#i just reached some big numbers from my standards in followers in my social and thought it would be nice to do something
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Let’s look at what happened from June 13th to July 13th. (ARCs, Preorders, Sales, Marketing!)
Note: I’m not talking about costs here and likely won’t ever. However, my author buddy JAL Solski has an awesome write-up on the costs, tax considerations, all sorts of numbers, of publishing their sapphic fantasy duology! I’m also very fond of Ros’s write-up on expectations and goals related to post-publication.
Before you start–some disclaimers on my experience
First, expect very little! These numbers will not impress you and honestly there’s a part of me that’s pretty embarrassed, like I'm advertising that I'm a big dummy who can't write. But all in the name of honesty & transparency!
Something I hear a lot from other new authors is, “Am I doing pretty good? Am I doing really badly? I don’t know.” Well, here’s another batch of numbers to consider!
Deep Roots is currently only available as an eBook & through Kindle Unlimited.
I’m not writing anything trendy. By a long shot. I can throw “queer fantasy” on it but that’s kinda the most I got. (When’s the last time you saw a runaway indie hit that didn’t have a ton of romance?)
I’m not popular on social media (260 IG followers with on average <10% engagement and <200 TikTok followers).
I have so many friends in my corner. Someone should stop you at the gate to the Indie Publishing Amusement Park of Hell and tell you, “Listen, if you want any hope of staying sane, make author friends.” Besides helping you navigate tech questions or giving second opinions on your cover, and, you know, understanding and empathizing with you, your friends will be the ones who comment on your posts, repost them, tell their friends, add you in their newsletter, read, and review. That can mean sales…but that also means having people lift you up and celebrate with you.
Advance Reader Copies
I began posting about ARC sign-ups April 4th, sent the first round of eBooks ~May 5th, and closed applications on June 2nd.
I didn’t use a service like Booksprout or Booksirens, just plain old BookFunnel and email (therefore my reach was entirely reliant on my social media efforts). I was most talkative about it on Instagram. I only posted like once or twice on Tumblr and TikTok, but they went really well for my standards.
Sign-Ups: 51
Reviews/Ratings:
By publication day I had 4 ratings/reviews on Goodreads, 1 on Amazon, and 1 on StoryGraph.
After 31 days I had 6 reviews and 10 ratings on Goodreads. 1 extra rating on StoryGraph; Amazon stayed the same.
Note: I was really lax with my ARC team about when reviews should be sent in. I was clear that I didn’t care if they were pre-publication (partly because well…I read ARCs a lot and I know I can’t always get to things on time, and partly because I didn’t decide a publication day until fairly late in the timeline).
However, from what I’ve seen for other authors, a pretty low return on ARC readers isn’t entirely uncommon? Kind of a kick in the confidence regardless.
Preorders
Total of 7. I don’t remember when I opened preorders, but I believe it was around the same time as the ARC application.
Marketing (sort of) from June 13th to July 13th
I ran a small (kinda last-minute) campaign for extra merch & an extra story for anyone who preordered or purchased during release week. I said that I would re-run this campaign for paperbacks.
These are my Tired Girl numbers:
Instagram: 5 posts specifically about DR. 2 non-DR related.
TikTok: 7 videos specifically about DR, most getting ~300 views, though one broke 1k. (Notably, I didn’t post about the release week extras on TikTok at all.). 2 non-DR related.
Tumblr: One post I would send spinning around the block every once in a while. Definitely lowest priority.
Release Week Sales
eBook: 3
KU: 15 pages read
Release Month Sales
eBook: 4
KU: 594 pages read
Future Plans
*Releases one giant sigh* I’M FREEEEEE
Once the book is written and done, cover made and words edited, there’s only one thing left in your control: marketing. Everything else is up to chance (honestly, marketing is up to chance a lot of the time, too).
But I pretty quickly decided to take it easy on social media. A wave of burn-out that had been chasing me since last summer finally caught up, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that when I saw like no return on investment for my posts or chatter, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to rest, instead of pushing this boulder up this hill, then. I deserve it.”
One plus of having paperbacks come out way after the eBooks? I get release day Part 2! (With fun new props for pics and videos!) I have a good list of video ideas & drafts, but I would always look at them and think, “Wouldn’t this be better to do when the paperbacks are around?” And soon, they will be!
As for blog posts, I want to continue being transparent with things like this. I will (hopefully) catch up on the numbers again near the end of August, as by then I’ll be making the decision to keep Deep Roots in KU for another three months or not.
Until then, lower your expectations! It’ll keep you sane out here. Thanks for reading and hanging out.
#vanessa.txt#writeblr community#writeblr#indie publishing#indie books#self publishing#self publication#book sales#this is allowed to be reblogged
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Gabrielle Aplin
Being signed to a major label vs going independent.
Gabrielle is a singer-songwriter from Bath, Somerset. She is known for her soft ethereal voice and meaningful, heartfelt lyrics and has been releasing music for about fifteen years now.
She signed with a major label in 2012; Parlophone Records. Her major label debut single was a cover of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘The Power Of Love’ that featured in the John Lewis Christmas advert in 2012. This song reached number one in the UK Singles Chart. “Parlophone saw the ad as an effective way of launching Aplin to a mainstream audience”. (Allchin, 2013).
Gabrielle spoke about how being signed to a major label was beneficial for her career in many ways. She explained that then, major labels were the only institutions that had access to TV and radio shows, which was the best way to gain recognition. Now, there are a lot of other ways to gain a following, like through social media. Being signed to a major label meant they could fund thing that artists otherwise often couldn’t, this enabled Gabrielle to tour around the UK, Europe, Australia and Japan. They also had contacts of people in the industry that she could work with, like songwriters and producers. She spoke about how most songwriters then would only work with artists if they were signed, whereas nowadays most people will work with you if they like you and your music. As a new artist hearing that was a relief, as it feels like signing to a major label isn’t the only way to become successful in the music industry nowadays.
Gabrielle also spoke about some of the downsides. She found that because these major labels are dealing with such big amounts of money, they will often reject syncs that come in if they don’t believe there is any money in them. They tend to look at stats and numbers and not at what would be beneficial to each individual artist.
She parted ways with Parlophone after five years and decided to go independent and create her own label. “There’s more capacity in this industry to do everything your own way and be a bit more independent, and kind of do your own thing” she said. Thankfully, she kept her masters, meaning all her previous EP’s and releases were under her and her managers name. She told the Standard: “It is nice not to worry about what the men in suits are thinking about. Major labels are great but it’s always nice to do something new.” (Foster, 2017).
She explained that if you want to fund yourself, starting your own label is a lot easier that it seems, “It sounds like I went and got an office and created this empire and employed a load people, I didn’t. It’s just myself and my manager making sure we owned everything I put out equally” “For me, starting a label was owning my recordings”.
Gabrielle talks about how being signed to Parlophone was definitely the right decision at the time, and it hugely helped with her career, but she is enjoying being in control and owning her own label.
Her talk gave me a lot of food for thought and different things to consider when deciding what road to go down as an artist. And I find her and her music very inspiring.
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Finally got the chance to draw Ange properly and I am satisfied with the result!
I would love to see your versions of them (not necessarily this pose) so see it as a DIY with no deadline and if anyone wants to try it feel free❣
Character info follows under the cut:
Ange Haddock has been using they/them since their teenage years.
They were born on Friday, 13 May. If you ask Ange this explains their clumsiness and bad luck that leads to dangers and misadventures. If you ask Nestor is the genes' fault.
Even as an adult, Ange continues calling Tintin Papa and Haddock Daddy. Calculus is still their dearest uncle and godfather and Nestor is just Nestor.
Affected by Papa's journalism and fascinated by new technological advances but not letting their artistic nature fall behind, they aspire to be a documentarist.
After art school, they travel the world searching for topics for their documentaries.
Ange loves all animals but especially hedgehogs, hamsters, and guinea pigs. They never get another dog or cat as they could never replace Milou and Chatton.
The standing-up quiff is Papa's work as his effort to tame Ange's unruled hair since a baby. Ange continues to do it by force of habit later in life.
The beanie is a favourite accessory for them; they haven't stopped wearing it since their teenage years. Before that, it was a variety of hats (baseball caps, floppy hats, berets, etc.).
They're really kind and well-mannered but, most of the time unintentionally, use Daddy's special swearing words. Despite everyone's efforts, Ange could never stop this habit. The least to say is Daddy is proud.
They try to keep in touch with all their family (all the uncles and aunts) but writing, in general, isn't their best skill so, despite a few letters, they prefer calls and, if they get the chance, visits.
Ange's home will always be Marlinspike Mansion and after every trip, they return there.
I have many ideas for Ange, their life and their adventures, and even their own friends! If you're interested I could share more and maybe someday I could show Ange's stories properly, who knows?
#hope you like them!#and there's no obligation to do the DIY of course#if you do the challenge please tag me#i just reached some big numbers from my standards in followers in my social and thought it would be nice to do something#also didn't make the inktomber what a surprise lol and felt a little bad#ange#ange haddock#tintin oc#haddotin#my art
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I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?
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Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.
Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.
The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.
There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.
We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.
That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)
Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.
Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.
A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.
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The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.
New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.
Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.
But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.
In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.
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There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.
Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.
In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.
A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.
(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)
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Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.
A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.
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Now... fandom...
I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.
As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.
People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.
A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.
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Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.
But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.
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Concerning the incredibly far and deep reach of CCP’s propaganda, the narratives the government can spin and call the truth; does ‘the common normal populace’ actually know what’s really going on?
Hello everyone!!! Happy Chinese New Year!!
I’m grouping these asks because if I hear them correctly, they’re all related to this question: how much do people in China know about the atrocities committed by their government, and why don’t they do something about it?
It’s a difficult question, isn’t it? A potentially upsetting one too, just to think about. My answers are more opinion-based, more personal this time. Since there’re no polls about what people know, they have to be based a little more on my own impression, which has more chances of error. Please bear with me and proceed with caution ...
As with people in most countries, what people know is hugely dependent on individuals. Specifically, re: politics, I can think of at least three reasons why people don’t have the facts
1) they have limited access to information 2) they’re being lied to about what they know 3) they’re not interested in current affairs.
1), of course, is what most people think about when it comes to China. You’re right, Anon(s), that VPN use is indeed rampant in the country and is essentially an open secret; there’re no official numbers but surveys have estimated the number of users can be up to 100 million, most of them being youngsters. They use it to do exactly what most of us would imagine: gain access to things they don’t have otherwise. Instagram has been (sporadically?) blocked since 2014 September and so while users may have set up their accounts while being overseas, it’s indeed, (very) possible, that they’ve set up and maintained their account under VPN use.
Wait, you may ask, so you mean the Great Firewall of China doesn’t exist?
That’s exactly the official stance. Not because of private VPN use, but because individuals/companies can apply for a license via their telecommunications company to visit all internet sites. Hence, the government’s claim that the Great Firewall doesn’t exist—you’ll be let through as long as you ask (and we’ll watch your every step)! There are also no explicit laws prohibiting the use of private VPNs; only a handful of arrests associated with private VPN use have been made and only since 2019, and the punishment is considered light—no imprisonment, just fines. It is, in contrast, against the law to *provide* private VPN services, and while companies have been shut down, the crackdown has still been incredibly sluggish by Chinese government’s standards, especially when the Xi regime has made its intention of banning VPN known and directives have been issued for that in 2017.
Why has VPN continued to enjoy this “grey existence”? Because without VPN, a lot of foreign businesses would leave—some, for example, require the most efficient online tools developed outside China to track the foreign markets, and talents have rejected job offers in the country when they realised they couldn’t get on their favourite social media. The science and tech sectors also rely heavily on VPN—programmers relying on Google to search stackoverflow, for example, to find known solutions to bugs.
VPNs have also served political purposes—Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-critical communities all over the world are all painfully aware of the Chinese government’s practice of hiring its own collection of internet commentators (”50 Cent Party”), and at times, mobilising their youths (gamers, fan circles) to scale the Firewall and astroturf, throw insults at the “CCP enemies” and bomb message boards with pro-CCP messages.
Also, a significant fraction of VPN companies, both in China and overseas, have been reported to have Chinese ownership, by companies with government connections. These VPN services provide a false sense of security for those who do not enjoy having big brother peeking behind their backs while acting as surveillance tools that extend beyond the country.
(Please be careful about free VPNs).
The next question: If until now, users of private VPNs only rarely get into trouble, what’s holding them from scaling the Great Firewall and learning the facts?
It is this: the law isn’t about “climbing the wall”, but what one does outside the wall.
Article 6 of the 2016 edition of Cybersecurity law states the following:
第六条 国家倡导诚实守信、健康文明的网络行为,推动传播社会主义核心价值观,采取措施提高全社会的网络安全意识和水平,形成全社会共同参与促进网络安全的良好环境
Article 6: The State advocates sincere, honest, healthy and civilized network conduct; promoting dissemination of the core socialist values, adopting measures to raise the entire society's awareness and level of network security, and forming a good environment for the entire society to jointly participate in advancing network security.
What this article implies is this ~ legally, Chinese citizens are bound to the Chinese government’s rules of good internet conduct, regardless of whether they use VPN to get on the internet. As with many Chinese laws, however, the vagueness in wording invites more questions than answers. Is it getting on Twitter, a banned website, “sincere, honest, healthy and civilized network conduct”? Obviously, it’s illegal to interact with other users about the Xinjiang’s internment camps, but what if one only goes there to talk about their favourite stars, because on Weibo supertopic they can’t even mention the stars’ name, can’t ahkgkhagjkfaskjgdf about their favourite fics? What if one goes there to discuss a M- or E-rated fic? Where is the line drawn and given its vagueness, will that line move tomorrow? How?
Most people, therefore, have opted to simply stay away from VPN. After all, China offers its own version of many of the fun websites out there (Weibo-Twitter; Instagram-Oasis; Tiktok-Douyin; Youtube-Bilibili). For those who do use VPN, they tend to stick to websites that are unlikely to cause issues (such as Instagram; Instagram became an issue when Hong Kongers started to upload information about the protests on there).
Now, let’s proceed to 2): People don’t know the facts because they’re being lied to about what they know.
There’s a difference between having access to facts and knowing that they’re facts. This is among the most painful lessons, perhaps, for those who followed the politics of the United States in the last few years (please forgive me for the US-centric-ness of the following few paragraphs!). Even with equal access to identical information, people can vary a LOT in their understanding of what are facts and what are lies.
This illustrates the power of propaganda—and propaganda in the US isn’t even centralised. Some media outlets and individuals (political leaders and analysts) have more say on what should be viewed as the truth, but parties without significant power—small foreign and domestic interests, fringe political organisations, conspiracy theorists, regular folks—have also made critical contributions to the “fake news” phenomenon in the US. There haven’t been apparent coordinations between these parties; little concerted effort has been made to create one coherent story out of the many tales told.
In China, the propaganda effort is centralised, coordinated, free of distractions from competing story lines. The One Story the government decides on is repeated, over and over again, on newspapers, in shows, in textbooks, on signs on the streets, on social media. To put it another way, when it comes to political discourse, the country is designed to be an echo chamber with 1.4 billion people. Over time, the One Stories inevitably become firmly held beliefs—so firmly held that even if the people are exposed to facts, they no longer believe in them.
This is especially true when the source of the facts are countries with strong traditions of freedoms of speech and press, where the facts are often laid out with a critical eye to the administration and with vastly different opinions attached to them. While we view the latter as evidences that the values we embrace are alive and well—a critical eye to the administration means the Fourth Estate is doing its job, and the different opinions means freedom of speech gets to live another day—people who haven’t been exposed to these values tend to interpret these things as signs of weakness of the government. They may think the Chinese government is better than its counterparts elsewhere because no one is penning scathing criticisms against it. They may think the Chinese government is stronger because it unifies the opinions of their people—the failure of which, they’ve been taught, would lead to social chaos and economic free-fall.
The Chinese population has also been “immunised” against the truths that may be exposed about their government by a propaganda talking point used since Chairman Mao’s days—that the “Imperialist” western world, particularly the United States, is always scheming its downfall. The phrase often used is 美帝亡我之��不死 (”The heart (intention) of Imperialist US to bring us down will never die”). Unfavourable truths exposed must therefore be part of the “bring down China” scheme. This decades-old demonisation of the political apparatus of the US and Europe also prepares the people to accept what most would see as outrageous conspiracy theories: for example, in March 2020, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that the US Army intentionally planted COVID in Wuhan during the 2019 Military World games. “Foreign interference” becomes a frequent and convenient scapegoat for policy decisions gone wrong, sometimes to a (somewhat) hilarious effect ~ for example, a Taiwanese journalist calculated the cost required for the CIA to fund the 2019 Hong Kong Protests, as the Chinese government had claimed—and it turned out that the CIA was too poor to do it.
(Many of us in the US would probably laugh at the idea that our government is capable of secretly paying 2 million foreign-language speaking strangers to show up together in one march.) (It can’t even get the COVID relief payments to its own people right over a period of months.)
(Fun trivia for turtles! As 美帝=“Imperialist US” is the synonym of a feared, imaginary super-villain—super organised, super efficient, super everywhere and super impossible to take down—c-BJYX, the indestructible No. 1 CP fandom in China, has been nicknamed “美帝 cp” by those not so enamoured with it.)
Finally, there’s the psychological factor. Once a set of beliefs becomes personal truths, listening to alternatives can be very upsetting (for those in the US: imagine the blue voting block made to listen to Fox News). Hence, even when people gain access to the facts later—for example, when they study/work abroad, even emigrate—they often don’t take advantage of the access. Instead, they remain logged in in the Chinese social media sites where they’re comfortable with not only the politics but also the language and the friendships they’ve built, and continue to immerse themselves in an environment heavy with CCP propaganda. They remain defenders of the Chinese government; some have even gone out and harass people who disagree with it, in the name of freedom of speech that their country of origin never offered to them.
Censorship, of course, is an important component of building a One Story echo chamber, and I should add a note about it: censorship in China comes in vastly different strengths. The restrictions on LGBT+ issues, for example, are fairly lax, relatively speaking—“homosexuality” remains a term one can find on their internet and a topic the administration continues to address, and while BL dramas are censored, their adapted versions, along with highly publicised discussions of their original material, have so far been tolerated. The strictest form of Chinese censorship would’ve allowed neither: any mention of the 1989 June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre , for example, is immediately removed, including any hints that the event may have happened. When the former leader of the Chinese government, Jiang Zemin (江澤民), was rumoured to have passed away, the censorship apparatus went so far as to remove all mentions of Jiang, which also happened to mean “large rivers”. Chinese netizens therefore joked that major rivers had ceased to exist in China that day, as one couldn’t find any information about them online.
(LGBT+ activists have therefore remained optimistic about the future of their campaign, despite the current state of affairs. To put it simply: the Chinese government has bigger fish to fry. Sexual minorities haven’t had major clashes with the administration, haven’t embarrassed the Chinese government with their demand for rights as the ethnic minorities—the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, the Mongolians etc did. Political dissidents, including the millions in Hong Kong, are also (far) ahead in the ranking of fish size.)
