#I saw people fighting about this in a poll comment section
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This Thea discourse is honestly concerning.
First of all, STOP BOTHERING NORA ABOUT STUFF LIKE THIS. Do not say things like she was wrong for writing Thea like that. Like stop, they’re her books. I know we might feel like they’re ours sometimes because she wrote characters that we connected to so much but they are HER CHARACTERS.
Also I don’t care who you want Kevin to be with. It doesn’t matter.
Do I think he should be with Thea, no. Do I ship Kevin with a man, yes. Am I going to fight with people on the internet about fictional characters and who they should end up with, ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Stop fighting.
#it’s actually ridiculous#I don’t think they should be together because she is a ‘raven through and through’ as Nora put it#and that’s not good for Kevin trying to heal#in my opinion it’s the worst thing for him#but seriously this is enough#I saw people fighting about this in a poll comment section#stop#aftg#all for the game#the foxhole court#the raven king#the king’s men#the foxes#aftg trilogy#Kevin day#queen kevin day
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Which of the polls is causing issues? As someone who's submitted here before and probably will in the future, I want to stay away from submitting characters who are subject to shit-stirring like this, since I know it can't be easy on you
Kikuri Hiroi v Senshi the comments turned into a dumpster fire. I should have just muted the notifications earlier because the original Gojo v Senshi poll comment section was even worse I just never saw it because I had to mute the notifications after it blew up because of the massive amount of notifications I was getting on that poll.
And there is no way to tell if a poll is going to turn into a problem because I never know what will blow up or how big. The issue with the Kikuri Hiroi v Senshi is that Kikuri Hiroi and the entire cast of Bocchi the Rock! All look very young and are drawn in a loli style. It's an artistic choice. However to a lot of people she still looks like a child even though she is 28 according to my research and I specifically picked the photo of her surrounded by alcohol bottles. So there have been some arguments about her age in the comment that got heated that I did delete. That's also one of the reasons why the rules are no underaged characters
But the poll is over now so don't worry about it. I never know what could turn into a problem. Just don't try to fight people in the comments and be respectful
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Do you know what I especially don’t like? When there’s this token/pick me aro/ace who says ‘I know this character is aro ace but I’m aro/ace and I ship them!!’ In a comment section of a ship for a character, as if the fact that they’re aro or ace allows them to decide when it’s appropriate to change a character’s sexuality. Although they don’t hold the same principal for gay (mlm) and lesbian characters.
Also I have yet to see anyone using those arguments for a lesbian or gay character. Like people are fighting tooth and nail just so a lesbian character isn’t shipped with a man, but god forbid someone says ‘this character is aro ace’ someone needs to argue that it’s a spectrum, as if we don’t know that already.
Also maybe I’m the only one that saw this but? I’ve seen people making polls on wether or not to write for Alastor, if it’s should contain nsfw, if it doesn’t, or if to avoiding write him at all and guess what the majority of the people voted? For there to be Alastor fics containing nsfw. Maybe this would be excusable if they went for Alastor fics because some people really didn’t know he might be aro as well. But nsfw?? Cmon now how are you gonna make a sexually repulsed character have intercourse whilst also remaining sexually repulsed (saw someone tried to do it, I didn’t read the fic and I guess I appreciate them trying but really?)
Lastly I don’t like it when people demonize us for complaining, cause we can’t let people have fun and we can’t expect to control a fandom, but most of us aren’t going out of our way to harass or attack anyone who ships Alastor, but these people have no problem complaining about us, making us out to be the bad guy when all we’re doing is complaining to our community.
Thiss!!
It’s so weird because you’ll see people write full on novels on how two characters who looked at each other for 5 seconds are gay but when I say “oh well Alastor voice actor said that he was Aroace” people say that unless Viv herself makes it canon it doesn’t matter.
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https://www.tumblr.com/taehyungfirst/746928189485531136/httpswwwtumblrcomtaehyungfirst74687442075960?source=share
To the anon,
You really have a lot of bitter resentment anon. My defending taekookers doesn't mean I don't defend Tae. I think we can conclude admin does the perfect job of defending Tae and they did with their post. Defending doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. I rather don't understand why you had the need to blame my defence on taekookers when you yourself is so resentful. I tried my best to be polite and open to the admin. I have been reading their blog and thoughts and they are wonderful. Never saw them flinging hate on tkkr and tkk bond. Reading their ask I understand now it wasn't mean to hurt our sentiments and I appreciate that. You however felt the need to throw hate. I wonder why. Have you closed your eyes to the reactions and setting up kth solos do? Tae biased people did when taennie rumour came up? Or when they set him up by boasting and commenting to other subsections and groups. I am sure you didn't. You know every section of fans have this misguided or conceited notion of deciding what is best for their idols, who should be supporting them and how. Who should be prosecuted with hate because you think they do. You go do a poll of tkkrs who would be have contributed more than kth solos or other tae biased armies. It's not a competion. My concern was just because a few people (minority) did you can't claim all tkkrs do. Atleast majority of them don't. So I think your generalizing and insult should take a back seat. As I said, if all you see is negativty then maybe you really should curate your timeline for your mental peace. It's easy to codemn people rather than seeing them in positive light.
To the admin,
Thank you for understanding my words and taking them in good spirit, as I intended. I also apologize for doubting you, I should know when you never behaved badly, you wouldn't start now. So I hope you would excuse me for doubting you. I really like your spirit and gushing on Tae. I hope we'll continue to do that together. For many more posts to come 🥂.
With all the love and respect,
M
Hi! Don’t apologize to me, it’s all fine, I think it was just a silly misunderstanding :)
Me and prev anon were mostly talking about the rotten apples, kths have set up Tae, jjks set up Jk, tkkers set them up, it happens and we should call them out, they’re not the majority and will never be but we shouldn’t let these people drag Tae or Jk through the mud for petty reasons.
That’s it! Let’s not fight among tete girls
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I just saw a poll on YouTube asking if people believed in god, and it's just like.... of all the places to ask about religion (specifically the Jesus and god ones), why would you want to do this on YouTube. With comments enabled, even.
Everyone knows damn well that YouTube comment sections are some of the worst places to try and find a tame discussion at. It's almost as horrible as Twitter, in that regard (where hostile QRTs easily and frequently bypass the disabling of a comment section). How could you lure people into an internet fight club with such a loaded question, OP. That's just cruel.
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A little ficlet for @gale-of-the-nomads Queen bee’s city au that has literally no point but I wanted to write it down
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“What do you MEAN there are people that ship Stinger with Queen Bee?!” Chloé exclaimed at the lunch table as Derek choked on his water, trying to hide it by putting his head down. Both stared at Gabby, who sat in front of them with a confused expression on her face.
“Um.... Do you guys even LOOK at the comments on the BuzzBlog?” She asked as she showed them the screen of her phone, opening a random section of comments. “Literally, all you have to do is look!”
And look they did. Varying levels of distress on their faces as they read the comments about thier hero identities. Comments on how cute they were together, how there was obviously some chemistry and even a few talking about how Stinger looked at her when she wasn’t looking (which Chloé could tell he was denying when she looked at him and he glared back) and vise versa.
But there were a few fans who would rather ship themselves with the hero and heroine. Derek could already hear Chloé’s rant later on about how she was ‘too good’ for anyone in this city and they’d be lucky if she’d give any of them a chance. He, however, felt a little flattered. He idly wondered what about him was attractive to the fans when he was in the suit.
Gabby took her phone back, looking amused at the two. “Don’t tell me...” She said and then gasped. “Chloé! I didn’t think he was your type! But you got a thing for heroes, huh?” Gabby winked and Derek swore he never saw a more horrified/disgusted look on his partner’s face. He must’ve looked amused at her pain because Gabby started on him without giving Chloé a chance to defend herself. “You think you’re innocent, Mr. Dalvir? I think I should warn Melody to watch out for the Queen of competition,” He wanted to die.
Over the course of the next four minutes, Gabby could hear her friends sputter to correct her. They talked over one another, studdering over thier words and even telling the other to shut up so Gabby can hear them. But she never did. The conversation was hard to keep up with but nevertheless she looked amused.
“Chill out, I’m teasing,” She finally said, trying to calm them down. “But that gives me an idea for a poll on the BuzzBlog! Who would you date? Queen Bee or Stinger?”
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“Ridiculous! Utterly ridiculous!” Chloé finished as she fell on the bed, sitting with her arms crossed and a pout as Derek rolled his eyes and made a bit more space for her dramatic ass, continuing to shuffle through Netflix.
“Speaking of ridiculous, which horrible teen movie do you wanna watch?” He asked as he reclined back, throwing the remote on her lap as he laid back and closed his eyes. “I’m bored,” He could feel her glaring at him but he didn’t open his eyes. It was quiet for a moment longer before she groaned, realizing he wasn’t about to look at her without incentive.
“Literally nobody in this city has taste. Even if I didn’t know who Stinger was, I wouldn’t date him!” She’s been going off for 10 minutes. Two minutes in, he wanted to argue that he was actually an amazing catch and she’d be lucky if he gave her a chance. However, he thought against it. He wouldn’t date Queen Bee even if he didn’t know who was under the mask either.
“You say him like he’s not in the room,” He said as he looked at her with a smirk on his lips. “Besides, Stinger is obviously attractive to some people. He doesn’t need your approval,” He said, his obnoxious smirk growing as she glared at him.
“I hate you,”
“Wow. You almost made me care,” He said, his voice not giving any indication that were true. “By the way, I should be leaving,”
“And leave me to do the homework myself?” She asked and he rolled his eyes.
“That’s what you’re supposed to do,” He put his book bag on.
“I’m not stupid,”
“Then don’t act stupid,” Derek said.
“Go awayyyyyy,” She groaned out and Derek smiled.
“Alright fine. See you later?” He asked and she sighed. She almost forgot about going out. “Come on, Ladybug doesn’t skip out on her patrols...”
“Untrue! I’ve seen that cat walking around Paris himself before!”
“Yeah? Well stingers can’t exist without bees,” He said and Chloé let out an exhale.
“Fine...”
“See you later,” He said, leaving her room and shitting the door behind him. And suddenly it was too quiet. She hated being left alone. Usually in Paris, she had Sabrina or Adrien to talk to. Sabrina was at least always there. And if all else failed, her butler always made her feel better.
Now she was in New York with her mother. Who was currently not at home. Should she call someone? Would that be desperate? Sure, if she called Gabby she wouldn’t know Derek was literally just there but she’d feel like she was desperate for attention.
In the end, she went on the BuzzBlog, looking at the shitshow Gabby pointed out to them today and seeing the poll already posted. She raised an eyebrow as she saw Queen Bee being only a couple votes ahead of Stinger. The people of New York may have taste after all. She looked on to discoverer Gabby’s posts. Pictures of them fighting crime, links to some Queen Bee or Stinger merchandise (few but people still loved to make it.). And then links to a fan fiction website. She knew that most contained fan stories written about herself and Stinger. She never read it but Derek admitted to reading one.
He claimed curiosity and told her there were stories that had them kissing or cuddling and shit like that. He said there were stories that had one of them dying (which gave him a heart attack but he never told her that). And then stories of... less innocent kissing. Well, he said sex but she really really doesn’t want to say the word. She remembered feeling her face heating at the time and Derek looked amused at her embarrassment. “Oh geez, is every teen in Paris big babies?”
She skipped the links to them but read the summaries sometimes. But it seemed even the summaries could embarrass her. Her face was warm again. She decided that was enough. She grabbed her bear and went to sleep.
