#no seriously the comments for that tweet are foul.

[moldsporr]

I can't stand the Persona fandom on twitter. I found out that in Persona 5 Tactica, you can pretend to marry all the Phantom thieves except Morgana, Akechi, and Sumire. And I was so excited!!! This is great!!! Then I see this article (linked so you can read the full thing yourself)

And like. Come ON. Is there anything "obsessive" about gay marriage here???

The way people are reacting to this post is insane. There is??? No sexualization here????? Gay people aren't inherently sexual. I thought people had moved past that.

Of course people were going to be worried about how they handled it. Did they forget about the gay couple/drag queen npcs??? That was fucking awful.

Twitter needs to implode

[redclercs]

DELICATE✰ CHARLES LECLERC.

ix. i'm so sick of running as fast as i can

— the one where they painted you out to be bad (so it's okay that you're mad).

warnings: fair warning you're going to be pissed, foul language, this one has more media between text and it's a little long. 2.3k words (+articles and a very long youtube thing!!)

currently playing: it's time to go by taylor swift!

masterlist ✢ next

By Alana Blake

YOU read it here first, friends. #YNCHARLES is still going strong even after the mess y/n found herself in during the Spanish Grand Prix weekend.

Rumor had it that after y/n's declarations where she said 'it was not serious' and 'she was just having fun', the Monegasque heartthrob dumped her immediately. This was fueled by the fact that we didn't see any pictures of them together during such weekend.

But sources have come to the rescue, letting us all know they're not broken up! "They talk every day for hours," our source said, "Both are still trying to keep it fun but more lowkey after everyone found out about the cheating."

RELATED: Victoria Presley's top five beauty hacks.

You would think that after a partner refers to you as a 'toy', dumping them is the best course of action, but apparently that doesn't apply to Mr. Leclerc who has "nothing but good things to say about y/n".

"He's excited to see her in New York before the Canada Grand Prix, they have it all planned out since she has her apartment back." The source added.

One thing is for sure, if we see y/n at the next Grand Prix, that's the big confirmation that they are together, since they blew their Elix cover by forcing them to end the contract.

SEE ALSO:

→ Victoria Presley's inauguration after party at the Grand Havana Room, you just had to be there.

→ Taylor Swift defends y/n y/ln: ''All of you have learned nothing!"

→ Aidan Kim on Charles Leclerc: "Never heard of him until my girlfriend cheated on me"

𝙂𝙊𝙏 𝙎𝙊𝙈𝙀𝙏𝙃𝙄𝙉𝙂 𝙏𝙊 𝙎𝘼𝙔? 𝙇𝙀𝘼𝙑𝙀 𝘼 𝘾𝙊𝙈𝙈𝙀𝙉𝙏 𝘽𝙀𝙇𝙊𝙒!

You're seeing the top comments.

Anonymous – 4 hr ago

They're both so shameless! and charles was liking tweets saying they were friends like he could really trick us.

kollhha – 3 hr ago

I hate her, Charles dump her ass for the love of god.

adriennewells – 40 min ago

no but seriously what is it about y/n that has men brainwashed?

Anonymous – 10 min ago

They WOULD be cute together, i don't think they're dating though.

June 10th, Los Angeles, California

You fit your life for the past months into two suitcases, and a carry on. Your room at Vic's house is messy and it feels strangely empty without your discarded shoes and dirty laundry on the floor. But it's time to go, you cannot impose your presence in this enormous house anymore. You have felt like an intruder since you started traveling to Formula 1 and coming back every week like this is your hotel and not your best friend's home.

"Are you really going back to New York?" Vic asks from behind you, voice low with sadness.

"Yes, Vic, I have to." you sigh, turning to meet her. She's dressed up in her fucsia workout gear, holding a light ring in her left hand and her phone in the right. Your flight leaves in the evening and you were hoping to have a meal with Vic before parting to the airport, but it looks like she's all booked.

"No you don't," she argues, entering the room. "Hollywood is here, y/n why do you need to go back to New York? You're an actress!"

You feel like a lot of things, except for an actress right now.

"I don't think Hollywood wants me right now, Vic," you say, going back to the unmade bed to lie down. You asked the cleaning lady if she could leave your room for last so you could finish picking your stuff up, and she agreed gently. "Plus, I really miss New York."

"y/n you haven't even visited my store, you can't go!" Vic's tone changes in octave, and it's not her whiny 'please don't do this' tone you're so used to. "I asked you for ONE favor and you're running to New York and you can't do even just that?"

"Woah, Vic, what the fuck?" you use your elbows as support to lean up and look at her. "Calm down. It's okay." you know her tantrum comes from the fact that she truly believes you could boost her beauty line sales and make her store a 'hot spot'. And it would work, for the wrong reasons. You don't want Vic being dragged down into this mess too. Mati and Charles are enough casualties.

"NO IT'S NOT!" Victoria is full-on yelling now, the light ring has been tossed aside. "I have given everything you've asked from me in the past months since your life started falling apart. I think I deserve something in return."

You ignore the bite of her words. She's angry, which is understandable to some level. She doesn't mean it, right? That she always expected something in return.

"Vic, listen, I know how important your store is to you. But I promise you, you don't want the attention I'm bringing to anyone close to me right now."

"Oh, so you're doing this for my own good now?" she scoffs, ponytail flying in the air as she turns around. "Are you fucking Charles Leclerc for his own good too? Or do men's reputations don't matter?" she spits.

You halt completely, halfway out of the mattress. "What did you say?"

"Oh, please y/n. You really want me to believe you don't want to be seen with me to 'protect me'" she throws the quotations in the air, "And yet you went on your pretty vacation with that bitch Matilde, and you talk to fucking Charles Leclerc every day!"

"Victoria, stop," your brain is a mix of anger, sadness and confusion. You’re having trouble catching up to the where the conversation is going. "That was different, Vic. In case you haven't noticed, things can't stop getting worse. My life is not good right now." You choke on the last words, because it's the first time you say such things out loud. You have never been more miserable.

Victoria scoffs yet again, and it’s a tear in your heart. She's really not backing off. "Of course your life isn't good y/n wah, wah. You have money and beauty and a pilot boyfriend, it sucks so much to be you!"

"Why are you so bothered about it? Why is Charles the main problem here?" you wipe the tears from your cheeks, scratching the skin with one of your rings. "Why the fuck are you acting like this?"

Everything was alright this morning at breakfast, when you reminded her you were leaving and your luggage was almost done. When you thanked her for taking you in and told her you could never really repay her support.

"Because you get everything you want all the time!" Victoria stomps to you, her face inches away when she stops. "You always get what you want no matter what. It didn't even matter that I said you view him as a fucking piece of meat! He still went after you."

The world moves in slow-motion as her words cascade on you. Your lungs close and your throat tightens again, and you want to fight the panic attack because you just know Victoria is not going to help you. How could she? If she's the one who betrayed you.

"How–Why–" you stutter, the hem of your shirt on your fist. You can fight this. "How could you do this to me?"

Victoria finally comes to the realization of what she let out, and covers her mouth. "y/n no– look–"

"Who told you about the ring?" your jaw is locked and you're trying not to lose focus. "How could you tell them about the ring?!"

"How could you not tell ME?! I'm your fucking best friend, you bitch!" she's raising her voice again, her surprise pushed aside because you're still fighting. "I had to find out through Aidan, months later."

The Cannes party. Of course.

You thought about asking her about it. Telling her it hurt you that she hung out so happily with Aidan when he was the reason you arrived at her house one night in February, frightened, sad, and confused. But you didn't because you trusted her. You would have trusted Victoria with your life at some point.

"It really is you, then," tears are streaming down your face again.

You feel stupid because only yesterday, in another rage-scroll through Twitter, you noticed people were already making theories about how it was Victoria who was selling information about you. And you felt so offended, how could they think your best friend would do that to you?

"How could you, Victoria? How could you make all that shit up?"

You talked to Victoria about the articles. You cried and told her you were sorry you didn’t let her in on the failed proposal, it was something you were still processing and couldn’t bring yourself to talk about, still wondering if it had been a mistake every now and then. You told her how sorry you felt to Charles because he just wanted to hang out with you—to be friends with you—and people marked him down as a home wrecker when he had nothing to do with it.

“It was definitely Mia though, wasn’t it?” She said as she rubbed your back and passed the box of tissues to you. “She always hated you, so weird. It was like she loved Aidan in a fucked up way.” Victoria even shuddered exaggeratedly, trying to make you laugh.

“Yeah I’m sure it was Mia, Aidan just won’t admit it.” You let her wipe your tears and smooth your hair down. Nobody could convince you that your ex-sister-in-law didn’t run to People and spewed shit. It was the most logical conclusion that Aidan was protecting his little sister.

This had been three days ago, she lied and made fun of you, to your face.

"So now I'm a liar? You are fucking Charles Leclerc! Or what, you expect me to believe all you do is hold hands and peck each other's cheeks?"

Again with Charles, it infuriates you.

"You told the press I'm a cheater! And I am NOT with Charles, God you're so stupid!"

"How would I know whether it's true or not? You never tell me anything anymore, do you? You don't care about me! I'm your best friend. I deserve to be your priority!"

"You deserve to rot in hell, you lying bitch." you don't even raise your voice anymore, "How could I ever love you?"

Victoria laughs, and your heart finally shatters. "I would do it again, y/n, because it's what you forced me to do."

The apartment is a mess, and you know it's on purpose. Your clothes are everywhere, the dirt from the plants you kept on the balcony is all over the floor, the coffee table is broken and your room looks like a hurricane passed through. Your coffee maker and your Specialty coffee both lie on the floor of the kitchen, and there is a horrible smell coming from the fridge. Aidan hasn't been gone long enough for things to rot to that extent, especially because every appliance is plugged in.

You don't want to look at the rest of the house, or your belongings. All you do is lean down to pick up your Moka pot, and make time to think, but you're unable to stand straight again. It's like the pain is pulling you down. How did your life become this?

A ruined apartment, a rejected engagement and a backstabbing best friend are things that happen in the movies. You would know. This wasn't supposed to happen to you.

Crying in that ruined kitchen, holding a Moka pot like it's your greatest treasure and not some piece of trash that you will never be able to use anymore, you get angry, furious. Because this is not your life and it was never supposed to be. And it's about time you start doing something about it.

You are sick of running. Of having people question you for not 'defending' yourself when you have no reason to be attacked in the first place. Relationships die, and yours had been past its time to be buried. Saying no is not a crime. And it never will be.

Victoria had burned her own thread with you in the worst way possible because you didn't make her the only person in your life. And you had overlooked every time you felt used by her, unloved, and tossed aside. Friends can break your heart too, and Victoria had ripped yours out of your chest.

Nobody has to tell you who you are, because you know. And you are nothing of what you've let tabloids, netizens and reporters say. You cannot keep running and you cannot keep hiding, and though you wish you had understood that earlier. It's never too late to pick yourself up.

Mildred and Walter are going to be pissed, but their advice was that you remained lowkey for however long it took Hollywood to get their next big scandal. Weeks, months, years.

And you're not about to scurry away into darkness like a rat.

FROM “JUST WATCH THIS” POSTED IN Y/N Y/LN'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL POSTED JUNE 12TH

[y/n,minute 01:30]: ❝...So I've finally decided to come here and tell you everything that has been happening for the past months. It's the truth, but whether you believe it is a personal choice.❞

[y/n,minute 05:56]: ❝It was a three-year dead-end relationship. You cannot, and should not, have a future with someone who laughs at your dreams, and tells you how you should behave and how to look to exalt him.❞

[y/n, minute 07:15]: ❝I said no. And I have not regret it for one second. I didn't tell anyone because I respect Aidan, although I don't think that is reciprocal by now.❞

[y/n, minute 10:01]: ❝I never cheated on him, and I know the source of those rumors. It breaks my heart to know that someone I trusted made up stuff about myself, and a part of my life that was so important to me. I am not telling you who it was, however, I will take legal action against them if the defamation continues.❞

[y/n, minute 14:54]: ❝Aidan decided to tell this person about our failed engagement, and I do not know if his intention was that this all became public. But I wish he'd been mature enough to handle it privately, like the adults we both are.❞

[y/n, minute 16:59]: ❝I started attending Formula 1 races because of an Ambassador contract I held with Elix until three days ago, when they decided to rescind it.❞

[y/n, minute 18:07]: ❝That's where I met both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, back in April. Since they are the drivers for Ferrari, we spent a lot of time in the same place, which led to us becoming friends.❞

[y/n, minute 19:04]: ❝Charles Leclerc is my friend and we are not romantically involved, I urge you to stop making stuff up about him too. He never messed with my past relationship, we did not know each other.❞

[y/n, minute 21:55]: ❝When all of this started, I believed—naively— that it could just die down on its own. I am an actress. I was not only 'Aidan Kim's girlfiend' and I am not only his ex-girlfriend now. I am y/n y/ln.❞

[y/n, minute 23:31]: ❝I should have spoken sooner. I should have shut everything down the moment I started feel miserable and out of control. But I also know, I was being crucified so badly because I am a woman.❞

[y/n, minute 26:00]: ❝You have made me feel miserable and anxious, I have suffered from panic attacks and sleepless nights. And I'm not saying this to make you all feel bad and regretful, because the one thing you lack the most is empathy.❞

[y/n, minute 28:45]: ❝But I want you all to think that, if it had been the other way around and Aidan hadn't wanted to marry me, you would have said 'he wasn't ready' and you would have let him move on and find "The One" in peace.❞

[y/n, minute 31:35]: ❝If it was Timothee Chalamet—whom I also have a deep appreciation for—doing RomComs and nothing more, you would call it 'his specialty' and never question his talent.❞

[y/n, minute 33:17]: ❝If I was a man, this wouldn't have killed my reputation.❞

[y/n, minute 36:21]: ❝I will not remain quiet anymore while you step on me and diminish my work. I do not owe anything to Aidan Kim except for the drama the past months have brought me.❞

[y/n, minute 38:11]: ❝I'm going to focus on the future. And I am well aware this will be continue to be a topic of conversation, but I am not scared anymore. Because I know who I am and who I can count on.❞

[y/n, minute 40:12]: ❝If it weren't for my fans, who have been fighting my battles so hard, I wouldn't be here either. They're here for me, and I can never repay such pure love.❞

[y/n, minute 42:22]: ❝If you watched up to here, I'm sure you're wondering whether you should believe all of this, and like I said, it's all up to you❞

[y/n, minute 44:50]: ❝I will not be speaking about Aidan Kim again, so I ask you to refrain from asking about him. It's all been said and done, and I'm eager to move on.❞

[END]

You are looking at the all the comments.

aidanbabes WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BITCH EVEN ON

flowerbedkim Oh so now Aidan forced her to be with him? Bullshit. You are never saving your lying ass y/n, fuck you!!!!!

thatbitch123 You are absolutely right y/n if you were a man this wouldn’t have happened it's so sad

ynbabes2 my queen i waited for you to speak for so long!!! WE HAVE TO MOVE ON FROM THIS

leclercstar you all have made this girl's life absolute hell, i hope you never find peace!! I'm glad she's friends with Charles and Carlos.

presleyvibes wait and you thank people but not Vic who let you stay at her house? you're an ungrateful bitch

albstappen I saw her pic with Lily Muni and I just knew she was one of the good ones

ynmybeloved EVERY TONGUE THAT RISES AGAINST YN SHALL FALL

kim41d4an IT'S YOUR WORD AGAINST AIDAN'S YOU CHEATING WHORE

June 12th, SoHo, New York.

You are trying to clean the mess around you as best you can. And although you could call someone to help you, sweeping and scrubbing keeps you busy and distracted. The first message you received after posting the video was from Mati a 'proud of you xx, tell me all about it later please!' text that made you take your first deep breath of the afternoon. You made an appointment with a doctor first thing in the morning, you want the panic to go away, you need it to.

Thoughts of how they're destroying you again, calling you a liar and a whore, swarm your brain and you try to toss them in the trash along with your ruined Dolce & Gabbana coat, mysteriously cut up with scissors. You told the truth, and not even the whole of it.

The video is being shown everywhere, you're sure you'll see it tomorrow in Good Morning America where they'll dissect every single move you make and every word that comes out of your mouth.

It's almost 9 pm when you finally stop wiping the apartment down, trying to get rid of every sign that Aidan Kim was ever inside it. It's not true that he paid for the apartment, you picked it yourself and made it a home and then he chose to come and live here, paying the rent once every three to five months. This is your home and you are reclaiming it.

Your phone rings and you take another deep breath before picking it up. Mildred and Walter have resorted to communicate with you through email, so you wonder who it is. Victoria called a few times during the weekend, left voicemails and text messages until you blocked her. Each of them with a new excuse and a more creative way to pin all of what she had done, on you.

It's a FaceTime call from Charles.

"Charlie!" you greet with a smile, before the image of him loads completely. "It's 3 am in Monaco, what the hell are you doing awake?"

Charles shrugs and you notice his bare shoulders, he's shirtless. You're suddenly self-conscious about the way you look. With your hair sticking up from the sweat, your greasy face and ragged shirt. It's a silly worry.

"I wanted to talk to you," he says, and you know he's tired. "I saw your video earlier, but I was doing something else."

"Oh, you saw that."

"I'm proud of you y/n, you are brave for speaking your mind like that. I know it must have taken some effort." Charles moves again and you see his chest, he's already in bed.

"Charles, go to sleep, we can talk about this later," you chuckle, heat is rising to your face.

"I wanted to see you y/n, it doesn't matter what time it is. And I really wanted to tell you I'm glad you posted that video."

"Thank you, Charlie. I should have done it sooner."

"The only one who knows what timing is right for you, is yourself."

"Yeah, I guess so." you sigh, you're exhausted too and you blame it more on the rollercoaster of emotions you've been through than deep cleaning your apartment.

"Are you tired?" he asks, suppressing a yawn.

"No more than you," you retort, but can't help yawning as well. It's a scientific fact that yawns are contagious. "Go to sleep, we can talk tomorrow."

You talked yesterday too, and the day before, and you cried so much on the phone again you thought he would eventually hang up until you calmed down. But Charles soothed you through the phone at 1 am Monaco time and told you to let it all out, and listened without interrupting you once how you called Aidan and Victoria every name in the book.

"Fine," Charles says, rubbing his left eye carelessly. "Will you give me a tour of your apartment tomorrow, then?"

"Yes! I finished cleaning it today!"

Charles laughs softly at your excitement. “We’ll talk tomorrow then, just because you need to sleep.”

“Sure I am the sleepy one,” you roll your eyes and Charles smiles, both dimples showing. “Goodnight Charlie, sweet dreams.” The last part you say it in a slightly mocking tone but Charles doesn’t take it as such, smile widening.

“Goodnight soleil,” he says and waits a few seconds for you to react to your newly given nickname before hanging up, anxious but satisfied.

─── team principal radio: ❝thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter and are liking the story so far. We're slowly getting to the y/n redemption. Once again, i really appreciate all of your interactions they mean the world to me. Also check out the series playlist if you haven't♡❞

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[ms-hells-bells]

Just saw that Rahul Kohli added to his misogyny by tweeting ‘normalize calling transphobes c*nts in 2021’ (The censorship is mine, he wrote out the full word) and I am suddenly taken with the desire to rip his throat out with my teeth. How about we normalize men actually facing consequences for calling women sexist slurs? If a man calls a gay man the f slur and the gay man reacts violently, it’s totally understandable and everyone says his anger and his reaction is justified. A man calls a bunch of women he disagrees with ‘c*nts’ on a public patform and it doesn’t violate their rules. If we’re angry about it it’s funny. If a woman punches a man for calling her a b*tch, c*nt, sl*t, wh*re, she’s overreacting. Our anger is never taken seriously. Men who are sexist and misogynistic are applauded when they use slurs against ‘bad’ women. There is nothing we can say or do because the majority of people do not really care about women. I am so, so angry but when I try and say that, no one takes me seriously. I am sick and tired of being nice. Normalize physically harming sexist and misogynistic men.

i mean, that’s why men all across the political spectrum love the current leftist politics. they hate the parts that affect them (eg ‘cancel culture’), but they love that now all they have to do to espouse misogyny is wait for the right, or ‘wrong’ type of woman to appear and then they can be as misogynistic as their hearts content. which is why although he’s absolutely a misogynist, women have to learn to grey rock these trash men, not care what they say about us, not bother freaking out every time they slur us, etc. because frankly no one cares that they’re calling us foul words, men (and women) have been doing that for thousands of years. we can’t keep trying to beg men to stop treating us like shit, it won’t work. so we should just stop caring about them, not sharing their shit, not giving them more limelight, just blank them out completely and focus on interacting positively with other women and doing things we can change, like keira’s amazing work. there’s nothing men hate more than being ignored and treated like nothing. he’s doing it because he’s getting sick satisfaction from all the upset women in his comments.

[forkickspodcast]

why are so many people on twitter hating on canwnt? i keep seeing tweets about how we are dirty and that one tweet about us being "shithouse queens". yeah canada slides a lot but i feel like they have gotten better and haven't fouled as much. (buchanan this cup has been way better than she has been in the past). it's especially grating when the uswnt gets away with so much but are continuously praised for their talent.

When Americans call us Shithouse Queens:

(Saw that comment and honestly laughed so hard. Seriously though I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s a bit of banter. And even if they legit hate our players due to tactics, tackles, whatever...it’s football. We’re all dramatic as hell about our favs.)

[edenfalling]

[Fic] “Take a Break” - Homestuck

Summary: Rose has a bad day. Jade has a solution. (600 words)

Note: This fic was written in response to the prompt: i've had a horrible week and you just brought me home my favourite treat, from snogfairy's wholesome domestic prompts list. It's also a fill for the Genprompt Bingo square: takeout. Part of the Leaf and Letter AU.

--------------------------------------------- Take a Break ---------------------------------------------

"Rose?"

"I'm sorry, the party you've dialed is not available. Please try again later," Rose said through the muffling veil of her handcrafted afghan. "Maybe some day when I haven't just spent three weeks on a breakneck tour and the past three days trying to run damage control on that stupid WisCon panel."

Jade's weight settled onto the sofa near Rose's hip, and her hand descended to gently pet Rose's back through the layers of wool and her silk dressing gown. (Rose had long been of the opinion that if she was going to brood, then by all gods both named and nameless, she was going to make a properly melodramatic fashion statement while languishing in woegothic misery. Besides, silk felt nice.) "There, there," Jade said.

"You're making light of my suffering," Rose accused from the depths of her fabric tomb. "The romance is dead."

"Light of my days, dark of my nights, our love is a rose in the garden of my heart -- and not one of those finicky tea roses that die if you sneeze at them; one of the heritage bush types that eat sheds and garages unless you prune them with a machete," Jade said, amusement clearly audible in her tone though she graciously managed not to actually snicker aloud. "If I still think you're sexy bundled up like the world's most ridiculous caterpillar -- which I do, heck if I know why! -- then I think the romance is pretty safe. But seriously, it'll blow over. And in the meantime, I brought you delicious takeout!"

"Food is a hollow conspiracy dreamed up to stave off the eternal truth of the universe's implacable indifference to life," Rose proclaimed.