For most issues, the censorship effort sits somewhere in the middle and is often inconsistent over time. The people, therefore, often have knowledge that an event has happened — even when the event is considered, beyond the Great Firewall, damaging to the reputation of the Chinese government. However, critical information is often missing in their knowledge, or is heavily distorted. For example, overseas Chinese citizens have insisted that the motivation of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests was economic, echoing the longstanding CCP propaganda that Hong Kongers have been jealous of China’s prosperity (reality: China’s GDP per capita was $10,268 USD in 2019, and Hong Kong’s, $48,713—more than 4 times higher). They missed out a critical fact: while the fast economic growth of China has created some unease—Hong Kongers have always known the Chinese government has only tolerated them and their freedoms for their ability to generate wealth—what has truly ignited Hong Kong’s anger is the Chinese government’s violation of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, and the terms it had agreed upon to get back the then British crown colony. Hong Kong hasn’t been demanding autonomy and freedoms because it’s a troublemaker, but because these things were promised to the city as conditions of the 1997 handover. As residents of the world’s third largest financial centre, Hong Kongers are diligent drafters and executioners of contracts (which international treaties are) and above all, faithful believers of them. For an asker (the Chinese government) to claim a contract as “historical” because it has received the goods (Hong Kong) and no longer feels a need to pay (allow Hong Kong 50 years of freedoms and autonomy) is offensive to the principle, the very heart and soul of the city.
(Gg’s former boss was a Hong Konger, and his experience working for him was a rather accurate reflection of Hong Kong’s view on business. What made an impression to Gg—that the posters should be without rips and misprints, even if these imperfections were not the fault of the design company—is a no-brainer to the Hong Konger in me reading the interview. Delivering high quality goods and services isn’t an act of kindness but rather, of professionalism and respect for the contract.)
(This interview is a highly recommended read, for those who’ve missed it!)
(One more example of “conveniently missed critical information”: remember GG’s show on Chongqing? Did you know the underground bombing shelters were not built by the Communist government, but the Nationalist government that was still ruling China during WWII?)
Anyway, where was I?
Right. We’re getting to 3): People are not getting the facts on the political situation in China because they’re not interested in current affairs.
Some—well, many— people are not interested in politics.
Some of you may be thinking: well, I’m not interested either. I follow politics because it’s important.
Why is it important? Because political engagement means you can do something about the many ills of the society, speak for those who cannot, force the government to change by voting, by voicing your opinion, by going to marches and protests etc.
What if you follow politics and still can’t do most of these things? What if, if you do choose to do these things, the price you pay may be astronomical? Will you still follow politics or devote your time, your energy to something else, something you’ve got more control over, something that won’t be as saddening, frustrating because it’s something you can actually change?
3) is therefore intricately related to why people often don’t do anything, even if they manage to find out about the facts.
There’re no national elections in China. Marches and protests are practically banned because while the Chinese Constitution guarantees the freedom of assembly (as it does freedom of speech and press; Article 35), it also explicitly states that "Citizens of the People’s Republic of China, in exercising their freedoms and rights, may not infringe upon the interests of the State, of society or of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.” (Article 51) — ie. the freedoms and rights only go as far as if they do not stand in the government’s way. Social media and all communications platforms are under constant surveillance, and so only opinions tolerated by the government is allowed...
And so, the fact, social ill that has broken your heart—you can’t tell for sure if it isn’t talked about because the government has censored it, how many people know about it and more importantly, how many among the people who know about it will agree with your take. If you break your silence and voice your concerns, how many people will have your back, even if you also conceive them as victims of the social ill? If the social ill is the lack of rights of a minority group, for example, will they appreciate your speaking out, or will your “rocking-the-boat” make things even worse for them? A heavily watched net means communications with the oppressed/vulnerable social groups are often filled with obstacles, if not outright impossible. You don’t know how these groups feel; you don’t even know how many affected individuals are there. You watch the and news and shows and they all talk about how wonderfully things are going; how everyone seems so hopeful and positive and happy with their lives—are you the only person feeling that way? Are you wrong? If you speak out then, will you be yelling into the void, or worse, yelling at the police who “invites” you for a chat in the police station? To speak for those who do not have a voice to speak, are you ready, willing to take the risk of also becoming one who no longer has a voice to speak? Is your family ready?
To put it another way: the opportunity cost of “doing something” about the political situation can be astronomically high in China, compared to the opportunity cost of us doing something similar in our own country.
If I want to support the LGBT+ population in my part of the US, for example, I can do so effectively with minimal investment and most importantly, with minimal risk. By pasting a rainbow flag on this Tumblr post, for example, I’ve already signalled to those who need support on this issue that I’m ready to give mine. And this “signal” of mine will join the hundreds and thousands on the site, collectively telling the activists doing the “on the ground” fighting that they’re not alone; that they have my vote of support. I pose no danger to myself in doing so; no one will accuse me of, arrest me for infringing upon the interests of the State and the Collective. The rainbow flag, a display of my stance, will not turn into a blurred blob the next time I look at it, transform overnight from a symbol of solidarity to a warning sign to those who may wish to join the cause. There’s no danger for me, even, to carry an actual, huge rainbow flag to Pride, perform my activism in person. I don’t have to worry about my phone already giving away my identity as a protester to the government, especially in post-COVID times. I don’t need to watch out for plain clothes pretending to be my allies. I don’t have to look at the many surveillance cameras present and wonder if I’ll get blacklisted as a troublemaker.
Am I still being tracked and taken pictures of? Possibly. But for this cause, at least, I’m not afraid that these information will be used to arrest me. If I were arrested, I know there'll be lawyers and activists who would come to my aid. LOUDLY. ANGRILY.
I’m not afraid. Period. I’m having fun. And I doubt I can say the same if I try to carry a rainbow flag to Tiananmen square and march there.
This vast difference in the opportunity cost of taking political action is the reason why I’ve refrained from demanding those who live under authoritarian dictatorships to stand up for their neighbours who’ve been oppressed / bullied by their governments. I’ve refrained from criticising them for looking away, minding their own business. Do I wish they’ve take action? Of course I do. Am I aware that their lack of action is potentially more harmful because of the frequent atrocities happening around them? Yes. But I also understand that going on a fight is far more frightening when one doesn’t even have a sense of how many will join their side of the fight; I understand that fighting for what one deserves—freedoms, rights, justice—should never equal martyrdom, and just because a regime has elected to put equal signs between the two doesn’t mean those equal signs should ever be there. I remind myself that, to ask the people in any authoritarian dictatorship to stand up for a political cause is to ask them to make sacrifices that we, as people in relatively free societies, do not need to make when standing up for the same cause. In a country where a father demanding the truth about the milk product poisoning of his own son got jail time for “eliciting social disorder”, to stand up for even a single issue, no matter how small that issue is, requires courage that I’m not sure I have.
I can’t ask anyone to do anything I may not be able to do myself.
And this is why I, too, have chosen to support these people, even if many of them are single-issue activists, even when many support the Chinese government on other issues that matter. For example, the late Dr Li Wenliang, one of the eight COVID whistleblowers in China who passed away from the disease, was an opponent of the Hong Kong Protest, but I still (greatly) appreciate, respect him for what he did. As long as they’re not actively helping the government to cause (more) harm to others, as long as their cooperation with their government falls within what is demanded of them as citizens, they have my support. Why? Because most people who speak out in China cannot afford to stand up for more than one cause before it becomes dangerous for them. Because even if it’s only a tiny vulnerable social group, one small minority that makes a tiny step towards more rights, more freedoms, more justice, it’s still a victory in a country where rights, freedoms and justice are luxury items for those with neither political nor economic power. Because those who’re not part of the ruling class cannot afford to cherry pick their allies, cannot afford to in-fight when the ruling class already holds absolute power. Because I still believe in pay-it-forward, that most people who’ve benefited from someone standing up for them, even for one small incident, one minor cause, is more likely to stand up for someone else.
This is, admittedly, not always an easy choice to make—not for me, at least. I do get frustrated, can’t help but think at times that those who subscribe to and spread propaganda are, to a certain extent, corroborators of the atrocities committed by their government. (So, to those who’ve felt this frustration, you’re not alone!). And the Hong Konger in me has every reason to be furious with everything about China right now—all I could think of, when I listened to Gg singing 異鄉人 Foreigner the other night, are all the Hong Kongers fleeing the city now, as refugees, because of their political beliefs.
But for now, I’m hanging on. I’ve been able to tell myself that given the country’s political reality, given its tradition of collectivism (which tends to view confrontational dissent with scorn), the paths to freedoms, to equal rights and acceptance, will not be the same as what I’ve seen, what I’ve wished for. They’ll likely be slow; They’ll likely be long and winding, taking three steps forward and two steps back; they’d likely be unexpected in places, offer us surprises —
And since it’s Chinese New Year / Valentines and I’m feeling brave (irresponsible?), I’d venture a little bit of speculation and say this ~ yes, I’ve wondered if one of these many paths may be trodden, intentionally or not, by two beautiful male idols and their millions of turtles. Is it wishful, fantastical thinking? I’d be the first to admit the answer is yes. But the BJYX scheme has been so well executed as of now, so effective that I can’t help but wonder if it’s leading towards some sort of a goal, whether devised by the humans involved or by the gods/Fates who, as c-turtles have said so romantically, have been writing an original BL story with our favourite boys. The goal may be personal —simply two people being able to act more like themselves again under the spotlight—or a bit more ambitious…
… Because the sneakers + ice-cream post did catch my attention (will probably have to devote a post on that?). Another small incident that has caught my attention, unrelated to Gg and Dd but can significantly change the path they may be trodding, is this — in June 2020, People’s Daily, the state controlled newspaper, boasted its country’s increasing friendliness towards the LGBT+ communities on Twitter . While the tweet was met with skepticism and soon removed, the message it sent is this: the Chinese government may have figured out the the Western world (in particular, the younger generations) view LGBT+ rights as a measure of progressiveness. While I’m still leaning towards the government maintaining a tight grip on LGBT+ rights within its borders, with the strengthening call to boycott 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics because of the country’s poor human rights record, I can see a glimmer of possibility that the same government may do the unexpected and cater to the queer community for the sake of propaganda. As I mentioned, the queer community hasn’t caused much headache for the Chinese government, and so it’s far more likely to be chosen as the “benefactors” of such a “we’re a human rights champion too!” propaganda campaign than, say, ethnic minorities and political dissidents. Promoting dissemination of core socialist values has always sat high on the CCP’s agenda list, and its target audience has always included foreign, non-Chinese populations; this effort is known as 大外宣—“The Great External Propaganda”. And who better to cast as leads of an international propaganda campaign on LGBT+ rights than two of its own stars who’ve already demonstrated loyalty to the government, who’ve already garnered international fame from a TV series widely viewed as queer, and who may actually be queer?
(And if—if!!!— this ever happens, may I ask everyone to please consider doing the following? Please do not feel a need to express gratitude. Please do not act as though it’s a gift. Celebrate as you would celebrate anyone in a free country exercising their birthright to live, to love the way they want — no less than that, no more than that.)
(For those who’ve asked ~ as international fans, not allowing the CCP to modify our expectations of how a government should behave may be one of the most effective ways to protect Gg and Dd.)
(I call this learning from the best: get the goods we want (more rights for the people in China), refuse to pay the cost (subscribe to CCP’s propaganda), and RUN! ❤️💛💚)
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Last week's episode of the BS-Free Witchcraft podcast (follow @traegorn if you don’t yet!) came to the unavoidable conclusion that Tiktok is hostile to human life, which, unavoidable, yeah. But it got me thinking about social media and witchcraft slightly more carefully than my usual thought about social media and witchcraft, which is “don't.” And – I still pretty much think, “don't” – but we can dig a little deeper, I feel!
The obvious problem with social media, which I am not breaking any new ground by saying, is that it thrives on Engagement, which means that the reach of something that engages the limbic system is disproportionate to the reach of something that might be insightful or truthful or even useful, but feels dry. The more all-powerful the algorithm, the more this takes on a life of its own (literally, for all I know...), but the rules of Engagement are in effect all over the internet, with generally unpositive outcomes for Discourse in every field. (To clarify: I think the internet itself has a number of positive qualities and benefits for human flourishing, but all of that has to be weighed against the fact that the internet also operates as basically a 24/7/365 Propaganda Engine that pushes people to be ever more inflammatory and/or pandering in order to break through the background noise.)
In that sense, then, witchcraft isn't anything unusual – it's just another area of human activity that's undergoing the same stresses online as all the other areas of human activity. But I actually think there's a sense where witchcraft does suffer particularly acutely from this dynamic. To explain how I get to this conclusion, I kind of have to slam my hand down on the third rail, so here we go: What Is Witchcraft, Actually?
Look, long story short: I'm not going to come to your house and slap the mortar and pestle out of your hand, so if you think I'm full of shit on this, so be it, just keep on keeping on. I'm not the sheriff of the Craft and I wouldn't want the power to enforce this definition even if that were possible, but I am a guy who prefers to have some kind of sense of what a word means before I run around using it, so I've given the question a lot of thought for myself, and I have (quite cleverly! I'm clever!) distilled three elements that I feel like are sort of load-bearing pillars of the Craft that show up more or less throughout the various versions and generally distinguish them from other paths either of occultism or spirituality. I like to think of them as Eros, Gnosis, and Heresy (well, Hairesis if we wanted to keep the Greek conceit going, but I just say Heresy in my mind). There's no reason to go into all three at length here; I'm saying this just to lay the groundwork that I believe witchcraft isn't just incidentally heretical as defined by certain outside institutional forces, but that in fact practicing Heresy is foundational and required.
By “practicing heresy,” I don't mean that you have to do the opposite of whatever your parents do, or that I think Christians get to set the standard by which everything else is judged deviant. I think those are both mental traps that people fall into, but I mean something much simpler than that. I'm using etymology to root the English word “heresy” in the Greek word hairesis, meaning “a thing that's chosen” or “one's (essentially) free choice.” To be a heretic, merging the modern and root definition, is to be someone who has insisted on making a choice for themselves. I think the reason witches are notoriously so fractious and disorganized and so disinclined to cob together and do the same thing in either the short or the long term is that our very nature is to treat every single piece of received wisdom or authoritative pronouncement as a big maybe. If we choose it. If we agree. If it works for us.
I mock that phrase a lot, honestly, maybe more than I should. Ask any witch why they do things the way they do, and you have like an 80% chance of hearing “well, it works for me.” Which I love, in theory! I love the idea of us as a group of mad experimenters, putting everything to the test and accepting it only once it's proven to work for us. In practice, though, there's one major problem, which is: it works to do what for you? What kind of results are you getting? Hell, what kind of result do you want or expect from practicing witchcraft? The concrete markers of mundane flourishing: financial security, rewarding relationships, good health, good reputation? Creative inspiration? The power to know and to enact your True Will? Self-development – moral, psychological, spiritual? Psychic powers, insight into the nature of reality, mystic secrets? A sense of belonging to a cosmos that's enchanted, wondrous, meaningful? Surprisingly few of us can answer that question, and if we don't know what we're aiming at, of course we can't know if the things we do are getting us closer or further away – if those things are working for us at all.
I think that makes witches particularly susceptible to all the flaws of the social media attention economy. We want all the options, we are choosers of things, so we're hungry for input, information, ideas. But most of us are unable to practice the core skill of being good at heresy, which is discernment. We don't know which of our myriad of options are better or worse than the others, because we're mostly not consciously navigating toward anything in particular, except an unarticulated feeling of desire to be somehow more than we are, other than we are. And that's a deeply human desire! It's also one that most schools of philosophy or religions or spiritual practices will at least attempt to provide some form for. You feel an inarticulate longing for Not This? Great, here's what you really want, what will satisfy the deep restlessness of your soul, and here's how a person gets from here to there. Some of those roadmaps are more structured than others, but they tend to have some language around what the Not This is all about, where this road is taking you. And then you have some combination of texts and live mentorship and co-learning community and Tradition and your own discernment that all collaborate to help you figure out what's going to Work for you as you do the Work.
Those things aren't exactly absent from witchcraft – you can still read books and find teachers and join communities and learn from history and practice discernment. You can do all those things, and hopefully you hit on the particular combination of factors that, well, works for you to help you learn and advance. But witches, being a whole community full of people who are deeply, fundamentally inclined toward Heresy, do tend to not do that first part, the part where they tell you where you're going. You can go wherever you want! It's your path! Hell, I did it a few paragraphs ago: I reassured you that I wasn't trying to tell you what witchcraft means, because it's not my place to do that for you, only for me.
I don't think you can make witchcraft non-heretical in that sense, or make witches not a bunch of heretics ready to throw hands in defense of their right to choose their own path. I wouldn't want to! It's not a flaw, it's part of (in my humble opinion) our identity and our magic. But you take that and throw it in a vat of the internet's constant content, constant Hot Takes, constant ever-increasing competition for the limited resource of Attention and Engagement, and it's just fucking overwhelming. It's being lost in the wilderness with no map and no compass and told it's your privilege to build your own map and compass. Grateful as you may theoretically be for your freedom, the reality is you're going to walk in a lot of circles. And you're probably going to fall in with the first other person you run into who really seems to know where they're going.
My unpopular solution to this is – silence. It's time. It's spaciousness. It's asking a lot of questions. It's taking in a lot of ideas without attaching yourself too tightly to the first ones that feel good – it's giving yourself room to wonder why an idea feels good to you, if it's nourishing a real hunger for you, or if it's stroking your ego by echoing your biases back to you. It's spending a significant amount of time in a space of humility. It's loving questions at least as much as you love answers, or at the very least defeating your fear of doubt and uncertainty to some degree. None of these are things that social media will ever give you, and honestly the internet is going to get in the way of most of that for you. And when you are ready to make a Choice about your path, or at least the next leg of your path, the solution is to find guides who seem to be going somewhere that you would actually want to end up – in a real way, not just the ones who are good at curating an image that appeals to you. Which is a talent, yes, but once you learn everything there is to know about curating an image, my guess is you're going to feel like there should be more. And you'll be right.
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Like Real People Do. (Spencer x Reader)
Chapter 1
*Gif not mine*
Prologue Chapter 2
Rating: M, eventually will be smut.
Words: 2.5k
Warnings: regular CM crime stuff. brief mentions of previous assault. vomit.
Request: OPEN/CLOSED
A.N Thanks for the love on the Prologue, message to be added to taglist. much love Cia
Chapter 1: However scary
You start to follow Hotch outside his office, barely containing the smile on your face. You couldn’t help it, the job you’ve been dreaming about for a decade was yours now. As you left the office, you couldn’t help but notice the short Italian man exiting his.
“Rossi?” You smiled. The man in question turned and grinned upon seeing you.
“Bella!” He opened his arms to hug you which you automatically accepted.
“I thought you retired, old man.”
Rossi scoffed. “You know me, can’t stay away for long.” Hotch stepped up, joining you guys. “So am I correct in assuming you’ve taken the job?” Rossi asks.
“You would be correct.” You smile. “And now, since I have a big girl job and can take care of myself. I’m hoping those mysterious money drops into my bank account will stop.” You gave him a knowing look. Though you and Rossi were not as close as you and Hotch, you still revered him as a father figure as much as he did you a daughter.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He says holding up his hands.
