#victim harassment by Republicans

[germiyahu]

This phenomenon of so called Leftists throwing up their hands at the tiniest pushback, or criticism, or suggestions on how to not actively be antisemitic needs to be studied. Because what do you mean instead of just accepting that an antisemitic troll claiming to be on your side said "Zionist Occupied Government" and denouncing this and moving on with your life... you double down, defend, and deflect. It's classic DARVO, but like, when people are very patiently and slowly explaining how this is a literal KKK Nazi white supremacist fascist phrase, it's not enough? You don't care?

It's clear that the "pro Palestinian" left have been fully infiltrated by fascists, both Western fascists who have always been nakedly antisemitic and are finding the perfect avenue to mainstream their Jew hatred... and Islamist fascists who simply never cared that Jews are a global minority group that has faced oppression and violence in multiple different continents, they don't care about social justice or fundamental human rights. It's not part of their intellectual tradition.

The "pro" Palestine movement has been captured by people who have decided that a) Palestine is emblematic of all of the problems of the world, and that b) every Jew is worth sacrificing to correct these problems, because c) if Palestine is emblematic, aren't Zionists responsible for everything then?

Now the prevailing thought is that someone should be able to call for violence against Jews, someone should be able to harass or even assault Jewish Americans, because bringing it up, complaining, taking a stand, that's the equivalent of telling them you like children blowing up, you like hundreds of thousands of people being homeless and food insecure, you like prisoners being detained in Guantanamo conditions without due process, where anyone can torture them as revenge even if there's no proof they're an actual Hamas member.

Is there a reason they argue like Republican Fox News addicts? I guess that kind of explains how easily the "movement" is falling apart to literal fascists.

They say "nobody cares about your hurt feelings ZIONIST!" if you mention literal stabbings and firebombs. They say "but we should talk about how pervasively synagogues indoctrinate the vast majority of Jewish people with Zionist ideology." They roll their eyes because "don't you know Palestinians are suffering 200x what these cushy American Jews could even imagine?" Facts don't care about your feelings uwu~

But at the end of the day, they care a lot about their own feelings, much more so than the facts. They feel entitled to hate all Jews all over the planet, to secretly revel in antisemitic rhetoric and acts, to want to take out their impotent frustration and despair on any and all Jews they'd like. This is very much about their feelings and not any Jewish people's feelings.

They've been waiting for this, or many of them never cared at all. Now it's finally Leftist to quote Nazis and openly make fun of Jews who are getting stabbed. Now it's finally Leftist to call for incinerating all of Israel and maybe we should consider a lot of Diaspora Jews too, you know they can't be trusted! Oh but don't forget to honor the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, innocent civilians should never have been targeted by America's vicious imperial violence!

The fact that it took this substantial contingent of watermelon twitter less than a year to go full mask off like this... is that revealing or troubling?

[diorgirl222]

Daily reminder that americans commit more crimes than immigrants but when it’s americans doing crime the government and republicans look the other way. They don’t speak on it or do anything to help prevent it, in fact they vote criminals in to run the white house. They are defining ALL immigrants even children as criminals. I promise you this isn’t about crime it’s about hate for race/ethnicities that isn’t a white american. Nothing is taken seriously about the rape against women that american men have done in fact the women here get mocked and victim blamed (look at the women/minors who trump has sexually assaulted/harassed and his supporters still support him!) nothing is done about the pedos (again they’re in the white house) nothing is done about the school shootings as jd vance says “it’s a fact of life” american crime is ignored but when it’s an immigrant even if they aren’t a criminal and only had come here for a better life, they will still be defined as a criminal because they aren’t a white american.

[mckitterick]

Christofascist Republican calls LGBTQ people "filth" during public forum

The culture of hate among Christofascists recently led to the violent beating and subsequent death of Choctaw two-spirit teenager Nex Benedict in Oklahoma.

When questioned about how 50+ anti-LGBTQ bills might have affected this case, State Senator Tom Woods said,

“We are a Republican state - supermajority - in the House and Senate. I represent a constituency that doesn’t want that filth in Oklahoma.”

Several audience members clapped at his statement, while others appeared shocked.

“We are a religious state and we are going to fight it to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma because we are a Christian state - we are a moral state,” Woods said. “We want to ... let people be able to go to the faith they choose. We are a Republican state and I’m going to vote my district, and I’m going to vote my values, and we don’t want that in the state of Oklahoma.”

State Representative David Hardin added, “How you live your life personally, that’s between you and God... but what goes through our public schools - I will fall back on my faith. I want to make sure that at least the children in our public schools have that faith... what I want to make sure of is that our young children have the right to grow up with that faith."

After the forum, Woods reiterated his stance on the matter: "I support my constituency, and like I said, we’re a Christian state, and we are tired of having that shoved down our throat at every turn... I stand behind my statement, and I stand behind the Republican Party values."

When asked what he thought of Woods’ characterization of LGBTQ people as “filth,” State Senator Dewayne Pemberton said, “No comment.”

Again and again, today's christofascist Republicans (any other sort doesn't get elected these days) reveal that they want to indoctrinate public school kids into their own bigoted hatred, forcing children to hate anyone who doesn't subscribe to their narrow interpretation of their religious texts. Christofascists seek to impose their personal, misguided religious biases on the general public, including creating laws codifying hate and authoritarian control over the lives and bodies of everyone, not just others in their own religion.

Make no mistake, Nex Benedict's death was caused by christofascist indoctrination of the three girls who brutally beat Nex in that school bathroom. Nex Benedict's death was caused by the school failing to take their injuries seriously, by hate codified in Oklahoma state laws designed to harass LGBTQ folks and normalize bigotry against them, by Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters appointing hate-speech villain Chaya Raichik (responsible for "Libs of TikTok") to the Oklahoma Department of Education's Library Media Advisory Committee even though she doesn't live in the state (but he likes that she used Benedict's school and teacher for targeted hate). And on and on - it's a systematic attack on personal freedom and human rights - and the lives of queer folks.

Nex Benedict's death is exactly what christofascists seek through indoctrinating children into their hate that perpetuates bigotry into the future and forcing their religious fanaticism into the public sphere through unconstitutional laws built on hate and control.

Do you want to live in a theocracy dictated by those who narrowly interpret their personal religious texts to promote hate? Because as long as citizens fail to speak out against these harbingers of civilizational collapse, they'll only feel more and more emboldened to turn hate crimes into victories.

We must not let another of our people become victim of systemic bigotry. To protect children and end generational indoctrination, we must fire all public officials who subscribe to christofascist hatred and, when appropriate, prosecute them for the violence they incite.

If we fail to end the careers of hateful christofascists, we fail our children.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita says that abortion reports aren’t medical records, and that they should be available to the public in the same way that death certificates are. While Rokita pushes for public reports, New Hampshire lawmakers are fighting over a Republican bill to collect and publish abortion data, and U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville has introduced a bill that would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to collect and provide data on the abortions performed at its facilities. Just last week, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed legislation that would have required abortion providers to ask patients invasive and detailed questions about why they were getting abortions, and provide those answers in a report to the state.   All of these moves are part of a broader strategy that weaponizes abortion data to stigmatize patients and to prosecute providers. And while most states have some kind of abortion reporting law, legislators are increasingly trying to expand the scope of the data, and use it to dismantle women’s privacy.