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Literally my first okay work for Miraculous Ladybug. And it’s me being embarrassing about gale’s au. I don’t like the end but I didn’t exactly have an end planned so this is it
#miraculous ladybug#chloe bourgeois#derek dalvir#queen bee’s city au#queen bee#stinger#gabby#audrey bourgeois
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reaction post typed while watching SPN 14x05 “Nightmare Logic”
oh, what a perfectly soft and emotional Destiel-parallelly piece of Meredith Glynn artwork. so precious, so loved~
03:47pm
things i know about this: meredith glynn wrote it
LET’S WATCH
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03:50
noooo maggie don’t do things like this alooooone
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i like the music as she enters... kinda weird and sparkly and awkward
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03:53
sammy...... you know what you need
someone to do the night shift
if only...... you had.............. someone else........................
*looks pointedly at dean*
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03:55
where does sam get the financial resources for shit like body cams
we never see them running credit card scams any more so........ ???????
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03:57
i love these cable things by the roads
so aesthetic
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03:58
even more spooky pretty music as dean and sam enter the tomb
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03:59
dean and sam lie so effortlessly and so in sync
i always enjoy seeing them do this, ever since dean told a firefighter he needed to go back into his apartment because he has a yorkie who pees when he’s nervous
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04:01
aw man i thought the “colleagues” would be cas and jack
bobby and mary’s cool too
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04:02
bobby’s wearing a cap like michael’s
and mary’s wearing a coat like cas’
..does this mean this story’s gonna be about dean’s war between those two things, like the two worlds he knows
bobby’s parenting vs. mary’s parenting
michael’s need for him as a vessel vs. cas’ love for him as a bestest buddy bro friend
not sure how bobby = micheal / mary = cas but i’m sure there’ll be some kind of explanation later
OR maybe they’re just costumes and they mean nothing
but......is that ever true? trenchcoats are automatically a cas thing now. and that cap is so iconic as michael now???
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04:09
i relate to this lady in the suit who has had Too Much Of Everything
i enjoy seeing people know their limits and expressing them to others rather than continuing past breaking point
sam’s doing great but also....... no
take a page from this lady’s book, sammy
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04:11
mary’s walking with sam
and i just wanna take a minute to appreciate how EASY meredith glynn’s episodes are to watch
her scripts flow so gently and everything makes logical sense
and her characters are coherent
there’s just this nice touch of emotional human realism cloaking all the supernatural weirdness and i so, so appreciate that
like.. for me personally, there’s not a single writer on the current team whose writing comes close to glynn’s
i want her to write more episodes with cas though, i know she’d write him just right
i honestly feel like i’m being hugged by someone as i watch this
so soft around my heart
is good
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04:16
sam: “you [and bobby have] gotten pretty close lately”
mary: “i thought so too”
OH WAIT I GET IT
I GET THE COAT AND THE HAT NOW
IT’S A DESTIEL THING
OH MY FUCKING GOD HOW DID I MISS THAT
IT’S SO BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS HOLY FUCKING FUCKDISAFKDSHGF
even the casual viewers will probably have noticed this one. i know it took me a second but as soon as this discussion happened it clicked
this is probably the most obvious parallel they’ve ever done i think
i didn’t see it before because i didn’t EXPECT it, you know?? ugh this is so validating
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04:22
now every word mary says, i’m just envisioning how it applies to cas’ perspective too
“he’s been hunting all the time, he won’t take a break even for a second. there’s something on his mind”
yeah, that mICHEAL HAT, quite literally sitting over his head like a dark halo
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04:26
the music in this episode is just so pleasing to my ears
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04:31
things i appreciate:
normal people being all “wtf you hunt monsters” and just being present while dean and sam talk about their shit
sam’s reference to “hunteri heroici” (my all-time fave episode besides “scoobynatural” jdgd that was five years ago what the hell)
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04:35
me: takes screenshot of this very pretty, very anxious lady because i want my hair to do what her hair does
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04:36
oop we just found the dean mirror and now we get to hear someone talk about the things he feels and offer advice that ultimately helps himself
god i love this
AND THE FACT I CAN UNDERSTAND THIS PARALLEL AND WHY IT’S HAPPENING
AGAIN SOLIDIFIES THE DEAN/CAS THING WITH BOBBY/MARY
because what mary said about bobby = what cas thinks about dean = what’s true about dean = this lady being overworked = dean not taking time off from hunting
(although it does seem to specifically apply to sam as well ?)
and sam mentioned earlier about how the dad he knew and the dad mary knew were different people, plus the earlier mentions this season about john’s problematic parenting (i forget when)
yeah that really makes a point of saying john abused his kids, for sure
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lady: “he was gone all the time, working for us, he said”
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
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lady: “i worshipped him when i was a kid. didn’t know any better”
oh deanie
please take notes
please know it’s okay to be angry at john and not continue to love him in a way that excuses his behaviours, even 14 years after he died
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wait wait wait
dean tells her to let it go, it’s the past, there’s nothing you can do about it now so it’s just baggage
WAIT
THAT MEANS
THAT MEANS HE LET THAT SHIT GO ALREADY???????
WHOA
OKAY COOL. COOL COOL COOL I’M PROUD OF YOU
now go be gay with cas
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“i try. every single day.”
hell yeah dean winchester giving good mental health advice to people and also millions of depressed people with various traumas watching this
ngl this legit just helped me a tiny bit with my issues with my own dad
urhgutguugb meredith glynn you are the good we need in this world
..............suddenly getting real emotional because goddamn i wanna meet her someday ;~; i wanna meet 1. misha and 2. meredith glynn, maaaaybe 3. jensen idk
mEREDITH GLYNN IS MY KINDRED SPIRIT
and DEAN WINCHESTER HELPS ME BE A MORE SELF-ACCEPTING PERSON
yay
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04:49
no but like.......... everyone seemed to enjoy last week’s episode, i only saw people posting good reviews. and i felt bad not not enjoying it, even though all the things people pointed out should’ve been right up my alley, something about the overall thing just fell flat for me
but this one
this one speaks to my heart
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04:53
maggie: “i didn’t mean to get caught--”
sam: “no no no, stop that. you did nothing wrong. okay?”
sam being a better dad to maggie than john ever was to anyone
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04:57
OH NO BOBBY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH NO!!!!!!!!!!!
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05:01
dean: “you’re giving him transfusions?”
nurse: “keeps up his iron”
suddenly i don’t trust the nurse
trying to take over the property maybe? a la scooby-doo, it’s always about real estate
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05:02
dean: “sasha, could you go....... make me a ....sandwich ?”
DEAN NO
(i type, in pain, as i laugh)
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/rewatches that interaction because it was actually really sweet the way dean mouthed “go” to sasha and she understood
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05:05
i’ve wanted a djinn story for SO LONG
(even wrote one myself - Prince of the Ether Realms)
trust glynn to be the one to re-weave the exact threads of this 14-year saga that also interest me specifically
also kudos for the fact she’s so obviously knowledgeable about the ENTIRE HISTORY of the show, as opposed to certain other writers who seem to contradict previous facts and re-reference things that were used differently before to make an important point, thereby nullifying the first point when used a second time
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05:11
hunter with the shaved head 10/10 style
headcanoning them as non-binary and into girls because of reasons
also there was a slight continuity error, this hunter hugs maggie twice in the two consecutive shots
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05:15
bobby: “it ends the same” [with bobby dead, i guess?]
mary: “no. you are not allowed to give up on me”
seeing this as dean and cas again
yeah i saw someone mention how at the end of last episode, dean suggesting they drive off a cliff and sam being like NOPE kind of reflected the wrongness of the they-all-die-at-the-end for the finale of SPN
and i think this brings it back to that again
i agree that the best ending is the one where they live to fight another day, not go out guns a-blazing
and this is cas telling dean he’s not allowed to give up and die because he wants to live side-by-side for as long as they can
i just really really want cas to say that to dean in a soft emotional scene like this. we don’t really get those unless they’re parallels??? and i wANT MORE DEAN AND CAS TALKING ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS DAMMIT
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05:20
DEAN AND CAS PARALLELS um i mean BOBBY AND MARY GOING OFF TO HANG OUT ALONE IN A CABIN OF LOVE AND HEALING
GDI LET DEAN AND CAS DO THAT TOO
but also awwww i actually kinda like the mary/bobby thing? because at the core, they ARE dean and sam’s parents, really
family don’t end with blood etc
bobby was the dad john never was
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05:23
sam: USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM
this is so satisfying
next up: hula hoops of salt and iron knuckle-dusters
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05:25
i love love love that dean can have a healthy mental approach to this shit, finally
i’m so fucking proud of him you don’t even know
i just......... i really wanna see him not only return to baseline mental goodness, but then overcome that and become greater at his zen thing, and then AT LAST be ready to accept cas’ love for what it is: romantic and everlasting and epic, and not have to interpret it into something else or ignore it to protect himself
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05:28
that light over dean’s shoulder is the angel on his shoulder
but is it michael or cas?
i’m going with cas, given that michael is a dark-hat-halo
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05:30pm
it’s over
that was amaziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing ;u;
bless meredith glynn for existing and bringing us such beautiful stories
BUT WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE GARDENER
WHY WAS HE THERE besides to ~add some colour~??? and i guess a red herring for viewers, so we have someone to suspect?
(idk. i never suspected him, because he was black and meredith glynn is better than that - unless she was trying to trick racist viewers?? (i know there's a lot of them, i saw the super-toxic comment section on instagram when jared, jensen and misha posted a “vote beto” thing the other day. and there was a poll mentioned at comic con once, half the american spn fanbase are republicans??? guess they really love guns and fascism))
i don’t really have anything to add here, i said it all as i went along
that dean/cas parallel....... oh boy
just please please please pleASE can we have Actual Destiel and not just parallels and hints. like. they barely talk???????? HOW IS THIS A SHOW WHERE TWO OF THE MAIN LEADS ARE CONSTANTLY FRAMED TO BE IN LOVE, WE’RE TOLD THEY’RE BEST FRIENDS, BUT WE ALMOST NEVER EVEN SEE THEM TOGETHER ANY MORE
HOW IS THIS HAPPENING
anyway the costuming was just so very UNSUBTLE and obvious and i think a lot of people would’ve caught that parallel even if they weren’t looking for it
music was good, directing was good, sasha’s hair was good, nobody we know actually died, that was good too
10/10
ten thumbs up
yeee
#WHOOOO WHAT A GOOD ONE#Meredith Glynn#14x05#nightmare logic#spn spoilers#season 14#Elmie watches things#post of postiness
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It Wasn’t Real (part one)
Summary: You’re part of the infamous Loser’s Club, and often asked, what are you afraid of? You reply, nothing, but what your friends don’t know is that your biggest fear is them.
prologue - one - two - three - four - five - six - seven - eight - nine - ten - eleven - finale
A/N: So literally i was overwhelmed by the amount of love and support I got for this story. Once again THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! I’m actually so excited to start this series and I have so many ideas bubbling around in my head, so please enjoy.
There’s something’s i need to make clear before we get started. The rest of the story (except for the first part) will happen four years after the events in IT Chapter One. I know that sounds weird but it will get better I promise! This is also sort of an AU mainly because IT will come back sooner than twenty-seven years, which doesn’t happen in the book. So it’s like based off the original story but isn’t at the same time?? It will all make sense! And there will be an Character x Reader ending, but i’ve closed down the poll as of now until we get further into the story! Right now, Richie is leading!
Anyways… I hope you all enjoy this story! Oh! And Henry hasn’t die in my story, as well as his father. Everything else is the same.
I hope you all enjoy this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. Send me a little comment in the ask section or leave it below on what you thought of this chapter. It doesn’t have to be long, I appreciate every single comment I receive and telling me just helps inspire me to write it more frequently.