"Yes, yes, the cake is a lie," Jade agreed, still petting Rose's back and shoulders. "But this isn't cake. This is fried dumplings from the Bamboo Palace, plus that weird garlic shrimp thing you like, plus as many fortune cookies as I could talk Mrs. Yao into fitting in the bag. I need to you mock the fortunes with me, Rose. It's imperative. I may fall into the broodfester throes if you don't, and we both know this household has a strict policy of only one unintelligible gibbering wreck at a time."

"This is blackmail and foul extortion," Rose said into the sofa cushions.

Jade's hand abandoned Rose's back -- a sudden yet inevitable betrayal. "Well, obviously! The question is, is it working?"

Rose sighed. "Yes, damn all creation to the nether pits of chaos. Ugh. Help me untangle myself and hand over the dumplings. I also demand chopsticks and soy sauce. If I'm going to be bribed and blackmailed into something approximating functional humanity, you'd better pull out all the stops."

"I even pulled out the embroidered napkins your mom gave us for my birthday," Jade promised, and, being a kind and generous soul, didn't take the opportunity to tickle Rose as she helped her lever herself upright and begin peeling the afghans off.

She did take the opportunity to kiss the rim of Rose's ear, but Rose accepted the additional bribe with regal grace. Jade's later insistence that she had squeaked was baseless fabrication.

And if mocking terrible fortune-cookie sayings gave Rose a better perspective on the deluge of offensive comments and tweets currently swamping her online presence, that was merely correlation, not causation. Or at least that was Rose's story, and since she was the professional storyteller in this household, clearly her words held more weight than those of a botanist.

Jade, the traitor, just laughed and stole Rose's last dumpling.

(It was okay. She'd earned it.)

---------------------------------------------

End of Story

---------------------------------------------

Look, I wrote a thing! :)

[dwestfieldblog]

THE ORGANISED WAR CRIMES OF ADOLF PUTIN

Remember this statement just before it all started? ‘The West has been destroyed without a shot fired.’ ‘There are no plans to invade’. Hmm.

News coming too fast to keep up, first off, sweet of Putin to send ‘peacekeepers’ (sic) into East Ukraine because the little darlings begged for help from the democratic monsters in Kjev. Does anyone other than a handful of grandmothers in St Petersburg really believe that with hundreds of thousands of soldiers (75 per cent of the entire army according to western sources) surrounding, that Kejv gave the order to fire a rocket at a kindergarten, or send ‘terrorists’ to attack Putins boys? The gremlin in the Kremlin plans a ‘denazification’of Ukraine. Thus ranted a man with small shoes while acting just like Adolf, invading an independent sovereign neighbour and murdering wholesale.  The world cuts off Russia from SWIFT banking system...which Mafia Vlad said would be taken as an act of war and in accordance, has readied the nuclear option to the highest level. The New Cold War close to white heat.

Shelling a nuclear plant is another step way over the borders of sanity. Sic simper tyrannis, we can only hope.

‘Facism is a system of government led by a dictator who typically rules by forcefully and often violently suppressing opposition and criticism, controlling all industry and commerce and promoting nationalism and often racism.’ How many boxes does Vladimir the Denazifier tick? So, Social Fascism (believing that social democracy stands in the way of a dictatorship of the proletariat beloved by Stalin but never allowed) is acceptable as opposed to National Socialism which appears to have everything in common. In other words, only Putin is allowed to be a Nazi Fyurer. Still, it is a very useful word to trigger a strong motherland response.. Zelensky is a brave hero, the type of president other types can only fantasise about being.

Putin was a taxi driver in the early nineties, nice he has a second job to fall back on when he is removed with prejudice from office. If he is allowed to stay alive. The problem wouldn’t end there... Medvedev, the former puppet PM/President/ whatever, recently tweeted after the start of war and sanctions that with the West ‘there is no particular need in maintaining diplomatic relations...we may look at each other in binoculars and gun sights’. So unless he is only posturing to remain in the bad boys club, he will have to go too. Siberian exile away from his more than a billion hectares of land. Leave them both for the wolves between the birch trees. And the very dodgy Sergei Shoigu.

Was reading the foul comments from the now offline Russia Today.  Hundreds of unlikely names from Western countries, writing in dubious un-English. The comments on almost every news item follow an endless pattern of slagging off the old guy in the White House, Soros, Zionists behind it all/ ‘little evil rat of a nation of money changers’ etc etc. Troll statements against black people...all in all, those who write so charmingly seem to be a blend of racists who would be ecstatic for useful idiot Trump’s return because they hate America and know he will hasten its end. Much as Boris Johnson has been doing for the UK.

Liked the comment that ‘Brits are insufferable and always have been’ If I were Scottish, Irish or working class English, furious offence would be taken at that. You foreign dogs, it is only the upper and middle class English who are insufferable, get it right. Arf. My favourite comment (but only because I ran out of a sense of humour after fifteen minutes and had to stop reading the poison) was; ‘The US funded the UN and they are both member (sic) of the gang. They were led by transgenders from CIA.’ Well, J Edgar of the FBI might have been a little bit queer but guys, who hasn’t dressed in female clothing at least once eh? Hahahahahah...ah that’s better, was starting to take life seriously.

Further proof of the worsening retardation of Donald Trump’s alleged brain continues with his first statement on Putin’s invited invasion. ‘This is genius... oh that’s wonderful, how smart is that?’ Fascinating that the very ones who follow him most, used to be the types who would declare such talk as commie sympathising and punch the guy out. Of course as the situation worsened, and many Republican supporters failed to agree with him, the sick peroxide one attempted to walk back his brown nosing even as he hinted again at running in 2024. Trump gets a button mushroom hard on for abuses of power, so very clearly he is a psychotic sado-maschochist into water sports.

Now...what about that 8 million dollar donation by Putin to the Brexit campaign to sway the results and get the five million Brits living in the EU to have their votes not be counted? Come on MI6, release the facts... (Seems unlikely while the current government are trying to cover up the oligarch money they received to booster their party. Perhaps after the next election.) Worst case scenario (if no nuclear war before then) is Boris, Trump, Xi and Putin still in power in 2024. Nice to see the ECJ quite reasonably ruling that in order for Hungary and Poland get their hands on the European treasure trove of handouts, that they must follow the written values to which they all agreed. Hard to do in Polsko, where the (bad) Law and (no) Justice Party have recently stated that ‘Gay rights is an ideology worse than communism...a foreign ideology’. All together now; NO, it isn’t you ridiculous people. Homosexuality verses Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and appalling student poetry? No contest. Good forgiving God fearing Christians with a firm grasp of realties. When Hungary and Poland reinstate the judges who followed the actual law and media outlets reporting the actual news as opposed to their government’s ideas AND allow women the right to choose over abortion etc etc etc, then they can suck at the teat.

Of course this could be yet another scale tipping in favour of the East’s propaganda against the lame duck West and both will be encouraged to leave the EU to bring the house of cards down. That said, I am very Very happily surprised that Hungary and Poland (and Turkey and even China) are firmly against Mad Vlad’s actions in Ukraine. Was not expecting them to all come out. Possibly this war will have the effect of uniting the previously steadily fragmenting unions around the world against a certain despotic mindset.

And now for some light entertainment...Just before the war, Prince Andrew settled financially with the fragrant Virginia...12 million pounds. Hmm, if there was really a genuine assault, why would anyone just take the money? Unless they are a w***e.. And if he was willing to pay (well, he won’t, his mum/ taxpayer and fading mates will) such a vast amount for something he didn’t do and to avoid going to court...how much dangerous dirt does he know of?  

Speaking of friends with the former Mr Epstein, Trump has set up his very only online platform for the excrement which Twitter, you tube and facebook (oops, sorry, Meta, arf) wouldn’t allow him to. In a criminal abuse of the word, he has called it Truth. Very hard to avoid a triple hernia while laughing so hard I almost vomited and evacuated my bowels at the same time. And they say men can’t multitask. In the interests of fake investigative journalism, I will use almighty Google to find whose money financed this putrid cadaver of an idea. (Truth Social...1.4 billion investment for disinformation in the name of freedom. Come on down, the definitely legal and not dodgy Patrick Orlando...)

Anyway, away from the war for another paragraph...There used to be a foul and ridiculous dj in the 60s-80s called Jimmy, he had lots of friends in the upper echelons of British society (including Mrs Thatcher) and was made a knight for services performed to charity and helping kids to fix their dreams. Seems he took decades of evil advantage of orphans, cripples, corpses and fans of all ages but mostly the underage. During his lifetime, Sir Jimmy’s name was whispered with bile but no charges were ever brought, most likely due to victim’s deep shame, witnesses’ fear of being called a liar and losing their jobs... and his protection from the establishment. He died without ever truly facing the public.

Another knight of the realm, the leader of the current opposition in the UK worked as a chief prosecutor before becoming a politician. A few weeks ago, he stood up in the House of Commons to reprimand Boris once again for his dire untruths and prevarication over the parties held in Downing Street environs during Lockdown. Sir Kier advised the PM that his lies and memory lapses wouldn’t wash with the Metropolitan police. The blonde liar rose red faced and blamed the Labour leader for being guilty of not having charged Sir Jimmy for his disgusting sins (a deceit provable by facts but enjoyed by the right wing cult minds) . The next day, Sir Kier was attacked by various cretins from Alpha Men asses who chose to believe an endless scum sucking liar from a government they hate. Piers Corbyn put the video of the attempted assault on his pages online. (Stop me if I have any of the actual facts wrong.)

THIS is the leader of Britain. A man who would strike back at a provable truth with a genuinely despicable lie. A man who will use any excuse to stay in power, any amount of ‘dead cats’ thrown on tables to distract the audience from his corrupted heart. A prime  minister who deliberately goes on live TV to speak in all earnest seriousness like an adult while looking like a fat eight year old boy after a rough and tumble. (As he dared to do after the war started. Damn sure he is happy for his Churchill moment now, so his endlessly shameful list of failures can be forgotten.) Meanwhile...

Putin warned of ‘Genocide’ in Donestk, the perfect false flag to justify a minor incursion of a few hundred tanks to protect his citizens (those with the passports he handed out so quickly). He must have got impatient to seize more of the means of production to support the country he allowed his criminal friends to bankrupt. Tsar Vladimir, like the revolution never happened. Your place in history is secure pal, but possibly nobody will be alive to read it.

West and East almost talking of diplomacy while ratchetting up the rhetoric and piling on the propaganda and spewing spurious information... various billionaire criminals on both sides must have decided that weapons won’t sell themselves en masse and they need to top up their accounts to make up the shortfall caused by covid...wargasms for the greedy rich and the bored. Well boys, haters of capitalism on one side (although enjoying the fruits of others labour) and despisers of the Eastern despotic mindset, remember it is a mistake to kill too many of your customers and mess up the flow of trade routes.

Which might well be the only reason China objected to the invasion and threat of nuclear warheads being used in Europe and the US. If the West is destroyed, China is finished, who else will it sell its crap to? India alone won’t cut it. (SHAME on the world’s largest democracy for not condemning the invasion. A very cosmic AUM to you Mr Modi. Shanti? Go eat a cow.)

A couple of months ago, Putin and Xi actually recently put in writing that they agreed to oppose the ‘abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights, and any attempt to incite divisions and confrontation with the world’. They also called on the international community ‘to respect cultures and civilisational diversity’ and ‘the rights of peoples of different countries to self-determination’. All together again...’YEAH, RIGHT’.

My dark passenger has a list of those who really need to wake up on a table surrounded by plastic sheeting. Yes, I have been watching Dexter...On a lighter note...seems very possible that at least some of Q Onan’s ideas were stolen from a deeply satirical and funny book created by several free thinking libertarian anarchists, the sublime Principia Discordia...or as RAW would say they are all truly full of their Self Hypnotical Idiational Trance. For any rednecks reading, that there’s an ac-ro-nym. Some  gloriously black humour that a work which extracts the urine from various idiots and conspiracy theorists has been taken by the same types as gospelJ Except that they are using the ideas to justify violence. Reminds me of Richard Bach’s warnings of the ‘Pagite Wars’ in One. Kids, perhaps it is better to read The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley before The Bible. Good luck.

Don’t worry; realities are just a bunch of little dots. The dots appear to move in expected order according to the Will of the focused watcher. They also seem to move according to the random thoughts of millions, just far less organised.

LOVE BEYOND BLOOD.

[write-this-way-please]

Bathtubs and Livestreams

Bathtubs and Livestreams [Zelo goes live...]

Why?

Why the hell was this kid always in a bathtub?

You groaned rubbing your temples. Originally you were planning on spending your night off doing some paperwork, maybe unwind with a nice cold glass of wine to calm your nerves. And call it an early night and just get some well-deserved sleep, because believe it or not PR was a lot of work. Mostly just paperwork, but it got tiring.

You were always thankful for the boys you had to work with because there was never much PR for them. Daehyun, and Youngjae would post occasionally. Himchan would much rather enjoy a night at the gym and a bottle of wine so he only dealt with the obligatory instagram post every other day. Jongup would rather not deal with his SNS at all, and Yongguk was a mysterious man with mysterious ways that only ever posted selfies, art, or anything else he could throw a black and white filter on and call it a night. Maybe the occasional tipsy V-live. But no harm no foul.

But Junhong on the other hand...He was a PR statement waiting to happen. You remembered when he was this soft makane, who would follow Yongguk like a lost duck. But now in the days of SNS you had to be on top of his every move. Instagram post, tweets, v-lives, instagram lives. It was all too much and this boy had a tendency of loving to post whenever he was in a bathroom.

And no, it couldn’t be a normal bathroom mirror selfie. It had to be him live streaming in a bathtub. What if he accidentally dropped his phone, or moved it the wrong way. Or even worst, accidentally turn on the back camera. There were just too many variables that you had to worry about and this wasn’t even the first time you’d talk to him about being careful about his post. It was just this time, it was a whole damn stream instead of a photo.

He grinned sloshing around in the tub, responding to the comments that flooded in. He ran his hand through his hair, laughing without a care in the world as he dropped hints to their comeback.

Instantly you remembered the heat you got for his photo of his tattoo, and any other bathroom selfie. You groaned rubbing temples just thinking of your boss getting on your case. And although the boys had the freedom to post what they wanted, it was your job to make sure anything that could deemed inappropriate or a hassle for the company was nipped in the bud.

A rational person should've just called or texted him. Tell him to be careful and call it a night. But no, you drank about two glasses of wine and lived way too close to Junhong’s apartment to do anything normally.

“Yah!!” you knocked on his door. “Junhong-ah! You open this door right now you-you punk” you were sure you sounded way too tipsy to be taken seriously but that didn’t stop you from knocking like a madwoman.

The door giving under you as it swung open made you stumble inside onto his chest. “Noona, shh. I got neighbors.” He chuckled catching you with his strong arms and walking you inside.

His chest and hair damp from his bath earlier. Feeling a few droplets his your face you backed away, sobering up even just a little at the compromising position. “Don’t you ever wear clothes?” your hand slipped down his chest as you looked up at him.

“You come to find out?” he smirked, leaning on his doorway.

“H-How would I know that you were naked?” you stomped your foot in offense.

“Well you did tune into my Insta live.” he closed the door behind you, pulling you inside. “Were you hoping I was still in the bath?” Leaning in close to your ear he smirked. “Did you want to join me?”

“N-No! Of course not! I’m here because...you…” Technically you were there because he was in the bath but not because of what he was saying. Right? You swallowed hard looking at him, letting your eyes drift down his too toned body. BAP was preparing for a comeback and he had been working out but apparently a lot more than you were expecting.

“You never needed a reason to come here before Noona~” He hooked his thumbs on the top of his sweat pants that already hung dangerously low on his hip bones. Your eyes following his every movement, watching as this one bead of water fall against his tattoo. “Eyes up here~” he teased with a wink.

“You are such a pain in the ass.” you huffed, hating that he knew how much of a control he had over you. There was nothing more dangerous than a beautiful man that knew he was beautiful.

“And yet here you are” he leaned closer to you, making you press your back against the wall. “Well Noona, I ended my stream so no harm no foul right? Nothing bad happened, it was completely appropriate and the fans were even happy so the company’s happy right?”

“Right…”

“And you can go back home can’t you?”

“Y-Yes..Yes I can…” your voice, far too quiet for your own liking.   

He eyed you and licked his lips. “But you’re not gonna..Are you?” he tilted your chin upward toward him, smiling seeing you slowly close your eyes as he leaned in.

After a moment passed and you didn’t feel a thing you opened your eyes and you almost punched him in his smug face. You could feel your cheeks heat up, hating that he knew what you wanted.

“Aww did Noona want a kiss?”

“I’m going home” you huffed, trying to walk away and save whatever dignity was salvageable at this moment, but he grabbed your hand, pulling you into his chest. Opening your mouth to protest, you were met with his soft lips. His hand cupping your face and coaxing you into a kiss. “Nnn”

Feeling him bite your lip, you moaned out giving him the opportunity to slip his tongue into your mouth. “Such a nice sound…” he grinned letting his hand trail down your stomach, past your sleep shorts, and into your panties. His finger curled into you making you shiver and hold onto him. “What other sounds can you make Noona?” he grinned against the shell of your ear.

You gripped at his muscular shoulders, your whole body quivered and your legs giving way. “Junhong…” you panted as another long finger entered you, pumping slowly.

“You’re so wet..” he smiled brightly trailing a kiss from your jaw down your chest, teasing your nipples through your t-shirt. “And no bra? You’re such a tease” he continued nipping at your breast while teasing your clit loving how you came undone to his touch.

You moaned slumping in his arms as you came against him. “Did you just….finish?” he whispered, nuzzling your nose. “You’re so pent up Noona? Did I help you? Did you like that?”

“You ask too many questions” you groaned eyeing him.

He smiled caressing your face, his thumb tracing over your soft lower lip. “Mmm and yet you look like you have a question for me.”

“Aren’t you going to finish what you started?” you pecked his thumb before letting your tongue lash against it.

“Mmmm I always finish what I start Noona” he effortlessly lifted you up, gripping your bottom as he carried you into his bedroom.

END

Just a little Zelo because that Insta live was pretty inspiring~   

[multipleservicelisting]

The tourists who believe travel restrictions don’t apply to them

(CNN) — As pandemic quarantines go, this might be the best: sprawling on a hotel balcony overlooking azure Caribbean waters as you bake gently in the sun.

But it isn’t enough for some.

The past month has seen a slew of high-profile cases of tourists getting in trouble for breaking the rules while on a sun-and-sand vacation.

In December, Skylar Mack, an American student, was jailed for two months when she flew to the Cayman Islands and, instead of quarantining for two weeks at her hotel as the law obliged her to do, popped out two days later to attend a jet ski competition in which her boyfriend was competing.

In January, former British beauty queen and model Zara Holland and her boyfriend Elliott Love quarantined at her four-star hotel in Barbados for the required five days, before taking a second PCR test, as is required for travelers from high risk countries. So far, so good — except that when Love’s second test came back positive, rather than face further quarantine, the couple made a dash to the airport to try and catch a flight home.

Then there was the British couple, again in Barbados, who tried to spice up self-isolation by inviting a local resident over for sex (she was caught climbing over the hotel fence), and the Jamaican tourist who popped out of his hotel quarantine for a soft drink — and has ended up doing jail time.

Staying put in the sun seems like the easiest thing anyone’s been asked to do so far in the pandemic — so why are people breaking the rules?

‘Switching off’

Countries around the world have implemented travel restrictions. Shown here: a testing center in Rome.

Antonio Masiello/Getty Images Europe/Getty Images

“Whenever people are presented with an extremely frightening scenario, previous research has shown that they switch off,” says clinical psychologist Bhavna Jani-Negandhi, who believes that health warnings should be at an “optimal level for people to take notice.”

In the case of, say, the harmful effects of smoking, warnings can be tailored up or down, to increase the chance of people taking note. But with regulations that need to be kept at a certain level to protect the local population, it’s not possible to beat about the bush.

In the pandemic, says Jani-Negandhi, “facts cannot be tailored. It seems that some people are behaving in a manner that would suggest they are switching off to the facts — believing that it will not happen to them and that only the most vulnerable are at risk.”

What’s more, according to one travel industry expert, the lack of coherency on travel restrictions across the globe doesn’t help.

“There’s no consistency, and travelers are being badly misled by the fact that there are no global rules,” says Paul Charles, Virgin Atlantic’s former director of communications who now runs his own PR consultancy, The PC Agency, and has become something of a thorn in the UK government’s side over its regular flip-flopping of travel regulations.

Charles has a vested interest in getting the travel industry back up and running, of course; but he believes a global approach, led by the G20 countries, would be the ideal way forward.

He says that a “global consistent testing program, so that everybody could be tested on departure with high-quality results within 30 minutes” would transform the way we are currently traveling (or not).

However, in the meantime, he says, any restrictions have to be enforced for travelers to behave them.

“I think the rules have to be fully supported by law — in a pandemic, you have to have strict enforcement so you achieve the outcome of lower infection rates and lower deaths,” he says.

“That’s perhaps been one of the issues — governments haven’t backed up tougher rules with tougher enforcement. Economies around the world are being ruined because people are breaking the law, meaning tougher measures are being put in place for longer.”

‘It only takes one uncaring person’

Skylar Mack was jailed when she broke her 14-day quarantine, two days in

Courtesy Jeanne Mack

Strict enforcement is exactly what the Cayman Islands are going for. As far back as January 2020, “We began planning and preparing for what we expected to be the eventual arrival of the virus on our shores,” says Roy Tatum, Head of the Office of the Premier, Alden McLaughlin.

Early measures included bans on travel from affected countries, and additional screening of arrivals. But despite precautions, the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in March. In response, the islands closed their borders and implemented a 14-day quarantine in government-controlled facilities for anyone entering the country, as well as implementing lockdowns and curfews, closing schools, and restricting access to care homes, hospitals, prisons and breaches.

The result? As of January 10, just 359 cases and two deaths during the entire pandemic.

“We have sacrificed much since the initial lockdown at the end of March, which has helped eliminate the virus within our local community,” says Tatum. “Today, people are able to live somewhat normal lives and many businesses have been able to open.

“The only way the virus is able to reinfect our community is if it arrives on our shores from the outside.”

But since “hundreds” of residents were prosecuted and fined for breaking the initial lockdown, there have been just seven potential quarantine breaches investigated, two of which have gone to court.

Skylar Mack was visiting her boyfriend, Vanjae Ramgeet, a Cayman Islands resident, when she fell foul of the law in November.

Allowed in as the partner of a resident, she should have quarantined for two weeks.

Instead, after just two days, she removed the tracking device that was making sure she stayed in one place, and joined her boyfriend at his jet ski event.

When police caught up with her, she was found to be not wearing a mask, and not social distancing.

Her initial sentence of four months in jail was halved on appeal in December. Ramgeet received an equal sentence.

But despite protestations from her family, who appealed to US President Donald Trump for help, and received a supportive tweet from his son, Eric, the authorities of the Cayman Islands — a self-governing British Overseas Territory — have not backed down.

“Should Covid-19 become widespread in our small community it would be potentially devastating,” says Tatum.

“We are talking about a disease that has the ability to kill people and destroy an economy. That the reason why anyone who deliberately flouts the important public health laws and regulations of our Islands that are in place to protect the wider population, should be subject to strict penalties.

“There also needs to be a deterrent to ensure people understand the seriousness of the virus and the importance of the public health law and regulations.

“It only takes one careless, uncaring person to move about our community to create serious health issues, including potential death by restarting community transmission.

