own?

Because that's what it feels like, to me, when the game calls elven knowledge dangerous without ever allowing you to question -- what about Tevinter rituals and magic? Tevinter's millennium of slavery, still in practice at present day? Should we destroy all their libraries too to keep the world safe from dangerous magics? Why do we only get to tell the Dalish, the nomad nations severely subjugated in present Thedas (If you ever played the previous games and have the context, at least, since this game that happens in Tevinter somehow manages to completely gloss over racism against elves as if it never existed) to destroy a one-of-a-kind, ancient trove of knowledge? And have it be framed as good and safe? As "moving forward"?

If you choose to free the archive, Rook says "The elves deserve the chance to chart their own course" to which Bellara answers "Right. Define ourselves by who we are, not who we were," but once again that writing just makes me question Bioware -- Do they not understand the point of history at all? Do they think indigenous peoples are monoliths stuck in the past if they choose to study the history they lost to colonialism? What purpose do they think that keeping that history and culture extinct serves? Who do they think it benefits?

If you step outside of what the game is telling you as fact and think for yourself, with the context of the other DA games in mind, do you still agree that it's inherently dangerous to keep the Archive? Do you still think these are equally morally weighted choices?

Or would you agree that DAV has to subtly convince you, out of character, that keeping this knowledge is inherently dangerous to make this dichotomy make sense?

Again. This wouldn't bug me if they just owned up to the fact your protagonist can, once again, genocide elves/their culture, just like in previous games. And scapegoat present elves too for the sins of their thousand-years-old tyrants, now suddenly returned (it would make so much sense for characters in the narrative to scapegoat the elves, and for us as heroes to fight against that. But no, they don't even go there except through Bellara's guilt.). It's just bizarre to have an elven historian guiltily agreeing with destroying the Archive and then telling us "The Evanuris broke us and kept us broken" without anyone, either Rook or her, ever mentioning a thousand years of Tevinter slavery and several centuries of Andrastian persecution and subjugation.

No. The Evanuris are the be-all and end-all of evil and everything bad that ever happened in Thedas, ever, can be traced back to them.

[gremlinmodetweeker]

(the rare) Ghost's Empire of Icks

I'm gonna be honest, I think a lot about Ghost, but I don't put much to paper. I think that it's because maybe I write so much König that I don't have much time for the big Brit. I do like him, but ya know, time. And energy too. However, today I woke up and I chose British. I must be true to my heritage.

Art from This Post

So! Ghost is rather different from the others because I suspect that every spark of joy in this man's heart is naught but a wee ember. He's genuinely such a massive killjoy it's insane.

There is no doubt in my mind that Ghost is the hardest person in the 141 to get along with. Not because he's mean, he's just... Flat.

See, the problem with Ghost is that he makes jokes all the time, it's just nobody but the 141 team picks up on them.

Ghost has the driest black British humour known to mankind. It's insanely hard to tell when he's joking about having beaten a man to death for a cup of coffee or if he actually did it. The problem is that there's a very good chance he isn't joking, but who's gonna tell the you that he's not? It's funny to watch you try and figure it out yourself.

Struggle, bitch.

That's essentially the T141 motto when it comes to figuring out Ghost's character. Gotta learn to earn, baby.

But the thing is, a pattern starts to form.

Whenever something goes wrong, Ghost will make the flattest joke you've ever heard.

*Car breaks down* Ghost: "Whelp, looks like we're walkin' boys. Cheer up, it's only a ten mile hike. We'll be there soon enough."

That's how subtle his humour is. You might genuinely mistake it for optimism if you didn't know him better. It's hard to follow sometimes, his jokes can be a wee bit cerebral, but he's a funny guy in all honesty. Not bad company after all.

Ghost might be the hardest person to really get in the 141, but if you crack the code he's absolutely hilarious. He genuinely is! It's just usually the most sarcastic one-liner you've ever heard.

If it's not hard to get Ghost's jokes, it's easy to understand how he feels about good ol' Great Britain.

He's a bloody patriot.

Patriotic to a fault.

That's not to say he can't take a joke, of course not. Hell, he's cracking them half the time. He is totally fine with laughing off how shitty his country is

But if you genuinely mean it? If you genuinely think Britain suck? Oh he has words. Maybe not out loud, but he's judging you hardcore.

You don't like the rain? Tough. Rain's what makes the Englishman a hardened man.

You don't like all their slang? Get used to it. If he can learn American slang to get your movies and use South African to go undercover, you can learn his. He's pretty petty about this too.

If you think Britain has a lot to answer for? He does agree, he's not going to advocate for colonialism and genocide, but also 'the past is the past so there's not much use dredging it back up'. He's a bit of a prick about this actually. I could have a lot to say to him, but he's too patriotic to really accept any faults.

He's also just really obnoxious about anything British. If it was invented by a Brit? He'll be sure to bring it up (notably will not bring up the fact that the inventor was actually Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish)

Tying in with his patriotism, Ghost is a bit... Stubborn. He's a bit of a stick in the mud, if you will. Bullheaded to a fault. He'll refuse to admit to something going wrong in his life in any way shape of form. Unfortunately, this mostly shows up when his hearing bothers him.

"Once went to a concert in Stonehenge. Crackin' good concert, but I got a ringin' in my ears for weeks afterwards. Still got it, if I'm gonna be honest."

"Wasn't that when you enlisted in the military? You know, started doing firearms training?"

"Well yeah. Why?"

It will take ages to get Simon's attention. Not because he's not interested, but because he just can't hear too well. When it's quiet he can filter noise easily enough, but if you're trying to get his attention in a club it's next to impossible.

When he's in loud situations, he's learned to rely a fair bit on lip reading. He'll never admit it, of course. He can hear just fine, you know.

He is too stubborn to take a hearing test. You'll just have to suffer with yelling at him when he's just in the next room or having to go hunt him down in the house whenever you need to get his attention.

Speaking of, finding Ghost is a whole issue in and of itself. He's a big man, about 6'5 (maybe a bit under but nobody would dare question him), and pretty broad. However, when he's moving about, he's entirely silent.

The problem with this is that Ghost likes to walk around quite a bit. If you leave to go do some shopping and ask him to wait outside the changing rooms, he'll bugger off and do his own thing.

You can't call his name, but you can try his phone. You just have to hope he has it on him. Or that it's charged, he's horrible for keeping it uncharged.

He's a bit of a menace with his sneaking off. Usually it's fine, but sometime you need him right now and he's off in the ether doing whatever

You'll get a phone call from the bank that he needs to take immediately and you'll spend the next fifteen minutes scurrying around the house trying to find him. You can't call his name, you just have to hope you find him as the person on the other end of the line steadily grows more irate with each passing minute.

It's a genuine nightmare scenario that you have to go through on a monthly basis

Once you find him, he's under his car in the garage fixing something and he's completely oblivious as to why you're so upset.

"If you needed me so badly, why didn't you just yell my name?"

You're going to kill him in his sleep one day.

Anyways, those are just some of my thoughts. I think he's a big gross man but I love him. He's just so grumpy all the time that it's fun. Grumpy, sarcastic, bitter. The perfect man.

Ghost Dump

Ghost Headcanons

[watchmegetobsessed]

THE FINAL SHOW

A/N: last night was a rollercoaster of emotions and i still can't believe love on tour is over, but it will always have a special place in my heart. one thing is for sure, im sill here and i will continue writing for this amazing human until he returns onto the stage where he belongs.

WORD COUNT: 2.6k

SUMMARY: You made a promise in the beginning of Love On Tour and now it's catching up with you and though your heart wants you to keep your word, you know it's not that easy, because it's about your boss, the person who matters the most to you.

MASTERLIST | SUPPORT ME!

You should have learned by now that Harry Styles never forgets.

He remembers every birthday, anniversary, every story anyone tells him, he remembers fans he has interacted with and he is extremely good with names. It’s definitely one thing you admire about him.

But know this tiny detail about him did not teach you to watch what you say around him, because he will recite your words even years later.

It’s been an on and off tango between the two of you for a long time. As his assistant, you’ve been dancing on the line of being professional and jumping into his bed whenever he does as so much as looking at you with those stupid, gorgeous eyes. He is your job, you keep telling that to yourself, but deep down you know he is more than just that.

He is… everything.

It would be easier if he only saw you as his assistant, but that’s not the case. Just how you caught those certain feelings, Harry has shown interest towards you, on several occasions, flirting with you bluntly, asking you out every possible chance.

And each time, when you turned down, a voice in your head screamed at you, but your rationality has been stronger so far and it hasn’t let you take that leap that would change everything forever.

Now, back to his immaculate memory.

You’d been working for him for over a year when the first European leg of Love On Tour was about to start, the residency shows were set to be announced and along with the South American, Australian and Asian dates and another full European leg was in the planning phase. Tour was looking endless and everyone on the team was joking that there won’t be a final show of Love On Tour.

Following another meeting in Harry’s LA home you were hanging out by his pool, something that happened quite often, because he liked to share what he had with the people around him. The sun was setting and you both had several glasses of wine, so the business talk has been long forgotten when you ordered food for the two of you.

You were in the shallow, lounge area of the pool where you could sit in the water and you were enjoying a hamburger while he was swimming around, watching you. You caught him looking right in the middle of a huge bite.

“What?” you asked, narrowing your eyes at him as he swam closer with a grin on his face.

“You look amazing.”

You snorted out loud, mouth full and probably smelling like onions.

“I’m sure I do,” you sarcastically said. “Is this what turns you on? Chewing and onion smell?”

“No. It’s you.”

You stopped and gave him a suspicious look. He moved over and sat beside you.

“You turn me on, Y/N,” he added, when you didn’t say anything, just leisurely staring back at you, as if he hadn’t just overstepped a major boundary between boss and employee.

“Harry, stop,” you mumbled, putting the remainder of your burger to the plate at the edge of the pool.

“What? You started it with guessing what turns me on.”

“It was just a joke!”

“Okay, and I told you the truth.”

“You definitely shouldn’t be saying shit like that to me.”

“Too late, already did, so I think we could take it even further,” he shrugged and you couldn’t hold back a laugh.

“Oh, you are something else, Harry Styles, you know that?”

“That didn’t sound like a no to me,” he grinned, moving just a tad bit closer, but still respecting your private space. “I really want to kiss you, Y/N,” he bluntly added and you knew it was the wine talking from him, sober Harry wouldn’t have said those words out loud, but it didn’t fail to make you feel dizzy and weak.

“That’s not gonna happen now,” you shook your head.

“Okay, if not now, then when?”

“You are so annoying,” you laughed again. “You know what? You can kiss me when Love On Tour officially ends,” you joked.

It was a genuine joke. Anyone would have known you didn’t mean it, but it was Harry you said it to and the moment the words left your mouth they burned into his memories forever.

“Alright then,” he simply said, splashed you and then swam away.

That was the beginning of 2022. You slept off the wine and though you never forgot you said it, you didn’t keep track of the promise you initially made.

Harry did, however.

Not one day went by without him thinking about those words and it was the only reason he was looking forward for the very last show of Love On Tour.

He’s been acting weird, probably since about Vienna. With two weeks until the end of tour and his break, your workload hasn’t gotten less so you couldn’t really care about his weirdness, but when you’re out for dinner in Barcelona with the band and some other crew members and two rounds of drinks have been consumed already, you finally acknowledge the change.

“Hey, you alright?” You poke your elbow into his side, stealing a fry from his plate. Shrugging, he pushes the plate closer to you.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?” you ask, snacking on his leftover fries.

“The end of tour.”

Freezing you instantly remember to that one conversation in his pool. You peek at him and find him already looking at you with a gaze that burns right into your heart. Clearing your throat you turn back to the fries and pretend like you don’t remember the promise you made.

“Just two more weeks and you’re free.”

“That’s not how I see it.”

“Mmm,” you hum, but don’t dare to look at him. You can feel his eyes on the side of your face, but luckily, before he could bring up anything specific Mitch call out his name from across the table and you’re relieved. For now.

It’s almost midnight when you all head back to the hotel and you and Harry somehow end up at the back of the group. The elevator is too full for the two of you to get in as well, so you wait for another round. While you’re still ignoring to look at him, he is very much only looking at you, it feels like.

The elevator returns and you get inside, but Harry pushes the button for the top floor.

“Hey, that’s—“

“I want to show you something,” he hold up a hand.

The top of the hotel has a rooftop bar with an amazing view of the city, the perfect grid of the streets, it’s breathtaking.

“I knew you would like it,” he smiles, leaning against the railing next to you, with his back towards the view, as if he was way more interested in seeing you than the city.

“Because you know me so well,” you chuckle softly.

“I do,” he answers quietly. “We have only four more shows.”

“Mhm,” you nod, eyes glued to the view in front of you.

“The final show of Love On Tour is in ten days.”

“I’m glad you keep track of the shows so well, I feel like I’m not even needed anymore,” you joke with a chuckle, but when you finally look at him you know why he is bringing all of these up.

“Do you remember what you promised would happen when the last show finally comes?”

“Harry…”

“You do,” he simply says. “I know you as someone who keeps her word.”

“It’s… Harry, that was never a promise, I was just joking!”

“None of it is a joke to me, Y/N.”