Pairing: Loser’s Club x Reader, slight Henry x Reader (you’ll see)
Warnings: force, bullying, depressing and sad tones.
Tag’s List: @chalatea
wanna be featured? message me letting me know!
It wasn’t real.
It seemed that maybe it was. When time passes, friends tend to forget each other. It was an unsaid thing. No friendships last forever, no matter hard you tried to make them. But something in you had always told you that when it came to the Loser’s Club that wasn’t true.
You’d been wrong.
Separated from those you called your family, everyone started drifting apart. Some of them still talked, like Eddie and Richie or Bill and Beverly, but in the end, no one really was as close as they use to.
It was almost as if they’d forgotten, stopped believing in what you all experienced. And you couldn’t understand why. Because while everyone was off moving on, forgetting, you only seemed to remember. You tried. Tried and fought and screamed and yelled for them, but it was like you were standing in the back, watching as their back turns. Watching Richie look away, watching Eddie follow or Bill turn and Beverly distance herself. You saw less and less of Mike, Ben never left the library and Stan… Stan wouldn’t even look at you.
Soon it was just you, just like IT had teased, and you were alone.
So, no, Bill, it was real.
Three Years Later…
You let out a breath of relief as the school bell rung, signalling the end of class. English class today in particular had been boring and repetitive, some idiot decided to back talk the teacher so the majority of the class was spent with Ms. Green lecturing you all. It would’ve been fine, had that not meant that your pile of homework had grown significantly larger in size.
Gathering your binder and books, you quickly stuffed them into your bag. Though when you looked up, you noticed that most of the students were already out and sighed. It meant the hallways were going to be cramped with people, and it was the end of the day.
Knowing it was inevitable either way, you slipped your backpack over your shoulders calmly and pulled the straps. “Have a nice weekend, Ms. Green.” You waved at your teacher. She may have just spent an hour yelling at you all and then the last half talking about what you had to catch up on, but she was nice when she wanted to be.
“You as well, Y/N.” She shortly replied, not sparring you a glance. You hesitated a moment, watching the way her eyes didn’t even move to say goodbye before sighing and making her way out the door. The hallway wasn’t as bad as you expected, which was a breath of relief. Quickly, you made your way down the hall, turned a right and low and behold there stood your locker.
Putting in the combination, you begin organizing what you’d need over the weekend and what you wouldn’t. Though, your moment of peace was quickly interrupted when the door of your locker was slammed to the side. You jumped, letting out a bewildered shock and turned to see who had so rudely disturbed you only to find a face you hadn’t wanted to see.
“Hey, babe.” Henry greeted, smiling down at you. Henry Bowers, the same Henry Bowers who use to bully you and your friends back in middle school. Of course, Henry confessed he doesn’t ever remember doing such a thing. I’d remember a pretty face like yours…
Refusing the urge to shiver, you sent a short smile at him; “Jesus, Henry. You nearly gave me a heart attack.” He only shrugged, as if he didn’t care. Smiling through the discomfort, you grabbed your locker door, moving it off of the next one and Henry wasted no time leaning against it.
Henry Bowers had been sent back two years, making him in the exact same grade as you, of course he was eighteen already. Though, that didn’t mean he acted any more mature.
“So, you coming with us to the pit tonight?” Henry asked, looking lazily over at you. Setting your final textbook in your locker, you shut the door with a soft thud; “us?”
“Belch and me.” He clarified. You hated Belch, all he did was well… belch. And it disgusted you, but it seemed no matter what him and Henry stayed friends. At least some things were the same. “Oh, and I believe Amy will be joining us.”
“Oh,” you mumbled. “I don’t think I wi-”
“Why not?” Henry interrupted, cutting whatever you’d been about to say off.
You shifted uncomfortably, taking a tentative step back when Henry straightened out. You should probably just go, Henry would back off if you did. But you really did not want to spend the night in some dingy corner of the town with belching Belch and bitchy Amy. “My mom… she wants me home tonight.”
“Your mom?” Henry laughed, as if that was the craziest thing you’d ever said. Leaning down, he didn’t ask when he grabbed your wrist; “your mom never wants you home. Come on, it’ll be fun.” Fun for you, you wanted to say, but knew better. Knowing nothing you could say would allow you to stay home, you let Henry drag you off into the direction of the school doors.
You zoned out whatever he’d been saying, loosing yourself in your mind. At least it was the weekend, you told yourself, after tonight you wouldn’t have to speak to anyone, let alone see anyone. Of course, two days only lasted so long… Weekends use to be filled with adventure back in middle school… of course you were a child then and so was everyone else… but, it had been an adventure.
“Agh…”
Turning your head, you were pulled from your thoughts as a familiar head walked by. You could almost swear… Time seemed to freeze, as the person’s head floated before you, but then suddenly it was gone. Looking down, you heard the thud as their body smacked against the ground.
“Watch where you’re going, freak.” Henry laughed, shoving his hand into Belch’s stomach in excitement. You hadn’t even noticed Belch join you…
Looking over at the body, you didn’t move as they slowly moved to their hands and knees. You of course, felt bad, put no part of you wanted to help them. You only stared with a lazy eye, your wrist still in Henry’s grasp. It was only when their head turned up to glare at your boyfriend did you feel an reaction flood through you.
“Eddie…” You whispered, gaining a strange reaction from Henry and Belch. Seeing their gaze, you moved to look away before your eye caught Eddie’s. There laid Eddie, the same Eddie you used to constantly worry over and mother, on his knees, blood pooling from his chin where he’d smacked it against the ground.
His eye met you, but you didn’t do anything.
Soon he groaned in pain, Henry had kicked him. Henry leaned forward, towering over the boy; “stay down.” And before you knew it, the grasp on your wrist tugged and you were off.
You gripped your jacket sleeves with force, watching as your breath formed before you in the cool evening air. You hated walking home alone, especially at night. It was when you saw things, things that shouldn’t be there but were. But of course, Henry hadn’t wanted to walk you home, so that left only one other option.
You laughed out into the bitter air, when did Henry ever wanna walk you home?
It’d caused many fights before, back when you first started dating. You didn’t want to stay out that later (or go out at all) but of course Henry wanted to, so you did. You’d stay out all night, doing whatever dumb thing him and his friends could think off until the sun had set and you could no longer see past you clearly. You’d beg him to walk you home, but he’d only shove you away and continue hanging with his friends.
Though, you guessed the moment of peace gave you time to think. Think about whatever. It never really was the same.
You let your eyes wander above you, to the night sky, viewing the many stars as you walked the streets of your neighbourhood. You were close, thankfully. It was January, meaning a new year and christmas had just passed. That also meant many houses still had there christmas lights up, too lazy to take them down and you could view the bright colourful lights in peace.
It wasn’t often you saw so much colour in your life nowadays.
Your feet made a crunching noise as you stepped into the snow, a sound you loved very much. There was nothing but colourful lights, empty streets and mindful thoughts.
“Y/N…”
You could see your house now, just before you and that gave you motivation to quicken your step.
“Y/N.” Gasping, you turned around at the voice. You weren’t sure what you’d expected, but you had expected something. Instead, all you found was nothing. Just the street you’d already walked on a million times and the darkened houses except for the bright christmas lights. Shaking your head, you turned back around. You must’ve been imagining it.
“Y/N.” Okay, that time you hadn’t. You were sure of it.
“Henry?” You called, turning around once again. “Henry is that you?” Of course, nothing. People didn’t really like to reply to you much these days. “Henry, I-I swear to god if this is a prank…” There was nothing there, but you were so sure you’d heard a voice.
“Y/N.” You spun, the voice now much closer behind you. Except when you turned around, there wasn’t anything there.
“Time to play.” You spun again, back around and for a moment you saw what you never thought you’d see again. IT. IT. It’s red fire-y hair and sinister smile. But the next time you blinked, it was gone. “Time to play, Y/N.” You instinctively took a step back as maniacal laughter filled your ears.
Bolting around, you took quick and loud steps to your house, not daring to peer back behind you. You scrambled for your keys, fumbling to get them out of your back but the minute you did, you unlocked your door and swung it open. You wasted no time slamming it behind you, falling to the ground before it as you let out a shaky breaths.
Holding your hand against your chest, you tried to even your breathing. You were never afraid, at least you hadn’t been. Your friends made you stronger and now where were they?
Panting, you let out a little whimper. The second you closed your eyes, IT appeared and you wasted no time in opening your eyes again. Taking a look around your dark and vacant house, you were pulled away from the events that had happened outside and back into reality. “Mom?” You called, “you home?”
You wandered into the kitchen, finding nothing. No note, nothing. She obviously wasn’t home, but it’d be nice if she could at least let you know. Sighing, you dropped your bag on the dining table, taking a seat on one of the chairs. You let your head lean on your hand, staring at the darkened room around you.
“What happened…?”
Part 2?
Let me know what you thought! I hope you all enjoyed!
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Protesters March from the White House to the Capitol Against Trump Muslim and Refugee Order
yahoo
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Thousands of people converged on the White House Sunday to protest President Trump’s executive order banning the entry into the United States of people from seven majority-Muslim nations, along with refugees of all religions from around the world.
“Shame! Shame!” the protesters chanted in the direction of the president, who was that afternoon at the White House holding phone calls with the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed, and then screening the animated film “Finding Dory.”
It was at least the fourth significant protest to address the new president at his new home since he took office on Jan. 20, during which time his disapproval rating has risen to 51 percent, according to the Gallup daily tracking poll, while his approval has sunk to 42 percent.
Protesters came because friends told them about the gathering. They came because they saw something on Facebook. Because they were on a list-serv. Because they were part of one of the new anti-Trump groups that have sprung up since the election, like Indivisible. They came to show solidarity, and outrage, and love. To tell the president, this is not who we are, and demand he undo what he had done.
The protest was called for 1 p.m. in a Facebook posting, and word of it was tweeted and shared overnight in documents listing protests around the nation against Trump’s abrupt Friday move. By 1:30p.m., Lafayette Park across from the White House was nearly full, and so were those parts of the pedestrian plaza in front of the White House gates not still cordoned off and full of inauguration structures.
Somewhere in the crush of people there were official rally speakers. Newly elected Democratic U.S. Sens. Kalama Harris (Calif.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada) were there, according to reports on social media.
Newly elected @SenCortezMasto and @KamalaHarris are at the White House protest against hothead #MuslimBan. #NoBanNoWall pic.twitter.com/UIkgd5yy6s
— Alice Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) January 29, 2017
Occasionally a cheer would go up that indicated the direction they were in. Without a sound system that could cover the entire park and grounds, few could hear anything other than the chants and the conversations of those in their immediate vicinity. But with the tumult of signs and sounds and people threading their way through the mass, it became an active sort of standing around. People pointed fingers at the White House, and livestreamed themselves and the rally on Facebook and Facetime, and took pictures of the crowd, and the signs, and each other. Protesters scrambled up into trees, and onto a wall surrounding the Bank of America building across from the U.S. Treasury building to get a better look. A woman with a microphone there ignored the distant official speakers and led the section of the crowd I could see in chants.
Some of the chants were old standbys, often heard in Washington:
“Whose House? Our House?”
“Stand Up! Fight Back!”
“This Is What Democracy Looks Like!”
There were new ones for the new occasion, and the new president, too:
“No Hate, No fear / Refugees Are Welcome Here!”
“Hands Too Small, Can’t Build a Wall!”
“Evil Plans! Tiny Hands!”
“No Ban, No Wall!”
Not everyone was in sync as they chanted, which had the odd effect of making that last one at times it sound like, “No Bannon, No Wall!”
Chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman, was a particular focus of ire at the protest, with some accusing him of being a Nazi or fascist in signs and comments.
The general sentiment outside the #Whitehouse. pic.twitter.com/t0YLlVl6R8
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) January 29, 2017
Around 2:15 p.m., the crowd got antsy and a cry went up, “March! March! March!”
The woman with the sound system announced that the group would be marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Trump Hotel, which is located just blocks from the White House, and the U.S. Capitol.
If this had been part of the plan, it was not previously advertised on Facebook.
The protesters turned around and started to walk out of the White House plaza, heedless of whether or not they had a permit to march or whether the streets were clear of cars. They were followed by the crush of people who had been in the park. The size of the gathering began to become apparent. It was more than 500 people. More than 1,000. They marched past me, a thickly packed crowd pouring out of the park and turning right, heading down 15th Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue. There were more than 5,000 people, certainly. The crowd kept going and going, increasing in size as word of the protest spread across social media, and as passersby joined from the street.
Many marchers had brought their children. There were pregnant women, and toddlers, and strollers galore. A few well-tended dogs. Groups of college students. Government workers. Non-government workers. People from Maryland, and Virginia, and D.C. Musical instruments, mainly drums, and at least one puppet.
The D.C. Police Department, skilled in the ways of de-escalation and crowd control in a city that is used to marches — and also one that voted more than 90 percent against Trump — blocked intersections with their cars to protect the marchers from errant traffic.
Signs ranged from the polite “I Love My Muslim Sisters & Brothers” to the pointed “Impeach Twitler” to the crude “First They Came for the Muslims And We Said NOT TODAY Motherf***er.” Some were educational – “97% of ISIS Victims are Muslim.” Many were scrawled on cardboard boxes by people who grabbed the first available poster-making material at hand on short notice. One individual sported a sign made out of a pizza box.
At the Trump Hotel, one declared, “Protest is the new brunch.”
The scene outside the Trump Hotel after security ceded the steps. Sign: "Protest is the new brunch." pic.twitter.com/FKaJDxxOLd
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) January 29, 2017
Another sign said simply, “Decency.”
Decency. pic.twitter.com/yiBGW84luO
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) January 29, 2017
Security personnel standing guard outside the hotel eventually thought the better of trying to keep the activists off the hotel steps. A triumphant cry went up as they receded. The protesters surged up the steps and stood on the landing outside the hotel, which kept its enormous black doors shut. “Shame! Shame! Shame!” they chanted. Guests exited through a side door.
Behind the throng, marchers continued on toward the Capitol, its white dome appearing polished to a shine in the flinty winter sunlight.
View from the Newseum this afternoon #MuslimBan pic.twitter.com/0JScYG705a
— Brittany Harris (@brittharr) January 29, 2017
Outside Trump Hotel, heading toward the Capitol. Never seen this kind of thing in DC. Crowd keeps coming & coming, growing bigger & bigger. pic.twitter.com/ia72umkHoT
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) January 29, 2017
At Dulles Airport an hour away, lawyers still worked frantically to sort out the consequences of the executive order as conflict reports about its implementation continued to pour in and travelers remained detained.
Another protest against the executive order was called for the following week. This time, people would have more time to plan.
#_uuid:f185e887-5b9d-345a-9c5d-000f9a3d5d1c#_revsp:Yahoo! News#_lmsid:a077000000CFoGyAAL#_author:Garance Franke Ruta
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Last Thursday afternoon, the front page of the Huffington Post featured a picture of New York Post reporter and CNN contributor Salena Zito, with the headline, “SLIPPERY SALENA: TRUMP WHISPERER EXPOSED!”
Huffington Post
The piece, by reporter Ashley Feinberg, was the culmination of months of speculation by reporters, but especially by a handful of anonymous Twitter accounts (including @rod_inanimate, @UrbanAchievr, @KT_So_It_Goes, and @cnn94cnn), that Zito was plagiarizing, mischaracterizing interviews, and, in the most serious allegations, fabricating quotes out of whole cloth.
If true, the allegations are devastating. Zito responded Tuesday evening with a detailed New York Post column, including a recording, two transcripts, and a photograph of notes aiming to rebut some, but hardly all, of the allegations. She also addressed the controversy on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. (She declined to comment for this article, referring me to her New York Post column addressing the allegations.)
Zito, who before the fall of 2016 was a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist with a local following, has benefited from Donald Trump’s rise in a way few others have. She made a name for herself by filing revealing dispatches from Trump country during the campaign, which featured conversations with “Main Street voters” whose “traditions, skills, jobs and lives” are under threat by the “cosmopolitan and political classes” exemplified by Hillary Clinton.
She admonished journalists that while they took Trump “literally, but not seriously,” Trump’s supporters took him “seriously, but not literally.” Her pieces explain that regular Joes out in Ohio and Pennsylvania don’t care that the president’s lawyer and campaign chair are guilty of numerous federal crimes because “as it stands we only really only [sic] have two parties; the party of the governing elite and the party of Trump.”
Her Trump voter–whispering columns earned her the New York Post job, a book deal (The Great Revolt, co-authored with GOP political consultant Brad Todd, which came out in May), a CNN contributor deal, and a joint project with Harvard’s Institute of Politics. She became a favorite of both mainstream journalists — Jake Tapper said in a book blurb that she “picked up on a political phenomenon long before polls or pundits had any idea of what was happening” — and conservatives, who see her as a rare voice of America’s traditionalist heartland. The president even sang her praises:
“The Great Revolt” by Salena Zito and Brad Todd does much to tell the story of our great Election victory. The Forgotten Men & Women are forgotten no longer!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2018
But as Zito’s star has risen, so have the questions around her reporting. Feinberg’s article focuses on the most frequent claim against Zito: that she misrepresents reliably Republican officials and donors as swing voters whom Trump won over. Zito and her defenders (like her New York Post colleague Seth Mandel and the Law360 reporter Alex Parker) insist that she always accurately portrayed the people she profiled, including disclosing their Republican Party histories when relevant.
But anonymous Twitter accounts have also unearthed three instances of apparent plagiarism by Zito, and the most damning claims against her, by far, have involved allegations that she fabricates quotes in stories. Zito has said she records “many” of her interviews, which would make verifying more contested stories possible, but she has yet to release any recordings in response to the fabulism accusations (though she did release one as part of the Post piece — more on that below).
Beyond the concrete allegations against Zito, the fight reflects widespread disdain among some journalists toward her anecdote-heavy, data-light, at times unduly credulous approach to political reporting. Zito prides herself on having caught a populist conservative wave that other analysts failed to see coming, and on doing it through interviews in small towns across the Midwest. But that leads to bolder proclamations that 2016 was “not a fluke” and was indeed a fundamental realigning event, as well as to overly charitable interpretations of her subjects’ intentions (as she once quipped, “There’s always ‘some’ portion of anyone’s followers who are racist”).
Incorrect analysis is obviously a very different problem than fabulism, plagiarism, and mischaracterizing sources. Those (especially the former two) are incredibly serious offenses that can get you run out of journalism. Doing political analysis in ways that feel wrongheaded to your critics, obviously, is not career-ending, nor should it be. But that disagreement helps explain why so many in the media have been willing to believe these claims about Zito, even without ironclad proof of the worst allegations.
Let’s start with the easiest-to-evaluate charges against Zito: allegations of plagiarism. On two occasions identified by @rod_inanimate, Zito copied language without credit from other sources: once from a fellow Pittsburgh reporter, the other time from Wikipedia. On a third occasion, highlighted by @cnn94cnn, she appeared to pass off quotes from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as ones she obtained herself.
On December 14, 2016, Zito began a New York Post column on the opioid crisis with this anecdote (emphasis in all the passages quoted is mine):
Exactly one month before Election Day, on a Monday, Rowen Lally boarded her school bus in McKeesport, Pa.
Before the 7-year-old left her house, she cared for her infant sister with a bottle and a diaper change, leaving her 3- and 5-year-old brothers at home with her parents.
On the way home from school, Rowen told the school bus driver her parents looked blue when she left the house and she couldn’t wake them up; a quick call was made to the school, which notified police.
Authorities discovered Rowen’s parents had been dead since Friday of a heroin overdose.
Zito cites no source for the story, despite offering a link to the other overdose story she mentions. But it appears she took it from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Karen Kane, who wrote up the school bus detail in her October 6, 2016, story this way:
The discoveries had come after Rowen had told a school bus driver on her way home from school Monday afternoon that her parents had been blue and that she had been unable to wake them that morning. The bus driver notified school officials who contacted police. The children were taken to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC for evaluation then were placed in the care of Allegheny County Children, Youth and Family caseworkers.
If Zito had given Kane credit for the story, it would have been basically fine. In the absence of such credit, it looks like she stole an anecdote from another reporter’s story.
Arguably an even more egregious example of plagiarism comes in her book with Todd, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. Interviewing Wisconsin voter Amy Giles-Maurer talking about her father, Zito and Todd write:
“He went into the Marines, right out of high school. Just volunteered and he was sent to Vietnam where he fixed F-4 Phantoms,” she says, referring to the tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bomber used extensively during the southeast Asian conflict.
If that feels like an oddly long and formal construction, almost like an encyclopedia entry, that’s because it was lifted directly from Wikipedia, the beginning of whose entry for the “McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II” currently reads:
The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II is a tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bomber originally developed for the United States Navy by McDonnell Aircraft.
The book was published in May; Wikipedia’s page history reveals that the article has used this exact language since May 31, 2017, and used nearly identical language for years before that. There is simply no explanation for the writing here other than Zito or Todd copying and pasting the relevant section from Wikipedia while not citing it.
There’s a third case of alleged plagiarism, highlighted by @cnn94cnn. It concerns a short news hit that Zito wrote for the Washington Examiner on February 21, 2018, titled, “Woman who had affair with GOP Rep. Tim Murphy is running for Congress.” @cnn94cnn alleges that, especially in its original form, it was uncomfortably similar to a Hill story by Lisa Hagen on the same topic, and originally, unlike the Hill, failed to credit the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with the story.
Here’s how the Zito story read originally:
Edwards said at the Allegheny County Court House that she is running for office because Pittsburgh deserves someone who will fight the battles no one wants to fight. She also said she expects her relationship with Murphy will come up again and again during the campaign.
“My opponents are likely to spend egregious amounts of time and money in an attempt to display my human mistakes for all to see,” Edwards said. “I was warned. I have been given explanations. I have been told to back down, and I am here to tell you, nevertheless, I will endure.”
That passage appears to imply that Zito herself saw Edwards say this at the Allegheny County Court House, when she is in fact quoting comments from Edwards originally heard and reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Paula Reed Ward. Zito’s post has since been updated to include a link to the Post-Gazette story, but it is still not clear that the quotes from Edwards come from the Post-Gazette originally. Zito’s post states simply: “She also told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette she expects her relationship with Murphy will come up again and again during the campaign.” (Zito addressed this charge in her column and argued that this was a sufficient fix.)
These cases, to me, represent serious wrongdoing and are deserving of an editorial reprimand at the very least. And while Zito’s New York Post column defending her work addresses the final allegation, it does not touch on the first two at all.
Key to Zito’s journalistic project is the idea that she is identifying voters in Midwestern states whom a Democratic Party ruled by liberal coastal elites can’t reach anymore. In her column defending her work, she cites this as a motive for her critics: “A few journalists, particularly those who rarely if ever leave the Washington Beltway or Midtown Manhattan, want to discredit my work because of what it reports. They want to silence the voices I listen to and record.”
Her critics argue in turn that this is a con, that, over and over again, the people she has chosen to feature in her reporting have turned out to be Republican Party officials, politicians, and donors.