Rokita’s ‘advisory opinion’, for example, argues that abortion data collected by the state isn’t private medical information and that in order to prosecute abortion providers, he needs detailed reports to be public. In the past, the state has issued reports on each individual abortion. But as a result of Indiana’s ban, there are only a handful of abortions being performed in the state. As such, the Department of Health decided to release aggregate reports to protect patient confidentiality, noting that individual reports could be “reverse engineered to identify patients—especially in smaller communities.” Rokita—best known for his harassment campaign against Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the abortion provider who treated a 10-year-old rape victim—is furious over the change. He says the only way he can arrest and prosecute people is if he gets tips from third parties, presumably anti-abortion groups that scour the abortion reports for alleged wrongdoing. He wants the state to either restore public individual reports, or to allow his office to go after abortion providers without a complaint by a third party. (Meaning, he could pursue investigations against doctors and hospitals without cause.)

Most troubling, though, is his insistence that women’s private abortion information isn’t private at all. Even though individual reports could be used to identify patients, Rokita claims that the terminated pregnancy reports [TPRs] aren’t medical records, and that they “do not belong to the patient.” [...] As I flagged last month, abortion reporting is becoming more and more important to anti-choice lawmakers and groups. Project 2025 includes an entire section on abortion reporting, for example, and major anti-abortion organizations like the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Americans United for Life want to mandate more detailed reports.

[...]  As is the case with funding for crisis pregnancy centers and legislation about ‘prenatal counseling’ or ‘perinatal hospice care’, Republicans are advancing abortion reporting mandates under the guise of protecting women. And in a moment when voters are furious over abortion bans, anti-choice lawmakers and organizations very much need Americans to believe that lie. We have to make clear that state GOPs aren’t just banning abortion, but enacting any and every punitive policy that they can—especially those that strip us of our medical privacy. After all, it was less than a year ago that 19 Republican Attorneys General wanted the ability to investigate the out-of-state medical records of abortion patients. Did we really think they were going to stop there?

@jessicavalenti writes a solid column in her Abortion, Every Day blog that the GOP's agenda to erode patient privacy of those seeking abortions is a dangerous one.

[dysthymia-wet-specimen]

NOT A PRO TRUMP POST I AM ANTI TRUMP AND ANTI CONSERVATIVE. YOU CAN'T BE A FEMINIST AND PRO TRUMP

tumblr, especially US-based feminist blogs, what do you think about this?

TDLR: Trump signed an act into law banning sexual content being shared without consent, including AI deepfakes (so making it illegal to share ai porn of adults made without their consent, was always illegal for kids) and forces it to be deleted/taken down by tech companies within 2 days of reporting. (article linked below so you can read for yourself)

i'm very wary of the republican party pushing any legislation right now, especially any that tries to "protect women" (often used as a dogwhistle to conceal republican sexual misconduct as well as target and fearmonger against poc and lgbt people, all while the party is run by a literal rapist), but I can't seem to find any kind of "catch" to this law. It was supported by both parties.

so my questions are:

what are your thoughts on this? is there something i'm missing here? i'm honestly just shocked to hear that there's actually victims being protected under this administration (obviously this isn't something trump invented, just signed, but still. i'm glad that it got passed) but i'm worried there's a catch i'm missing.

again, super important to realize trump shouldn't be congratulated for this nor the conservative party. but this is a big win for protecting sexual violence victims to me. hopefully other countries will implement similar policies.

i myself had an nsfw ai chatbot made of me (just nsfw text, no images, but it did use my real first name and a pic of my face) using a pic of my face as a minor. (i was a minor when it was made and so was the person who made it who was also younger than me, still evil tho) not the same situation ofc, and it got taken down, but i hope this makes it easier for victims of this kind of cyber-sexual harassment to know what they can do about it.

[mariacallous]

Celeste Borys and Kira Lynch don’t leave the house much these days. When they do venture into their small Utah communities—to go grocery shopping, to take their kids to school or the playground—neighbors whisper and stare. “I’ve had people take pictures and videos of me, and I've had someone come up and yell at me,” Lynch says. “Someone at my daughter’s junior high told me to keep my mouth shut and called me some bad names. It’s terrifying.”

“I don’t leave unless I have to,” says Borys. “My day-to-day life doesn’t exist.”

The man whose followers scorn and harass them seems to have no such problems. Long a household name in conservative Mormon circles, Tim Ballard has become nationally known in recent years: He’s the former operative for Homeland Security who says he became so alarmed during the Obama administration by the government’s supposed inaction on child sex trafficking that he decided to go out and fight it on his own, recruiting other true believers to join him on dramatic sting operations in dangerous places, later serving as cochair of the Trump administration’s advisory council on trafficking and ultimately inspiring the heavily fictionalized film Sound of Freedom based on Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), the anti-trafficking organization he founded. (The organization now goes by the name OUR Rescue.)

Ballard is also a defendant in ongoing civil lawsuits in Utah brought by women—Borys and Lynch among them—who allege that he sexually abused them under the guise of saving children. Borys and Lynch have filed police reports regarding their allegations that Ballard sexually assaulted them; Ballard has denied the claims made against him. OUR, which is mentioned in one of the suits, has countersued Borys and her husband.

“This is just a bunch of random details, gossip, and easily disproven falsehoods packaged up to generate some quick clicks,” Ballard’s spokesperson Chad Kolton wrote in response to a request for comment; he also notes that the claims against Ballard in a separate suit have been dismissed. That suit was brought by a veteran Marine who said she was injured at a training overseen by Ballard; a judge ruled she did not have standing to bring it because she had signed a waiver.

While Borys and Lynch mostly stay at home, talking to their families, each other, and their lawyers, Ballard, when not defending himself by claiming he’s the victim of a shakedown, makes regular appearances at high-profile Republican events. He showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. In March, he joined a Catholic event at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort alongside Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. In April, Mar-a-Lago hosted a fundraiser for the Ballard Family Legal Defense Fund. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this summer, he sat for an interview with Trump’s former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. “The leftist agenda is almost verbatim the pedophile agenda,” said Ballard, grim-faced beneath a cap bearing the logo of Aerial Recovery, a self-described disaster relief and anti-trafficking group with which he now works. “You’ve got supporters here, Tim,” Giuliani told Ballard, adding, a moment later, “Pretty soon, you’re going to have one in the strongest and most powerful position in the world.”

All of this is fairly shocking to Lynch and Borys, who worked with Ballard at OUR. Just last summer, Borys says, she was by Ballard’s side as he crisscrossed Capitol Hill, meeting with Republican legislators about human trafficking and reveling with them in the success of Sound of Freedom, which brought in around $250 million in global ticket sales. “Those people know my face,” she says. “I was in those meetings and on phone calls and texting different people in the congressional world.” By fall, it emerged that Ballard and OUR had parted ways months before, following an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct that employees had made against him. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a longtime supporter of Ballard, publicly rebuked him for “morally unacceptable” behavior. And in the fall of 2023, accusers filed the first set of lawsuits against Ballard. Yet Ballard’s star on the Trumpist right never dimmed.

“They know what’s going on with him right now,” Borys says. “For them to ignore it but then to promote him, it’s so disgusting to me.”

Lynch met Ballard in 2021, when she was giving him a haircut. She’d seen Sound of Freedom in an early preview but at the time didn’t realize that she was cutting the hair of the man on whose life it was loosely based. All she knew was that he was famous.

“I’m kind of a big deal,” she remembers him telling her; he was taken aback and even offended that she didn’t know more about him. He told her, she says, about the amazing things he did and how children were saved by his operations.

“He’s talking about children and sex slavery,” she says. “I’m a mother of four. I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I got sucked in right that second.”