You roll your eyes, but hate the effect his words have on you. Like your whole inside is on fire, begging to just give in finally, to end this years long game and act on the feelings you’ve been pushing down so hard all this time.

Sighing you cross your arms over your chest. You want to make fun out of it again and say that it was all just about a kiss, but you know, you both know that it would never stop at one kiss, that it’s bigger than that and it would consume you fully if you let your walls down.

“This seems like a big mistake,” you tell him honestly. “What if it goes wrong and… I lose my job… and you.”

Your voice breaks at the end and you can’t look him in the eyes. You’ve spent endless nights thinking about what would happen if you gave in and it all went downhill. Your job might be the last thing on the list of worries, what really scares you is to imagine a version of your life without him because.

It would break you.

“Being scared of the wrong outcome will keep you away from the best things in your life, Y/N.”

“Did you just call yourself the best thing in my life?” you try to joke, but he just gives you a look.

“Don’t think about the what ifs, if you get there, you’ll figure it out. You always do. We always do.”

“This is not that simple,” you shake your head. “You know it’s not that simple.”

“But it is,” he chuckles, but you keep shaking your head. “Figuring out my feelings has never been this simple.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence when not even you know whether you’re about to give in or not and for a split second it actually feels like you’re breaking, but something pulls you back last minute.

“No. And we should be heading back, you have a show tomorrow. You need to get some rest.”

You step away from the railing and start walking back, but when you notice that he’s not coming you turn around and see him staring at the city this time. Opening your mouth you’re about to call out for him, but then change your mind and let him be, walking back to your room.

When you see him again in the morning he doesn’t bring it up again and you’re convinced he won’t bring your promise up again.

The last show has everyone all over the place, you’ve been running around since about six in the morning, picking up people, making sure the hotel check-ins go smoothly and everything is exactly how it should be. The day feels like a whole week, but the excitement and bittersweet sadness that’s been wrapped around everyone is what keeps you up on your feet still.

But the real weight of the last show hits the moment it finally starts.

This is the time when you have nothing to do so you watch Harry perform every night, meaning that this is the 169th time you’re seeing him take the stage and perform just as perfectly as he did at the first, the fiftieth and one hundredth show. He always gives his absolute most. Not just at his shows, but in his life as well. That’s one of the million reasons you fell for him.

Medicine has everyone dying, all 100 thousand people out there and then Harry starts giving his speech that’s extra long this time, talking about how grateful he is for everything, for his fans, his friends and family and it’s one big emotional mess and you can’t help but cry a bit as well, watching from the side.

“The last two years of my life, the last two years of this tour has been the greatest experience I could ever ask for…”

“I see it, the love, in how it’s affected all the people around me, continue to affect people. It does not end with this tour.”

“I love you, thank you so much.”

Screaming rolls over the crowd as an answer and you expect him to go on with starting As It Was, but then he starts talking again.

“There is one more thing I want to say tonight. I have learned and experienced so much in the past years. I will be forever thankful for the memories we’ve made.”

There. He said we, he switched up his narrative. That’s how you know he is not talking to the crowd. He is talking to you.

“If this is it, if it never goes beyond this, I would live a happy life. With you forever in my heart. But if we ever take it further, if we ever take the risk and reach for the stars and we might fall… just know that I will always be here for you. You can never lose me. No matter what. I love you.”

You suck on your breath, covering your mouth with your hand as you stare at him stand in the middle of the stage, staring out ahead of him, the crowd screaming for him, oblivious to the one sided conversation that just happened between you and him.

As It Was starts and the show carries on towards the end, but you’re still frozen in that moment and when the show ends and you watch Harry drop to his knees on the stage, you know things will never be the same.

Backstage is like a tornado once the show is over, the band walks off the stage and Harry is following right behind with Lloyd by his side, but when he sees you standing still in the middle of the madness, he drops out of the conversation right away and stops a few feet away from you, letting you decide where to go now.

“You promise?” you breathe out, your throat closing up. “You promise I will never lose you?”

“I thought that was clear by now, Y/N,” he replies, his chest still rapidly rising and falling. “But if you need me to actually say it, I will. You will never lose me, no matter what. It will always be you and me and I know you’re scared, but I’m—“

He doesn’t get to finish, because you’re already throwing yourself into his arms and kissing him.

It doesn’t matter that the whole crew bursts out into screaming and whistling, that you’re giving a second show with the way you get lost in each other, because in your little bubble it’s just you and Harry and everything that’s been building between the two of you.

Every joke, every teasing comment, all the stolen looks and suppressed feeling that was never acted on is now free, they all burst out of your chest and into the electricity that’s snaking around you as you keep taking more and more of him, hungry to make up for the past years.

The clapping dies down when you finally pull back, forehead resting against his, his hands holding you so tight as if he was afraid you might run away any moment.

“You kept your promise. I knew you were trusty, Y/N Y/L/N,” he chuckles, pecking your lips softly again as you laugh at his words, finally opening your eyes to look at him.

“Actually I feel like I kissed you. I promised you could kiss me, so technically—“

“Shut up, you’re already getting on my nerves,” he laughs, kissing you over and over again, so your promise is actually fulfilled. “Can’t wait for you to do that every day for the rest of my life.”

“I thought that was part of my job too, have I not been doing that?” you tease, lips moving against his as you speak.

“You have, but you can take it to a whole new level now,” he laughs, pulling you against him before letting you go and popping the bubble, though his hand never lets go of yours, not while everyone congratulates him, not when the final show celebrations start and not when he pulls you into his hotel room to end this journey of Love On Tour with you by his side, but also start a new chapter.

Thank you for reading, please like and reblog if you enjoyed and buy me a coffee if you want to support me!

[mistydeyes]

Hi,if you’re not busy can you write a fic of Cod characters with a cia agent gf ?

yes ofc! yk i love a good little government agent gf moment :)

a double life

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summary: From hidden occupations to a particular set of skill sets, the 141 learns to adapt to having a girlfriend who has all the right qualifications (and who could completely kick their ass).

pairing: Task Force 141 x fem!reader

warnings: swearing, mentions of weapons/violence

┊ ⋆ ┊ . ┊ ┊┊ ⋆ ┊ . ┊ ┊┊ ⋆ ┊ . ┊ ┊┊ ⋆ ┊ . ┊ ┊┊ ⋆ ┊ . ┊ ┊┊

price

"Sorry I can't be there to meet you, Price," Laswell spoke over the web camera feed, "got tied up in South America." Price nodded as he held the bridge of his nose, Laswell had promised her best field agent to act as a point person for their mission in New Zealand. However, just the thought of some middle-aged retired veteran or worse yet, hot-shot rookie, made his headache pound even further. "She's a good one, Price," Laswell reassured, "skilled in practically every major language and the best marks in her physical fitness examination." "Yes Kate, I read her file, but it seems like you failed to include a photo-" He was interrupted by a sturdy knock at the door. "Looks like she's here."

As you cracked the door open, you practically dropped the files that sat in your arms. "What are you doing here?" Price asked jovially and you could feel the breath release from your sternum, "didn't expect an on-base visit like this." As the pieces began to fit together, you realized he didn't know what you were actually there for. "John, Kate sent me here," you whispered as you shut the door gently, "heard you're going to New Zealand." As the realization hit him like an oncoming train, you braced for impact. "You-you work for the CIA?" he asked almost foolishly and you nodded in response. "I did say I worked in Virginia," you corrected, "and you had to know my surprise visit yesterday wasn't just a spur-of-the-moment thing." Price could feel his headache reach a fever pitch as he reviewed your file again. "Then what's with the name?" he asked, "you lie about that too." You let out a laugh as you explained, "People have nicknames and mother's maiden names, John." As you sat back in your chair and crossed your legs, Price wondered what he had done for the universe to gift him you.

soap

Despite your initial reservations, Johnny was quite good at keeping your occupation vague and nonchalant in conversation. You were honest about your work in central intelligence and he took that secret to the grave. Your long-distance relationship was written off as you working in some company in DC and no one batted an eye at your occasional inference at military strategy or surveillance techniques. When you returned home, you would always be sure to show him extra appreciation for his covertness. "Tryna make me patriotic?" he would joke before you would kiss him and stifle his laughs.

However, he loved testing your skill set and seeing if you were as trained of an operative as your file read. "Let's see what they teach you over there, Bonnie," he joked as he lined up his sights at the air gun range. You refrained from kicking him as you stood back to watch him. You almost let out a laugh when you saw his small pellet ricochet just slightly off target. "Hmm and that's why Ghost is your long-range weapons specialist," you teased as he got up and switched positions. You breathed in as you looked down your sights and positioned your rifle towards the farthest target on the range. "You Americans, always so fucking cocky," he muttered under his breath before you quickly shut him up with a quick shot directly into the center of the target. The metal hen spun around widely at your expert marksmanship and you exhaled your held breath. You stood up and tried to size up your tall boyfriend. "Best 2/3?" you offered and you smiled as he kissed your forehead before ushering you out of the way to try again. "Fucking CIA training," he whispered as he got into position again. "You say something, you glorified sergeant?"

gaz

It was 4 am when you arose from the bed and leaned into Kyle, taking in his warmth and seeking refuge from the cold London air. You could always rely on your boyfriend to be your human-sized space heater. As you laid your head across his chest, you could feel him stir lightly. "Time to go already, love?" he asked with his eyes still closed and you muttered in confirmation. You always knew what challenges came with living so far away from the States but you had someone who made it all worth it. He kissed your forehead lightly as you rolled off the bed. You tried to quietly make your way to the bathroom to let him get some more hours of precious sleep but upon your return, it was clear Kyle was more awake than before.

"You sure you don't need me to drive you to the airport?" he offered yet again as you dressed quickly in dress slacks and a blouse. "MI6 is sending a car," you explained as you collected your overnight bag, "just try to get some sleep, my love. I'll text you when I land in Langley." Despite your soft kiss on the cheek, Kyle still pouted as you pulled away. "Don't understand why you can't be a liaison officer for us," he mumbled but you ruffled his hair slightly. "When the position becomes available, I'll be the first application on there," you smiled, doing a final check of your things, "just tell Price to write me a hell of a recommendation letter." With that, you shared another long kiss as you slightly cringed at his morning breath. "I'll be sure to say hi to the cybercrime analysis team for you, hopefully, they'll actually take my advice this time," you laughed before exiting out of your apartment and embracing the cold English air you had grown to love.

ghost

When the question arose of your occupation, you would always smile and defer to being just an "American government worker." However, you always knew Simon had more than just an inkling as to your occupation. When you spoke about military strategy, and combat techniques, or even had various conversations in different languages over the phone, it was clear to him that you were more than just a civilian. The shock didn't even resonate with him when you uttered the words, "Paramilitary Operations Officer," it all seemed to fall into place. He wouldn't bat an eye when it came to long stretches of days that you were in minimal contact with him. "I'll be back," you would reassure as you pulled on a dark hoodie and headed out the door with a bag. Simon would always be there to clean your wounds and ice your bruises.

It was a shock when Simon hadn't heard from you in a month. You had left in the middle of the day in a black Mercedes that disappeared off the English skyline. It was the unfortunate timing that he had been on leave when you left and there had been no word from Price regarding a new mission. Every morning, he would turn over in your king-sized bed expecting to see you smiling back at him. However, the days dragged on without any information meeting his ears. You could practically still picture his terrified face when you turned the key into the door and slammed your bag down. Simon paused upon seeing your blackened eye and wrapped knuckles. The eye bags on your delicate face further added worry to the situation. "Don't ask," you whispered as you fell into his chest, "intel was shit." That was all Simon needed to lift you gently and place you back on the couch. As he held you in his arms with an ice pack to your eye, you slightly pulled away from his touch. "I promised I would come back, didn't I?"

[madhatterbri]

Loyalty Lies | W.O.

Summary: Will. Smut. American Revolution AU.

Happy birthday to my favoritest, magicalest fart. ❤️ May you have many dreams with a boy band, Will Ospreay, for the rest of your days. @magicalbuttertarts . Thank you for always being there and being so supportive and laughing at my shitty jokes. Please check her masterlist out here.

Will Ospreay Masterlist

AEW Masterlist

Taglist: @theworldofotps @smallestsnarkestgirl @hodgepodge-musings @magicalbuttertarts @99hook

Will stood in the dark away from the shine of the moonlight that peered through the windows. Anyone who happened to find him in the house would spell disaster for him and the lady of the house. A British soldier in the home of a single woman. He would be hanged before the sun rose from the east.

Footsteps made him hold his breath. His heart pounded in his chest. He hoped and prayed that his love would be coming through those doors. Not taking any chances, he grabbed his pistol and pointed to the door.

Y/N walked through the door, humming happily. Tonight was a success. She managed to get more Intel from the drunks at the tavern. Drinks made even the most noble men betray their secrets. Men were too easy.

A satchel rested on her table. She grabbed the letters from under her skirts and kissed them. It had been months since she last saw Will. They were playing a dangerous game, and his absence was excused. The letters were then placed in the satchel. By morning, they would be hidden in a hole in a tree to be picked up by a British soldier.

"What does a bloke have to do to get a kiss like that?" Will asked.

She jumped at the sudden interruption of silence. Her hands placed over her chest as she tried to calm down. After regaining her wits, she looked towards his direction. A smile tugged at her lips. "I don't see any war here to stop him from getting one."