“We have a small population and a close community that still treasures and respects our elders, who, as we all know, are very high risk.

“In addition, if the Cayman Islands had to go back into a lockdown situation, the effect on our local economy, and the impact on our children, elderly and indeed the broader population, would be considerable.”

‘You must be held accountable’

Barbados is allowing tourism, but travelers must quarantine on arrival.

Shutterstock

So far this year, it’s Barbados that has hit the headlines for tourists behaving badly, as they flock to the Caribbean. Many of thse traditional alternative winter sun destinations are out of bounds due to closed borders, which perhaps explains the slew of offenders descending on the region.

When Elliott Love, ensconced in the plush beachside Sugar Bay hotel, tested positive, he and girlfriend Zara Holland cut off their quarantine wristbands and checked out.

They caught a taxi to the airport and attempted to board a plane for the nine-hour flight back to the UK, knowing that the new UK variant is thought to be up to 70% more transmissible.

They were arrested as they went through security on December 29. Holland was given a $12,000 (US$5,900) fine, instead of a nine-month prison sentence, and was bailed for an undisclosed amount. Love — who was tried several days later, when he was no longer testing positive for the virus — was fined $8,000 ($4,000).

Neither Holland or the couple’s lawyer responded to a request for comment.

But they’re not the only tourists behaving badly in Barbados. On January 1, Swiss national Ismail Elbagli was fined $6,000 (US$3,000) when he left the hotel where he was quarantining, having tested positive.

Elbagli argued that his wife had received a call confirming a negative test that morning, and assumed it covered both of them. His fine was reduced from $8,000 in light of the circumstances.

In reaction to social media outcry that white tourists were being fined, while the only Black rule-breaker was jailed, Chief Magistrate Ian Weekes told the court that prison terms were a last resort, if paying a fine was not an option.

Neither the Barbados tourist board nor the government were available to comment on the restrictions.

However, Acting Chief Medical Officer Dr Kenneth George has laid the blame for the island’s increasing case numbers partially at the door of rule-breaking tourists.

And in a video posted to Facebook shortly before Holland’s trial, Prime Minister Mia Mottley said: “We are very clear that on those persons who are visiting us, and to the extent that anyone is breaching our protocols, the government of Barbados through the Covid Monitoring Unit will take the necessary action for any visitors.

“We believe that by far the majority of them are compliant, but the handful who have chosen to ignore our mores, ignore our customs, ignore our laws and guidelines… you must be held accountable.”

Why one traveler broke the rules

One traveler broke the UK lockdown to travel to Venice in June.

Andrea Pattaro/AFP/Getty Images

So what’s going on in the heads of people when they break the law when traveling?

For one rule-breaker, it was merely the idea of seeing how far they could go.

The UK resident, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job, told CNN he traveled from London to Venice for a vacation in June while the UK was still in lockdown and all but essential travel was banned.

“It was at the end, when lockdown was about to be lifted, and the news was saying how people are booking holidays and everything was getting booked up. I thought, I want to travel, but not with the crowds — when it’s still quiet,” he says.

“I’d seen images of famous landmarks being empty, so it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

At the time, Italy was allowing travelers from the UK, so he was breaking no rules on arrival, even though he was on departure. “I didn’t see it as breaking the rules too much — I was thinking for myself, basically,” he says.

“Italy was more safe at that point than the UK, so by going, Italy was more at risk — but they were the ones with the open borders.”

He flew via Dublin, which was locked down at the time, but allowing transit passengers.

“But I had a couple of hours between flights and out of curiosity wanted to test what happened,” he says.

So instead of staying in the airport, as he was obliged to do, he went outside — and nobody stopped him.

“I was looking for a bus to the city center to see if there was time to get a Guinness. But there was no shuttle, and with nothing running I didn’t want to spend too much money on Ubers.”

The UK traveler doesn’t see his infractions in the same light as those travelers to the Caribbean who he calls “bad” and “irresponsible.”

But he says that one thing that made him feel comfortable with traveling when he shouldn’t, was seeing footage of travelers arriving in the UK at the start of lockdown. The UK never closed its borders (and has only recently stopped arrivals from countries exposed to the new South African variant); but when Passenger Locator Forms and then quarantine were introduced, travelers were filmed arriving, clearly unaware of the restrictions.

“That’s why I felt pretty safe [breaking the rules],” he says.

He also says that on return to the UK’s Stansted airport, he was not asked for his Passenger Locator Form, or told to quarantine for 14 days, as he was obliged to do at that point. He did do so, though says that a couple of days afterward, quarantine restrictions were lifted so he ventured out.

Psychologist Bhavna Jani-Negandhi says his behavior is understandable.

“When people see others break the rules, then they could wonder why different rules apply and they might try getting away with it,” she says.

But for some, arriving in countries where the travel restrictions are enforced by the law may come as a sharp surprise.

from Multiple Service Listing https://ift.tt/3nIuzJe

[easyfoodnetwork]

The Boundary Pusher

Peter Meehan’s transgressive vision helped redefine food media with the groundbreaking Lucky Peach, and later transformed the LA Times’s food coverage. But that vision came with a toxic management style characterized by intimidation, a barrage of sexualized commentary, and explosive anger, according to two dozen current and former staffers.

On Tuesday, June 30, staffers on the Los Angeles Times food section prepared to log in to Zoom for their weekly 11 a.m. meeting. It had been pushed back 15 minutes — a potentially ominous sign. The day before, writer Tammie Teclemariam published a lengthy Twitter thread laced with allegations about the section’s editor, Peter Meehan, spanning his time as editor of groundbreaking food magazine Lucky Peach and as head of the Times’s food section. Now, after a day of nonstop texting and immense uncertainty, the team would face each other for the first time.

Sitting in their bedrooms, living rooms, and other makeshift workspaces, the staffers anxiously signed on. Meehan was missing, but as faces from other teams populated their Zoom windows, it looked like it might be business as normal, except for the appearance of Times managing editor Kimi Yoshino, Meehan’s direct boss. At the top of the meeting, she outlined the paper’s response to a few of the assertions in Teclemariam’s thread (Meehan’s salary is not $300,000; he planned coverage of Juneteenth). A discussion about cliquishness broke out after Andrea Chang, the section’s deputy editor, asked staffers to come to her with any concerns; several food staffers, including Chang, apologized for contributing to an atmosphere of insiders versus outsiders that orbited around Meehan.

As the conversation continued, Bill Addison, one of the paper’s two restaurant critics (and formerly Eater’s national critic), worried that it was sidestepping the larger issue raised by the thread, which he describes as “the culture of fear that Peter had been masterful at creating.” Before it could end, Addison spoke up and said, “Even after those tweets, I am right now afraid of retaliation from Peter.” The tone of the room shifted. One by one, staffers spoke out: about waves of panic that hit whenever a Slack or phone call from Meehan arrived, about him belittling their work in public Slack channels, or screaming in all caps about small mistakes. One staffer reminded Yoshino that she had come to Yoshino’s office and wept about Meehan’s behavior. When someone outside the department remarked that the group seemed eerily calm discussing these painful experiences, Ben Mims, a cooking columnist, replied that Meehan was still their boss, and they were afraid of what he would do.

The next day, Yoshino informed Meehan the paper would launch a formal investigation into the allegations raised at the meeting. Meehan offered his resignation and publicly apologized on Twitter, characterizing Teclemariam’s thread as alleging “a number of things I don’t think are true” and describing his failures as those of perfectionism. “In my tunnel-vision commitment to making the best things we could, I lost sight of people and their feelings,” he wrote in a statement.

Later that week, Jenn Harris, a senior writer in the food section and a 10-year veteran of the paper, posted a statement in a locked company Slack channel. Torn up by what she’d heard in the meeting, Harris apologized for not speaking out sooner. She said that she’d been on Meehan’s good side, and she’d been afraid to find out what would happen if she wasn’t. She alleged that Meehan once called her “fuckable” after a work dinner. On another occasion, she alleged, he rested his head on her shoulder and slid his hand up her dress in the back of a car. After she pulled his hand away and said, “no,” Harris said he tried to put his hand up her skirt again. When she demanded to know what he thought he was doing, she alleges that Meehan, who was intoxicated, had mumbled, “Pushing boundaries.”

In the midst of the national uprising for Black lives sparked by a white police officer’s killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a wave of protests broke out in newsrooms across the country, from the New York Times to Refinery29. The first of these were directly tied to issues of racism and anti-Blackness, but they have since expanded to the broader problem of toxic leadership in the industry, and the dominance of white men and women in positions of power. Social media has driven much of this reckoning by providing a space for rank-and-file editors and writers to speak out. Most notably in the food media world, Bon Appétit editor Adam Rapoport resigned in the wake of social media protests by employees of color over unfair treatment, sparked when Teclemariam tweeted a photo of Rapoport in brownface.

While Meehan’s resignation occurred after his staff spoke out in a meeting, many of those staffers say without Teclemariam’s Twitter thread, that conversation would never have occurred. Meehan’s departure occurs during a moment of wider agitation at the Times over the paper’s hiring decisions after its acquisition by the billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018, which some staffers say privileged star journalists from the East Coast establishment — overwhelmingly white and male — who were richly rewarded while existing staffers battled in union contract negotiations for fair compensation after years of brutal cuts. Meehan is in some ways the most obvious example of this trend: He never relocated to Los Angeles, instead flying out one week a month from his home in New York.

Meehan may not be a household name, but he is one of the most consequential food journalists of the last decade, whose mentors and compatriots include Mark Bittman, David Chang, Jonathan Gold, and Anthony Bourdain. One of an emerging generation of culture hounds who took food seriously as a badge of cool, Meehan started his career working for Bittman, who helped him land a gig writing the New York Times’s $25 and Under column in 2004, a plum position for an emerging food writer. His real ascendance began when he teamed up with Chang, at the time a brash young chef who sparked a nationwide mania for ramen and pork buns, whose early creative evolution Meehan had chronicled as part of his column. He went on to co-author the Momofuku cookbook, which was as groundbreaking as the restaurant was, and helped establish the irreverent yet maniacal perfectionism of Chang’s star persona.

In 2011, Chang and Meehan joined forces with Chris Ying, then an editor at the San Francisco small press McSweeney’s, to launch the food magazine Lucky Peach. From the first issue, the magazine was a phenomenon, combining McSweeney’s fetish for literary excess and groundbreaking design with Momofuku’s foul-mouthed, ramen-worshiping swagger. Over its six-year run, the magazine racked up critical adoration and industry awards, spun out successful cookbooks, and arguably changed the way food media worked and looked forever. Its abrupt closure in 2017 caught even the magazine’s contributors off guard, and was attributed to irreconcilable differences between Meehan and Chang. (Both signed a legal agreement in 2013 with a robust nondisparagement clause.)

In the summer of 2018, Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic and secular saint of Los Angeles food, died of pancreatic cancer. Gold was a frequent contributor to Lucky Peach, and had already been advocating for Meehan to be recruited to oversee a revival of the Times food section. After Gold’s death, Meehan came to work at the paper, first as a consultant and then as the section’s official editor, overseeing the relaunch of a standalone food section, heavy on illustration and other hip signifiers of the design that had characterized Lucky Peach. With his many, many connections in the food world, he delivered in-depth features on, say, the closing of the world-famous Faviken, and brought talent from all over the world to the paper’s monthlong, revenue-generating Food Bowl. Within months, Meehan developed a reputation across the paper as difficult, but these issues were considered by upper management to be the necessary price of working with a hard-driving auteur.

To Meehan’s expansive roster of friends and allies, he was a generous, brilliant, and genuinely subversive writer and editor. I know this from personal experience: There’s a great deal of professional overlap between Eater and Lucky Peach. A number of its staff and contributors, including many people I spoke to for this story, have contributed to Eater. I’ve attended numerous Lucky Peach parties, contributed a story to the magazine, and have met Meehan on several occasions, finding him to be charming, thoughtful, and sharp.

Behind all of Meehan’s public success, however, were ever-growing ranks of scarred, fearful staffers who worked under him. Interviews with more than two dozen sources, including former Lucky Peach employees, current Los Angeles Times staffers, and freelancers for both publications, allege that Meehan’s management of both these publications veered beyond the realm of a difficult boss in a high-stakes environment, and into a deeper and more disturbing toxicity. They describe a relentless cycle of unrestrained generosity and explosive anger, while his disdain for professionalism, combined with a zeal for perfection, led to workplaces with few boundaries and constant tension. A number of sources for this story spoke anonymously out of a fear of professional retribution from Meehan or their current employer.

Violent tempers, inappropriate jokes and comments, and allegations of sexual misconduct are far from unknown issues in the media world, and they’re a hallmark of the restaurant industry. Lucky Peach got its start in the cradle of the Momofuku restaurant group, making these dynamics even more intertwined. Former Lucky Peach staffers with restaurant experience say it was especially disturbing to see the behavior they associated with hostile kitchens — behavior David Chang has apologized for perpetuating in his own restaurants — replicated in an office.

Former staff, including many media industry veterans, say working under Meehan was shattering in a way they had not experienced under other tough bosses. At Lucky Peach, his over-the-top insults and physical displays of anger — slamming doors, hitting tables, knocking over chairs — created an atmosphere of fear, while female staffers say that Meehan’s sexual jokes and inappropriate comments crossed a line even in their freewheeling and irreverent workplace. At the Los Angeles Times, Meehan’s outbursts were limited to Slack or other written communication, but pushing back, staffers say, led to difficulties around deadlines, feedback, and assignments, while his lack of professional boundaries culminated in one employee finding herself subject to repeated sexual commentary, and, in one incident, unwanted, sexually charged touching.

Meehan declined repeated requests to speak on the record. In a letter sent to Times food staffers and provided to Eater, the paper’s management said, “Employees told us that Meehan created a negative work environment where employees did not feel comfortable raising their concerns. … We have taken a series of actions that reflect the seriousness of the allegations, including imposing, where appropriate, discipline, and insisting that managers receive new counseling and training.”

Marian Bull, who freelanced for Meehan both at Lucky Peach and the Times, says Meehan’s persona, steeped in subversive cultural tropes, could obscure how his behavior reinforced a much blander and more oppressive status quo. “He thought his transgressiveness absolved him,” she says.

In food media, the last great economic cataclysm ushered in a broification of the industry after decades of publications staffed and run largely by white women and gay men. In 2009, Gourmet shuttered, and Bon Appétit was relaunched under Rapoport, a straight, white male editor from GQ. Lucky Peach was born soon after, on a lark: What if a food magazine was written for the people who cooked the food, not who ate it?

Chris Ying met Meehan and David Chang in 2009 while putting together an experimental newspaper, called the San Francisco Panorama, which featured a food section, for McSweeney’s. A year later, the pair approached Ying, who had cooked in restaurants, with an idea for a food magazine. The first issue, exuding pork fat and swagger and bad words to spare, was overseen by Meehan and Ying and put together by McSweeney’s staff, with significant input from Chang. In addition to its restaurant cred, the magazine’s aesthetics and zine-like attitude borrowed from indie rock culture, positioning it as a publication for those left out of the mainstream.

Chasing the unexpected hit led to a fuzzy leadership structure and a bicoastal operation. Ying became the editor-in-chief, heading a small San Francisco office spun off from McSweeney’s, while Meehan worked from New York. While the magazine, especially its early issues, was a true collaboration between Meehan and Ying, Meehan always held a larger share in the company, commanded a higher salary, had more say over the budget, and was more tightly connected to Momofuku and Chang.

In late 2011, Rachel Khong was hired as the magazine’s managing editor and first employee. The first time Khong hung out with Meehan, her new boss, was at an alcohol-fueled dinner at San Francisco’s Mission Chinese, where the small staff of the new food magazine were feted. At the end of the night, she sent an email to her boyfriend when she got home, asking for a ride to the office the next morning and adding, “Peter Meehan kissed me goodbye!” Today, Khong says she no longer remembers this kiss, in part because her time working for Meehan involved a barrage of blurred boundaries. “For many mornings during those years, I would wake up to a Peter phone call and go to sleep after talking to Peter,” Khong says. “It was always there were just never any boundaries.”

As at many indie publications, the work schedule at Lucky Peach was punishing at best, and like many small staffs working closely together to produce an aggressively honed creative product in a pressure-cooker environment with unforgiving standards, a distinct workplace culture emerged that reflected the profane, transgressive high-low spirit of the magazine. The bicoastal offices ran on constant riffing over email and Hipchat, a Slack precursor, and elaborate wordplay and absurdist imagery were the norm. Editors would say they were tickling, massaging, diddling, and piddling a piece; jokes about hot chats and “that’s what she said” were volleyed back and forth. At the San Francisco office, a running prank was to jump out of the closet to scare other employees; deadline stress would devolve into ridiculous fake headlines and photoshopping frogs’ heads onto bodybuilders.

By 2014, Meehan began to staff up the New York office, which was eventually located in its own space at 128 Lafayette Street, in Chinatown. (Disclosure: This space is now the Eater test kitchen.) The giddy, weird energy that pervaded the magazine’s stressful early days — which still reigned in San Francisco — was overlaid with dread in New York. While members of the San Francisco office say they had seen glimpses of Meehan’s temper — Khong recalls seeing him slam a door violently over a video call — on the East Coast, fear of his anger pervaded the office. Several staffers recall a New York editor saying, during one of Meehan’s explosions, “Peter, please don’t make me cry today.”

Priya Krishna, who was hired out of college to do outreach and customer service, says that, at first, getting a job at Lucky Peach was thrilling. She’d devoured the magazine in college, and when she went to events with “Lucky Peach” on her nametag, people were eager to talk to her. Behind the scenes, she says that the work culture was increasingly toxic — the New York office was often tense and silent. She would cry on Sundays because she had to go back the next day. “I was scared to go to work,” she says. “My day was dependent on this man’s mood, whether Peter was going to feel generous that day and buy us all lunch, or whether he’d be angry at something that would set him off.”

Late in her tenure at Lucky Peach, Krishna was called into a meeting over a subscription partnership that was underperforming. “Peter banged his hands on the table really really loudly and the table shook, and [he] yelled ‘WHAT HAPPENED?’ at the top of his lungs,” she says. Another employee sent messages to the SF office about the incident over Hipchat. When Krishna took a scheduled call after that meeting, Meehan publicly berated her for not addressing the partnership immediately, and told her to go home for a month and see if she had a job when she came back. She resigned a few days later.

During the photoshoot for the magazine’s last cookbook, All About Eggs, which Khong traveled to New York to oversee, the tension in the office was extraordinarily high, even by Lucky Peach standards. Meehan slammed a door so loudly the staffer who witnessed it was frightened. At one point, a staffer alleges, he grew so angry about the state of the kitchen, which was littered with boxes from new equipment, that he shoved a chair out of the way to charge at her in a manner she found threatening. “He stormed at me physically, and stood over me, raised a fist or his hand,” she says. Then, she says, Meehan seemed to catch himself and back away. “That was the tone and tenor of how things were there,” she says.

Walter Green, who began working at Lucky Peach as a designer in the magazine’s early days, when he was just 20 years old, says Meehan encouraged him to write, and he viewed him as a mentor. “He could be a really, really sweet guy at times,” he says. “He would invite us to get burgers with him in the evening and hang out with his family.” But even though Green, who eventually became one of the magazine’s art directors, was never a target of Meehan’s temper, he understood it as a problem in the office. “I viewed him as a damaged person who would act out,” he says. “Coming from a family where people do sometimes fly off the handle and say mean things or act out, if I’m around Peter, I want to make sure to keep him calm and make sure he doesn’t blow up at people. You feel protective of your coworkers.” Green says that when things got tense, he would take Meehan on walks to calm him down or play silly music to lighten the mood.

While Lucky Peach’s culture was casual and frequently profane, former staffers say that Meehan revelled in his propensity for over-the-top insults and descriptions of violence, which struck a dissonant chord coming from their boss. Of a contributor who wouldn’t translate a piece he reported for the magazine, Meehan wrote in an email in 2016, “I’m gonna mouthbarf seeing that half-bald sweater-wearing pussy’s name printed in my magazine if he’s unwilling to do the basic legwork of the relatively simple fucking task at hand.” Multiple staffers describe Meehan recounting a time he threatened another employee by saying he would shove a “golf umbrella” up his ass and open it. (This former employee says Meehan never said this to him).

Lucky Peach employees often spoke in crude metaphors or riffed on absurdist sexualized scenarios. But multiple staffers say that Meehan crossed the line, indulging in a truly constant barrage of heavily sexualized terminology in casual conservation and at times making quips directed at specific female staffers. In one exchange, when Khong said getting through submissions would be “easier with interns,” Meehan responded, “No, that’s NSA sex.” When she got a space heater for the office, Meehan said he’d always been trying to “heat up her space.”

Coming from her boss, these types of jokes made Khong uncomfortable, but she had no idea how to respond; she felt obliged to either play them off or to laugh. “He was a grown man who was my boss and I felt I had to be deferential to when he made those jokes,” she says. “He felt people were either cool or not cool, and you could be on either side of that.”

Aralyn Beaumont, who was hired as an assistant editor for the magazine before becoming its research director, also remembers Meehan making off-putting comments that objectified her. At a work lunch, Beaumont says that he remarked in front of the entire table, “You might have bluer eyes than Chad Robertson, who I thought had the prettiest eyes.” During that same visit to San Francisco by Meehan, after Beaumont ordered ramen, Meehan asked her if she was bulimic — an inside joke that referenced when Chang ate so much ramen during a trip to Japan that he threw up, an incident recounted in the first issue of Lucky Peach. To the young, junior employee, the comment felt alienating. “Maybe he thought that was a compliment, but I had an eating disorder since I was 13,” she says.

In New York, Meehan’s behavior around one young female staff member in particular made others in the office uncomfortable, even though they were unsure if it bothered her. Staffers recall Meehan giving her shoulder massages and making joking suggestive comments about her. On one occasion, he put his feet in her lap. Staffers brought their concerns to Ying, then the magazine’s editor-in-chief. The group discussed going to HR, but decided against it, in part because the HR team served Momofuku as a whole, not Lucky Peach. Ying opted to discuss the concerns with Meehan in person. “I had a private conversation with him, in which I expressed how disappointed I was both in the fact that his actions were making the staff uncomfortable, as well as disappointed as his business partner that he would jeopardize the business in this way. He was pretty contrite.” Ying did not address the issue with the female employee, since he saw the problem as lying squarely with Meehan, but he says that he now regrets not dealing with the situation more forcefully.

The woman at the center of these accusations told Eater there was never an inappropriate relationship between herself and Meehan, and while she does not recall much of his behavior, she believes this was in part because she did not think she could challenge the culture there, and so she accepted it. In retrospect, she believes that some of his actions toward her were inappropriate — she says that he once repeated a joke he’d heard that touched on her sex life — and undermined her professionally. But she had no idea that a complaint had been lodged by her colleagues; no one at the magazine ever spoke to her about Meehan’s behavior.

By 2016, Meehan and Ying’s partnership began to deteriorate, and Ying became more involved in projects outside the magazine, including the nonprofit he co-founded, Zero Food Print. Ying says that he and Meehan spoke about transitioning to an editor-at-large role, but in time, he felt that he had transitioned into no role at all, where his suggestions and ideas were undermined and disrespected. When Peter began repeatedly asking when he planned to leave entirely, he decided to do it. At the time, Ying was one of the few prominent Asian-American editors in the food world, and his departure marked the end of an era at the magazine. (Several staffers of color observed that by the end of Lucky Peach, the masthead had become almost entirely white.)

