#prepare for a post-Roe world

[bitchesgetriches]

How to Prepare for a Post-Roe World (Bonus Episode)

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

The true, tactical significance of Project 2025

TODAY (July 14), I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! NEXT SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Like you, I have heard a lot about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's roadmap for the actions that Trump should take if he wins the presidency. Given the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect:

https://www.project2025.org/

But (nearly) all the reporting and commentary on Project 2025 badly misses the point. I've only read a single writer who immediately grasped the true significance of Project 2025: The American Prospect's Rick Perlstein, which is unsurprising, given Perlstein's stature as one of the left's most important historians of right wing movements:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

As Perlstein points out, Project 2025 isn't new. The Heritage Foundation and its allies have prepared documents like this, with many identical policy prescriptions, in the run-up to many presidential elections. Perlstein argues that Warren G Harding's 1921 inaugural address captures much of its spirit, as did the Nixon campaign's 1973 vow to "move the country so far to the right 'you won’t even recognize it.'"

The threats to democracy and its institutions aren't new. The right has been bent on their destruction for more than a century. As Perlstein says, the point of taking note of this isn't to minimize the danger, rather, it's to contextualize it. The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without "interference" from democratic institutions, so that their power to extract wealth from First Nations, working people, and the land itself is checked only by rivalries with other aristocrats. The project of the right is grounded in a belief in Providence: that God's favor shines on His best creations and elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is "that which leads to elite status."

When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a hereditary meritocracy: a bloodline infused with God's favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the "good bloodline" reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty. Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his "race realism" with mystical nonsense: "God favored me with superior genes." The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn't favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.

So we should be alarmed by the right's agenda. We should be alarmed at how much ground it has gained, and how the right has stolen elections and Supreme Court seats to enshrine antimajoritarianism as a seemingly permanent fact of life, giving extremist minorities the power to impose their will on the rest of us, dooming us to a roasting planet, forced births, racist immiseration, and most expensive, worst-performing health industry in the world.

But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory. The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.

The right wing coalition needs to pander to forced-birth extremists, racist extremist, Christian Dominionist extremists (of several types), frothing anti-Communist cranks, vicious homophobes and transphobes, etc, etc. Pandering to all these groups isn't easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things – the post-Roe forced birth policies that followed the Dobbs decision are wildly unpopular among conservatives, with the exception of a clutch of totally unhinged maniacs that the party relies on as part of a much larger coalition. Even more unpopular are policies banning birth control, like the ones laid out in Project 2025. Less popular still: the proposed ban on no-fault divorce. Each of these policies have different constituencies to whom they are very popular, but when you put them together, you get Dan Savage's "Husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office":

https://twitter.com/fakedansavage/status/1805680183065854083

The constituency for "husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office" is very small. Almost no one in the GOP coalition is voting for all of this, they're voting for one or two of these things and holding their noses when it comes to the rest.

Take the "libertarian" wing of the GOP: its members do favor personal liberty…it's just that they favor low taxes for them more than personal liberty for you. The kind of lunatic who'd vote for a dead gopher if it would knock a quarter off his tax bill will happily allow his coalition partners to rape pregnant women with unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds and force them to carry unwanted fetuses to term if that's the price he has to pay to save a nickel in taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

And, of course, the religious maniacs who profess a total commitment to Biblical virtue but worship Trump, Gaetz, Limbaugh, Gingrich, Reagan, and the whole panoply of cheating, lying, kid-fiddling, dope-addled refugees from a Jack Chick tract know that these men never gave a shit about Jesus, the Apostles or the Ten Commandments – but they'll vote for 'em because it will get them school prayer, total abortion bans, and unregulated "home schooling" so they can brainwash a generation of Biblical literalists who think the Earth is 5,000 years old and that Jesus was white and super into rich people.

Time and again, the leaders of the conservative movement prove themselves capable of acts of breathtaking cruelty, and undoubtedly many of them are depraved sadists who genuinely enjoy the suffering of their enemies (think of Trump lickspittle Steven Miller's undisguised glee at the thought of parents who would never be reunited with children after being separated at the border). But it's a mistake to think that "the cruelty is the point." The point of the cruelty is to assemble and maintain the coalition. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the point:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

The right has assembled a lot of power. They did so by maintaining unity among people who have irreconcilable ethics and goals. Think of the pro-genocide coalition that includes far-right Jewish ethno-nationalists, antisemitic apocalyptic Christians who believe they are hastening the end-times, and Islamophobes of every description, from War On Terror relics to Hindu nationalists.

This is quite an improbable coalition, and while I deplore its goals, I can't help but be impressed by its cohesion. Can you imagine the kind of behind-the-scenes work it takes to get antisemites who think Jews secretly control the world to lobby with Zionists? Or to get Zionists to work alongside of Holocaust-denying pencilneck Hitler wannabes whose biggest regret is not bringing their armbands to Charlottesville?

Which brings me back to Project 2025 and its true significance. As Perlstein writes, Project 2025 is a mess. Clocking in an 900 pages, large sections of Project 2025 flatly contradict each other, while other sections contain subtle contradictions that you wouldn't notice unless you were schooled in the specialized argot of the far right's jargon and history.

For example, Project 2025 calls for defunding government agencies and repurposing the same agencies to carry out various spectacular atrocities. Both actions are deplorable, but they're also mutually exclusive. Project 2025 demands four different, completely irreconcilable versions of US trade policy. But at least that's better than Project 2025's chapter on monetary policy, which simply lays out every right wing theory of money and then throws up its hands and recommends none of them.

Perlstein says that these conflicts, blank spots and contradictions are the most important parts of Project 2025. They are the fracture lines in the coalition: the conflicting ideas that have enough support that neither side can triumph over the other. These are the conflicts that are so central to the priorities of blocs that are so important to the coalition that they must be included, even though that inclusion constitutes a blinking "LOOK AT ME" sign telling us where the right is ready to split apart.

The right is really good at this. Perlstein points to Nixon's expansion of affirmative action, undertaken to sow division between Black and white workers. We need to get better at it.

So far, we've lavished attention on the clearest and most emphatic proposals in Project 2025 – for understandable reasons. These are the things they say they want to do. It would be reckless to ignore them. But they've been saying things like this for a century. These demands constitute a compelling argument for fighting them as a matter of urgency, with the intention of winning. And to win, we need to split apart their coalition.

Perlstein calls on us to dissect Project 2025, to cleave it at its joints. To do so, he says we need to understand its antecedents, like Nixon's "Malek Manual," a roadmap for destroying the lives of civil servants who failed to show sufficient loyalty to Nixon. For example, the Malek Manual lays out a "Traveling Salesman Technique" whereby a government employee would be given duties "criss-crossing him across the country to towns (hopefully with the worst accommodations possible) of a population of 20,000 or under. Until his wife threatens him with divorce unless he quits, you have him out of town and out of the way":

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Final_Report_on_Violations_and_Abuses_of/0dRLO9vzQF0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22organization+of+a+political+personnel+office+and+program%22&pg=PA161&printsec=frontcover

It's no coincidence that leftist historians of the right are getting a lot of attention. Trumpism didn't come out of nowhere – Trump is way too stupid and undisciplined to be a cause – he's an effect. In his excellent, bestselling new history of the right in the early 1990s, When the Clock Broke, Josh Ganz shows us the swamp that bred Trump, with such main characters as the fascist eugenicist Sam Francis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke

Ganz joins the likes of the Know Your Enemy podcast, an indispensable history of reactionary movements that does excellent work in tracing the fracture lines in the right coalition:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/when-clock-broke-106803105

Progressives are also an uneasy coalition that is easily splintered. As Naomi Klein argues in her essential Doppelganger, the liberal-left coalition is inherently unstable and contains the seeds of its own destruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Liberals have been the senior partner in that coalition, and their commitment to preserving institutions for their own sake (rather than because of what they can do to advance human thriving) has produced generations of weak and ineffectual responses to the crises of terminal-stage capitalism, like the idea that student-debt cancellation should be means-tested:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

The last bid for an American aristocracy was repelled by rejecting institutions, not preserving them. When the Supreme Court thwarted the New Deal, FDR announced his intention to pack the court, and then began the process of doing so (which included no-holds-barred attacks on foot-draggers in his own party). Not for nothing, this is more-or-less what Lincoln did when SCOTUS blocked Reconstruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

But the liberals who lead the progressive movement dismiss packing the court as unserious and impractical – notwithstanding the fact that they have no plan for rescuing America from the bribe-taking extremists, the credibly accused rapist, and the three who stole their robes. Ultimately, liberals defend SCOTUS because it is the Supreme Court. I defended SCOTUS, too – while it was still a vestigial organ of the rights revolution, which improved the lives of millions of Americans. Human rights are worth defending, SCOTUS isn't. If SCOTUS gets in the way of human rights, then screw SCOTUS. Sideline it. Pack it. Make it a joke.

Fuck it.

This isn't to argue for left seccession from the progressive coalition. As we just saw in France, splitting at this moment is an invitation to literal fascist takeover:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/melenchon-macron-france-left-winner

But if there's one thing that the rise of Trumpism has proven, it's that parties are not immune to being wrestled away from their establishment leaderships by radical groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

What's more, there's a much stronger natural coalition that the left can mobilize: workers. Being a worker – that is, paying your bills from wages, instead of profits – isn't an ideology you can change, it's a fact. A Christian nationalist can change their beliefs and then they will no longer be a Christian nationalist. But no matter what a worker believes, they are still a worker – they still have a irreconcilable conflict with people whose money comes from profits, speculation, or rents. There is no objectively fair way to divide the profits a worker's labor generates – your boss will always pay you as little of that surplus as he can. The more wages you take home, the less profit there is for your boss, the fewer dividends there are for his shareholders, and the less there is to pay to rentiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Reviving the role of workers in their unions, and of unions in the Democratic party, is the key to building the in-party power we need to drag the party to real solutions – strong antimonopoly action, urgent climate action, protections for gender, racial and sexual minorities, and decent housing, education and health care.

The alternative to a worker-led Democratic Party is a Democratic Party run by its elites, whose dictates and policies are inescapably illegitimate. As Hamilton Nolan writes, the completely reasonable (and extremely urgent) discussion about Biden's capacity to defeat Trump has been derailed by the Democrats' undemocratic structure. Ultimately, the decision to have an open convention or to double down on a candidate whose campaign has been marred by significant deficits is down to a clutch of party officials who operate without any formal limits or authority:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-hole-at-the-heart-of-the-democratic

Jettisoning Biden because George Clooney (or Nancy Pelosi) told us to is never going to feel legitimate to his supporters in the party. But if the movement for an open convention came from grassroots-dominated unions who themselves dominated the party – as was the case, until the Reagan revolution – then there'd be a sense that the party had constituents, and it was acting on its behalf.

Reviving the labor movement after 40 years of Reaganomic war on workers may sound like a tall order, but we are living through a labor renaissance, and the long-banked embers of labor radicalism are reigniting. What's more, repelling fascism is what workers' movements do. The business community will always sell you out to the Nazis in exchange for low taxes, cheap labor and loose regulation.

But workers, organized around their class interests, stand strong. Last week, we lost one of labor's brightest flames. Jane McAlevey, a virtuoso labor organizer and trainer of labor organizers, died of cancer at 57:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/jane-mcalevey-strategy-organizing-obituary

McAlevey fought to win. She was skeptical of platitudes like "speaking truth to power," always demanding an explanation for how the speech would become action. In her classic book A Collective Bargain, she describes how she built worker power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey helped organize a string of successful strikes, including the 2019 LA teachers' strike. Her method was straightforward: all you have to do to win a strike or a union drive is figure out how to convince every single worker in the shop to back the union. That's all.

Of course, it's harder than it sounds. All the problems that plague every coalition – especially the progressive liberal/left coalition – are present on the shop floor. Some workers don't like each other. Some don't see their interests aligned with others. Some are ornery. Some are convinced that victory is impossible.

McAlevey laid out a program for organizing that involved figuring out how to reach every single worker, to converse with them, listen to them, understand them, and win them over. I've never read or heard anyone speak more clearly, practically and inspirationally about coalition building.

Biden was never my candidate. I supported three other candidates ahead of him in 2020. When he got into office and started doing a small number of things I really liked, it didn't make me like him. I knew who he was: the Senator from MBNA, whose long political career was full of bills, votes and speeches that proved that while we might have some common goals, we didn't want the same America or the same world.

My interest in Biden over the past four years has had two areas of focus: how can I get him to do more of the things that will make us all better off, and do less of the things that make the world worse. When I think about the next four years, I'm thinking about the same things. A Trump presidency will contain far more bad things and far fewer good ones.

Many people I like and trust have pointed out that they don't like Biden and think he will be a bad president, but they think Trump will be much worse. To limit Biden's harms, leftists have to take over the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, so that he's hemmed in by his power base. To limit Trump's harms, leftists have to identify the fracture lines in the right coalition and drive deep wedges into them, shattering his power base.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

[emjayewrites]

Private Landing (Lewis Hamilton) (14.1/15) - Part I

SUMMARY: In the high-speed world of Formula One, Lewis Hamilton subtly introduces a mysterious partner via Instagram after a slight mishap during an interview. Sparking media intrigue, everyone wants to know: who is the enigmatic figure that calls herself Mrs. Hamilton?

INSPO: this post

PAIRINGS: Sir Lewis Hamilton x Aurora "Rorie" Phillips-Hamilton (faceclaim is Justine Skye)

WARNINGS: drama, angst, sexual content, formula one b.s., pre-established relationship (with flashbacks). RATED M (18+)

TAGLIST: @a-moment-captured, @boujiestpoet, @avngrsfangirl, @cocobutterqwueen @yeea-nah @alika-4466 @scorpiobleue @certifiedlesbianbaddie @motheroffae @perfecttrashface @saturnville @weetjy @lewlewlemon44 @cranberryjulce @chaoticcoffeequeen @periodjosh @melanin-queen369 @niahxo @purplelewlew @f1-football-fiend @imjustheretomanifest @gg-trini @kinggbl @iamryani @mitruscity @nichmeddar @xoscar03 @eugene-emt-roe @cherry2stems @louvrepool @tremendousstarlighttragedy @ggaslyp1 @lewisroscoelove

A/N: Please let me know if you want to be added/removed from the taglist. This chapter is a bit shorter for the plot. The headers/dividers are by @inklore

CHAPTER 14.1: Silverstone Baby

Monaco's summer heat made Rorie's growing bump feel even more pronounced as they entered Dr. Dubois's office. At sixteen weeks, her petite frame couldn't hide the pregnancy much longer - oversized shirts and blouses had become her wardrobe staple.

The past few weeks had been a whirlwind since The Sun's public apology and retraction. Social media had exploded with support after the karting charity race in Austria. "This is what journalism should focus on!" one viral tweet read, accompanied by photos of the junior racers in their miniature suits. "Lewis Hamilton's son has his racing lines DOWN" another proclaimed, with side-by-side comparisons of father and son's driving styles.

The racing community had rallied around them, the paddock's usual politics temporarily forgotten in the face of watching their children race. Even the typically cynical F1 journalists had nothing but praise for the event, particularly after learning the cancelled practice session had been Stefano Domenicali's idea.