When Ballard asked if she wanted to get involved in his mission, Lynch says, she enthusiastically agreed. She had just gone through a crushing divorce, and her father was dying of a brain tumor. Lynch was, she says, “desperate for something to come along and help me spiritually.” Lynch says that Ballard told her that he was close friends with M. Russell Ballard, a high-ranking member of the LDS Church’s second-highest governing body, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

OUR was a powerhouse long before Sound of Freedom appeared in theaters, raising millions of dollars in donations every year from devoted fans. The group’s exploits were frequently exaggerated. At the White House and in op-eds, for example, Ballard told the story of how the group had helped rescue a teenage girl who was trafficked from Mexico to New York and forced into sex work for several years, citing the story as evidence of the need for a border wall; at one point, he said the group had helped her “escape her hell.” In fact, according to court records, the girl rescued herself and didn’t come into contact with OUR until well after she’d escaped her captors.

Additionally, as early as 2020, a letter was circulating in philanthropic circles in Utah accusing Ballard of misconduct toward women. OUR denied everything: In a statement to Vice News at the time, an OUR spokesperson wrote, “OUR categorically denies the baseless allegations made in the anonymous letter shared with Vice. The OUR board of directors received the letter 12 months ago and, after a thorough investigation, found zero evidence to corroborate the allegations contained in the letter.”

In Lynch’s community, Ballard was still regarded as a hero. Members of her family, she says, were fans of Ballard’s; her mother gasped in excitement when she learned that Lynch had just done his hair, and showed her a shelf full of books that Ballard had written. “They were all praising him to the roof,” Lynch says. “Automatically, that put me in a very safe place with him in my head.”

Ballard’s books, several of which were published by an LDS Church–owned imprint and promoted by the conservative influencer Glenn Beck, contributed a great deal to his fame and followed two tracks. On one, he lays out supposed ties between figures from American history like George Washington and Mormonism. On the other, he positions himself as a modern-day abolitionist, part of a line with Harriet Tubman. One book, Operation Toussaint, is an adaptation of a documentary showing Ballard and his associates carrying out paramilitary work in Haiti. Missions like this were the basis of Ballard’s image as the leader of an elite group of operators doing the work governments didn’t dare and wresting sex slaves from the hands of traffickers. (Files from an investigation carried out by a Utah prosecutor and the FBI released under a public records request would later show these missions in a much less glamorous light—detailing, among other things, the role of a psychic medium named Janet Russon in providing intelligence and one of Ballard’s backers groping the naked breasts of a trafficking victim he believed to be a minor.)

Lynch never went on missions with Ballard. She was instead asked, she says—after being told of the visions he’d had of them working together to save children—to participate in training operations in which they went to strip clubs.

The first time, she alleges, Ballard arrived at her house beforehand with a close friend and OUR employee in tow, as well as Ballard’s son. At her house, Ballard asked her to put fake tattoos and eyeliner on him, getting into the undercover persona he used, which he called “Brian Black.” But almost immediately, Lynch says, once Ballard was in character, he began groping her and trying to kiss her body while she asked him to stop and reminded him that his son and friend were waiting. The behavior continued as the two rode in an Uber, Lynch says, which she calls “horrific.”

“He doesn’t listen,” she says. “He gets in this mindset where it's like he doesn’t see or hear you. It’s whatever he wants.”

Borys, for her part, began working with OUR in July of 2022 as a volunteer before moving on to paid roles in October of that year; by the time she left the organization, she was working as Ballard’s executive assistant. She also began secretly going on missions when, she says, Ballard told her he “was in the middle of a trafficking ring operation and needed a new female partner to come in” to play his girlfriend.

This was part of what Ballard has called the “couples ruse,” in which he and a woman would tell traffickers they were romantic partners, and act as such, while on missions. Ballard has claimed this was necessary to ensure that he and other male operators wouldn’t have to engage in sexual behavior with victims or traffickers while undercover.

Almost immediately after agreeing to work as Ballard’s partner, Borys’ affidavit says, she was flown to California to do “ops training,” which consisted of staying in hotels, hot-tubbing at a Four Seasons, doing workouts on the beach, and Ballard showing Borys what kind of physical acts they had to do while “undercover” and what his supposed boundaries were. She describes him lifting her shirt to admire her stomach, complimenting her “hot body,” kissing her on the neck and insisting it was fine since it avoided kissing on the lips, and showing her how he simulated sexual penetration during operations to fool traffickers who might be observing them.

Ballard, her affidavit says, told her that traffickers could “smell pheromones,” and so they needed to have real sexual chemistry in order to fool them. (The affidavit also alleges that Ballard removed his temple garment, which observant members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wear under their clothes, telling her “he sees angels all around, and that this isn't wrong.”)

Their first practice operation happened in Mexico, the affidavit says, where she was forced to get a couples massage with Ballard that culminated in a female massage therapist touching her in a sexual way while she froze, closed her eyes, and waited for it to be over. “I heard Tim say he had never seen this done so close and he was getting a lesson,” Borys writes in the affidavit.

"Within seconds, once I was there, I found myself in a situation where I didn't even have time to get out of it,” she says. “I was just staring at him for help.” Afterward, she recalls, she wept, and he told her, “We’re going to save so many kids, you have no idea.’”

Borys doesn’t believe these missions ever led to the rescue of a child. They nonetheless persisted—as did, her affidavit says, not just sexually abusive but spiritually manipulative behavior. Borys, who was raised a Latter-day Saint but is no longer practicing—”I’m so glad you’re not LDS anymore,” she remembers him saying—became enmeshed with Russon, the psychic medium. (Russon did not respond to a request for comment.)

“My life revolved around Janet and her readings,” Borys says; Russon would claim to channel her grandmother and allegedly encourage her and other operators not to worry about taking part in sexualized behavior.

“Janet would say, ‘Our bodies are just bodies, and God gave us bodies to use them to go save kids,’” Borys says.

Ballard, Lynch says, would also frequently assure her while touching her inappropriately that they were doing the right thing, saying things like “I know this is hard, but God will be with us,” and “we’re bringing light into dark places.” He also explicitly told her, she says, that the couples ruse was sanctioned by both God and M. Russell Ballard. (The denunciation LDS Church leadership issued of Tim Ballard in 2023 cited “the unauthorized use of President Ballard’s name for Tim Ballard’s personal advantage and activity regarded as morally unacceptable.”)

The allegations are not limited to the workings of couples ruse. At one point, Lynch’s affidavit says, Ballard came over to her house and sexually assaulted her on her staircase—something her lawyers say she reported to authorities in the fall of 2023, after joining the civil suit. (The following day, in text messages to her that WIRED has viewed, he asked to come by and pick up his belt, which he’d left lying on her floor.)

In early July, the women’s legal team filed a motion in which they say the state crime lab told them that DNA found on Borys’ skirt matched Ballard’s. (Borys alleges that Ballard sexually assaulted her and ejaculated on her leather skirt.) The motion urged the court to instruct the Utah County Sheriff’s Office to turn over the crime lab analysis to Borys’ legal team.

(In a statement to Utah outlet Fox 13, Ballard’s team accused Borys’ legal team of tainting a criminal investigation, asserting this was “consistent with the other illegal and unethical behavior that has been a hallmark of the Borys case.” Janet Russon, meanwhile, appeared on a podcast called The Last Dispensation and suggested that Ballard’s semen could have been found on her skirt because the two shared a suitcase. )

It took a while, Borys says, before she began to view herself as a victim of sexual misconduct. “I remember doing something on an op and I was so scared to go do this specific thing,” she says, her voice breaking. “And right before, all I could think was, ‘If little kids are having to do this, I can do this.’”

She would go home at night and make dinner—“trying to compartmentalize,” she says, while also texting with alleged traffickers on a burner phone.