“Sure you don’t, old man.” You laughed. “How’s… Krystal?” You say trying to remember which wife Rossi was on now.
“Divorced.” Rossi smirks.
“Aw, I’m sorry, Dave. I thought 3 would be the lucky number.”
“So did I.” Rossi smiled. “How’s Persephone?” David smiles widely at the mention of your adoptive mother's name.
“Still not interested in becoming number 4.” You laughed, inducing a boisterous laugh from Dave and a small chuckle from Hotch. “She’s currently backpacking through India and building eco houses along the way.”
“Sounds like Persephone.” David smiles. You guys continue to catch up for a couple of more minutes not noticing the team staring up at you from the bullpen.
“Do you guys know who she is?” Emily asks
“No but Rossi and Hotch know her by the looks of it.” Derek replies.
“I met her in the elevator.” Spencer speaks up. “Her name’s Y/N.”
“Wonder what she's doing here.” Derek says as Penelope walks up with a tin of her famous cookies that Spencer is already reaching for. She pulls back so it’s out of reach from his perch on his desk.
“Well, if she took the job then that is your newest team member.” Penelope smiled. “Hotch asked me to do a background check last week so I assume he’s hiring her. Which means these cookies are for her.” She says pulling even more back as Spencer continues to make grabby hands at the tin.
“Why does she get cookies her first day? I didn’t get any on my first day.” Spencer points out, not caring how much he sounds like a child.
“I’m not really allowed to talk about it, but let’s just say I think she could really use the kindness.”
“What did you find out about her, Baby girl?” Derek asked.
Penelope frowns slightly, she never liked keeping secrets, especially from the team. “I’m really not allowed to say, but what I can tell you is that she’s smart, like really smart. Maybe not Reid’s level but smart enough to make dean's list at an Ivy League every year.”
“Which school?” Spencer asks.
“Stanford.”
Spencer nods. That would make her pretty smart, that or just good at school. As he’s exiting his thoughts, JJ walks past them, throwing a “We have a case.” Over her shoulder before heading to Rossi, Hotch and the new girl.
We all begin filing into the conference room, Rossi, Hotch and Y/N walking in last. Hotch clears his throat. “This is Agent Y/L/N.” He says gesturing at you. “She will be joining us this case. I’m sure you guys will get around to formal introductions later.” Hotch says before taking a seat nodding at JJ to start. You hold up your hand in a small wave before taking a seat next to Hotch. Everyone else regards you with a small nod except a brightly dressed blonde woman who excitedly waves back at you.
“We’re heading to Nashville.” A blonde woman, you assume, is JJ says pulling up images of victims on the screen. You swallowed the lump in your throat, you were used to crime scene photos, you studied several in the FBI academy but kids would always get to you. “3 boys ages 10-13 all have gone missing on their way home from school, all found 5 days later buried arms across chest, heads shaved.”
“Signs of remorse are obviously there but the hair...is something different.” A dark haired woman pointed out.
“Could be trichophilia.” You pointed out. Everyone looked at you, you cleared your throat under the scrutiny. “Trichophilia. It’s the fetishzation of hair.” You provide. Everyone nods and JJ continues to provide information on the case before Hotch announces wheels up in 30. You go to grab your files and notebook when the brightly dressed blonde woman ambushes you a tin fully extended to you.
“Hi, I’m Penelope Garcia, and these are for you!” practically shoving the tin into your hands.
“Thank you, I’m Y/N.” You smiled, you weren’t really a sweets person but you weren’t going to turn down the kindness. A brown skinned man and the dark haired woman from before walked up to you both.
“I’m Emily Prentiss, this is Derek Morgan” she says both holding their hands out for you to shake. You shuffle the cookies and files into one arm to shake hands with them.
“Y/N Y/L/N.” You say back.
“So you seemed to already know Hotch?” Derek pointed out.
You had been prepared for someone to ask about that so you rattled off your prepared speech. “Yes, Hotch is a family friend.” That seemed like the easiest way to explain your relationship.
“So that’s how you were able to steamroll in here, huh? Friends with the boss?” The man laughs.
“No, I think it might’ve been one of my several degrees, merits or letters of recommendation, one of which from the director himself.” You point out. “Though I suppose knowing Aaron didn’t necessarily hurt things.”
Derek holds up his hands in surrender. “That could be true too. I guess we’ll see out on the field.” He says before him and Prentiss walk out.
You sigh heavily and start heading out the same way before a small voice pipes up behind you.
“They’ll come around.”
You turn your eyes onto the man you had met in the elevator before. “Sorry?”
“Morgan and Prentiss. They’ll come around, they acted like that towards me when I first started too. It’s-uh because you’re young.”
You nodded. He had a point and so did Morgan in a sense. You were very young, seemingly too young to be starting in a field like this. You knew it’d be hard to believe Hotch didn’t pull some strings for you.
“I knew my age would probably raise some questions. But I worked really hard, and it sucks I have to prove myself 10x over just because of my age.”
“I understand.” He says, following you out of the conference room.
“I felt like you would. You introduced yourself as Dr. Reid before but we look around the same age.”
“Yes, I hold 3 doctorates.”
“Three?!” You said incredulously. “What were you like, eleven starting college?”
“12, actually.” He smiles. He has a nice smile, instantly crosses your brain. You dash that thought immediately.
“That would have to make you some sort of genius.”
“I believe there’s not quantifiable way to measure intelligence but I suppose by societal standards, I am. I have an IQ of 187.”
You let out a deep whistle. “And here I thought I’d be the smart one.” You laugh.
He fumbles a bit over his words. “I-I mean you still could be. L-Like I said, there’s no way to accurately measure intelligence.”
You laugh before rounding your new desk grabbing your go bag underneath it. “Thanks for the vote of confidence but we both know that’s not true.” You smile before turning to head towards the jet.
——————————————————
You and the team had been in Madison county for 4 days now and you were hitting a wall. The day you arrived there had been a 4th body found, same cause of death, same shaved head only this time the word HELP was carved into the boy’s back. You knew this was a part of the job, going to crime scenes and having to see bodies but you couldn’t stop the thoughts. His hands were on your neck again, his knife grazing your sides. You felt the bile rise up.
“Pull over.” You all but scream to Morgan he nods, zipping the car to the side of the road. You instantly hop out and release your lunch.
Morgan steps out and pats your back. “It’s alright, kid. First one’s never easy. Especially when it’s children.”
He thinks you’re sick from the crime scene You think. That’s probably for the best.
“Thanks.” You mumble. He nods as you guys wordlessly walk back to the SUV.
Since then you’ve been at the police station working on the geographical profile with Spencer. You know Morgan had probably said something to Hotch about your upchuck and that was why you were stuck here. But still, you couldn’t think to complain. Spencer was incredibly smart and great to work with.
“There’s something we’re missing.” He says off handedly. You nod agreeing. You take in the circle like pattern the unsub seemed to be going in. It didn’t make sense. You had profiled him as a socially awkward loner with an overbearing parent. He wasn’t good with adults but could somehow get kids to trust him. Enough to get into the car with him late at night. It hit you a second later.
“Oh my god.” You said scrambling for your phone to call Garcia. Spencer looks over at you, raising an eyebrow questioningly.
“You’ve reached your high priestess.” You hear Penelope’s voice come through the speaker.
“Hey Garcia, it’s Y/N.” You say. “Can you tell me what business is near the first dump site? I have an idea.”
You hear the faint sound of clacking as she finds the information for you. “Looks to be a bus lot.” You fought the urge to pump your fist in the air. You were right.
“Alright Garcia. I need a background check on all school bus drivers in Madison county, cross check it with anything that would fit the profile so minor stalking charges, assault…” you train off. “How long do you think that’ll take?” You ask.
“If I get started now, a couple hours.” She says. “Penelope out.” She says, hanging up.
You look up to see Spencer looking right back at you. “A bus driver.” You say smiling. “Think about it, everyday you ride the bus home from school and play outside with your friends until late. And when you're heading home your bus driver approaches you in his car offering to take you back. You have no reason not to trust him because he’s brought you home safely so many times before.” You explain, a brief frown grazing your lips. These children met an untimely demise all for trusting someone they were supposed to trust.
Spencer nods, taking in your words. “Good work,” he says. “You figured it out.”
You flushed under the high praise. “I’m sure you would’ve come to the same conclusion given more time.” You say.
“But I didn’t.” He says. “You did, and you probably saved another kid's life in the meantime.” He smiled and patted your shoulder before turning back to the board.
You looked at his back for a while. You knew since you stepped on the elevator that first time you were attracted to Spencer Reid. He was tall with a lean build and a nice set jaw and incredibly smart. You’d be lying to yourself if that wasn’t your exact type. But on top of all that, he was nice. Almost sickeningly so.
Suddenly you felt a lot more at risk than before.
————————————————
William Davison was arrested September 7th. You were right, he was a bus driver for Madison county. Police caught him in his car full of things that pointed him directly to the abductions.
You and the team were now back on the jet heading home. While the rest team was playing cards you opted to sit in the back. Textbooks laid out on the table as you tried to take notes from them. You were so engrossed. You didn’t see Spencer come take the seat in front of you.
“What’re you studying?” He asked.
You look up. “Uh, I’m in my doctoral program for psychology right now.” You say. “Right now, I’m working on an essay about nature vs. nurture effects on the killer's mind.”
“And what is your theory?” He asks.
“That while I do believe nurture plays a role somewhat, if someone has a predisposition to kill, hurt or maim that is something they are born with. Primates and to some effects humans are naturally empathetic creatures so I think people with the desire for violence are defects. Now even though that’s the case it’s still your own conscious decision to kill.” You say pausing. “Some people are born with natural predispositions they don’t follow all the time. Like your hands for instance.”
“What about my hands?” He inquired.
You swallow, clearing your throat. “Well you have fairly large hands, with l-long fingers.” You stutter. Nice going, Y/N. You think. Way to tell the guy you’re starting to develop a crush on that you’ve been staring at his hands. “In the primitive stage, that would’ve made you good at hunting and gathering. In a more modern sense, you’d be good at piano. Though I imagine, you don’t do either.” You say, already knowing the answer. You were a profiler now after all.
“No, I do not.” He smiled widely at you, he always appreciated intelligent conversation when it came by. “I disagree with your theory though.”
“Really? Why’s that?” You question. He begins to go on a long winded explanation why he thinks Nature vs. Nurture is outdated, taking several detours to talk about some other theories he’s found interesting. You watch him intensely taking in the words. You try to pay attention, you really do. But your eyes keep going back to the mouth the rapid words are coming out of and the hands that are also gesturing widely. You just had tuned back in when he suddenly stopped. You tilted your head at him.
“What’s wrong?” you asked.
“Nothing.” he says, looking mildly uncomfortable. “It’s just… no one lets me talk for this long.”
“Really?” You question, he nods. “Well, I was listening, I find it interesting. Actually…” you trail off picking up your pen, flipping to a new page in your notebook. “Do you mind if I write some of this down, might come in handy when I write my paper later.”
He nods enthusiastically as he continues his thoughts from before. You start writing fast now to keep up, interjecting here and there to ask him to expand on some stuff. Eventually the rest of the team drifts off until it's only the sound of his soft voice and the scratch of your pen filling the plane.
Taglist: @haylaansmi
#spencer x reader#spencer reid x reader#spencer x you#spencer reid x you#criminal minds#bau x reader#spencer x reader smut#spencer reid x reader smut
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Archenemies to Superfriends
Do you know how hard it is to make Lila likeable? Do you know the struggle I went through to write this fic? I know I said I wanted a challenge, something unique. BUT WHAT THE HELL! This took me longer than my last two fics combined. Class salt but make Lila the good guy? Like seriously, do you hate me? I hope the Anon requester likes this.
"I regret that we meet in this way. You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend." — Romulan Commander, Star Trek: The Original Series, "Balance of Terror"
It turned out there was a line Lila Rossi wouldn’t even cross. Sure, she wasn’t the nicest person in the world. Far from it. She was a liar, a thief, a cheater, a bully at times, a social climber.
But she wasn’t a monster.
As she looked the sketchbook in Alya’s hand, and the vindictive look on her face; Lila realized what was about to take place would push her over the line into monster status.
The school day had just ended. Most students had already left. Lila had been about to leave when Alya stopped her.
“How? How did you get it?” Lila asked. Surely Marinette wasn’t foolish enough to leave it around.
It was Alix who preened, “I snuck it out of her bag.”
“She’s been so mean to you, girl,” Alya said. “Marinette needs to learn a lesson.”
No, Marinette hadn’t been mean to her. Lila never even implied the bluenette had been mean to her. Lila spun her stories to the class, and whenever Marinette called her out for lying (which she was), the class would gang up on the Bluenette and accuse her of being jealous, of bullying poor Lila.
It was actually rather startling how fast the so call best friends had turned on the girl. Lila didn’t even have to push or instigate it like she usually did. No, a few promises of meeting famous celebrities, and they all rushed to do it on their own.
Rose’s sleepover. Rose didn’t invite Marinette at the other girls’ insistence so Lila wouldn’t feel unease.
Nino’s party. No one mentioned it Marinette. She had been acting crazily lately.
Trip to the movie. Marinette would just ruin it for everybody.
And so on and so forth. Until the class was going out of their way to avoid the bluenette. Some even went as far as verbally bashing the other girl and ending their friendships. It got to the point where no one, not even Adrien, would speak to Marinette; and ostracized her to the back of the class. Only Chloe defended the girl and sought out her friendship. To which Alya snorted, “Of course. Bullies belong with bullies.”
Now the class had moved on to destroying private property. Great.
Lila sighed. How was she going to get herself out of this one?
Lila prided herself on still being able to look at herself in the mirror at the end of the day. Despite all she had done and would be willing to do; Lila was firm on what she wouldn’t do.
Destroying someone’s life work; something they had spent months and months on, something that had nothing to do with Lila, was going too far.
Lila needed to move quickly. She eyed the sketchbook. It was a standard black sketchbook, nothing special. She owned a similar one herself that she used for quick doodles and to write down ideas.
That was when Lila got an idea. She quickly put her school books on the desk and beamed at her moronic classmates. Then all it took were quick sad eyes, and a can I hold it first, please. For Alya to hand it over. Then Lila accidentally spilled all off her books on the ground, and when everyone rushed to help her. Lila switched the two sketchbooks.
Then it took her classmates, not friends (never friends); Alya, Max Alix, Kim, Nino, Mylene, Ivan, all of ten seconds to destroy the book into as little pieces as they could. Never even bothering to look to see if it was actually Marinette’s work.
They left the pieces scattered on Marinette’s desk.
Just as they finished said girl rushed back into class, a frantic searching look on her face. It took her five seconds to notice the torn sketchbook on her desk. Pure devastation overtook her face, tears filled her blue eyes.
Alya snipped a mean retort about Karma and left the class with the other students following behind her. Not realizing Lila wasn’t among them. Not caring that she had just hurt the girl she had sworn was her bestie not too long ago.
Marinette stared quietly at the mess, not letting the tears fall. “Why?” She whispered.
“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” Lila told her. “You don’ have to believe me. But I swear I didn’t. This isn’t my m.o.”
Marinette wanted to lash out at the other girl; scream about it being her fault, and her being a liar. But she couldn’t even find words to speak.
“Here,” Lila said as she handed over the sketchbook. “I switched it with mine before they could… you know.”
Marinette blinked once, then twice, before she slowly reached for the book; hope filling her. And sure enough. Relief rushed through her. She thanked all the kwami. “Why?” She asked Lila. “You hate me.” That had been the basis for their relationship for months.
Lila snorted, “I don’t hate you. I don’t hate anyone,” She shrugged. “Hate clouds judgment. You’re just my competition. No one likes their rival team.”
Marinette stared at the Italian girl. Rival team? Competition? What? “We’re not even competing for anything! If it's about Adrien. He’s yours. I don’t want him.” It turned out, the blond was too cowardly for her taste. Not enough backbone.
“Of course we’re competing!” Lila snapped. “Since I got to this school.”
“Over what?”
It was Lila’s turn to stare. Didn’t the other girl know? Hadn’t they been fighting for the top spot?
“Being the most popular girl in school.”
Marinette just looked confused. “But I’m not popular. Especially not now.”
“Not popular?” Lila could’ve cursed. “Not popular! On my first day, I didn’t go more than a foot before someone mentioned the wonderful Marinette. She’s so smart. She’s so sweet. She’s so EVERYTHING. I knew from day one we were archenemies. You knew it too. Why else would you try to call me out so much!”
“…I just don’t like liars.”
That time Lila did scream.
Because it wasn’t possible. There was no way Marinette Dupain-Cheng hadn’t even realized they had been competing. This wasn’t just some delusional one-side battle on Lila’s side. No way.
“Why me?” Marinette asked, with a tilted head, reminded Lila of a puppy. “There are tons of more popular girls. Aurore; she’s the most beautiful girl in school. Ondine, she’s the best athlete. Ruby in drama was literally voted the most popular kid in school last year.”
“That’s different,” Lila waved it off. “Those girls are popular for one specific thing. Even Ruby was only voted because she throws the best parties. And even then, most only like them for that thing. Everyone likes you.” Or at least all but one class now.
A class that had proven to be worthless. Lila was starting to realize that she had been playing against her most noteworthy opponent, who apparently never realized they were competing, in a less than worthwhile game to be the most popular girl in class to get the approval of the students. Students who, again, weren’t worth it.
“You’re the only one worth a damn in this school,” Lila admitted as she sat down at her desk. “That’s why you. You’re the best. I want to beat the best.”
She never attacked the weak. She attacked the strong. She went after the strongest of the strong. Lila thrived off competition. She just didn’t want to win. She wanted to be The Winner. Lila wanted the number one spot engraved with her name. To do that she had to beat the best.
Her motto: A hero is only as good as his villain. The reverse is also true.
Lila knew since was a little girl that she would never make it the big leagues if she only fought small fries. So in every school, in every class; Lila found what was most important to her fellow students and went after it. Some school was easy. A few classes valued music; Lila started a band, with her as the lead singer, and knocked out her competition. Sports freaks; Lila always had a knack for futbol. Everyone in class fought to have the best grades (It only happened once) but Lila said bring it on.
Even she had to cheat, sabotage, lie, or whatever else to get to the top she’d do it. And she did. And she was always won.
She was the most popular kid in school within the month. Always.
As for her competition. Some fell easily; too easily for her taste. Some took months to fall. One guy took an entire year. His name had been Felix, and he been Lila’s favorite nemesis. He had fought with everything he had; pushed Lila far beyond her limits and made her think outside the box every time they went head to head.
He had been the joker to her Batman. (Afterall, every villain is a hero in their own mind)
But eventually, even Felix fell.
It had been glorious. A high that Lila road all the way to her new school in France.
Looking back, Lila should’ve known better. She should’ve known that Felix had been preparing her for her greatest battle yet. The fight of her lifetime. Against the greatest opponent, she would ever know.
Marinette.
The Superman to her Batman. All good things good and pure Versus the big bad of the night.