"Getting winded already?" Lewis asked softly as Rorie paused in the lobby of Dr. Dubois's office, Dr. Chen's trusted colleague in Monaco.

"Your child's pressing on everything," Rorie replied, adjusting her flowing top. "Between this and keeping up with our son..."

Lyric, ever curious, explored the waiting room with enthusiasm. "Mama sick again?"

"No, baby. Just tired." She settled into a chair, grateful for the air conditioning. "The Sun's apology bought us some time, but people will start noticing soon. That video of me at the karting race had some comments already."

Lewis nodded, pulling Lyric onto his lap. "Post-Silverstone party will be perfect timing. Everyone together for your birthday and Lyric's..."

"And Baby LH squared's debut," Rorie finished, rubbing her bump. "At least Dr. Chen's referral worked out - I wasn't looking forward to flying back to Los Angeles every few weeks."

Dr. Dubois welcomed them warmly. "Ah, the Hamiltons! Angela's told me so much about you. And who's this young man?"

"I'm Lyric!" he announced proudly. "I race now!"

"Oh yes, I saw the videos," Dr. Dubois smiled. "Second place - very impressive! Would you like to help me today? We're going to look at pictures of your baby brother or sister. Sarah and Angela mentioned you're about sixteen weeks now?"

"Yes," Rorie confirmed as she settled onto the exam table. "Angela said you've worked together for years?"

"Since our residency," Dr. Dubois smiled, preparing the ultrasound. "She called me personally about your case. Now, let's see this little one."

The ultrasound screen flickered to life, and Dr. Dubois began the examination. Lyric pressed closer to Lewis, fascinated by the images.

"There we are..." She pointed to the screen. "Look, Lyric - the baby's sucking its thumb!"

"Baby tiny," Lyric observed, his nose almost touching the monitor.

"Not so tiny anymore," Dr. Dubois smiled. "About the size of an avocado now. Let's see if we can determine the sex..." She pressed the wand against Rorie's belly, but the baby seemed determined to maintain its privacy. "Stubborn little one. Let me try something Angela taught me..." Her hands gently pressed around Rorie's bump, encouraging the baby to shift position. "Ah, there we go! Congratulations - you're having a girl!"

Lewis's face split into a triumphant grin. "I knew it!" He bent to kiss Rorie's belly, then her lips. "Told you, love."

"Finally a girl dad, eh?" Dr. Dubois chuckled.

Lewis couldn't contain his happiness. "Lyric, you're going to have a sister!"

Lyric considered this news carefully. "Like L’waura?"

"Yes, like Laura," Rorie laughed, thinking of how the two had become even more inseparable since the karting race. "Would you like that?"

"Name her L’waura?" Lyric asked hopefully.

"We'll add it to the list," Lewis promised, catching Rorie's amused look. They both knew Laura would remain just Lyric's friend rather than his sister's name.

Dr. Dubois printed several ultrasound photos, including one of their daughter still sucking her thumb. "She's perfect," she assured them. "Strong heartbeat, good size - though Mama might feel a bit cramped soon with such a tiny frame."

"Already do," Rorie admitted, accepting Lewis's help to sit up. "Worth it though."

As they left the office, Lyric holding tight to the ultrasound picture of his sister, Rorie leaned into Lewis's side. "A girl," she whispered.

"A girl," he repeated, voice full of wonder. "Think she'll let us sleep more than this one did?"

"Hamilton genes?" Rorie laughed. "Not a chance."

"I believe you owe me dinner. I won our bet," Lewis grinned.

"You're insufferable when you're right," Rorie groaned good-naturedly.

"Ice cream?" Lyric piped up hopefully.

Lewis scooped him up. "Of course - we're celebrating your sister after all."

The Silverstone fanzone vibrated with energy as Lewis stepped onto the stage. The British crowd's roar was deafening as he climbed the steps alongside George Russell, both Mercedes drivers grinning at their home fans. Flags waved in the sea of people - Union Jacks mixed with Mercedes silver and Lewis's purple personal flag.

"Lewis, George - what an incredible turnout!" The interviewer shouted over the crowd. "Your home race always brings out the fans, but this feels special today."

"It really does," George agreed, waving to a group from King's Lynn. "Nothing like racing at home."

"Lewis, we see quite the family gathering here for you?"

"Yeah, got everyone here today," Lewis beamed. "My mum, dad, stepmum Linda, my sisters Nicola and Sam, my brother Nicolas, all the nieces and nephews. And of course, my wife and Lyric."

The crowd erupted at the mention of his son's name, many holding up signs referencing his karting race performance.

"Like Father, Like Son!" read one sign.

"Lyric Hamilton 2040 WDC!" proclaimed another.

"Speaking of Lyric," the interviewer jumped in, "that was quite the showing in Austria. Any thoughts on Mercedes 2040 - Hamilton and Wolff junior lineup?"

Lewis chuckled at the interviewer's suggestion about Lyric's future F1 career, shaking his head. "He's not even two yet!" His smile was warm but firm. "If he wants to race when he's older, I'll support him completely. But no pressure - he needs to find his own path, his own passions. The karting race was for charity and fun. Let him be a kid first."

The crowd's appreciation for his answer was evident in their cheers. George nodded in agreement. "Though I have to say," he added with a grin, "his racing lines were pretty impressive for a toddler."

"Takes after his dad," the interviewer laughed. "Speaking of racing today, both of you qualified strongly. Lewis, P2 - your best qualifying this season. How are you feeling about the race?"

"I feel good. I'm ready."

The pre-race preparation felt different today. Maybe it was having his entire family present, or maybe it was something more - a feeling in the air.

The formation lap. Grid position. Five red lights.

Lights out.

Lewis got a perfect start, challenging Max into Turn 1. The Red Bull defended, but Lewis stayed close, waiting. The Mercedes had shown strong race pace all weekend.

Lap after lap, he maintained the pressure. The pit stops came and went, the gap remaining constant. Then, on lap 48, a chance - Max went slightly wide at Copse.

Lewis pounced, taking the inside line. This time, unlike 2021, there was no contact. Clean, precise, perfect. The crowd roared as he took the lead.

"Great move, Lewis," Bono's voice crackled over the radio. "Twelve laps to go, let's bring this home."

Those final laps felt eternal. Each corner, each straight stretched impossibly long. But the checkered flag finally flew, and Lewis Hamilton crossed the line first at Silverstone once again.

"YES!" His victory radio message was pure emotion. "Thank you everyone! We're back!"

The cooldown lap was a blur of waving to the crowds, his heart pounding with joy. In parc fermé, his father reached him first, wrapping him in a tight embrace. His mother was next, tears streaming down her face.

Then Rorie, beautiful and radiant. He hugged her carefully, wanting nothing more than to acknowledge their daughter too, but knowing they had to wait just a little longer. Lyric bounced in his uncle Nicolas's arms, cheering "Dada win! Dada win!"

The podium celebration was electric, the British crowd singing "God Save the King" at full volume. Lewis pointed to the sky, then to his family below. Nine hundred and forty-five days made this moment even sweeter.

Later, on the fanzone stage again, trophy in hand and surrounded by his family, Lewis felt complete. The Mercedes crew joined them, Toto pulling him into a bear hug.

"Worth the wait," Toto said simply.

"Abso-fuckin'-lutely," Lewis replied, catching Rorie's eye. He made his way to his wife once more, pulling her into a passionate kiss that caused everyone to hoot and holler, even Roscoe had something to say and let out a few howls.

When they finally broke apart, both cheesing so hard like Cheshire cats, Lewis leaned close to her ear to say: "I’m going to tear your ass up later, Mrs. Hamilton. Might fuck ‘round and have twins."

And with that, he gave her his usual panty-melting smirk and a wink for added effect while Rorie just shook her head in mock annoyance.

Leave it to her husband for always thinking about sex. Even after winning his first Grand Prix after 945 days.

"Down, boy."

"Never."

______________________________________________

The London summer evening painted their garden in warm golden light as Rorie surveyed the preparations she'd been directing since dawn. Fairy lights twinkled between oak trees, their subtle glow ready for when dusk would settle. White linen-covered tables dotted the lawn, decorated with fresh peonies and hydrangeas - her favorites mixed with the bright colors Lyric had insisted on.

"The bounce house goes there," she directed, pointing to a clear space near the children's area. "Lyric will riot if he doesn't have somewhere to burn energy with Jack and the others."

Lewis appeared behind her, hands settling on her shoulders. "You should rest. You've been at this since five AM."

"Can't rest. Your mother's coming, and you know she notices everything."

"Pretty sure she already suspects," Lewis chuckled. "You've been wearing my shirts for weeks."

The first guests arrived precisely at four - the Magnussens, always punctual, with their children immediately making a beeline for the bounce house. Louise hugged Rorie carefully, a knowing look in her eyes. "You're glowing," she whispered.

Susie and Jack Wolff weren't far behind, Jack proudly clutching his recent karting trophy. "Look what I won!" he announced to anyone within earshot.

"Good job, Jack!" Rorie praised, though her eyes were on Susie, who was studying Rorie with growing suspicion.

Miles and Spinz had commandeered the music setup, their friendly bickering carrying across the garden.

"Mate, you cannot play that at a kid's party," Miles protested.

"It's a clean version!"

"It's still about–"

"Boys," KiKi interrupted, hugging Rorie. "Let's keep it family-friendly. Need any help, Ror?"

"Just keep me from losing my mind," Rorie laughed.

Timothy wandered the garden, camera in hand, capturing candid moments: Anthony telling racing stories to an enraptured audience, Carmen and Marian deep in grandmother mode and comparing notes about their existing grandchildren, and Lyric leading a pack of children to chase Roscoe, who seemed delighted by the attention.

"He's such a little menace," Hailey observed from her seat, one hand resting on her own visible pregnancy.

Justin nodded, watching the children play. "He's going to run the playground."

Rorie's sister Aaliyah arrived with an armful of presents, her eyes narrowing at how Rorie's oxford shirt draped. "Something's different about you…"

"Help me with the cupcakes?" Rorie deflected, leading her sister toward the kitchen.

As the sun began its descent, casting long shadows across the garden, Lewis stood and tapped his glass with a spoon. The chatter gradually quieted.

"Thank you all for coming to celebrate Rorie and Lyric's birthdays," he began, his voice warm with emotion. "The past few years have blessed us beyond measure. But…" he paused, eyes finding Rorie's, "we have one more surprise."

Rorie stood beside him, fingers working at her oxford shirt buttons. As the fabric fell open around her sixteen-week bump, Marian's screech pierced the evening air.

"Thank you Jesus!" She rushed to embrace her daughter, tears flowing freely. "My baby's having another baby!"

The garden erupted in celebration. Carmen and Anthony enveloped Lewis in a tight hug while Linda wiped tears from her eyes. Nicolas kept repeating, "I knew it! I knew something was different!"

When the initial excitement began to settle, Rorie cleared her throat. On cue, waiters appeared with cupcakes decorated with either "2" or "31".

"On three," she announced, eyes sparkling, "everyone take a bite."

"One…" Lewis began, arm around her waist. "Two…" Rorie continued, hand on her bump. "Three!" Lyric shouted, chocolate already smeared on his chin.

Pink filling revealed itself as everyone bit down.

"It's a girl!" the Hamilton family announced together.

Miles dissolved into tears, surprising no one. "You lot are too good at this, bruv. First the karting race, now this…"

"Our kids are going to be best friends," Hailey laughed, embracing Rorie.

"Another girl for the gang," Louise grinned. "Laura will be thrilled."

Under the fairy lights, surrounded by family and friends, their precious secret was finally, joyfully out. Lyric tugged on Lewis's shirt, pointing to his mother's bump. "Sister in there," he announced proudly. "I help teach racing."

Lewis scooped him up, pressing a kiss to his cheek. "Yes, you will, big man. Yes, you will."

The Hungarian paddock settled under overcast skies, a stark contrast to the warmth that had flooded Lewis's social media since their announcement. Rorie's photos, captured by Huy in New York, had taken over Instagram - stunning shots of her in a flowing black designer dress, the Manhattan skyline creating a dramatic backdrop. Her elegant silhouette highlighted the gentle curve of her bump, the high-fashion aesthetic pure Rorie. Huy's caption had been beautifully cryptic: "Baby LH-squared coming soon… 💙💗"

The fashion blogs that would normally be dissecting his new Dior ambassadorship and upcoming African-inspired ski resort collection were instead filled with screenshots of the announcement. "Lewis Hamilton: Seven-Time World Champion, Fashion Designer, and Soon-to-be Double Dad!" read one headline.

Social media was ablaze with speculation: "The way she's styled that bump! 😍" "Team boy! Lyric needs a brother!" "Nah, it's definitely a girl - look at how she's carrying" "First the Silverstone win, now this - what a summer for the Hamiltons!" "Anyone else notice the blue tights she’s wearing? 👀 #TeamBoy!"

"Any hints about what it is?" The questions and congratulations came from every direction as Lewis made his way through the paddock. Team principals, mechanics, catering staff - everyone had theories. His phone hadn't stopped buzzing since Rorie's post went live, the Dior announcement almost completely overshadowed by impending parenthood.

"Another little champion!" Fred Vasseur called out and enveloped him in a quick hug. "Do you guys know what the baby is?"

"I can’t tell you, Fred. Sorry," laughed Lewis as Fred pouted like a child.

"I won’t tell anyone. Not even my wife."

"Sorry, no can do. Rorie’ll kill me." And with that, he pantomimed his lips shut and continued on his way as Fred muttered a few grumbled curses in French.

The Mercedes garage buzzed with extra energy. Toto had already ordered two tiny race suits - one pink, one blue, and conspiratorially push the pink one closer to him. "We'll save the other for next time," he'd joked with a wink.

Charles Leclerc then stopped by the Mercedes garage. "Another racing Hamilton," he grinned. "Boy or girl?"

"You'll find out soon enough," Lewis replied smoothly, though keeping their secret made him want to burst.

"The Dior collection's looking amazing," Naomi Campbell had texted him a bit later. "But more importantly - any hints about baby? You know I need to start shopping! 👶🏽"

As qualifying approached, the congratulations and questions continued. Even the Sky Sports crew led with baby speculation before asking about track conditions.

The overcast sky threatened rain as Lewis prepared for qualifying, but his mood remained bright. Between Silverstone's victory, the pregnancy announcement, and yes, the Dior partnership, everything felt aligned.

His PR team had already fielded calls from every major outlet, all wanting exclusive details about the pregnancy. They'd stuck to their plan - minimal information, maximum privacy. After everything with The Sun, they were taking no chances.

"Focus time," Bono reminded him as he climbed into the car.

But even as he centered himself for qualifying, Lewis couldn't help but smile. Fashion collections could wait. Championships would come and go. Right now, his growing family was the only headline that mattered - even if everyone else was still guessing what color to buy.

The clouds grew heavier as qualifying approached. Weather radar suggested rain might hold off until Q2, but nothing was certain. Just like all the gender predictions flooding social media.

"Ready?" Bono asked, appearing with his race notes.

Lewis nodded, feeling centered despite the buzz around him. The Mercedes felt good under him during practice. Maybe today would bring another celebration to add to their summer of joy. Either way, as he prepared to head out for Q1, Lewis felt complete. His career was soaring, his fashion dreams were becoming reality, and most importantly, his family was growing.