“I would think I was doing good in the world,” she says. And she desperately wanted to see something tangible from the work—a “win,” she adds. “I felt so conflicted and dirty. I wanted that win so all the dirtiness would go away.”

At this time, Ballard’s reputation as a heroic anti-trafficking expert was at a peak. His rhetoric around trafficking—that it’s the world’s largest criminal enterprise, carried out with impunity due to the negligence and incompetence of the federal government generally and Democrats specifically—had become incredibly popular. QAnon believers took a particular interest, especially after Ballard appeared to support a false conspiracy theory that furniture company Wayfair sold children online by saying that “with or without Wayfair,” the selling of children online was “common.” (Jim Caviezel, who played Ballard in Sound of Freedom, has lent overt support to QAnon beliefs; Ballard, he claimed, taught him that traffickers extract a substance from children’s bodies that “elites” then inject to preserve their own youth. An OUR spokesperson denied at the time that Ballard had explained this to Caviezel.) As this was playing out, the QAnon-tinged Save the Children movement became a driving force in Republican politics, and Ballard himself began to eye a run for the US Senate.

In 2023, Ballard quietly parted ways with OUR following an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct that employees made against him. Lynch, who was not an employee, has a hazy memory of the time but remembers telling friends of an OUR employee that inappropriate things had happened. They, she says, told their friend, who then reported it to human resources. (Her lawyer, Suzette Rasmussen, confirms this sequence of events.)

Borys became Ballard’s executive assistant in early 2023. She was walled off, she says, from other OUR employees. When the investigation began, she knew little about it and was told that its scope was limited to a report made by one woman and would go away. It wasn’t until after she’d quit OUR, and after she’d seen attorney Suzette Rasmussen on TV discussing a suit the pseudonymous women she was representing had filed against Ballard in civil court in Utah, that she really began to process her experiences.

“I was still trying to understand all the stuff I had been going through working for him,” she says. “Once I saw Suzette, I felt like she was my safest place I could go to to protect myself.”

It wasn’t until after she’d gotten out of Ballard’s orbit, blocked his phone number, and filed a lawsuit, Borys says, that she started to understand how traumatized she was. “I was listening to a police officer doing a podcast or on the news, and he said you don’t get to—” here she pauses, and starts to cry. “You don’t get to create a victim by saving victims. And that really hit me.”

The legal process is ongoing; in addition to the suits and criminal investigation, Borys and Lynch have filed for permanent protective orders against Ballard, which currently await the scheduling of evidentiary hearings.

The two are also still very much processing their experiences not just with Ballard but with OUR, which neither now believes was ever a legitimate child-rescue operation.

“Where’s the proof?” asks Borys. “There just isn’t any proof, and when you try to talk to anyone about it who still works there and believes it, it’s like Tim Ballard—red in the face, flustered and frustrated. Instead of answering questions, they fire back at you.”

WIRED provided a detailed list of questions to Chad Kolton, a spokesperson for Tim Ballard. In response, Kolton wrote, in part, “I started responding to each of these and then reconsidered as it seems like a waste of time … There is absolutely nothing new about Tim’s work with Republicans which he’s done openly for years because they actually want to do something about the problem of trafficking rather than denying it exists. The cases against him have begun to fall apart, with one already dismissed and another facing an evidentiary hearing about serious allegations of illegal and unethical conduct by the plaintiff and her attorneys.”

OUR did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

“I hope he goes to jail,” Lynch says. “That’s a really honestly hard thing to say, and it’s been hard to understand that might happen. I have to realize it’s not me putting him in jail. It’s not us. It’s him and what he did.”

She also, she says, simply wants the truth to be known.

“Nobody deserves to go through something like this, and someone like him doesn’t deserve to be on a presidential campaign or speaking engagements,” she says. “He doesn’t deserve that right right now.”

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Last week, a federal judge blocked the justice department from canceling $3.2m in federal grants to the American Bar Association (ABA). The court agreed with the ABA’s claim that the administration was retaliating against it for taking public stances against Donald Trump.

But how had the US president retaliated? Which grants had he clawed back? Those supporting programs that train lawyers to defend victims of domestic and sexual violence.

It was just one of Trump’s many acts of aggression against perceived enemies that just happen to – or quite deliberately – target women.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, after the release of the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape, Vox’s Libby Nelson noted that there was something fundamentally different about Trump’s sexism from the sexism of his predecessors. “Usually, the critique of Republican candidates has been based on policy – healthcare access and abortion rights – or on attitudes heavily influenced by religion,” she wrote. But “Trump’s anti-feminism owes more to the gleeful vulgarity and implicit threats of violence of 4chan than the traditional debate over what a woman’s role should be in the public square.”

Trump II is both a personal and a political misogynist – a chimera with the soul of a snake and the brains of a policy wonk, transplanted from the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

The widest target of Trump’s aggression is the universe of people capable of having babies. Four days after the inauguration, his administration directed the justice department’s civil rights division to cease enforcing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (Face) Act, which prohibits harassment or blockage of patients entering abortion clinics. His administration dismissed three ongoing cases, pardoned 23 convicted violators of the law, and limited future prosecutions to “cases presenting significant aggravating factors, such as death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage”.

In March, he began withholding tens of millions of dollars from Title X, the only federal program supporting reproductive healthcare. The move was not explicitly anti-abortion – the Hyde Amendment banned federal funding for abortion 50 years ago – but it was surely aimed at pleasing religious fundamentalists who oppose all interference with “natural” baby-making. Lots of providers, including some Planned Parenthood affiliates, immediately collapsed, leaving millions of people with no family planning, cancer screening or prenatal services. Now, having failed repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood through legislation, Republicans are trying to hide the dirty deed in the budget. And like much of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” targeted by the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), these cuts would cost taxpayers far more than they would save: according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost will be $300m over the next 10 years in unwanted births and shifts of reproductive services to other providers.

Trump isn’t sparing mothers who want to be mothers, either. A week ago, funding to study maternal mortality was rescinded and most of the workers who monitor and improve maternal and child health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were placed on leave. The cuts came just after researchers at the National Institutes of Health published a paper documenting a huge rise in mothers’ deaths in childbirth or within a year afterward, most notably among Native American and Black women; the authors urged the government to make combatting these deaths “an urgent public health priority”.

Where women’s bodies are now subject to harm by intentional neglect, they will also be more vulnerable to harm by violence. Before his inauguration, Trump called for the execution of rapists. A few months later, the justice department suspended grant applications from non-profits providing emergency shelter, legal assistance and crisis services to victims of domestic and sexual violence under the Violence Against Women Act. The agencies were caught promoting “woke” agendas – evident from the word “gender”, as in “gender-based violence”, in their mission statements. The grant program appears to be back up on the justice department website, but no one knows for how long.

In late April, the administration zeroed out all funding for training, auditing, data collection and victim support under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (Prea), which Congress passed unanimously in 2003. Prea does not protect migrants in detention, but the Department of Homeland Security was nevertheless subject to oversight, and that included investigating sexual abuse by Ice employees. Not any more. In spite of thousands of complaints of sexual violence against detained women and children, the Trump administration closed the department’s three watchdog agencies, including the offices through which detainees could lodge complaints.

As part of its elimination of anything suggestive of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the administration halted the military’s sexual assault prevention training. The defense department reported in 2023 that nearly a quarter of active-duty women were subject to sexual harassment – and they are just the ones who risked coming forward.

The policies that smash the legal bulwarks against sexual violence and those that put pregnant people’s lives at risk make for the most compelling subject lines on fundraising emails from advocates for women, people of color and other legally protected classes hardest.