It had been a fight Lila had been waiting for her life. And yet it turned out, Marinette never even really noticed.
And to think, Lila had thought she had been winning. The class turned again Marinette. Everyone loved Lila. Except none of it seemed to bother the other girl. In fact, she seemed to get stronger.
For every friend Marinette lost, she found another; a better one. Aurore, Claude, Ondine, Marc, Luka, Bridgette; the list went on and on.
Alya voted to have Marinette removed as class president. Marinette gets on the student council. The class loses its most organized student. Lila declines the role of feigning that she was too busy. To make it worse all the well-planned birthday parties, school trips, free costume designer, and the random sweet day where baked goods were brought to class on particularly stressful school days, (all of which Lila had enjoyed).
Adrien no longer speaking to her. (Honestly, Lila never saw what anyone saw in the blond model besides the potential connection he offered. He was naive and a far too idealistic for her taste). Marinette gets twelve different boys, and three girls, asking her to the sweethearts dance.
Without the class clinging to her and demanding her time, Marinette seemed to thrive. No longer stressed; rarely ever late. Lila, on the other hand, found her days busier and busier as her classmates tried to lean on her more.
No matter the bad thing that happened, Marinette just stronger. And she never lost her positive attitude.
Marinette shook her head. This one turning out to be one strange day. “If you want the class, you can them. They’re my friends anymore.” She glanced at the pieces of the sketchbook on her desk. “I don’t know who they are in anymore.”
“Fame seekers,” Lila answered. “More concerned with what someone can do for than actual friendships. You get used to them.” She paused. “I don’t want them either. They’re…”
“Taxing,” Marinette offered as she sat down next to Lila. “Emotionally draining. Opinionated. Users.”
“Bad friends.”
“That too.”
It went quiet. Neither girl knowing what to say. Lila didn’t know what to do now that all competition was all but officially declared over. Marinette realized that her ex-friends' actions couldn’t be blamed on Lila. Everything they did was on their own. Forgiveness wasn’t going to happen. So what are they fighting for? What could they fight for?
“Truce?” Marinette offered. “I let the morons believe whatever you want. And you just leave me out of it.”
Lila nodded, “You go your way. I go mine.”
This was worse than Superman V Batman movie ending as far as Lila was concerned. At least no one died.
That was it. They left school that day feeling a little shook. Each girl agreed to move on and avoid each other.
Except that wasn’t what happened.
Somehow, slowly, Lila and Marinette became friends.
It started off small. Lila had needed a break from her groupies and hid in the art room. Marinette had been working in there.
“They too much again?” Marinette asked.
Lila winced but nodded.
“I used to hide in the back of the library,” Marinette offered. “On the roof. Any random classroom I could find. Sometimes, I even just left for my parents.”
“Seriously?” Lila asked. “They’ve always been like this.”
Marinette snorted. “Worse. Wait until they start asking you for favors. Which will turn into demands.”
“…They are just the worst.”
Then both girls laughed.
After that whenever Lila needed a break, she sought out the presence of the other girl. Sometimes they hung out in the library, on the roof, wherever. It was nice.
It wasn’t until Lila showed up in Marinette’s room, bitching about her mom canceling their plans together again. Marinette just listens to Lila’s sorrows and offered ice cream. They spent the entire night just bitching and watching reruns of Doctor Who. (It turned out Lila was a bit of nerd.) Lila slept over and slept easily for the first time in months.
That was when the two realized they were friends.
Marinette, Lila’s once declared greatest enemy, became her first real friend.
After that everything just fell together. Lila started showing up at Marinette’s and more.
Eventually, Lila being invited to Marinette’s girls’ night and being introduced to a new friend to Chloe, Kagami, Aurore, and Ondine.
Upon seeing her, Chloe snorted, “She got you too, huh. It’s the eyes. Don’t look her in the eyes.”
“Yes,” Kagami agreed. “I, too, had declared Marinette my rival. Now I wear bunny pajamas and adorn avocado oatmeal face masks.”
Well shit, Lila thought as she eyed Marinette’s former rivals, did I ever stand a chance?
The answer was no.
But Lila didn’t mind.
After that Chloe found herself having more actually friends than ever before. In Chloe, she found a second-best friend. Someone she could always bitch with, and not just to. The blond had the presence Lila had always strived for. Chloe stalked through the hall like a model on the runway. People jumped out of her way. She was a phenomenal force to be reckoned, likened to Wonder Woman.
Marinette and Lila were two peas in a pod. They both strived to the best, thrived under pressure, and loved fashion. But while Lila wanted to model and be in front of the camera, Marinette wanted to design.
Lila loved Marinette’s clothes and decided the girl need a bit of a push. So she reached out to Chloe, and together they teamed up to convince Marinette to start her own website. It took a bit of work but MDC designs were officially online. All designs, of course, were modeled by Lila, Chloe, and Marinette’s other girlfriends. Lila had never felt so glamorous. Marinette never looked so happy.
Lila started being the one Marinette went to whenever she needed someone to cover for babysitting. Or had to have a random excuse as to why she wasn’t present. And Lila did both jobs remarkably well.
Still, despite their friendship, Lila was a bit surprised to get Marinette’s birthday invitation. Marinette made her promise not to tell anyone. Even more so, when Marinette took her and Chloe, Kagami, Luka, Claude, Marc, Aurore, and Ondine to Clara Nightingale concert. They had backstage passed and Lila nearly died when Clara rushed over to hug Marinette after a song. Lila took a lot of pictures, even one of her and the superstar together, but didn’t post them.
Which left Marinette happily surprised. Apart, though small, still expected Lila to boast in class about the additional celebrity she knew. But that never happened. Marinette felt relief and a bit guilty, she supposed some part of her was testing the other girl to see if she could trust her; and was happy to find out Lila had passed.
Despite their Lila and Marinette’s friendship things at school didn’t change. The other students in class still froze Marinette out. Lila, though, did her best to keep them from doing anything mean to the bluenette. Though this only happened when the other students needed something Marinette used to do for them; like free babysitting, custom-designed dresses, stage design, and interview with Ladybug, it wasn’t going to happen. Or when the class trips were lackluster at best.
Lila hadn’t realized just how much she and Marinette had grown to like and trust each other until Ladybug showed up in her room. She was prepared to send a barging remark to the hero who had nearly sabotaged her attempts to win over Adrien, thus the rest of the class, when Ladybug spoke.
“Marinette sent me,” The red hero said. “She said I could trust you; that you’d make a good hero.” And then Ladybug showed her the fox miraculous, a replica of the one Lila used to wear.
Lila’s mouth dropped opened.
“As soon as the fight’s done, you’ll need to return it to me,” Ladybug stated firmly. “Do you understand.”
And just like that Volpina was reborn. Her costume was darker than before, her tail a bit longer and curved. Her mask black.
Ladybug and Volpina fought side by side against a Clown Akuma that turn people into balloon animals. During the fight, Volpina learned that Chat Noir had, once again, abandoned Ladybug after the hero turned down his affections. Lila never felt so much disgust. What kind of hero was that?
After the fight, Volpina and Ladybug met back up in Lila’s room and Lila immediately handed over the miraculous.
“Thanks for the help,” Ladybug smiled as he pocked the necklace.
Lila nodded, “Chat Noir was wrong. What he’s doing is sexual harassment. Like seriously, look it up. No means no. You shouldn’t have to take that.”
“He’s my partner.”
“He’s not acting like it.”
The words seemed to affect Ladybug who visibly wilted. She didn’t say another word as she left.
However, not long after Lila found herself being called forth to fight as Volpina more and more. Chat Noir never showing up once.
When both heroines were confronted by a furious Alya, live streaming, Lila learned something.
“What happened to Rena Rouge?” Alya demanded, hurt and anger in her eyes. “Why replace her with this faux-hero? And what about the rest of the new team Miraculous; Viperion, BrightRoar, and Ryuko. What about the old team?”
Faux-hero? Ladybug had to physically stop Volpina from ripping into the reporter.
“Rena Rouge has been retired,” Ladybug glared. “She proved herself to be untrustworthy. In fact, all former heroes such as Caraprace and Chat Noir have been retired. They have been replaced by permanent heroes like Volpina, here, Queen Bee, Viperion, BrightRoar, and Ryuko. They have proven themselves to loyal and capable heroes.”
No one knew who was more stunned Lila or Alya. She was a permanent hero? Chat Noir had been replaced? What?
“What?” Alya asked. “Rena was amazing. A much better hero than some people,” She gave a dirty look to Volpina. “And You and Chat Noir belonged together. Everyone says so!”
“Rena was a good hero,” Ladybug said. “But outside the mask, she proved herself unworthy. As for me and Chat Noir. I’ve said countless times, I felt nothing but friendship for him. It was Chat Noir and tabloid sites like the Ladyblog that hyped up that nonsense.”
“Tabloid?” Alya shrieked.
“Yes, tabloid.” Ladybug hissed. “Why do think I stopped working with you?”
In retrospect, Lila should’ve realized sooner the fallout that would happen not long after. Alya wasn’t the type of person to own up to her own mistakes. However, Lila had been so busy cheering at being a new permanent hero that she got a little distracted.
After Ladybug called her out, Alya spent all every ounce energy to find out how she went from Ladybug’s goto to Ladybug’s no go. And then answer was in the comments to her videos of Lila. All calling out the Italian to be a liar.
By Monday, everyone in the class knew. As soon as Lila walked into class, Alya tore into accused her of lying and ruining her blog.
TO which Lila gave big crocodile tear-filled eyes, “I just wanted to make friends.” She tried to gain sympathy. It didn’t work.
Soon all the class was screaming at her.
It stopped when Bustier and Marinette walked into class.
Bustier looked like a deer caught in the headlines, unsure of what to do.
Marinette had looked directly at Lila, “You can sit in back with me and Chloe.”
“Girl’s, she a liar,” Alya hissed. “You were right.”
Marinette scoffed, “And yet she’s a better friend than you ever were.” She looked at Lila again, ignoring the protests from her classmates around her. “Come on.
Lila smiled as the two girls made their way to the back of the classroom to join Chloe in the back.
Lila, Marinette, and Chloe sent matching Ice Queen looks to the rest of the students in class; daring them to say something, to approach.
And just like the heroes: Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, Lila likened them to be; no one would even consider it.
It wasn’t like anyone else in the class was worth a damn anyway.
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Precious Glass [pt. 1]
(NOTE: I was going to wait until I made some sketches for the fics but they might take too long, so I’ll just post the story now before I re-edit and add the pics later, I’ll post them in my art blog at the same time too)
There is no one in the Rose Kingdom who doesn’t know of the name, Divus Crewel, unless they live under a rock. The man with the iconic black and white hair and signature fur coat, not to mention he’s always brought his smoking pipe with him to wherever he goes.
Divus Crewel is a man who has high standards for being a perfectionist when it comes to the clothes he wears; he won’t settle for anything that doesn't meet even one of his standards.
Plenty of fashion brands try to design new clothes and hope he’ll review them, though his criticism is rather scathing and even downright blunt, it’s what makes the products better and boosts the sales.
But because of his reputation as the Monster Fashionista, many give up and couldn’t handle his brutal honesty. Gaspard was well aware of Divus’ reputation and although he knows that if he approves of the shoes that he created, then his business will flourish from his stamp of approval. But he’s such a soft-hearted man, he still feels like his designs aren’t ready to present to the big leagues of the fashion world.
So, that’s why he decided to play safe and chose to present it to a noble who wanted some shoes to match his newest outfit. Gaspard decided to take the opportunity to travel to the Rose Kingdom to deliver his shoes, he brought his precious daughter, Ella with him.
The carriage arrived at the noble’s estate where the father and daughter got off the carriage and were invited inside by the butler. When Gaspard presented the shoes, the noble was very impressed by his work that he wanted to invite him as his plus one along with his daughter as thanks.
Though Gaspard thought that it was too much for some footwear, it was a good opportunity to be introduced to more social elites who can help boost his business. So, he took the invitation and thanked the noble before heading home with his daughter in tow.
When the day of the party came, Gaspard and Ella went inside the grand venue along with the noble and his wife. He held with him a fancy bag containing his latest designs to show off to. The entire place was a paradise for the Glaciels, everywhere is a gold mine for new inspiring designs. The ladies with the feathered fans and mermaid dresses, the gentlemen with silk coats and shiny leather shoes, the family of two can’t help but zone out a bit during the event.
But Gaspard was snapped out of his daydreaming when the noble mentioned his name and beckoned him to come forward. He let Ella sit on a nearby chair as he took out one of his eye-catching works and presented it to the group.
The noblemen have gathered around him to marvel at his craftsmanship. While he was busy with entertaining business opportunities, Ella’s attention was on a peculiar man with black and white hair that was lounging on a corner sofa, sipping red wine.
She took note of his red and black vest and the faux fur coat that he wore loosely, she noticed that her father just happened to pack a nice pair of shoes that would make his outfit better by a lot. Swinging her little legs off the chair to rummage in the bag, she pulls out a pair of black shoes with red outlining the bottom part with a red gem adorned on top. She speed-walked to the man, being mindful of the people she might bump into.
As she walked, some of the nobles looked to her in amusement and complimented on how doll-like she was in her baby blue dress. Once she reached her target however, the nobles paled as they know Divus isn’t probably fond of children and most tend to stay away from him.
Divus looked to his side and was mildly surprised to see a rather adorable little doll looking up at him with her bright blue eyes.
“Hello, sir!” She greets him with a perfectly executed curtsey, which makes him smirk. This little pup was very brave to speak to him, most children ran away from one look on his face, the entire situation was amusing to him. He decided to play along to see what the little pup could do.
“Good day to you as well, young lady… what business do you have with someone like me?”
“I noticed you wear a very dashing ensemble, and I couldn’t help but notice how it would look more dashing once you wear a new pair of shoes!” She presents the shoes to him wearing a proud smile.
That got the people nearby to start praying for the child, if there’s one thing Divus hates, its people questioning his fashion sense. They thought she’ll never live to see another day after this.
But Divus was silent, he wasn’t scowling… far from it, he was genuinely surprised at the child. He looked at the shoes she offered; they were absolutely marvelous. At first, he thought it was the child who made them, but she couldn’t have. She must know who the designer of the shoes was, and if she does then he might have to grab the opportunity to meet the designer of such exquisite shoes.
“Little lady, would you care to tell me who made these lovely shoes?” He grins at her and she nods her head before pointing to her father in the group over the other side of the room.
Divus gets up from his seat and puts down his wine glass on the table to walk towards where Gaspard and the others are, with Ella walking behind him.
As Divus was approaching, Gaspard started to notice how the others froze and started to back away from him, which made him worried. Did he come on too strong? Was he too forward and has now made it awkward for himself? Before he could even answer his thoughts, a gloved hand lands on his shoulder and he hears a deep voice full of pride. Divus grins at him when he turns his head to look.
“You must be that man who brought his dear little pup into this party~” he teased, not realizing that Gaspard just may have gotten pale.
“I-If my daughter did anything to offend you then-“, he was cut off by Divus chuckling, Gaspard thought he had a chance of staying clear of his radar, but he can’t exactly blame Ella for approaching him, he knows she likes to approach people who catch her eye.
“I must say, she was quite the salesperson when she approached me! Hardly anyone has managed to convince me to try anything other than what I picked; you know”
That caught him off guard, Divus was known for being extremely picky with his clothes and recommendations are risky unless you truly understand his tastes. He glanced at Ella who was holding his newest design in her tiny little hands, her smile is practically beaming with anticipation.
“I must know the name of the designer who made the shoes”
“I-I am Gaspard Antoine Glaciel, and this is my daughter… Ella Glaciel, p-pleased to meet you, Sir Crewel!”
“Glaciel? My, my… to think that I’d meet members of the famed Glaciel family”
“Famed?!”
“I’ve read articles about the Glasswork Kingdom and their fashion; I’ve always wanted to see for myself but I was always swamped with work… Your designer brand was always front cover of your kingdom's newspapers”
That was so surreal hearing from the monster fashionista, to think that Divus Crewel himself was looking into his business when he thought that his designs might not get accepted by him. He could feel a bit of shame for putting himself down just because he was scared of a bit of bluntness.
He was snapped out of his daydreaming when Divus handed him a business card, it contained his number and an address.
“It’s a pleasure to get acquainted with a fine man who sees fashion the way I do. If you ever have new designs please do contact me. I look forward to doing business with you~”
Gaspard’s jaw hung open as Divus walked off but not before turning back to him to say one last thing.
“Oh, and miss Ella… when you follow in your daddy’s footsteps please feel free to inform me when you start your own line of fashion”
Ella grins at him and waves goodbye before tugging on her father’s pants, he looks at her with a dumbfounded expression.
“Papa, I guess you were right! The Rose kingdom certainly has a big opportunity!” By the gods, the heavens just had to bless him with a child that’s bolder than a bear. Compared to her, he was a frightful deer.
He says nothing as he pockets the card and leads Ella to the buffet table to see if there are any cakes, he can give her as a reward for helping out with the family business.
#phnx#dca#dca stories#diamond crown academy#ella glaciel#twst#twst oc#twisted wonderland#divus crewel
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By Timothy Snyder
Published Jan. 9, 2021 - Updated Jan. 10, 2021, 10:12 a.m. ET
When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.
Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.
People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view.
In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.
Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.
Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave them flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to his will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.
Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.
Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.
Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.
My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.
Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.
Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.
Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”
One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.
In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”
The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.
Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.
On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.
It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.
The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.
When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far.
If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol.
Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who deserves representation.
The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.
In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.
At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.
Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.
Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.
The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?
On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.
The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.
Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.
As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.
The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.
If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.
Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.
Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.
Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.
When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?
To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election.
America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity including “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth,” as well as the book “On Tyranny,” on America’s turn toward authoritarianism. His most recent book is “Our Malady,” a memoir of his own near-fatal illness reflecting on the relationship between health and freedom.
***
Essay copied & pasted here in its entirety for the benefit of those stuck behind the paywall. Follow the link for the accompanying photos and captions.
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Hey Alice... I think we’re lost. Please don’t get mad! If we just keep walking straight, we might be able to head out of the forest. As your guide, this little white rabbit can’t fail you here! But do tell me, Alice, did you multiply or am I seeing double vision? There’s five hundred of you!
Yes, five hundred! Five. Hundred. 5-0-0!!! Oh my goodness... this growth is absolutely insane especially since your journey down the rabbit hole started roughly about a month ago. Thank you for trusting me and the boys to lead you to a real happy ending. Thank you for not getting mad at me for disappearing every now and then. And most importantly... thank you for not getting mad at me ahahaha! Do not panic. Remain calm. I know the way. I just need to start at the beginning... where is Ches- I mean- Chen’ya when I need him the most. Hey! Where are you off to? Come back this instant, Alice. These parts of Wonderland are dangerous! Ahhh I don’t think they can hear me anymore... Deary me... Oh look! A fork in the road! A sign too! Let’s see... what does it say....