The season still had plenty of racing ahead, the Dior collection would launch in due time, but right now, sitting in his car and listening to the familiar pre-qualifying radio checks, Lewis was simply a man looking forward to the future - all while keeping the sweetest secret tucked safely away.

"Track is clear," Bono's voice came through the radio. "Let's make this one count."

Lewis pulled out of the garage, ready to give the crowd something else to talk about besides baby predictions. Though he had to admit - watching the world try to guess what they already knew made every lap just a little bit sweeter.

_______________________________________________

Aaron lounged in one of the deck chairs on his brother's sprawling South Carolina property, watching Azariah tend to the grill. The smell of barbecue filled the warm evening air, punctuated by the distant sounds of Azariah's kids playing in the yard.

"You were wrong for that," Azariah said suddenly, not looking up from the grill. "What you said to Rorie in Barcelona."

Aaron scoffed, taking a swig of his beer. "Man, why you still on that?"

"Because you were out of line." Azariah's voice was firm but calm, the same tone he'd used to keep Aaron in check since they were kids. "And you know it."

"Whatever," Aaron muttered.

Azariah finally turned to face his younger brother. "You're mad at Dad. I get it. We all are. But Rorie? She didn't ask for any of this."

"She got the good life though, didn't she?" Aaron's voice was bitter. "Living it up with her Formula 1 champion husband while we—"

"While we what?" Azariah cut in. "Got private school education? Trust funds? Come on, man. You sound stupid right now."

Aaron fell silent, his jaw working as he stared out at the perfectly manicured lawn.

"You know what I see when I look at Rorie?" Azariah continued, flipping a burger. "I see a woman who grew up without her father. The only difference is she had no idea who he was."

"She knew," Aaron argued weakly.

"A name," Azariah corrected. "She had a name. That's it. No Christmas presents, no graduation appearances, no father-daughter dances. Nothing."

Aaron shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

"So check yourself," Azariah concluded. "Your beef is with Dad. Don't put that on her."

As the sun set over the property, Aaron sat with his brother's words simmering in his mind. Azariah's wife, Michelle, came out with a plate of cornbread, their two daughters trailing behind her.

"Uncle Aaron!" the girls called out, but Aaron barely heard them, lost in his thoughts.

"Earth to Aaron," Azariah said, waving a spatula. "Food's ready."

Aaron didn’t move, his mind drifting to Rorie. News of her second pregnancy had hit him harder than he wanted to admit. He thought of Azariah's recent comment about how his daughters were excited to meet their cousin Lyric and the new baby. Azariah had even brought it up earlier that day, casually suggesting that Aaron should smooth things over.

Aaron had dismissed it at the time, but now the words weighed on him.

"I need to talk to Dad," Aaron said suddenly, standing up.

Azariah paused, studying his younger brother. "About?"

"About all of it. About her." Aaron’s voice was tight with emotion. "About why he gets to play happy family now when he—" He broke off, shaking his head.

"Aaron—" Azariah started, concern etched in his face.

"Nah, man. I hear you about Rorie, alright? Maybe you’re right. But Dad? He doesn’t get to just..." Aaron’s fists clenched at his sides. "He doesn’t get to pretend like everything’s cool now."

Azariah nodded slowly, sensing the deep pain behind his brother’s anger. "Just don’t do anything stupid."

Aaron was already heading toward his car, his dinner forgotten. The anger that had been misdirected at Rorie had found its proper target, and Martin Edwards was about to hear exactly what his youngest son thought about his attempts at playing father of the year.

TO BE CONTINUED.....

[captainbisexuelle]

I wrote an angry, well received post on FB when Trump was first elected. I wrote a really angry post on here when Roe was overturned and it became the most engaged with op I've made.

But I didn't feel white hot when Trump was elected this time. I was more mentally prepared for the outcome, and what that says about the condition of the US. It came over me like a calm sadness. I'm not angry, I'm disappointed.

Everyone has an opinion about what the Dems, or Harris specifically, could have done better. Everyone has a think piece about the median voter or economic motivations, but I honestly don't think we'll know what happened until it's analyzed in a few decades, with a clearer hindsight.

I think about how lonely everyone seems. Communities are fractured, people work too much and socialize too little, there's an enormous gulf between expectations that men and women have for heterosexual relationships. The big picture is one of division and isolation.

What's the small picture? How can each of us make our own lives better? How can we also improve the lives of those around us?

When we're upset, have we formed a support system to lean on? Do we only live in our communities, or do we participate in them?

If there's some fatalistic fascist regime coming, I want to be fostering kindness and happiness in my corner of the world. And maybe it's just me who can do better there, but I have a feeling it's not.

[mitigatedchaos]

You Won't "Beat Trump at His Own Game"

Post for July 8, 2024 5,500 words, 25 mins

[ @morlock-holmes ]

Like, can you guys imagine Donald Trump ever admitting that he lost a debate? Let alone imagine his party *withdrawing him as nominee* because of it? And we're going to beat him at his own game by, uh, doing literally the exact opposite of his game?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

Your plan is to beat Trump by being better at being Trump than Trump is? Damn, son. You got a Texas oil baron lined up or something?

-★-

I watched the first hour of the debate. At one point the moderator asked Trump about abortion. As the Republican candidate, this is a tricky question for him, since evangelical voters would like abortion banned in most cases (and thus presumably every state). Trump then argued that he was leaving it up to the states, and the states would decide. He says that he agrees that the abortion pill should be legal, and agrees with the court ruling in favor of it, and that he supports the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. Further, he's against third trimester and 'post-birth abortion.'

While banning most first trimester abortion only has 38% support, banning most third trimester abortion has 80% supermajority support. The views of the median voter are in tension: they don't want to force women to have babies they don't want, but they also don't want to kill babies.

Biden stumbles in his delivery of his canned line in response, which appeared to be based on the idea that strict limits on abortion access would de facto nullify the exceptions.

Democrats have repeatedly lied about abortion. Republicans have repeatedly lied about abortion. The whole argument about 'after-birth' abortions appears to be based on political fencing with bills, which Democrats also do. (Something like the classic, "Oh, sure, it's illegal, but will you make it super double illegal? Oh, you won't? That means you support it, then.")

(I should note, at the time, I wrote, "I don't think Americans should trust a single word either of these guys is saying.")

But later, Biden trips over Roe v. Wade and the three trimesters to the point that it's unclear just what the hell he means.

The main CNN video doesn't support comments, but there's a clip that does. The top comment?

we're fucked as a nation

In my opinion, these comments overall agree with my post...

Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.

It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.

-★-

With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."

There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.

People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.

Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.

I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.

All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.

So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.

So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)

Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."

It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.

So to me, this feels safe.

I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.

I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)

This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.

-★-

Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)

Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.

So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)

But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.

To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:

Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position. We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police." "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."

In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.

From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)

This was a triple failure.

First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.

Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.

Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.

Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.

Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.

I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.

In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.

-★-

There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.

But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.

To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.

I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.

Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.

Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.

So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.

The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?

First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)

Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)

Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.

So was Trump right? Was he wrong?

Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.

What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.

Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.

Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.

(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)

-★-

Anyhow, that was all background.

How did Democrats get into this mess?

Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.

The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.

After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.

Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.

Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.

They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.

This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.

One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.

A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.

The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.

So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)

-★-

Why did this happen?

First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.

There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)

Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).

Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."

The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.

Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.

Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.

However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)

It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.

We lack means to convert funding into results.

(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)

Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.

They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.

Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)

When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."

The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.

And for the debate itself...

Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭

Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.

-★-

A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:

Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.

I had been writing a draft response to this.

Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)

Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.

During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).

In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.

Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)

There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.

However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.

One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.

For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.

While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.

Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.

If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.

In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.

-★-

As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:

"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."

Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.

Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:

Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.

He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.

Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.

A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.

There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.

Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.

For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.

For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.

Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"

To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"

From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.

But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.

The actual job is President of the United States.

If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.

That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.

-★-

Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.

How do you deal with this?

That's "simple": split the issues.

A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.

Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.

For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.

For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.

The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.

Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.

-★-

If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.

You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.

-

[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.

[2] It's more complicated than this.

[bloodstainedsaint]

Hey, I'm not sure if you take requests, but if you do, I have an idea:) Could you write something about a young woman who was in the Air Force disguised as a man and her plane was hit by the Germans while under attack, forcing her to jump out, leaving her stranded with her plane down and easy company witnessed the whole thing and tries to look for the pilot?

maybe with some romance or whatever with my mans lieb or doc roe if that’s possible hihi

when worlds collide (joseph liebgott x air force! reader)

word count: 1000+

warnings: blood & injury, but nothing really graphic

notes: sorry for the wait on this one 😭 i've been busy BUT i promise to be posting more during my break

You didn't remember much after your plane was hit by German flak while passing over some Dutch forest you couldn't recall the name of. What you could remember was everything rapidly blinking and on fire around you, dials going this way and that, your hands flying around the control board and trying desperately to pull up with the yoke as you cursed violently beneath your breath.

Following your fruitless struggle against gravity, you remembered preparing to parachute out of your plane and into the woods beneath you.

You were pretty sure you blacked out for a while after that.

-

The sight of a fighter plane nosediving into the ground and its booming resulting crash interrupted an otherwise uneventful five-man patrol through the woods.

“Jesus Christ! Did you see that?” Babe exclaimed, gawking up at where the plane had been in the sky mere seconds ago.

“Looks like it landed near us,” Pat observed.

Don looked wide-eyed. “It was one of ours. The pilot might need our help if he ejected in time!”

Lip shushed them. “There's AA guns nearby. Someone ought to go back and tell Battalion they’re positioned somewhere to our left near that dike we passed. Christenson, you go.”

As Pat nodded and left the way they came, Lip said, “We can't take too long looking for a pilot we don't know is alive or not." He checked his watch and sighed. "Alright, meet back here at 1700. Stay alert. Don't go too far on your own.”

The squad spread out in search of the hopefully-alive pilot. Joe walked with his rifle at the ready for about 20 minutes before stumbling upon large chunks of debris from the plane. Not far from that was a severed parachute, and then a blood trail.

He followed it until he noticed a pilot sitting on the ground next to some brush with his back turned to him, his clothes torn up enough to where large parts of skin littered with cuts were visible. Joe slowly approached, mindful not to scare him and wind up with a bullet in his head.

“Hey,” he called out. “Hey, buddy.”

The pilot turned around, and Joe noticed that “he” was not a he at all.

Your hand shot to the pistol on your belt, leveling it at him while vainly covering up your top half. You’d been trying to treat your wounds with the first-aid kit strapped to your waist; you'd gotten several steadily bleeding scratches from falling through trees and one or two broken ribs from your hasty landing. You ended up taking off your corset to relieve pressure on your ribcage, leaving you with your ripped up uniform and coveralls.

Regardless of your relief that an American soldier had found you rather than a German one, you kept your hand fixed on your sidearm.

“Woah, lady, put down the gun. I'm not a Kraut.” Lowering his own gun, his narrowed eyes flashed to your chest and widened at the sight of the reddish purple bruises that blemished it. "Goddamn..."

“It’s not what it looks like,” you managed out, though talking (or breathing, for that matter) was difficult.

“I don’t care what it looks like,” he said, the edge to his tone softening as he carefully walked toward you. “You need help.”

You painfully exhaled and set the gun down next to you. You turned around again to focus on treating your injuries, wincing with the movement. “I'm fine.”

“You don't look it.” He crouched down next to you. You flinched away slightly — you'd been disguised as a man for a while now, and this was the first time anyone was seeing you so vulnerable since your enlistment — before letting him inspect your wounds, albeit with you concealing your chest with your arms and what remained of your jacket.

“What’s your name?” he asked, gingerly applying sulfa powder to the gashes on your body.

You slightly hissed at the stinging sensation. “(Y/N), Senior Airman, 4th Fighter Group.”

“Joseph D. Liebgott, Technician 5th Grade, 101st Airborne.”

There was a temporary silence, punctuated only by you sucking in air through your teeth. As he bandaged one of the cuts, he said, “We need to get you some help. I was out here on patrol with my squad; we have a medic back at—”

“What?” You looked at him with a bewildered expression. “No, I don't need any medic. I just need help informing my superiors I got lost going through dense fog and got shot down here.”

“Why not? ‘Cause he'll see you're a girl?”

You gave him a pointed look. “Why else? If you haven't noticed, there aren't very many women serving on the front lines.” You paused and took a deep breath in through your nose. “If you bring your squad over here, someone's gonna report me and get me kicked out of the Air Force…Hell, I don't even know if I trust you to not report me. I just met you, for Chrissakes.”

In truth, you didn’t even know why you were letting him tend to you anyways — you were capable of doing it yourself, your biggest secret was currently exposed, and he was a stranger. But there was something about his change in demeanor and a sudden tenderness in his voice once he saw your injuries that made you want to trust him.

“Your secret’s safe, (Y/N),” he said firmly, a set expression on his face. “I got no reason to rat you out; I just met you too.”

You scanned his face for any signs of deceit, sighed when you found none, and nodded. “I��m still not letting your medic take a look at me.”

“Fine, but that’s not gonna stop me from helping you. I’ll be quick; the guys are gonna be expecting me back soon. We’ll go talk to them together.”

He resumed his aid, and after a few minutes, you could tell that he had started getting curious; he didn't seem like a man who knew how to shut up.

“How’d you disguise yourself as a man this long?”

With a shaky inhale, you closed your eyes as his hands brushed over your rib cage. Involuntarily, a small smile made its way onto your face as the countless predicaments you’d found yourself in flooded your memory. “It’s a long story.”

Liebgott cracked a crooked smile. “I can make some time.”

Laughing despite the pain that flared in your rib cage from the action, you couldn't help but feel that this chanced occasion wouldn't be the last time you would speak to Liebgott. And for some reason foreign to you at that moment, you hoped that your intuition was correct.

-

taglist: @mads-weasley, @ronsparky, @dcyllom, @malarkgirlypop, @joetoyesbrassknuckles101

[selkies-world]

Me, in the UK, preparing to watch the USA get turned into a fully fledged Christian ethnostate thanks to the fact they willingly voted a Christian Nationalist into power:

Meanwhile, USAmericans:

Here's what's going to happen, now that the orange bastard is on America's throne.

First, it'll be trans people & immigrants that will get the brunt of it. They'll be treated worse than they have this century.

Then it'll be BIPOC and disabled people. It'll be the women & girls who get it the worst, out of these groups.

Then it'll be the gays, and marriage will be returned to the state, Roe & Wade style.

Then it'll be women.

Along the way, they'll also be taking money and funding out of education and the workforce, and putting it into the military, weapons, tech for the pet elongated muskrat, and the church. Funding for climate and science and medicine will be taken away and relocated.

Your weather reports will be privatised, and if you pay to be able to view them, they will give you false information, and will intentionally fail to mention climate change. You will not know when a wildfire is predicted, or a flood, or a hurricane. Likewise, you will not know when those events happen in other states. You will not know what the weather is like in the rest of the world because the news will be heavily censored and filtered.

You will also lose porn. All LGBTQIA+ content, including shows and resources and books, will be classified as pornography, and banned. You will lose the general Internet, and anonymity, and privacy. Spyware will be mandatory on your devices. Anyone caught looking at banned material will be prosecuted, and labeled as a monster - someone looking at gay porn, or reading gay fanfic, or reading up on safe gay sex, will be branded as a pedophile or a sexual deviant.