But the disproportionate harm these folks are suffering from the decimation of the federal workforce by Doge is possibly most consequential, because it may not be reversible. Women and Black people are more likely to work in government jobs than in the private sector; a recent McKinsey analysis found that women, particularly women of color, are promoted at higher rates in public institutions than in private corporations. But government jobs also provide union representation, job security, pensions and other benefits that lift people of color into the middle class and allow them to accumulate the property and wealth denied them since slavery – benefits that do not accrue to home health aides, chambermaids and workers in the other low-paid, precarious occupations where women and people of color predominate.

[the-most-humble-blog]

🔥 DEMOCRATS JUST DECLARED WAR ON WOMEN—AND THEY’RE LOSING BADLY 🔥

You can lie. You can gaslight. But you can’t outrun biology—or the backlash.

🚧 Welcome back to the Wrecking Crew. Another day, another Democratic self-inflicted disaster, and this time, they’re doubling down on one of the most indefensible, politically suicidal positions possible.

Let’s be crystal clear—this isn’t even a partisan issue anymore. ✔ 79% of Americans reject men in women’s sports. ✔ Even lifelong Democrats are side-eyeing this insanity. ✔ Yet here we are, watching the "party of women" sell out actual women to pander to an ideology that erases them.

The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act should have been the easiest, most common-sense bill in modern history—yet Democrats voted it down as if their political lives don’t depend on it. Spoiler: They do. And they just signed their own electoral death warrant.

🚧 LET’S PILE UP THE BODIES OF THEIR LOGIC 🚧

Because, if we’re going to talk about who’s really getting hurt here, let’s start with:

✔ The young girls losing out on scholarships, records, and championships to boys who weren’t good enough to compete in men’s leagues. ✔ The female athletes being forced to share locker rooms with biological men. ✔ The women getting physically outmatched, overpowered, and literally injured by stronger, faster male-bodied athletes.

This is not a hypothetical. This is happening right now.

📌 Remember Fallon Fox? The male-born fighter who broke a woman’s skull in MMA and then had the audacity to gloat about it? 📌 Remember Lia Thomas? The "former" male swimmer who went from ranking #462 among men to crushing records and taking first place in women’s events? 📌 Remember Hannah Arensman? The world-class female cyclist who retired because she kept getting beaten by male riders?

🔥 WHERE THE HELL ARE THE "FEMINISTS" NOW?

They were screaming about the "patriarchy" keeping women down for decades—but when actual, literal male bodies are dominating women’s spaces, they’re suddenly silent?

Not just silent. Complicit.

🚧 DEMOCRATS CHOSE A MASSIVE, UNLOSABLE FIGHT—AND SOMEHOW THEY LOST 🚧

You don’t have to be a Republican to know that this is absolute insanity. Hell, you don’t even have to be conservative. You just have to be capable of basic critical thinking.

But let’s break down their clown car of excuses anyway.

"This isn’t happening that often."

So what? Since when do civil rights and fair competition get decided by how many victims exist?

✔ Slavery wasn’t "that common" in the North—should we have ignored it? ✔ Only a handful of women get raped at college each year—should we stop caring? ✔ There aren’t that many women getting harassed at work—should we stop fighting for workplace protections?

🔥 How many crushed dreams and broken bones are “acceptable” to you? 🔥

"We need to protect trans kids!"

Sure. We can talk about trans kids playing sports—without throwing actual girls under the bus.

But that’s not what Democrats want. They don’t want fairness. They don’t want compromise. They want absolute ideological compliance.

Because if they actually cared about protecting all kids, they wouldn’t be saying, “Girls should just deal with it” while boys with biological advantages rob them of their futures.

🔥 Women fought for Title IX. And Democrats just torched it. 🔥

"This is just a Republican culture war distraction!"

Oh, now you want to pretend this doesn’t matter?

When 78% of Americans—INCLUDING DEMOCRATS—disagree with you? When parents are pulling their kids from school sports? When female athletes are quitting mid-career because competing is pointless now?

But sure, let’s ignore the issue because it’s inconvenient for your party.

🚧 DEMOCRATS JUST FORFEITED WOMEN'S RIGHTS—AGAIN 🚧

🔥 They chose this hill to die on, and now they're bleeding out. 🔥

This was their moment to say: 📌 "We respect women’s rights." 📌 "We believe in fairness." 📌 "We are NOT anti-science, reality-denying lunatics."

Instead? They threw their weight behind biological men invading women’s sports, even as voters recoil in horror.

🚀 Democrats are The Forfeit Party. ✔ They forfeit logic. ✔ They forfeit fairness. ✔ They forfeit elections.

And in 2026 and 2028, they're going to forfeit a lot more.

👏 Good job, Democrats. You just alienated voters you desperately needed. 👏

🚧 FINAL DEMOLITION: HERE’S HOW THIS ENDS

Republicans will run on this issue until the day Democrats are forced to admit they screwed up.

✔ Parents will vote against you. ✔ Women will vote against you. ✔ Even moderates will vote against you.

🔥 You had one job, and you blew it. Now get ready to pay for it. 🔥

🔴 REBLOG. COMMENT. FOLLOW. SPREAD THE FIRE. 🔴

🚀 Reblog this and make sure Democrats own this disaster. 🚀 Comment with your thoughts—because this meltdown isn’t over yet. 🚀 Follow for more unapologetic, fact-based destruction.

Ready for more unapologetic truth bombs? Follow The Most Humble Blog for sharp takes, dark humor, and the hard conversations no one else will have.

🔥 No survivors. No apologies. Just facts. 🔥

⚖️ LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This post is written for the purpose of artistic expression, cultural commentary, and psychological exploration of social and gender dynamics. It does not condone or encourage violence, harassment, or discrimination of any kind. Any references to power, strength, restraint, or critique are metaphorical, symbolic, and rooted in historical and cultural analysis. This is not a call to action — it’s a cultural mirror. If you feel offended, ask yourself if it’s from actual harm — or from seeing something you hoped no one would say out loud.

✨ TL;DR: If you're mad, it’s probably not because it’s wrong — it’s because you know it’s true.

[germiyahu]

My fellow liberals, there are only a few courses of action that you can take in this political climate, in the wider context of Mahmoud Khalil's detainment. If you find Trump's and the Republican Party's rhetoric about combatting antisemitism to be hollow, and you find their targeting of pro-Palestinian agitators (who easily could be charged with federal crimes, just saying) unacceptable, then in my (admittedly limited) understanding, you can do one of three things:

Disengage from these universities and other predominantly non-Jewish, and especially vocally anti-Israel/anti-Hillel/anti-Jewish spaces. Whether that's evacuating from hostile universities, withdrawing from non-Jewish spaces in general, what have you. You could also arm yourselves. Or, the hail Mary, you can give up on America and move to Israel. Essentially, you can ignore the antisemities and leave them to their own devices, knowing that nothing will change.

Tacitly make peace with civil liberties being eroded by an illiberal government who at least pays lip service to fighting antisemitism. Do the conservatives have ulterior motives? Absolutely. Are they using the Jewish Community as a fall guy? Probably. Will they continue to do nothing to purge their own side of the aisle of their own antisemites? Don't make me laugh. But do their actions actually tackle a growing problem that is harassing and even assaulting Jews? That is attacking Jewish institutions and places of worship? Yes, they are.

Sit and twiddle your thumbs as your traditional "allies" do literally nothing, whether that's "Leftists," non-Jewish liberals, the Democratic Party, etc. Because they've been doing nothing. If you're not comfortable with options 1 or 2, this is the only realistic option left. Continue to put faith in institutions that are saying increasingly loudly that they simply do not care about you.