Take Amy Giles-Maurer, the Wisconsin woman whose father built the “tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bombers.” In the book, Giles-Maurer (also referred to as simply “Amy Maurer”) is depicted as a Republican who supports Trump in spite of his sexism and the Access Hollywood tape. In a New York Post column, Zito described her as “the married, educated, suburban mom whom experts missed in the 2016 election — and still don’t get today,” the kind of voter whom “the Clinton campaign tried hard to win over.”
The Post column doesn’t mention that Giles-Maurer is a Republican (although Zito’s book does); neither the column nor the book mentions that Giles-Maurer is the corresponding secretary of the Kenosha County, Wisconsin, Republican Party. An August 2016 article in the Kenosha News mentions her involvement in opening a field office for House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, in which she praises Ryan for his “conservative agenda.” She is listed as a member of the Kenosha Republican Party board of directors as early as March 2015. That, suffice it to say, does not sound like a 2016 swing voter.
The revelation that Giles-Maurer is a highly active Republican forced the conservative writer S.E. Cupp, who based a New York Times op-ed on Zito’s reporting, to issue a correction, saying she had no idea that Giles-Maurer is a Republican. She, apparently, was misled by Zito’s reporting.
Defending her use of Giles-Maurer to HuffPost’s Feinberg, Zito states that her book is “about the most surprising archetypes of voters who became part of this populist coalition, those voters are both Republican and Democrat. Much of the book is focused on the kind of normally Republican-leaning voters that Hillary Clinton unsuccessfully sought to convert to her campaign.” To Zito, Giles-Maurer fits that archetype.
In a Twitter thread, Zito further noted, “In the book, Amy Giles-Mauer, the woman in question, is clearly identified as not just a Republican, but as an engaged GOP primary voter.” In her New York Post defense of her work, Zito notes that her Post column about Giles-Maurer featured “a large photo of her wearing a Kenosha GOP board pin.”
That’s all true (the book notes that Giles-Maurer originally supported Scott Walker), but there’s a difference between being a primary voter and being a party official. And it remains the case that it would have been better to disclose Giles-Maurer’s role as a Republican activist, especially in the New York Post column, in a clearer way than a hard-to-read pin in a photograph.
There are other suspicious cases. Feinberg highlights Cynthia Sacco, a Michigan woman whom Zito describes in the book as having “spent most of her adult life voting mostly Democrat.” Zito neglects to mention that Sacco was a delegate to the Republican county convention in 1994, which complicates the portrait of her as a longtime Democrat. To Feinberg, Zito replied, “The assumption that she cannot differ with her husband who was a delegate for the GOP in 1994 is a wee bit sexist,” but Sacco herself was a delegate too, as well as her husband.
Other cases are messier. @rod_inanimate attacks Zito for profiling Erie, Pennsylvania’s David Rubbico in her book, a man whom Zito describes in her statement to Feinberg as “a long time Democrat who liked Obama.” Rubbico was elected in 2018 to a local committee position in the Pennsylvania Republican Party. But that’s obviously after the 2016 election, which to Zito and her defenders confirms the narrative that Rubbico was energized to get into conservative politics by Trump.
Zito, in her response, notes that he only recently ran county committee-person–and this is verifiably true. And his letters are a recent activity. Does it seem improbable that he voted for Obama? Maybe. Maybe that’s why she interviewed him!
— Alex Parker (@AlexParkerDC) August 29, 2018
@rod_inanimate and Feinberg also cite a letter that Rubbico wrote in January 2017 that said, “our nation … has been decimated by President Barack Obama over the last eight years,” and that Trump “is not a racist for saying that immigrants should be legal. He is holding America first by wanting to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees, both groups that are embedded with terrorists.”
That does make it feel implausible that he previously was sympathetic to Obama. But the letter’s date is still post-election, so Zito’s version of events is still plausible. Zito has also published audio and a transcript of her conversation with Rubbico, a somewhat odd move given that the authenticity of his comments was never in doubt.
Another source Zito has cited is Anthony Ripepi, a chief of surgery who lives in Peters Township, Pennsylvania, a case documented by Zito critic Beau Boughamer.
Zito prominently featured Ripepi in a January 31, 2018, New York Post column originally headlined “Donald Trump is still the man to these blue-collar voters.” It has since been retitled “Donald Trump is still the man to this Pennsylvania home,” which is probably for the best, given that “chief of surgery” is hardly a blue-collar job.
Zito would later defend the original statements by saying she does not write her own headlines: “Obviously, reporters don’t write their own headlines, so this accusation tells you something about my trolls and the journalists who fell for the trolling.” (It’s true that at many, but not all, outlets, journalists don’t get to headline their pieces.)
She described Ripepi and his wife, Michelle, as “upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar, upper-middle-class exurb.” Per census data, the town has a median household income of about $110,000, or double the median for Pennsylvania as a whole; Peters Township is generally considered an affluent Pittsburgh suburb. I also don’t know what the phrase “blue-collar, upper-middle-class exurb” means.
The frequency with which Zito mentions Ripepi is also striking. She cites him in a November 11, 2016, Washington Post piece titled, “Trump’s voters won’t mind if he doesn’t keep all his promises”; he is one of only three voters cited to prove that contention. She also cites him in a January 5, 2017, Washington Examiner piece titled, “America to Obama: Stop now. You lost,” in which Ripepi is upgraded from speaking for Trump voters to speaking for “America” (he is, again, one of just three voters). He appears yet again in a November 9, 2016, piece in the New York Post, in which he’s described as a foe of the “cosmopolitan class” and their “constant mocking of those who live in flyover country.”
Zito makes some fair inferences about him in that piece, noting, “The fundamental truth is that the Trump voter was still predominantly white, but both male and female, with a salary ranging from middle- to upper-middle-class to well-off and college-educated.” That’s more honest than claiming he speaks for “blue-collar” people (which, granted, could be chalked up to a headline writer’s flub). But citing the same “man on the street” — a surgeon, no less — four separate times is, if not unethical, then at least strange.
Zito has repeatedly cited voters without giving their names, or their last names, or other information that might allow other reporters to track them down and verify their stories. This is unusual (as several reporters on Twitter have noted, the norm is to always get a name when talking to voters and other “people on the street”), and it becomes a problem when some of her stories are, frankly, a bit hard to believe.
The most startling cases to me (also highlighted by some other reporters like the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale) involve remarkable things Zito has claimed to have heard at gas stations.
As highlighted by @KT_So_It_Goes and @cnn94cnn, on at least three occasions Zito has claimed to hear remarkable impromptu political statements by voters at gas stations.
There was the time in Hagerstown, Maryland, that two friends were shooting the shit about Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) letter, cosigned by 46 Senate Republicans, to the government of Iran:
Dodging raindrops and balancing bottled water and a bunch of power bars under one arm, a young man returned to his car at a Sheetz gas pump along old U.S. 40 in this western Maryland town, sandwiched between Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The local public radio station blared through the open car door, reporting on the letter to Iran from 47 Senate Republicans. Adjusting his seat, he said to a traveling companion: “Good for them.”
“Wait, who?” his friend asked.
“The guys who sent the letter to Iran, that Cotton guy,” he replied. “For all we know, the president will issue an executive order and give Iran whatever they want.”
Then he shut the car’s door and drove east toward the U.S. 522 overpass.
There was the time she pulled over off US 422 and heard a gas station manager complaining about Democrats, and Martha Plimpton in particular:
A clip of Martha Plimpton’s exuberance over the “best” abortion she ever had played out on the television overhead of a gas-station counter somewhere along U.S. Route 422 between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
A woman with a name tag noting her as the manager rolled her eyes and said to no one in particular as she went about stacking the shelves behind the counter, “And they wonder why people don’t vote for Democrats around here anymore.”
In 2014, in a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review piece reprinted in RealClearPolitics (I haven’t been able to find a dateline), Zito claims she heard this:
Standing at a gas station pump, as news blared overhead about the Fort Hood shootings, a young mother with two children buckled into her sedan’s car seats sighed.
“I hope someday if, God forbid, tragedy strikes again at a military base, whoever is president doesn’t still head to a fundraiser,” she said.
I’d be remiss here, though, if I left out the time she claims to have hung out at an abandoned gas station until someone came and gave her a perfect quote about the gas station’s sign, imploring customers to support them over big businesses:
Last week, a man and his family pulled into the gas station and was surprised to find it closed, “I kept meaning to stop here on the way home, but other things got in the way,” he said.
He read the sign and sighed, “They [the gas station] kept telling us we need you, and we kept thinking we’ll get there soon, they will always be around,” he explained.
There are more, like the French girl who used the somewhat archaic English phrasing “people young and old,” which seems like an odd thing for a non-native speaker to say but which is phrasing Zito herself has also used. Nonetheless, Zito has, in her New York Post defense of her work, produced a transcript of her interview with the girl, confirming the girl said that; I personally find her defense there sufficient.
Then there’s her interview with “Greg,” a “small businessman” and “lifelong Republican” who issues quotes like this:
“We cannot let these hard-liners undermine every imagined slight or, even worse, do it simply based on the ‘stagery’ that attracts viewers or clicks,” Greg said.
I had never heard of the word “stagery” before Greg said it in Zito’s piece, but it appears she uses it in her own articles quite a bit. Zito has produced notes from the interview with the word “stagery” written on them:
The “stagery” notes. Salena Zito
A skeptical observer would note that famous journalistic fabulists like Stephen Glass have fabricated notes — but as a reporter who has certainly quoted people from notes without an audio recording attached, I’m willing to give Zito the benefit of the doubt on this case.
Then there’s the time Zito claims a presidential campaign staffer admonished her for saying “God bless you”:
There’s the time she followed up a favorable retweet of a point former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made with a perfect quote from a guy at a gas station backing up Fleischer’s argument:
Here she retweets Ari Fleischer talking about the IRS and Benghazi scandals, and then 16 minutes later tweets a perfectly matched quote from a guy at a gas station. Granted those were both big stories at the time, but it’s still a very fortuitously overheard quote. pic.twitter.com/HfCBPxIktO
— Adrenochrome Harvester (@ClenchedFisk) August 25, 2018
There’s the two separate times she claimed people in cars with “COEXIST” bumper stickers gave her the finger:
And the time she claimed to have interviewed protesters for “Demand Protest,” a fake organization purportedly paying people to protest Trump that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, of all people, exposed as a hoax that didn’t actually hire any protesters. That makes her claim to have met the fake group’s employees a little fishy-sounding:
Despite what @UrbanAchievr says above, I don’t consider these incidents ironclad proof she makes stuff up. My own attempt to dig deeper into the fabulism claims came up empty. On June 16, 2018, Zito published an account in the New York Post of several trips she took with Harvard students, aiming to give them a sense of what the “heartland” is really like. It ended with this anecdote:
In our final week, the class attended Mass at St. Stanislaus, a Polish church in the Strip District of downtown Pittsburgh. Before then, only two of my students had set foot in a Catholic church.
At the end of Mass, an older gentleman came up to me and said how nice it was to see young people dressed up and going to church. When I told him they were students from Harvard, he beamed.
“I have been reading for years that college kids these days are thin-skinned, what’s that word … ? Snowbirds, snowflakes, anyways … that they have no easiness with meeting someone new or trying something different or won’t be open to opposing opinions,” he said.
He smiled as he gave my kids an approving thumbs-up.
“Don’t you just love when a stereotype is blown up right in front of you?”
This felt suspicious to me, and to a number of others on Twitter. But Zito named the Harvard students on the trip, and I was able to talk to five of them. Four of the five remember going to Mass, and one of them recalls the final quote.