Will had been sneaking to her house for months whenever the war drew him back to New York. One night, he foraged around her isolated cabin for food. The rations were low, but his need for food was high. She caught him and told him to come inside. That night, she made him stew. They formed a friendship which then blossomed into a relationship.

Their night started with a simple kiss, followed by another, and another. Soon, clothes were stripped and left forgotten on the floor in a trail to her bed. Kisses went further and further south. His face buried between her legs. She bit her lip and gripped the pillow. Her other hand gripped his blonde locks. Will's tongue and fingers explored what no man had ever done before. His name fell from her lips like a prayer.

Nights like these didn't happen often, but when they did, they made the most of it. Satisfied with pleasing his woman, he kissed back up to her lips. Her moans muffled by his lips when he thrusted inside of her. His thrusts were slow and steady. He always took his time. A part of him was lost in the notion that this could last forever if he went slower. The two of them in a cabin in the woods together forever.

Her fingernails scratched his back as he hissed against her. Her legs wrapped around his waist. Fingers snaked through his hair. His thrusts picked up as he felt their end near. His hips hesitated slightly when he wasn't sure where to finish.

"Inside," she told him after feeling his hesitation.

"Are you... are you sure?" He stammered. A woman getting pregnant without a man would be a major scandal. Her getting pregnant by a British soldier would be disastrous.

She hummed in response. A few more thrusts and he stilled inside of her. Her body tensed around him as they reached the peak of their orgasm. Will pulled out of her. She moved to the side lazily as he lay next to her. He enveloped her in his muscular arms.

They stared into each other's eyes. Their tones hushed as they talked about their future after the war. A little place such as hers filled with the pitter patter of the tiny feet of their children. He often remembered their talks whenever he found himself on the battlefield. They always helped push him through.

She was the first to fall asleep. Her head nestled into his chest. His fingers traced lazy shapes into her shoulder. Will laid on his back as he stared at the ceiling. His eyes suddenly started to close. The only clue of a war going on outside rested on a table a few feet away from them.

The secrets of top rebel military officials left on the wooden table. Secrets obtained by a woman betraying her country for her British soldier with their hopes that the war would come to an end.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

A mole infiltrated the highest ranks of American militias. Here's what he found.

ProPublica

January 4, 2025 8:26PM ET

John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.

On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return. He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the 20-year-old Honda. This was his new home.

He turned on a recording app to add an entry to his diary. His voice had the high-pitched rasp of a lifelong smoker: “Where to fucking start,” he sighed, taking a deep breath. After more than two years undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired. Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now, he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets back to the rest.”

In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.

It was addressed to me.

The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.

Now he was a fugitive. He drove south toward a desert four hours from the city, where he could disappear.

1. Prelude

I’d first heard from Williams five months earlier, when he sent me an intriguing but mysterious anonymous email. “I have been attempting to contact national media and civil rights groups for over a year and been ignored,” it read. “I’m tired of yelling into the void.” He sent it to an array of reporters. I was the only one to respond. I’ve burned a lot of time sating my curiosity about emails like that. I expected my interest to die after a quick call. Instead, I came to occupy a dizzying position as the only person to know the secret Williams had been harboring for almost two years.

We spoke a handful of times over encrypted calls before he fled. He’d been galvanized by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, Williams told me, when militias like the Oath Keepers conspired to violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. He believed democracy was under siege from groups the FBI has said pose a major domestic terrorism threat. So he infiltrated the militia movement on spec, as a freelance vigilante. He did not tell the police or the FBI. A loner, he did not tell his family or friends.

Williams seemed consumed with how to ensure this wasn’t all a self-destructive, highly dangerous waste of time. He distrusted law enforcement and didn’t want to be an informant, he said. He told me he hoped to damage the movement by someday going public with what he’d learned.

The Capitol riot had been nagging at me too. I’d reported extensively on Jan. 6. I’d sat with families who blamed militias for snatching their loved ones away from them, pulling them into a life of secret meetings and violent plots — or into a jail cell. By the time Williams contacted me, though, the most infamous groups appeared to have largely gone dark. Were militias more enduring, more potent, than it seemed?

Some of what he told me seemed significant. Still, before the package arrived, it could feel like I was corresponding with a shadow. I knew Williams treated deception as an art form. “When you spin a lie,” he once told me, “you have to have things they can verify so they won’t think to ask questions.” While his stories generally seemed precise and sober — always reassuring for a journalist — I needed to proceed with extreme skepticism.

So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chat logs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.

The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.

Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.

Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.

(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)

Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.

Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”

2. The Struggle

If there is one moment that set Williams on his path into the militia underground, it came roughly a decade before Jan. 6, when he was sent to a medium-security prison. He was in his early 30s, drawn to danger and filled with an inner turbulence.

Williams grew up in what he described to me, to friends and in court records as a dysfunctional and unhappy home. He was a gay child in rural America. His father viewed homosexuality as a mortal sin, he said. Williams spent much of his childhood outdoors, bird-watching, camping and trying to spend as little time as possible at home. (John Williams is now his legal name, one he recently acquired.)

Once he was old enough to move out, Williams continued to go off the grid for weeks at a time. Living in a cave interested him; the jobs he’d found at grocery stores and sandwich shops did not. He told me his young adulthood was “a blank space in my life,” a stretch of “petty crime” and falling-outs with old friends. He pled guilty to a series of misdemeanors: trespassing, criminal mischief, assault.

What landed Williams in prison was how he responded to one of those arrests. He sent disturbing, anonymous emails to investigators on the case, threatening their families. Police traced the messages back to him and put him away for three years.

Williams found time to read widely in prison — natural history books, Bertrand Russell, Cormac McCarthy. And it served as a finishing school for a skill that would be crucial in his undercover years. Surviving prison meant learning to maneuver around gang leaders and corrections officers. He learned how to steer conversations to his own benefit without the other person noticing.

When he got out, he had a clear ambition: to become a wilderness survival instructor. He used Facebook to advertise guided hikes in Utah’s Uinta Mountains. An old photo captures Williams looking like a lanky camp counselor as he shows students an edible plant. He sports a thick ponytail and cargo pants, painted toenails poking out from his hiking sandals.

Many people in Utah had turned to wilderness survival after a personal crisis, forming a community of misfits who thrived in environments harsh and remote. Even among them, Williams earned a reputation for putting himself in extreme situations. “Not many people are willing to struggle on their own. He takes that struggle to a high degree,” one friend told me admiringly. Williams took up krav maga and muay thai because he enjoyed fistfights. He once spent 40 days alone in the desert with only a knife, living off chipmunks and currants (by choice, to celebrate a birthday).

Williams struggled to get his survival business going. He’d hand out business cards at hobbyist gatherings with promises of adventure, but in practice, he was mostly leading seminars in city parks for beer money. He would only take calls in emergencies, another friend recalled, because he wanted to save money on minutes.

Then around New Year’s in 2019, according to Williams, he received an email from a leader in American Patriots Three Percent, or AP3. He wanted to hire Williams for a training session. He could pay $1,000.

Finally, Williams thought. I’m starting to get some traction.

3. The Decision

They had agreed there’d be no semiautomatic rifles, Williams told me, so everyone brought a sidearm. Some dozen militiamen had driven into the mountains near Peter Sinks, Utah, one of the coldest places in the contiguous U.S. Initially they wanted training in evasion and escape, Williams said, but he thought they needed to work up to that. So for three days, he taught them the basics of wilderness survival, but with a twist: how to stay alive while “trying to stay hidden.” He showed them how to build a shelter that would both keep them dry and escape detection. How to make a fire, then how to clean it up so no one could tell it was ever there.

As the days wore on, stray comments started to irk him. Once, a man said he’d been “kiked” into overpaying for his Ruger handgun. At the end of the training, AP3 leaders handed out matching patches. The ritual reminded Williams of a biker gang.

He’d already been to some shorter AP3 events to meet the men and tailor the lesson to his first meaningful client, Williams told me. But spending days in the woods with them felt different. He said he found the experience unpleasant and decided not to work with the group again.

This portion of Williams’ story — exactly how and why he first became a militia member — is the hardest to verify. By his own account, he kept his thoughts and plans entirely to himself. At the time, he was too embarrassed to even tell his friends what happened that weekend, he said. In the survival community, training militias was considered taboo.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Williams was hiding a less gallant backstory. Maybe he’d joined AP3 out of genuine enthusiasm and then soured on it. Maybe now he was trying to fool me. Indeed, when I called the AP3 leader who set up the training, he disputed Williams’ timeline. He remembered Williams staying sporadically but consistently involved after the session in the mountains, as a friend of the group who attended two or three events a year. To further muddy the picture, Williams had warned me the man would say something like that — Williams had worked hard to create the impression that he never left, he said, that he’d just gone inactive for a while, busy with work. (Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group. “He was very well-respected,” he said. “I never questioned his honesty or his intentions.”)

Even Williams’ friends told me he was something of a mystery to them. But I found evidence that supports his story where so many loners bare their innermost thoughts: the internet. In 2019 and early 2020, Williams wrote thousands of since-deleted entries in online forums. These posts delivered a snapshot of his worldview in this period: idiosyncratic, erudite and angry with little room for moderation. “There are occasionally militia types that want these skills to further violent fringe agendas and I will absolutely not enable them,” he wrote in one 2020 entry about wilderness survival. In another, he called AP3 and its allies “far right lunatics.” The posts didn’t prove the details of his account, but here was the Williams I knew, writing under pseudonyms long before we’d met.

One day, he’d voice his disdain for Trump voters, neoliberalism or “the capitalist infrastructure.” Another, he’d rail against gun control measures as immoral. When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in 2020, Williams wrote that he was gathering medical supplies for local protestors. He sounded at times like a revolutionary crossed with a left-wing liberal arts student. “The sole job of a cop is to bully citizens on behalf of the state,” he wrote. “Violent overthrow of the state is our only viable option.”

Then came Jan. 6. As he was watching on TV, he later told me, Williams thought he recognized the patch on a rioter’s tactical vest. It looked like the one that AP3 leaders had handed out at the end of his training.

Did I teach that guy? he wondered. Why was I so cordial to them all? If they knew I was gay, I bet they’d want me dead, and I actually helped them. Because I was too selfish to think of anything but my career.

Shame quickly turned to anger, he told me, and to a desire for revenge. Pundits were saying that democracy itself was in mortal peril. Williams took that notion literally. He assumed countless Americans would respond with aggressive action, he said, and he wanted to be among them.

4. A New World

Williams stood alone in his apartment, watching himself in the mirror.

“I’m tall.”

“I’m Dave.”

“I’m tall.”

“I’m Dave.”

He tried to focus on his mannerisms, on the intonation of his voice. Whether he was saying the truth or a falsehood, he wanted to appear exactly the same.

Months had passed since the Capitol riot. By all appearances, Williams was now an enthusiastic member of AP3. Because he already had an in, joining the group was easy, he said. Becoming a self-fashioned spy took some trial and error, however. In the early days, he had posed as a homeless person to surveil militia training facilities, but he decided that was a waste of time.

The casual deceit that had served him in prison was proving useful. Deviousness was a skill, and he stayed up late working to hone it. He kept a journal with every lie he told so he wouldn’t lose track. His syllabus centered on acting exercises and the history of espionage and cults. People like sex cult leader Keith Raniere impressed him most — he studied biographies to learn how they manipulated people, how they used cruelty to wear their followers down into acquiescence.

Williams regularly berated the militia’s rank and file. He doled out condescending advice about the group’s security weaknesses, warning their technical incompetence would make them easy targets for left-wing hackers and government snoops. Orion Rollins, the militia’s top leader in Utah, soon messaged Williams to thank him for the guidance. “Don’t worry about being a dick,” he wrote. “It’s time to learn and become as untraceable as possible.” (The AP3 messages Williams sent me were so voluminous that I spent an entire month reading them before I noticed this exchange.)

Williams was entering the militia at a pivotal time. AP3 once had chapters in nearly every state, with a roster likely in the tens of thousands; as authorities cracked down on the movement after Jan. 6, membership was plummeting. Some who stayed on had white nationalist ties. Others were just lonely conservatives who had found purpose in the paramilitary cause. For now, the group’s leaders were focused on saving the militia, not taking up arms to fight their enemies. (Thanks to Williams’ trove and records from several other sources, I was eventually able to write an investigation into AP3’s resurgence.)

On March 4, 2021, Williams complained to Rollins that everyone was still ignoring his advice. Williams volunteered to take over as the state’s “intel officer,” responsible for protecting the group from outside scrutiny.

“My hands are tied,” Williams wrote. “If I’m not able to” take charge, the whole militia “might unravel.” Rollins gave him the promotion.

“Thanks Orion. You’ve shown good initiative here.” Privately, he saw a special advantage to his appointment. If anyone suspected there was a mole in Utah, Williams would be the natural choice to lead the mole hunt.

Now he had a leadership role. What he did not yet have was a plan. But how could he decide on goals, he figured, until he knew more about AP3? He would work to gather information and rise through the ranks by being the best militia member he could be.