I personally don't like any of these options. Throwing up your hands and giving up on changing hearts and minds feels defeatist. Creating your own institutions to protect Jews will be seen as aggressive and will be punished by both sides of the aisle. Making Aliyah is difficult and will only weaken the Jewish Community in America. Leaning on fascists who claim to want to help is morally untenable and dangerous, as so many in Jumblr are pointing out. But the only other path forward is to sit idly by and continue to put your faith in the status quo, and in non-Jewish institutions that have proven they're not willing to lift a finger to help Jews.

The Islamists have no intention of changing their views. The Marxist-Leninists and Anarchists and Maoists and the broader Rose and Red Triangle emoji Left have no intention of changing their views. The Nazis and Christian Nationalists have no intention of changing their views. So what is the course of action? Either trust in institutions that are objectively failing the Jewish Community, look to literal fascists who will cause more harm to everyone as they pay lip service to safeguarding Jews, or give up on the system entirely.

I don't begrudge Jews who decide to (at least temporarily) place their trust in Donald Trump and his kakistocracy. Because we as liberals have to admit, liberal institutions are objectively doing nothing and will continue to do nothing. The Democratic Party and the university system has failed. They will continue to say "We are against antisemitism and islamophobia and all forms of hate," they will continue to frame violent Jew hating terrorist sympathizers as the real victims and absolve themselves of actually coming to terms with the antisemitism in their party and their boards. You can absolutely make a moral line in the sand. You can say "I don't want to empower ICE to disappear legal U.S. residents even if its supposedly to help Jews like me!" but you have to be aware that nobody else is doing anything to help Jews like you. And they're currently not likely to.

So what do you do? You can naively hope that Trump genuinely intends to help Jews and make peace with his continual eroding of norms and values and the Constitution itself. You can naively hope that the Democrats will suddenly and magically decide to help their heretofore extremely loyal base and make peace with their continual failure to do so. You can disengage with the system altogether and start creating and enforcing Jewish-centric or even Jewish-only spaces in all avenues of life (or above all, flee to Israel), and naively hope that you won't be smeared as a bigot or a threat for doing so.

There are no good or easy solutions here.

[protoslacker]

Myron Cope

I strongly agreed with Amanda Marcotte's Salon piece, House of hate: Republicans in Congress turn MAGA harassment campaign against trans colleague. Marcotte points out that bullying isolates the victim, because people don't want the mob turning on them. But she emphasizes that truth and power in "There's safety in numbers." Standing with victims of bullying is standing for them.

I was reminded of Myron Cope a Pittsburgh sports journalist who died in 2008. I have very little interest in sports. But in the olden days, if cars had radios in them at all they were most often AM radios, Certainly the pickup truck I drove had no FM capacity. So on my commutes I listened to Myron Cope On Sports.

Myron Cope was a mensch and so many people in Pittsburgh loved him. On his regular talk show he did old school journalism. He got the names of high school players and coaches and filled-in with information so his audience could picture a person who fit those names. It wasn't just stats and wins and losses. Most of the time the portraits were very complimentary.

For me, someone who hardly followed sports at all, a big reason I loved him was he called out gay bashing and bigorty on his show. I feel sure that Myron Cope made many others step up for gay people and against violence against us. It's probably not something that lots of people remember about Myron Cope, but I think almost everyone would say of him that he stood with the underdogs. It's a reason his memory is a blessing to me.

The Wikipedia article is pretty good: Myron Cope.

[velvetvexations]

anon really went Ah a trans woman who isnt skinny or hairless or feminine and doesnt want to be (thing that can also be true for cis women) clearly this must be a man. anyway (horny voice) wow you are a foot taller than me

I sure am~!

I don't know if it's your blog aesthetics or your kinks or your outspoken opinions on trans rights that gets me the most but i have a huge crush on you for all of the above

I'm a gift.

The way some of the trfs you reblog talk about "tmes" just sounds so much like the way a lot of incels I've seen talk about women, and it still makes me double take sometimes. I don't have an eloquent explanation of how exactly, but the vibe is just so similar to what I saw as an edgy teen on 4chan and it's so weird to see in places that claim to be "progressive"

lotta resentment

MALL ANON HAS A TUMBLR NOW??? we got side-characters fuck yes

an ever expanding cast

came for the trf takedowns and stayed for the neato aesthetic posts hope youre havin a lovely day miss velvet

thank you!

I’m so sick of people on this website taking every opportunity they get to accuse trans men who are just talking about their oppression of being 1. A violent misogynist 2. Not even trans 3. A straight up rapist or abuser. I’m actually so exhausted.

I know anon, and I'm so, so sorry. It's tiring. Take breaks as often as you can.

TRFs saying they need to post discourse and be rancid shit because theyre doing it for "the transfems who cant" (ex, trans women of color & sex workers) sounds INCREDIBLY similar to TERFs saying they need to Post Discourse and Be Rancid because "women in third world countries cant"

it sure is

Maybe i just misread it wrong but why was that one anon implying its bad for transmen to make “trans ppl should be having crazy t4t sex?” Jokes. Is there anything actually wrong about that joke?

I think you mean person I reblogged? They were saying it was sexual harassment lmao.

I feel like a lot of confusion about terfs and radfeminism is simply because a ton of self identified terfs arent radfems but are ppl whos politics abt men arent as intense (like dog standard gender essentialism) but for a lack of a better term coopt the terf concepts around transphobia.

That's certainly true, the term is becoming rapidly diluted not just from people who call all transphobes TERFs but all transphobes calling themselves TERFs. We're still not to where radical feminism is not at the core of it, though.

Some very weird trans people in the dropout tag are complaining about how dungeons and drag queens "makes them uncomfortable" PLEASE explain to me how this is literally any different from conservatives whose reaction to drag is "icky!!! Gross!" Like??? Do they think its progressive to shit on drag queens? Do they think this is ok because they happen to be trans? They sound like Republicans!

well see transfems who do drag aren't real transfems because something something

thoughts on this applying to transfem TRFs?

Blocked so I have no clue what this says.

Re: wounded gazelle. I don't even think it's always that and on purpose. Sometimes it very very blatantly IS. But other times people feel (understandably!) hurt by the backlash they are receiving and instead of thinking "This feels shitty... but could I possibly be in the wrong?" they think "I'm being attacked! This means I am a victim and therefore correct!" genuinely and through lack of self awareness rather than planned malice. Not always easy to tell the difference though!

They are very stupid and egotistical, that is true yes.

[captainlordauditor]

There were signs and calls for the death of Palestinian People it was in the news, just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen

. It is also largely agreed by Pro-Palestinian people that antisemitism isn’t okay and that there are nazis actively trying to infiltrate our protests.

And that “no ceasefire” maybe MOST of it was related to Hamas and the idea that they will not honor a ceasefire, but “no ceasefire” means death for more Palestinians, that they cannot receive aid, or leave without worry of being attacked.

1)source

2) a Jewish man was murdered at a protest and you're telling me yall agree that "antisemitism isn't okay?"

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

If your movement is being "infiltrated" the antisemites are doing a damn good job of it.

3) Gaza also shares a border with Egypt, who took three weeks to allow Palestinians to enter into Egypt to escape the war. And while it's not enough, aid has been getting through to Gaza.

Hamas hides weapons caches under hospitals and schools. That has been well documented for the past 9 years. What, exactly, do you expect Israel to do in this situation besides lay down and die?