You will also find that sex ed is removed from schools. Even anatomy & biology classes will be different. You can't miss something if you're never taught it in the first place, surely. Teen pregnancies will increase, as birth control becomes illegal, and pregnancy complications, child deaths, miscarriages and teen parents will be very commonplace. Sexual diseases will also become more prevalent as the medication for them will become scarce; PReP will be next to impossible to access, so a small AIDS epidemic will resurface. Antibiotics and vaccines will become rarer and rarer.

All porn will be deigned as a threat to children, and kink safespaces for adults will be hunted and shut down as being a threat to society. Gay clubs, too. Pride will be canceled, as will pride clubs in schools and colleges. Funding for therapy & mental health resources will dry up.

Families will be torn up, children will be tortured and abused, and adults will be forced to go along with it, face the same treatment, enact the abuse, or go to jail for child abuse because they tried to help their child. Gay adoptions will stop, as will family support for families with gay children.

Meanwhile, the UK will be in a political war with the USA. Palestinians will be bombed more, and so will most countries in the middle East. Egypt will become a target, and a few other parts of Africa. Russia and Ukraine will continue to attack each other, but Russia will be watching the USA and UK. So will North Korea and China.

None of you will be told if there's another pandemic. None of you will be told if there are millions or hundreds of millions of deaths. None of you will be told about loved ones in danger in other countries or states. None of you will be told the truth about anything.

Congratulations, America. You've built your walls high, and fortified your country. But you haven't just shut the rest of the world out; you've shut yourselves in.

If you don't believe me, save this post and come back to it 1 year from now. 2 years. 3 years. 4. Take a screenshot of it. And let's see which of us is right.

[oldguardleatherdog]

How And Why We're Getting "Christian Reconstructed" Out Of Civil Society: An LGBTQ+ Activist's Guide To Action

This is based on my response to a recent Reddit post about the New Apostolic Reformation/Dominionist/Christian Reconstructionist political movement that's behind anti-trans, anti-drag, anti-LGBTQ+ laws, parental rights, systematic destruction of libraries, book bans, harassment of librarians and teachers, the "don't say gay" movement, the 303 Creative Supreme Court "right to discriminate" decision, school board takeovers, curriculum cleansing, the antics of Roger Stone and General Flynn, and every other damn thing that's making our lives hell in America. Here's how to understand the whole toxic mess so we can fight these jackals off, protect ourselves, claw back our rights, and put this movement down for good.

7 Mountains: Gotta Catch 'Em All! "There's no reasoning with these people and their cultish beliefs," many people are saying, and I think it helps to understand the source of those beliefs in order to fight effectively against the tide of hatred that is on the brink of destroying what's left of our rights and freedoms in this country.

I grew up Fundamentalist Evangelical in the 1960s and 70s. Looking back, the seeds of today's poison were being planted even then in ways that were subtly but unmistakably aligned with the New Apostolic Reformation ("NAR"), the movement based on Dominionist "7 Mountains" Christian nationalism that's the driving force behind Moms for Liberty, Gen. Flynn and Roger Stone, the Alliance Defending Freedom (the org that brought the anti-LGBTQ+ web designer to the Supreme Court), Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, the GOP candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania last election cycle (Mastriano), and more. (Check out Jennifer Cohn, jennycohn1 on Twitter, a journalist whose coverage of Christian Nationalism is amazing and essential.)

Evangelical involvement in politics was minimal until the rise of Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, and the "Moral Majority" in 1981. In the 42 years since, it's been a steady march to bring the seeds planted in us kids in the 1970s to today's hideous bloom.

I don't adhere to those beliefs, but I have a deep native knowledge of their intent and the ways believers are impelled by them to make these laws and file these lawsuits and elect slavering semi-sane madmen to power and stoke cultural panic.

These people aren't just getting started - they've got traction, scalps on their belt already, and they're gaining steam and hungry for more.

NAR Christians (such as Ginni and Clarence Thomas, Sen. Ted Cruz' father Rafael, former Rep. Michelle Bachmann, failed GOP candidate for governor of Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano, Jan. 6 co-conspirator Phil Waldron, General Mike Flynn, insurrectionist Roger Stone, and the Moms For Liberty) believe that it's their Divine Mission to prepare the nation and the world to become the Kingdom of God.

This is called "post-millennialism" - the term for the set of beliefs upon which the NAR is based and that drives its adherents. NAR believes that we are in the End Times as foretold in Scripture, and that today's Christians are commanded by the Lord to do everything humanly possible in pursuit of one singular goal: to bring God’s kingdom to pass on Earth and prepare the way for Christ's return. Viewed for decades as a far-out fringe heretical movement populated by apostates and quacks, these zealots will stop at nothing to bring this to pass.

See all the "cleansing" that's going on now? Roe v. Wade overturned, the abortion bans, the trans bans, the anti-drag laws, books being pulled from school shelves, public libraries being shuttered and defunded, anti-immigrant laws, the Twitter takeover and its right-wing reformation - the list goes on. This is ALL a direct result of the NAR/Christian Reconstructionist influence and the untold dark-money billions and shadowed billionaires that finance it.

We're in a very dark and deep hole, as a country, as a culture. But we're not helpless. We start by arming ourselves with knowledge, by reading and heeding the reporting of Jenny Cohn and Bruce Wilson and Kira Resistance on Twitter and in the Bucks County (PA) Record reporting from the epicenter of Dominionist/NAR politics, take action online and in the places where we live. In today's world, we can be activists and influencers for good without having to leave the house, and if you want to protest in person or march in support of the cause, you won't be alone.

There are movements and organizations gathering steam in our community that have been preparing for action and are ready to launch. Some are more visible than others, but all are made up of committed activists, funders, legal advisors, and LGBTQ+ citizens who are tired of being abused by these people and the violence (literal and legislative) against us. Old-line AIDS activists like me are disgusted at the sight of our life's work and our decades of progress being rolled back and obliterated seemingly overnight. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are just not having it and are rightly pissed off by what's shaping up to be a bleak future.

It's not going to be easy or quick, but I know there are enough good people among us to hold back the worst of the current moment, rebuke and reverse the legislative oppression and physical danger, restore full access to HRT and gender-affirming care, roll back the "abortion bounty" laws and support vulnerable individuals and families with assistance and relocation, claw back and secure the civil rights that have been stolen from us, and restore light to our country, our culture, our lives, and our future.

I'm engaged in this fight, and after nearly 40 years of activism I've never been more lit up with passion and determination than at this moment. This fight is winnable. You're needed now. Watch this space for opportunities where your presence, your effort, your voice is wanted and will be welcomed, and feel free to message me with your questions, ideas, activist resources needed or offered, organizations you know of that need support, general questions, strategic advice, and words of encouragement you wish to give or need to hear. Let's gooooooooo

[mortul]

introducing the general information about one christoph dowell-- this will be a post detailing what the public knowledge on him is, and it'll also talk semi-public/private aaand private details, as well! please consider this post in a state of perpetual development.

PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE ON "JOHN ROE": (this is knowledge anyone can access, learn, andor know.)

do not call him by his actual, government name while he's on the job-- anonymity is of the utmost importance in his line of work. for this reason, christoph'll most likely introduce himself to others as john roe. personally, i don't really care too much what the narration refers to him as (this is mostly to avoid confusion.) but, in terms of what the actual muse knows, they'll know him as john roe only.

you can employ him on the deep web, while using the ever-popular tor browser. there is an entire network of assassins that christoph is affiliated with, and he's usually one of the first faces you'll see.

if you are in need of his services, be prepared to pay a hefty amount. he is not cheap, doesn't accept any kind of bartering, and always takes cash before the hit. the process itself is pretty simple; all you do is fill out the provided form and wait for a response. christoph usually establishes contact in a day or two, after the information is processed by and communicated through his info broker. by then, payment is required before the job, done through an external service his broker graciously "offers".

the network he is apart of is known only as the assassin's bureau, and it does have a base of operation. somewhere. it's underground, at least.

he is exceptionally hard to kill. and even more-so, he is obnoxiously and deeply resourceful. anything that is within reach, he can and will turn into a weapon-- this is one of many reasons he's a popular choice.

loves smoking luxury cigars as a civilian but smokes cheap, gas station cigarettes while on the job.

as a civilian, he's comfortably rich and acts accordingly. while not outright flaunting his luxury and privilege, christoph is the proud owner of more than just a few gucci-brand accessories-- these primarily revolve around lighters, cigar cases, shoes, and a random spread of clothing. with that in mind, yes, his favorite luxury brand is gucci. his second favorite is versace. honorable mentions include dior, hermès, and fendi.

resides in dallas, texas. feel free to say hi if you see him!

SEMI-PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE ON "JOHN ROE": (this is information those within the bureau, be it as an employee or employer, would know.)

his first name is christoph, but assassin etiquette dictates that nobody refers to their fellow assassin as their actual name. their code name/alias suffices, unless they happen to cross paths within the underground circuit.

his first hit was an absolute fucking disaster, and it's a miracle he managed to kill the guy in the first place. many consider it a fluke, but christoph's more than managed to prove that he is, in fact, the guy.

there is no real "ranking" system within the bureau, but christoph is considered a top contender within the circuit regardless. the website automatically filters based off of perceived popularity, with "john roe" being spotted in the first-to-second rows on the first page consistently. however... if you were to filter based off of affordability, he's going to be in the waaaay back. his fellow assassins love giving him (sometimes playful, sometimes legitimate.) shit about this, and he always has a snappy comeback such as, "i make it worth it, though! my client always get th'results they want."

SEMI-PRIVATE KNOWLEDGE ON CHRISTOPH DOWELL: (this is generalized information, disregarding the assassin world, that certain individuals would know about christoph, within reason.)

those supernaturally inclined are capable of gathering that christoph simply isn't human. to what extent, however, depends on their own perception skills and what amount of "tells" christoph himself chooses to give. most of the time, the default assumption seems to be zombie or reanimated.

anyone who is aware of what a ghoul is will most likely be aware of how one is made: somebody fucked up a satanic ritual somewhere, somehow. ghouls are a byproduct of a ritual gone awry, always being killed after the intended sacrifice was already brought forth and killed first.

hey, why the hell can he still walk around with his head cut clean off of his neck? and oh my god, why is he asking me for some duct tape and to "come help him for a sec"?

john roe obviously isn't his real name, but he'll take a while to actually reveal his name. and when he does, he refuses to be called "chris"-- it's a long story, weigh down by some heavy baggage and that's as much as he'll disclose.

he likes men. this will seem redundant, but he loves reminding people. in addition to this, he's also married and wears the wedding ring proudly, flashing it occasionally should the opportunity arise.

he prefers smoking luxury-brand cigars, sitting out in his private suite's pool, and losing five of the ten rounds of a video game he's supposed to be really good at. he does, in fact, have a high-end gaming computer, and he maintains regular upkeep on it. tallying up its current worth, it's somewhere in the 4000-to-5000 american dollar range. he loves that machine.

speaking of said suite, it's actually an apartment on the topmost floor of the complex. it's one of those places that as soon as you set foot inside, you just know the owner is made entirely out of nothing but money.

actually has a semi-decent landlord, but it's mostly because said landlord is a bit of an eccentric guy and christoph matches his energy quite well.

he occasionally dabbles in drag as an art form, every so often performing at nearby nightclubs under the pseudonym scab. his style mostly resembled that of genderfuck and embraced said nature. his performances are normally well-received, being noted as high-energy and crowd-focused. in spite of this, he rarely stayed after the show and would only linger behind-the-scenes for as long as he was required before leaving. this is something both the regulars and club has simply accepted about him.

PRIVATE KNOWLEDGE OF CHRISTOPH DOWELL: (this is information those christoph trusts fully would know, including his family, husband, and similar. if this wasn't discussed between us privately or revealed to your muse personally, there will be ZERO access to this information.)

he struggled with commitment, with his marriage to one leontios dowell (he took his surname, isn't that just the sweetest thing?) being christoph's first, real committed relationship in, well, years. christoph, prior to, would partake in the occasional one-night stand and ensured it stayed as casual as possible.

his first concert was an avril lavigne concert. second was for christina aguilera. he actually loved both experiences and would go again if ever given the chance.

fought for his absolute goddamn life against his husband's sister, aelita, over one of the weirdest misunderstandings ever (long story.) and involved her smashing a tv over his head. he still hasn't forgiven her for that.

with regards to his trauma, only his family (and this does include his husband.) are aware of the details. but even then... christoph is still stingy on the full story, only recently revealing it in full to leontios and only leontios.

[agriftatsea]

Another day, another slew of posts from people calling for a boycott of the United States Election as a method of campaigning for change. (Refusing to participate in your shitty democracy will not actually improve the democracy btw) So! Here's a reminder that half of the country seems hellbent on re-instating a guy who is truly, comically worse than 'Genocide Joe' and it sounds like we need a reminder on how bad he was the first time.

List of horrible things Trump did in office, in no particular order:

Pulled out of the Paris Accord, claiming that climate change was not a big enough concern

Slashed regulations in safety and environmental impact in nearly every industry, some of which Biden has re-instated

Put Betsy DeVos in charge of education where she funneled money from public schools to private Christian schools and who got slammed in a class action lawsuit for her unwillingness to forgive fraudulent student loans

Put two judges on the Supreme Court which then went to repeal Roe vs Wade

Constantly downplayed COVID-19, incorrectly claimed 85% of people who wore masks got COVID anyway to justify why he didn't wear one when it messed up his spray tan, and overall horribly handled the pandemic in a way that still affects people every day

Scaled back SNAP (food stamps) to ‘save taxpayers money’ affecting 700,000 people

Pulled troops out of the Syria-Turkey border without consulting Congress or the Pentagon, leaving hundreds of thousands of people to die or be bombed

This is not even close to everything he did, because we’re still investigating what he did with all those classified documents (though even Fox News is worried that the deaths of dozens of international agents were a result of Trump leaking their identities to his foreign friends) and he keeps talking about how he wants to make himself President for Life. Even if we did somehow manage to elect a third party President, they wouldn't be able to do anything without getting all of the Dems and all of the GOPs on their side, and if you think that a centrist like Biden hasn't gotten much done you are not prepared for the nothing that Jill Stein will do if we get her elected.

“But all of our options are shit!”

I know! But one of our options is a con artist and a rapist who keeps insisting his ex-President status makes him immune to any prosecution, and the other is a union-supporting old man heading a government that is currently unified in allowing genocide. If you’re going to insist on throwing your vote away, keep in mind the thousands of people still attending Trump's rallies who have already proven they will show up in some of the worst winter weather conditions ever to prove their loyalty and think about what it would be like if we had to deal with them forever.

"Why can't we just burn it all down and start over?"

A civil war (because that's what it would be) would cause even more damage to vulnerable populations, and if you are wanting to mitigate harm you have to do the boring shit like vote and volunteer and talk to your neighbors. Life isn't a Marvel movie. The good guys aren't the ones with with the giant robots, and we can't save the world in 210 minutes with some vindicating violence and perfectly timed explosions. Changing the world is slow, and messy, and involves more 'being civil with e people you don't initially agree with' than anyone wants to make a movie about.

But if Trump gets the presidency back, he is never going away. As one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, this is not a risk we can take. We have a responsibility to the rest of the world to not blow this election in a fit of (justified) outrage.