Event Details:
Prologue:
Perhaps you should have listened to that hopeless guide of yours, the meek white rabbit that lead you to this Wonderland. As unreliable as she may be, she probably has a better sense of direction than you. She would serve as lovely company now in this dark and eerie forest. The clouds shroud the moonshine. You shiver in the cold, pulling your cloak closer for warmth but to no avail. The grip on your basket tightens as the wind howls and the leaves crunch beneath your feet. Even the slightest sound sent you into a panicked frenzy. You regret your decision. You thought you could make more progress but it seems that you dug a deeper hole. Where is that silly rabbit?
SNAP!
What was that? Oh... just a twig.
AWOOOOOOH!
And wolves too? Wonderful. Your pace quickens.
“Please, please, be dawn already!” you pray, running away from the source of those rather terrifying sounds.
Light on your feet and with a shaky breath, you ran as fast and as much as you could. The contents of your basket, snacks the little white rabbit packed for you, shook vigorously. They would probably crumbs by now. You lift the cloth wrapped around the carrier to check. And to no surprise they were. Nevertheless, every bit is present therefore if you submit to your hunger anytime now, broken cookies and biscuits would suffice.
“Later,” you chide yourself.
The task at hand is to find shelter for the night— preferably a cozy cottage of an elf or something of the sort, a safe haven where you could eat comfort food and spend the night. Wishful thinking. A cave would honestly do. You’re tired for crying out loud! What kind of shortcut did that rabbit have to take?
Oof!
Irritation blinds you. You didn’t see where you were going. Not to mention this cloak’s hood covers a good portion of your field of vision. You pull back the soft fabric to see what you collided with. The surface isn’t hard enough to be a tree nor is it furry enough to be a creature of the night. You brace yourself for the worst.
Drawing back the hood, an ethereal site greets you. He’s gorgeous, something out a fairytale. Quite princely. Too princely. Too good to be true. His skin lacks sign life. His complexion is of a sickly pale. Something isn’t right.
He reaches for you. You step back in shock.
“Are you lost little lamb?” a smug voice coos.
Event Rules:
First things first: don’t save the event banner edit (or any edit of mine, really). Just click on it for better quality.
Okay now we can get to the actual rules and details~
Yes! Another milestone event~ I will save the cheesy thank you note for the end as this isn’t the section for lovemail and gushing.
Lost in the Woods is an event where you, the reader, somehow managed to get lost in a rather spooky forest with no company whatsoever. While running away from the many dangers of this place, you bump into a certain someone. Who is that someone? What do they do?
Imagine the rest of it! Tell me what you want to happen. What do you envision? Daydream away, but don’t be too specific! Tell me what kind of vibe do you want i.e. fluffy, spicy, spooky etc.
Here is an example: “The person before me was Riddle! Oh how glad am I to see him... he knows his way around Wonderland and now he’s offering to help me get out of the woods though it would seem that he’s hungry as well. I would like to share some snack with him~”
Another example if you don’t feel like writing out a scenario for me: “I bumped into Riddle and I would like to share snacks with him. I want a fluffy vibe.”
Something like that. And for all of these event related requests, please put a “🌙” somewhere in your request so I can sort them out.
This event is just like my Café Rosé Event albeit with a different concept and procedure.
However, unlike the previous event, I will be writing headcanons, scenarios, and oneshots for this event. My general requests are still closed so you cannot request anything that is not related to this event. Also note that you can only request once for this event so choose wisely!
And of course, all of my standard rules still apply.
This request acceptance period for this event will be from Sunday, September 20th @ 1:00AM PST to Tuesday, September 23rd @ 1:00AM PST.
That’s a total of three days.
It may change depending on how much requests I get for this event, but I am swamped with school work and three other requests are rotting in my inbox so keep that in mind.
If you have any questions, please message me or send an ask off anon so I can reply to you privately.
Author’s Note:
First and foremost, I would like to apologize to anyone looking forward to my twstOBer spree. While I have written several pieces for the event, this milestone it more important to me so I dropped that event. I’ll still post the ones I have written so there’s that. Plus this event is just as spooky~ But anyways-!! I said this many times throughout this post, but I’ll say it again: thank you, thank you, thank youuuu! A number like five hundred may seem small to other blogs, but to me, it’s a very big number. Moreover, I achieved this milestone in a mere month and a half! That’s insane to me. I’ve never had such rapid growth on any social media account before. Thank you all for reading and enjoying my writing. I know I’m not the most active or most socialable blog on this platform but you all mean a lot to me. Old or new, I appreciate all of you. I hope that you’ll continue to support me until the next milestone event: 1000 followers. See you then~
#twisted wonderland#twst#twisted wonderland imagines#twst imagines#twisted wonderland x reader#twst x reader#milestone#event#event post#lost in the woods event#thank you for 500
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Chapter 8: Wine Before Whiskey
Tolerate It
Paring: Modern!Tommy Shelby x Original Female Character
Story Rating: R (No minors should read this fic).
Word Count: 2,827
Warnings: None
Description: Tommy Shelby is the owner and CEO of Shelby Company Limited. Starting out as a Bookmaker, Tommy had big ideas to expand his riches. In the past ten years, the company has grown rapidly to expand its business ventures from bars to producing alcohol, manufacturing motor vehicle parts, and exporting. One of the richest men in Great Britain, Tommy Shelby, has it all. Unfortunately, the death of his wife, Grace, left the multi-millionaire mogul alone and depressed. He needed someone to fulfill his needs and deepest darkest desires.
A/N: I wanted Tommy and Rose to connect on a more personal level in this chapter. I wanted them to become comfortable with each other outside of the bedroom. I don’t want their relationship to be solely about sex.
I do not permit my work to be posted on any other site without my permission.
Tag list: @owenniasstars
Wine. A nice tall glass of wine. That is all Rose wanted to cap off the day. She decided not to respond to the text messages from her friends or mother. Rose was not in the mood to come up with some bullshit excuse for being photographed out with Tommy. Also, it was not their business, and she didn’t need to justify anything with an excuse.
With a glass of wine in hand, Rose sat on the couch in the living room with her feet up. As Rose flipped through the television, the front door opened and slammed shut.
When Rose saw Louis rush up the stairs, she called out to him, “Hey, Louis!” He ignored her. Sighing, Rose got up to follow her son upstairs.
“Louis,” she spoke through the door while knocking. “Is everything okay?” Still nothing. “Louis, honey, what is wrong? From the way you slammed the front door, you seem upset. Did something happen at school today?”
Louis opened his bedroom door to come face-to-face with his mother. “Did something happen at school today,” he said mockingly. “How about the fact that my mother was photographed out with a rumored gangster. Or the fact that some of my classmates are referring to you as one of Tommy Shelby’s whores. You know he has been rumored to date escorts mom. Did you not know when you first started seeing him? In fact, how did you even meet him in the first place?”
Shifting from one foot to the other, Rose looked down at the floor. She was too embarrassed to meet her son’s accusatory gaze. “All of that stuff, the rumors about Tommy, are just that, rumors.” Rose felt sick lying to her son. “And Tommy isn’t a gangster. He is a businessman.”
“That is not what I hear. There is a whole sub-Reddit about how he really earned his millions. I should show it to you. Maybe it would rethink your association with the man,” Louis rambled on. “How did you get introduced to him anyway? It isn’t like you both run in the same social circle.”
Rose sat down on the bed and drew her knees up. It was her way of buying time to formulate a believable response, or rather lie. Thankfully, she had already thought up different scenarios that would be the most believable.
“Do you remember that business trip I took with Linda back in March? It was to a conference up in Birmingham, the educators and practitioners conference,” she explained, which that part was actually the truth. She did go to a conference up north with her boss back in March. However, here comes the lie, “Well, Tommy was there as well. He just showed up unexpectedly. He wasn’t on the agenda, but he gave a speech, something about…I don’t know, I can’t remember. I wasn’t really paying attention. But it was at one of the social networking gatherings where I ran into him. We talked most of the night. He asked for my number, which I gave him, not thinking he would actually call. But we have been in contact for a while. It was only recently that we have gone on dates.” Again, all lies. Rose started to feel sick. She could feel bile began to rise in her throat.
Sighing, Louis folded his arms across his chest and leaned against his desk. He still wasn’t looking at his mother. “It’s all weird. You never really dated. Or not date so out in the open before.”
“Is one of the reasons why you’re upset with me dating is because of dad? Are you still hoping your dad and I get together?” Rose asked, concerned about what he would say. She wished Louis weren’t so hung up on the idea of her and Nick ending up together. It was never going to happen.
He only shrugged. “Is it so wrong that a kid would want their parents to be together?”
There wasn’t much she could say to that concept. “How about we get pizza for dinner, okay,” she suggested hoping to move on from the subject.
“Fine. I got homework to finish up,” said Louis defeated. The look on his face broke Rose’s heart.
“Alight. I’ll tell you when the pizza arrives. The usual?” she asked.
“The usual,” replied Louis nonchalantly while opening his school books and notebooks.
Rose left his room and walked down the stairs. She hated herself at that moment.
While Rose waited for the pizzas to arrive, she decided to send a quick text to Tommy.
As Tommy sat at his desk looking over contracts, it would be another late night at the office; he received Rose’s text.
Rose: Tommy, we need to talk. Can I stop by your office around 3 PM tomorrow?
The message took him by surprise. He wasn’t expecting to hear from Rose or for her to ask to meet up with him.
Tommy: Yes, you can stop by. However, instead of 3:00, let’s meet at 4:00.
His reply back was his way of maintaining control. He found it rather amusing that Rose felt comfortable requesting, or rather ordering, Tommy for a meeting. Tommy was tempted to ask what the meeting would be about but didn’t really think too much of it.
If the meeting turned out to be fruitless, he could end with Rose bent over his desk and punish her for wasting his precious time. The thought was already getting him hard.
Leaning back in his chair, Tommy began to rub his hardness through his pants. Taking his cock out of his pants, he began to stroke back and forth. As Tommy continued to stroke, he only thought of Rose, which was unusual. Whenever Tommy was pleasuring himself alone, he would always think of Grace. He would picture his wife on her knees or bent over his desk or taking her up against the wall. It was always Grace.
But now, Tommy was picturing Rose. He saw her face clearly in his head. He imagined Rose under his desk pleasuring him with her mouth and hands. He wanted Rose bent over on his desk, taking her from behind, on the floor, the conference table, against the wall, and the floor. Tommy began to realize he wanted Rose all of the time.
At that thought. Tommy soon began to worry about why Rose asked for a meeting out of the blue. He began to wonder if she was regretting their arrangement due to being in the press. However, Tommy told Rose that being in the press was likely, and she appeared to understand that fact. No, something must have alarmed her. He would find out what it was. He would get it out of her one way or another. Tommy wasn’t going to let her go that easy.
Friday! The day Father Time preferred to drag on and on. The hours on the clock appeared to move slower and slower, Rose noted. She was at work catching up on what she missed yesterday morning. It was the usual task; looking over budgets, setting up meetings, working on meeting agendas, finishing up the minutes from past meetings, and making sure the office was stocked with supplies. It was the same thing every day. Nothing changed, and the more she stayed at the job, the more fed up she became. Rose knew she needed to get out there and look for a better job. One that matched the college degree that she worked hard to obtain. A job that paid well where she would no longer have to be an escort to make a living.
However, the money Tommy was offering to Rose was better than any standard 9 to 5 job could offer.
When 3:15 finally rolled around, Rose gathered her belongings and headed to meet Tommy.
“Ms. Turner!” someone shouted at her.
Thankfully, Rose knew that voice. She turned around to see Isaiah with a megawatt smile, waving her over to his car.
“Let me guess, Tommy sent you to deliver me to him?” Rose questioned sarcastically. “And I told you to call me Rose.”
“Yes, he did, and yes, you did. Come on, we don’t want to be late,” Isaiah answered and opened the passenger door for Rose. She got in the car.
“You saw my son take the car this morning and let Tommy know, huh?”
“Yep,” was all Isaiah said and began to drive out of the College’s parking lot.
With the way Isaiah drove, he managed to make it to the building that held Tommy’s office in half of the time. He smoothly moved the car around the building’s underground parking garage.
“Okay, we are here. You can take the elevator to Tommy’s office,” he instructed and told Rose which floor to select.
“Thank you, Isaiah. I appreciate it. I figure Tommy is going to ask you to take me home?”
“That is to be determined. He might want to take you home himself. Have a nice evening, Rose. Take care,” said Isaiah and waved goodbye.
She selected the floor instructed by Isaiah and waited. Tommy was on the building’s top floor, so the elevator continuously stopped and let people on and off. When the elevator finally reached her destination, the doors opened. Rose only saw a few people pass by. There was no one at the front desk, so she stood by and waited until someone showed up.
Looking at her phone, it read 3:50. She still had ten minutes to spare. “Rose, hi. How are you?” She turned to see Andrew walk towards her.
“Andrew, hi. I’m good. You?”
“Same. Can I get you some coffee or tea?” he asked. “Mr. Shelby is finishing up a call at the moment. Please, have a seat.”
“Okay. Water would actually be great, thanks.”
Andrew managed to get Rose’s water before Tommy emerged from his office. However, he was not alone. He was followed by a very tall and lanky man with a full beard and similar hairstyle to Tommy, but longer on top.
“Arthur, continue to keep me posted on Changretta,” Rose heard Tommy whisper but pretended not to hear anything. She made it look like she was too preoccupied with her phone to notice the two men not far from her.
“Esme is working on it, Tom. She is having trouble with a few firewalls, or whatever she called them, but assures she can crack ’em,” Arthur shared. “Said she would get a file on your desk by Monday.”
“Okay, good. That is good. I’ll talk to you later, brother,” Tommy responded, patting Arthur’s back.
Arthur said his goodbye and left for the elevators. Tommy turned towards Rose.
“Rose,” he spoke to get her attention. He motioned with his hand for her to follow him into the office.
Closing the door behind him, Tommy told Rose to take a seat.
“Your text seemed rather…urgent,” Tommy began as he poured himself a whiskey. He offered on to Rose, but she declined. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, well…no, not really. I…uh…I don’t really know…” Rose began but was having trouble forming the words. “I don’t really…oh my God, it’s my son. He isn’t too keen on the idea of me ‘dating’ you. He saw the pictures. Apparently, some of the kids at school were making fun of him because of them. I have friends asking questions. Even my mom saw them, and I don’t talk to her at all. Everything has gotten out of hand. I mean, I wasn’t quite expecting this kind of outcome. It is a lot to take.”
Gulping down the whiskey, Tommy proceeded to pour another one for himself and one for Rose.
“Drink,” he ordered, handing Rose the glass that held the amber color liquid, which she took and gulped it down. She placed the now empty glass on Tommy’s desk. “Feel better?”
“Not really. Can I ask you something? It is kind of a personal question, but I’m asking you for some advice,” Rose asked and continued when Tommy gave her the go-ahead to proceed. “You have a kid yourself, a son. When I originally agreed to our deal, I never fully thought of the consequences that could occur. I didn’t think of how it would affect my child. To put it blankly, he is upset that I’m with you. It’s all about his stupid dad and wanting us to be together. So my question to you is, how do you go about lying to your child?”
Once again, Rose caught Tommy completely off guard with her question. That was not what he was expecting. The fact that she had the audacity to bring up his son didn’t even bother him as it would if it were anyone else. He was craving a cigarette at the moment. “My son, Charlie, spends most of his time at boarding school. He is only home on holidays and special occasions. When I have my son with me, he only wants to spend time with his cousins or me. He never really gave my ‘relationship’ with Lizzie much thought. To him, she was only daddy’s friend. Plus, the observation skills of an eight-year-old doesn’t quite compare to the observation skills of a sixteen-year-old.”
Tommy had a point, Rose thought. She motioned to him if she could refill her glass of whiskey. With Tommy’s go-ahead, she got up and poured herself a drink. This time Rose took small and sat back down.
Taking in a deep breath, Rose mentioned, “You’re lucky. It is so much easier when your kid is younger. They don’t ask so many questions or notice things that don’t add up. You can tell them pretty much anything, and they’d believe you. But when your kid gets older, prepare yourself for the questions he will no doubt ask.”
She looked up when Tommy sighed. He was leaning in his chair, staring up at the ceiling. “Charlie turned eight back in February. He is beginning to ask me questions about his mother, like where she was from and if we can visit the town, how we met, what made me attracted to her, all that stuff. The one question that scares me…” Tommy began, but Rose could sense hesitation.
“He’s going to ask why did mummy have to die?” Rose finished for him. Tommy only nodded his head. “I don’t envy you on that part.”
Quite soon filled the office as Tommy and Rose sat in silence and sipping down whiskey. “Who was that guy that in here earlier?” Rose asked to kill the silence.
“That was my older brother, Arthur,” Tommy answered. “He and my younger brother, John, both own a couple of bars and clubs around England. They have been working on a new line of Peaky Blinders Vodka to go with our whiskey and gin brand.”
“You really dabble in everything, don’t you. Where do you go from here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should try my hand at politics, eh. An MP to go with my OBE” teased Tommy with an exceedingly rare boyish grin on his face. Rose noticed that Tommy’s smile was rather sweet and brightened his facial features. “Yeah, that is exactly what my family needs is me in politics.”
Rose softly scoffed, “I don’t think we need any more millionaires in politics, no offense.”
“No offense taken,” Tommy chuckled and downed his drink. He got up to grab his jacket and swung it on. He took Rose’s glass and finished it for her. “Come on, let’s go.”
Tommy grabbed Rose’s hand and pulled her up from the chair. “Where are we going?”
“I’m taking you to dinner. We can talk more there,” Tommy proposed and guided Rose out of the office.
“I won’t be able to stay the night if that is what you were considering,” she stated while in the elevator.
“Not what I was considering,” uttered Tommy, honestly. He put his hands on Rose’s shoulder and turned her to face him. “Only dinner.”
“Only dinner?”
“Nothing more, nothing less,” Tommy replied, placing a soft kiss on Rose’s lips. He entwined his hand in Rose’s and walked her to his car.
He took Rose to Bar 61, London’s most famous Spanish tapas restaurant. When they were seated, Rose liked the relaxed and upbeat charm of the establishment. She was surprised that Tommy chose the place since it was more family-friendly rather than high-end/upscale. But the man before her was always full of surprises. They sat in a more secluded area of the restaurant where they wouldn’t be disturbed.
Tommy ordered a bottle of wine for them to share. He raised his glass for a toast. “What are we toasting?” Rose asked with a smile.
“How about to good health and new friends,” Tommy suggested and clinked his glass with Rose’s.
“And to new adventures,” Rose added, now with a sly smile on her face.
“To new adventures,” Tommy repeated, and they clinked their glass again.
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Baseball Trivia - Josh Anderson
Type: Y/N insert shorts, strangers to enemies-ish to lovers, series
Requested: No
Warnings: standard swearing
AN: This will be a shortish four part series. It’s complete, so I’ll put the next one out Wednesday.
She was never going to an athletics conference again. There was too much testosterone and not enough actual conversation about their field, and was now the biggest waste of $300 Y/N had ever spent. In a room of 250-plus communications directors, she was one of maybe 20 women, and all of them had somehow managed to get themselves seats in a clump on one side of the room. Y/N, on the other hand, ended up in the row with all the washed-up college athletes that were convinced they could still play. The guy on her right was rambling on about how hard it was not to check out the female athletes to the guy on her left, who was agreeing emphatically. Fucking assholes.