In both an editorial context and casual conversation, discussions about race and ethnicity could be frank and involve reappropriating slurs or stereotypes, especially in dialogues between Ying and Meehan. Some of these conversations were genuinely productive for the magazine, but Ying says he now regrets how he spoke about Asianness with Meehan. “I gave him an ‘honorary Asian card.’ That’s my fault and I own that,” Ying says. “I was improving my relationship with Peter by defanging myself. You give other people power by saying, ‘Here, it’s cool, because I’m saying this in front of you.’ It’s self-degrading in so many ways. The damage is it gives him license with other people who aren’t okay with it.”

Meehan did not appear to see (or set) boundaries between how he spoke with his business partners, Ying and Chang, and how he spoke to people who worked for him. For Asian-American staffers who were not partners but employees, his habit of speaking like an insider to Asian-American culture was fraught. Khong recalls that during her time there, Meehan discussed staffers’ ethnicity in a way that felt tokenizing. “It was like he’s calling you a Malaysian person or a Chinese person, [so you should] go get this story, or ‘Chris and Rachel are the Asians, they can do this,’” Khong says. “This casual way of referring to Asians, or to Dave being Korean, felt right on the edge of appropriateness. I think he felt like he was in on the joke.” And while the magazine’s aesthetics often reappropriated or satirized Orientalist tropes, when Meehan was the creative force behind the joke, it took on a different tone; Krishna recalls feeling uncomfortable when Meehan styled one of her mother’s recipes with a statue of a Hindu deity in the Power Vegetables cookbook, for instance.

While Chang was the most famous face associated with Lucky Peach, he claims to have had limited visibility into the work environment, mostly contributing ideas over email and meeting with Meehan or Ying at infrequent work lunches. He was in contact with high-up staffers, including Khong and Ying, but says he did not meet other employees until after the magazine’s closure. His distanced approach, which became more pronounced, several staffers say, as his relationship with Meehan grew more tense, meant that staffers struggling with Meehan’s behavior were unsure who to turn to, while Chang’s own reputation for anger did not encourage people to come forward.

Chang provided the following statement to Eater, in which he says he is bound by a legal agreement not to disclose or disparage Meehan. “First, to the staff of Lucky Peach, I let you down and I’m sorry. Within the first twelve months of the magazine’s start, I largely stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the company. I chose instead to contribute ideas from a distance. I am incredibly proud of the magazine, its contributors, and its staff, but frankly, I wasn’t around for much of its life and I regret it.” Chang notes he has gone on to work with several former Lucky Peach staffers, including Ying and Khong at Majordomo Media, and Krishna on a forthcoming cookbook. The statement further says, “Throughout my career, I have been known — even celebrated by the media — for being an angry bully in the kitchen. I have tried not to hide my shortcomings and I have worked extremely hard to become a better leader and a better person.”

“Had I been better, had I created an environment that was a polar opposite, with no shades of black or gray,” he added later, “I can imagine a scenario where they would have come to me, and that’s what I’ve been wrestling with.”

One veteran of Lucky Peach says that the magazine’s last year, when the San Francisco office consisted only of Aralyn Beaumont and Meehan was fully in control, was less marked by his temper. Ben Mims, now a cooking columnist at the Los Angeles Times, worked for Meehan during the magazine’s final months, and says he had no bad experiences with Meehan then. The magazine’s closure was sudden, unexpected by freelancers or staff, and because neither Chang nor Meehan can or will speak publicly about it, remains a subject of fascination. (One thing everyone agrees on is that Lucky Peach was not profitable.)

Ying says he feels frustrated that over the years, Meehan has become known as the “founder” of Lucky Peach when the first issue was put together over his own kitchen table. He also expressed frustration over how allegations about Meehan’s behavior might erase the work he and other Lucky Peach staffers were proud of. “Rachel worked on every single piece in the magazine,” Ying says.

The magazine’s goodbye letter, written by Meehan, argues that he and Ying got too much credit for the magazine, but does not mention Khong at all, despite her integral role in much of the magazine’s history and development; she became its executive editor in 2015. Khong departed the magazine in 2016, having hit her limit with Meehan’s behavior and frustrated by disparities between her salary and compensation and those of new hires. “I never wanted to leave the job,” Khong told me through tears. “The good parts were so good and he was the biggest bad part of it.”

The environment Meehan stepped into at the Los Angeles Times was markedly different from the scrappy early days of Lucky Peach, and several former Lucky Peach staffers told me they’d hoped the structure of the institution would blunt Meehan’s behavior. In fact, Meehan’s arrival as a consultant was greeted with relief by a paper still reeling from the loss of Gold. As editor of the newly created food section, Meehan frequently battled with other departments at the paper, isolating it from the organization as a whole. Because Meehan never moved to Los Angeles, his interactions with staff mostly occurred in locked Slack rooms or clustered in weeklong visits.

Even though Meehan only flew out for one week a month from New York, his manner over Slack, over email, and in edits was enough to put the whole section on the defensive. Mims, the former Lucky Peach staffer, says that when a story of his went live on the site without following protocols, Meehan exploded at him in a group Slack channel, berating him in all caps over the decision, even though Mims thought Meehan had approved it. The exchange, over what Meehan called, “THE F-ING STORY THAT JUST WENT LIVE,” prompted a conversation with Meehan’s deputy editor, Andrea Chang, in which Mims said no one should speak to their employees like that. After a day of tension, Meehan, who was in the LA office, sent an apology email and gave Mims an awkward hug, according to Mims, saying, “We hurt the people we like the most.” Mims says after this, he believes it became harder to have pitches approved or to get feedback in a timely fashion, resulting in stressful, last-minute rushes to meet deadlines — leading him to conclude that pushing back any harder would make his life even more difficult.

Bill Addison, one of the paper’s two restaurant critics, who had worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Magazine, and Eater before coming to the Times, also says within weeks of joining the paper, he found Meehan’s behavior went beyond tough editing into something that felt like bullying. He admired the editorial eye Meehan brought to the section, Addison says, but within months he found himself demoralized and afraid. He did not speak up beyond going to Yoshino, because he feared both internal retaliation, since he perceived Meehan to be supported by the paper’s leadership, and public castigation, since in the past Meehan had publicly attacked other colleagues at the paper on Twitter.

Patricia Escárcega, the paper’s other restaurant critic, says she also felt shut down by Meehan, despite the fact that he’d fought to bring her to the paper. Other staffers describe the relationship between the two as notably chilly. She felt singled out, and eventually went to Yoshino to complain. In an email to Eater, Escárcega described the meeting: “I told her I felt like I was working for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I told her I was walking on eggshells. I sat in her office and cried. She said he was under a lot of stress.”

Escárcega, the only Latina in the section, says she also felt a “subtle” pressure to write about Mexican food, a subject that she cares about deeply but didn’t want her work reduced to. “It definitely felt like there was more resistance when I wrote about different types of cuisines,” she says. In an initial statement from a company spokesperson, the Los Angeles Times told Eater, “Meehan has been an advocate for more inclusive coverage in the section he helped relaunch, reflective not only of Los Angeles’ vast and diverse food scene, but also of the writers, photographers, designers and illustrators who chronicle it.”

Managing editor Kimi Yoshino, who was Meehan’s direct supervisor, provided a statement to Eater noting Meehan’s talent as an editor should not have come “at the expense of the staff’s well-being.” The statement continues, “It became clear Peter had problems in the way he communicated and collaborated with others. I believed those problems were fixable and worked with him to become a better manager and more diplomatic communicator. I regret not doing even more to fully understand the extent of the staff’s concerns.” Yoshino characterized her own working relationship with Meehan as challenging and says, “I sometimes found his approach to be rude and disrespectful to our colleagues. I had many difficult conversations with him about the changes he needed to make as a manager, though I see now that wasn’t enough.”

One of the issues that employees struggling with Meehan’s behavior point to is that he seemed to create an environment of insiders and outsiders, and that the insiders included deputy food editor Andrea Chang and, to a lesser extent, Yoshino. Chang, senior writer Jenn Harris, and columnist Lucas Peterson (a former Eater contributor) would regularly dine out together, expensing their meals if they were relevant to a story, and posting glossy photos of these nights out to Instagram. Meehan would join during the one week each month that he was in town (there was even an Instagram hashtag: #peteweek). This “cool kids” dynamic (as more than one staffer put it) was in part driven by these posts. Instagram plays a more professional role in the food world than many other sectors of media, as an arena to display dining knowledge and build a profile, and while it’s one thing to know a boss and certain coworkers are friendly it’s another to see evidence of that relationship posted on social media for likes and clout, especially as other staffers were alienated by and fearful of Meehan.

The group was genuinely close, especially Chang, Peterson, and Harris, and the boundaries between managers and writers were blurry, since Peterson and Meehan were high school friends, and Harris had at one point been the interim editor of the food section. The group drank together often, stayed out late, visited each others’ homes, and spoke frankly about personal matters, including their sex lives, smearing the boundaries between personal and professional.

On July 3, 2019, Harris says that Meehan obliterated those boundaries. That night, she went with Meehan, Chang, and Peterson to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. It was a social outing, not a work one, and Chang drove the group. When they left, Harris says Meehan was so drunk he seemed to raise a fist at Peterson when Peterson tried to help him up, and Meehan needed to be led down to the car. “Pete got into the back of the car with me,” Harris says. “Instead of leaving the middle seat open, he slid next to me and put his head on my shoulder. I thought he was going to pass out on my shoulder and fall asleep. As we’re driving, I felt him stick his hand and slide it under my dress on my inner thigh. I picked his hand up, really caught off guard and really embarrassed. I said, ‘No,’ and put his hand back on his own lap and then a couple seconds later he did it again. I took his hand off and put it back and I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ He mumbled, I understood him saying the words, ‘Pushing boundaries.’ So I said, ‘The boundaries are fine where they are, don’t fucking do that.’”

Peterson and Chang say they did not witness what happened in the back of the car. Harris says, and Peterson confirms, that she told both him and Chang about Meehan’s actions later that night. Harris asked them not to report the incident to anyone, and Peterson suggested that he talk to Meehan directly. (Chang declined to comment further for the story.) After such a long friendship, Peterson was shocked and upset by what he had heard. The next day, he confronted Meehan and told him his behavior had been, he says, “violent and inappropriate,” and he says Meehan apologized to him. Peterson told him he needed to speak to Harris and Chang. Harris says he never did speak to her about the incident, even as they continued to socialize. “I don’t know how we all kept hanging out trying to pretend like nothing was wrong,” Peterson says. “I’m honestly still so angry with myself for not doing or saying more. During the past year, Jenn and I have talked over these incidents a lot. And I think we were just really afraid.”

Later that summer, while out at the Chateau Marmont, along with Chang and Peterson, after a review dinner at Chateau Harare nearby, Harris joined Meehan on the smoking patio. She does not exactly remember what they were discussing, but she believes it was the subject of dating apps and her experiences with them. Harris says that Meehan said, “Jenn Harris, you are fuckable, you’re very fuckable. I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you, but I would stick your head in a pillow and fuck you.” She says that she did not interpret this as a solicitation so much as an inappropriate attempt to compliment her, but it made her deeply uncomfortable, so she went back to the table. She says she later told Peterson and Chang, as well as several other people, about the comments.

There was one other incident, which Harris did not include in her Slack post after Meehan’s departure. On another night in late summer 2019, Harris, Meehan, and Chang got together at Chang’s apartment, again as a social outing rather than a work one. They ordered in Thai food, and there was drinking — Harris perceived Meehan to be very drunk. She says, “We were sitting on the couch, and I was getting up to leave and he just looked at [her and Chang] and drunkenly said, ‘I could have fucked both of you tonight.’ I started laughing, like, are you fucking delusional? I said, ‘Well, I’m leaving now,’ and I left him there.”

Harris says she was never afraid of Meehan during these interactions, and at times tried to convince herself that these actions and comments had not been a big deal. But she did fear him in the office, and that led her to be afraid to say anything about what happened, or to stop hanging out with Meehan and the rest of the friend group. She saw when Meehan unleashed tirades in public Slack channels, and she recalls once hearing him say he would make a person who had pissed him off “his hobby.” Harris did not ever want to become his hobby. “He can be so nice and charming and supportive of your career,” she says. “I was worthy of being invited to social engagements. I benefited from that. I would think over and over, ‘What happens when he stops liking me?’ I didn’t want to find out.”

Harris also saw how upper management valued Meehan at the paper, and his ability to bulldoze through long-standing barriers and red tape to get what he wanted for the section. During her years at the Times, the food section had long fought to have a dedicated photographer and social media person — under Meehan, they got both. Harris wasn’t sure if this was Meehan’s doing or if management was just finally giving the section the resources it needed, but either way, she did not believe her story would be heard. “He is this beloved person in food media and at work, and I didn’t know if I told someone, if I’d be the one who had to leave,” she says. “If I said something, and he was still my boss after, it would be awkward. I was just scared.” (In her statement to Eater, Yoshino says, “I was shocked and appalled to hear the serious allegations of misconduct, including against one of my longtime friends and colleagues.”)

During her long tenure at the paper, Harris worked closely with Jonathan Gold, and she’s troubled by how often management has said Meehan got the job because he was Gold’s choice, even though Gold wasn’t the person who hired him. The paper spoke to, among other sources, former colleagues at the New York Times to vet Meehan; no one ever contacted anyone at Lucky Peach. Harris says, “I knew Jonathan very well, and I really don’t think that he would have been okay with this behavior, or been aware of it. For people in the building to say, ‘Oh, he was Jonathan’s pick,’ that is skirting responsibly for who hired him, and did or did not properly vet him. That’s a deflection of responsibility on a dead man.”

Following Meehan’s resignation, a wave of posts proliferated across social media by people who had worked with Meehan at Lucky Peach and the Los Angeles Times, who finally felt able to speak out. Aralyn Beaumont described her time at Lucky Peach as “living with a hole that has yet to close.” Chris Ying wrote on Instagram that “it took me a long time — too long — to understand that we weren’t dealing with a run-of-the-mill bad boss.” Rachel Khong wrote about how Twitter could distort the complexities of the situation. “I don’t believe Peter is an evil person. I don’t believe in evil people, full stop,” she wrote. But, she continued, “the harm that was done to us was not one Tweetable instance but was daily, and relentless, and insidious.”

Staffers at the Los Angeles Times, who by then had seen Harris’s allegations about Meehan’s behavior in Slack, were sharper-edged. Ben Mims wrote that the apology posted by Meehan was “an embarrassment,” saying that “‘tunnel vision’ and a ‘management style’ doesn’t begin to describe the culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation that traumatized our whole team.” Lucas Peterson posted a long statement that many other staffers say encapsulated what it was like to work for Meehan, especially where he wrote, “One of my colleagues described it as like being in a house of horrors — we were all in different parts of the house, and had different experiences. But we were all in the house.”

On August 11, the entire food section at the Los Angeles Times sent a letter to management calling for an end to the holding pattern in place since Meehan’s departure. “The continued uncertainty regarding leadership — with no end in sight — is putting the future of the section in peril,” it states. “There has been no communication from upper management since July 6, which has only served to shake our confidence further during an already upsetting and traumatic time.” The letter demands regular updates on the HR investigation launched after the allegations about Meehan’s behavior surfaced on social media and Slack, and the immediate posting of both the food editor and deputy food editor positions, with an eye toward addressing the section’s lack of representation of the demographics of LA. “We at the Food section recognize the work of the Times’ Black and Latino caucuses, and insist that people of color, particularly those underrepresented in the newsroom, be prioritized in any new hiring,” the letter states.

On August 20, management relased the results of an internal HR investigation launched in the wake of Meehan’s departure. The report states, “Employees told us that Meehan created a negative work environment where employees did not feel comfortable raising their concerns. We also found that managers failed to prevent or report behavior they knew or should have known was inappropriate.” Yoshino will no longer oversee the section, and Chang has been reassigned to Column One. Internally, some LAT staffers say they are dissatified with these changes, including Chang’s lateral move into another section.

It’s not a coincidence, or even that singular, that the Los Angeles Times uprising against Meehan happened over Zoom and the reassessment of Lucky Peach happened over social media, all of it sparked by a single, pointed Twitter thread. This is a story shaped by COVID-19 and the mass quarantine of professional workplaces. The pandemic chewing through the tattered American safety net is too gigantic a disaster to contemplate head on for long, but its silent destruction is always unfolding, creating an atmosphere of fear and urgency whose only outlet is the streets, or social media.

Every institution seems to be failing, and failing us. Navigating media jobs over screens during this frightening moment has left workers isolated and exhausted, but also in possession of a strange freedom. As career ladders crumble, many journalists are doubling down on the one thing the job can still offer: a sense of meaning. That meaning grows sour if bosses are cruel or inequities are entrenched, and calling out a famous, perhaps brilliant editor as a bad boss is less intimidating if there’s no newsroom to face them in. The best hope is for a better way of life to rise from America’s disastrous failure, but right now, the pandemic still rages — the worst may just be beginning. Those with professional jobs in cities willing to issue stay-at-home orders, a bleak blessing, are trapped at home with nothing but time to reassess the past’s failures, and enumerate what must be born anew.

The question for the media reckoning underway is: What might truly subvert the old power structures? What comes after the legend of the brilliant, intimidating, perfectionist editor, embodied appetizingly by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada (who in reality is most often a white man)? In the recent past, explosive tempers and blurred lines could be excused if the end product were exciting enough. Dismantling that ethos is only a start; it stems from larger inequities in how power and value are accorded in a newsroom, and who gets credit for the work. In an industry where power is nakedly ranked on a masthead, it took the lateral, flattening effect of social media to shake those hierarchies. “I think Peter had a gift for surrounding himself with talented people,” Escárcega wrote in an earlier email. “I hope we get smarter about who we exalt and why.”

Meghan McCarron is Eater’s special correspondent. Andrea D’Aquino is an illustrator based in New York City. Fact checked by Samantha Schuyler

Disclosures: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater. The Eater Test Kitchen that housed Lucky Peach was, for a time, sublet from Momofuku. A number of people in this story have contributed to Eater, including Tammie Teclemariam, Marian Bull, Rachel Khong, Lucas Peterson, and Bill Addison.

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Peter Meehan’s transgressive vision helped redefine food media with the groundbreaking Lucky Peach, and later transformed the LA Times’s food coverage. But that vision came with a toxic management style characterized by intimidation, a barrage of sexualized commentary, and explosive anger, according to two dozen current and former staffers.

On Tuesday, June 30, staffers on the Los Angeles Times food section prepared to log in to Zoom for their weekly 11 a.m. meeting. It had been pushed back 15 minutes — a potentially ominous sign. The day before, writer Tammie Teclemariam published a lengthy Twitter thread laced with allegations about the section’s editor, Peter Meehan, spanning his time as editor of groundbreaking food magazine Lucky Peach and as head of the Times’s food section. Now, after a day of nonstop texting and immense uncertainty, the team would face each other for the first time.

Sitting in their bedrooms, living rooms, and other makeshift workspaces, the staffers anxiously signed on. Meehan was missing, but as faces from other teams populated their Zoom windows, it looked like it might be business as normal, except for the appearance of Times managing editor Kimi Yoshino, Meehan’s direct boss. At the top of the meeting, she outlined the paper’s response to a few of the assertions in Teclemariam’s thread (Meehan’s salary is not $300,000; he planned coverage of Juneteenth). A discussion about cliquishness broke out after Andrea Chang, the section’s deputy editor, asked staffers to come to her with any concerns; several food staffers, including Chang, apologized for contributing to an atmosphere of insiders versus outsiders that orbited around Meehan.

As the conversation continued, Bill Addison, one of the paper’s two restaurant critics (and formerly Eater’s national critic), worried that it was sidestepping the larger issue raised by the thread, which he describes as “the culture of fear that Peter had been masterful at creating.” Before it could end, Addison spoke up and said, “Even after those tweets, I am right now afraid of retaliation from Peter.” The tone of the room shifted. One by one, staffers spoke out: about waves of panic that hit whenever a Slack or phone call from Meehan arrived, about him belittling their work in public Slack channels, or screaming in all caps about small mistakes. One staffer reminded Yoshino that she had come to Yoshino’s office and wept about Meehan’s behavior. When someone outside the department remarked that the group seemed eerily calm discussing these painful experiences, Ben Mims, a cooking columnist, replied that Meehan was still their boss, and they were afraid of what he would do.

The next day, Yoshino informed Meehan the paper would launch a formal investigation into the allegations raised at the meeting. Meehan offered his resignation and publicly apologized on Twitter, characterizing Teclemariam’s thread as alleging “a number of things I don’t think are true” and describing his failures as those of perfectionism. “In my tunnel-vision commitment to making the best things we could, I lost sight of people and their feelings,” he wrote in a statement.

Later that week, Jenn Harris, a senior writer in the food section and a 10-year veteran of the paper, posted a statement in a locked company Slack channel. Torn up by what she’d heard in the meeting, Harris apologized for not speaking out sooner. She said that she’d been on Meehan’s good side, and she’d been afraid to find out what would happen if she wasn’t. She alleged that Meehan once called her “fuckable” after a work dinner. On another occasion, she alleged, he rested his head on her shoulder and slid his hand up her dress in the back of a car. After she pulled his hand away and said, “no,” Harris said he tried to put his hand up her skirt again. When she demanded to know what he thought he was doing, she alleges that Meehan, who was intoxicated, had mumbled, “Pushing boundaries.”

In the midst of the national uprising for Black lives sparked by a white police officer’s killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a wave of protests broke out in newsrooms across the country, from the New York Times to Refinery29. The first of these were directly tied to issues of racism and anti-Blackness, but they have since expanded to the broader problem of toxic leadership in the industry, and the dominance of white men and women in positions of power. Social media has driven much of this reckoning by providing a space for rank-and-file editors and writers to speak out. Most notably in the food media world, Bon Appétit editor Adam Rapoport resigned in the wake of social media protests by employees of color over unfair treatment, sparked when Teclemariam tweeted a photo of Rapoport in brownface.

While Meehan’s resignation occurred after his staff spoke out in a meeting, many of those staffers say without Teclemariam’s Twitter thread, that conversation would never have occurred. Meehan’s departure occurs during a moment of wider agitation at the Times over the paper’s hiring decisions after its acquisition by the billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018, which some staffers say privileged star journalists from the East Coast establishment — overwhelmingly white and male — who were richly rewarded while existing staffers battled in union contract negotiations for fair compensation after years of brutal cuts. Meehan is in some ways the most obvious example of this trend: He never relocated to Los Angeles, instead flying out one week a month from his home in New York.

Meehan may not be a household name, but he is one of the most consequential food journalists of the last decade, whose mentors and compatriots include Mark Bittman, David Chang, Jonathan Gold, and Anthony Bourdain. One of an emerging generation of culture hounds who took food seriously as a badge of cool, Meehan started his career working for Bittman, who helped him land a gig writing the New York Times’s $25 and Under column in 2004, a plum position for an emerging food writer. His real ascendance began when he teamed up with Chang, at the time a brash young chef who sparked a nationwide mania for ramen and pork buns, whose early creative evolution Meehan had chronicled as part of his column. He went on to co-author the Momofuku cookbook, which was as groundbreaking as the restaurant was, and helped establish the irreverent yet maniacal perfectionism of Chang’s star persona.