[blackpilljesus]

I can't imagine how as a woman you can be like ''yes all men'' and still strive to be with one who is ''not bad'' spoiled girlies, they call themselves, who make some based points but still, how much smarter do they think they are, to believe that they will find a good moid? Like how can you have access to more information than ever regarding male degeneracy and if you live in a better country, have the freedom to exist independently from men with dignitiy, hear about abortion becoming illegal, incel governments, gender religion and still want to be with a man and give birth to either potential victims or future sexual harasser. Even if you divorce him after breeding with him, you are eternally connected with him, if you decide to be with your kids and even if you let him raise your kids, chances are that they will sexual harass them and post nude videos of your child, especially if she is a girl (case in a typical male korean forums). some governments are one islamic revolution away to make life even worse for women, others just take anti-feminism stance and ride on it. I read a twitter post of someone who means that murican republican politicans will ride on anti-feminism in case Kamala wins

It's definitely wild. Many of these women think they're either too lucky or smart to end up with a bad moid. One thing about logic & stats is that sometimes no amount if it matters if your emotions say another thing and with many of these women they still want a level of romance at the end of the day. Also some women feel special about being with a "good one"; I see it often in feminist spaces where women will smugly talk about how their nigel would never *until he does* when it comes to talking about maIe evil.

Typically the excuse given for maIe aligned women is that "they just dont know" which is bs because even when women do know they just dont care and would prioritise their desires at the risk of others. This, as well as the islamic revolution part in your ask is part of what blackpilled me.

[mitigatedchaos]

Trump at the 2024 RNC

(~1,300 words, 6 minutes)

Thoughts on the final night of the Trump Convention.

#1A: A lot of this stuff is, right or wrong, very obvious. For example, the stuff from the school safety speaker. It's obvious that having students assaulting the staff will be bad for both the staff and the other students.

#1B: I was in a group chat with some Republicans, and one woman asked why Obama/Biden instituted the rule from the school safety segment; I speculated that they probably saw a correlation between suspensions and later arrests, and assumed the suspensions caused the arrests. "That's so stupid," she said. (There is an alternative theory for school discipline - it applies smaller punishments to smaller infractions, so that students' first brush with institutional discipline isn't from the cops.)

#2: Hulk Hogan knew what he was there to do, and he did it. The classic shirt-ripping and muscles contribute to the sense of vigor, but really, the whole convention still feels ten years older than 2015. (I've heard that he took down Gawker with help from Peter Thiel, and Gawker was involved in obnoxious 2014-era antics beyond just harassing Hogan. I suppose with this, his debt is repaid.)

#3: It would seem the Erick Trump was chosen to speak for the "they... came after Trump!" faction of the Trump coalition, moreso than Trump himself. Makes sense strategically.

#4A: The "perhaps God... protected Trump" bit honestly feels crass, basically just there because Dems lost the active shooter roll. No, I don't mean because the shooter didn't hit; I mean they lost the roll to avoid having a shooter show up in the first place.

#4B: While Trump did have a segment on the shooting, and used a photo prominently circling the flying bullet, he doesn't call for revenge! and seemingly just groups it in with all his other complaints, like the lawsuits, media coverage that he's a "threat to democracy," and so on. I think implicitly, almost everyone is assuming the assailant was mentally ill in some way.

#4C: On Twitter, there were some attempts to argue that either Trump himself or the Trump movement don't care about the other victims of the shooter. At >$6.2M in fundraising, the Trump movement have basically raised a full weregild for each one. And of course, there was a dedicated segment on them with a moment of silence.

This fits with the Trump mentality. There are reports of him being obnoxious to bill by contractors, but 'that's business.' Trump likes to think of himself as generous outside of this context, or at least that's the image he likes to project. For him, I think this is one of the benefits of being rich.

This was always going to be a dumb angle of attack, but it's not surprising a lot of Twitter Democrats tried it anyway.

#5: Trump's language was quite simplistic in this speech, especially in the assassination section.

#6: Quite frankly, not all of these economic policies are great ideas.

With that said, the consistent message is "we're all going to be rich!" which, again, right or wrong, is an obvious message. Support for energy abundance? Also obvious.

'We'll let you choose whether to have either a gasoline, hybrid, or electric vehicle'? Very obvious, given current problems with electrical charging infrastructure. In some parts of the country, the cables for electrical chargers even get cut to steal the copper. (More information on that here.)

Aside: Fuels

Gasoline is a lower-trust energy storage and transportation option. Plug-in electric hybrids, which can charge at home and refill with gasoline on the go, are likely the future for the next several decades.

Thinking in terms of fundamental characteristics, there is different balance of trade-offs for synthetic fuel, electricity transmission, and battery storage. Both creating synthetic fuel and charging a battery result in energy losses. Synthetic fuel creation losses are higher on a per-charge basis than battery charging. However, the battery itself is much more energy-intensive to create than a fuel tank. Thus, an attacker would prefer to steal the gasoline instead of the fuel tank holding it, and the battery itself instead of the electricity it contains.

Electricity transmission requires long-distance material infrastructure between the source and the destination. If you have a favorable security environment, that's not a problem. There are reports that electricity pylons are being robbed of their structural supports in South Africa. A more obvious problem - building a massive solar farm in the Sahara and an intercontinental electrical grid to transmit the energy from it leaves you vulnerable along the entire transmission length.

Anywhere with lots of consistent sunlight and access to water (preferably salt water for ecological reasons), where political forces support the necessary infrastructure and are willing to hire engineers, can be a source of synthetic fuels. This is a much more favorable security environment.

#7: A good chunk of the speech is just Trump saying the things he's going to do.

Trump remains the low-trust candidate, which I think is something that a lot of professionals who are Democrats don't really understand. In a low-trust environment, where people don't trust that your rhetoric is correlated to the conversion of money into positive outcomes, you want simple promises with easily observable results, not high ideological rhetoric. (Matt Yglesias wrote about this in 2021. You may not trust Matt himself, but the logic of it is simple.)

Trump blowing off the fancy rhetoric frightens professional types, because it makes it look like anything could be up for sale, but establishes his credibility among people who think professional types are lying. (For example, how they continuously screw-up major blue municipalities.) This is part of the whole deal with Trump 1 and The Wall.

#8: Not a lot of 'uniting' going on here. There's a bit of it, but it's definitely leaning towards, 'we should unite... by voting for me,' rather than outreach.

If you thought he was going to deliver a galaxy-brain genius speech and completely break the context and win with 70%, you're going to be disappointed.

#9: A more competent, more virtuous, and more epistemically rigorous Democratic Party could have taken away 50% of Trump's issues, and left him with a lot less material to campaign on.

To me, it doesn't feel like Trump was selected by providence to lead the United States to a glorious new era - it feels more like he was selected to humiliate everyone else, by forcing them to make a choice.

To quote a random Twitter user:

"Ackshually Kamala wasn't 'in charge' of the border mkay she was just asked to study the 'root causes' of why migrants come from the top 3 nations we basically assigned her a term paper we wouldn't actually give her any real authority OK don't you get it?" This is, somehow, meant to be a defense of her. The press have adopted a lawyerly attitude toward "the truth." They are addicted to finding technicalities and have no interest in what is, in the broadest sense, true. This is why Trump deranges them: he serially exaggerates and bullshits while expressing fundamental truths.

In theory, this shouldn't be a close election. Obviously the reality TV star whose statements are extremely loose should lose.

In theory, this shouldn't be a close election. Obviously the faction that thinks it's OK for teachers to get beat up in schools should lose.

In the groupchat, I said, "The people that get mugged and change their party registration, I can work with. It's the people that get mugged and don't change their opinion that are scary."

One of the Republicans had an interesting response. "It's because they think they deserve it," he said.