Remember Reagan? How a celebrity got to be president and ruined so many people's lives decades after his death, including horribly mishandling a pandemic because treating it like an illness and not a punishment/inconvenience wasn't on his agenda? Do we really wanna go through that again?

Vote blue. Even slow progress is progress.

Don't give up.

[bitchesgetriches]

How to Prepare for a Post-Roe World (Bonus Episode)

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[lewepstein]

The State of Our Minds

or How to Survive Another Trump Presidency

I’m writing this post from what feels like the eye of a political hurricane, the period of relative calm between the November  presidential election and the January 20th inauguration of Donald Trump. I was touring Australia and New Zealand during the build-up to the November election when the bad news hit.  As much as I thought I was emotionally prepared to accept a Trump victory - some positive assessments about Harris’s chances of winning by pollsters in late October had raised what turned out to be false hopes - I realized that I was actually in shock and painfully deflated by the new political realities we were about to face.  I felt lucky to be buffered by the magnificent countryside that I was enveloped in on the other side of the world and the connection forged in my marriage that allowed us to process the immediate sense of loss.  It highlighted the ways that being in nature and nurturing our relationships can sustain us through political winters and offer us broader perspectives on the political dramas that will continue to swirl about us.

One immediate post-election realization I had was something akin to aversion: to the podcasts, the opinion columns and the cable news channels, most notably MSNBC, all of which I had been glued to before November 5th.  It wasn’t that they were doing anything wrong or different than what they had been doing before the election.  And maybe that was the point. They were just doing their jobs, pivoting from predicting the dangers of a Trump presidency to reporting on it.  The chances of a liberal Harris/Waltz ticket winning had been overblown, but the pundits weren’t to blame.  And yet the sting of defeat was intense and the exhaustion and deflation felt by just about everyone I spoke  with was palpable.  Kubler Ross’s 1969 Classic, “On Death and Dying” comes to mind in which the phases of shock and denial are followed by anger and despair and eventually by acceptance. But, unlike death which involves the absolute loss of someone in our orbit, Harris’s and the Democratic Party’s electoral defeat may also be a prelude to other losses - rights and freedoms that will predictably be attacked and diminished during a second Trump term. 

How can I describe what many of us are experiencing at this time?  In what ways is it different from other times?  And how does it go beyond what normally happens when “our side” loses an election and we face the administrative power and policies of the opposing party, one with whom we fundamentally disagree?  I believe the answer to these questions has to do with coming to terms with a truly dismal and dangerous state of affairs but on more than an intellectual level.  Something more foundational seems to have changed in American politics and many of us  may be struggling with emotional responses that are visceral and intense.  

 It is impossible to be told  that, “our democracy is on the line,” and that “Trump is a fascist,” as stated by several of his closest, past advisors, without becoming unsettled. We also cannot hear Trump say that he will, “Be a dictator on day one,” and  unleash a reign of terror against his perceived enemies without it setting off alarm bells for any of us who believe in democracy. How can those who see themselves as progressives be cognizant that a majority of our fellow Americans pulled the lever for a man of Trump’s character without feeling a sense of disillusionment and even betrayal?  

 I have found it helpful to examine the more personal meaning of this loss before contemplating how to contend with it during the next four years.  Having been a 1960s activist it is hard to fathom a world that is not moving forward in ways that I had always imagined it would.  For Baby Boomers like myself, progress was a given and backsliding, an outlier.  Roe versus Wade and The 1965 Voting Rights Act were laws I thought were enshrined. And yet, they’ve  been overturned.  A significant portion of the working class has shifted to the political right - the same working class that I had once thought would live out its legacy and become the vanguard of a progressive revolution. The number of countries around the world in which autocrats have seized power has grown exponentially.  Even the advanced democracies of Europe with decades of successful social democracy have fallen prey to the rise of fascist political parties and populist leaders who all embrace the scapegoating of immigrants, one dominant religion, illiberal policies toward women, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and most notably, autocratic, strongman rule.  This is not the world I thought my children and grandchildren would inherit.  Examining the larger meaning of this seachange in politics within the context of our personal histories and our current life phase may provide insight and understanding regarding the emotional responses we are having.

The question of how to survive another Trump presidency becomes an emotional challenge even for those of us who are not in his immediate line of fire.  Immigrants,trans people, women seeking reproductive care along with politicians and journalists who have opposed Trump will predictably be targeted during this administration.  Corporate leaders who are willing to kiss Trump’s ring and forces on the far right have already ascended to positions of policy making and power. For those of us who subscribe to a more liberal world view, our task has more to do with decisions around how much we choose to expose ourselves to the harsh glare of what is about to unfold.  We need to consider whether or not to participate in activities that could be deemed “political."  What those activities might be may be something else to ponder.  

The following are  some things we may want to consider as we face the next four years. What I am recommending is neither over-exposing ourselves to the inevitably upsetting news we will be hearing nor totally tuning it out and disengaging from the outside world.  

 Finger pointing and blame may be our first impulse in the aftermath of an electoral defeat of the magnitude we have  just experienced.  But it is a futile effort designed to deflect from the enormity of the loss we have experienced.  Moving beyond blame may be a personal challenge for each of us in the charged and polarized political environment in which we live.  But the guidelines for overcoming blame are no different for political discourse than they are for the couples whom I counsel.  Casting blame is almost always what I call a stuck position in which differences aren’t being honored and personal responsibility is being overlooked.

It is understandable to want to avoid witnessing the upsetting things that will inevitably come to pass during a second Trump presidency.. But even if we attempt to block the entire rollout of the new administration by neither viewing a newscast nor looking at a newspaper, it may not be possible to stop Trump’s words and actions from seeping into our consciousness and our lives.  Unless we shelter in place and stuff cotton into our ears we will necessarily overhear the conversations of others and pick up the vibes from the world around us.

  It may be wise to follow the path of moderation: detach from an obsessive focus on politics while viewing just enough news and analysis to not be blindsided by some of the policy rollout or events that we had not anticipated. Being prepared is being self protective  in the best way.  It means striking a balance between realistic assessments of  what a second Trump administration might look like without becoming obsessed with predictions about worst case scenarios and catastrophes that have not yet occurred. 

Being judicious about what we consume in the area of political journalism is important.  I’ve become very selective regarding my media menu. I no longer read my on-line newspaper during breakfast or in the evening before bedtime and I have stopped watching cable news channels that are designed to inflame. I’ve also discovered that news analysis podcasts can be less activating than headlines and news stories because they are once removed from events and easier to reflect on.   What I am finding is that I am less activated emotionally  when I am attempting to understand a phenomenon than when I am demonizing an individual or group of people or casting blame.

We will predictably witness rights being trampled upon, and norms being violated in this second Trump presidency.  Accepting our own moral outrage can co-exist with not demonizing others.  Maybe we will find it in ourselves to turn our outrage into energy and take up the cause of opposing what feels most evil to us in our own small ways. But if we venture into the heat of battle we must remember to keep our hearts at peace. 

[bitchesgetriches]

It should not escape notice that the FDA is currently coming after AidAccess.org because they "cause the introduction into interstate commerce of misbranded and unapproved new drugs in violation of sections 301(a), 301(d), and 505(a) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) (21 U.S.C. §§ 331(a), 331(d), and 355(a)]." Read the full text of the FDA's filing here.

... I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a medical expert. But I am a woman of childbearing age in a country that just reelected the guy responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade. So I feel pretty confident in endorsing AidAccess in spite of the FDA's concerns. Because we could be looking at a future in which it becomes extremely difficult to obtain medication abortions through legal means.

Yeah, AidAccess is introducing abortion medication to interestate commerce in violation of FDA law. That's the whole point.

Here's more:

How To Get an Abortion 

How to Prepare for a Post-Roe World (Bonus Episode) 

[emjayewrites]

Private Landing (Lewis Hamilton) (14.2/15) - Part II

SUMMARY: In the high-speed world of Formula One, Lewis Hamilton subtly introduces a mysterious partner via Instagram after a slight mishap during an interview. Sparking media intrigue, everyone wants to know: who is the enigmatic figure that calls herself Mrs. Hamilton?

INSPO: this post

PAIRINGS: Sir Lewis Hamilton x Aurora "Rorie" Phillips-Hamilton (faceclaim is Justine Skye)

WARNINGS: drama, angst, sexual content, formula one b.s., pre-established relationship (with flashbacks). RATED M (18+)

TAGLIST: @a-moment-captured, @boujiestpoet, @avngrsfangirl, @cocobutterqwueen @yeea-nah @alika-4466 @scorpiobleue @certifiedlesbianbaddie @motheroffae @perfecttrashface @saturnville @weetjy @lewlewlemon44 @cranberryjulce @chaoticcoffeequeen @periodjosh @melanin-queen369 @niahxo @purplelewlew @f1-football-fiend @imjustheretomanifest @gg-trini @kinggbl @iamryanl @mitruscity @nichmeddar @xoscar03 @eugene-emt-roe @cherry2stems @louvrepool @tremendousstarlighttragedy @ggaslyp1 @lewisroscoelove

A/N: Please let me know if you want to be added/removed from the taglist. I've may have watched too much Law & Order: SVU.

CHAPTER 14.2: 'Til The End

The Los Angeles courthouse steps felt endless in the July heat, reporters and photographers crowding the perimeter despite the early hour. Lewis's hand remained steady at the small curve of Rorie's back as they ascended, her flowing Dior maternity dress (a gift from Kim Jones himself) catching the morning breeze. At seventeen weeks, their daughter made her presence known in the graceful way Rorie navigated each step, one hand resting protectively over her bump.

"Mrs. Hamilton! Over here!" "Lewis! A comment about the case?" "Rorie! How are you feeling?"

The cacophony of shouted questions blended together as their security detail maintained a careful barrier. Julian met them at the top of the stairs, his usual composed demeanor a stark contrast to the circus below.

"Ready?" he asked simply, noting how Lewis shifted slightly to shield Rorie from a particularly aggressive photographer.

"More than ready," Rorie replied, her voice steady despite the circumstances. The past months of preparation had led to this moment - facing Deja Barnes in court.

Inside, the courthouse's air conditioning offered blessed relief. Their footsteps echoed through the marble corridor as Julian briefed them on last-minute details. "Deja's new attorney, Margaret Nguyen, has a reputation for aggressive cross-examination. Don't let her rattle you. Stick to the facts we've discussed. District Attorney Jones is a real shark though."

They paused outside the courtroom doors. Lewis turned to Rorie, his eyes full of concern. "You sure you want to be here? No one would blame you if—"

"I need to be here," Rorie cut in softly, squeezing his hand. "She tried to destroy our family, Lewis. She needs to see exactly who she failed to break."

With that, they walked into the courtroom together, hand in hand, their presence commanding attention. DA Jones, seated at the prosecution's table, glanced up from her notes and offered them a brief but confident smile.

"Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton," she greeted warmly, her tone professional but reassuring. "Glad you’re here. Let’s make sure justice is served."

Rorie returned a polite smile, her grip on Lewis’s hand tightening for a moment as they approached their seats with Julian in tow.

As they sat down, the quiet strength radiating from Rorie and Lewis was palpable.

The courtroom fell silent as Judge Morrison took her seat. Deja sat beside Margaret Nguyen, dressed in a conservative navy suit that couldn't quite mask the hostility radiating from her posture. Her eyes locked onto Rorie immediately, a mixture of hatred and something else - perhaps regret - flickering across her face.

The charges rang out clearly in the hushed space: "The State of California vs. Deja Barnes on multiple counts of criminal harassment, attempted extortion, theft of medical records, and conspiracy to distribute confidential information."

DA Jones's opening statement cut through the tension. "Your Honor, this case goes beyond simple harassment or theft of medical records. This is about the calculated betrayal of friendship, orchestrated by Ms. Barnes when her obsession with Mr. Hamilton led her to exploit every confidence Mrs. Hamilton had ever shared with her."

Margaret Nguyen's defense strategy became clear quickly: paint Deja as The Sun's victim rather than a conspirator. But Luisa's testimony shattered that narrative.

"I've worked for Sir and Mrs. Hamilton for three years," Luisa testified, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. "They treated me like family. When Ms. Barnes approached me about Miguel's visa… she knew exactly what she was doing."

"And what happened when you refused initially?" Jones asked.

"She said if I didn't help her, she'd make sure Miguel never got back into the country." Luisa's voice cracked. "I was desperate. But when I saw what The Sun published… what they wanted to do to Mrs. Hamilton, to their family…" She paused, wiping a tear. "I couldn't live with myself."

Rorie squeezed Lewis's hand as Luisa detailed how Deja had manipulated her way into accessing not just the IVF records, but had also helped Alexander uncover documentation about Martin Edwards's affair.

When Deja took the stand, her facade cracked. "He noticed me first," she insisted, staring at Lewis. "All-Star weekend, 2017. We had a connection before she came along."

"Ms. Barnes," Jones's voice was precise, "could you describe this alleged 'connection'?"

"He smiled at me. We talked about basketball." Her voice took on a desperate edge. "He remembered my name."

"For how long did this interaction last?"

Deja shifted uncomfortably. "Maybe… five minutes?"

"And based on this five-minute conversation six years ago, you felt justified in stealing medical records and attempting to expose Mrs. Hamilton's most private matters?"

"She wasn't supposed to have him!" Deja burst out, her composure finally shattering. "She knew how I felt about him. She knew, and she went after him anyway."

"Did Mrs. Hamilton know about your interaction with her husband at the 2017 All-Star weekend?" Jones asked calmly.

"No," Deja admitted reluctantly. "I never told her."

"So how exactly did she know 'how you felt about him'?"

Deja's composure cracked further. "She should have known. She was my best friend. She should have..."

"Ms. Barnes," Jones continued, "please tell the court about what happened in Melbourne, Australia in April 2022."

Deja's jaw tightened. "I was just trying to show her the truth."

"The truth?" Jones's voice sharpened. "Or were you attempting to stage a scene to destroy their marriage? Please explain to the court how you gained access to Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton's hotel suite."

"I..." Deja faltered. "I told the hotel staff I was Mrs. Hamilton's friend, that I was surprising her."

"And then?"

"I waited until Lewis came back from qualifying. Made it look like..."

"Like you and Mr. Hamilton were having an affair," Jones finished. "Despite knowing Mrs. Hamilton was in the middle of an IVF cycle at the time."

"She needed to see—"

"Ms. Barnes," Jones interrupted, "please explain the text messages between you and Alexander Davies where you discuss, and I quote, 'using the bastard child angle to really twist the knife.'"

The courtroom gasped as Jones displayed the messages on the screen. Deja's words about exploiting Rorie's parentage, about using Luisa's desperation to access medical records, about staging the Australia incident - all laid bare in black and white.

"I have more messages here," Jones continued, swiping to the next screen. "This one from March 2023, where you tell Mr. Davies, and I quote: 'I know everything about her IVF struggles. Every failed attempt, every heartbreak. When this story breaks, it'll destroy her.'"

Rorie's hand tightened around Lewis's as their private pain was exposed in the courtroom. But she held her head high, their daughter's movements beneath her palm a reminder of everything they'd overcome.

Deja was rendered speechless. "The prosecution rests, Your Honor," Jones stated, returning to her seat.

Judge Morrison turned to Margaret Nguyen. "Your witness, counselor."