“Although I don’t remember the part about thin-skinned students clearly, he did say the bit about stereotypes being blown up and he was very pleased to meet us,” Malcolm Reid, Harvard ’21, told me. “I do think it was an accurate representation of that conversation.”
That said, Reid and three other students on the trip told me they had been in a Catholic church before, putting a lie to Zito’s insistence that “only two of my students had set foot in a Catholic church.”
But that’s a relatively minor factual error in the scheme of things, and nothing in my conversations with the students provided positive evidence that Zito was fabricating; Reid’s testimony inclined me to believe the “stereotype” line is accurate.
The Harvard story almost feels like the Salena Zito problem in microcosm. There’s no absolute proof of fabrication, though it would have been much better journalistic hygiene for her to name the man she met in the church to help her editors and others with fact-checking. But it’s sloppy (two students who’d been to Mass versus four-plus), and there’s no confirmation that the most fake-sounding quote (“Snowbirds, snowflakes”) is real.
Zito has been defiant throughout this controversy. In a long thread replying to @rod_inanimate, she alleged the account and others “lied, in an attempt to discredit my hard-earned reputation, and my hard work.” She then elaborated on Face the Nation and in her New York Post column.
Seth Mandel, her colleague at the Post, “spent his entire Labor Day weekend, late into the night last night, and all day today, helping Salena compile” a defense of her work, Mandel’s wife, Bethany Shondark Mandel, said on Twitter. Seth Mandel has argued that “anyone with a shred of integrity will acknowledge [Zito’s] debunking and move on.”
That’s not likely to happen, and given Zito’s cases of plagiarism and the highly suspicious nature of some of the quotes above, I’m not sure that it should happen. The controversy will likely only be resolved if Zito releases audiotapes for the suspicious incidents, proving that her anonymous men on the street said what she claims they said. The only audio released so far has been that of Rubbico; she has produced no verification of any of the gas station incidents, for instance, or that she really met people hired by Demand Protest. Until she produces more audio, the doubts will remain, and her defenders will remain indignant that people believe them.
I remain skeptical of some of Zito’s reporting. I would still like to hear audio of some of her more fantastical anecdotes, and the plagiarism, especially the Wikipedia case, is unacceptable. But fabulism is an incredibly serious charge, and if people are going after Zito’s job, they’ll need much firmer evidence than currently exists.
Original Source -> The Salena Zito controversy, explained
via The Conservative Brief
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New world news from Time: Ahead of Pakistan’s Elections, Transgender Activists Push for a Seat at the Table
Pakistan’s transgender community recently celebrated the passage of a landmark law recognizing their basic rights. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2017 allowed citizens to determine their own gender identity, as well as banning harassment and discrimination against transgender people by employers, education services, and healthcare providers.
Pakistan became one of a handful of nations that provide protections for the minority, known locally in the country as khwaja siras — an umbrella term for members of the “third sex” community.
Historically, transgender people have occupied a complicated position in South Asian societies across Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. They are sometimes revered for supposed mystical powers, or invited to dance at auspicious events like weddings and births to bless the parties. Others see khwaja siras as misfits, relegating them to begging and prostitution to make a living. In Pakistan, attitudes toward transgender people can turn deadly. Earlier this year, a transgender woman was shot dead because she didn’t have change to break a higher currency note. In 2016, a community activist died of gunshot wounds because the hospital couldn’t decide which ward, male or female, to admit her to.
“Transgender people have been recognized in South Asia for centuries — the gender binary idea came into the picture only when the colonizers arrived,” says Omar Waraich, deputy director of Amnesty International in South Asia. “Sadly, they are ostracized and treated as freakshows by large sections of society.”
The new law is the latest step in a series of slow but significant developments that have helped Pakistan’s khwaja siras gain recognition. The community was first legally recognized in 2009 in a Supreme Court ruling that stated transgender people could obtain national identity cards with a third sex option. In 2013, Bindiya Rana, became one of the first legally recognized transgender women to stand in elections, and last year saw the country’s first third-gender passport being issued. In March, journalist Marvia Malik became Pakistan’s first transgender news anchor.
In the run up to Pakistan’s general elections on July 25, the law has taken on a new significance. About 13 transgender people were initially contesting seats this year. But nine candidates have reportedly dropped out due to financial constraints and public harassment to withdraw their nominations, underscoring the obstacles transgender people continue to face.
“For me, the real historic moment will be when a transgender candidate wins a seat,” Waraich says. “No one can say whether that will happen in these elections but you do get a sense that there is a sense of wanting to try something different.”
Ahead of the polls, TIME spoke to transgender activists who are spurred by a desire to help Pakistan’s transgender community have a voice in the national dialogue.
Bindiya Rana, chairperson, Gender Interactive Alliance Pakistan
Insiya Syed—ReutersBindiya Rana, a transgender independent candidate for the elections, during a pre-election analysis program in Karachi April 23, 2013.
“I was one of the first legally recognized members of my community to stand for elections in the 2013 polls. I ran because I wanted to show people that transgenders are just as capable as others and to inspire others like me. Despite the new law, there is no mention of khwaja siras in party manifestos and no reservation for us in government bodies.
The last national census listed just over 10,000 transgenders in all of Pakistan but the actual number is much higher. It felt like they don’t consider us as citizens. And it’s because of that census report that we couldn’t get the 5% reservations that we asked for in the bill. That’s why our community has to fight these elections for a seat at the table.”
Nayyab Ali, candidate in 2018 elections and national spokesperson, All Pakistan Transgender Election Network
Courtesy of Nayyab Ali.Nayyab Ali campaigning ahead of Pakistan’s upcoming general elections.
“The transgender community is progressing slowly in Pakistan — we’re finding positions in various industries like education and journalism. But the real change-making power lies in politics, which is why I’m contesting the elections this year. We need to be part of the legislative process to better our community. It’s nice to talk about acceptance and social inclusion but the ground realities need to change, too.
The new bill is encouraging though there’s still a lot of work to be done. Committees will be set up, policies drafted, by-laws framed and we need to be part of that. We now have something to work toward though there’s a long way to go. But I’m positive, there has been a lot of support and goodwill so far.”
Mehlab Jameel, activist, involved in the drafting process of the new law
“I realized the importance of having a voice in the legislative process while drafting the new bill. One of the earliest versions had a clause that allowed for a screening committee to administer medical tests and decide who was and wasn’t a transgender. That went completely against our rights — we need to be recognized on our own terms.
That’s why when we had a chance to sit down with parliamentarians and the National Commission for Human Rights, the body that was tasked with drafting a new bill, we pushed for self-perceived gender identification. They were very understanding and heard us out and finally gave into our demand. But without that dialogue this wouldn’t have happened.
The transgender community is active now and the momentum is with us. We have to build on it during the elections.”
July 19, 2018 at 11:06AM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com
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Major anti-abortion groups and leaders are pouring money and their support into an upcoming congressional primary in Illinois — but this time, it’s for a Democrat.
Rep. Dan Lipinski is one of the last anti-abortion Democrats left in Congress. For that reason — and his other socially conservative stances on LGBT rights and immigration — organizations like Planned Parenthood Action Fund and NARAL Pro-Choice America have put their weight behind his progressive opponent Marie Newman.
But in an unusual move, as first reported by McClatchy Thursday, the influential anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List is putting significant resources into a last-minute push on Lipinski’s behalf, including a “six-figure investment” in digital and mail campaigns and a canvassing push that aims to knock on 17,000 doors of anti-abortion, Democratic households in the district before the election next Tuesday.
“These is absolutely the first time we have supported a pro-life [Democratic] candidate in a campaign of this magnitude,” SBA List spokesperson Mallory Quigley told BuzzFeed News Thursday.
“He has come under fire from his own party specifically for his pro-life position, and his primary challenger is making the race about abortion.” Quigley continued. “It’s unfortunate that there are not more of his kind in his party.”
SBA List is a nonpartisan organization, but it is rare for them to support a Democrat. In 2010, the group actively worked to take down 20 Democrats in the House of Representatives who called themselves “pro-life” (15 of them were not reelected), going so far as to put up billboards in the district of then-Ohio Rep. Steve Driehaus reading, “Shame on Steve Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion!”
Since President Donald Trump’s election, the question of whether or not Democrats should accept and support anti-abortion candidates to win back seats in Republican-held districts has been hotly debated in the party, and some see Lipinski’s seat as putting this question to the test. Recent polling shows Lipinski and Newman neck-in-neck.
Though SBA List is the only major anti-abortion organization actively campaigning for Lipinski, many anti-abortion leaders said they have personally donated time and money to support Lipinski’s campaign.
Tom McClusky, the Vice President of March for Life, told BuzzFeed News that Lipinski is the first member of Congress he has ever personally donated to. McClusky and March for Life’s president Jeanne Mancini both donated to Lipinski’s campaign this year and have encouraged other anti-abortion movement leaders and friends to do the same.
“He’s a pro-life hero, the exact kind of person we want in office,” Mancini told BuzzFeed News in a statement Thursday. “Lipinski is in office for the right reason, really fighting for the dignity of the human person in every way. I respect him tremendously.”
Lipinski has represented Illinois’ 3rd district since 2003. The district has voted blue in presidential elections since 1988, and went to Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries. Only one Republican is running for the seat — Arthur Jones, an open Holocaust denier (he has a section on his website labeled “Holocaust?”) who is very unlikely to win given the district’s tilt.
Neither Lipinski nor Newman’s campaigns immediately responded to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.
Pro-abortion rights groups have been focused on this race for much longer than SBA List and their conservative counterparts. NARAL began a passionate campaign against Lipinski in November, which included a digital and mail campaign called “Let’s Dump Dan.” Other progressive organizations like EMILY’s List, MoveOn, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, among others, joined together in a super PAC to spend a total of $1.6 million on advertising and canvassing campaigns for Newman and against Lipinski.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund and NARAL told BuzzFeed News that they didn’t see SBA List’s last-minute push as a threat to Newman, but rather as a sign that the anti-abortion movement was worried about their candidate. They also saw it as a confirmation of what they had been accusing Lipinski of since November: that he is in line with Trump on the issue.
In the wake of some of those attacks, Lipinski quietly ditched a scheduled speaking engagement at the anti-abortion March For Life in January, after it was announced at the last minute that Trump would speak as well.
“Maybe [SBA List] is worried, but their involvement should worry Dan Lipinski’s people more,” NARAL spokesperson Kaylie Hanson-Long said. “When the same organization that stands solidly with Donald Trump decides to go all in, how do you think that’s going to go with this energized Democratic base that want nothing more than to defeat Trump and his values? Not well.”
Ema O'Connor is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.
Contact Ema O'Connor at [email protected].
Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
via BuzzFeed - Latest
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Clarification about Millennials for Bishop Talbert Swan and Generation X'ers who Think Like Him
When I initially seen Bishop Swan’s status I had no words, polite enough, to respond.
First of all, he asked a question ABOUT millennials and didn’t invite us to the table to explain.
he said “why are we?" to separate himself & whatever group of black church goers that agree with him FROM millennials. He deleted my comment and later his whole status.
I have a great deal of disdain for any individual that is SUPPOSED to be the Shepard of ALL the sheep in his ministry but still wants to know WHY people with issues need help.(b/c obviously not having a job, living with parents, and not going to school is an issue....He said it himself!)
so...
That’s stupid.
He literally used a statistic that said (UNDER HALF) of millennials need help with jobs, trade work, or education. That’s how I read the statistic…I didn’t read it and say “Oh, let’s stop pouring energy, effort and time into them because some of them still live with parents, God don’t speak to them anyhow.”