In 2011, Chang and Meehan joined forces with Chris Ying, then an editor at the San Francisco small press McSweeney’s, to launch the food magazine Lucky Peach. From the first issue, the magazine was a phenomenon, combining McSweeney’s fetish for literary excess and groundbreaking design with Momofuku’s foul-mouthed, ramen-worshiping swagger. Over its six-year run, the magazine racked up critical adoration and industry awards, spun out successful cookbooks, and arguably changed the way food media worked and looked forever. Its abrupt closure in 2017 caught even the magazine’s contributors off guard, and was attributed to irreconcilable differences between Meehan and Chang. (Both signed a legal agreement in 2013 with a robust nondisparagement clause.)

In the summer of 2018, Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic and secular saint of Los Angeles food, died of pancreatic cancer. Gold was a frequent contributor to Lucky Peach, and had already been advocating for Meehan to be recruited to oversee a revival of the Times food section. After Gold’s death, Meehan came to work at the paper, first as a consultant and then as the section’s official editor, overseeing the relaunch of a standalone food section, heavy on illustration and other hip signifiers of the design that had characterized Lucky Peach. With his many, many connections in the food world, he delivered in-depth features on, say, the closing of the world-famous Faviken, and brought talent from all over the world to the paper’s monthlong, revenue-generating Food Bowl. Within months, Meehan developed a reputation across the paper as difficult, but these issues were considered by upper management to be the necessary price of working with a hard-driving auteur.

To Meehan’s expansive roster of friends and allies, he was a generous, brilliant, and genuinely subversive writer and editor. I know this from personal experience: There’s a great deal of professional overlap between Eater and Lucky Peach. A number of its staff and contributors, including many people I spoke to for this story, have contributed to Eater. I’ve attended numerous Lucky Peach parties, contributed a story to the magazine, and have met Meehan on several occasions, finding him to be charming, thoughtful, and sharp.

Behind all of Meehan’s public success, however, were ever-growing ranks of scarred, fearful staffers who worked under him. Interviews with more than two dozen sources, including former Lucky Peach employees, current Los Angeles Times staffers, and freelancers for both publications, allege that Meehan’s management of both these publications veered beyond the realm of a difficult boss in a high-stakes environment, and into a deeper and more disturbing toxicity. They describe a relentless cycle of unrestrained generosity and explosive anger, while his disdain for professionalism, combined with a zeal for perfection, led to workplaces with few boundaries and constant tension. A number of sources for this story spoke anonymously out of a fear of professional retribution from Meehan or their current employer.

Violent tempers, inappropriate jokes and comments, and allegations of sexual misconduct are far from unknown issues in the media world, and they’re a hallmark of the restaurant industry. Lucky Peach got its start in the cradle of the Momofuku restaurant group, making these dynamics even more intertwined. Former Lucky Peach staffers with restaurant experience say it was especially disturbing to see the behavior they associated with hostile kitchens — behavior David Chang has apologized for perpetuating in his own restaurants — replicated in an office.

Former staff, including many media industry veterans, say working under Meehan was shattering in a way they had not experienced under other tough bosses. At Lucky Peach, his over-the-top insults and physical displays of anger — slamming doors, hitting tables, knocking over chairs — created an atmosphere of fear, while female staffers say that Meehan’s sexual jokes and inappropriate comments crossed a line even in their freewheeling and irreverent workplace. At the Los Angeles Times, Meehan’s outbursts were limited to Slack or other written communication, but pushing back, staffers say, led to difficulties around deadlines, feedback, and assignments, while his lack of professional boundaries culminated in one employee finding herself subject to repeated sexual commentary, and, in one incident, unwanted, sexually charged touching.

Meehan declined repeated requests to speak on the record. In a letter sent to Times food staffers and provided to Eater, the paper’s management said, “Employees told us that Meehan created a negative work environment where employees did not feel comfortable raising their concerns. … We have taken a series of actions that reflect the seriousness of the allegations, including imposing, where appropriate, discipline, and insisting that managers receive new counseling and training.”

Marian Bull, who freelanced for Meehan both at Lucky Peach and the Times, says Meehan’s persona, steeped in subversive cultural tropes, could obscure how his behavior reinforced a much blander and more oppressive status quo. “He thought his transgressiveness absolved him,” she says.

In food media, the last great economic cataclysm ushered in a broification of the industry after decades of publications staffed and run largely by white women and gay men. In 2009, Gourmet shuttered, and Bon Appétit was relaunched under Rapoport, a straight, white male editor from GQ. Lucky Peach was born soon after, on a lark: What if a food magazine was written for the people who cooked the food, not who ate it?

Chris Ying met Meehan and David Chang in 2009 while putting together an experimental newspaper, called the San Francisco Panorama, which featured a food section, for McSweeney’s. A year later, the pair approached Ying, who had cooked in restaurants, with an idea for a food magazine. The first issue, exuding pork fat and swagger and bad words to spare, was overseen by Meehan and Ying and put together by McSweeney’s staff, with significant input from Chang. In addition to its restaurant cred, the magazine’s aesthetics and zine-like attitude borrowed from indie rock culture, positioning it as a publication for those left out of the mainstream.

Chasing the unexpected hit led to a fuzzy leadership structure and a bicoastal operation. Ying became the editor-in-chief, heading a small San Francisco office spun off from McSweeney’s, while Meehan worked from New York. While the magazine, especially its early issues, was a true collaboration between Meehan and Ying, Meehan always held a larger share in the company, commanded a higher salary, had more say over the budget, and was more tightly connected to Momofuku and Chang.

In late 2011, Rachel Khong was hired as the magazine’s managing editor and first employee. The first time Khong hung out with Meehan, her new boss, was at an alcohol-fueled dinner at San Francisco’s Mission Chinese, where the small staff of the new food magazine were feted. At the end of the night, she sent an email to her boyfriend when she got home, asking for a ride to the office the next morning and adding, “Peter Meehan kissed me goodbye!” Today, Khong says she no longer remembers this kiss, in part because her time working for Meehan involved a barrage of blurred boundaries. “For many mornings during those years, I would wake up to a Peter phone call and go to sleep after talking to Peter,” Khong says. “It was always there were just never any boundaries.”

As at many indie publications, the work schedule at Lucky Peach was punishing at best, and like many small staffs working closely together to produce an aggressively honed creative product in a pressure-cooker environment with unforgiving standards, a distinct workplace culture emerged that reflected the profane, transgressive high-low spirit of the magazine. The bicoastal offices ran on constant riffing over email and Hipchat, a Slack precursor, and elaborate wordplay and absurdist imagery were the norm. Editors would say they were tickling, massaging, diddling, and piddling a piece; jokes about hot chats and “that’s what she said” were volleyed back and forth. At the San Francisco office, a running prank was to jump out of the closet to scare other employees; deadline stress would devolve into ridiculous fake headlines and photoshopping frogs’ heads onto bodybuilders.

By 2014, Meehan began to staff up the New York office, which was eventually located in its own space at 128 Lafayette Street, in Chinatown. (Disclosure: This space is now the Eater test kitchen.) The giddy, weird energy that pervaded the magazine’s stressful early days — which still reigned in San Francisco — was overlaid with dread in New York. While members of the San Francisco office say they had seen glimpses of Meehan’s temper — Khong recalls seeing him slam a door violently over a video call — on the East Coast, fear of his anger pervaded the office. Several staffers recall a New York editor saying, during one of Meehan’s explosions, “Peter, please don’t make me cry today.”

Priya Krishna, who was hired out of college to do outreach and customer service, says that, at first, getting a job at Lucky Peach was thrilling. She’d devoured the magazine in college, and when she went to events with “Lucky Peach” on her nametag, people were eager to talk to her. Behind the scenes, she says that the work culture was increasingly toxic — the New York office was often tense and silent. She would cry on Sundays because she had to go back the next day. “I was scared to go to work,” she says. “My day was dependent on this man’s mood, whether Peter was going to feel generous that day and buy us all lunch, or whether he’d be angry at something that would set him off.”

Late in her tenure at Lucky Peach, Krishna was called into a meeting over a subscription partnership that was underperforming. “Peter banged his hands on the table really really loudly and the table shook, and [he] yelled ‘WHAT HAPPENED?’ at the top of his lungs,” she says. Another employee sent messages to the SF office about the incident over Hipchat. When Krishna took a scheduled call after that meeting, Meehan publicly berated her for not addressing the partnership immediately, and told her to go home for a month and see if she had a job when she came back. She resigned a few days later.

During the photoshoot for the magazine’s last cookbook, All About Eggs, which Khong traveled to New York to oversee, the tension in the office was extraordinarily high, even by Lucky Peach standards. Meehan slammed a door so loudly the staffer who witnessed it was frightened. At one point, a staffer alleges, he grew so angry about the state of the kitchen, which was littered with boxes from new equipment, that he shoved a chair out of the way to charge at her in a manner she found threatening. “He stormed at me physically, and stood over me, raised a fist or his hand,” she says. Then, she says, Meehan seemed to catch himself and back away. “That was the tone and tenor of how things were there,” she says.

Walter Green, who began working at Lucky Peach as a designer in the magazine’s early days, when he was just 20 years old, says Meehan encouraged him to write, and he viewed him as a mentor. “He could be a really, really sweet guy at times,” he says. “He would invite us to get burgers with him in the evening and hang out with his family.” But even though Green, who eventually became one of the magazine’s art directors, was never a target of Meehan’s temper, he understood it as a problem in the office. “I viewed him as a damaged person who would act out,” he says. “Coming from a family where people do sometimes fly off the handle and say mean things or act out, if I’m around Peter, I want to make sure to keep him calm and make sure he doesn’t blow up at people. You feel protective of your coworkers.” Green says that when things got tense, he would take Meehan on walks to calm him down or play silly music to lighten the mood.

While Lucky Peach’s culture was casual and frequently profane, former staffers say that Meehan revelled in his propensity for over-the-top insults and descriptions of violence, which struck a dissonant chord coming from their boss. Of a contributor who wouldn’t translate a piece he reported for the magazine, Meehan wrote in an email in 2016, “I’m gonna mouthbarf seeing that half-bald sweater-wearing pussy’s name printed in my magazine if he’s unwilling to do the basic legwork of the relatively simple fucking task at hand.” Multiple staffers describe Meehan recounting a time he threatened another employee by saying he would shove a “golf umbrella” up his ass and open it. (This former employee says Meehan never said this to him).

Lucky Peach employees often spoke in crude metaphors or riffed on absurdist sexualized scenarios. But multiple staffers say that Meehan crossed the line, indulging in a truly constant barrage of heavily sexualized terminology in casual conservation and at times making quips directed at specific female staffers. In one exchange, when Khong said getting through submissions would be “easier with interns,” Meehan responded, “No, that’s NSA sex.” When she got a space heater for the office, Meehan said he’d always been trying to “heat up her space.”

Coming from her boss, these types of jokes made Khong uncomfortable, but she had no idea how to respond; she felt obliged to either play them off or to laugh. “He was a grown man who was my boss and I felt I had to be deferential to when he made those jokes,” she says. “He felt people were either cool or not cool, and you could be on either side of that.”

Aralyn Beaumont, who was hired as an assistant editor for the magazine before becoming its research director, also remembers Meehan making off-putting comments that objectified her. At a work lunch, Beaumont says that he remarked in front of the entire table, “You might have bluer eyes than Chad Robertson, who I thought had the prettiest eyes.” During that same visit to San Francisco by Meehan, after Beaumont ordered ramen, Meehan asked her if she was bulimic — an inside joke that referenced when Chang ate so much ramen during a trip to Japan that he threw up, an incident recounted in the first issue of Lucky Peach. To the young, junior employee, the comment felt alienating. “Maybe he thought that was a compliment, but I had an eating disorder since I was 13,” she says.

In New York, Meehan’s behavior around one young female staff member in particular made others in the office uncomfortable, even though they were unsure if it bothered her. Staffers recall Meehan giving her shoulder massages and making joking suggestive comments about her. On one occasion, he put his feet in her lap. Staffers brought their concerns to Ying, then the magazine’s editor-in-chief. The group discussed going to HR, but decided against it, in part because the HR team served Momofuku as a whole, not Lucky Peach. Ying opted to discuss the concerns with Meehan in person. “I had a private conversation with him, in which I expressed how disappointed I was both in the fact that his actions were making the staff uncomfortable, as well as disappointed as his business partner that he would jeopardize the business in this way. He was pretty contrite.” Ying did not address the issue with the female employee, since he saw the problem as lying squarely with Meehan, but he says that he now regrets not dealing with the situation more forcefully.

The woman at the center of these accusations told Eater there was never an inappropriate relationship between herself and Meehan, and while she does not recall much of his behavior, she believes this was in part because she did not think she could challenge the culture there, and so she accepted it. In retrospect, she believes that some of his actions toward her were inappropriate — she says that he once repeated a joke he’d heard that touched on her sex life — and undermined her professionally. But she had no idea that a complaint had been lodged by her colleagues; no one at the magazine ever spoke to her about Meehan’s behavior.

By 2016, Meehan and Ying’s partnership began to deteriorate, and Ying became more involved in projects outside the magazine, including the nonprofit he co-founded, Zero Food Print. Ying says that he and Meehan spoke about transitioning to an editor-at-large role, but in time, he felt that he had transitioned into no role at all, where his suggestions and ideas were undermined and disrespected. When Peter began repeatedly asking when he planned to leave entirely, he decided to do it. At the time, Ying was one of the few prominent Asian-American editors in the food world, and his departure marked the end of an era at the magazine. (Several staffers of color observed that by the end of Lucky Peach, the masthead had become almost entirely white.)

In both an editorial context and casual conversation, discussions about race and ethnicity could be frank and involve reappropriating slurs or stereotypes, especially in dialogues between Ying and Meehan. Some of these conversations were genuinely productive for the magazine, but Ying says he now regrets how he spoke about Asianness with Meehan. “I gave him an ‘honorary Asian card.’ That’s my fault and I own that,” Ying says. “I was improving my relationship with Peter by defanging myself. You give other people power by saying, ‘Here, it’s cool, because I’m saying this in front of you.’ It’s self-degrading in so many ways. The damage is it gives him license with other people who aren’t okay with it.”

Meehan did not appear to see (or set) boundaries between how he spoke with his business partners, Ying and Chang, and how he spoke to people who worked for him. For Asian-American staffers who were not partners but employees, his habit of speaking like an insider to Asian-American culture was fraught. Khong recalls that during her time there, Meehan discussed staffers’ ethnicity in a way that felt tokenizing. “It was like he’s calling you a Malaysian person or a Chinese person, [so you should] go get this story, or ‘Chris and Rachel are the Asians, they can do this,’” Khong says. “This casual way of referring to Asians, or to Dave being Korean, felt right on the edge of appropriateness. I think he felt like he was in on the joke.” And while the magazine’s aesthetics often reappropriated or satirized Orientalist tropes, when Meehan was the creative force behind the joke, it took on a different tone; Krishna recalls feeling uncomfortable when Meehan styled one of her mother’s recipes with a statue of a Hindu deity in the Power Vegetables cookbook, for instance.

While Chang was the most famous face associated with Lucky Peach, he claims to have had limited visibility into the work environment, mostly contributing ideas over email and meeting with Meehan or Ying at infrequent work lunches. He was in contact with high-up staffers, including Khong and Ying, but says he did not meet other employees until after the magazine’s closure. His distanced approach, which became more pronounced, several staffers say, as his relationship with Meehan grew more tense, meant that staffers struggling with Meehan’s behavior were unsure who to turn to, while Chang’s own reputation for anger did not encourage people to come forward.

Chang provided the following statement to Eater, in which he says he is bound by a legal agreement not to disclose or disparage Meehan. “First, to the staff of Lucky Peach, I let you down and I’m sorry. Within the first twelve months of the magazine’s start, I largely stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the company. I chose instead to contribute ideas from a distance. I am incredibly proud of the magazine, its contributors, and its staff, but frankly, I wasn’t around for much of its life and I regret it.” Chang notes he has gone on to work with several former Lucky Peach staffers, including Ying and Khong at Majordomo Media, and Krishna on a forthcoming cookbook. The statement further says, “Throughout my career, I have been known — even celebrated by the media — for being an angry bully in the kitchen. I have tried not to hide my shortcomings and I have worked extremely hard to become a better leader and a better person.”

“Had I been better, had I created an environment that was a polar opposite, with no shades of black or gray,” he added later, “I can imagine a scenario where they would have come to me, and that’s what I’ve been wrestling with.”

One veteran of Lucky Peach says that the magazine’s last year, when the San Francisco office consisted only of Aralyn Beaumont and Meehan was fully in control, was less marked by his temper. Ben Mims, now a cooking columnist at the Los Angeles Times, worked for Meehan during the magazine’s final months, and says he had no bad experiences with Meehan then. The magazine’s closure was sudden, unexpected by freelancers or staff, and because neither Chang nor Meehan can or will speak publicly about it, remains a subject of fascination. (One thing everyone agrees on is that Lucky Peach was not profitable.)

Ying says he feels frustrated that over the years, Meehan has become known as the “founder” of Lucky Peach when the first issue was put together over his own kitchen table. He also expressed frustration over how allegations about Meehan’s behavior might erase the work he and other Lucky Peach staffers were proud of. “Rachel worked on every single piece in the magazine,” Ying says.

The magazine’s goodbye letter, written by Meehan, argues that he and Ying got too much credit for the magazine, but does not mention Khong at all, despite her integral role in much of the magazine’s history and development; she became its executive editor in 2015. Khong departed the magazine in 2016, having hit her limit with Meehan’s behavior and frustrated by disparities between her salary and compensation and those of new hires. “I never wanted to leave the job,” Khong told me through tears. “The good parts were so good and he was the biggest bad part of it.”

The environment Meehan stepped into at the Los Angeles Times was markedly different from the scrappy early days of Lucky Peach, and several former Lucky Peach staffers told me they’d hoped the structure of the institution would blunt Meehan’s behavior. In fact, Meehan’s arrival as a consultant was greeted with relief by a paper still reeling from the loss of Gold. As editor of the newly created food section, Meehan frequently battled with other departments at the paper, isolating it from the organization as a whole. Because Meehan never moved to Los Angeles, his interactions with staff mostly occurred in locked Slack rooms or clustered in weeklong visits.

Even though Meehan only flew out for one week a month from New York, his manner over Slack, over email, and in edits was enough to put the whole section on the defensive. Mims, the former Lucky Peach staffer, says that when a story of his went live on the site without following protocols, Meehan exploded at him in a group Slack channel, berating him in all caps over the decision, even though Mims thought Meehan had approved it. The exchange, over what Meehan called, “THE F-ING STORY THAT JUST WENT LIVE,” prompted a conversation with Meehan’s deputy editor, Andrea Chang, in which Mims said no one should speak to their employees like that. After a day of tension, Meehan, who was in the LA office, sent an apology email and gave Mims an awkward hug, according to Mims, saying, “We hurt the people we like the most.” Mims says after this, he believes it became harder to have pitches approved or to get feedback in a timely fashion, resulting in stressful, last-minute rushes to meet deadlines — leading him to conclude that pushing back any harder would make his life even more difficult.

Bill Addison, one of the paper’s two restaurant critics, who had worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Magazine, and Eater before coming to the Times, also says within weeks of joining the paper, he found Meehan’s behavior went beyond tough editing into something that felt like bullying. He admired the editorial eye Meehan brought to the section, Addison says, but within months he found himself demoralized and afraid. He did not speak up beyond going to Yoshino, because he feared both internal retaliation, since he perceived Meehan to be supported by the paper’s leadership, and public castigation, since in the past Meehan had publicly attacked other colleagues at the paper on Twitter.

Patricia Escárcega, the paper’s other restaurant critic, says she also felt shut down by Meehan, despite the fact that he’d fought to bring her to the paper. Other staffers describe the relationship between the two as notably chilly. She felt singled out, and eventually went to Yoshino to complain. In an email to Eater, Escárcega described the meeting: “I told her I felt like I was working for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I told her I was walking on eggshells. I sat in her office and cried. She said he was under a lot of stress.”

Escárcega, the only Latina in the section, says she also felt a “subtle” pressure to write about Mexican food, a subject that she cares about deeply but didn’t want her work reduced to. “It definitely felt like there was more resistance when I wrote about different types of cuisines,” she says. In an initial statement from a company spokesperson, the Los Angeles Times told Eater, “Meehan has been an advocate for more inclusive coverage in the section he helped relaunch, reflective not only of Los Angeles’ vast and diverse food scene, but also of the writers, photographers, designers and illustrators who chronicle it.”

Managing editor Kimi Yoshino, who was Meehan’s direct supervisor, provided a statement to Eater noting Meehan’s talent as an editor should not have come “at the expense of the staff’s well-being.” The statement continues, “It became clear Peter had problems in the way he communicated and collaborated with others. I believed those problems were fixable and worked with him to become a better manager and more diplomatic communicator. I regret not doing even more to fully understand the extent of the staff’s concerns.” Yoshino characterized her own working relationship with Meehan as challenging and says, “I sometimes found his approach to be rude and disrespectful to our colleagues. I had many difficult conversations with him about the changes he needed to make as a manager, though I see now that wasn’t enough.”

One of the issues that employees struggling with Meehan’s behavior point to is that he seemed to create an environment of insiders and outsiders, and that the insiders included deputy food editor Andrea Chang and, to a lesser extent, Yoshino. Chang, senior writer Jenn Harris, and columnist Lucas Peterson (a former Eater contributor) would regularly dine out together, expensing their meals if they were relevant to a story, and posting glossy photos of these nights out to Instagram. Meehan would join during the one week each month that he was in town (there was even an Instagram hashtag: #peteweek). This “cool kids” dynamic (as more than one staffer put it) was in part driven by these posts. Instagram plays a more professional role in the food world than many other sectors of media, as an arena to display dining knowledge and build a profile, and while it’s one thing to know a boss and certain coworkers are friendly it’s another to see evidence of that relationship posted on social media for likes and clout, especially as other staffers were alienated by and fearful of Meehan.

The group was genuinely close, especially Chang, Peterson, and Harris, and the boundaries between managers and writers were blurry, since Peterson and Meehan were high school friends, and Harris had at one point been the interim editor of the food section. The group drank together often, stayed out late, visited each others’ homes, and spoke frankly about personal matters, including their sex lives, smearing the boundaries between personal and professional.

On July 3, 2019, Harris says that Meehan obliterated those boundaries. That night, she went with Meehan, Chang, and Peterson to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. It was a social outing, not a work one, and Chang drove the group. When they left, Harris says Meehan was so drunk he seemed to raise a fist at Peterson when Peterson tried to help him up, and Meehan needed to be led down to the car. “Pete got into the back of the car with me,” Harris says. “Instead of leaving the middle seat open, he slid next to me and put his head on my shoulder. I thought he was going to pass out on my shoulder and fall asleep. As we’re driving, I felt him stick his hand and slide it under my dress on my inner thigh. I picked his hand up, really caught off guard and really embarrassed. I said, ‘No,’ and put his hand back on his own lap and then a couple seconds later he did it again. I took his hand off and put it back and I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ He mumbled, I understood him saying the words, ‘Pushing boundaries.’ So I said, ‘The boundaries are fine where they are, don’t fucking do that.’”