Margaret rose smoothly, adjusting her blazer. "Ms. Barnes, could you tell the court about your relationship with Mrs. Hamilton before all of this?"

"We were close," Deja's voice softened slightly. "Since college. I was there for everything - her struggles with her father…"

"And when she began dating Mr. Hamilton?"

"She knew," Deja's voice hardened again. "She had to have known how I felt. I talked about him all the time after that All-Star weekend, about how amazing he was. Then suddenly she's dating him, and she never even mentioned knowing me to him?"

"Objection," Jones interrupted. "The witness has already admitted she never told Mrs. Hamilton about her interaction with Mr. Hamilton."

"Sustained," Judge Morrison ruled.

Margaret shifted tactics. "Let's talk about Alexander Davies. How did he approach you?"

"He said he was doing a story about Rorie. About her rise to fame, her marriage…" Deja paused. "He said The Sun would pay well for insider information."

"Did he pressure you to provide specific types of information?"

"Objection," Jones stood. "The defendant's text messages clearly show she was the one suggesting angles to pursue."

"Overruled. The witness may answer."

"He kept pushing for more," Deja continued. "Said the story needed something juicier than just her background. When I mentioned her dad…"

"So Mr. Davies manipulated you into revealing private information about your friend?"

"Objection!" Jones's voice rang out. "Counsel is leading the witness."

"Sustained."

Margaret changed direction again. "The incident in Melbourne - why were you really there?"

Deja's eyes flickered to Rorie for the first time since taking the stand. "I wanted to talk to her. To explain. But then I saw an opportunity to…"

"To what?"

"To make her feel what I felt," Deja's voice cracked. "Watching them together, seeing their perfect life, their perfect marriage. While I just had those five minutes…"

Margaret stepped closer to her client. "Ms. Barnes, could you describe your emotional state during this period?"

"Objection," Jones interrupted. "Relevance?"

"I'm establishing my client's state of mind, Your Honor," Margaret countered.

"I'll allow it, but tread carefully, counselor."

Deja dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. "I was... I felt betrayed. He promised to stay in touch after All-Star weekend."

"Objection, Your Honor," Jones stood. "The defendant has already testified the interaction lasted only five minutes. There's no evidence of any promises."

"Sustained."

Margaret pressed on. "You were distraught, weren't you? Watching your best friend live the life you'd dreamed of with the man who—"

"Objection!" Jones's voice cut through. "Counsel is testifying for the witness."

"Sustained. Ms. Nguyen, please rephrase."

"How did you feel, seeing their relationship develop?"

"I couldn't handle it," Deja's voice wavered. "Every Instagram post, every race weekend, every time she called me crying about the IVF not working... I just kept thinking it should have been me."

"And when Alexander Davies contacted you?"

"He said people deserved to know the truth about her. About her father, about how she was..." Deja paused, glancing at Rorie. "About how she was trapping Lewis with the IVF treatments."

Their daughter chose that moment to kick, as if protesting the lies being told about her parents.

"So you were emotionally vulnerable when The Sun approached you?"

"Objection," Jones stood again.

"Sustained."

Margaret changed tactics. "The Melbourne incident - you've expressed regret about that. Could you explain why?"

Deja's eyes welled with tears that Lewis and Rorie both recognized as performative. "I was desperate. Watching them together, seeing their perfect life… I just wanted her to feel some of the pain I felt."

"No further questions, Your Honor," Margaret concluded, returning to her seat.

Judge Morrison checked her watch. "Given the hour, we'll recess for the day. Court will reconvene tomorrow at 9 AM." The sharp crack of her gavel echoed through the courtroom.

As the bailiff announced "All rise," Deja's eyes locked onto Rorie and Lewis. There was something unsettling in her gaze - not quite hatred anymore, but something more complex, more dangerous. Even as her attorney guided her toward the exit, she kept looking back at them.

DA Jones approached the Hamiltons as they gathered their things. "We're in a strong position," she said in a low voice. "The evidence is overwhelming, and her testimony today did her no favors."

"How much longer?" Julian asked, his tone making it clear he wanted this chapter closed for his clients.

"With the pace we're moving, we should have a verdict by end of week," Jones replied. "Her attempts to paint herself as the victim aren't landing with the jury. You can see it in their faces."

Lewis kept his arm protectively around Rorie as they headed for the exit. "The sooner this is over, the better," he murmured, feeling their daughter's movements against his side where Rorie pressed close.

"Tomorrow we'll hear from the hotel staff in Melbourne," Julian informed them quietly. "Then the digital forensics expert about the text messages. We're almost through this."

As they reached the courthouse steps, they could see Deja being led to a waiting car, but even then, she turned for one last look at them - at the life she'd convinced herself should have been hers.

____________________________________________

The private conference room provided a quiet refuge from the craziness outside. Rorie picked at her salad while Marian watched with concerned eyes. The past two days had been grueling - twelve witnesses, including the Melbourne hotel staff and even a digital forensics expert breaking down the text messages.

"Baby, you need to eat something," Marian urged, pushing the plate closer to her daughter. "My grandbaby needs nutrients."

Rorie shook her head, her hand resting on her bump. "I can't, Mama. Not with…" She trailed off, remembering yesterday's testimony from her former clinic nurse about how Deja had pumped her for information, pretending to be concerned about Rorie's struggles.

"I always knew that girl wasn't right," Marian said softly. "The way she'd look at your photos with Lewis, how she'd ask those strange questions about your relationship. Like she was studying you instead of being your friend."

"I should have seen it."

"Don't you dare blame yourself," Marian's voice was firm. "That girl had screws loose long before you met Lewis. I remember how she used to show up at odd hours, always with some crisis that needed your attention."

A gentle kick from her daughter made Rorie smile faintly. "Your granddaughter agrees with you."

"Smart girl already," Marian smiled, but her eyes remained worried. "You sure you're ready for this?"

Before Rorie could answer, a security guard appeared at the door. "Mrs. Hamilton? Court's resuming."

Lewis was waiting outside the conference room. Rorie took his hand, drawing strength from his steady presence as they made their way back to the courtroom. Marian followed close behind, her prayers barely audible.

The bailiff's voice rang out clear: "The Court calls Aurora Isis Phillips-Hamilton to the stand."

Rorie squeezed Lewis's hand one final time before making her way to the witness stand. After being sworn in, she settled into the chair, adjusting her flowing dress over her bump.

"Please state your name for the record," DA Jones began.

"Aurora Isis Phillips-Hamilton."

"Mrs. Hamilton, could you tell the court about your friendship with the defendant?"

"Objection," Margaret Chen stood. "Relevance?"

"Your Honor," Jones replied, "the defendant's relationship with Mrs. Hamilton is central to establishing the betrayal of trust that led to these crimes."

"Overruled. The witness may answer."

Rorie took a deep breath, her hand instinctively moving to her bump. "We met in college. She became one of my closest friends and was there for everything…"

"And when did you meet your husband?" Jones asked.

"I met Lewis in 2018, about a year after the All-Star weekend she mentioned. She never once told me about meeting him there."

Jones nodded. "Could you tell the court about what happened in Melbourne?"

"Objection! Your Honor, this has already been established through other witnesses."

"Your Honor," Jones countered, "Mrs. Hamilton's direct experience is relevant."

"Overruled. Proceed."

Rorie's voice remained steady. "I was going through our fourth round of IVF. Lewis was at the paddock for qualifying. I was there to surprise him…" She paused. "That's when I found Deja there, staged in our bed."

After Jones finished, Margaret approached with a predatory smile. "Mrs. Hamilton, isn't it true you knew about my client's feelings for your husband?"

"Objection," Jones stood. "Asked and answered."

"Sustained."

Margaret tried another angle. "You enjoyed having power over her, didn't you? Keeping her close, watching her pine after your husband?"

"Objection!" Jones's voice rang out. "Counsel is badgering the witness."

"Sustained. Ms. Nguyen, move on."

"You never considered her feelings when you started dating Mr. Hamilton?"

Rorie's eyes flashed. "How could I consider feelings she never expressed? But more than that - how could she consider my feelings when she tried to destroy my marriage during one of the most vulnerable moments of my life? When she used my struggles with infertility as ammunition?" Her voice cracked slightly. "She wasn't just my friend. She was family. And she used everything she knew about me, every private moment I shared with her, to try to break me."

The jury leaned forward, several members nodding. Margaret's face tightened as she realized the impact of Rorie's words.

"No further questions," Margaret said quickly.

"The witness may step down," Judge Morrison announced. "Ms. Nguyen, does the defense have any more witnesses?"

Margaret stood. "Your Honor, I request a meeting in chambers."

A ripple of surprise went through the courtroom. Judge Morrison's eyebrows rose, but she nodded. "Very well. Counsel, in my chambers. Court is in recess."

Rorie made her way back to Lewis and her mother, her legs slightly shaky after the emotional testimony.

"What just happened?" she whispered as they watched the attorneys disappear into chambers with Judge Morrison.

"Something's up," Julian muttered, his eyes narrowed. "Nguyen must realize how badly this is going."

"The jury's faces when you spoke…" Marian squeezed her daughter's hand. "Baby, you did so good."

Ten minutes later, the doors opened. Judge Morrison returned to her seat while DA Jones quickly approached their group.

"Nguyen asked for a plea deal," she informed them in a low voice. "She wanted probation and a fine, no jail time."

"And?" Julian pressed.

"I said no. With the evidence we have, she's looking at serious time. She tried to destroy lives here."

Judge Morrison called the court back to order. "Counselor Nguyen, your witnesses?"

"Yes, Your Honor. The defense calls Lewis Hamilton to the stand."

Lewis squeezed Rorie's hand before making his way to the witness stand. After being sworn in, he settled into the chair, his posture relaxed but alert.

"Please state your name for the record."

"Sir Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton."

Margaret approached, holding a presentation clicker in her hands. "Mr. Hamilton—"

"It's Sir," Lewis interrupted, causing Margaret to tilt her head in confusion. "I was knighted by the King of England, so my proper address is Sir Hamilton - Mr. Hamilton is my father, just FYI."

Several jury members and court attendees chuckled softly.

"Sir Hamilton," Margaret declared with a slight frown, "let's talk about 2017. You were quite the party boy then, weren't you?"

"I enjoyed myself," Lewis answered candidly. "I was single, successful. Yes, I had my 'fuckboi era' as people call it."

"And you met my client during All-Star weekend?"

"Apparently. I honestly don't remember the specific interaction she described."

Margaret displayed the first photo on the screen - Lewis with his arm around both Deja and KiKi at what appeared to be a beach party. "Just friends?"

"Just friends," Lewis confirmed firmly. "That photo's from a group trip to Mykonos. There were about fifteen of us there."

She showed another photo - Lewis kissing Deja's cheek while Rorie kissed the other. "This seems rather intimate."

"That was Deja's birthday party," Lewis explained patiently. "I have similar photos with all our friends. You can check my Instagram - I'm affectionate with everyone in my circle. But I never looked at any of Rorie's friends that way. Never gave Deja any reason to think otherwise."

"Are you suggesting my client imagined your connection?"

"Objection, argumentative!"

"Sustained."

"Look," Lewis leaned forward slightly. "You can pull up every photo from every party, every group vacation. What you'll find is exactly what I'm saying - a group of friends hanging out. Nothing more. I never led your client on. I never promised her anything. And I certainly never gave her any reason to think she had the right to try to destroy my marriage."

Several jury members nodded, and Margaret's shoulders tensed as she realized her strategy was backfiring.

Margaret tried another angle. "Sir Hamilton, did you ever contact my client privately?"

"Only in group chats with all our friends. Never one-on-one."

"Yet you had her number?"

"Objection," Jones interrupted. "Asked and answered through previous testimony about group communications."

"Sustained."

Margaret shuffled through more photos. "These trips, these parties... you were very comfortable with my client."

"I was comfortable with all our friends," Lewis replied evenly. "That's what friendship looks like."

After several more failed attempts to imply impropriety, Margaret concluded her cross-examination. DA Jones stood.

"Sir Hamilton, in your own words, what was the nature of your relationship with Ms. Barnes?"

"She was my wife's friend. Nothing more. I never saw her as anything else, never acted in any way that should have given her that impression. I barely remember talking to her at that All-Star weekend."

"And your relationship with Mrs. Hamilton?"

Lewis's face softened as he looked at Rorie. "She's everything. My wife, the mother of our son, and our baby on the way. We've been through so much together - the ups and downs of IVF, building our family..." He turned back to face the jury directly. "What Ms. Barnes did... accessing our private medical records during one of the most vulnerable times in our lives, trying to expose my wife's relationship with her father, staging that scene in Melbourne... it's unforgivable."

His voice grew firmer. "She betrayed not just my wife's trust, but our entire family's. She should be ashamed of herself for working with The Sun to try to destroy us, for exploiting Luisa's situation with Miguel, for using private information my wife shared with her in confidence. The fact she thought a five-minute conversation at a basketball game six years ago somehow justified all this..." He shook his head. "It's delusional."

The jury was hanging on every word. Even Judge Morrison seemed moved. In the gallery, Deja had shrunk in her seat, while Margaret's face had gone pale.

"No further questions, Your Honor," Jones concluded.

Judge Morrison turned to Margaret. "Any redirect, Ms. Nguyen?"

"No, Your Honor," Margaret replied, her voice tight.

"The witness may step down," Judge Morrison announced.

As Lewis returned to his seat beside Rorie, Judge Morrison addressed the courtroom. "Does either counsel have any additional witnesses?"

"No, Your Honor," both attorneys responded.

"Very well," Judge Morrison shuffled her papers. "We'll hear closing arguments tomorrow morning at 9 AM. Court is adjourned." The crack of her gavel echoed through the room.

As people began filing out, Deja's gaze followed Lewis and Rorie, watching as he helped his pregnant wife stand, his hand protective at her back.

"You did amazing," Rorie whispered to Lewis as they left the courtroom.

"Just told the truth," he replied softly, pulling her closer. "Ready to end this tomorrow?"

Behind them, they could hear Margaret urgently whispering to Deja about considering options, but they didn't look back. They'd said their piece. Tomorrow would bring the final chapter of this painful saga.

______________________________________________

The next morning arrived heavy with anticipation. The courtroom was packed as Jones delivered her closing argument, methodically laying out how Deja had betrayed trust, stolen private medical information, and conspired with The Sun to destroy the Hamiltons.

Margaret's closing felt desperate in comparison, still trying to paint Deja as a heartbroken woman manipulated by the media. The jury's expressions suggested they weren't buying it.

As they filed out to deliberate, Marian squeezed Rorie's hand. "Now we wait."

Three hours later - a surprisingly short time for such a complex case - the bailiff announced the jury had reached a verdict.

"That's quick," Marian whispered, her voice tense. "That's real quick."

Judge Morrison addressed the packed courtroom. "Has the jury reached a unanimous verdict?"

The lead juror stood, paper trembling slightly in her hands. "We have, Your Honor."

"What say you?"

"In the matter of The State of California vs. Deja Barnes, on the count of criminal harassment, we find the defendant guilty."

Rorie's hand tightened around Lewis's.

"On the count of theft of medical records, we find the defendant guilty."

Deja began to shake her head slowly.

"On the count of conspiracy to distribute confidential information, we find the defendant guilty."