#1. The status was messy…if he wanted real concrete facts about his question google is all the way free 365 days a year.
#2. His status was a classic case of what was said VS what was interpreted. He tried to play it cool but the people in his comments were not here for it. He needed people to validate what he said instead of actually getting the HELP his ministry(mind) needs to better be able to bridge the gap.
I’m so confused at the logic behind this man’s status because he graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Master of Divinity in Urban Ministry from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. HOW did you go to school to figure out how to bridge the gap and ask a question like this??
WE both know good and well “urban” anything means you’d like to know (if only a little) about how to develop communities and individuals…right?
So what do you do when the educated ole schools THINK they know, TREAT you like they know, and DISMISS you before you get a chance to speak?
You respond in a way they can understand.
My good sir, you are a Bishop. If you ever wanna know why you (and people your age) need to care about a certain demographic of HUMAN BEINGS....don’t embarrass/entertain yourself by asking it over social media.
Get you a PR person, you may have had a valid point but no one wanted it to hear it after you deliberately used a statistic that:
reflects that MOST millennials are working or in school or both
PROVES WHY… our proclivities, wishes and desires MATTER.
WE ARE NOT TOSS-A-WAY’s you can’t just stop working on people because they live with their parents. Granted your INDIVIDUAL ministry may be dusty and in need of a Young Adult revival (or trainings for jobs, tech schools, and universities since that validates our worthiness to be worked on.)
Y’all know me…I like receipts. So I had to go find the study that prompted Bishop Swan to ask his question…
Whatever the case… because I’m here to correct AND INFORM I took it upon myself to actually r e a d the study….and y’all wanna know something? I found his answers.
Here is the link to the study he was referring to:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/demo/p20-579.pdf
Here are the quotes that were pulled directly from the study:
“Not only do
more young families have student
debt, they are deeper in debt too.
The amount owed on student loans
nearly tripled, rising from a median
of $6,000 to $17,300 across the
same period (in 2013 dollars)”
“Americans believe young people
should accomplish economic
milestones before starting a family.
Americans reported that the ideal
age for getting married and having
children is 25, the same age when
most Americans believe a young
person should be capable of supporting
a family”
(the mindset accompanied WITH the actions the Bishop is referring to)
Also…here are some links to timelines of the horrid rising educational cost…
http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/a-timeline-of-college-tuition/
https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-and-fees-and-room-and-board-over-time-1976-77_2016-17-selected-years
So he can better understand our debt, or why some choose to avoid college altogether.
To draw attention to the “living with parents” section…more black millennials than any other race in America live with their parents.
We also are fighting mass incarceration.
We also are fighting gentrification.
We also are fighting social constructs.
We are also fighting…..white privilege.
We are also fighting job discrimination.
We are also the psychological effects of WATCHING our grandparents, cousins, sisters and brothers get killed on FB live daily by authority. *something your 22 year old self saw minimally...I get to see on the daily basis. yay me! *
....SO THE LAST THING WE NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU SIR IS THAT THERE IS NO LONGER A NEED TO WORK WITH US...because if you'll be honest & real with yourself, that's the color of MOST of the millienials you pastor and who follow you on Facebook.
When Bishop Talbert Swan went college at any one of his 5 or so schools he went to, it didn’t cost NEARLY as much as it does today. I could build a house next door to his with the amount of money I had to borrow/was awarded in scholarships to attend Union, Rust College, Jackson State University, Lane AND Texas Southern…that’s 5 institutions , 4 cities, 1 degree, 2 cars, 1 apartment and two books later, chile!
…and on my Sunday mornings I don’t need a vessel before me that thinks less of me in ANY aspect. This 22 year old goes because she needs answers, love, and mentorship. This 22 year old goes because she’s been brought up to believe that if she cannot be vulnerable anywhere else in America she should at least feel safe and WANTED at the House of God.
Bishop, you’re too smart to ask questions JUST to get likes….start the honest discussion, and approach anything you’re not knowledgeable about as a student instead of derogatively.
Next time, read. I can tell from your educational backing found here (http://www.talbertswan.org/about-bishop-swan/) …that you know how. Hopefully somewhere in-between the anointing and God-given logic...you’ll get an answer instead of gossip about the state of your intellectual capacity.
& just KNOW that what you “asked/suggested” and the “we did it better/worked harder” mindset that came along with it is DANGEROUS. Take care of the people who will soon be taking care of you.
Millennials share the same age, NOT experience…
On behalf of millennials, Read…it’s STILL fundamental!. No need to reply with a long list of things you've done to prove anything, we could care less...just do better moving forward. That'll be just enough.
& I still...love you with the love of God.
More links that will help you understand, and with this knowledge I hope you ask better questions.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/6ce955194a094829ae433c74d32e98e7/genforward-poll-half-black-youth-face-job-discrimination
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/09/23/495013420/black-white-wage-gap-racial-disparity-discrimination
https://thinkprogress.org/how-racial-bias-affects-the-quality-of-black-students-education-642f4721fc84
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/27/blacks-with-college-experience-more-likely-to-say-they-faced-discrimination/
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-link-between-racism-and-depression-2834951
I’m going to ask that every millennial who comment’s also provide you with links from credible sources so that you will have a wealth of information about the topic at hand. Bless you.
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By Yves Smith. This article was first published on Naked Capitalism.
On every conceivable front, the Democrats double downing down on the strategy that led them to hemorrhage losses in representation, meaning power, at every level of government. In keeping, more and more voters are leaving the party.
The latest repeat of a failed strategy is to try to smear Sanders in a cack-handed effort to win over his base. This is as likely to succeed as calling Trump voters “deplorables” did.
The reality is that the Democratic party leders have no strategy. Instead, they are taking the playbook of a mad scientist in a kitschy horror movie, frantically spinning dials and flipping switches as his invention has gone out of control. His control, needless to say.
The Democrats’ actions made clear they were fixated on the Federal government patronage and revolving door goodies that control of the Executive branch conferred. Beyond the state-that-is-almost-a-country of California, the lucre isn’t large enough for them to deviate from their stance of being party of the 10% and trying to hold onto their traditional base by being marginally less God-awful than Republicans. Reader johnnygl flagged this section of a Washington Post story on how the post-election strategy of Russiaphobia plus Trump bashing plus yet more identity politics isn’t working with voters:
Democrats have lost considerable ground on this front. The 28 percent who say the party is in touch with concerns of most Americans is down from 48 percent in 2014 and the biggest drop is among self-identified Democrats, from 83 percent saying they are in touch to just 52 percent today. That is a reminder that whatever challenges Trump is having, Democrats, for all the energy apparent at the grass roots, have their own problems.
Let’s put this more bluntly: even with Trump turning out, whether by virtue of capture, inclination or not caring, backing solidly Republican positions, with his impulsive foreign policy shows of manhood as an added huge negative, Democrats are becoming more and more immune to lesser-evilism. The party has tried to fool voters too many times with hope and change and other pro-worker cant while delivering the goods only to their wealthy patrons. The defectors aren’t coming back until the party starts to deliver for them.
The Unity campaign is revealing how desperately the Democrats are clinging to their self-delusion. They seem to believe that they can kick Sanders and his voters and yet still get them to turn out at the polls for them. By contrast, Sanders, who knows what moves his base isn’t him personally but his policies, has only upside from participating in this charade. He gets a platform to keep selling his message, while the Democrats kid themselves that they can peel away his supporters without making concessions.
One proof that the operatives recognize the Unity campaign is backfiring is the upsurge in attacks on Sanders via the most loyal Democratic party mouthpieces, the Washington Post and the New York Times. With the election proving that the establishment media doesn’t have much sway with great swathes of the public, these hit pieces are tantamount to throwing water balloons at Sanders from the Acela: they may make gratifying splashes but they don’t do real damage. But they demonstrate yet again how committed the party remains to losing if winning requires giving more to ordinary citizens.
The first smear masquerading as reporting, Bernie Sanders’s strange behavior, ran last week in the Washington Post. It was so obtuse, presumably by design, that I remarked then: “This is either a candidate for ‘Most clueless political piece every written,’ as in ‘What about ‘power struggle’ don’t you understand?’ or Democratic party authoritarianism in action. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.”
The article, by Aaron Blake, is intellectually dishonest from the get-go. This is its first paragraph:
Bernie Sanders has embarked on a “Come Together and Fight Back” tour with with Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez. But he’s not really helping on that first part.
Really? Sanders launched a Unity Tour and Perez and the Democratic Party establishment decided to come along? This sort of “unity” charade is a Democratic party fixture.
Let us not forget why this exercise is even seen as necessary. The Democrats are trying to win over Sanders voters who correctly saw the selection of Perez as DNC head over Sanders’ pick Keith Ellison as a big fat middle finger to them. This “Unity Tour” is the 2017 analogy of the many efforts to “reintroduce” Hillary Clinton to voters, as if after decades of overexposure, they were somehow in the dark as to what she was about. They presume that if Perez hits the road with Sanders, they’ll come to like the new DNC, even though it is just the same as the old DNC.
The benefit to Sanders is that this is so patently foolish is that all he has to do is play along. He gets to go around the US and keep pitching his preferred policies.
But as Perez is getting boos at virtually ever whistlestop, someone must be at fault! And it can’t possibly be that the Democrats are trying to get the dogs to eat dog food that they’ve already rejected. No, it must be Sanders’ doing. The article proceeds from the straw man that it is Sanders’ job to create Democratic party unity, when the onus is on the party to find a way to reach his voters.
Put it another way: the Post, presumably reflecting the views of the Democratic elite, sees voters as chattel. They actually seem to believe that Sanders is like an old Tammany hall boss, or a union leader, who can deliver a block on his say so. So look at the things the Post views as offenses:
He said that he still isn’t actually a Democrat
He repeated his line that President Trump “did not win the election; the Democrats lost the election” — drawing some angry responses from Hillary Clinton supporters who see this as either a shot at her or as something that Sanders’s primary campaign contributed to (or both)
Sanders’s message has differed from Perez’s in a couple key ways
The big hissy fit, however, that Sanders hadn’t endorsed Ossoff yet, stating yet another obvious fact that Democrats don’t want the children to hear: “Some Democrats are progressive, and some Democrats are not,” and saying he didn’t know enough either way to decide.
Sanders did relent and endorse Ossoff. While purists are unhappy over that move, the reality is that his support will make perilous little difference either way in an affluent district in the South. And as reader Marina Bart pointed out in comments, the tisk-tiskers are missing the real play:
If the entire corporate media is aimed against you, it is very hard to fight back. Six corporations control something like 90% of media distribution in this country, and they deliver the messaging their plutocratic owners desire. Now add Silicon Valley’s corporate-controlled social media platforms, which have the same masters, same agenda, and same willingness to manipulation what information their users can access. Activists alone cannot win national elections. We need some sizable chunk of the millions who don’t really like or want to think about any of this, whether because they’re comfortable or despairing. They want the same policies we want. They just don’t want to work hard to get it, or grapple psychologically with the real situation we’re facing, because it’s upsetting. To reach those voters, we need some media coverage that isn’t aggressively hostile or deceitful. That’s why the Unity Tour was a brilliant thing for Bernie to do, even if it means getting prodded into sort of endorsing a hack like Ossoff.
Bernie is trying a strategy to take over the party from within. To do that means things like “Okay, sure, I’ll “endorse” Ossoff. He’d be better than a Republican. But he’s no progressive, and we need a progressive movement.” And then the Dems scream at him again, and try to squeeze better compliance out of him, but the damage TO THEM is done — lots of discussions of Ossoff’s positions, which means more people find out that he’s opposed to universal health care. I saw people all over the place in the last few days saying they had given Ossoff money and now they were sorry. Next time, maybe they’ll do a better job of vetting the candidates the neoliberal Dems are pushing.