BU’s communications director was on the stage rambling on about keeping social media current, like he had any fucking clue how to do that. Y/N knew for a fact he didn’t even know how to post to Twitter, let alone how to run an effective page. Honestly, most of the keynote speakers were useless. Having 20-plus years in a field like athletics communications didn’t mean much besides knowing most of the other people who had also been there for 20-plus years. The actual job had evolved tremendously in the last 5 years, let alone since they first came into the field. It wasn’t just about writing press releases and keeping track of records any more. They were the people who wrote articles about the teams for the athletics website, the ones who live-tweeted games and kept the social media pages current and innovative. Y/N could almost guarantee most of the speakers didn’t even know how to send a tweet.
The two assholes on either side of her grew tired of being sleazy, and decided to torture her instead. Y/N took a deep breath when she noticed their attention turn her way. “So, sweetheart, what exactly do you do?” Y/N rolled her eyes. Those fucking assholes were really going to call her sweetheart?
She cut a glare at asshole #1 on her right, and he actually flinched a little. “First of all, don’t call me sweetheart.” Asshole #2, the one on her right, actually snorted, and Y/N raised an eyebrow at him as well. “Secondly, I’m the Senior Manager of Communications and Media Relations at UBC in Vancouver. I coordinate the press for all of our athletic teams, as well as organize all of the social media pages and our website.” The two were silent, and Y/N smiled slightly. “So what do you boys do exactly?” BU’s director finished talking before either one had a chance to answer, and it was almost too bad. She was looking forward to watching them flounder. Really, her job was a big deal. To be the person in charge and also be a female was a big deal, but to also be her age was pretty big too. At 26, she should probably still be working a low-level job, probably just now getting out of the internship stage. Senior management was usually relegated to guys like Mr. BU, who was old enough to be her dad, but hey: she was good at her job.
Cam, one of Y/N’s classmates at BC, was thankfully waving at her from his spot in the back of the room, and Y/N slid away from her seatmates without a goodbye. Hopefully she’d never have to see them again. “So,” Cam called out as Y/N got closer, “was it enlightening?” Cam laughed in response to her eye-roll, and Y/N pulled the taller guy in with a laugh. It was nice to see him again. After BC the pair had gone their separate ways, and now they were on opposite coasts. Cam was fortunate enough to find a job close to home in New York, while Y/N had found herself on the far side of the continent in Vancouver. It was weird, after being together almost constantly for four years, to see each other maybe once a year, but it had worked out for the best.
“Listen, Cam, the guys on either side of me spent the entire time talking about checking out the college girls. They were older than us.” Cam reacted appropriately, making a gagging noise, and Y/N was again thankful to have a person there with her. “Any chance I can get you to go out tonight?” Cam made an apologetic face, and Y/N groaned. “No, you have to come with me so people leave me alone.”
Most of the time, people assumed they were together and guys left her alone. If he wasn’t there, guys would be bothering her off and on all night, and she never attracted the good guys. She was a magnet for married 40-somethings who liked younger women. “Sorry, babe,” Cam said apologetically, “but my flight leaves in like 2 hours. I’m headed to the airport like now.” He reached out his arms for a hug, and Y/N grudgingly obliged. “I am excited to see you in the city in a few months, though!” The two smiled at each other, and Y/N walked with Cam until he reached the bus taking a ton of the conference attendees to the airport. “Have fun, Y/N. Go be wild for the night.” He kissed her on the cheek with a smirk, and Y/N shook her head at him as he climbed onto the bus. She would go out that night, Y/N decided, and she would deal with those men if it meant doing something spontaneous for once.
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The bar looked welcoming, in a part of the city that looked a little less young and crazy than the part near the conference and her hotel. Distance from universities, Y/N had learned, meant everything when it came to bars. The ones close to Ohio State had been wild, and full of college kids. Definitely not her scene. This bar, on the other hand, was perfect. It was homey, sports memorabilia on the walls and country playing from the speakers. Y/N got a beer from the bartender and settled in on a barstool, staring up at the television screen above her. It was playing a replay of the Blue Jackets game from earlier that day, a Sunday matinee performance that had turned into a minor brawl with the Penguins.
She sat in silence for almost an hour, waving for another beer about 45 minutes in. At one point three men threw themselves onto the barstools next to her, arguing emphatically about some video game, but they thankfully left her alone.
At some point the argument between the boys had become goofing around, and then they began arguing again. “I’m telling you, man, the Yankees were the first ones.” One of the guys mentioned baseball, and Y/N’s ears perked up. Baseball was her favorite sport to work at UBC, even if the guys could be even more cocky than the hockey boys, something she’d previously thought impossible.
Out of the corner of her eye Y/N saw the guy next to her shake his head in disagreement. “No way, man. I think Toronto was the first team to retire a number.” Oh, sports trivia. Y/N smiled. This was her specialty.
“Technically,” Y/N interrupted, “The Habs were the first professional sports team to retire a number.” The trio turned to look at Y/N looking confused, and Y/N caught the eyes of the guy who’d mentioned the Yankees. He was pretty, with blue eyes that somehow managed to be kind and intimidating at the same time. She held his stare as she continued speaking. “If you were talking about just baseball, then it was the Yankees. They’ve also retired more numbers than any other professional sports team.” Y/N trailed off as the three continued to stare at her wordlessly, and she smiled nervously.
It was starting to get awkward when one of the guys finally spoke, and Y/N almost slumped over in relief. “How the hell do you know that?” The guy that spoke, whom she now recognized as Seth Jones, was starting at her disbelievingly. Actually, now that Y/N thought about it she recognized all of the guys. Boone Jenner and Josh Anderson stared at Y/N on either side of Seth, and Y/N sat up a little straighter. Athletes. She knew how to handle them.
She shrugged in response to Seth’s question. “I’m a sports fan. I like random facts like that.” Y/N held out a hand. “Y/N. Nice to meet ya.” Boone grabbed her hand first, and Y/N relaxed at the sight of his smile. There was something welcoming about him. Seth followed suit, gesturing at the other two guys. “I’m Seth. That’s Boone, and this,” he shouldered Josh, “is Josh. We’re also sports fans.” Y/N smiled at the three of them, and Josh reached out his hand to her as well. His hand was warm, and she found herself caught up in his eyes again.
“It’s nice to meet you, Y/N,” Josh said, and Y/N had to fight to break his gaze. “Are you from the area?” She shook her head and looked away to clear the fog that had taken over her brain. “I’m from out of state,” she said. “I work for a university’s athletics department, and I’m in town for a conference.” She answered what would probably be their next question quickly. “And before you ask, yes I knew who you guys were. Baseball has my heart, but I do love hockey as well.” The boys all looked at each other and grinned.
Boone clapped Y/N on the shoulder, and she smiled up at him. “It’s nice to meet you, Y/N. So outside of knowing more about sports than everyone else, what do you do?”
Y/N laughed. “I work in athletics communications. We’re in charge of social media for the university athletics, coordinating press, stats, all that fun stuff.” The guys were all nodding like they knew what she was talking about, and she laughed a little. “You know the promotional videos and other random crap that gets posted on social media?” They all nodded at that. “I’m part of the crew that designs those. I’m the person who live-tweets games. I’m also the person who decides which reporters get to talk to our athletes and which athletes are going to be available for pressers after games.”
Seth whistled. “That’s a lot of shit Y/N, how the hell do you manage all of it?” She waved her arms. “No,” she laughed, “I don’t do it all alone. We have interns that help, I just need to make sure that everything gets done right. I actually have an intern that developed a concept for an absolutely incredible intro video for our women’s hockey team this fall that I can’t wait to help her put together.” The guys all nodded along like they were following. It was refreshing to talk about her job with people who kind of understood what she was talking about, outside of the people she worked around all day.
The conversation moved on from there, and eventually Boone and Seth left the bar, the latter leaving with some girl while the former headed home alone. Josh remained, hooked on the increasingly drunken words coming out of Y/N’s mouth. At some point they had moved on to embarrassing stories about themselves, and after Josh shared a story about biting it in front of his new team Y/N only felt it was fair to share her first-day horror story. “So I’m sitting there thinking I’m doing a great job, like maybe this internship was gonna work, when I get a text from my boss.” It was her biggest mistake as an intern, and really her biggest mistake in the field period. “It turns out I was live-tweeting the hockey game on the women’s basketball page.” Josh had the appropriate reaction, widening his eyes and gripping the hand Y/N had settled onto the bar top between them.
“No!” He exclaimed, throwing his head back when Y/N nodded in response. “What did you do?” He was genuinely invested, and Y/N’s mildly drunk brain was having trouble computing that. Why in the hell did a professional athlete seem so interested in the behind-the-scenes world of college athletics?
It didn’t matter. She had a story to tell. “I totally panicked. Like I’m on the phone apologizing to my boss, who’s not yelling but sounds waayyy disappointed, and at the same time I’m trying to delete all the tweets. It was hands-down my worst day on the job ever.” Y/N met Josh’s eyes again, and the expression changed. They grew warmer, a little more fiery, and Y/N found herself leaning forward to meet his kiss halfway.
She was never going to be able to kiss someone like this again. The couple of other guys Y/N had kissed in the past were good, but Josh was wow. Granted, players generally had a good amount of experience in that department, but maybe that just meant she needed to kiss more players. It was pure passion, and Y/N groaned when Josh’s hand found its way into the hair at the base of her skull. He tilted her head back to kiss her deeper, and then broke away suddenly. “Please come home with me.” Josh’s words were whispered into her ear, his proximity sending fireworks through Y/N’s brain. There was no question. She was totally going.
Josh smiled when Y/N nodded in response. He slid a fifty onto the bar to cover their drinks and then some before grabbing Y/N’s hand and tugging her out the door of the bar and into the street. They were close to his apartment, a little less than two blocks away, and his hands were all over her as they stumbled up the stairs and into his place. It was modern, with lots of windows and some random abstract art she was sure he hadn’t picked out for himself, but that was the extent of the tour she got. He practically carried her into his room in his haste to get her clothes off, and Y/N settled in to enjoy the night. She had a feeling it was going to be a good one.
Getting out of Josh’s bed was the hardest part of Y/N’s night. Not only was it comfortable as hell, but the man sprawled across the sheets was tempting to cuddle with. If it wasn’t for her early morning flight Y/N might have stayed, maybe gone another round, but the flight was coming up fast and she still had to get back to her hotel across the city and then to the airport. Y/N paused as she exited the bedroom, considering for a moment leaving a note or her number, but then she decided against it. It’s not like they’d ever see each other again, right?
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Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie, a video essay on how the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers recruit. Clocking in at 41 minutes, 6756 words, 633 individual drawings, and 27 sources (including three full books), it is by far the longest and most heavily-researched video in The Alt-Right Playbook. I am very tired.
It took so long to put this behemoth together that my Patreon started to dip. So, maybe a little more than usual, if you want to keep seeing videos like these, please consider backing me on Patreon.
Transcript below the cut.
Say, for the sake of argument, your friend Gabe is starting to worry you.
Gabe’s always been just, you know, a regular guy. Not very political. He likes video games, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, and anime. White guy shit. The only offbeat thing about him is you suspect there’s like a 20% chance he’s a furry. For all intents and purposes, Gabe is a normie.
But recently Gabe’s been spending a lot of time on some radically conservative forums, and listening to radically conservative podcasts, and picking some radically conservative arguments with you and your friends. You never would have expected this, not from Gabe, and, given the speed it’s happened, it’s worrying to think where it might be headed.
How have the Alt-Right gotten their hooks into your friend?
If you’ve ever known a Gabe, this video is for you. Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie.
Step 1: Identify the Audience
What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.
Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.
This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.
So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.
This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.
And so we come to Gabe.
Gabe exists at the intersection of the kinds of people the Alt-Right is looking for - straight white cis men who feel emasculated by modern society, primarily, though they do make exceptions - and the kinds of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. Gabe fits the first profile in that he got bullied in high school, and often feels he has to hide his nerdy side for fear of getting ridiculed. The Alt-Right also has success with men who can’t get laid or recently got divorced or feel anxious about an influx of non-white people in their community. These things can make one feel like less than the confident white man they’re “supposed” to be. And it’s the closest they will ever come to being minoritized.
Regarding the second profile, it’s important to know that Gabe is not categorically different from you or me. He’s a cishet white dude - his problems are not unique. There isn’t a ton of research into the demography of the Alt-Right, but there may be a higher-than-average chance Gabe has a history of being abused or comes from a broken home. You don’t know if it’s true of Gabe, he’s never said. But most abuse survivors don’t become Nazis. The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational: it happens often during periods of transition, as dramatic as the death of a loved or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could have gone down the path to becoming a Leftist.
This is not to make an “economic anxiety” argument: the animating force of the Far Right is and always has been bigotry. But the Alt-Right targets Gabe by treating his “economic anxiety” as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that, when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the Alt-Right before they find us.
Step Two: Establish a Community
Were Gabe pledging an old-school hate movement, there would probably be a recruiter to usher him into an existing community. But that’s the kind of formalized interaction modern extremists try to avoid. Online extremism has many points of entry, and everybody’s journey is unique, so rather than be comprehensive we will focus on what are, in my estimation, the two most common pathways: the Far Right creates a community Gabe is likely to stumble into, or infiltrates a community Gabe is already in.
The stumble-upon method has two main branches, one of which is just “Gabe ends up on a chan board,” which we’ve already done a video about. The other is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan’s cult of anonymity: Gabe ends up in the fandom of a Far Right thought leader.
These folks are charismatic media personalities (that’s charismatic according to Gabe’s tastes, not ours; I don’t understand it, either). These personalities may gain traction on any number of platforms, from podcasts to reportage to blogging, though the most effective platform for redpilling is, and yes I am biting the hand that feeds me, YouTube. They may get Gabe’s attention through fairly standard means, like talking about or even generating controversy to get themselves trending, while some of the more committed will employ dubious SEO tactics like clickbait, google bombing, and data voids (just pause for definitions, we don’t have time).
What they tend to have in common, especially the most accessible ones, is that they don’t present themselves as entry points to the radical Right. In fact, many did not set out to be Far Right thought leaders, and may not think of themselves as such (though they are often selling products, of which the Alt-Right are among their biggest purchasers, and it’s not like they’re turning the money away). How they present is the same way anyone presents who wants to be successful on social media: accessible, approachable, authentic. The face-to-face relationship a budding extremist forms with their recruiter or the leader of their hate group’s local chapter are here folded into one parasocial relationship with a complete stranger.
Why this person appeals to Gabe is they’re not selling politics as politics, but conservatism as a kind of lifestyle brand. They rely heavily on criticizing or ridiculing the Left: feminists are oversensitive, Black people unintelligent, queer folks doomed to loneliness, and trans people insane; I dunno if it’s a coincidence that these are all things Gabe thinks about himself in his low moments. By contrast, they don’t sell conservatism as having sounder policies or a more coherent moral framework, but that abandoning progressive principles and embracing conservative ones will make Gabe happier. Remember, Gabe isn’t looking for white nationalism or misogyny, what he wants is the cure to soul-sickness, and these friendly micro-celebs are here to offer a shot of life advice with politics as the chaser. It is extremely important that politics be presented as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs.
The second pathway is infiltration, which is its own beast. Media personalities sometimes become gateways to the Right almost by accident: they do something edgy, a part of their audience reacts positively, and, facing no real consequence, they do it more; this leads to further positive reinforcement from conservative fans, the rest of the audience acclimates, and the cycle repeats, the personality pushing the envelope further and further based on what flies with their increasingly conservative audience. In this way, they become a right-wing figure by both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience.
Infiltration is deliberate.
The Far Right will reliably target any community that has 1) a large, white, male population, 2) whose niche interests allow them to feel vaguely marginalized, and 3) who are not used to progressive critique of said interests. This isn’t to say progressive critique doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been baked into the property from the beginning, but that it has been, so far, easy for white guys to ignore. As such, progressives within that community probably don’t talk politics much, and women and minorities are perfectly welcome to post, same as anyone, but just, you know, don’t, don’t make identity politics, you know, like, a thing.
Given Gabe’s proclivities, he’s probably already in a number of fan communities where he can geek out and not get teased. And this is where the Far Right will go looking for him
Communities are at their most vulnerable to infiltration at times of political discord. This can happen naturally - say, a new property in the fandom has a Black protagonist - or it can be provoked - say, a bunch of channers join the forum and say provocative things about race to get people arguing - or both. Left to its own devices, the community might sort out its differences and maybe even come out more progressive than they started. But, with the right pressure applied in the right moment, these communities can devolve into arguments about the need to remove a nebulously-defined “politics” from the conversation.
The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.
(Now, it is curious how the things that provoke the most disagreement tend to be whichever ones make white dudes uncomfortable. One of life’s great, unanswerable mysteries.)
You can gather where this is going: a community that doesn’t tolerate progressivism but does tolerate Nazism is going to start collecting Nazis, Nazis whose goal is to drive a wedge between the community and the Left. Once the Left acknowledges, “Hey, your community’s developing a Nazi problem,” the Nazis - who are, remember, trusted, apolitical members of the community who might just be kidding about all the Nazi shit - say, “Did you hear that, guys?! Those cultural Marxists just called all of us Nazis!” Wedge. Similarly, any community members who say, “but Nazis though” are framed as infiltrators pushing an agenda, even if they’ve been there longer than the Nazis have. They get the wedge, too.
This is how fandoms radicalize. They are built as - yeah, I’ll say it - safe spaces for nerds, weebs, and furries, and are told that the Left is a threat to their safety. Given a choice between leaving a community that has mattered to him for years and simply adjusting to the community’s shifting politics, the assumption is that Gabe will stay. This assumption is right often enough that a lot of fandoms have been colonized.
What is true of both of these methods - Gabe finding the Right or the Right finding him - is that Gabe does not come nor stay for the ideology. He’s here for the community, the sense of belonging, of being with his people, of having his fears validated and his enjoyment shared. The ideology is simply the price of admission.
Step Three: Isolate
There is a vast, interconnected network of Far Right communities out there, and Gabe is, at this point, only on the periphery. In order to keep him in, they need to disrupt his relationships to other communities, and become, more and more, his primary online social space. Having made this space hostile to the Left, they now seek to break his connections to progressives elsewhere in his life.
This is hard to do online. The whole appeal of moving radicalism to the internet is that your away-from-keyboard life doesn’t have to change. You are crypto the moment you log off. Some thought leaders will encourage their audience to cut ties with Family of Origin, or “deFOO,” but, even then, they can’t monitor whether the audience has actually done it the way an in-person movement could. And so alienating Gabe from the Left is less controlled, and, consequently, may be less total. How much Gabe isolates is up to him.
But the vast majority of Far Right media presumes an alienation from the Left. Part of conservative bloggers and YouTubers making the Left look pathetic is doing a lot take-downs and responses. This is a constant repetition of the Left’s arguments for the purpose of mockery, and, for Gabe, it starts to replace any engagement with progressive media directly. He soon knows the Left only through caricature. It also trains him, if he does directly engage, to approach the Left with the same combative stance as his role models. (For reference, see my comment section.) And this is only if he doesn’t partake in one of the many active boycotts of “SJW media.”