"On the count of attempted extortion…" the juror paused. "We find the defendant not guilty."

"The jury is thanked and excused," Judge Morrison announced. "Sentencing will take place next week, Monday at 10 AM. The defendant is to remain in custody until then."

"No!" Deja suddenly screamed, jumping to her feet. "You don't understand! She stole everything from me! Everything!"

"Ms. Barnes!" Judge Morrison's gavel cracked sharply. "Control yourself!"

"This isn't fair!" Deja continued, struggling as Margaret tried to calm her. "Lewis was supposed to be mine! She trapped him! She—"

"Ms. Barnes, you are in contempt!" Judge Morrison's voice cut through the chaos. "Bailiff!"

As the bailiff moved to restrain her, Deja's wild eyes found Rorie. "You think this is over? You think—"

The bailiff wrestled her toward the door leading to holding, her screams echoing through the courtroom until they were finally muffled by the heavy doors closing behind her.

Judge Morrison banged her gavel once more. "Court is adjourned until sentencing."

In the sudden quiet, Lewis wrapped his arm around Rorie, pressing a kiss to her temple. Their daughter kicked strongly, as if celebrating the verdict in her own way.

"It's over," he whispered. "It's finally over."

Lewis helped Rorie up, guiding her quickly through the crowd and into a private conference room. As soon as the door closed behind them, her composure finally broke. Months of stress, betrayal, and pain came pouring out as she collapsed into sobs.

"Baby girl..." Marian rushed to hold her daughter as Lewis supported them both.

"It's over," Rorie gasped between sobs, her whole body shaking. "Oh God, it's really over."

Lewis gathered both women into his arms, one hand protectively covering where their daughter was kicking frantically, responding to her mother's surge of emotion. "Let it out, love. Just let it all out."

"My sweet girl," Marian murmured, stroking Rorie's hair as she had when she was small. "You've been so strong."

Rorie couldn't stop crying, months of carefully maintained composure dissolving in the safety of her family's embrace. Every terrible moment - finding Deja in their Melbourne suite, learning about the stolen medical records, seeing their private struggles splashed across the papers - came pouring out in gut-wrenching sobs.

"I trusted her," she choked out. "I trusted her with everything..."

"I know, baby," Lewis whispered, his own eyes wet as he held his wife closer. "I know."

They stayed like that, wrapped around each other, until Rorie's sobs gradually quieted to hiccups and shaky breaths. Their daughter had settled too, as if sensing the storm had passed.

"Ready to go home?" Lewis asked softly, wiping tears from her cheeks.

Rorie nodded, exhausted but lighter somehow. The betrayal would always hurt, but today justice had been served. Today, they could finally begin to heal.

The Parisian morning light filtered through gauzy curtains as Rorie moved above Lewis, her braids falling around her face like a silken curtain. Her skin gleamed, her every curve mesmerizing as she rode him with slow, deliberate movements.

"Fuck..." Lewis groaned, his head tipping back against the pillows as his hands gripped her hips. "Rorie... you’re unreal," he murmured, his voice husky with awe.

Rorie smirked, leaning forward to press her lips to his ear. "I know," she teased, her breath warm against his skin.

His hands slid up her back, holding her closer as he whispered, "You feel so good, baby. I could stay like this forever."

Her laugh was soft and throaty, her movements quickening as they lost themselves in the moment. They both came apart five thrusts later and then she laid on top of him, tracing lazy patterns on Lewis's chest, both still catching their breath. Their daughter was particularly active, as if protesting their early morning activities.

"Think we woke her up," Rorie chuckled, guiding Lewis's hand to where their daughter was doing what felt like somersaults.

"Sorry, baby girl," Lewis murmured to her bump. "Blame your mama for being irresistible."

Before Rorie could retort, tiny fists pounded on their bedroom door. "Mama! Dada! Up up!"

"Speaking of being woken up," Lewis laughed, reaching for his shorts while Rorie wrapped herself in a robe. "Coming, big man!"

As Lewis let an excited Lyric bounce onto their bed, Rorie's phone buzzed with a text from Julian: "Barnes sentencing - 2 years with possibility of parole after 18 months. 5 years probation after release. Mandatory psychiatric treatment. Permanent restraining order granted. No contact allowed with any member of Hamilton family, including social media. Also banned from all F1 events/paddocks worldwide."

"Good," Lewis said, reading over her shoulder while Lyric snuggled between them.

"Sister kick!" Lyric announced, placing his small hand on Rorie's bump.

"She's very active this morning," Rorie smiled, the weight of Deja's sentencing lifting from her shoulders. "Ready to watch Uncle Miles win his medal?"

"He got this," Lewis agreed, checking the time. "Semi-finals start in three hours."

Rorie's phone buzzed again - Julian adding: "She broke down crying during impact statements. Kept apologizing. Judge wasn't moved. Said her actions showed calculated malice, not just emotional distress. The psychiatric evaluation revealed concerning obsessive patterns."

"It's really over," Rorie whispered, leaning into Lewis as Lyric chattered excitedly about breakfast and Uncle Miles's "sword fighting."

"It's over," Lewis confirmed, kissing her temple. "Now let's go watch my best friend win Olympic gold."

"Breakfast first!" Lyric insisted, tugging their hands. "Pancakes!"

As they got ready for the day, Rorie felt lighter than she had in months. Paris sparkled outside their window, Miles had a shot at Olympic glory, and their daughter proved to be just as energetic as her brother. The darkness of betrayal was behind them, sealed away by justice and time.

______________________________________________

Lewis looked like Miles' biggest fan, decked head to toe in Team USA fencing gear with "CHAMLEY-WATSON" emblazoned across his shirt. The Olympic venue was packed, and cameras constantly turned to their section, where Snoop Dogg had been entertaining Lyric with funny faces between matches.

"Uncle Snoop!" Lyric giggled as the rapper pretended to fence with imaginary swords.

"Little man got the moves," Snoop laughed, fist-bumping the toddler.

Nina leaned over to Rorie, both wearing matching "Team Miles" shirts. "The paps are having a field day with this section," she whispered, nodding toward the photographers below. "Lewis Hamilton, Snoop Dogg, and a baby watch?"

KiKi was seated on her other side and she shook her head at the photographers nearby. "Fucking vultures," she muttered to no one in particular, but Rorie heard every word and she squeezed her friend’s arm. Since the court ruling, KiKi had gotten more protective, if possible, and she was supposed to be watching her man win a gold medal, not worry about her. But then again, KiKi will always be KiKi.

Shaun White, sitting with his arm around Nina, chuckled. "Don't forget Spinz trying to teach Snoop fencing terms."

"It's called a parry, Uncle Snoop!" Spinz was explaining enthusiastically. "Not a block!"

The semi-final match was intense, Miles moving with precision and focus. But his opponent, a veteran French fencer, matched him point for point. The crowd gasped as the final exchange ended with Miles just missing his target.

"Fourth place," Rorie sighed as they watched Miles take his position off the podium during the medal ceremony. "He's going to be devastated."

"Still proud of him though," Lewis said, adjusting Lyric on his hip. "Making the Olympic semi-finals is huge."

Later, as Miles approached their group, still in his Team USA gear, his smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "Sorry I couldn't get that medal."

"Are you kidding?" Snoop stood up to hug him. "You showed out, nephew! Fourth in the world!"

"Uncle Miles sword fight good!" Lyric declared with all the confidence of a toddler, making Miles' smile finally turn genuine.

"Thanks, little man." Miles ruffled Lyric's hair before turning to Rorie. "At least you and my niece showed up."

"Wouldn't miss it," Rorie hugged him tight. "LA 2028, yeah?"

"Maybe," Miles laughed. "But first, I need food. And possibly several drinks."

"Non-alcoholic for some of us," Nina patted Rorie's bump.

Miles then diverted his gaze to KiKi, and Rorie smiled brightly as she recognized that lovey look Lewis was fond of giving her. "Hey baby."

KiKi stretched as much as she could ok her tiptoes, no doubt trying to accommodate Miles’ staggering height, to kiss him quickly on the lips. "You did such a great job today, okay? Don’t dwell on this too much. I’m so proud of you."

As they made their way out of the venue, photographers called out for group photos. Snoop immediately struck a fencing pose, making everyone laugh.

"Alright rockstar, ready for dinner?" Lewis lifted Lyric into his arms as they headed to their waiting van.

"Pizza!" Lyric declared, playing with the curls at the nape of his father's neck.

"Always pizza with you," Lewis chuckled. "Just like your mama."

Rorie watched them from her seat, smiling at their exchange. Lyric had Lewis wrapped completely around his little finger, and she had a feeling their daughter would be exactly the same.

"Uncle Miles meet us?" Lyric asked hopefully.

"Yeah, baby. He's just getting changed first," Rorie assured him. "He'll meet us at the restaurant."

At the trendy Parisian bistro, Lewis kept Lyric entertained in his lap while discussing his upcoming plans with Shaun.

"So after this, I'm doing this whole African tour - Madagascar, Morocco, Senegal. Got some sustainability projects I want to check out, plus some cultural experiences I've been wanting to explore."

"You're leaving your pregnant wife all alone?" Shaun teased, earning a playful swat from Nina.

"Actually," Rorie piped up, sipping her water, "I'm kind of looking forward to it. Give me time to nest, hang out with the girls. Plus, someone needs to supervise the nursery renovation."

Her phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number:

"Hi"

Then immediately after:

"It's Aaron. Your brother. I wanted to apologize for everything. Can we meet?"

Rorie's hand trembled slightly as she stared at the message. After everything with Deja, trust didn't come easily anymore.

"You okay, love?" Lewis noticed her expression.

"Yeah," she replied softly, typing back a simple 'yes' to Aaron. "Just really hungry."

The bourbon arrived first, a small mercy as Aaron checked his watch again. Fifteen minutes late - typical. His father had always operated on his own time, everyone else's schedules be damned. The crystal tumbler felt cool against his palm as he took a slow sip, letting the liquid warm his throat.

A flash of movement caught his eye as their waitress approached, all curves and honey-brown skin. "Can I get you anything else while you wait?" Her smile was sweet but knowing.

"Nah, I'm good mamas. Thank you though." He returned her smile, appreciating how her dress hugged her hips as she walked away. At thirty-one, Aaron had mastered his father's charm, but he'd sworn never to deploy it the same way.

The same way that had produced a sister two months older than him.

The math had been eating at him since the news broke. Two months. His mother had been seven months pregnant with him while his father had another child being born. The fucking audacity of it all made his jaw clench.

Martin Edwards finally swept in, all Tom Ford suit and corporate confidence. "Sorry I'm late, son. Board meeting ran long."

"Sure it did," Aaron muttered, but raised his glass in greeting anyway.

The waitress returned, and Aaron watched with growing disgust as his father's eyes tracked her movement, that same appreciative glance he'd caught himself making earlier.

Like father, like son - the thought made his stomach turn.

After ordering and some surface-level chat about Aaron's investment firm, he couldn't hold back anymore.

"Were you ever going to tell us about her?" The question cut through their carefully maintained screen of normalcy.

Martin's face tightened almost imperceptibly. "It's complicated, son."

"Complicated?" Aaron's laugh was bitter. "You went on fucking Piers Morgan and lied through your teeth. Made it seem like you and Mom were separated when you knocked up Rorie's mother. But that's not true, is it?"

"I was put in a corner when the story broke. I had to protect our family name—"

"Our family name?" Aaron's voice rose slightly before he caught himself. "You mean the same name you almost gave to your outside child while my mother was pregnant with me?"

Martin sipped his drink, too composed for a man being confronted about his infidelity. "Your mother and I have an… arrangement. Have for years. She does her thing, I do mine. The only rule was no other children."

"And yet."

"Marian was adamant about keeping the baby. I tried to handle it quietly, but…" Martin shrugged. "At least she never asked for money."

The casual way he dismissed creating and abandoning a child made Aaron's hands shake. "Why not just divorce? Why keep up this fucking charade?"

"Divorce?" Martin scoffed. "Never. It would look bad."

"But having a bastard isn't?"

"Watch your tone," Martin warned, his mask slipping slightly. "You don't understand the complexities of adult relationships—"

"I understand plenty," Aaron cut in. "I understand you're so obsessed with appearances that you'd rather live a lie. I understand why we only saw you at carefully choreographed family events. I understand why Azariah's marriage seems so foreign to me - because I never saw what a real one looked like growing up."

"You're out of line."

"No, you're out of line. Have been for decades." Aaron stood, throwing cash on the table for his drink. "You know what the worst part is? Not the affair, not the lies. It's that you're still trying to control the narrative. Still trying to play puppet master with all our lives."

"Aaron—"

"I'm meeting with Rorie next week," he announced, watching his father's face pale slightly. "Because unlike you, I actually want to know her. The real her, not whatever story you're trying to sell to the outside world."

He left his father sitting there, barely acknowledging the waitress's goodbye. The summer air hit him like a wall as he stepped outside, his mind racing with three decades of realizations. Everything he thought he knew about family, about marriage, about love - all of it filtered through his father's carefully constructed lies.

His phone buzzed - a text from Azariah: "How'd it go?" "About as well as expected," he typed back. "Dad's still Dad." "You good?" Aaron paused, thinking about Rorie, about their upcoming meeting, about all the years they'd lost. "No," he replied honestly. "But maybe I will be."

_______________________________________________

Aaron sat in his car for a moment, taking in the elegant Georgian façade of his sister's London home. Sister. The word still felt foreign on his tongue, especially knowing she existed while his mother was carrying him. Life had a sick sense of humor sometimes.

He checked his reflection, running a hand through his waves and adjusting his gold chain before popping a mint in his mouth. The orange Hermes bag sat in his backseat - the saleswoman had assured him it was foolproof for apologies, though she probably hadn't dealt with many "sorry I was an asshole to my newly discovered sister" situations.

Grabbing the bag and the two teddy bears - one for Lyric, one for the baby - he walked up the path and rang the doorbell, his mind drifting to the headlines he'd read about Rorie's court case. Her supposed best friend doing her dirty like that… maybe trust issues ran in the family.

His own behavior in Barcelona made him cringe now. Lewis Hamilton would've been well within his rights to knock him out that day. Getting his ass beat by a Formula 1 driver - Twitter would've had a field day with that one.

A dog's bark interrupted his thoughts, followed by the patter of small feet and a child's excited "I get it!"

"Lyric Apollo Hamilton, don't you dare touch that doorknob!" Rorie's voice rang out clear and firm.

Aaron couldn't help but chuckle. Black moms really did all share the same tone.

The door opened to reveal Rorie, her bump obvious now in plain white t-shirt and cute overalls, with Lyric beside her. The kid was almost to her waist - though considering Rorie's height, that wasn't saying much. The resemblance to Lewis was uncanny, from the braids to his facial features.

Damn...did her genes even put up a fight? "Hi," Aaron said softly, suddenly nervous.

"Hi," Rorie replied, one hand resting on her bump.

"Can I… can I say hi to him?" Aaron gestured to Lyric.

After Rorie's nod, Aaron crouched down. "Hey little man. I'm your Uncle Aaron."

"Hi," Lyric said shyly, peeking around his mother's leg. "You tall like Dada."