Peterson and Chang say they did not witness what happened in the back of the car. Harris says, and Peterson confirms, that she told both him and Chang about Meehan’s actions later that night. Harris asked them not to report the incident to anyone, and Peterson suggested that he talk to Meehan directly. (Chang declined to comment further for the story.) After such a long friendship, Peterson was shocked and upset by what he had heard. The next day, he confronted Meehan and told him his behavior had been, he says, “violent and inappropriate,” and he says Meehan apologized to him. Peterson told him he needed to speak to Harris and Chang. Harris says he never did speak to her about the incident, even as they continued to socialize. “I don’t know how we all kept hanging out trying to pretend like nothing was wrong,” Peterson says. “I’m honestly still so angry with myself for not doing or saying more. During the past year, Jenn and I have talked over these incidents a lot. And I think we were just really afraid.”

Later that summer, while out at the Chateau Marmont, along with Chang and Peterson, after a review dinner at Chateau Harare nearby, Harris joined Meehan on the smoking patio. She does not exactly remember what they were discussing, but she believes it was the subject of dating apps and her experiences with them. Harris says that Meehan said, “Jenn Harris, you are fuckable, you’re very fuckable. I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you, but I would stick your head in a pillow and fuck you.” She says that she did not interpret this as a solicitation so much as an inappropriate attempt to compliment her, but it made her deeply uncomfortable, so she went back to the table. She says she later told Peterson and Chang, as well as several other people, about the comments.

There was one other incident, which Harris did not include in her Slack post after Meehan’s departure. On another night in late summer 2019, Harris, Meehan, and Chang got together at Chang’s apartment, again as a social outing rather than a work one. They ordered in Thai food, and there was drinking — Harris perceived Meehan to be very drunk. She says, “We were sitting on the couch, and I was getting up to leave and he just looked at [her and Chang] and drunkenly said, ‘I could have fucked both of you tonight.’ I started laughing, like, are you fucking delusional? I said, ‘Well, I’m leaving now,’ and I left him there.”

Harris says she was never afraid of Meehan during these interactions, and at times tried to convince herself that these actions and comments had not been a big deal. But she did fear him in the office, and that led her to be afraid to say anything about what happened, or to stop hanging out with Meehan and the rest of the friend group. She saw when Meehan unleashed tirades in public Slack channels, and she recalls once hearing him say he would make a person who had pissed him off “his hobby.” Harris did not ever want to become his hobby. “He can be so nice and charming and supportive of your career,” she says. “I was worthy of being invited to social engagements. I benefited from that. I would think over and over, ‘What happens when he stops liking me?’ I didn’t want to find out.”

Harris also saw how upper management valued Meehan at the paper, and his ability to bulldoze through long-standing barriers and red tape to get what he wanted for the section. During her years at the Times, the food section had long fought to have a dedicated photographer and social media person — under Meehan, they got both. Harris wasn’t sure if this was Meehan’s doing or if management was just finally giving the section the resources it needed, but either way, she did not believe her story would be heard. “He is this beloved person in food media and at work, and I didn’t know if I told someone, if I’d be the one who had to leave,” she says. “If I said something, and he was still my boss after, it would be awkward. I was just scared.” (In her statement to Eater, Yoshino says, “I was shocked and appalled to hear the serious allegations of misconduct, including against one of my longtime friends and colleagues.”)

During her long tenure at the paper, Harris worked closely with Jonathan Gold, and she’s troubled by how often management has said Meehan got the job because he was Gold’s choice, even though Gold wasn’t the person who hired him. The paper spoke to, among other sources, former colleagues at the New York Times to vet Meehan; no one ever contacted anyone at Lucky Peach. Harris says, “I knew Jonathan very well, and I really don’t think that he would have been okay with this behavior, or been aware of it. For people in the building to say, ‘Oh, he was Jonathan’s pick,’ that is skirting responsibly for who hired him, and did or did not properly vet him. That’s a deflection of responsibility on a dead man.”

Following Meehan’s resignation, a wave of posts proliferated across social media by people who had worked with Meehan at Lucky Peach and the Los Angeles Times, who finally felt able to speak out. Aralyn Beaumont described her time at Lucky Peach as “living with a hole that has yet to close.” Chris Ying wrote on Instagram that “it took me a long time — too long — to understand that we weren’t dealing with a run-of-the-mill bad boss.” Rachel Khong wrote about how Twitter could distort the complexities of the situation. “I don’t believe Peter is an evil person. I don’t believe in evil people, full stop,” she wrote. But, she continued, “the harm that was done to us was not one Tweetable instance but was daily, and relentless, and insidious.”

Staffers at the Los Angeles Times, who by then had seen Harris’s allegations about Meehan’s behavior in Slack, were sharper-edged. Ben Mims wrote that the apology posted by Meehan was “an embarrassment,” saying that “‘tunnel vision’ and a ‘management style’ doesn’t begin to describe the culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation that traumatized our whole team.” Lucas Peterson posted a long statement that many other staffers say encapsulated what it was like to work for Meehan, especially where he wrote, “One of my colleagues described it as like being in a house of horrors — we were all in different parts of the house, and had different experiences. But we were all in the house.”

On August 11, the entire food section at the Los Angeles Times sent a letter to management calling for an end to the holding pattern in place since Meehan’s departure. “The continued uncertainty regarding leadership — with no end in sight — is putting the future of the section in peril,” it states. “There has been no communication from upper management since July 6, which has only served to shake our confidence further during an already upsetting and traumatic time.” The letter demands regular updates on the HR investigation launched after the allegations about Meehan’s behavior surfaced on social media and Slack, and the immediate posting of both the food editor and deputy food editor positions, with an eye toward addressing the section’s lack of representation of the demographics of LA. “We at the Food section recognize the work of the Times’ Black and Latino caucuses, and insist that people of color, particularly those underrepresented in the newsroom, be prioritized in any new hiring,” the letter states.

On August 20, management relased the results of an internal HR investigation launched in the wake of Meehan’s departure. The report states, “Employees told us that Meehan created a negative work environment where employees did not feel comfortable raising their concerns. We also found that managers failed to prevent or report behavior they knew or should have known was inappropriate.” Yoshino will no longer oversee the section, and Chang has been reassigned to Column One. Internally, some LAT staffers say they are dissatified with these changes, including Chang’s lateral move into another section.

It’s not a coincidence, or even that singular, that the Los Angeles Times uprising against Meehan happened over Zoom and the reassessment of Lucky Peach happened over social media, all of it sparked by a single, pointed Twitter thread. This is a story shaped by COVID-19 and the mass quarantine of professional workplaces. The pandemic chewing through the tattered American safety net is too gigantic a disaster to contemplate head on for long, but its silent destruction is always unfolding, creating an atmosphere of fear and urgency whose only outlet is the streets, or social media.

Every institution seems to be failing, and failing us. Navigating media jobs over screens during this frightening moment has left workers isolated and exhausted, but also in possession of a strange freedom. As career ladders crumble, many journalists are doubling down on the one thing the job can still offer: a sense of meaning. That meaning grows sour if bosses are cruel or inequities are entrenched, and calling out a famous, perhaps brilliant editor as a bad boss is less intimidating if there’s no newsroom to face them in. The best hope is for a better way of life to rise from America’s disastrous failure, but right now, the pandemic still rages — the worst may just be beginning. Those with professional jobs in cities willing to issue stay-at-home orders, a bleak blessing, are trapped at home with nothing but time to reassess the past’s failures, and enumerate what must be born anew.

The question for the media reckoning underway is: What might truly subvert the old power structures? What comes after the legend of the brilliant, intimidating, perfectionist editor, embodied appetizingly by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada (who in reality is most often a white man)? In the recent past, explosive tempers and blurred lines could be excused if the end product were exciting enough. Dismantling that ethos is only a start; it stems from larger inequities in how power and value are accorded in a newsroom, and who gets credit for the work. In an industry where power is nakedly ranked on a masthead, it took the lateral, flattening effect of social media to shake those hierarchies. “I think Peter had a gift for surrounding himself with talented people,” Escárcega wrote in an earlier email. “I hope we get smarter about who we exalt and why.”

Meghan McCarron is Eater’s special correspondent. Andrea D’Aquino is an illustrator based in New York City. Fact checked by Samantha Schuyler

Disclosures: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater. The Eater Test Kitchen that housed Lucky Peach was, for a time, sublet from Momofuku. A number of people in this story have contributed to Eater, including Tammie Teclemariam, Marian Bull, Rachel Khong, Lucas Peterson, and Bill Addison.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3l0UbBf via Blogger https://ift.tt/3giC9XE

[junker-town]

The full story behind that video of Russell Westbrook threatening a Jazz fan

Westbrook and two teammates say the fan told him to “get on your knees like you’re used to,” which the fan denied.

Russell Westbrook got into it, again, with a pair of Jazz fans in the middle of Oklahoma City’s nine-point win over Utah on Monday. It’s the second time in as many years that Westbrook has had a run-in with fans in Utah, following a set of altercations with Jazz fans during a playoff game last season.

But this time was different. This time, the blowup had a racial undertone, with conflicting stories about what was said from each side.

Let’s investigate.

Video surfaces

During Monday’s game, video of Westbrook threatening to wash some Jazz fans surfaces on Twitter.

“I’ll f*ck you up,” the video catches Westbrook saying to what appears to be a pair of fans. “You and your wife.”

Things get heated between Russell Westbrook and Utah Jazz fans again. “I’ll f*ck you up. You and your wife,” he says. Not sure what these fans said to him, but he also had issues with Jazz fans during the postseason. pic.twitter.com/LquwRmLVNy

— Eric Woodyard (@E_Woodyard) March 12, 2019

Pay close attention to the Thunder player who is closest to the action. That’s Patrick Patterson on OKC’s bench. This will be important later.

Warning cards

Twenty-three minutes after the video surfaced, Eric Woodyard of the Deseret News reported Utah’s staff issued five fans “warning cards” because their actions directed toward players were in violation of the NBA’s Fan Code of Conduct, which requires that guests “enjoy the basketball experience free from disruptive behavior, including foul or abusive language or obscene gestures.”

Five Utah Jazz fans received "warning cards" that their comments, gestures and/or behaviors directed at players were in violation of the NBA Fan Code of Conduct, but were able to return to their seats after their altercation with Russell Westbrook.

— Eric Woodyard (@E_Woodyard) March 12, 2019

These were the fans who Westbrook appeared to be addressing.

Westbrook’s side

Russell Westbrook didn’t take any questions after the game. Instead, he addressed his altercation with the pair of Jazz fans. He said one told him to “get on your knees like you’re used to,” then said his wife repeated the same statement.

And here’s the end. pic.twitter.com/OE5nleXRXf

— Brett Dawson (@BDawsonWrites) March 12, 2019

“The realization of it is a young man and his wife in the stands told me to get down on your knees like you’re used to. And for me that’s just completely disrespectful to me,” he says. “I think it’s racial. I think it’s just inappropriate in a sense of there’s no protection for the players. I think there are a lot of great fans around the world that like to come to the game and enjoy the game. Then there are people who come to the game to say mean, disrespectful things about me, my family.

“For many years, I’ve done all the right things. I’ve never done anything to hurt or harm anybody. I’ve never been in any trouble, never fought a fan. Been in the league 11 years, clean slate, humble. I’ll take all the criticism from everybody. I’ve been doing the same thing for years. But for me, disrespect will not be taken.

“Especially here in Utah. Every time I come here, it’s a lot of disrespectful things that’s said.”

Westbrook also addressed his comment that he would “f*ck up” the fan’s wife.

“As for beating up his wife, I’ve never put my hands on a women, never will, never been in any domestic violence, never have before,” he says. “But once he said the comment, his wife repeated it, the same thing to me, as well. That’s kind of how that started. I know you guys only saw the end of the video, but the start is what’s important and way more disrespectful than what you guys heard.”

The fan’s side of the story

After the game, Shane Keisel, the fan in question, spoke to Utah TV station KSL5 about his exchange with Westbrook. He says he told Westbrook to “sit down and ice your knees, bro.” Kiesel also swears he never said a curse word to Westbrook.

Shane Keisel, the Jazz fan who was involved in a verbal altercation with Russell Westbrook during the Jazz loss to the Thunder, explains his side of what happened. @KSL5TV @kslsports #nba pic.twitter.com/ScCSRttTCg

— Jeremiah Jensen (@JJSportsBeat) March 12, 2019

“It was when Joe (Ingles) had come by and poked Paul George in the eye. And then Joe goes over and apologizes immediately, and then Russ is just f-bombing and carrying on and acting a fool down here, and everybody’s getting on him,” Keisel says. “Then he had, I guess, heat, I thought it was ice. So I just told him, ‘just sit down and ice your knees, bro.’ And he turned to me and is like, ‘That’s heat. That’s heat.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, you’re gonna need it.’ And then it turned into not safe for the work.”

Patterson speaks

Patrick Patterson had a front-row seat to the action, and he was disgusted by what he saw. He says here that the fan told Westbrook to “get down on your knees like you’re used to,” which is a serious left turn from “sit down and ice your knees, bro.” He also hints that comment wasn’t all that was said.

Fans can say shit about a mans family, wife, & kids.. Tell a player “Get down on your knees like your use to.” As men, what do you expect us to do? Shut up & dribble? No one is held accountable for their actions except for us. Fans are protected in every way possible but not us.

— Patrick Patterson (@pdpatt) March 12, 2019

Yes. And more..

— Patrick Patterson (@pdpatt) March 12, 2019

Raymond Felton also backs Westbrook’s account

Felton, one of Westbrook’s teammates also sitting on the bench, corroborated his side of the story.

Raymond Felton: “I’m going to speak on this, and I want everyone in here to really tune into this and understand...” pic.twitter.com/2rXjcQhAMV

— Maddie Lee (@maddie_m_lee) March 12, 2019

“That was absurd, what they said to Russ,” Felton said. “That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not the first time it happened. It happened in Portland.”

Keisel’s profile is found

Twitter detectives found Keisel’s profile and several damning tweets that shed light on his beliefs outside his Jazz fandom. Keisel eventually deleted these tweets, and later deleted his entire Twitter profile.

It turns out Keisel has tweeted about Westbrook in the past. Those tweets include, “Russell Westbrook is a classless piece of shit. Somebody needs to kick his ass. #tool #poorloser” and “Russell Westbrook needs to go back where he came from!! #MAGA.”

Russell Westbrook argues with Utah Jazz fan Shane Keisel. here are some of his tweets about Westbrook. this man purposely bought tickets close to the OKC Thunder bench where both he & his wife yelled racially charged words towards Russ. Utah needs to hold this man accountable.. pic.twitter.com/ztoilJ0Kvg

— Eric Britt (@_Ericbritt) March 12, 2019

The Jazz are looking into this

Utah is investigating everything and is reportedly taking the matter seriously.

According to league sources, the Jazz are conducting a full investigation into the matter, and are taking the matter of the integration between Russell Westbrook and the fans seriously

— Tony Jones (@Tjonesonthenba) March 12, 2019

They should be

Remember: Westbrook had not one, but two altercations with Jazz fans during last season’s playoff series. To jog your memory, one was at halftime of Game 6 of the first round of the playoffs.

Russell Westbrook and fan get into it at the end of the first half. #NBA#ThunderUp pic.twitter.com/EoqkMklm6k

— @TITANSHOMER (@TitansHomer) April 28, 2018

The other altercation was at the end of OKC’s disappointing loss.

Thunder’s Russell Westbrook takes exception to Utah fan after Game 6 loss to Jazz pic.twitter.com/Ef1cgEhVm4

— Ben Golliver (@BenGolliver) April 28, 2018

After the game, Westbrook criticized Jazz fans and the level of disrespect in their trash talk.

“I don’t confront fans, fans confront me,” Westbrook said during his post-game press conference. “Here in Utah, a lot of disrespectful, vulgar things are said to the players here with these fans, man. It’s truly disrespectful. Talk about your families, about your kids. It’s just disrespect to the game, and I think it’s something that needs to be brought up.”

It’s not just Utah

Westbrook literally had to shove a Nuggets fan away after that fan ran onto the court and yelled in his face.

There was also an instance when a young Nuggets fan with court side seats poked Westbrook on the elbow, which prompted Westbrook to approach the fan and his father to explain why that wasn’t OK.

Russell Westbrook pulled the dad card on a Nuggets fan after the kid gave him a little push. pic.twitter.com/b4nBTXlV9r

— ESPN (@espn) February 27, 2019

[endenogatai]

UK Far Right activist circumvents Facebook ban to livestream threats

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a Far Right UK activist who was permanently banned from Facebook last week for repeatedly breaching its community standards on hate speech, was nonetheless able to use its platform to livestream harassment of an anti-fascist blogger whom he doorstepped at home last night.

UK-based blogger Mike Stuchbery detailed the intimidating incident in a series of tweets earlier today, writing that Yaxley-Lennon appeared to have used a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent the ban on his own Facebook and Instagram pages.

I've spent the last few months documenting how 'Tommy Robinson’ uses doorstepping to intimidate his critics, and how social media giants have enabled it.

So what does he do? Turns up at my house tonight. 1/ pic.twitter.com/NBB4B636eY

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

In recent years Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the moniker ‘Tommy Robinson’ on social media, has used online platforms to raise his profile and solicit donations to fund Far Right activism.

He has also, in the case of Facebook and Twitter, fallen foul of mainstream tech platforms’ community standards which prohibit use of their tools for hate speech and intimidation. Earning himself a couple of bans. (At the time of writing Yaxley-Lennon has not been banned from Google-owned YouTube .)

Though circumventing Facebook’s ban appears to have been trivially easy for Yaxley-Lennon, who, as well as selling himself as a Far Right activist called “Tommy Robinson”, previously co-founded the Islamophobic Far Right pressure group, the English Defence League.

Giving an account of being doorstepped by Yaxley-Lennon in today’s Independent, Stuchbery writes: “The first we knew of it was a loud, frantic rapping on my door at around quarter to 11 [in the evening]… That’s when notifications began to buzz on my phone — message requests on Facebook pouring in, full of abuse and vitriol. “Tommy” was obviously livestreaming his visit, using a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent his ban, and had tipped off his fans.”

A repost (to YouTube) of what appears to be a Facebook Live stream of the incident corroborates Stuchbery’s account, showing Yaxley-Lennon outside a house at night where can be seen shouting for “Mike” to come out and banging on doors and/or windows.

At another point in the same video Yaxley-Lennon can be seen walking away when he spots a passerby and engages them in conversation. During this portion of the video Yaxley-Lennon publicly reveals Stuchbery’s address — a harassment tactic that’s known as doxxing.

He can also be heard making insinuating remarks to the unidentified passerby about what he claims are Stuchbery’s “wrong” sexual interests.

In another tweet today Stuchbery describes the remarks are defamatory, adding that he now intends to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

A couple of things: First, let me assure you, I take my reputation very, very seriously. For 'Tommy’ to call me a paedophile is defamatory in the extreme. We've got it on video. See you in court, 'Tommy’. /9

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

Stuchbery has also posted several screengrabs to Twitter, showing a number of Facebook users who he is not connected to sending him abusive messages — presumably during the livestream.

During the video Yaxley-Lennon can also be heard making threats to return, saying: “Mike Stuchbery. See you soon mate, because I’m coming back and back and back and back.”

At the same time, messages came flooding in via social media. Despite being banned by Facebook, he was using a mate's account to stream – and the abuse came flooding in. /5 pic.twitter.com/doyzinSewO

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

In a second livestream, also later reposted to YouTube, Yaxley-Lennon can be heard apparently having returned a second time to Stuchbery’s house, now at around 5am, to cause further disturbance.

Stuchbery writes that he called the police to report both visits. In another tweet he says they “eventually talked ‘Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary ‘exposing me'”.

I called the police – who wouldn't? They came and eventually talked 'Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary 'exposing me’. /7

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

We reached out to Bedfordshire Police to ask what it could confirm about the incidents at Stuchbery’s house and the force’s press office told us it had received a number of enquiries about the matter. A spokeswoman added that it would be issuing a statement later today. We’ll update this post when we have it.  

Update: Bedfordshire Police have now sent the following statement regarding the incidents:

We were called to reports of a man causing a disturbance outside a house in Spurcroft, Luton at around 10.52pm on Monday (4 March) and again at around 5:21am on Tuesday (5 March). Officers attended and we are now establishing the circumstances around both incidents so we can determine whether any offences have been committed.

Stuchbery also passed us details of the account he believes was used to livestream the harassment — suggesting it’s linked to another Far Right activist, known by the moniker ‘Danny Tommo’, who was also banned by Facebook last week.

Though the Facebook account in question was using a different moniker — ‘Jack Dawkins’. This suggests, if the account did indeed belong to the same banned Far Right activist, he was also easily able to circumvent Facebook’s ban by creating a new account with a different (fake) name and email.

We passed the details of the ‘Jack Dawkins’ account to Facebook and since then the company appears to have suspended the account. (A message posted to it earlier today claimed it had been hacked.)

The fact of Yaxley-Lennon being able to use Facebook to livestream harassment a few days after he was banned underlines quite how porous Facebook’s platform remains for organized purveyors of hate and harassment. Studies of Facebook’s platform have previously suggested as much.

Which makes high profile ‘Facebook bans’ of hate speech activists mostly a crisis PR exercise for the company. And indeed easy PR for Far Right activists who have been quick to seize on and trumpet social media bans as ‘evidence’ of mainstream censorship of their point of view — liberally ripping from the playbook of US hate speech peddlers, such as the (also ‘banned’) InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Such as by posting pictures of themselves with their mouths gagged with tape.

Such images are intended to make meme-able messages for their followers to share. But the reality for social media savvy hate speech activists like Jones and Yaxley-Lennon looks nothing like censorship — given how demonstrably easy it remains for them to circumvent platform bans and carry on campaigns of hate and harassment via mainstream platforms.

We reached out to Facebook for a response to Yaxley-Lennon’s use of its livestreaming platform to harass Stuchbery, and to ask how it intends to prevent banned Far Right activists from circumventing bans and carrying on making use of its platform.

The company declined to make a public statement, though it did confirm the livestream had been flagged as violating its community standards last night and was removed afterwards. It also said it had deleted one post by a user for bullying. It added that it has content and safety teams which work around the clock to monitor Live videos flagged for review by Facebook users.

It did not confirm how long Yaxley-Lennon’s livestream was visible on its platform.

Stuchbery, a former history teacher, has garnered attention online writing about how Far Right groups have been using social media to organize and crowdfund ‘direct action’ in the offline world, including by targeting immigrants, Muslims, politicians and journalists in the street or on their own doorsteps.

But the trigger for Stuchbery being personally targeted by Yaxley-Lennon appears to be a legal letter served to the latter’s family home at the weekend informing him he’s being sued for defamation.

Stuchbery has been involved in raising awareness about the legal action, including promoting a crowdjustice campaign to raise funds for the suit.

The litigation relates to allegations Yaxley-Lennon made online late last year about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy called Jamal who was shown in a video that went viral being violently bullied by white pupils at his school in Northern England.