He took note of the job titles of leaders he met, like an Air Force reserve master sergeant (I confirmed this through military records) who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended paramilitary trainings, where the group practiced ambushes with improvised explosives and semiautomatic guns. He offered his comrades free lessons in hand-to-hand combat and bonded with them in the backcountry hunting jackrabbits. When the militia joined right-wing rallies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear. Williams attended as their “gray man,” he said — assigned to blend in with the crowd and call in armed reinforcements if tensions erupted.

Since his work was seasonal, Williams could spend as much as 40 hours a week on militia activities. One of his duties as intel officer was to monitor the group’s enemies on the left, which could induce vertigo. A militia leader once dispatched him to a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a local library, he said, where he saw a Proud Boy he recognized from a joint militia training. Was this a closet right-winger keeping tabs on the socialists? Or a closet leftist who might dox him or inform the police?

He first contacted me in October 2022. He couldn’t see how the movement was changing beyond his corner of Utah. AP3 was reinvigorated by then, I later found, with as many as 50 recruits applying each day. In private chats I reviewed, leaders were debating if they should commit acts of terrorism. At the Texas border, members were rounding up immigrants in armed patrols. But Williams didn’t know all that yet. On our first call, he launched into a litany of minutiae: names, logistical details, allegations of minor players committing petty crimes. He could tell I wasn’t sure what it all amounted to.

Williams feared that if anything he’d helped AP3, not damaged it. Then, in early November, Rollins told him to contact a retired detective named Bobby Kinch.

5. The Detective and the Sheriff

Williams turned on a recording device and dialed. Kinch picked up after one ring: “What’s going on?” he bellowed. “How you doing, man?”

“I don’t know if you remember me,” Kinch continued, but they’d met years before.

“Oh, oh, back in the day,” Williams said, stuttering for a second. He knew Kinch was expecting the call but was confused by the warm reception. Maybe Kinch was at the training in 2019?

“Well I’m the sitting, current national director of the Oath Keepers now.”

The militia’s eye-patched founder, Stewart Rhodes, was in jail amid his trial for conspiring to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Kinch said he was serving on the group’s national board when his predecessor was arrested. Rhodes had called from jail to say, “Do not worry about me. This is God’s way.”

“He goes, ‘But I want you to save the organization.’”

Kinch explained that Rollins, who’d recently defected to the Oath Keepers, had been singing Williams’ praises. (Bound by shared ideology, militias are more porous than outsiders would think. Members often cycle between groups like square dance partners.) “I imagine your plate is full with all the crazy stuff going on in the world, but I’d love to sit down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Williams said. “AP3 and Oath Keepers should definitely be working together.” He proposed forming a joint reconnaissance team so their two militias could collaborate on intelligence operations. Kinch lit up. “I’m a career cop,” he said. “I did a lot of covert stuff, surveillance.”

By the time they hung up 45 minutes later, Kinch had invited Williams to come stay at his home. Williams felt impressed with himself. The head of the most infamous militia in America was treating him like an old friend.

To me, Williams sounded like a different person on the call, with the same voice but a brand new personality. It was the first recording that I listened to and the first time I became certain the most important part of his story was true. To authenticate the record, I independently confirmed nonpublic details Kinch discussed on the tape, a process I repeated again and again with the other files. Soon I had proof of what would otherwise seem outlandish: Williams’ access was just as deep as he claimed.

I could see why people would be eager to follow Kinch. Even when he sermonized on the “global elitist cabal,” he spoke with the affable passion of a beloved high school teacher. I’d long been fascinated by the prevalence of cops on militia rosters, so I started examining his backstory.

Kinch grew up in upstate New York, the son of a World War II veteran who had him at about 50. When Kinch was young, he confided in a later recording, he was a “wheelman,” slang for getaway driver. “I ran from the cops so many fucking times,” he said. But “at the end of the day, you know, I got away. I never got caught.”

He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23 years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the “Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American. (A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)

Then around Christmas in 2013, Kinch’s career began to self-destruct. In a series of Facebook posts, he said that he would welcome a “race war.” “Bring it!” he wrote. “I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!” An ensuing investigation prompted the department to tell the Secret Service that Kinch “could be a threat to the president,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. (The Secret Service interviewed him and determined he was not a threat to President Barack Obama, the outlet reported. Kinch told the paper he was not racist and that he was being targeted by colleagues with “an ax to grind.”) In 2016, he turned in his badge, a year after the saga broke in the local press.

Kinch moved to southern Utah and found a job hawking hunting gear at a Sportsman’s Warehouse. But he “had this urge,” he later said on a right-wing podcast. “Like I wasn’t done yet.” So he joined the Oath Keepers. “When people tell me that violence doesn’t solve anything, I look back over my police career,” he once advised his followers. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, because violence did solve quite a bit.’”

Kinch added Williams to an encrypted Signal channel where the Utah Oath Keepers coordinated their intel work. Two weeks later on Nov. 30, 2022, Williams received a cryptic message from David Coates, one of Kinch’s top deputies.

Coates was an elder statesman of sorts in the Oath Keepers, a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran with a Hulk Hogan mustache. There’d been a break-in at the Utah attorney general’s office, he reported to the group, and for some unspoken reason, the Oath Keepers seemed to think this was of direct relevance to them. Coates promised to find out more about the burglary: “The Sheriff should have some answers” to “my inquiries today or tomorrow.”

That last line would come to obsess Williams. He sent a long, made-up note about his own experiences collaborating with law enforcement officials. “I’m curious, how responsive is the Sheriff to your inquiries? Or do you have a source you work with?”

“The Sheriff has become a personal friend who hosted my FBI interview,” Coates responded. “He opens a lot of doors.” Coates had been in D.C. on Jan. 6, he’d told Williams. It’d make sense if that had piqued the FBI’s interest.

To Williams, it hinted at a more menacing scenario — at secret ties between those who threaten the rule of the law and those duty-bound to enforce it. He desperately wanted more details, more context, the sheriff’s name. But he didn’t want to push for too much too fast.

6. The Hunting of Man

A forest engulfed Kinch’s house on all sides. He lived in a half-million-dollar cabin in summer home country, up 8,000 feet in the mountains outside Zion National Park. Williams stood in the kitchen on a mid-December Saturday morning.

Williams had recently made a secret purchase of a small black device off Amazon. It looked like a USB drive. The on-off switch and microphone holes revealed what it really was: a bug. As the two men chatted over cups of cannoli-flavored coffee, Williams didn’t notice when Kinch’s dog snatched the bug from his bag.

The night before, Williams had slept in the guest room. The house was cluttered with semiautomatic rifles. He had risked photographing three plaques on the walls inscribed with the same Ernest Hemingway line. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man,” they read. “Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else.”

They spotted the dog at the same time. The bug was attached to a charging device. The animal was running around with it like it was a tennis ball. As Kinch went to retrieve it, Williams felt panic grip his chest. Could anyone talk their way out of this? He’d learned enough about Kinch to be terrified of his rage. Looking around, Williams eyed his host’s handgun on the kitchen counter.

If he even starts to examine it, I’ll grab the gun, he thought. Then I’ll shoot him and flee into the woods.

Kinch took the bug from the dog’s mouth. Then he handed it right to Williams and started to apologize.

Don’t worry about it, Williams said. He’s a puppy!

On their way out the door, Kinch grabbed the pistol and placed it in the console of his truck. It was an hour’s drive to the nearest city, where the Oath Keepers were holding a leadership meeting. Williams rode shotgun, his bug hooked onto the zipper of his backpack. On the tape, I could hear the wind racing through the car window. The radio played Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.”

Kinch seemed in the hold of a dark nostalgia — as if he was wrestling with the monotony of civilian life, with the new strictures he faced since turning in his badge. Twenty minutes in, he recited the Hemingway line like it was a mantra. “I have a harder time killing animals than a human being,” Kinch continued. Then he grew quiet as he recounted the night he decided to retire.

He’d woken up in an oleander bush with no memory of how he’d gotten there. His hands were covered in blood. He was holding a gun. “I had to literally take my magazine out and count my bullets, make sure I didn’t fucking kill somebody,” he said. “I black out when I get angry. And I don’t remember what the fuck I did.”

Kinch went on: “I love the adrenaline of police work,” and then he paused. “I miss it. It was a hoot.”

By the time they reached Cedar City, Utah, Kinch was back to charismatic form. He dished out compliments to the dozen or so Oath Keepers assembled for the meeting — “You look like you lost weight” — and told everyone to put their phones in their cars. “It’s just good practice. Because at some point we may have to go down a route,” one of his deputies explained, trailing off.

Kinch introduced Williams to the group. “He’s not the feds. And if he is, he’s doing a damn good job.”

Williams laughed, a little too loud.

7. Doctor, Lawyer, Sergeant, Spy

Early in the meeting, Kinch laid out his vision for the Oath Keepers’ role in American life. “We have a two-edged sword,” he said. The “dull edge” was more traditional grassroots work, exemplified by efforts to combat alleged election fraud. He hoped to build their political apparatus so that in five or 10 years, conservative candidates would be seeking the Oath Keepers’ endorsement.

Then there was the sharp edge: paramilitary training. “You hone all these skills because when the dull edge fails, you’ve got to be able to turn that around and be sharp.” The room smelled like donuts, one of the men had remarked.

The week before, Kinch’s predecessor had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. This was their first meeting since the verdict, and I opened the recordings later with the same anticipation I feel sitting down for the Super Bowl. What would come next for the militia after this historic trial: ruin, recovery or revolt?

The stature of men leading the group’s post-Jan. 6 resurrection startled me. I was expecting the ex-cops, like the one from Fresno, California, who said he stayed on with the militia because “this defines me.” Militias tend to prize law enforcement ties; during an armed operation, it could be useful to have police see you as a friend.

But there was also an Ohio OB-GYN on the national board of directors — he used to work for the Cleveland Clinic, I discovered, and now led a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The doctor was joined at board meetings by a city prosecutor in Utah, an ex-city council member and, Williams was later told, a sergeant with an Illinois sheriff’s department. (The doctor did not respond to requests for comment. He has since left his post with the UnitedHealth subsidiary, a spokesperson for the company said.)

Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias. They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead, they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,” another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting than an insurrectionist cell.

Kinch had only recently taken over and as I listened, I wondered how many followers he really had outside of that room. They hadn’t had a recruitment drive in the past year, which they resolved to change. They had $1,700 in the bank. But it didn’t seem entirely bravado. Kinch and his comrades mentioned conversations with chapters around the county.

Then as they turned from their weakened national presence to their recent successes in Utah, Williams snapped to attention.

“We had surveillance operations,” Kinch said, without elaboration.

“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff” on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.” Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question. (The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training exercises.

“Absolutely, yeah, I’m excited about that.” Williams was resolved to find his way onto the national board.

8. The Stakeout

On Dec. 17, 2022, a week after the meeting, Williams called a tech-savvy 19-year-old Oath Keeper named Rowan. He’d told Rowan he was going to teach him to infiltrate leftist groups, but Williams’ real goal was far more underhanded. While the older Oath Keepers had demurred at his most sensitive questions recently, the teenager seemed eager to impress a grizzled survival instructor. By assigning missions to Rowan, he hoped to probe the militias’ secrets without casting suspicion on himself.

“You don’t quite have the life experience to do this,” Williams opened on the recording. But with a couple years’ training, “I think we can work towards that goal.” He assigned his student a scholarly monograph, “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society,” to begin his long education in how leftists think. “Perfect,” Rowan responded. He paused to write the title down.

Then came his pupil’s first exercise: build a dossier on Williams’ boss in AP3. Williams explained it was safest to practice on people they knew.

In Rowan, Williams had found a particularly vulnerable target. He was on probation at the time. According to court records, earlier that year, Rowan had walked up to a stranger’s truck as she was leaving her driveway. She rolled down her window. He punched her several times in the face. When police arrived, Rowan began screaming that he was going to kill them and threatened to “blow up the police department.” He was convicted of misdemeanor assault.

Williams felt guilty about using the young man but also excited. (“He is completely in my palm,” he recorded in his diary.) Within a few weeks, he had Rowan digging into Kinch’s background. “I’m going to gradually have him do more and more things,” he said in the diary, “with the hopes that I can eventually get him to hack” into militia leaders’ accounts.

The relationship quickly unearthed something that disturbed him. The week of their call, Williams woke up to a series of angry messages in the Oath Keepers’ encrypted Signal channel. The ire was directed toward a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who, according to Coates, was “a real piece of shit.” His sins included critical coverage of “anyone trying to expose voter fraud” and writing about a local political figure who’d appeared on a leaked Oath Keepers roster.

Williams messaged Rowan. “I noticed in the chat that there is some kind of red list of journalists etc? Could you get that to me?” he asked. “It would be very helpful to my safety when observing political rallies or infiltrating leftists.”

“Ah yes, i have doxes on many journalists in utah,” Rowan responded, using slang for sharing someone’s personal data with malicious intent.

He sent over a dossier on the Tribune reporter, which opened with a brief manifesto: “This dox goes out to those that have been terrorized, doxed, harassed, slandered, and family names mutilated by these people.” It provided the reporter’s address and phone number, along with two pictures of his house.

Then Rowan shared similar documents about a local film critic — he’d posted a “snarky” retweet of the Tribune writer — and about a student reporter at Southern Utah University. The college student had covered a rally the Oath Keepers recently attended, Rowan explained, and the militia believed he was coordinating with the Tribune. “We found the car he drove through a few other members that did a stakeout.”