Once introductions were over, he followed Rorie through the house. The kitchen was all sleek marble and natural light. They stood awkwardly for a moment, studying each other's features - same eyes, same nose. Yeah, they were definitely siblings.

"Can I get you something to drink?" Rorie asked. "Water? Coffee? Lemonade?"

"Lemonade would be nice."

As she waddled to the fridge, Aaron gestured to the bags. "I, uh, brought some things. For you and Lyric. And the baby."

"Thank you," she said softly, returning with his drink. Her hand went to her belly again.

"How far along are you?"

"Six months. Due in November." A small smile crossed her face. "It's a girl."

"A girl?" Aaron felt a unexpected wave of emotion. A niece. "That's… that's amazing."

"Yeah," Rorie agreed, then added quietly, "Listen, about Barcelona—"

"I was wrong," Aaron cut in. "So wrong. I was angry at Dad and I took it out on you. Lewis should've knocked my ass out."

A hint of amusement crossed Rorie's face. "He considered it."

"Dad finally told me everything," Aaron said, watching as Rorie leaned against the counter. "About how you were born while my mom was pregnant with me. About their 'arrangement.'" He made air quotes around the last word.

"That must've been…" Rorie searched for the right word.

"Fucked up? Yeah." He took a sip of lemonade. "Makes me question everything, you know? Like was any of it real? The family dinners, the holidays…"

"Mama! Hungry!" Lyric announced as he ran inside the kitchen, tugging at Rorie's clothes.

"What do you want, baby?"

"Apple and peanut butter!"

"Okay, go sit at the island," Rorie instructed, moving to grab an apple. As she started slicing it, she continued their conversation. "Azariah did mentioned that you went to see Martin."

"Yeah, it happened last week in New York." Aaron watched as she carefully spread peanut butter on the apple slices. "He's doing what he does best now - pretending the conversation never happened."

"Here you go, baby," Rorie placed the plate in front of Lyric, who immediately grabbed a slice. "Careful, don't make a mess."

"Thank you, Mama!"

"He's so polite," Aaron observed.

"Lewis is big on manners," Rorie smiled, one hand absently rubbing her bump. "Though sometimes I think Lyric's just naturally sweet."

"Unlike his uncle, huh?" Aaron said ruefully. "I really was an ass in Barcelona."

"You were," Rorie agreed, but her tone was gentle. "But I get it now. Finding out about me… it couldn't have been easy."

"Still. The things I said to Lewis…"

"Dada best!" Lyric chimed in, peanut butter smeared on his chin.

Both adults laughed as Rorie grabbed a napkin to clean his face. "Yes he is, baby."

"I've been…" Aaron paused, watching this domestic scene that felt so foreign yet familiar. "I've been so focused on work, on being Dad's perfect son, that I forgot how to just… be human sometimes. Seeing you with your family, it's made me realize some things."

"Like what?"

"Like maybe success isn't just about board rooms and investment portfolios. Maybe it's about this too - family, love, apple slices with peanut butter."

Rorie smiled, reaching for her own apple slice. "Well, you're welcome to be part of this family. If you want to be."

"More apple please, Mama!" Lyric interrupted again.

"What do we say?"

"Please and thank you!"

As Rorie prepared more apple slices, Aaron felt something shift inside him. Maybe this was what growing up really meant - not corner offices and power moves, but learning to open your heart to new possibilities, new relationships. Even if they came with sticky-fingered nephews.

"Still can't believe that I have another sister," Aaron mused, watching Lyric happily munch on his snack. "I always thought Athena would be the only one I had to worry about."

"Speaking of Athena," Rorie said, wiping peanut butter from Lyric's hands, "she's been amazing through everything. Coming to races, checking on me during the trial..."

"Yeah, she got Dad's media savvy but Mom's heart, thank God." Aaron paused. "Have you... have you met my mom?"

Rorie's hand went to her bump again, a protective gesture Aaron was starting to recognize. "Not yet. I'm not sure she wants to."

"She asks about you," Aaron admitted. "Tries to be subtle about it, but I can tell she's curious. Especially after everything with that Deja person hit the news."

"All done!" Lyric announced, holding up his clean plate.

"Good job, baby. Why don't you go play with Roscoe for a bit? Stay where I can see you."

As Lyric scampered off to find the dog, Rorie turned back to Aaron. "It's been a lot, honestly. Finding out about Martin, dealing with Deja's betrayal, this pregnancy..."

"But you seem happy," Aaron observed. "Like, genuinely happy."

"I am. Lewis, Lyric, this little one," she smiled, patting her bump. "They're everything."

"The Birkin's not gonna fix what I said about your family in Barcelona," Aaron said suddenly. "But I hope it's a start."

"The fact that you're here, trying - that means more than any bag." She paused. "Though I definitely won't say no to the Birkin."

They both laughed, the tension finally breaking.

"Uncle Aaron!" Lyric called from the living room. "Look at Roscoe's trick!"

"Go," Rorie nodded toward her son. "He's been dying to show someone new how he taught Roscoe to 'high five.'"

As Aaron moved to join his nephew, he felt something he hadn't expected - peace. Maybe they couldn't change the past, couldn't fix their father's mistakes, but they could build something new. Something real.

In the soft lighting of their home studio, Rorie sat at the piano, her phone propped up showing Lewis's face as he lounged in what looked like a Moroccan riad.

"Listen to this part," she said, playing a haunting melody. "I wrote it after Aaron left yesterday. It's about family - the ones we're born with, the ones we choose…"

"That bridge is beautiful, love," Lewis said softly. "How did it go with him?"

"Better than I expected. He's… he's trying. It's weird though, seeing pieces of myself in someone I just met." Her hands drifted over the keys. "He brought Lyric a teddy bear."

She turned the camera to show their son fast asleep on the studio couch, clutching said bear.

"Poor little man couldn't keep his eyes open," Lewis chuckled. "These late studio sessions with Mama are wearing him out."

"Speaking of wearing out," Rorie shifted, their daughter particularly active. "How's Morocco?"

"Incredible. Bittersweet though." Lewis's voice grew thoughtful. "Last season with Merc… feels like the end of an era."

"But the beginning of so much more," Rorie reminded him. "The fashion line, the movie–"

A FaceTime request from Justin Bieber popped up on her screen.

"Oh shit, babe - can I call you right back? It's Justin."

Lewis's expression immediately turned concerned. "Yeah, go take care of it. Probably about Hailey."

Rorie quickly switched calls to find Justin's excited face. "Ror! It's happening!"

She could hear Hailey's controlled breathing in the background. Justin flipped the camera to show Hailey in what looked like the back of an SUV, clearly in labor.

"Oh my God!" Rorie squealed. "My godson is coming! Hang on–" She quickly opened her British Airways app. "There's a 6 AM flight, I can be there by tomorrow afternoon–"

"Breathe, baby, breathe," she heard Justin coaching Hailey.

"We're almost at Cedars," Hailey called out between breaths. "Love you, Ror!"

After they hung up, Rorie quickly texted Lewis: "Hailey's in labor! Can you change your flight to LA instead? 🙏🏾"

His response came immediately: "Already on it. See you tomorrow, love. Tell Hails to hold that baby in till we get there 😂"

______________________________________________

In the private suite at Cedars-Sinai, Rorie couldn't stop staring at the tiny bundle in her arms. Jack Blues Bieber had his father's chin but his mother's delicate features, and he was absolutely perfect.

"Look at his little fingers, Lyric," she whispered to her son, who was perched carefully beside her on the plush hospital chair. "That's your new friend."

"He small," Lyric observed, gently touching Jack's hand.

"You were that small once," Hailey smiled from her bed, looking radiant despite having given birth just hours before.

The door opened as Lewis arrived, laden with gift bags. "The party can start now," he grinned, greeting Justin with their signature handshake. "Congratulations, brother!"

"Thanks man," Justin beamed with new-dad pride. "Look what we made."

Lewis made his way to Rorie, pressing a soft kiss to her lips before dropping one on Lyric's cheek. His eyes went soft as he took in the sight of his wife holding the newborn.

"He's gorgeous, Hails," Lewis said, carefully stroking Jack's dark hair. "Got your nose."

"Thank God," Justin laughed.

"He's perfect," Rorie cooed, her own bump pressing against Jack as she held him. "Aren't you, Jack Blues? The most perfect godson ever."

"This'll be us in a few months," Lewis murmured, his hand finding her bump.

"Speaking of," Hailey sat up slightly, "have you guys decided on a name yet?"

"We have," Lewis smiled mysteriously. "But we're keeping it quiet for now."

"That's not fair," Justin protested. "We told you guys Jack's name months ago!"

"Patience," Rorie laughed, carefully passing Jack to Lewis. "Look at your Uncle Lewis, baby boy. He's going to teach you all about racing."

"And fashion," Lewis added, cradling Jack with practiced ease from his experience with Lyric. "Got to start them young."

"Baby sleep lots," Lyric observed seriously, making all the adults laugh.

"Yes they do, big man," Justin ruffled Lyric's hair. "But soon you'll have a baby sister to play with."

Watching Lewis hold Jack while Lyric peered curiously at the baby, Rorie felt her heart swell. In a few months, they'd be back here, introducing their daughter to the world. But for now, she savored this moment - her best friend's happiness, her husband's gentle way with babies, and the pure joy of new life.

"We did good, didn't we?" Hailey said softly, reaching for Justin's hand.

"The best," Rorie agreed, one hand on her bump. "Welcome to the world, Jack Blues."

TO BE CONTINUED....

Can you believe that we have only 3 chapters left???

Do you like my work? Buy me a coffee to support

[at-the-end-of-days]

Conspiracy Theory Time:

It is February 28, 2024.

Looking at America, they have cancelled Roe v. Wade, resulting in more pregnancies.

They have a Migrant “crisis.”

Though Europe is having a similar issue:

Warsaw, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Irregular immigration to the EU from Western Africa rose more than ten times on the year in January, according to the bloc's Frontex border agency, which expects overall arrivals to grow in 2024 and says halting the movement of people completely is impossible.

.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-border-agency-says-stopping-migration-is-impossible-2024-02-07/#:~:text=Warsaw%2C%20Feb%207%20(Reuters),of%20people%20completely%20is%20impossible

Their military is restructuring. Aka, cutting about 24,000 positions.

Their military is also offering a chance for Migrants to fast track their U.S. citizenship by joining the military.

If you served honorably in the U.S. armed forces for at least one year at any time, you may be eligible to apply for naturalization. While some general naturalization requirements apply under INA 328, other requirements may not apply or are reduced.

https://www.uscis.gov/military/naturalization-through-military-service#:~:text=If%20you%20served%20honorably%20in,not%20apply%20or%20are%20reduced.

That was in 2023. 2024?

It’s even faster.

And Senate leader, Mitch McConnell is stepping down in November.

And we all know how much politicians love their money and to stay in power.

And the United States can never pay back its national debt.

My theory?

The United States has been planning world war 3 for a long time. They planned to overthrow Roe v. Wade to begin preparing for a massive population loss. They’re fighting all they can to ensure as many women as possible get and stay pregnant, both as a means of controlling women, and to pump the population before a dip. They can’t pay back their national debt, and they would need a valid reason to cancel the debt, or destroy their own economy.

They’ve been purposefully firing up the migrant issue for a while now, both in policy and in opinion of the population, so that the Migrants will feel they have no other choice than to join the military for citizenship.

So, they vacated positions, to save the “true born Americans” and then send in as many migrants as possible to get a war started, to keep the “true borns” in reserve. Yes, countless will die, but now more of the “other” can die in their government’s eyes.

^this doesn’t reflect my morals, I do not approve of this, or war, it’s simply what I think their government is considering.

I don’t like Trump as a person, politician, or businessman from what I’ve read and seen. But would he even have a chance to be President of the United States if NATO goes into Ukraine before the election? Wouldn’t their current President simply remain president? But the other politicians, their party leaders at least, know more than their people do. I don’t think their Senate leader wants to lead during a war, so, stepping down come the election.

But that’s my theory, that everything’s been planned by the United States for a global conflict.

[ohioprelawland]

Iowa Passes New Bill on Abortions

By Zeyu Su, The Ohio State Class of 2025

July 18, 2023

Recently, the Republican-led Iowa legislature passed a bill banning most abortions after six months. On Friday July 14, 2023, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds officially signed the new abortion bill into law after Tuesday’s session, where lawmakers got together and held a special session with the purpose of passing the bill. With the bill being passed, Iowa will join a list of states that have limitations on abortions, which includes Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and Texas. It is worth mentioning that Ohio and South Carolina have also passed a six-week abortion bill recently, however, both of the bills are currently facing legal challenges, and it is possible that the same could happen to Iowa and its bill.

Currently in Iowa before the new bill, abortions are legal up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. However, with the new bill going into effect after the signature of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, the new abortion bill will be effective immediately, assuming the new bill is not blocked by a court. It will prohibit and ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which is usually before many women will even know if they are pregnant or not. The new bill does not just ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, in some cases, abortions are banned when any fatal pulse or cardiac activity can be heard and detected via the ultrasound. There are exceptions for pregnancies resulted from rape and from incest. For exceptions to be applied to those pregnancy cases, the rape needs to be reported to law enforcement or a public or private health agency, including a family doctor, within 45 days of the rape. For incest, within 140 days, the case needs to be reported too.

Once the news broke out, voices and opinions from different sides emerged. In her statement, Governor Kim Reynolds said that the bill was passed to serve as justice for the unborn, and “justice for the unborn should not be delayed” (Edelman, 2023). She believes that they have a responsibility to not only protect the unborn in law, but to also create changes in the Post-Roe world where the destructive culture of abortion still exists in society. There were many Iowans who support the new six-week abortion ban. Vicki Miller, one of the Iowans that are in favor of the ban, said that “life is precious”, and claimed that the Bible said once a child is conceived as a child, the child is alive. On the other hand, there were many voices that went against the new abortion ban. In her recent statement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed Iowa’s new abortion ban will “penalize health care providers and cause delays and denials of health and life-saving care” (Kekatos & Ross, 2023). The Biden-Harris administration will continue to fight and defend against any attempts that try to ban abortions nationwide. Many Pro-Life supporters also begun to the preparations of filing legal challenges in court to get the new bill blocked. In his most recent statement, Mark Stringer, the Executive Director of ACLU of Iowa, said “The ACLU of Iowa, Planned Parenthood, and the Emma Goldman Clinic remain committed to protecting the reproductive rights of Iowans to control their bodies and their lives, their health, and their safety —including filing a lawsuit to block this reckless, cruel law” (Fingerhut, 2023).

In 2018, Governor Kim Reynolds also attempted to sign a six-week abortion ban into law. However, that bill was permanently struck down by a district court in January 2019. It is worth keeping an eye on whether Reynolds’ attempt this time around will end in a similar result.

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Fingerhut, H. (2023, July 12). Iowa GOP passes a bill banning most abortions after about 6 weeks | AP News. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/iowa-abortion-ban-special-session-506e5e3fcd5517024a94a8e3a52d627e

Iowa passes bill banning abortions after ‘cardiac activity’ is detected. (2023, July 12). [Video]. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/iowa-republicans-pass-new-6-week-abortion-ban-rcna93625

Kekatos, M., & Ross, K. (2023, July 14). Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signs new 6-week abortion ban into law. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/US/iowa-gov-kim-reynolds-signs-new-6-week/story?id=101082504