Yaxley-Lennon responded to the viral video by posting a vlog to social media in which he makes a series of allegations about Jamal. The schoolboy’s family have described the allegations as defamatory. And the crowdjustice campaign promoted by Stuchbery has since raised more than £10,000 to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

The legal team pursuing the defamation litigation has also written that it intends to explore “routes by which the social media platforms that provide a means of dissemination to Lennon can also be attached to this action”.

The video of Yaxley-Lennon making claims about Jamal can still be found on YouTube. As indeed can Yaxley-Lennon’s own channel — despite equivalent pages having been removed from Facebook and Twitter (the latter pulled the plug on Yaxley-Lennon’s account a year ago).

We asked YouTube why it continues to provide a platform for Yaxley-Lennon to amplify hate speech and solicit donations for campaigns of targeted harassment but the company declined to comment publicly on the matter.

It did point out it demonetized Yaxley-Lennon’s channel last month, having determined it breaches its advertising policies.

YouTube also told us that it removes any video content that violates its hate speech policies — which do prohibit the incitement of violence or hatred against members of a religious community.

But by ignoring the wider context here — i.e. Yaxley-Lennon’s activity as a Far Right activist — and allowing him to continue broadcasting on its platform YouTube is leaving the door open for dog whistle tactics to be used to signal to and stir up ‘in the know’ followers — as was the case with another Internet savvy operator, InfoWars’ Alex Jones (until YouTube eventually terminated his channel last year).

Until last week Facebook was also ignoring the wider context around Yaxley-Lennon’s Far Right activism — a decision that likely helped him reach a wider audience than he would otherwise have been able to. So now Facebook has another full-blown hate speech ‘influencer’ going rogue on its platform and being cheered by an audience of followers its tools helped amass.

There is, surely, a lesson here.

Yet it’s also clear mainstream platforms are unwilling to pro-actively and voluntarily adapt their rules to close down malicious users who seek to weaponize social media tools to spread hate and sew division via amplified harassment.

But if platforms won’t do it, it’ll be left to governments to curb social media’s antisocial impacts with regulation.

And in the UK there is now no shortage of appetite to try; the government has a White Paper on social media and safety coming this winter. While the official opposition has said it wants to create a new regulator to rein in online platforms and even look at breaking up tech giants. So watch this space.

Public attitudes to (anti)social media have certainly soured — and with livestreams of hate and harassment it’s little wonder.

“Perhaps the worst thing, in the cold light of day, is the near certainty that the “content” “Tommy” produced during his stunt will now be used as a fundraising tool,” writes Stuchbery, concluding his account of being on the receiving end of a Facebook Live spewing hate and harassment. “If you dare to call him out on his cavalcade of hate, he usually tries to monetize you. It is a cruel twist.

“But most of all, I wonder how we got in this mess. I wonder how we got to a place where those who try to speak out against hatred and those who peddle it are threatened at their homes. I despair at how social media has become a weapon wielded by some, seemingly with impunity, to silence.”

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/2VG1XTz via IFTTT

[sheminecrafts]

UK Far Right activist circumvents Facebook ban to livestream threats

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a Far Right UK activist who was permanently banned from Facebook last week for repeatedly breaching its community standards on hate speech, was nonetheless able to use its platform to livestream harassment of an anti-fascist blogger whom he doorstepped at home last night.

UK-based blogger Mike Stuchbery detailed the intimidating incident in a series of tweets earlier today, writing that Yaxley-Lennon appeared to have used a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent the ban on his own Facebook and Instagram pages.

I've spent the last few months documenting how 'Tommy Robinson’ uses doorstepping to intimidate his critics, and how social media giants have enabled it.

So what does he do? Turns up at my house tonight. 1/ pic.twitter.com/NBB4B636eY

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

In recent years Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the moniker ‘Tommy Robinson’ on social media, has used online platforms to raise his profile and solicit donations to fund Far Right activism.

He has also, in the case of Facebook and Twitter, fallen foul of mainstream tech platforms’ community standards which prohibit use of their tools for hate speech and intimidation. Earning himself a couple of bans. (At the time of writing Yaxley-Lennon has not been banned from Google-owned YouTube .)

Though circumventing Facebook’s ban appears to have been trivially easy for Yaxley-Lennon, who, as well as selling himself as a Far Right activist called “Tommy Robinson”, previously co-founded the Islamophobic Far Right pressure group, the English Defence League.

Giving an account of being doorstepped by Yaxley-Lennon in today’s Independent, Stuchbery writes: “The first we knew of it was a loud, frantic rapping on my door at around quarter to 11 [in the evening]… That’s when notifications began to buzz on my phone — message requests on Facebook pouring in, full of abuse and vitriol. “Tommy” was obviously livestreaming his visit, using a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent his ban, and had tipped off his fans.”

A repost (to YouTube) of what appears to be a Facebook Live stream of the incident corroborates Stuchbery’s account, showing Yaxley-Lennon outside a house at night where can be seen shouting for “Mike” to come out and banging on doors and/or windows.

At another point in the same video Yaxley-Lennon can be seen walking away when he spots a passerby and engages them in conversation. During this portion of the video Yaxley-Lennon publicly reveals Stuchbery’s address — a harassment tactic that’s known as doxxing.

He can also be heard making insinuating remarks to the unidentified passerby about what he claims are Stuchbery’s “wrong” sexual interests.

In another tweet today Stuchbery describes the remarks are defamatory, adding that he now intends to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

A couple of things: First, let me assure you, I take my reputation very, very seriously. For 'Tommy’ to call me a paedophile is defamatory in the extreme. We've got it on video. See you in court, 'Tommy’. /9

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

Stuchbery has also posted several screengrabs to Twitter, showing a number of Facebook users who he is not connected to sending him abusive messages — presumably during the livestream.

During the video Yaxley-Lennon can also be heard making threats to return, saying: “Mike Stuchbery. See you soon mate, because I’m coming back and back and back and back.”

At the same time, messages came flooding in via social media. Despite being banned by Facebook, he was using a mate's account to stream – and the abuse came flooding in. /5 pic.twitter.com/doyzinSewO

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

In a second livestream, also later reposted to YouTube, Yaxley-Lennon can be heard apparently having returned a second time to Stuchbery’s house, now at around 5am, to cause further disturbance.

Stuchbery writes that he called the police to report both visits. In another tweet he says they “eventually talked ‘Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary ‘exposing me'”.

I called the police – who wouldn't? They came and eventually talked 'Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary 'exposing me’. /7

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

We reached out to Bedfordshire Police to ask what it could confirm about the incidents at Stuchbery’s house and the force’s press office told us it had received a number of enquiries about the matter. A spokeswoman added that it would be issuing a statement later today. We’ll update this post when we have it.  

Stuchbery also passed us details of the account he believes was used to livestream the harassment — suggesting it’s linked to another Far Right activist, known by the moniker ‘Danny Tommo’, who was also banned by Facebook last week.

Though the Facebook account in question was using a different moniker — ‘Jack Dawkins’. This suggests, if the account did indeed belong to the same banned Far Right activist, he was also easily able to circumvent Facebook’s ban by creating a new account with a different (fake) name and email.

We passed the details of the ‘Jack Dawkins’ account to Facebook and since then the company appears to have suspended the account. (A message posted to it earlier today claimed it had been hacked.)

The fact of Yaxley-Lennon being able to use Facebook to livestream harassment a few days after he was banned underlines quite how porous Facebook’s platform remains for organized purveyors of hate and harassment. Studies of Facebook’s platform have previously suggested as much.

Which makes high profile ‘Facebook bans’ of hate speech activists mostly a crisis PR exercise for the company. And indeed easy PR for Far Right activists who have been quick to seize on and trumpet social media bans as ‘evidence’ of mainstream censorship of their point of view — liberally ripping from the playbook of US hate speech peddlers, such as the (also ‘banned’) InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Such as by posting pictures of themselves with their mouths gagged with tape.

Such images are intended to make meme-able messages for their followers to share. But the reality for social media savvy hate speech activists like Jones and Yaxley-Lennon looks nothing like censorship — given how demonstrably easy it remains for them to circumvent platform bans and carry on campaigns of hate and harassment via mainstream platforms.

We reached out to Facebook for a response to Yaxley-Lennon’s use of its livestreaming platform to harass Stuchbery, and to ask how it intends to prevent banned Far Right activists from circumventing bans and carrying on making use of its platform.

The company declined to make a public statement, though it did confirm the livestream had been flagged as violating its community standards last night and was removed afterwards. It also said it had deleted one post by a user for bullying. It added that it has content and safety teams which work around the clock to monitor Live videos flagged for review by Facebook users.

It did not confirm how long Yaxley-Lennon’s livestream was visible on its platform.

Stuchbery, a former history teacher, has garnered attention online writing about how Far Right groups have been using social media to organize and crowdfund ‘direct action’ in the offline world, including by targeting immigrants, Muslims, politicians and journalists in the street or on their own doorsteps.

But the trigger for Stuchbery being personally targeted by Yaxley-Lennon appears to be a legal letter served to the latter’s family home at the weekend informing him he’s being sued for defamation.

Stuchbery has been involved in raising awareness about the legal action, including promoting a crowdjustice campaign to raise funds for the suit.

The litigation relates to allegations Yaxley-Lennon made online late last year about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy called Jamal who was shown in a video that went viral being violently bullied by white pupils at his school in Northern England.

Yaxley-Lennon responded to the viral video by posting a vlog to social media in which he makes a series of allegations about Jamal. The schoolboy’s family have described the allegations as defamatory. And the crowdjustice campaign promoted by Stuchbery has since raised more than £10,000 to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

The legal team pursuing the defamation litigation has also written that it intends to explore “routes by which the social media platforms that provide a means of dissemination to Lennon can also be attached to this action”.

The video of Yaxley-Lennon making claims about Jamal can still be found on YouTube. As indeed can Yaxley-Lennon’s own channel — despite equivalent pages having been removed from Facebook and Twitter (the latter pulled the plug on Yaxley-Lennon’s account a year ago).

We asked YouTube why it continues to provide a platform for Yaxley-Lennon to amplify hate speech and solicit donations for campaigns of targeted harassment but the company declined to comment publicly on the matter.

It did point out it demonetized Yaxley-Lennon’s channel last month, having determined it breaches its advertising policies.

YouTube also told us that it removes any video content that violates its hate speech policies — which do prohibit the incitement of violence or hatred against members of a religious community.

But by ignoring the wider context here — i.e. Yaxley-Lennon’s activity as a Far Right activist — and allowing him to continue broadcasting on its platform YouTube is leaving the door open for dog whistle tactics to be used to signal to and stir up ‘in the know’ followers — as was the case with another Internet savvy operator, InfoWars’ Alex Jones (until YouTube eventually terminated his channel last year).

Until last week Facebook was also ignoring the wider context around Yaxley-Lennon’s Far Right activism — a decision that likely helped him reach a wider audience than he would otherwise have been able to. So now Facebook has another full-blown hate speech ‘influencer’ going rogue on its platform and being cheered by an audience of followers its tools helped amass.

There is, surely, a lesson here.

Yet it’s also clear mainstream platforms are unwilling to pro-actively and voluntarily adapt their rules to close down malicious users who seek to weaponize social media tools to spread hate and sew division via amplified harassment.

But if platforms won’t do it, it’ll be left to governments to curb social media’s antisocial impacts with regulation.

And in the UK there is now no shortage of appetite to try; the government has a White Paper on social media and safety coming this winter. While the official opposition has said it wants to create a new regulator to rein in online platforms and even look at breaking up tech giants. So watch this space.

Public attitudes to (anti)social media have certainly soured — and with livestreams of hate and harassment it’s little wonder.

“Perhaps the worst thing, in the cold light of day, is the near certainty that the “content” “Tommy” produced during his stunt will now be used as a fundraising tool,” writes Stuchbery, concluding his account of being on the receiving end of a Facebook Live spewing hate and harassment. “If you dare to call him out on his cavalcade of hate, he usually tries to monetize you. It is a cruel twist.

“But most of all, I wonder how we got in this mess. I wonder how we got to a place where those who try to speak out against hatred and those who peddle it are threatened at their homes. I despair at how social media has become a weapon wielded by some, seemingly with impunity, to silence.”

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2VG1XTz via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a Far Right UK activist who was permanently banned from Facebook last week for repeatedly breaching its community standards on hate speech, was nonetheless able to use its platform to livestream harassment of an anti-fascist blogger whom he doorstepped at home last night.

UK-based blogger Mike Stuchbery detailed the intimidating incident in a series of tweets earlier today, writing that Yaxley-Lennon appeared to have used a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent the ban on his own Facebook and Instagram pages.

I've spent the last few months documenting how 'Tommy Robinson’ uses doorstepping to intimidate his critics, and how social media giants have enabled it.

So what does he do? Turns up at my house tonight. 1/ pic.twitter.com/NBB4B636eY

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

In recent years Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the moniker ‘Tommy Robinson’ on social media, has used online platforms to raise his profile and solicit donations to fund Far Right activism.

He has also, in the case of Facebook and Twitter, fallen foul of mainstream tech platforms’ community standards which prohibit use of their tools for hate speech and intimidation. Earning himself a couple of bans. (At the time of writing Yaxley-Lennon has not been banned from Google-owned YouTube.)

Though circumventing Facebook’s ban appears to have been trivially easy for Yaxley-Lennon, who, as well as selling himself as a Far Right activist called “Tommy Robinson”, previously co-founded the Islamophobic Far Right pressure group, the English Defence League.

Giving an account of being doorstepped by Yaxley-Lennon in today’s Independent, Stuchbery writes: “The first we knew of it was a loud, frantic rapping on my door at around quarter to 11 [in the evening]… That’s when notifications began to buzz on my phone — message requests on Facebook pouring in, full of abuse and vitriol. “Tommy” was obviously livestreaming his visit, using a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent his ban, and had tipped off his fans.”

A repost (to YouTube) of what appears to be a Facebook Live stream of the incident corroborates Stuchbery’s account, showing Yaxley-Lennon outside a house at night where can be seen shouting for “Mike” to come out and banging on doors and/or windows.

At another point in the same video Yaxley-Lennon can be seen walking away when he spots a passerby and engages them in conversation. During this portion of the video Yaxley-Lennon publicly reveals Stuchbery’s address — a harassment tactic that’s known as doxxing.

He can also be heard making insinuating remarks to the unidentified passerby about what he claims are Stuchbery’s “wrong” sexual interests.

In another tweet today Stuchbery describes the remarks are defamatory, adding that he now intends to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

A couple of things: First, let me assure you, I take my reputation very, very seriously. For 'Tommy’ to call me a paedophile is defamatory in the extreme. We've got it on video. See you in court, 'Tommy’. /9

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

Stuchbery has also posted several screengrabs to Twitter, showing a number of Facebook users who he is not connected to sending him abusive messages — presumably during the livestream.

During the video Yaxley-Lennon can also be heard making threats to return, saying: “Mike Stuchbery. See you soon mate, because I’m coming back and back and back and back.”

At the same time, messages came flooding in via social media. Despite being banned by Facebook, he was using a mate's account to stream – and the abuse came flooding in. /5 pic.twitter.com/doyzinSewO

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

In a second livestream, also later reposted to YouTube, Yaxley-Lennon can be heard apparently having returned a second time to Stuchbery’s house, now at around 5am, to cause further disturbance.

Stuchbery writes that he called the police to report both visits. In another tweet he says they “eventually talked ‘Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary ‘exposing me'”.

I called the police – who wouldn't? They came and eventually talked 'Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary 'exposing me’. /7

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

We reached out to Bedfordshire Police to ask what it could confirm about the incidents at Stuchbery’s house and the force’s press office told us it had received a number of enquiries about the matter. A spokeswoman added that it would be issuing a statement later today. We’ll update this post when we have it.  

Stuchbery also passed us details of the account he believes was used to livestream the harassment — suggesting it’s linked to another Far Right activist, known by the moniker ‘Danny Tommo’, who was also banned by Facebook last week.

Though the Facebook account in question was using a different moniker — ‘Jack Dawkins’. This suggests, if the account did indeed belong to the same banned Far Right activist, he was also easily able to circumvent Facebook’s ban by creating a new account with a different (fake) name and email.

We passed the details of the ‘Jack Dawkins’ account to Facebook and since then the company appears to have suspended the account. (A message posted to it earlier today claimed it had been hacked.)

The fact of Yaxley-Lennon being able to use Facebook to livestream harassment a few days after he was banned underlines quite how porous Facebook’s platform remains for organized purveyors of hate and harassment. Studies of Facebook’s platform have previously suggested as much.

Which makes high profile ‘Facebook bans’ of hate speech activists mostly a crisis PR exercise for the company. And indeed easy PR for Far Right activists who have been quick to seize on and trumpet social media bans as ‘evidence’ of mainstream censorship of their point of view — liberally ripping from the playbook of US hate speech peddlers, such as the (also ‘banned’) InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Such as by posting pictures of themselves with their mouths gagged with tape.

Such images are intended to make meme-able messages for their followers to share. But the reality for social media savvy hate speech activists like Jones and Yaxley-Lennon looks nothing like censorship — given how demonstrably easy it remains for them to circumvent platform bans and carry on campaigns of hate and harassment via mainstream platforms.

We reached out to Facebook for a response to Yaxley-Lennon’s use of its livestreaming platform to harass Stuchbery, and to ask how it intends to prevent banned Far Right activists from circumventing bans and carrying on making use of its platform.

The company declined to make a public statement, though it did confirm the livestream had been flagged as violating its community standards last night and was removed afterwards. It also said it had deleted one post by a user for bullying. It added that it has content and safety teams which work around the clock to monitor Live videos flagged for review by Facebook users.

It did not confirm how long Yaxley-Lennon’s livestream was visible on its platform.

Stuchbery, a former history teacher, has garnered attention online writing about how Far Right groups have been using social media to organize and crowdfund ‘direct action’ in the offline world, including by targeting immigrants, Muslims, politicians and journalists in the street or on their own doorsteps.

But the trigger for Stuchbery being personally targeted by Yaxley-Lennon appears to be a legal letter served to the latter’s family home at the weekend informing him he’s being sued for defamation.

Stuchbery has been involved in raising awareness about the legal action, including promoting a crowdjustice campaign to raise funds for the suit.

The litigation relates to allegations Yaxley-Lennon made online late last year about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy called Jamal who was shown in a video that went viral being violently bullied by white pupils at his school in Northern England.

Yaxley-Lennon responded to the viral video by posting a vlog to social media in which he makes a series of allegations about Jamal. The schoolboy’s family have described the allegations as defamatory. And the crowdjustice campaign promoted by Stuchbery has since raised more than £10,000 to sue Yaxley-Lennon for defaming the teen.

The legal team pursuing the litigation has also written that it intends to explore “routes by which the social media platforms that provide a means of dissemination to Lennon can also be attached to this action”.

The video of Yaxley-Lennon making claims about Jamal can still be found on YouTube. As indeed can Yaxley-Lennon’s own channel — despite equivalent pages having been removed from Facebook and Twitter (the latter pulled the plug on Yaxley-Lennon’s account a year ago).

We asked YouTube why it continues to provide a platform for Yaxley-Lennon to amplify hate speech and solicit donations for campaigns of targeted harassment but the company declined to comment publicly on the matter.

It did point out it demonetized Yaxley-Lennon’s channel last month, having determined it breaches its advertising policies.

YouTube also told us that it removes any video content that violates its hate speech policies — which do prohibit the incitement of violence or hatred against members of a religious community.

But by ignoring the wider context here — i.e. Yaxley-Lennon’s activity as a Far Right activist — and allowing him to continue broadcasting on its platform YouTube is leaving the door open for dog whistle tactics to be used to signal to and stir up ‘in the know’ followers — as was the case with another Internet savvy operator, InfoWars’ Alex Jones (until YouTube eventually terminated his channel last year).

Until last week Facebook was also ignoring the wider context around Yaxley-Lennon’s Far Right activism — a decision that likely helped him reach a wider audience than he would otherwise have been able to. So now Facebook has another full-blown hate speech ‘influencer’ going rogue on its platform and being cheered by an audience of followers its tools helped amass.

There is, surely, a lesson here.

Yet it’s also clear mainstream platforms are unwilling to pro-actively and voluntarily adapt their rules to close down malicious users who seek to weaponize social media tools to spread hate and sew division via amplified harassment.

But if platforms won’t do it, it’ll be left to governments to curb social media’s ‘antisocial’ impacts with regulation.

And in the UK there is now no shortage of appetite to try; the government has a White Paper on social media and safety coming this winter. While the official opposition has said it wants to create a new regulator to rein in online platforms and even look at breaking up tech giants. So watch this space.

Public attitudes to (anti)social media have certainly soured — and with livestreams of hate and harassment it’s little wonder.

“Perhaps the worst thing, in the cold light of day, is the near certainty that the “content” “Tommy” produced during his stunt will now be used as a fundraising tool,” writes Stuchbery, concluding his account of being on the receiving end of a Facebook Live spewing hate and harassment. “If you dare to call him out on his cavalcade of hate, he usually tries to monetize you. It is a cruel twist.

“But most of all, I wonder how we got in this mess. I wonder how we got to a place where those who try to speak out against hatred and those who peddle it are threatened at their homes. I despair at how social media has become a weapon wielded by some, seemingly with impunity, to silence.”

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2VG1XTz Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[toomanysinks]

UK Far Right activist circumvents Facebook ban to livestream threats

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a Far Right UK activist who was permanently banned from Facebook last week for repeatedly breaching its community standards on hate speech, was nonetheless able to use its platform to livestream harassment of an anti-fascist blogger whom he doorstepped at home last night.

UK-based blogger Mike Stuchbery detailed the intimidating incident in a series of tweets earlier today, writing that Yaxley-Lennon appeared to have used a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent the ban on his own Facebook and Instagram pages.

I've spent the last few months documenting how 'Tommy Robinson’ uses doorstepping to intimidate his critics, and how social media giants have enabled it.

So what does he do? Turns up at my house tonight. 1/ pic.twitter.com/NBB4B636eY

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

In recent years Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the moniker ‘Tommy Robinson’ on social media, has used online platforms to raise his profile and solicit donations to fund Far Right activism.

He has also, in the case of Facebook and Twitter, fallen foul of mainstream tech platforms’ community standards which prohibit use of their tools for hate speech and intimidation. Earning himself a couple of bans. (At the time of writing Yaxley-Lennon has not been banned from Google-owned YouTube .)

Though circumventing Facebook’s ban appears to have been trivially easy for Yaxley-Lennon, who, as well as selling himself as a Far Right activist called “Tommy Robinson”, previously co-founded the Islamophobic Far Right pressure group, the English Defence League.

Giving an account of being doorstepped by Yaxley-Lennon in today’s Independent, Stuchbery writes: “The first we knew of it was a loud, frantic rapping on my door at around quarter to 11 [in the evening]… That’s when notifications began to buzz on my phone — message requests on Facebook pouring in, full of abuse and vitriol. “Tommy” was obviously livestreaming his visit, using a friend’s Facebook account to circumvent his ban, and had tipped off his fans.”

A repost (to YouTube) of what appears to be a Facebook Live stream of the incident corroborates Stuchbery’s account, showing Yaxley-Lennon outside a house at night where can be seen shouting for “Mike” to come out and banging on doors and/or windows.

At another point in the same video Yaxley-Lennon can be seen walking away when he spots a passerby and engages them in conversation. During this portion of the video Yaxley-Lennon publicly reveals Stuchbery’s address — a harassment tactic that’s known as doxxing.