“That’s awesome,” Williams said. Internally, he was reeling: a stakeout? In the dossier, he found a backgrounder on the student’s parents along with their address. Had armed men followed this kid around? Did they surveil his family home?

His notes show him wrestling with a decision he hadn’t let himself reckon with before: Was it time to stop being a fly on the wall and start taking action? Did he need to warn someone? The journalists? The police? Breaking character would open the door to disaster. The incident with Kinch’s dog had been a chilling reminder of the risks.

Williams had been in the militia too long. He was losing his sense of objectivity. The messages were alarming, but were they an imminent threat? He couldn’t tell. Williams had made plans to leave Utah if his cover was blown. He didn’t want to jeopardize two years of effort over a false alarm. But what if he did nothing and this kid got hurt?

9. The Plan

By 2023, Williams’ responsibilities were expanding as rapidly as his anxiety. His schedule was packed with events for AP3, the Oath Keepers and a third militia he’d recently gotten inside. He vowed to infiltrate the Proud Boys and got Coates to vouch for him with the local chapter. He prepared plans to penetrate a notorious white supremacist group too.

His adversaries were gaining momentum as well. Williams soon made the four-hour drive to Kinch’s house for another leadership meeting and was told on tape about a national Oath Keepers recruiting bump; they’d also found contact information for 40,000 former members, which they hoped to use to bring a flood of militiamen back into the fold.

Despite the risk to his own safety and progress, Williams decided to send the journalists anonymous warnings from burner accounts. He attached sensitive screenshots so that they’d take him seriously. And then … nothing. The reporters never responded; he wondered if the messages went to spam. His secret was still secure.

But the point of his mission was finally coming into focus. He was done simply playing the part of model militia member. His plan had two parts: After gathering as much compromising information as he could, he would someday release it all online, he told me. He carefully documented anything that looked legally questionable, hoping law enforcement would find something useful for a criminal case. At the very least, going public could make militiamen more suspicious of each other.

In the meantime, he would undermine the movement from the inside. He began trying to blunt the danger that he saw lurking in every volatile situation the militiamen put themselves in.

On Jan. 27, 2023, body camera footage from the police killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, became public. “The footage is gruesome and distressing,” The New York Times reported. “Cities across the U.S. are bracing for protests.” The militias had often responded to Black Lives Matter rallies with street brawls and armed patrols.

Williams had visions of Kyle Rittenhouse-esque shootings in the streets. He put his newly formulated strategy into action, sending messages to militiamen around the country with made-up rumors he hoped would persuade them to stay home.

In Utah, he wrote to Kinch and the leaders of his other two militias. He would be undercover at the protests in Salt Lake City, he wrote. If any militiamen went, even “a brief look of recognition could blow my cover and put my life in danger.” All three ordered their troops to avoid the event. (“This is a bit of a bummer,” one AP3 member responded. “I’ve got some aggression built up I need to let out.”)

After the protests, Williams turned on his voice diary and let out a long sigh. For weeks, he’d been nauseous and had trouble eating. He’d developed insomnia that would keep him up until dawn. He’d gone to the rally to watch for militia activity. When he got home, he’d vomited blood.

Even grocery shopping took hours now. He circled the aisles to check if he was being tailed. Once while driving, he thought he caught someone following him. He’d reached out to a therapist to help “relieve some of this pressure,” he said, but was afraid to speak candidly with him. “I can check his office for bugs and get his electronics out of the office. And then once we’re free, I can tell him what’s going on.”

He quickly launched into a litany of items on his to-do list. A training exercise to attend. A recording device he needed to find a way to install. “I’m just fucking sick of being around these toxic motherfuckers.”

“It’s getting to be too much for me.”

10. The Deep State

On March 20, Williams called Scot Seddon, the founder of AP3. If he was on the verge of a breakdown, it didn’t impact his performance. I could tell when Williams was trying to advance his agenda as I listened later, but he was subtle about it. Obsequious. Methodical. By day’s end, he’d achieved perhaps his most remarkable feat yet. He’d helped persuade Seddon and his lieutenants to fire the head of AP3’s Utah chapter and to install Williams in his place.

Now he had access to sensitive records only senior militia leaders could see. He had final say over the group’s actions in an entire state. He knew the coup would make him vastly more effective. Yet that night in his voice diary, Williams sounded like a man in despair.

The success only added to his paranoia. Becoming a major figure in the Utah militia scene raised a possibility he couldn’t countenance: He might be arrested and sent to jail for some action of his comrades.

With a sense of urgency now, he focused even more intently on militia ties to government authorities. “I have been still collecting evidence on the paramilitaries’ use of law enforcement,” he said in the diary entry. “It’s way deeper than I thought.”

He solved the mystery of the Oath Keepers’ “sheriff”: It was the sheriff for Iron County, Utah, a tourist hub near two national parks. He assigned Rowan to dig deeper into the official’s ties with the movement and come back with emails or text messages. (In a recent interview, the sheriff told me that he declined an offer to join the Oath Keepers but that he’s known “quite a few” members and thinks “they’re generally good people.” Coates has periodically contacted him about issues like firearms rules that Coates believes are unconstitutional, the sheriff said. “If I agree, I contact the attorney general’s office.”)

Claiming to work on “a communication strategy for reaching out to law enforcement,” Williams then goaded AP3 members into bragging about their police connections. They told him about their ties with high-ranking officers in Missouri and in Louisiana, in Texas and in Tennessee.

The revelations terrified him. “When this gets out, I think I’m probably going to flee overseas,” he said in his diary. “They have too many connections.” What if a cop ally helped militants track him down? “I don’t think I can safely stay within the United States.”

Four days later, he tuned into a Zoom seminar put on by a fellow AP3 leader. It was a rambling and sparsely attended meeting. But 45 minutes in, a woman brought up an issue in her Virginia hometown, population 23,000.

The town’s vice mayor, a proud election denier, was under fire for a homophobic remark. She believed a local reporter covering the controversy was leading a secret far-left plot. What’s more, the reporter happened to be her neighbor. To intimidate her, she said, he’d been leaving dead animals on her lawn.

“I think I have to settle a score with this guy,” she concluded. “They’re getting down to deep state local level and it’s got to be stopped.” After the call, Williams went to turn off his recording device. “Well, that was fucking insane,” he said aloud.

He soon reached out to the woman to offer his advice. Maybe he could talk her down, Williams thought, or at least determine what she meant by settling a score. But she wasn’t interested in speaking with him. So again he faced a choice: do nothing or risk his cover being blown. He finally came to the same conclusion he had the last time he’d feared journalists were in jeopardy. On March 31, he sent an anonymous warning.

“Because she is a member of a right wing militia group and is heavily armed, I wanted to let you know,” Williams wrote to the reporter. “I believe her to be severely mentally ill and I believe her to be dangerous. For my own safety, I cannot reveal more.”

He saw the article the next morning. The journalist had published 500 words about the disturbing email he’d gotten, complete with a screenshot of Williams’ entire note. Only a few people had joined that meandering call. Surely only Williams pestered the woman about it afterwards. There could be little doubt that he was the mole.

He pulled the go bag from his closet and fled. A few days later, while on the run, Williams recorded the final entries in his diary. Amid the upheaval, he sounded surprised to feel a sense of relief: “I see the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in two and a half years.”

Coda: Project 2025

It was seven days before the 2024 presidential election. Williams had insisted I not bring my phone, on the off chance my movements were being tracked. We were finally meeting for the first time, in a city that he asked me not to disclose. He entered the cramped hotel room wearing a camo hat, hiking shoes and a “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip T-shirt. “Did you pick the shirt to match the occasion?” I asked. He laughed. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

We talked for days, with Williams splayed across a Best Western office chair beside the queen bed. He evoked an aging computer programmer with 100 pounds of muscle attached, and he seemed calmer than on the phone, endearingly offbeat. The vision he laid out — of his own future and of the country’s — was severe.

After he dropped everything and went underground, Williams spent a few weeks in the desert. He threw his phone in a river, flushed documents down the toilet and switched apartments when he returned to civilization. At first, he spent every night by the door ready for an attack; if anyone found him and ambushed him, it’d happen after dark, he figured. No one ever came, and he began to question if he’d needed to flee at all. The insomnia of his undercover years finally abated. He began to sketch out the rest of his life.

Initially, he hoped to connect with lawmakers in Washington, helping them craft legislation to combat the militia movement. By last summer, those ambitions had waned. Over time, he began to wrestle with his gift for deceiving people who trusted him. “I don’t necessarily like what it says about me that I have a talent for this,” he said.

To me, it seemed that the ordeal might be starting to change him. He’d become less precise in consistently adhering to the facts in recent weeks, I thought, more grandiose in his account of his own saga. But then for long stretches, he’d speak with the same introspection and attention to detail that he showed on our first calls. His obsession with keeping the Tyre Nichols protestors safe was myopic, he told me, a case of forgetting the big picture to quash the few dangers he could control.

Williams believes extremists will try to murder him after this story is published. And if they fail, he thinks he’ll “live to see the United States cease to exist.” He identifies with the violent abolitionist John Brown, who tried to start a slave revolt two years before the American Civil War and was executed. Williams thinks he himself may not be seen as such a radical soon, he told me. “I wonder if I’m maybe a little too early.”

I’d thought Williams was considering a return to a quiet life. Our two intense years together had been a strain sometimes even for me. But in the hotel room, he explained his plans for future operations against militias: “Until they kill me, this is what I’m doing.” He hopes to inspire others to follow in his footsteps and even start his own vigilante collective, running his own “agents” inside the far right.

In August, I published my investigation into AP3. (I used his records but did not otherwise rely on Williams as an anonymous source.) It was a way of starting to lay out what I’d learned since his first email: what’s driving the growth of militias, how they keep such a wide range of people united, the dangerous exploits that they’ve managed to keep out of public view.

Two months later, Williams published an anonymous essay. He revealed that he’d infiltrated the group as an “independent activist” and had sent me files. He wanted to test how the militia would respond to news of a mole.

The result was something he long had hoped for: a wave of paranoia inside AP3. “It’s a fucking risky thing we get involved in,” Seddon, the group’s founder, said in a private message. “Fucking trust nobody. There’s fucking turncoats everywhere.” (Seddon declined to comment for this story. He then sent a short follow-up email: “MAGA.”)

Sowing that distrust is why Williams is going on the record, albeit without his original name. He still plans to release thousands of files after this article is published — evidence tying sheriffs and police officers to the movement, his proudest coup, plus other records he hopes could become ammo for lawsuits. But Williams wants to let his former comrades know “a faggot is doing this to them.” He thinks his story could be his most effective weapon.

Every time militia members make a phone call, attend a meeting or go to a gun range together, he wants them “to be thinking, in the back of their heads, ‘This guy will betray me.’”

[crumbledcastle28]

Javier Peña: The Shittiest Goodbye

Pairing: Javier Peña x fem!reader (she/her; afab)

Summary: Javier has no one saying goodbye to him. No one but you.

He smiled; you could tell even from behind your tears. His golden skin crinkled under his eyes, and he pulled you forward by the waist for a short hug. A really short hug – barely four seconds – before he stepped away and leaned down, gathering a bag in each hand.

“I’ll…I guess I’ll see you.”

You kept looking at him. You couldn’t seem to stop. Neither could he.

Warnings: feeeels, crying, kissing, yearning, longing, and all that jazz, one line that can kind of be interpreted as a size kink, but a hopeful ending.

Word Count: 2.2k

A/N: javi. he's always going to fucking do it for me.

A/N 2: I haven't watched narcos in like four years so if the plot is splotchy, I apologize.

If you would like to leave a like, ask, reblog, or comment, it would be much appreciated <3

Pedro Masterlist

He had told you in person, which was better than nothing.

“They’re sending me home. Tomorrow morning,” he said, putzing with the plastic chain hanging from the lamp on your desk. Eyes unable to meet yours. “My flight’s at 6.”

And then he walked away, each sound of his step away from you tipping the globe further and further off its axis.

You had known he was starting to take matters into his own hands. You had known said matters were dirty, bloody, and grey. And you had known said hands were now buried in a while lot of shit because of it.

You had known, and you still knew, walking into the El Dorado International Airport, squinting against the rising sun. You knew perfectly well who Javier Peña had gotten himself involved with and what they both had done on each other’s behalf.

The fact of the matter was – you didn’t give a shit, because what Javi was doing was moving the DEA further towards its goal than ever. It was fucking working.

In your opinion, if agents couldn’t get their hands dirty, then they couldn’t catch Escobar. Luckily for you, Javier felt similarly.

And yet, here he was, being sent home. The one person who gave you any comfort in the shitshow that had become your life. The only friend who had remained so every single day, the only one you could count on. The one man in all of South America that actually made you feel safe.

And, arguably, the only person in the entire DEA who truly wanted things to get better, even if it left a mark on his soul he could never wipe away.

These thoughts haunted you as you searched for Javi. For six in the morning, the gates were surprisingly crowded. Your tired eyes did their best to search for his prominent features – chestnut hair, perfectly highlighted with tips of blonde by the South American sun, broad shoulders, high cheekbones, curved, Roman nose, pouted lips, likely leaning on one leg, popping his hip out, with his hands on his waist. You secretly hoped he was in his Levi’s leather jacket.