In addition to mocking the Left’s arguments, they also, curiously, appropriate them. This is one part sanitization: liberal centrism is more socially acceptable; indeed, many figures on the outer layers think of themselves as moderates, even as they serve as gateways to radicalism. But, also, many of Gabe’s problems could be addressed by progressive leftism, so they sell him racist, sexist versions of it. Yes, there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, but the solution isn’t unions, it’s deporting immigrants; yes, there is a chronic loneliness and anger to being a man in the modern age, but it’s not because of the toxic masculine expectations placed on you by the patriarchy, it’s women being slutty; yes, wealth disparity does mean a tiny percentage of elites have more influence over culture and politics than the rest of us combined, but the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the Jews. And it’s hard for Gabe to reject these ideas without, in the process, rejecting the progressive ideas they’re copied from; the Right’s “take the red pill” is, to the untrained eye, similar to the Left’s “get woke.” (Or, at least, the bowdlerized version of “get woke” that is no longer specifically about race which came to fashion when white people started saying it, grumble grumble.)
Take the red pill or reject them both; either is a step to the right.
As this rhetoric slips into his day-to-day conversation, even as seemingly harmless “irreverence,” it may strain relationships with people who are not entertained by this shit. Off-color comments about race and gender can certainly be wearying for female and non-white friends, which can lead to a passive distance or an eventual confrontation [“why is everyone but me so sensitive?!”], which only seem to confirm what his reactionary community says about liberal snowflakes. If he says these things on social media, he may get his account suspended, and, if he comes back under an alt, you can bet his new reactionary friends will be the first to reconnect, applaud the behavior that got him banned, and repeat should he get banned again. A few cycles of this and he’s lost touch with everyone else.
Also, his adoption of the insular, meme-laden terminology of this community makes him less and less comprehensible to outsiders.
Over time, sources of information get replaced with community-approved ones: conservative news, conservative YouTube, conservative Wikipedia if he’s really committed. The Algorithm soon takes note and stops recommending media from the Left. He stops watching shows with a “liberal agenda,” which usually means shows starring women and people of color. Now, there is evidence that the human mind responds to fictional characters similarly to real people, and that consuming diverse media can decrease bigotry in ways roughly analogous to having a diverse group of friends, which is one of many reasons we say representation matters. By consuming a homogenous media diet, Gabe stymies his ability to have even parasocial relationships with anyone who isn’t a cishet conservative white dude or one of their approved exceptions.
To the extent that any of this happens, it happens at Gabe’s discretion and at his own chosen pace. It has not been forced on him, only encouraged and rewarded. But the fact that it hasn’t been forced can make him all the more willing to accept it, because it seems safe to consider; even though his life and social circle are changing to accommodate, he does not feel committed. But many Gabes have walked these halls, and, if they close the door behind them, there’s nowhere left to go but down.
Step Four: Raise their Power Level
(...and they say we ruined anime.)
Consider the ecosystem of the Alt-Right as layers of an onion, with Gabe sitting at the edge and ready to traverse towards the center. (No, I’m not just going to reiterate the PewDiePipeline, though, if you haven’t seen it, go do that.)
The outer layer of the onion is extremism at its most plausibly deniable. Without careful scrutiny, the public-facing figureheads could pass as dispassionate, and the websites as merely problematic rather than softly fascist. It is valuable if Gabe believes this as well; that, at this stage, he believe the bigotry is simply trolling, the extremists an insignificant minority, and any report of harassment faked. That he believe where he is is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. And that he continue to believe this at each successive layer.
People in the deepest crevices of the Alt-Right self-report getting redpilled on multiple issues at different times in their journey to the center of the onion. If Gabe’s first red pill is about the SJWs coming for his free speech, he’ll think that’s all anyone in his community believes; there’s no racism here, people are just making a point about their right to use slurs. Then, when he gets redpilled on the white genocide, he’ll laugh at those Alt-Lite cucks who tried to sweep the race realists under the rug, and at himself for having once been one, but acknowledge that those channels and websites are still useful for onboarding people, so he won’t denounce them. At the same time, nobody takes those manosphere betas seriously.
And this process is reiterated with every pill swallowed: gender essentialism, autogynephilia, birtherism, Sandy Hook truth, pizzagate, QAnon if he’s really out there. The heart of the onion is typically the Jewish Question, but these can happen in any order, and in any number. But each layer sells itself as being, finally, the ultimate truth. Each denies the validity of the others; the layers ahead don’t exist, they’re made up my liberals, while the people behind are asleep where you are now awake. That’s why they chose “the red pill” as their metaphor: take it, and everything will be revealed. That’s why it cozies up with conspiracism. But what’s supposed to follow is that this knowledge help Gabe in some way, and it doesn’t. Blaming immigrants doesn’t actually fix the economy, and hating women doesn’t make men less lonely. But, having been alienated from everything outside the onion, once that sinks in, the only recourse on offer is to seek out the next pill.
And pills are easy to find. Those within the network have laissez-faire relationships, even as they, on paper, disavow one another. When they need a source or a guest host, they aren’t going to go to the Left; they’re going to feature each other. The Left is the enemy; their ideas are beneath consideration, and the only reason to engage them is for public humiliation. [Shapiro’s book.] But you can interview “western chauvinists” and that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing them, just, you know, it’s fine to hear ‘em out, nothing should be off-limits in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, Nazis are apolitical.
And because these folks keep showing up in each others’ metadata, regardless of what they say, Google thinks there is definitely a relationship between the guy “just asking questions” and the guy denying the Holocaust. Gabe is softly exposed to many flavors of conservatism just slightly more radical than he is now, and is expected, at the very least, to not question their presence. This is an environment where deradicalizing - listening to the Left - would be sleeping with the enemy, but radicalizing further? You do you, buddy.
Gabe’s emotional journey, however, is somewhat more complex. If you’ve spent any time reading or watching reactionary media you’ve probably noticed it’s really. fucking. repetitive. It’s a few thousand phrasings of the same handful of arguments. Like, there’s only so many jokes about attack helicopters! But these people just crank out content, and most of it’s derivative; the reason to pick one personality over another isn’t because they say something different, but because they say it differently. Gabe just picks the affect it’s delivered in.
Repetition dulls the shock of the most egregious statements, making them appear normal and prepping him for more extreme ideas. Meanwhile, the arguments themselves? They’re not good. (BreadTube will never run out of shit to debunk.) They are repetitive because they’re not good. They’re mantric. A good argument you only need to hear one time; if you can follow it, internalize it, and explain it to someone else, you know you’ve understood it. But a bad argument can’t convince you on its own merits, so it will often rely on affect. This can be the snappy, thought-terminating cliche, or the long, winding diatribe that sounds really sensible while you’re hearing it but when someone asks you for the gist you can only say “go watch these 17 videos and it’ll all make sense.” Both these approaches are largely devoid of content, but, gosh, if they don’t sound sure of themselves.
And that mode can be very persuasive, but it doesn’t stick the way a coherent argument does. It needs to be repeated, the affect replenished, because the words matter less than the delivery. There needs to be a steady stream of confident voices saying “we’ve got this figured out and everyone else is stupid” or Gabe’s gonna notice the flaws. They are not well-hidden.
And the catch-22 of returning to that stream over and over is that these communities are stressful even as they are calming. People afraid they will die virgins go to forums with people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, you will die a virgin.” People afraid Syrians are coming to kill us all watch videos by people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, Syrians are coming to kill us all.” Others have already pointed out that rubbing your face in your worst anxieties is a form of digital self-harm, but I need to you understand the toxic recursion of it: Gabe is going to these communities to get upset. Every emotion is converted into anger, because sadness, fear, and despair are paralyzing but anger is motivating; Gabe feels less helpless when he’s pissed off. And so, while he’s topping up on reassuring nonsense, he’s also topping up on stress. And, being cut off from everything outside the network, the only place he knows to go to release that stress is back to the place that gives it to him. It’s a feedback loop, pulling him deeper and deeper on the promise that, at some point, relief will come.
It is a similar dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships.
When someone in Gabe’s community makes a racist joke, they are presenting Gabe with a choice between the human interaction of laughing with his friends and his societal responsibility not to be a fuckin’ racist. And not laughing seems ridiculous; everybody’s friends here; no one’s getting hurt; this is harmless. And so the irreverent race joke draws a line between the personal and the political, and suggests that one can be safely prioritized over the other. One way to look at radicalization is being asked to stick with that seemingly innocuous decision as the stakes are raised incrementally: first with edgier humor, and then comments that are funny because they’re shocking but you couldn’t really call them jokes, and then “funny” comments that are also sincerely angry, but, in each instance, since he laughed with his bros last time, it stands to reason he should keep favoring the personal over some abstracted notion of “politics.”
This is why the progressive adage “the personal is political” is among the most threatening things you can say in these spaces.
I’m not trying to make a slippery slope argument. Most of us who laughed at edgy jokes when we were teenagers didn’t grow up to be Nazis. It is a slippery slope in the specific context of being in community with people trying to radicalize you. Gabe is a lonely white boy in need of friends, and laughing at a racist joke is personal, while not laughing is political. Staying in a community that has Nazis in it is personal, and leaving is political. The personal is what brings people together and the political drives them apart. (The “only if some of them are bigots” part of that sentence is usually lopped off). There’s this joke on the internet that nerds perceive only two races: white and political. Following that logic, what could be more apolitical than an ethnostate?
They are banking on his willingness to adapt his beliefs to suit an environment that meets a need. That same need can be satisfied by white nationalism. There are few things more seductive to people who doubt their own worth than being told you are valuable simply for being white. And you can sub in male, cis, straight, allosexual, or able-bodied. It just takes priming: by the time Gabe officially embraces bigotry, he’s already been acting like a bigot for months. The red pill is simply the moment he says it out loud.
Change Gabe’s surroundings, and you change Gabe.
Step Five: ???
The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.
To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.
This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.
But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.
The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.
So where does that leave Gabe? He’s gone through this whole process of largely hands-off indoctrination - and I should stress his journey may look like what we’ve outlined or it may look different in places, this video is not comprehensive - but now he’s swallowed every pill he cares to, he blames half a dozen minorities for everything he sees as wrong with the world, and no one will give him anything to do. You’ve got this ad hoc movement frothing young men into a militant fervor and then just leaving them to stew in their own hate. Should we really be surprised at how many commit mass shootings?
This is a machine for producing lone wolves.
Leaving men to take up arms of their own volition is a way of enacting terror while being just outside the popular conception of a terror cell. There are also, of course, more classic militias that will offer Gabe clear directives - they’re recruiting from the same pool. And Gabe may stop short of this step, settling in a middle layer that suits him or finding the inner layers too extreme. But violence is the logical conclusion of an ideology of hate, and, should Gabe take this step, he can approach violence in the same incremental fashion he approached conservatism.
He can start with yelling at people on Twitter, and then maybe collective brigading, DDoS attacks, sharing dox, leaking nudes, calling their phone numbers, texting them pictures of their houses from the sidewalk. These acts of cruelty become games of oneupmanship within his community. All this can start as far back as Step 2, and get more intense the deeper he goes. Some people join explicitly partake in harassment and violence the way Gabe joined to talk about anime.
But this behavior can serve as a kind of buy-in. The Left and the feminists and the LGBTQs and the Muslims and the immigrants are all, within his community, subhuman. You’ve maybe heard the conservative catchphrase “feminism is cancer”; well don’t treat cancer by having a respectful exchange of ideas with it, but by eradicating it down to the last cell. Cruelty against the Left is framed as righteous.
From any other perspective, posting someone’s bank information is something you might feel ashamed of. Which creates a psychological imperative not to consider other perspectives. A thing that keeps people in is staving off the guilt they will reckon with the moment they step out. Gabe is also aware that anything he’s done to the Left could be done to him if he leaves; some communities even keep dox on their members as insurance. And the things he’s been encouraged to do to the Left will likely make him feel that the Left would never take him now; the radical Right is the only home he’s got. Harassment becomes another tool of isolation.
Steadily, options for Gabe are whittled down to being a vigilante or a nihilist. There are periods of elation: moments the Alt-Right feels it’s winning - or, more accurately, the people they hate are losing - are like cocaine. They are authoritarians, after all. But the times in between are mean and angry. They are antisocial, starved of emotional connection, consuming incompatible conspiracies that may at any point run them afoul of one another, devoted to figureheads who cater to but cannot risk leading them, and living under constant threat of being outed to the Left or turned on by the Right for stepping out of line. Gabe took this journey for the sense of community and purpose, and, but for the rare moments everything goes their way, the Alt-Right can’t maintain either. They can only keep promising his day will come, a story he could get from a $5 palm reading.
The feeling there’s nothing left but to kill yourself or someone else is so common it’s a meme.
But there is always a third option: Gabe can leave.
Pre-Conclusion: For Fuck’s Sake Do Not Make Gabe Your Whole-Ass Praxis
Before we continue, I want to state plainly that Gabe went off the deep end because he found a community willing to tell him that, because he is a cishet white man, the world revolves around him. Do not treat him like this is true.
If a fraction of the energy spent having debates with America’s Gabes were spent instead on voter re-enfranchisement, prisoner’s rights, protections for immigrants, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and redistricting, Gabe’s opinions, in the societal sense, wouldn’t matter. Reactionary conservatism is a small and largely unpopular ideology that is only so represented in our culture and politics because they’ve learned how to game the system.
And I get it. Those are huge problems that are going to take years to address, where, if you know a Gabe, that’s a conversation you could have today. And, if you think you can get through to him, it is worthwhile to try. This is a fight on many fronts and deradicalization is one of them. But it is only one, so please keep it in perspective. It sends an awful message when we spend more time trying to get bigots back on our side than we do the people they are bigoted against.
Your value as a lefty does not hinge on whether you can change Gabe’s mind.
Conclusion: How Gabe Gets Out
He may just grow out of it. These communities skew young, and some folks hit a point where hanging with edgy teens doesn’t feel cool anymore.
He may become disillusioned after the movement fails to deliver on its promises.
He may become disillusioned if something goes wrong in his life and his community isn’t there for him, if he feels they like his race and his gender but don’t actually care about him.
He may be shocked if he sees the Alt-Right at its worst before being appropriately conditioned. Charlottesville was a step too far for a lot of people.
His community may turn on him for any perceived unorthodoxy, and he may leave out of necessity.
He may be separated by circumstance from the community - a trip with no internet, hospitalization, arrest - and not be able to top up on the rhetoric. This may lead him to question his beliefs.
His community may disappear, either tearing itself apart or getting shut down by authorities.
He may have incidental contact with populations he’s supposed to hate, and have trouble reconciling who they are in person with what he’s been told about them. In his community, people bond over shared intolerance, but, suddenly, being tolerant helps him make friends. (This is one reason the Alt-Right has made a battleground of the college campus.)
He may form or revisit relationships outside the network, people who can offer him the connection he’s been looking for. This may reintroduce outside perspectives. More importantly, it rekindles his ability to have healthy relationships at all, something the Alt-Right has estranged him from.
As with recruiters, it seems these “escape hatch” relationships can sometimes be parasocial; coming to respect a public figure who is on the Left, or is critical of the Alt-Right.
Someone he is close to may compel him to choose, “me or the movement.” A lot of young men leave to save a romantic relationship.
Hearing stories from people who’ve already jumped may help; there aren’t a lot of public formers, and some raise suspicions as to their sincerity, but it is getting more common, and may be the closest we get to exit counseling for the Alt-Right.
He may become aware of the ways he’s being manipulated, or have them revealed to him, maybe because he stumbled into BreadTube, I dunno. Knowledge that you are being indoctrinated is no guarantee it won’t work - you are not immune to propaganda - but it can help one resist.
And he may revisit a core belief system that used to guide him, be it religion or social justice or a really wholesome fandom, and be reminded of the identity he used to have.
Moments like these, in isolation or in aggregate, can inspire Gabe to jump. They are also good times for friends to intervene. The reach and the impunity that comes with the internet means it has never been easier to fall into reactionary extremism. It has also never been easier to get out. People who exit skinhead gangs often fear for their lives; for Gabe, there’s a chance getting out is as simple as going to a different website. Much of his community does not know his name or his face and he may not important enough to dox.
What doesn’t get Gabe out - not reliably, not that I have seen - is an argument with a stranger who proves all his facts wrong and his ideology bunk. Facts don’t always work because facts don’t care about his feelings. This was about staying in a community, and holding onto an identity, that mattered to him. It was about belonging, and that is something a rando from the other side of the culture war can’t give him and probably shouldn’t be responsible for.
The theme here is human connection. Before he can do the work of disentangling himself, and facing the guilt of what he’s believed and maybe done, he has to know there’s somewhere for him on the other end of it. That the Right hasn’t ruined him. They’ve told him all of history is groups fighting each other over status, and, without his clan, he’ll be an exile. He needs a better story.
I don’t know that lefty spaces are ideal for this, in no small part because bringing someone who’s a bit of a Nazi but working on it into diverse communities is… questionable. And it probably wouldn’t be good for him, either; having just gotten out of a toxic belief system, he’s going to be deeply skeptical of all ideologies. In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him - to use a therapy term - a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings, where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged. That comes later. It is delicate and time-consuming work that should not be done in public, but we find these beliefs, built up over the course of months or years, tend to fall away very quickly with a shift of environment. Change Gabe’s surroundings and you change Gabe.
But, instead, a lot of people who jump are functionally deprogramming themselves, which is working for a lot of them, but it’s haphazard, and there are recidivists.
If you don’t personally know a Gabe, or have training as a counselor, you may not be in a position to help him. Possibly there are things you can do to disrupt the recruitment process or prevent infiltration of spaces you’re in - I’m looking into it, but talk to your mods - but, elephant in the room: meaningful change will require reform on the part of platform holders. Tools to disrupt this process already exist and are being used on groups like ISIS, but they’re not being used on the Alt-Right because they try oh so very hard not to get classified as terrorists (and also any functioning anti-radicalization policy would require banning a lot of conservative politicians, so there’s that...).
But what makes our story better than theirs is that the fight for social and economic justice, though it is long, and difficult, and frustrating, when it works, it fulfills the promise the Right can’t keep: it materially make people’s lives better. I am not prone to sentimentality, or to giving these videos happy endings. But one thing we have that the Alt-Right doesn’t is hope.
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wuxia/xianxia: a loose and somewhat second-hand introduction to the genre, pt1
Sorry for the unconventional q, but i keep seeing Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation everywhere and I kinda want to get into it but a) don't know where to start (web series? live action adaptation?? wait how many are there!) and b) i don't really "get" wuxia / xianxia, that sorta stuff, i find it really hard to cross that cultural barrier and chinese mentality seems very alien. (it's not that i have no experience w different mentalities but chinese in particular is v hard to grasp w/o sources).
So if you have the time and patience, I'd love to hear a summary of it (like, a coherent summary bc all i get on the wikis is a shower of names and concepts that don't make sense to me) and perhaps some "intro for dummies" abt the relevant parts of chinese history and mentality tied to it? not just the cultivation / buddhist part but also re: familial relationships, philosophy and all that. (v brief and low effort of course) Thank you and sorry for bothering you!