He can also be heard making insinuating remarks to the unidentified passerby about what he claims are Stuchbery’s “wrong” sexual interests.

In another tweet today Stuchbery describes the remarks are defamatory, adding that he now intends to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

A couple of things: First, let me assure you, I take my reputation very, very seriously. For 'Tommy’ to call me a paedophile is defamatory in the extreme. We've got it on video. See you in court, 'Tommy’. /9

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

Stuchbery has also posted several screengrabs to Twitter, showing a number of Facebook users who he is not connected to sending him abusive messages — presumably during the livestream.

During the video Yaxley-Lennon can also be heard making threats to return, saying: “Mike Stuchbery. See you soon mate, because I’m coming back and back and back and back.”

At the same time, messages came flooding in via social media. Despite being banned by Facebook, he was using a mate's account to stream – and the abuse came flooding in. /5 pic.twitter.com/doyzinSewO

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

In a second livestream, also later reposted to YouTube, Yaxley-Lennon can be heard apparently having returned a second time to Stuchbery’s house, now at around 5am, to cause further disturbance.

Stuchbery writes that he called the police to report both visits. In another tweet he says they “eventually talked ‘Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary ‘exposing me'”.

I called the police – who wouldn't? They came and eventually talked 'Tommy’ into leaving, but not before he gave my full address, threatened to come back tomorrow, in addition to making a documentary 'exposing me’. /7

— Mike Stuchbery

(@MikeStuchbery_) March 5, 2019

We reached out to Bedfordshire Police to ask what it could confirm about the incidents at Stuchbery’s house and the force’s press office told us it had received a number of enquiries about the matter. A spokeswoman added that it would be issuing a statement later today. We’ll update this post when we have it.  

Stuchbery also passed us details of the account he believes was used to livestream the harassment — suggesting it’s linked to another Far Right activist, known by the moniker ‘Danny Tommo’, who was also banned by Facebook last week.

Though the Facebook account in question was using a different moniker — ‘Jack Dawkins’. This suggests, if the account did indeed belong to the same banned Far Right activist, he was also easily able to circumvent Facebook’s ban by creating a new account with a different (fake) name and email.

We passed the details of the ‘Jack Dawkins’ account to Facebook and since then the company appears to have suspended the account. (A message posted to it earlier today claimed it had been hacked.)

The fact of Yaxley-Lennon being able to use Facebook to livestream harassment a few days after he was banned underlines quite how porous Facebook’s platform remains for organized purveyors of hate and harassment. Studies of Facebook’s platform have previously suggested as much.

Which makes high profile ‘Facebook bans’ of hate speech activists mostly a crisis PR exercise for the company. And indeed easy PR for Far Right activists who have been quick to seize on and trumpet social media bans as ‘evidence’ of mainstream censorship of their point of view — liberally ripping from the playbook of US hate speech peddlers, such as the (also ‘banned’) InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Such as by posting pictures of themselves with their mouths gagged with tape.

Such images are intended to make meme-able messages for their followers to share. But the reality for social media savvy hate speech activists like Jones and Yaxley-Lennon looks nothing like censorship — given how demonstrably easy it remains for them to circumvent platform bans and carry on campaigns of hate and harassment via mainstream platforms.

We reached out to Facebook for a response to Yaxley-Lennon’s use of its livestreaming platform to harass Stuchbery, and to ask how it intends to prevent banned Far Right activists from circumventing bans and carrying on making use of its platform.

The company declined to make a public statement, though it did confirm the livestream had been flagged as violating its community standards last night and was removed afterwards. It also said it had deleted one post by a user for bullying. It added that it has content and safety teams which work around the clock to monitor Live videos flagged for review by Facebook users.

It did not confirm how long Yaxley-Lennon’s livestream was visible on its platform.

Stuchbery, a former history teacher, has garnered attention online writing about how Far Right groups have been using social media to organize and crowdfund ‘direct action’ in the offline world, including by targeting immigrants, Muslims, politicians and journalists in the street or on their own doorsteps.

But the trigger for Stuchbery being personally targeted by Yaxley-Lennon appears to be a legal letter served to the latter’s family home at the weekend informing him he’s being sued for defamation.

Stuchbery has been involved in raising awareness about the legal action, including promoting a crowdjustice campaign to raise funds for the suit.

The litigation relates to allegations Yaxley-Lennon made online late last year about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy called Jamal who was shown in a video that went viral being violently bullied by white pupils at his school in Northern England.

Yaxley-Lennon responded to the viral video by posting a vlog to social media in which he makes a series of allegations about Jamal. The schoolboy’s family have described the allegations as defamatory. And the crowdjustice campaign promoted by Stuchbery has since raised more than £10,000 to sue Yaxley-Lennon.

The legal team pursuing the defamation litigation has also written that it intends to explore “routes by which the social media platforms that provide a means of dissemination to Lennon can also be attached to this action”.

The video of Yaxley-Lennon making claims about Jamal can still be found on YouTube. As indeed can Yaxley-Lennon’s own channel — despite equivalent pages having been removed from Facebook and Twitter (the latter pulled the plug on Yaxley-Lennon’s account a year ago).

We asked YouTube why it continues to provide a platform for Yaxley-Lennon to amplify hate speech and solicit donations for campaigns of targeted harassment but the company declined to comment publicly on the matter.

It did point out it demonetized Yaxley-Lennon’s channel last month, having determined it breaches its advertising policies.

YouTube also told us that it removes any video content that violates its hate speech policies — which do prohibit the incitement of violence or hatred against members of a religious community.

But by ignoring the wider context here — i.e. Yaxley-Lennon’s activity as a Far Right activist — and allowing him to continue broadcasting on its platform YouTube is leaving the door open for dog whistle tactics to be used to signal to and stir up ‘in the know’ followers — as was the case with another Internet savvy operator, InfoWars’ Alex Jones (until YouTube eventually terminated his channel last year).

Until last week Facebook was also ignoring the wider context around Yaxley-Lennon’s Far Right activism — a decision that likely helped him reach a wider audience than he would otherwise have been able to. So now Facebook has another full-blown hate speech ‘influencer’ going rogue on its platform and being cheered by an audience of followers its tools helped amass.

There is, surely, a lesson here.

Yet it��s also clear mainstream platforms are unwilling to pro-actively and voluntarily adapt their rules to close down malicious users who seek to weaponize social media tools to spread hate and sew division via amplified harassment.

But if platforms won’t do it, it’ll be left to governments to curb social media’s antisocial impacts with regulation.

And in the UK there is now no shortage of appetite to try; the government has a White Paper on social media and safety coming this winter. While the official opposition has said it wants to create a new regulator to rein in online platforms and even look at breaking up tech giants. So watch this space.

Public attitudes to (anti)social media have certainly soured — and with livestreams of hate and harassment it’s little wonder.

“Perhaps the worst thing, in the cold light of day, is the near certainty that the “content” “Tommy” produced during his stunt will now be used as a fundraising tool,” writes Stuchbery, concluding his account of being on the receiving end of a Facebook Live spewing hate and harassment. “If you dare to call him out on his cavalcade of hate, he usually tries to monetize you. It is a cruel twist.

“But most of all, I wonder how we got in this mess. I wonder how we got to a place where those who try to speak out against hatred and those who peddle it are threatened at their homes. I despair at how social media has become a weapon wielded by some, seemingly with impunity, to silence.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/05/uk-far-right-activist-circumvents-facebook-ban-to-livestream-threats/

[recentanimenews]

K-POP Superstars Jaejong and OH MY GIRL Helm the OP/ED of NOBLESSE TV Anime

  Following the trend for the rest of the Crunchyroll Original WEBTOON TV anime adaptations, helming the opening and ending themes for Noblesse, adapted from Kwangsu Lee's WEBTOON series, will be K-POP musicians Jaejoong singing the opening theme  'BREAKING DAWN’, and OH MY GIRL performing ‘Etoile’, the ending theme. A new trailer was unveiled to coincide with the musical news.

    Both songs will be performed in Korean, Japan, and English, with both Jaejoong and OH MY GIRL apprehensive about singing in multiple languages. The full comments from the K-POP performers were released alongside new comments from the cast of the series, all of which can be read below.

    Jaejoong’s Comment on 'BREAKING DAWN':

  “I am very happy that I was asked to sing the opening theme song for the TV anime Noblesse. I also have a feeling of nervousness from the responsibility of the worldwide release of the song, which is sung in Japanese, Korean, and English.

  'BREAKING DAWN' is a song about moving forward with hope against the world we live in today! The song is imbued with that positive message.”  

  OH MY GIRL’s comment on ‘Etoile’:

  “Hello, it's OH MY GIRL here!

  We're going to be in charge of the ED theme song for the TV anime Noblesse which will be released in October!

  Both Raizel and Frankenstein, the main characters, are fascinating. The action scenes in the series are amazing, coupled with the large scale of the story.

  The ending theme song 'Etoile' was also sung in Japanese, Korean, and English. It would make us happy if people from all over the world could listen to this song.

  The TV anime Noblesse will be broadcast in October. 


Everyone, please enjoy it!”

  The series is being directed by Yasutaka Yamamoto (Hinomaru Sumo), with Shunsuke Tada as chief director, Sayaka Harada on series composition, and Akiharu Ishii handling the character designs and chief animation supervision.

  Previously released key visual:

  Tarusuke Shingaki (Mirio in My Hero Academia) is voicing the newly awoken 820-year-old Cadis Etrama di Raizel, who is kind to all but has trouble adjusting to modern life.

      Shingaki’s comment:

  “Rai has always been reserved. He's a being of absolute power who has just awoken and, for the first time, shows a keen interest in the outside world. But it's hard to communicate due to Rigel's reserved nature.   I've heard that the original WEBTOON has been read by many people. I hope that those people, as well as those who are new to the world of Noblesse, will enjoy the thrill and excitement of the action and sound effects that only animation can provide. 

Thank you for your support!"

  Daisuke Hirakawa (Momotaro in Hozuki's Coolheadedness) is voicing Frankenstein, the principal of Ye Ran High School, and the loyal servant to Rai.

      Hirakawa’s comment:

  “Frankenstein has been the faithful steward of the main character, Lord Rai, since before he fell into a long sleep, and is now the principal of the high school where the series is mainly set. The gap between the serious scenes and the occasional comedic scenes is one of the highlights of this work. I hope many people will enjoy the series.”

  Kousuke Onishi (Neinhart in Fairy Tail) is voicing M-21, a mysterious character that was experimented on by the Union Organisation, leaving him with a scar across his face. Despite this, he’s still popular with the ladies.

      Onishi’s comment:

  “My name is Hirosuke Onishi and I will be voicing M-21.

He is short-tempered, foul-mouthed, and cold-hearted.

But he's also very loyal and loves his companions more than anyone else.

I'm happy to be able to watch him live his clumsy and straightforward life with everyone.

There are other great and unique characters in this story!

I think both men and women will enjoy this series!

I'm looking forward to it!”

  Ryota Iwasaki (Inasa in My Hero Academia) is voicing Tashiro Yusuke, Rai’s classmate who is an athletic, hot-blooded young man with a strong sense of justice.

      Iwasaki’s comment:

  “Tashiro Yusuke that kind of guy, cheerful, energetic, straightforward, and loyal to his friends!

The daily scenes with his classmate Manabu are really humorous.

But when his friends are in trouble, he becomes incredibly cool!

  I'm getting to voice a very human and interesting role, so look forward to seeing Tashiro's various facial expressions.”

  Yohei Hamada (Bathin in As Miss Beelzebub Likes it.) is voicing Kase Manabu, another classmate of Rai and Tanshiro’s best friend who excels at using computers.

      Hamada’s comment:

  “Manabu Kase is a normal high school student who is good at computers and various other things.

  He was leading a normal school life with his friends Yuu-chan and Tashiro Yusuke.

Personally, I think Tashiro and Kase are the epitome of everyday life for Rai.

  We had fun acting out a very ordinary school life!

  Please look forward to the seriousness and the surrealism of Noblesse!”

  Noblesse launches as a Crunchyroll Original from October, it is described as such:

  Raizel awakens from his 820-year slumber.

  He holds the special title of Noblesse, a pure-blooded Noble and protector of all other Nobles.

  In an attempt to protect Raizel, his servant Frankenstein enrolls him at Ye Ran High School, where Raizel learns the simple and quotidian routines of the human world through his classmates.

  However, the Union, a secret society plotting to take over the world,

  dispatches modified humans and gradually encroaches on Raizel’s life, causing him to wield his mighty power to protect those around him...

  After 820 years of intrigue, the secrets behind his slumber are finally revealed, and Raizel’s absolute protection as the Noblesse begins!

Source: Supplied Press Release

  ©Noblesse Animation Partners

  ---- 

Daryl Harding is a Japan Correspondent for Crunchyroll News. He also runs the YouTube channel about Japan stuff called TheDoctorDazza, tweets at @DoctorDazza, and posts photos of his travels on Instagram. 

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[dwestfieldblog]

THERE IS NO SAFE WORD

ATEH MALKUTH, VE-GEBURAH, VE-GEDULLAH, LE-OLAHM...

Anybody who understands my music will never be unhappy again. Beethoven. That sounds like a cue for a song...and here it is...

Well, now we know the actual defined amount of stubborn dumb stupidity for sure in America. Over 70 million morons. Loved seeing Trump jr call on his dad to wage ‘Total war’ (A phrase Goebbels used in Berlin 1943 when the allies were approaching... and we know how that ended, go on Big Don, do the honourable thing for the first time in your foul life.) Junior also said ‘It’s time to clean up this mess and stop looking like a banana republic’. Why yes son, it is, so off you all pop. Daddy is busy implanting his loyalists in the Pentagon and already thinking of running in 2024 but by then he should either be in prison or in exile on a tiny freezing Scottish island with a one hole golf course where he can still cheat. Seems likely he, family and their backers are planning to make good use of their through the looking glass rabies crazed sheep and continue to destabilize America for the Kremlin. Loved that the orange psychopath tweeted early ‘I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!’ and watched as he demanded all votes be counted...and the more they were, the more he lost by. HILARIOUS.

And his call to arms to ‘Stand back and stand by’ to The Proud Boys, who are not far right Nazi thugs at all no sir. To misuse Hunter S Thompson’s genius for the hundredth time, I hope that this is where the wave (of populist filth Trump has been riding) finally breaks and rolls back. But over 70 million morons say different. The 80 million who voted for the other guy must be happy there are so many who can clean the streets and fill the shelves at food shops. Education needs to be improved in America and Britain next year, a ‘LOT’.

January 20th 2021...Celebrate with joy the end of a despotic douche bag...allow the world to feel lighter. Republicans, you should feel ashamed. America, this bastard has been undoing your Constitution like a prom queen’s girdle for a button mushroom quickie rape for four years and couldn’t have cared less about Covid and how many of you died...as he said ‘It is what it is’. So SAD!!!! Arf. Donald, you are and were nothing more than a spoiled five year old brat with as much empathy for humanity as a lizard. A banishing ritual will need to be performed in around the White House...call up the Native Indians, the witches and South Park and cleanse the area of astral poison. The swamp will be drained when the deranged incubus’s entire family of scheming wannabe aristocrats vacates for good.And don’t let him sit at a little table to pardon them and himself.Lowlifes...speaking of whom...

It has taken a lot to make me smile this year (what, you too huh?) but seeing Rudy Giuliani giving a press conference between a porn book store and a funeral parlour in a parking lot did it. The T family, Jared, Rudy, Pompeo, Paula White (the Unchristian millionaire), the slurring ‘star witness’ Melissa Carone, spokeswoman Kayleigh with her cute little cross and all the rest of those despicable liars must all be flushed down the drains, no second chances, repentance or absolution.And as for Dr Scott Atlas telling the American public to ‘rise up’ against the safety measures called for by the state against Covid...A doctor telling you to ignore the rule against large indoor gatherings etc. A doctor.RISE UP? 12 million cases in the US as of mid November...254 thousand dead. That number is rising fast. Good luck from keeping the world falling on you Atlas, Wonder what the orange one offered him to blab such stinking dung. Another doctor with a hypocritical oath.

The smug toad Steve Bannon on yet another shitestirring podcast,spoke about beheading virologist Dr Fauci and the Director of the FBI Christopher Wray...‘I’d put the heads on pikes, right. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you are gone.’Twitter banned him outright (and how long did that take?) but the ever wonderful facebook didn’t think that advocating murder online like any other good fundamentalist was reason enough. They believe in the first amendment, hurrah for the robot Zuckerberg.Like? Dislike? Delete, good luck.

And meanwhile the EU budget, involving 673 billion pounds for Covid connected concerns has been blocked by the continuing charming behaviour of Hungary and Poland. And why would they do that at this time of dire need? Why, because the release of the funds is dependent upon the rule of actual law in each of the countries to which the money is allocated. They have some very naughty politicians there who are upset about this and the darlings have taken it personally. These men could well be directly responsible for hundreds of unnecessary deaths. Hungary’s PM Orban said the clause would ‘jeopardise trust’ between member states. Well pal, they already don’t trust you due to your actions in the last ten years over freedom of speech, assembly, judges etc etc.

The Polish ‘Justice’ minister said the clause was ‘...really an institutional political enslavement, a radical limitation of sovereignty’. Sounds like Nigel Farage.(btw, Love that he lost 10 thousand pounds betting on his golden mate to win the US Presidential election. Oh well, you can pick that up fast enough from taking the Euros you rail against eh? Got to relish the classic two faced double English standards he stoops so low to wave so high) Anyway, I digress, if it seems unfair to Poland and Hungary that they act more like actual democracies rather than extremist populist swine, perhaps they should also leave the EU and team up with Mother Russia and Uncle China.Again, Vladimir must be well pleased with how Europe and America are collapsing.

Belarus...the ‘police’ are beating up women, using stun grenades on unarmed pensioners and teens. These are not police and have nothing to do with any law other than that of the jungle. Lukashenko is their Trump, a man who always swore his country would be independent of Russia and then accepts 1.5 billion dollars in loans. Good luck with paying back the interest with your soul Alex, needs must when the Devil drives eh? Loved how those loyal to the dictator described the protestors as truants and transsexuals’. 150,000 of them? Seems a lot. But never mind, hired thugs and sadists are always easy to come by, whatever the country and whatever the year. Easy work and fun if you enjoy it, conscience free. Sure they are just trying to feed their families.

China wants a global QR Covid code, making tracking humans even easier via their brilliant technology. Let’s see who falls for that one, would you want yet more personal data known by those who created the virus and shot their own children? (For the record, I do not think Covid was taken over there and released by enemy agents and I certainly don’t think it was created by accident any more than the updated version will be.) Making a fortune out of others’ misfortune seems quite like disaster capitalism for communists.  Drug companies will be hoping the 19 virus will ‘mutate’ to 21 and 22 in order that we will all need annual vaccines.

Prague, on the anniversary of the Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution on November 17th, 250,000 march against their PM, (an ex informer to the communists) who has been Premier for too many years...another rich businessman deep in corruption scandals, I loved his comment after witnessing the thousands that he didn’t ‘understand’ why they were doing it. That said, there were many protesting against the use of...face masks. Ok, by all means choose not to wear them. Then stay the hell away from everyone else until you are vaccinated and don’t you dare go to hospital when you fall ill. Deal?

Englerland...The manic baldhead liar Cummings has at last been kicked out of Downing Street and a fine and noble advisor he was to the PM eh? Herd immunity my arse. Seems possible he might work for Farrage and continue destroying the system from within. Fnord. God help us all, the ‘UK’ is hosting the United Nations Climate Change conference in November 2021 and taking the presidency of the G7 in January...with Boris at the helm? Nobody takes this blustering useless lying cretin seriously unless their jobs depend on him. Tory supporters, what does it take for you to see reason, how much evidence of unending failure? At very least replace the Chumocracy rampant in the government or Doom, damnation, despair, death and more doom will repeat.Nice to see we get the vaccine tested on us first...guinea pigs are safer for the rest of the world on an island...

Fascinated to see that 20m pounds were not available for poor children’s free school meals but 21 million in taxpayers’ money for a go between businessman to get PPE (piss poor excuse/personal protection equipment) for NHS staff, was. How much did the go between pocket? 55 thousand dead in UK, fifth in the world,so proud of the levels of national intelligence and Govermental planning. Brexit and Covid in a double whammy with the most incompetent and corrupt government in my lifetime. As John Lydon used to rant on a perfect loop;’ This is what you want, this is what you get’. Possibly I am abusing his actual meaning, sorry Johnny. No future for the UK...None for me anyway...

Was the UK and America’s snowflake nonsense, seeded with the birth of instagram, tik tok et al/ forums with young folk seeking approval from their peers and feeling important when they were ‘Liked’? A few years later in the (ha ha) real world, they are easily insulted by others who do not find them having much depth or value. Kids’, being ‘liked’ is not the same as being respected, or loved. Pretend alpha males, being feared is not respect either.

‘Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones or rhetorical hooks) humans can be moved to action, even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organised religion’ RAW. It also explains why, in tandem with tones, symbols and an altered brain speed,directed Will can cause change in ‘realities’. The litany of ritual, the mantras of magick and images focused to fire with the Tantric arrow. Oops, missed again. Anyway...back to the negativity☺‘

...as population increases, wages fall but later prices increase....and the relation between them –is to be considered the index of revolutionary potential...and can be predicted as precisely as eclipses in astronomy’. Robert Anton Wilson, The Widow’s Son (Hilaritas Press) 1985.

Thanks to Covid, hundreds of thousands of businesses have collapsed; the jobless or part timers are unable to pay rent or feed their families...and receive little or no support from governments who have either pocketed their taxes or just given rewards and contracts to their friends. The overload stress levels and knock on effect on those who had the virus and still suffer -or those who could not get into hospital for treatment will be massive. Every populist knows there has never been a better time to manipulate the fear and anger of the masses. Demonstrations, riots and harsher laws will spread each creating their own chain reaction.Watch out for Nationalists pointing fingers, don’t buy their snake oil. Avoid giving groups like QAnon any of your energy, paranoia is a creepy way to live and a sleazy way to die.

Ten months of reading emails which come across like distress signals or suicide notes from friends or that scene in Interstellar when the son knows his father could be dead by the time the message gets through. BUT...‘Help may arrive invisibly and unexpectedly from unknown sources’. Be open to this. Be sensitive and attuned to quantum parallels, there is a reaction going on to all the uff and crud, sidestep, step to the side... Allwhere and all now. You don’t need to ‘believe’ this, just be aware, sense it.

TANA, ORPHEUS, ARADIA, LUCIFER (or Robin, Marian, Orfee, Bride, all ye gentry come from Side)...Protection and guides, projected archetypes created by our minds and evolved by themselves...

We, as a species, exist in a world in which exists a myriad of data points. Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us. The pattern of the structure originates within our biological and sociological properties.Persinge and Lafreniere.1977.

The intelligence should direct the will. Aquinas. The light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body will be full of light. Matt6:22.

Have tied the last five years together and I have a feeling my time in this country is coming to an end, give it seven months perhaps. Thank you for reading, hope some was entertaining...Withe much Love from Donkey Oti, and Onan the Barbarian, stay healthy, wishing you the best Christmas and 2021 possible, Ba-ra-ka, Et in Arcadia Ego . Love, always.