Your eyes squinted as you peered around, lost in the sea of bodies, children, staff, and flight attendants. Suddenly, the thought of missing him wrapped its coils around you, sending a strange, foreign heat down to your toes and up your scalp. Your breathing heightened, images of him already on his flight, alone, thinking no one cared, thinking no one came from him, began to flood your brain. Your fingers grabbed at your chest, your teeth clamped around the skin of the inside of your mouth, pulling so hard you began to bleed.

He had said six, right? In the morning? Today? Had I heard him wrong?

Had he lied to me?

That thought was too much to bear, too much to process, too much too much too much –

A warm, callused hand wrapped around your forearm. You gasped, heart pounding so loud in your head that the man attached to the hand had to repeat what he was saying. His voice was muffled, his face was blurry, but everything about him was so handsome, and so familiar.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked in a kind of whisper-yell.

It was like you had taken a sedative, looking at Javier Peña, standing right in front of you. Not gone, not forgotten. Right here. Your nervous system evened instantly, like a bucket of warm, clean water had been dumped over your body.

You smiled at him, despite yourself. Despite the situation. Despite it all.

The edge of his lip quirked slightly, but it lasted quicker than a second, before returning to his usual scowl.

“Answer my question,” he said, pulling you towards him. He didn’t sound mad, just…shocked, and a little terrified. His touch on you was gentle, but firm.

You swallowed; eyes still locked into his. You placed your hand on his chest to steady yourself and grinned at the feel of the leather.

“Only if you answer mine first – did you really think you would get to leave without saying goodbye?”

He huffed, meeting your stare, unable to prevent the drop of humor that had culminated in his eyes. “I did say goodbye.”

“Oh please,” you said, pushing away from him. “That was the shittiest goodbye ever.”

He stayed silent for a moment, before letting out a quiet chuckle.

“Besides, six o’clock in the morning is an early call time for you,” you said. You were proved correct by the dark circles under his eyes. You wondered if he had slept at all the night before. “Had to make sure you actually made it.”

“Right,” he said, and looked around him, placing his hands on his hips. His tone suddenly became serious. “You shouldn’t be here.”

That shocked you. “Are you kidding me? Why not?”

“What if – someone sees you, from the DEA, thinks you were working with me. Then what?”

“Then I fucking deal with it,” you said. “I wasn’t going to let you leave thinking that no one would care that you were gone.”

That froze him, his eyes widening just so. The fact that he was shocked at all by that statement caused a fresh set of tears to line your eyes. It was faint, but it was noticeable.

He sighed, looking down at his shoes, allowing you to notice his bags placed on either side of his feet– a large leather carrier, and a small backpack. For a moment, he looked like he was about to say something, until a voice over the speaker interrupted him.

“Flight to Austin, Texas, boarding group one may begin boarding. I repeat, boarding group one may begin boarding for flight to Austin, Texas.”

Javier glanced down at his watch before pulling his ticket out of his back pocket, reading it over with furrowed eyebrows. “I’m group two. I should probably…”

You nodded, a wave of emotion suddenly rocking you once more. The tears were streaming now, down your face. You tried to wipe them away, put they just kept coming.

He took a step closer to you. “Why the tears, ángel?”

You sniffled, wiping your nose, doing the best you could to collect yourself. Maybe that was a good thing, as it allowed this newfound pet name to go completely over your head. The voice that came out of your mouth was nasally and cracked. “I am going to have to do so much paperwork.”

He smiled; you could tell even from behind your tears. His golden skin crinkled under his eyes, and he pulled you forward by the waist for a short hug. A really short hug – barely four seconds – before he stepped away and leaned down, gathering a bag in each hand.

“I’ll…I guess I’ll see you.”

You kept looking at him. You couldn’t seem to stop. Neither could he.

He opened his mouth, once again about to say something, when the speaker went off again.

“First call for boarding group 2 for flight to Austin, Texas. I repeat, first call for boarding group 2 for flight to Austin, Texas.”

He didn’t move an inch. There were so many things you were wishing to say in that moment.

Don’t go. Please, don’t leave me here.

I’ll be alone. I’ll be alone, with you away.

I would have done the same thing you did, working with those men.

I understand why you did it, maybe better than anyone else.

I would have done the same thing, in your shoes. A couple times, I almost joined you.

I’ll go with you, and we’ll never go back. Never. Never.

You didn’t say a word, your confidence swirling down and down, deeper and deeper inside of you. Javier licked his lips and turned around, beginning to walk away. Like he did that day at your desk. Like he did however many times you had asked to help him with what he was doing. Like he did whenever the two of you would make eye contact for just a little too long.

At that all too familiar sight, the confidence inverted itself, instead flooding upwards all at once, flooding your brain with a mantra of why the fuck not?

For once, you listened to that voice, and did the same thing Javier had done to you only moments before. You took a long stride forward, grabbed his elbow, and turned him around.

And then, you took his face in your hands, and you kissed him.

Kiss was a stretch – it was more like a quick peck, barely even felt by either party. But it was something, something that got him as close to you as you had always wanted him to be – his breath fanning your face, his chest pressed against yours, a mix of coffee and mint on your lips, which you quickly licked away. Oddly enough, it steadied your heart, calmed you down instantly.

Because you had that now. That memory. Something more than passing glances and quick hugs. A part of you, in that moment, didn’t even care what his reaction was, because that feeling alone was enough for you to live with.

The rest of you, however, short circuited at the fact that he may not have wanted that at all, and you had completely violated him in the middle of a fucking airport.

You looked up into his wide eyes for barely a second before backing away from him, the beginnings of a million sorrys forming on your tongue.

That was until the bags slipped from his hands, landing on the harsh carpeting with a thud. He then rushed forward, using one hand to frame your face, and the other on the nape of your neck to tip your head back.

There was no time for your brain to accept this as fact before he brought your lips to his own, his kiss nothing less than searing, and nothing more than perfect.

You reciprocated as soon as you were able, wrapping your arms around his back to steady yourself. The feeling of his lips upon yours was better than you had ever imagined, better than you had ever fantasized about while he sat in your peripheral vision during meetings. His lips were soft, buttery, and so was his facial hair. It tickled your nose just so, which only heightened when he tilted your head further, licking the inside of your mouth. You moved your fingers to his hair in response, tugging him so harshly into you you stumbled backwards.

It was hot and sweaty, messy and desperate, and neither of you were letting up. Not even to breathe. His hands moving down to your waist felt too good, his chest against yours too real, his hair between your fingers too addictive, his soft groan every time your tongues clashed too vivid, and your lips molding together too perfect.

You were speaking to each other, in a way. Both of your bodies reciprocated every move, grabbing and twisting and pulling, both saying the same thing over and over and over again.

I’m going to miss you so fucking much.

Small eruptions of gold began to spawn behind your eyes, ones of pure pleasure, disbelief, and dizziness. His hands turned greedy now, encompassing the span of your back like it was nothing. The hairs on his face began to burn you, the feel of his warm mouth consuming you.

It was too much, too much too much too much, but it was so fucking good –

“Final call for boarding group two for flight to Austin, Texas. I repeat, final call for boarding group two for flight to Austin, Texas.”

It was like a switch flipped in both of your brains at once, propelling the both of you off of each other instantly. He didn’t make eye contact, not even for a second – just wiped his mouth quickly, fetching both bags, and turning from you, walking towards his gate.

He disappeared within the crowd, and you did the same. Turning back towards the entrance, pushing your way through the half-awake travelers, headed god knew where for god knew what.

Your lips still thumped, and so did your heart, so much so that you didn’t really know if you could feel your feet.

There were so many thoughts you could have been having, so much intricacy to the situation, that your brain did the only thing it could – it shut it all down, completely. If it hadn’t, you worried you wouldn’t have been able to pull from him in the first place.

It wasn’t until you made it back to your apartment and set your keys down on your nightstand that the thoughts started flooding in. There were too many to dissect, too rapid to make sense of, but one outweighed them all.

Had he looked back?

In your still hazy brain, that cemented every other question you had, calmed the steady stabbing that had begun to ache inside your skull. You fell asleep, the sun now high in the sky, illuminating your room into a kind of gold. It was a nice change, after a week of grey weather, but you were too gone to the world to notice.

The last thought you had before you escaped to slumber, and the first that you had the second you returned, was all the same: had Javier Peña looked back?

***

He had. Many, many times.

Tag list: (if you would like to be added or were somehow missed, please feel free to let me know :))

@lovesbiggerthanpride @paintlavillered @xocalliexo @c4psicle @joelsflannel @thesmutslut @untitledarea @daphne-turner @queerponcho @ririi-3

[greml1nb0i]

THE HAZBIN LEAKS SHOW THAT S2 WILL ONLY GET WORSE: Characters

OK so my first gripe,

Emily's song is ear bleedingly annoying. Idk who her VA is but omg, idk if she's tone deaf or if they just have her mouth directly into the mic but my gods woman. STEP BACK you are assaulting my brain with these nonstop high sopranos.

Also the literal shot of Sir P trying to kill himself cuz of how either how annoying Emily is being or the fact he misses his friend, regardless it was a WILD fucking scene to show. Suicide isn't off the table for Viv's jokes, i guess.

Speaking of Sir P, his reason for being in Hell is so fucking stupid.

How tf is being scared of Jack The Ripper a sin?! His sin is just being scared of being murdered if he spoke out.

THAT'S JUST NORMAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR, WHAT?!

I hate to break it to you Viv, but not everyone is going to act like a macho hero when they see a damned murder!! Most people fucking run and hide! Why? CUZ THEY DONT WANNA DIE! They don't want to be targeted if shit goes south.

Also what is the thought process here in making his sin being just "cowardice"?? Viv are you trying to say that people who have most def been in Sir P's shoes, [witnessing a murder] are cowards that deserve to go to hell?? What's the motive here? Am i missing something?? Is being too afraid to be murdered, a sin??

Also apparently he was sent to Heaven for "saving Cherri Bomb"

save her from what?

Last i checked, in the final ep; he just kisses her as she's about to through a bomb and then says "i love you, remember me" only to have one of the most anti climatic "deaths" in the show. She wasnt even being attacked or threatened in anyway. So where tf does the plot point of "i saved her" come in??

Also can we talk about these fuck-ass human designs for Sir P and Alastor??

I don't mind Sir P's as much as i hate Alastor's. Its the fact Viv doesnt know wtf she's doing when she makes these designs.

Sir P just looks like a generic guy. One look at him and you cannot tell what time period he's from, same goes for Alastor. They could easily be frickin neighbors in the early or late 90s but no, they're supposedly from different timelines.

Alastor iirc is from the 1940-50s, and Sir P is from the 1800s, [Jack the rippers final kill was 1863-1888]

Why, Viv, cant you do any research for the time periods YOUR characters come from??

Why do they both look like cartoon barbers; not a radio show host and not a genius inventor?? Like did you even look at the differences in fashion and culture for any of these characters?!

Men fashion from the late 1800s looked like this:

This is [white] Men's fashion in the 1940-1950s:

See Viv, their fashion styles are different and shouldn't look the same at all. Why does every character have pinstripes, if it doesnt even reflect that time period in an authentic way??

And to add a cherry on top, this is what African American men would wear in Alastor's time period:

Do you see the difference in styles Viv?

Black men were not given the same nice everyday casual wear that white men did. They often wore hand-me-downs or had to work their asses off to just afford 1 nice looking suit.

you wanna know why?? Cuz Viv, the Jim Crow laws were still in full affect til the late 60s and early 70s. They were not seen as people, black men and women were still heavily discriminated against and were even still being victims of-

[MAJOR TW FOR RACISIT STUFF]

lynching's. Alastor would feel lucky, he only got mistaken for a deer and shot; he could have, and probably did, go through much much worse in his actually living life.

Tell me you didn't do any research for your characters without telling me you didn't do any research for your characters.

TLDR; So not only is Viv using more gross jokes in her next season, but the character designs have gotten even worse.

Lmk what you want the next topic to be about, if i missed anything you would've liked mentioned here, lmk in comments or asks and i'll reply. I reply to everyone as long as you arent being a jerk.

EDIT:

I've been made away that Alastor didn't in fact live in the 1940s and 50s but the 1930s. i will say most of my points still stand, but here the men's fashion for his time period.

also that makes his radio show even more of an impossible achievement, in the 1930s majority, if not, half of the black men in America were out of work cuz of racism, discrimination and segregation, ya know, cuz the Jim Crow. White people called for African Americans to be fired from any jobs as long as there were whites out of work. Racial violence again became more common, especially in the South.

Tell me again Viv, how tf did Alastor even thrive??

[read-marx-and-lenin]

This is a genuine question that I hope I can ask but you don't need to answer if you don't want to or can't! I've heard a lot of people, for example a relative of mine who visited a couple of times DDR, say that communist or socialist countries were poor and it could be seen in the architecture, the clothes, the food etc. While this is obviously too simple way of thinking, especially when you don't consider the way other capitalist countries have affected socialist countries and still do, I was wondering where the "raggedy and poor" looks that everyone always seem to bring up come from. Do capitalist countries look richer simply bc they take from other countries and socialist countries avoided doing that? I feel like people always bring up the poor looks of socialism when they want to dispute or discredit it. Sorry if I explained this poorly!