[mariacallous]

This week, WIRED launched our Rogues issue—which included going a bit rough ourselves. WIRED senior correspondent Andy Greenberg flew to Louisiana to see how easy it would be to recreate the 3D-printed gun authorities say they found on Luigi Mangione when they arrested him for the murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. The result? It was both easy and legal.

On Wednesday, US, European, and Japanese authorities announced the disruption of one of the world's most widely used infostealer malware. Known as Lumma, the malware was used to steal sensitive information from victims around the world, including passwords, banking information, and cryptocurrency wallets details, according to authorities. Microsoft's Digital Crime Unit aided in the operation, taking down some 2,300 URLs that served as the Lumma infrastructure.

A mysterious database containing more than 184 million records was taken down this week following its discovery by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler. The database contained 47 GB of data, which included information related to Amazon, Apple, Discord, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Microsoft, Netflix, Nintendo, PayPal, Snapchat, Spotify, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo, and more.

In other news, the US charged 16 Russian nationals for allegedly operating the DanaBot malware, which authorities say was used in a wide variety of attacks, from ransomware to espionage. And a recent webinar revealed how a major venture capitalist helped get Starlink satellite internet activated for Israel following the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas.

But that's not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn't cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

The US intelligence community is looking to create a marketplace where private information gathered by data brokers under the guise of marketing can be purchased by American spies, The Intercept reports. Contracting data shows the US spy agencies intend to create a “Intelligence Community Data Consortium” that uses AI tools to sift through people’s personal data; information that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has previously acknowledged “could facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.” In addition to providing insight into Americans’ behaviors and religious and political beliefs, commercial data frequently includes precise location information, offering the US government the ability to surveil people’s movements without acquiring a warrant—exploiting a widely recognized loophole in US privacy law.

Federal lawmakers attempted to ban the US government from buying what it calls “commercially accessible information” last year, with the Republican-controlled House passing a version of a law known as the “Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.” However, the US Senate, then controlled by the Democratic Party, rejected the legislation.

Reporting by WIRED has repeatedly demonstrated how such data can offer US adversaries the ability to monitor the movements of US military and intelligence personnel, including in and around sensitive facilities that house nuclear arms.

A Mysterious Hacking Group Is Revealed to Work for the Spanish Government

Back in 2014, Russian security firm Kaspersky announced it had discovered a sophisticated hacking group it called Careto, Spanish for “Ugly Face” or “Mask,” that had targeted victims across Europe and Cuba. Now, more than a decade later, former employees of the company have finally confirmed what Kaspersky wouldn’t spell out at the time: That they believe Careto was a rare sighting of hackers working on behalf of the Spanish government. Careto’s targets included energy companies, research institutions, and activists, but it particularly focused on Cuba, likely due to the island nation’s giving refuge to members of a Spanish separatist group designated as terrorists by several European countries. Kaspersky’s researchers found a Spanish phrase in the hackers’ malware code that translates to “I shit in the sea,” an expletive phrase typically used by Spaniards but not other Spanish speakers. Given the sophistication of Careto’s hacking, the public confirmation of Kaspersky’s attribution to Spain adds another known player to the game of high-level state-sponsored hacking.

Signal Introduces New Feature to Block Screenshots by Microsoft Recall

Microsoft’s Recall feature, which constantly takes and archives screenshots of Windows users’ activity, still represents a serious privacy problem—even after Microsoft significantly walked back its rollout in response to criticism. So the encrypted messaging app Signal has gone so far as to exploit a digital rights management feature of Windows typically used to protect copyrighted materials to block Recall from taking screenshots of the app by default on Windows machines. After all, the Recall feature—which will likely be required for some corporate or government users—will essentially remove any privacy promise from Signal’s disappearing messages feature for both Recall users and anyone communicating with them. The screenshot-prevention feature can be turned off in Signal’s settings, but it will be turned on by default in Windows. “Microsoft has simply given us no other option,” Signal wrote in a blog post.

Russia’s Fancy Bear Hackers Targeted Security Cameras to Spy on Ukraine Aid

The hacker group within Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency known as APT28 or Fancy Bear first rose to infamy for its targeting of the 2016 US election, but it’s no surprise that the group has more recently focused on Ukraine. According to a new assessment from no fewer than 11 countries’ intelligence agencies, the hacker group has been targeting a broad array of technology and logistics firms involved in providing aid to Ukraine. “Dozens of entities, including government organizations and private/commercial entities across virtually all transportation modes: air, sea, and rail” have been targeted in the campaign, the advisory reads. Perhaps most notable about the agencies’ accusations is that the hackers targeted 10,000 security cameras in countries bordering Ukraine, including at border crossings, military facilities, and train stations. According to the agencies, the GRU hackers also carried out reconnaissance of the network of at least one producer of industrial control system components for railway systems—suggesting a possible intention to attempt sabotage—but didn’t actually succeed in breaching the company.

US Indicts Russian National Over Qakbot Malware

The US Department of Justice on Thursday indicted a Russian national, Rustam Gallyamov, on allegations that he designed software that was widely used by ransomware gangs and is known to have infected hundreds of thousands of computers, netting the gangs roughly $8.6 million in profit, according to DOJ figures. Prosecutors say more than $24 million was seized from Gallyamov, 48, over the course of its investigation. Federal charges unsealed this week allege that Gallyamov himself gained access to victims’ computers and provided it to an array of cybercriminal organizations, including Dopplepaymer, REvil, Black Basta, and Cactus, among others.

The investigation into the now disrupted malware, known as Qakbot, was announced in August 2023 under former US attorney general Merrick Garland, who credited a multinational operation that included Europol and prosecutors and law enforcement agencies in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Latvia, and the United Kingdom. Agencies of Canada and Denmark have also been credited in the investigation that targeted Gallyamov.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

I'm a bi woman who works with FOUR crotchety, old Boomers. They're religious and they're Trumpers. I mind my own business and don't take my personal life to work, but these are the last people on Earth who'd kill me for being queer (ik you don't care for that word, so I apologize). Like, I just know I could walk into work tomorrow and be like, yeah, I'm totally gay, and they'd be like, doesn't matter, Kid, just do your work.

My family is pretty anti gay, and I don't think they'd accept me, so I stay in the closet, but there is 100% no way they'd disown me, let alone want me dead.

Conservative friends just love me like normal, and it's not even a question in my mind if they care about my sexual preferences.

I'm sorry for every LGB+ person who's been abused. I know they're out there, I've been friends with some of them. I even know a guy whose parents sent him to conversion therapy in high school. It's terrible to know some people hate us.

But this across the board, black and white, right wingers want you dead mentality is nonsense. It's ignorant fear mongering. Spiteful.

Worst I've seen the conservatives do is threaten to pray for me. 😂

Of course, I don't have much of a victim card to show for. There have been times I was harassed or snubbed for my sexuality, almost always by other gay women. Liberals, at that. For the most part, though, people have left me alone, and you know what? It doesn't matter. I see the way you and others get treated right here on Tumblr, and I'm appalled.

My conservative friends, family, and coworkers would never talk to me the way these cowardly Zoomer brats talk to you.

And let's just say, I'm not remaining anonymous because I'm afraid of my conservative family and friends; as a matter of fact, there are libs (some I consider friends!) following me, and I don't need the aggravation of their whole, how dare you talk to that transphobic traitor schtick.

I don't think this is even the 20th ask I've gotten from someone in the original LGBT alphabet soup saying almost these exact same things. It's so weird how Republicans and libertarians hate us and want us dead, but instead of ever trying to harm us or attack us, they just...act like normal people as long as we do the same. It's almost like maybe a lot of bad interactions between gays and the right aren't because the right can't stop from hating us, but because so many gays these days are absolutely insufferable.

You're absolutely right and you should say it.