("brief and low effort" referring to what I'm asking from you, not to what I need for me - as in i asked for it so i'm more than ready for a complicated essay, but you can write with as much detail as you like, I don't want to ask for some sort of comprehensive tome)
Okay first, you do realize that if you want “brief and low” for anything, you’re asking the wrong person? I was a philosophy major. brief got drilled out of me a long time ago.
Second... well, explaining what makes The Untamed / Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (mdzs for short, from the chinese title, Mo Dao Zu Shi) such a standout story does require understanding some of the wuxia conventions it subverts -- as well as some that it plays straight (so to speak) very, very well.
I figure the best approach (again, sadly not brief) is to first get a handle on the genre of wuxia. Gonna break this post into two, so you’re not reading in a single three-hour stretch or something. I’ll do a follow-up about mdzs, to hopefully make it a bit more accessible for you.
before I do that, let me first say: I didn’t grow up with this genre, so there’s going to be parts that I may miscast unintentionally. for an insider’s view, my go-to voices are @guzhuangheaven, @atthewaterside, @dramatic-gwynne, @the50-person and @drunkensword. if any of them are reading this and can point to more/other/better voices, please do.
I have three analogies -- like cultural doorways -- and like all analogies, they break down when you get into the finer details. In the broad strokes, though, they mostly work, and if nothing else, hopefully they’ll demonstrate that wuxia may be a chinese-specific version, but part of a storytelling tradition that’s nearly universal.
The three doorways are: the american wild west, the samurai era, and the british arthurian romances. And, in a tangential way, the regency period in the romance genre.
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The term ‘wuxia’ can be translated several ways, but I prefer ‘martial chivalry’. Most wuxia takes place in the jianghu, a harder term to unpack. Generally, though, ‘the jianghu’ has connotations not all that different from what americans mean when they reference the wild west.
More of a concept than a physical place, the jianghu (like the ‘wild’ west) exists beyond the reach of the law and/or civilization. It’s occupied by a diverse cast of farmers, merchants, beggars, and so on, but also by outlaws, gangs, hermits, pretty much all those who don’t like the suffocating nature of the civilized world, for whatever reason. It’s not a lawless place (except to outsiders); it does have laws, but those are only unto itself.
So, jianghu is a world to itself, for the most part -- which also makes it kind of timeless. Tang dynasty, Song dynasty, Ming dynasty, it could be any of them and all of them and none of them. Just as the heyday of the cowboys and the cattle drives was barely a decade long, a culture’s romanticized history stretches into lifetimes that exist separate from any date you could pin down on a calendar.
The average wuxia protagonist would fit in reasonably well as knight errants in an arthurian romance, with one important detail in difference: they’re rarely aristocrats. Wuxia protagonists are just as likely (if not more so) to be lower-born, whether the child of farmers, or servants, some common caste.
This is where wuxia diverges from the british and japanese traditions, which have a bit more noblesse oblige going on (knights and samurai both being upper-class types). Even ‘aristocratic’ characters tend to be so only within the jianghu -- sort of like the way a territory’s elected leader in the wild west would’ve had no pull in Washington, given they weren’t from a fully-recognized state.
Wuxia does often have politics, between competing sects (think schools of learning), but that political infighting is independent of the capital’s rules or wishes. A lot of stories -- in the rare cases the topic even comes up -- tends to speak of ‘the capital’ in disparaging terms.
That’s not to say wuxia is all about the flat social systems (it’s definitely not), but most commonly a rank implies some level of competence/study. The title of sect leader isn’t granted, it's earned. Children inherit, but it’s also a common storyline to have an heir with no skills (who then goes through all the trials and tribulations to finally level up and earn that position in turn).
What makes wuxia hard to grasp is its vernacular: the conventions that form the backbone that make something recognizably ‘wuxia’ and not just ‘historical drama set on a frontier in a loosely-defined time period’.
Frex: in a Wild West story, convention is two gunfighters at opposite ends of the street, and at least one of them is wearing a holster tied to his leg with string in a way that no real gunfighter wore, ever, but Hollywood came up with the idea and now it’s a permanent part of our imagination. In the arthurian romances, convention is carrying the token of one’s lady love (a distant, untouchable figure who rarely appears on-page), or meeting the unnamed knight in black on the jousting field. Convention are the samurai who’ll die for their lord’s honor, always touchy and prickly at the first sign of disrespect.
These are things granted the most remarkable gravity, that to an outsider might seem ridiculous. (Why is there always tumbleweed?)
Now, wuxia is the latest evolution in a long-lived literary tradition (and by ‘long’ I mean like 2000+ years) -- but like any living tradition, each subsequent generation reinvents it for their time. Part of that reinvention comes from particularly influential writers, who put their own spin on things, and their interpretation becomes the next generation’s standard for the genre -- “of course wuxia must have X” or “a protagonist never does Y”. (Like how Tolkien almost single-handedly changed western concepts of elves, in fiction.)
And here’s where I explain what regency romance has to do with it. Another short-lived period, in real history, but along came Georgette Heyer, who took bits and pieces of actual research, blended them with her reactionary politics, exaggerating some things and ignoring other things completely. The result is a time-that-never-was, but she cast (and still casts) a shadow so vast that I’ve seen multiple romance writers complain that readers will see a footnoted-and-researched version as wrong, if it contradicts one of Heyer’s made-up conventions.
Modern wuxia has its own Heyer-sized influencers -- like Jin Yong (the Condor trilogy, Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils), Wen Rui'an (The Four), Gu Long (The Legend of Flying Daggers, The Proud Twins), to name a few of the biggest. If you have a chance or are inclined, the big names get remade on a pretty regular basis, and catching one will at least let you see some ur-tropes in action.
But it also means that you can’t really extrapolate, in the sense of saying, “in wuxia, people do X, ergo, X is also a factor in Chinese culture.” It’s like... take any western made in the 50s, and the vernacular is simple. The bad guys wear black hats, the good guys wear white hats, the prostitutes wear bright-colored dresses with frills and the good women wear subdued colors buttoned up to their neck. It told an audience exactly what character filled what role, but that’d tell you zero about real people you might meet in Nebraska or Utah, let alone New York City.
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Almost forgot: xianxia is basically wuxia but with ‘immortal heroes’ -- so there’s gods, divine influences, non-human beings as characters (main or NPC), etc. (Btw, by ‘immortal’ I mean exactly that, like this character is six hundred years old, that one’s a thousand years old, etc.) You can think of xianxia as wuxia, but amped way up on the mystical scale.
Xianxia will sometimes take place on earth (jianghu) but sometimes in the celestial realm (heaven). Or a mix of both, like stories where a character falls (or is banished, or defects) from heaven and has to go through various trials and tribulations as a mortal human in order to regain a power, rise in rank, fall in love, or whatever their goal is.
A number of wuxia stories are driven by some sort of mcguffin, but in xianxia, the mcguffin is more likely to be a powerful spiritual weapon. But I can also think of a number of wuxia in which the mcguffin would fit right in, in xianxia (some near-mystical thing with significant positive, or negative, power independent of the wielder, which often amplifies or boosts the wielder to an inhuman degree, etc).
Thing is, the mcguffin being divine/infernal supernatural isn’t enough alone to make the story xianxia. I’m pretty sure you need non-human or super-human immortals and/or creatures to be considered in the xianxia genre.
part two
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Is America really ready to reclaim democracy?
I’m going to share a fact with you — and you’re not going to like it.
America’s problems can be reduced to the following. White Americans want America to be a failed state — and that is its fundamental, deep, and long standing problem. That is how America ended up here — more than half a century of white hostility to any kind of social progress whatsoever — which resulted in social collapse, and culminated in Trumpism. White people made America a failed state.
But are white people ready to own this problem, of their own extremism? Is that long-term social position really about to change this election, finally, after more than half a century? Are white Americans ready to become a modern, functioning society? The answer, right about now, is a kind of hysterical “yes!” We all — all of us sane and thoughtful people anyways — want Biden to win, and put an end to the long nightmare of the Trump years. But — despite what the polls might say — how realistic is that?
“Kill Umair! Get him!!!” Maybe you’re foaming at the mouth, ready to dispute my simple fact. So take a hard look at the chart above. What does it say?
I have some bad news, and then I have some worse news. Don’t worry, you’ll thank me later. The first piece of bad news is this. Here’s a fact that most people underestimate. America is still about 80% white. 80%. Given the record-breaking turnout, this election is going to be more about America’s white majority than about minorities, probably, at least if every group turns out in record numbers roughly equally. Minorities have much less power than many imagine, precisely because they are still seriously in the…minority. This election is about white America, and if it really wants to live in a democracy — or if it’s happier living in a fascist society.
You might think that sounds over the top, so here’s the worse news. The chart above says this. It says that white Americans, as a group, have never, as a group, voted for a Democratic President. Never in modern history. In fact, the chart above in fact understates the problem. This trend goes back to JFK and perhaps before. Are you beginning to see the problem here? Why I say “America’s problem is that white people want it to be a failed state?”
Let me make it clearer. White Americans can be relied on, in the majority, as a group, to “vote Republican.” I put it in quotes because it’s worth examining what that anodyne statement really means. Liberal, sane, thoughtful White Americans often overestimate how many of them there are, how widespread their cause is. The result is that when I say “Americans are…” meaning of course the majority, which is still white, I get a wave of protest. Americans aren’t dumb! Americans aren’t dumb! They’re not violent, stupid racists! They want to live in a modern society! Are they, do they — at least the white majority? Let’s take a brief and hard look at reality.
Here are some things white Americans have been for, as a group, in their majority. Segregation. Endless war. Inequality. Billionaires. Capital. Guns and religion as primary social values. That is what the voting pattern above means. Conversely, here are some thing white Americans have been against, as a group, in their majority. Desegregation. Civil rights. Womens’ rights. Their own healthcare, retirement, and childcare. Public goods of any kind whatsoever. That is what the “voting pattern” above means in the real world. Need I go on? America’s problem is that white Americans as a social group, its majority social group, want America to be a failed state. They don’t want to live in a modern, civilised democracy, and never have.
White America is America’s problem. A big, white, ignorant problem. The problem of the white American voter — that white Americans don’t want to admit — goes back more than half a century at this point. If the answer is “Make America Great Again!” then the question is: “well, who brought it this point of self-destruction?” and the answer is….white Americans. They’re the ones responsible for the self-destruction of the society they still rule as a massive majority. Nobody else is responsible for their poverty, despair, and humiliation but them. That is what the chart above makes crystal clear.
Who voted, over and over again, to have worse lives? No healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare — no public goods of any kind whatsoever? White Americans did. What the? The question baffles the world. Why would anyone choose a worse life? The answer is that white Americans would not accept a society of true equals. “I won’t pay for those dirty, filthy peoples’ educations, healthcare, retirements! Why, their grandparents were my grandpappy’s slaves!” White Americans chose to retain power, supremacy, superiority, even in a failing society. They chose staying on top of decline and ruin, rather than prospering as equals.
Let me make that even clearer, by putting it in a global perspective. This is the part you’re really not going to like.
White Americans are the rich world’s most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way. “Voting conservative” after all doesn’t mean nearly the same thing in Europe or Canada. There, even conservative parties agree on the basics — people should have healthcare, education, retirement, that the only point of the public purse isn’t endless war and death machines. Conservatism in America is off the charts, and so “voting” that way carries a very different meaning. It means that White Americans are the rich world’s most regressive, ignorant, and self-destructive political bloc — by such a long way that they might as well not be in the rich world at all.
I don’t mean any of that as an insult, by the way. I mean it objectively, literally, factually. You’d think that by now White Americans would have figured out that voting against their own standards of living ever rising just because it meant black and brown people would have public goods too was…imbecilic. Especially watching Europe and Canada rise and prosper. They’ve had more than half a century to figure that out. But they still haven’t. What else do you call the inability to learn from the world and history but…ignorance?
Do you know what the word imbecile means? Someone who can’t look after themselves. But that’s what has happened: white people are the ones who wrecked their very own lives, futures, and society — beginning the moment, decades back, that minorities finally gained a few rights, in a giant, stupid, endless, escalating temper tantrum, that culminated in Trumpism.
I know this sounds insulting. But to speak factually and empirically about levels of self-destruction this immense requires us to reach beyond the lines of everyday discourse. Let me try again, then.
White Americans really are different. From their peers — or at least the people they believe are their peers. But the truth that their political choices over decades reveals is this. White Americans have almost nothing in common with White Europeans or Canadians — who back the expansive social contracts of social democracies reliably. White Americans reliably reject such choices, which is how they made their society collapse. instead, they have more in common with the ethnic-religious-fundamentalist majorities of nations like Iran, or the authoritarian-nationalist majorities of nations like Russia. They are regressive, sectarian, fundamentalist, unable to change, trapped by their own ideologies.
That is how and why America collapsed. Black People didn’t make it so. Brown People didn’t. Native Americans didn’t. America is still about 80% white, and white Americans make a certain choice reliably and consistently and predictably as a group — they vote “conservative,” but conservative in America doesn’t mean what it does in the rest of the rich world — it means something much more like Iran or Russia. Bang.
White Americans impoverished themselves, through decades of such folly. Voting against their very own basic public goods. Which meant they had to pay monopolists eye-watering prices for those very things which could and should have been socially provided — healthcare, higher education, retirement, and so on. Today, the average American dies in $62,000 of debt. Do you know what that predicted, a few years ago? A fascist implosion. When majorities grow impoverished, they turn even more regressive, violent, ignorant, and brutal. America’s white majority was already all those things — and then they became even more so.
A demagogue came along, Trump, who blamed white America’s problems on everyone but white Americans. Mexican babies. Black mothers. Latino immigrants. Syrian refugees. Gay minority couples. Everyone but white Americans was responsible for the plight of white Americans. But how could they be? America was and is still 80% white. Nobody was ever responsible for white America’s stunning plunge into poverty, humiliation, and despair — but white America.
But nobody wants to blame themselves, do they? It’s only human to project one’s failings onto others. So white America took Trump’s bait. And it was easier, too, to sell that line of nonsense, that racism, that prejudice, that bigotry, to a white majority that was already those things, and always had been. It was a self-reinforcing process, which was inevitable once America’s white middle and working class began to implode. Fascism was coming to America.
And it did.
Those of us who warned of it were called alarmists and hysterics and so on, when we warned of camps, genocide, bans, raids, purges. As all those things came to pass, and, sick to our stomachs, we survivors tried to warn all over again, we were mocked, shamed, and condemned. By white Americans. Even the good ones. We were told we were underestimating the power of white America to do the right thing.
But we understood something that white American never has about itself. White America has never done the right thing. Ever. At least not in modern history. White America, again, the chart shows us, has been for segregation and war and brutality — and against desegregation, women’s rights, civil rights, and so on. White America, as a group, as a majority, has never, ever voted for anything even slightly towards greater equality, justice, freedom, for all. It has only ever voted to preserve, maintain, and expand its own power. Ever.
White Americans — the good and reasonable ones — overestimate their social group so badly that they probably imagine a majority of white people voted for Obama. Wrong. Even Obama couldn’t win a majority of whites. The only candidate who came close was Bill Clinton — and even he failed. White Americans, again, never voted any way but fanatically “conservative”, which, in global terms, means more like majorities in Iran or Russia than Canada or Europe — regressive, ignorant, brutal, hostile, selfish, and supremacist, not modern, gentle, fair, wise, sophisticated, thoughtful, peaceful, tolerant.
White America’s escalating temper tantrum — its pattern of regressive voting — finally escalated in Trumpism. That is how all of America ended up here. Ruled by white America’s fascists and fanatics, too. Which even the sane and thoughtful white Americans despair at. But will they finally understand themselves? Can they look in the mirror once and for all?
We survivors and scholars have seen all this before — the phenomenon of the deceptive majority. By “deceptive majority,” I mean the idea that good and reasonable white Americans have about themselves. That as a majority, they are good and reasonable, and so goodness and sanity and reason will prevail in the end. They have not in America precisely because white Americans badly overestimate just how sane and reasonable their group in society is. How can they be, when they think guns matter more than healthcare and human rights?
I’m sorry if that sounds harsh. But again, I am only speaking to you factually, empirically, objectively. White Americans have voted over again and again for their guns and their Bibles — but they have never, ever voted as group to have healthcare or retirement for all or any single aspect of a functioning modern society whatsoever. Not to this day.
White America seemed to prefer supremacism and theocracy and authoritarian-fascism over modernity, as a social group. And that is how America ended up being a failed state. That, my friend, is the ugly and difficult fact.
That is the problem of the white American voter. And it spells real trouble.
Because when we say things like “Biden will win in a landslide!” what we are really saying is: white American as a group will, for the first time in modern history, not vote Republican. That they will, as a group, vote for something other than regressivism of the most extreme kind on offer. That the massive tide and force of history will suddenly turn on its head. That a decades long trend will simply reverse itself en masse, like never before.
We are asking for something greater than we may know — for history to deliver us a genuine transformation in long-standing political and social attitudes amongst a majority that has never, ever felt the way we wish them to. Who have never, ever been on the side of modernity or greater democracy or more civilization.
We are hoping for change of the deepest kind. Are we overconfident, then?
I’m not saying that a Biden landslide is impossible. But I am willing, at this stage, to call it unlikely. I don’t think white America is suddenly going to reverse decades of history. I think history has a terrible momentum and inertia, which doesn’t turn itself around so easily. I think social attitudes and political preferences don’t simply magically upend themselves overnight. I don’t think white America as a majority is going to back Biden. (If it does, it will be thanks to young people, though.)
Where does that leave us? Not in a very good place. The problem of the white American voter is very, very real. More real than white Americans know — which is precisely why their pundits and intellectuals never discuss it: they are giving their own social group’s regressivism and imbecility a free pass. But it’s the elephant in the room, just how different white Americans really are, as a group, in the majority, how regressive, cruel, hostile, ignorant, and backwards. That’s not an opinion — it’s a sad, terrible, frightening fact.
It’s possible that minorities will deliver the election for Biden. That’s if turnout for them is much, much higher than for whites. We don’t know, really, if that’s the case. I’d say while the chances are slim, they are very real.
More likely, though, is the following scenario. White America votes the way it always has as a group, as a majority — to screw everyone else over, as hard as possible, even if it itself pays a price. That will lead to three possible outcomes. One, an outright Trump victory. Two, a undecided election, which the Supreme Court will obviously hand to Trump. Or three, the most likely, in my estimation, months of chaos, as America tries to figure out what to do next, about the mess its in, and the GOP makes every grab for raw power.
And the protests of the good and thoughtful white Americans don’t help: “not all of us!” Sure, Chet, not all of you. But enough of you have been like this for most of modern history. Embittered, hostile, cruel, backwards.
Is that about to change? I don’t know, my friends. I doubt it, but I hope so. So why do I tell you this? Because we minorities are what we have always been: barely tolerated interlopers and hated intruders in the Promised Land. You, my white American friend, are the only one with the power to change any of it.
Umair October 2020
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