I would say the main reason that many socialist countries appear poor to Western eyes is simply because a lot of them did not adopt Western fashions. So to take West vs East Germany as an example, West Germany was economically and culturally dominated by the US, and so the more American one looked and acted, the more wealthy one seemed. This made East Germany look "old-fashioned" by comparison.

It is true that imperial core nations get much of their wealth through exploitation, but this also contributes to the apparent differences through the availability of certain products. One of the often-heard claims of Eastern poverty is the lack of availability of fruits such as bananas and oranges. But where do these fruits come from? The tropics, which are dominated by imperial powers. West Germany had access to imperialist markets and could get cheap oranges. East Germany didn't have the same access and so oranges were a luxury.

You see the same issues of economic isolation in North Korea vs South Korea today. South Korea occupies an extraordinarily privileged position with its relationship to the US, just as West Germany did, whereas North Korea is even more economically and culturally isolated today than East Germany ever was. Yes, the DPRK is a poor nation, but they look even more poor because of a lack of Western fashions and Western products which are signifiers of wealth to Western eyes.

However, it remains the case that socialist economies are better capable of improving the average wellbeing of their citizens than capitalist economies are. In the capitalist world today, more than two-thirds of workers earn less than the local purchasing power equivalent of USD$10 a day. That is to say, the money they earn each day would afford them less than what $10 could afford a person in the United States. This number has only gotten worse over recent decades. So regardless of what anyone might say about the poverty of socialist nations, at least socialist nations are improving the lives of their citizens. Capitalist nations have been stagnating as more and more wealth is siphoned off into the pockets of the imperialists.

Recommended reading:

[milaisreading]

Confusions, confusions...

🌱🩷: Listen up, Idk what possessed me to write this in the middle of my exam season... but I did. Let me know if you want a pt2..

Warnings: Reader uses a mix of she/her and they/them. The characters are aged up here and they are pros now.

⚽️Blue lock belongs to Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura⚽️

Now, (Y/n) had found herself in a lot of weird situations during her time in Blue Lock, and even when she left. She knew nothing good would come out of Ego forcing her to join Re Al after the project ended. But, he promised he would make her retire as soon as the dust had settled with the project. Surprisingly, nearly 7 years after leaving Blue lock, the dust never settled down, as the team was still the topic of sports channels in and out of Japan. (Y/n) was just glad Ego and Anri somehow convinced the Re Al and the other teams that the former Blue lock players need to be supervised by the medical staff from the project. If it wasn't for that, her cover would have been blown the day she entered Spain.

'Well, it would have been weird if I immediately announced my retirement after Blue lock had ended...' (Y/n) would think to herself, hoping that one day she could leave these boyish clothes behind and go out in dresses with no fear that someone will recognize her. But, for now she would take it. After all, masks were a good cover-up when you leave your apartment.

Now, the other insanities aside, the one she was facing now while being surrounded by Sae and the former World 5 team was something that felt like it was from a sitcom.

"Uh... what makes you guys think I have a girlfriend?" (Y/n) laughed nervously as Luna laughed while Loki held the wine bottle away from Sae.

"We know everything! Sae showed us the pictures and everything. Pablo, Silva,Loki,  remember to pay Adam and I."

(Y/n) felt herself grow even more confused as the three man pouted while Adam pat her head, looking like a proud father.

"I always knew you had it in you to find yourself a lady. Unlike those three who thought you would only be loyal to football." The Brit laughed as he pointed at Pablo, Silva, and Loki, who were going through their wallets.

"I was hoping that..." Loki muttered. (Y/n) noted he looked weirdly sad.

"Come on, the little guy is a football nerd. Just like that Isagi kid."

"Yeah, you really think we would imagine him to look at women." The two South Americans said while taking their money out.

"What's the money for?-"

"Enough!" Sae suddenly grabbed (Y/n)'s shoulder and forced her to face him, and she will admit, never before was she more scared in her life. The glare he was giving her was beyond terrifying.

"Why didn't you tell me you had a girlfriend? I had to have the shock of my life seeing a woman walk in and out of your apartment. And also, letting her leave her underwear like that in your closet?! Do you have no shame?!"

(Y/n) felt her heart stop for a moment as Sae started shaking her. Noticing the state she was in, Luna and Adam went to pull her away from Sae, while Silva, Pablo, and Loki tried to get Sae to let go of her.

"Hey, Sae, stop."

"You are being dramatic, dude."

"(Y/n) is an adult. Let him be happy with his girl."

'He should be happy with me on the field! Not some random chick!' Sae thought in anger as he heard Pablo's words.

'When did he see that?! And by woman... oh shit, he could have only meant me... But, when did he see me? I was always careful!' (Y/n)'s eyes widened in fear as it dawned on her. She felt numb for a moment, she couldn't even feel Luna and Adam pull her out of Sae's grip. She blinked a few times as she watched Silva and Pablo hold Sae back while Loki stood between them just in case.

"How... how do you know all of that?" (Y/n) suddenly spoke up as Sae's eyes narrowed even more.

"Sae said he stumbled upon your girlfriend when she left your apartment last weekend."

Pablo spoke up instead.

"And he decided to follow her. He said he found the... the things when he visited you once." Loki laughed awkwardly at the end, which mortified (Y/n) even more.

'Oh no... oh no...'

Luna, noticing her distressed state spoke up in a much softer tone than usually.

"Kid, it's ok if you don't want to talk about it yet. Relationships are complicated, especially for football players."

(Y/n) looked in surprise at Luna and slowly started shaking her head.

"But I am not-"

"Trust us, we won't judge you. If you and your lady don't want to say anything for now, it's fine." Silva said now as Adam nodded in agreement.

'That woman was me! The underwear was mine!' (Y/n) wanted to yell at them, but she knew she couldn't.

"I just didn't think redheads were your type." Pablo mused.

'That was a wig!' She groaned and sat down on a nearby chair.

"Does anyone else know this?" (Y/n) asked while looking back at Sae, who huffed and looked away.

"Sae... You didn't tell anyone, right?" Luna asked as Loki went to get (Y/n) a glass of water.

"I may have told some..."

"What?!"

'I an doomed!!' She groaned, already awaiting an incoming headache.

Now what had happened? Let's go back to the week prior to the faithful weekend. The whole team could see that (Y/n) was happier than usually, and while Luna was happy that one of his midfielders was doing well, he was a little concerned when he was told she would leave practice earlier than he usually does. Luna knew (Y/n) pretty well, he would say, and hearing the football obsessed midfielder leave earlier was something he never expected.

'Is he sick? Maybe someone is bothering him? But, he would have told me that, right? He would have told Sae at least.' The Spaniard mused as he watched her run out of the stadium while telling the rest of the team goodbye. Luna looked over his shoulder at Sae, only to find the younger have the same confused expression while looking at the exit. So, that's when he decided he would give Sae the job to check this out. Sae was closer to (Y/n), so having him ask her all these questions wouldn't be all too weird.

Meanwhile, (Y/n) was happy for a few reasons the two men would have never guessed. The first reason being that she found a few cute dresses she could wear on Saturday, she finally found a wig that would suit her better than the last one, and the third reason being that Chigiri's sister will be visiting Madrid this week, so she will finally have someone who knew her secret to talk to. Life was good, for now.

Right now, (Y/n) was in her apartment, rummaging through her closet to find something to wear for her trip on Saturday. She had her day off that day, and those days she would spend shopping and visiting cafés in Madrid.

"Hmmm? This pink dress looks cute, maybe putting this white blouse underneath it would be nice! Oh! And these heels as well. Hmm? But, which bag should I pick." She smiled and put the clothes on the bed and then went to look through the box that had her bags in.

'Hmm... I need to contact Chigiri-san later on as well. She said she wanted to stay at a hotel close by, so I need to check if they have free rooms.' (Y/n) yawned.

Meanwhile, Sae was in a video call with the people he least expected to call, Manshine's trio and some of (Y/n)'s closest friends.

"So, he didn't tell you people anything either?" Sae raised an eyebrow as Reo shook his head.

"No. As I said, he was talking to us 2 nights ago, and he looked and sounded normal. Why are you even asking?" Reo raised an eyebrow as Nagi chimed in.

"Is there something we should know?"

"Yeah, aside from him being happier than usually, you didn't say there was anything weird about him." Chigiri said in boredom as Sae sighed.

"He has been leaving practice earlier than usually."

"Earlier? How early?" Nagi wondered.

"Like, right on the clock. The moment the coach announces that practice is over, he drops everything and leaves." Sae answered. Now this was something that caused the trio to look at each other in concern. They knew (Y/n) better than anyone else did, and she wouldn't just leave like that. They remember how they always had to drag her away to sleep while they were in Blue Lock. Heck, Ego would threaten her with punishments I she didn't listen and go rest.

"How long has that been going on?" Chigiri asked, looking directly at Sae now.

"Since Monday."

"That's odd... Did he have a recent interview or match that he was disappointed by?" Reo inquired, only to earn a negative from the redhead.

"No. We don't have any matches this month, and he didn't have an interview that went bad to my knowledge. But, he wouldn't be that cheerful if there was a bad incident." Sae argued, earning a nod from Reo. Nagi chuckled a little as he laid his head on the table.

"Maybe our captain found himself a girlfriend."

There was a silence for a moment before Reo and Chigiri busted into a laughter.

"Please, he is married to football. There is no way." The redhead argued.

'He better only have eyes for football.' Was what he actually thought.

"Yeah, and even if he had any interests, he has no idea how to flirt." Reo added in.

'Thank God for that.'

Sae kept quiet as he watched the trio, frowning at the thought of (Y/n) possibly liking someone, let alone dating. The midfielder was his, and he won't be sharing him with anyone. It was annoying enough that he had to fight off the former Blue lock team at times.

'He wouldn't let some random woman get between him and football. There is just no way.'

It was the next evening on a Thursday that Sae decided to visit (Y/n). Practice ended earlier, and the redhead was sure she already rested enough.

"Hm? Sae?" The woman blinked when she saw the man outside in the hallway.

"What are you doing here at this time?"

"Can't I be here?" Sae raised an eyebrow in confusion, causing her to quickly shake her head.

"Not at all! I am just surprised you are here. Come inside, I am in the middle of making dinner. Want to join?"

Sae chuckled at her nervous reaction and pat her head.

'Cute. There is no way this guy has a woman.' He thought in relief and nodded his head before taking his shoes off.

"Sure. I will use your bathroom first, ok?" Sae said, earning a nod from her.

"Yeah, sure. You know where it is." She said before going to the kitchen. Sae watched (Y/n) leave before quickly walking down the hallway, not to the bathroom, but to the room across from it.

'It looks tidy... as expected from him.' The Itoshi thought as he looked at the bedroom, not finding anything off or anything. That was until he found a odd pink bottle on the bedside table.

"Hm?" Sae mused and slowly walked towards it and picking the bottle up. The man read what was on the bottle, only to freeze up when he realized what the words said.

'A...a woman's perfume? Why does he have it?' Sae took in a few sharp breaths as he slowly took out his phone and took a picture.

'This has to be a coincidence... Maybe he didn't read what was on the bottle. He can be careless after all. He wouldn't... he wouldn't let some woman into his home like this. He isn't like that.' Sae argued to himself and looked at the wardrobe. He hesitated for a moment, but as he looked back at the bottle, he grew more and more agitated. So, he simply opened the wardrobe, as silently as possible and started looking around. There was nothing unusual there. Just some shirts, pants, the two uniforms from Re Al, his underwear- Sae's eyes widened when he saw something that is out of place for a wardrobe from a man.

'A... a bra?!'

Rage slowly subsided as a feeling of numbness came over him.

'Why is that here? Why would he have it? That perfume and now this... this thing! Is he serious with someone? He has to be if he let's her leave stuff like this here...' Sae's eyes narrowed as the anger slowly returned but he couldn't just stand there and do nothing. He quickly took a picture of the item as well and quickly left the room. He needed to calm down, he couldn't lash out now.

'I will find that chick and set her straight. There is no way a nobody will get in my way, or in (Y/n)'s football career.'

On Friday evening, Sae called (Y/n) and proposed to hang out the next day. He had to find out more about all of this. But, to Sae's surprise, she rejected the idea, quite nervously as well. Quickly saying she had some other plans and to maybe do this next week. Before Sae could say anything else, she ended the call, leaving the player even more concerned.

'Is he meeting her today?' Sae wondered. Tomorrow he will visit (Y/n) and finally see what was going on.

The next day....

Now, Sae had expected something to happen. Maybe seeing (Y/n) nervously leave her apartment, looking like a nervous wreck. He expected to see (Y/n), but not some random woman leaving his apartment.

'Who is that now?!' Sae's eyes widened as he hid in a corner and watched the woman lock the familiar apartment door. The man clenched his fists as the woman happily skipped down the hallway and talked on her phone.

"Hey? You are already at the hotel? Good. I will be there soon, we can go shopping then. I have the card with me." She said to the person, oblivious to the redhead being nearby.

'She is treating that place like it belongs to her. That's (Y/n)'s place! Is she trying to take control of him? And who let her have his card?!' Sae felt anger bubble up inside of him as he slowly followed after her. He stopped when he saw her wait for the elevator, cursing a little because the woman worse sunglasses and a mask. He quickly took his phone out and shot a picture before she could leave his sight.

'He isn't dating... there is no way... Maybe it's his sister? Does he have a sister? Why did he give her his key?' Sae felt his whole world spinning as he decided to take a moment and sit down on the ground. This was all too much for him. Where did he go wrong? He made sure (Y/n) stayed back and practiced with him after the regular hours. He even kept an eye on all the fans during interviews after a game.

'So how did that woman get to him? What tricks did she use? Is she just using him till she finds some new player?' Sae clenched his fists.

"This has to be a coincidence... a joke. There is no way..."

A few days later...

"Sae, are you doing ok? You have been glaring and pouting the whole day." (Y/n) asked in worry as she handed him a bottle of water. But, instead of being told an answer, the midfielder sent her a sharp glare and looked away.

"Why would you care? Why would I tell you even?"

"Aren't... aren't we friends?" (Y/n) blinked in confusion as Sae huffed, reminding her more of a toddler than anything.

"Just leave me alone." He said coldly. As much as she wanted to argue, she didn't. Simply putting the bottle on the ground, (Y/n) walked back to where Luna was as the man had some suggestions on her improvement.

Sae turned to look back at her, the same hurt and anger still present on his face.

'What does she even have to offer to you? I will need help here...' Sae sighed as he thought back about the Manshine trio.

Present time...

"YOU TOLD CHIGIRI, REO, AND NAGI ALL OF THAT?! COULDN'T YOU HAVE TALKED TO ME FIRST?!" Now it was Luna and Adam's turn to hold (Y/n) back from lunging at Sae, who looked like all of it was no big deal. Loki and Pablo stood in front of Sae, not wanting to witness a murder. Silva was standing to the side, whistling at how much everything escalated.

"You would have just denied everything!" Sae argued as (Y/n)'s glare intensified.

"Besides, it's just the 3 of them who know." Sae shrugged.

"I have a hard time believing that..." Silva commented as the rest of the World 5 team nodded in agreement. And the Brazilian man was really not prepared to find out how right he was... Nobody was, to be honest.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

1939 MSG Nazi rally

+

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 27, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 28, 2024

I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way. 

It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight. 

There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas. 

Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.  

Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024. 

On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric’s wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump. 

Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York’s competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: “The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive.” Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no.  

Meanwhile, the decision of the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post not to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have sparked a backlash. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like.”

Early on October 26, the Washington Post itself went after Trump backer billionaire Elon Musk with a major story highlighting the information that Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, had worked illegally when he started his career in the U.S. Musk “did not have the legal right to work” in the U.S. when he started his first successful company. As part of the Trump campaign, Musk has emphasized his opposition to undocumented immigrants.

The New York Times has tended to downplay Trump’s outrageous statements, but on Saturday it ran a round-up of Trump’s threats in the center of the front page, above the fold. It noted that Trump has vowed to expand presidential power, prosecute his political opponents, and crack down on immigration with mass deportations and detention camps. It went on to list his determination to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), use the U.S. military against Mexican drug cartels “in potential violation of international law,” and use federal troops against U.S. citizens. It added that he plans to “upend trade” with sweeping new tariffs that will raise consumer prices, and to rein in regulatory agencies. 

“To help achieve these and other goals,” the paper concluded, “his advisers are vetting lawyers seen as more likely to embrace aggressive legal theories about the scope of his power.” 

On Sunday the front page of the New York Times opinion section read, in giant capital letters: “DONALD TRUMP/ SAYS HE WILL PROSECUTE HIS ENEMIES/ ORDER MASS DEPORTATIONS/ USE SOLDIERS AGAINST CITIZENS/ ABANDON ALLIES/ PLAY POLITICS WITH DISASTERS/ BELIEVE HIM.” And then, inside the section, the paper provided the receipts: Trump’s own words outlining his fascist plans. “BELIEVE HIM,” the paper said. 

On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, host Jake Tapper refused to permit Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, to gaslight viewers. Vance angrily denied that Trump has repeatedly called for using the U.S. military against Americans, but Tapper came with receipts that proved the very things Vance denied. 

Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden began in the early afternoon. The hateful performances of the early participants set the tone for the rally. Early on, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by Kill Tony, delivered a steamingly racist set. He said, for example: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” He went on: “And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.” Hinchcliffe also talked about Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins. 

The speakers who followed Hinchcliffe called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil.” They called former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a b*tch,” and they railed against “f*cking illegals.” They insulted Latinos generally, Black Americans, Palestinians and Jews. Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s claim that “America is for Americans and Americans only” directly echoed the statement of Adolf Hitler that "Germany is for Germans and Germans only.” 

Trump took the stage about two hours late, prompting people to stream toward the exits before he finished speaking. He hit his usual highlights, notably undermining Vance’s argument from earlier in the day by saying that, indeed, he believes fellow Americans are “the enemy within.”  

But Trump perhaps gave away the game with his inflammatory language and with an aside, seemingly aimed at House speaker Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over,” Trump said. 

It seems possible—probable, even—that Trump was alluding to putting in play the plan his people tried in 2020. That plan was to create enough chaos over the certification of electoral votes in the states to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, each state delegation gets a single vote, so if the Republicans have control of more states than the Democrats, Trump could pull out a victory even if he had dramatically lost the popular vote.

Since he has made virtually no effort to win votes in 2024, this seems his likely plan. 

But to do that, he needs at least a plausibly close election, or at least to convince his supporters that the election has been stolen from him. Tonight’s rally badly hurt that plan. 

As Hinchcliffe was talking about Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris was at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia talking about her plan to spread her opportunity economy to Puerto Rico. She has called for strengthening Puerto Rico’s energy grid and making it easier to get permits to build there. 

After the “floating island of garbage” comment, Puerto Rican superstar musician Bad Bunny, who has more than 45 million followers on Instagram, posted Harris’s plan for Puerto Rico, and his spokesperson said he is endorsing Harris. 

Puerto Rican singer and actor Ricky Martin shared a clip from Hinchcliffe’s set with his 16 million followers. His caption read: “This is what they think of us.” Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who has 250 million Instagram followers, posted Harris’s plan. Later, singer-songwriter and actress Ariana Grande posted that she had voted for Harris. Grande has 376 million followers on Instagram. Singer Luis Fonsi, who has 16 million followers, also called out the “constant hate.”

The headlines were brutal. “MAGA speakers unleash ugly rhetoric at Trump's MSG rally,” read Axios. Politico wrote: “Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks.” “Racist Remarks and Insults Mark Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally,” the New York Times announced. “Speakers at Trump rally make racist comments, hurl insults,” read CNN.

But the biggest sign of the damage the rally did was the frantic backpedaling from Republicans in tight elections, who distanced themselves as fast as they could from the insults against Puerto Ricans, especially. The Trump campaign itself tried to distance itself from the “floating island of garbage” quotation, only to be met with comments pointing out that Hinchcliffe’s set had been vetted and uploaded to the teleprompters. 

As the clips spread like wildfire, political writer Charlotte Clymer pointed out that almost 6 million Puerto Ricans live in the states—about a million in Florida, half a million in Pennsylvania, 100,000 in Georgia, 100,000 in Michigan, 100,000 in North Carolina, 45,000 in Arizona, and 40,000 in Nevada—and that over half of them voted in 2020. 

In 1939, as about 18,000 American Nazis rallied inside Madison Square Garden, newspapers reported that a crowd of about 100,000 anti-Nazis gathered outside to protest. It took 1,700 police officers, the largest number of officers ever before detailed for a single event, to hold them back from storming the venue.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[botaniqueer]

That "First the came for the Communists" poem is fine in itself, but it's also important to note that, even if they never come for you it's still important to protect other people. If you were a white ethnic German, you were safe in Nazi Germany and could live a perfectly comfortable life, but that comfortable life was earned with blood.

Nazi Germany wasn't Mordor; White Germans thrived under Hitler and had genuine gains in their quality of like, especially the poorer ones. Many of them didn't care or engage with the fact that their neighbors were disappearing because they were fine personally, and plus "those people probably did something, unlike us upstanding Germans". This apathy eventually resulted in 6 million of my people being killed, along 5 million more of many other vulnerable peoples, each of those 11 million people being someone else's entire universe and having just as vivid of an internal life as those living "normal" lives, extinguished forever.

Many of those Germans didn't belong to the Nazi party, and didn't have jobs enforcing those policies (at least not directly, since societal interactions are complex and long-winding), but as a Jew, I have about as many positive feelings towards them as I do towards the Nazis themselves and will never ever forgive them.

This long post also isn't to come down on folks who have been sharing that stuff of course, and this is more directed towards the people who have the attitude of apathy towards groups who aren't them, and who pretend nothing is going on.

For those of us living in settler-colonial states like the US and who are settlers, we are the equivalent of those white Germans. Even when the republicans aren't out being fully heinous and things appear to be okay, our standard of livings are built upon the privileging of our lives over Indigenous and Black people, and people in the global south.

In another long form post, I talk about how Americans fantasize about what they would do if they were alive during the Holocaust or Chattel Slavery, and the answer is how they're reacting now to current events. Folks who have been boosting resources and reading about Palestine would have likely been doing the same back then. And like the white Germans I mentioned, folks who pretend like nothing is happening, or who are ignoring the fact that trans folks and many others are scared for their lives right now would have absolutely done nothing then.

It's important we be the people we wished folks back then had been, and not repeat their mistakes. For us settlers in the US that means fighting against settler colonialism and for Land Back even if things are good for us personally. People deserve good living standards, but we have to learn how to do it without exacting a cost on other people.

[rei-ismyname]

Is Magneto mistaken or am I taking this too literally?

Ambassador Magneto has a lot to say in House of X, especially to humans on the subject of violence.

All his dreams are coming true and he's not shy about expressing his feelings on the matter. At the Jerusalem habitat the other ambassadors (who are all intelligence plants) claim to be wary of military advantage Krakoa and the gates provide.

Let's fact check Magneto there. 'There has never been a mutant war.'

What's this then? It doesn't sound very good at first glance but can it be considered a mutant war? It's basically Magneto himself unleashing an EMP and making demands of the UN. A mutant sanctuary - one they gave him too - Genosha. Terrorist act? Yeah defs. War? I'd say no.

What else? Oh yeah, that time Magneto conquered Santo Marco, a fictional South American country. Spoilers for a comic from 1963.

Okay so shelling is bad, definitely a warlike action, though it's later said there were no casualties at all, mainly thanks to Mastermind's illusions. Still, really bad optics there dude. The fake soldiers are straight up goose-stepping. This is drawn by Jack Kirby too, who definitely had strong feelings about that kind of thing - not something he'd portray unintentionally.

You'll note Mags having pseudo telepathy at this point, mainly bc Stan Lee had no idea how magnetism works.

Let's be honest, there's a big Nazi vibe to this occupation. This is in X-Men #4 in 1963, over a decade before Mags was retconned into a Jewish holocaust survivor. I'm honestly not a big fan of the original X-Men run and I can see why it got cancelled. Magneto was their greatest foe, but he was a pretty one dimension Doctor DOOM expy with none of the pathos, willpower or consistent ideology Claremont would reinvigorate him with. Anyway, sensing defeat, Magneto arms a nuke to blow the whole country up. Yikes.

It's actually Quicksilver who solves that problem, deciding he's not okay with nuking a few million people. It's the start of his face turn proper, with only Wanda's 'debt' to Mags keeping her there, and therefore Quicksilver as well.

See? Not cool, Mags. Not cool. When it's all said and done though, his occupation of Santo Marco is very brief and news doesn't get out. I assume Chuck had something to do with that. Though the country refuses to accept Krakoa for 'ideological reasons' nearly 60 years later, so maybe not. I'm going to say it definitely counts as 'conquering their land and making slaves of their people ' though.

Honestly, Magneto has died a lot since then, had amnesia and barely aged in 70 years so maybe he doesn't remember. One could argue that the spirit of what he's saying is correct - Magneto the individual did a lot of supervillain shit but there hasn't been a unification of mutants who then warred upon humans. Indeed, the opposite is true. Most mutant conflicts that could be called a war were defensive after these events.

None of the 'ambassadors' took issue with past events or his record, instead focusing on future hypotheticals. Someone should tell them that if mutants united in world conquest they'd likely be very successful and humans wouldn't know until it was too late. Technically Magneto has been tried for his acts before an international court, and acquitted because he'd been turned into a baby and was considered a different person. Yes, really.

The conversation pivots to the emissaries being there in bad faith, with slick concealing a gun. (Not that it would be very useful.)

Magneto demonstrates why that's the case and doesn't budge on his position. I guess we could say Magneto was (technically) right, in this specific circumstance. A show of force is certainly needed to make them take Krakoa seriously. It's only fitting then that Mags acts as the stick to make the carrot more palatable. I've still got room for one more pic so here's the X-Men enjoying post-training birthday cake, cut by Cyclops and his POWER BEAM. The X-Men's first birthday as a group.

Note the contrast in vibes around the Brotherhood of EEEVIL Mutants' dinner table, with petty bickering, Mastermind being a creep (the X-Men have that too tho NGL,) and a very impressive tower of mashed potato. Good to know Toad has poor table manners and that Pietro is willing to punch on over it. Not to be mean, but Wanda's headgear looks super silly. Oh well, it was the sixties!