And Bernie trundles on, saying things the corporate media has been hiding: how the Democratic Party lost seats all over the country during Obama’s term, just how bad that is. He’s shown the DNC Chair to be a boor and a boob.
He’s making it much harder for the Democrats to run the play they’re trying to run. He’s slowing down their ability to promulgate numerous false stories about who they are, how popular they are, what policies are popular, where their money goes — all of this is really helpful to any real change, no matter what comes next.
The effort to beat Sanders into line became more obviously two-faced with another hack job, this one in the New York Times, At a ‘Unity’ Stop in Nebraska, Democrats Find Anything But.
The cause celebre is that Sanders has backed a young progressive, Heath Mello, who is running for mayor of Omaha. Per the fixation of the Democrats with the top of the ticket, since when have they cared about a mayoral campaign, particularly in flyover?
Mello’s offense is that he is being depicted as anti-abortion. But that is a trumped up charge. Mello is Catholic. He’s adopted the formula that many Catholic campaigners have so as not to offend fellow Catholics who might be inclined to vote for him: to say he’s personally pro-life but politically supports abortion rights.
So what is his sin that has gotten the attack dogs after him, when anyone with an operating brain cell knows the real issue is his economic positions? This is apparently the only real dirt:
Mr. Mello, a practicing Catholic, supported a Nebraska State Senate bill requiring that women be informed of their right to request a fetal ultrasound before an abortion.
Let us contrast that with the actions of Democratic party vice presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, who also took the position that he is personally pro-life but politically supports the right to abortionsper Politico:
He pledged in his 2005 gubernatorial campaign to reduce the number of terminated pregnancies in the state by promoting adoption and abstinence-focused education. That cycle, the state NARAL chapter ripped Kaine’s GOP opponent, Jerry Kilgore, as “an extremely anti-choice candidate” but still withheld its endorsement of Kaine because he “embraces many of the restrictions on a woman’s right to choose.”
In a 2007 NARAL scorecard, Kaine was described as a “mixed-choice” governor and his state got an F grade thanks in part to a number of laws and other policies restricting access to abortions. Two years later, Kaine upset both local and national reproductive rights groups by signing a law that authorized the sale of customized “Choose Life” license plates. Kaine argued he was supporting free speech, but his critics complained that the law would fund pro-life organizations and didn’t square with another very important hat that he was wearing at the time: Obama’s personally picked head of the Democratic National Committee.
And proving how captured groups will go to bat for Team Dem, the validators for the attack on Mello and Sanders are the heads of the American Federation of Teachers and the pro-abortion group NARAL. But did either of them object to Tim Kaine’s clearly dodgy record? From the same Politico story quoted above:
Tarina Keene, president of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, declined to comment specifically on Kaine’s stance on abortion. Instead, she issued a statement focused on her group’s reasons for endorsing Clinton.
Oh, and what about the sainted Obama, who doesn’t have the vexing problem of having been raised Catholic? Or the Clintons?
In fact. both are official backers of the policy devised by Richard Nixon: of having abortions be legal but keeping them scarce by not having the government pay for them. That of course is not problem to the affluent 10% that is the Democratic party’s true base. The Hyde Amendment, the legislative embodiment of the “no Federal funding of abortions except to save the mother’s life or in cases of incest or rape, became law in 1976. The law was made more restrictive in the 1980s. The only change under the Clinton Administration was to allow for Medicaid to cover abortions for rape and incest.
Recall that Hillary Clinton said that in 2008 abortions should be “safe, legal and rare, and by rare, I mean rare.” categories that are not mutually compatible. And that is consistent with an earlier statement, reflecting her Methodist roots, that she saw abortion as “morally wrong”.
From an Atlantic story in 2016:
For the most part, Clinton’s stance matches the official stance of the United Methodist Church, or UMC—the tradition in which she was raised and remains a faithful member….To understand Clinton, according to her husband, “you should look first at her Methodist faith.” Her youth pastor and lifelong mentor, the Reverend Donald Jones, said she views “the world through a Methodist lens.”….
Clinton has made efforts to reach out to pro-life advocates and, The New York Times reports, she shows sincere respect for those whose stance is motivated by religious belief. It is not clear, however, that the public understands Clinton’s piety or the depth of her attachment to the Methodist tradition.
Needless to say, that resulted in Clinton in having a “nuanced” position on abortion that might look a tad too equivocal. Again from the Atlantic:
One of Clinton’s greatest challenges in the run-up to November will be to persuade the Millennials—people aged 18 to 35—who supported Bernie Sanders to go to the polls. Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum argued recently that young voters appreciated Sanders’ simple and clear rejection of limits on abortion: “He’s for X, full stop. He’s against Y, end of story. Millennials want a decisive answer, Drum said; otherwise it doesn’t “sound like the truth.” Because Clinton is open to regulations on abortion, progressive Millennials may see her as “another tired establishment pol who never gives a straight answer about anything.”
And Obama, the 11th dimensional chess player whose religion has never seemed to impinge on his politics? Obama issued Executive Order 13535, which extended the Hyde Amendment to Obamacare.
But you’d never know that reading the howls of the loyal camp followers, like Lauren Rankin in Allure, who followed close on the heels of the New York Times hit piece with Bernie Sanders’ Actions Show He Values Votes More Than Women. It apparently does not occur to her that a $15 hour minimum wage and other worker protections will give women a much greater ability to get abortions because more women who are now middle or lower income would be able to pay for them themselves.
And this is yet another demonstration of the Democrats embracing failure. Women’s fashion magazines were virtually ordering their readers to support Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Similarly, a female friend described Alternet’s pre-election editorial stance as “How to have better orgasms while voting for Clinton.”
Yet recent polls show that female tribalism didn’t work very well. Sanders has more support among women than men. It appears that women are more acutely aware of the precariousness of their financial position that fashion magazine writers and editors are.
In other words, the attacks on Mello and Sanders are rank hypocrisy. If you are card-carrying neoliberal, you are permitted to have “nuanced” positions on abortion. Bona fide progressives need not apply.
But as much as the mainstream media and orthodox Democrats try to have it both ways, savage Sanders yet win over his base, the more they will prove that he should proceed apace with his bottoms-up takeover campaign.
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Trolls Are Winning the Internet, Technologists Say
By Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic, March 28, 2017
I’m going to confess an occasional habit of mine, which is petty, and which I would still enthusiastically recommend to anyone who frequently encounters trolls or other unpleasant characters online.
Sometimes, instead of just ignoring a mean-spirited comment like I know I should, I type in the most cathartic response I can think of, take a screenshot, and then file that screenshot away in a little folder that I only revisit when I want to make my coworkers laugh.
I don’t actually send the response. I delete my silly comeback and move on with my life. For all the troll knows, I never saw the original message in the first place. The original message being something like the suggestion, in response to a piece I once wrote, that there should be a special holocaust just for women.
It’s bad out there, man!
We all know it by now. The internet, like the rest of the world, can be as gnarly as it is magical.
But there’s a sense lately that the lows have gotten lower, that the trolls who delight in chaos are newly invigorated and perhaps taking over all of the loveliest, most altruistic spaces on the web. There’s a real battle between good and evil going on. A new report by the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center suggests that technologists widely agree: The bad guys are winning.
Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 technologists and scholars about the forces shaping the way people interact with one another online. They asked: “In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?”
The vast majority of those surveyed--81 percent of them--said they expect the tone of online discourse will either stay the same or get worse in the next decade.
Not only that, but some of the spaces that will inevitably crop up to protect people from trolls may contribute to a new kind of “Potemkin internet,” pretty façades that hide the true lack of civility across the web, says Susan Etlinger, a technology industry analyst at the Altimeter Group, a market research firm.
“Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view,” Etlinger told Pew. “The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor.”
Tor is software that enables people to browse and communicate online anonymously--so it’s used by people who want to cover their tracks from government surveillance, those who want to access the dark web, trolls, whistleblowers, and others.
“Of course, this is already happening, just out of sight of most of us,” Etlinger said, referring to the use of hidden channels online. “The worst outcome is that we end up with a kind of Potemkin internet in which everything looks reasonably bright and sunny, which hides a more troubling and less transparent reality.”
The uncomfortable truth is that humans like trolling. It’s easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online--and it’s hard for platforms to design systems to stop them. Hard for two reasons: One, because of the “ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity,” as Pew puts it. And, two, because technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for people.
“Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform,” said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report. “Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged, excepting of course some egregious cases.”
News organizations, which once set the tone for civic discourse, have less cultural importance than they once did. The rise of formats like cable news--where so much programming involves people shouting at one another--and talk radio are clear departures from a once-higher standard of discourse in professional media. Few news organizations are stewards for civilized discourse in their own comment sections, which sends mixed messages to people about what’s considered acceptable. And then, of course, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter serve as the new public square.
“Facebook adjusts its algorithm to provide a kind of quality--relevance for individuals,” said Andrew Nachison, the founder of We Media, in his response to Pew. “But that’s really a ruse to optimize for quantity. The more we come back, the more money they make... So the shouting match goes on.”
The resounding message in the Pew report is this: There’s no way the problem in public discourse is going to solve itself. “Between troll attacks, chilling effects of government surveillance and censorship, etc., the internet is becoming narrower every day,” said Randy Bush, a research fellow at Internet Initiative Japan, in his response to Pew.
Many of those polled said that we’re now witnessing the emergence of “flame wars and strategic manipulation” that will only get worse. This goes beyond obnoxious comments, or Donald Trump’s tweets, or even targeted harassment. Instead, we’ve entered the realm of “weaponized narrative” as a 21st-century battle space, as the authors of a recent Defense One essay put it. And just like other battle spaces, humans will need to develop specialized technology for the fight ahead.
Researchers have already used technology to begin to understand what they’re up against. Earlier this month, a team of computer scientists from Stanford University and Cornell University wrote about how they used machine-learning algorithms to forecast whether a person was likely to start trolling. Using their algorithm to analyze a person’s mood and the context of the discussion they were in, the researchers got it right 80 percent of the time.
They learned that being in a bad mood makes a person more likely to troll, and that trolling is most frequent late at night (and least frequent in the morning). They also tracked the propensity for trolling behavior to spread. When the first comment in a thread is written by a troll--a nebulous term, but let’s go with it--then it’s twice as likely that additional trolls will chime in compared with a conversation that’s not led by a troll to start, the researchers found. On top of that, the more troll comments there are in a discussion, the more likely it is that participants will start trolling in other, unrelated threads.
“A single troll comment in a discussion--perhaps written by a person who woke up on the wrong side of the bed--can lead to worse moods among other participants, and even more troll comments elsewhere,” the Stanford and Cornell researchers wrote. “As this negative behavior continues to propagate, trolling can end up becoming the norm in communities if left unchecked.”
Stopping trolls isn’t as simple as creating spaces that prevent anonymity, many of those surveyed told Pew, because doing so also enables “governments and dominant institutions to even more freely employ surveillance tools to monitor citizens, suppress free speech, and shape social debate,” Pew wrote.
“One of the biggest challenges will be finding an appropriate balance between protecting anonymity and enforcing consequences for the abusive behavior that has been allowed to characterize online discussions for far too long,” Bailey Poland, the author of “Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online,” told Pew.
Another challenge is that no matter what solutions people devise to fight trolls, the trolls will fight back. Even among those who are optimistic that the trolls can be beaten back, and that civic discourse will prevail online, there are myriad unknowns ahead.
“Online discourse is new, relative to the history of communication,” said Ryan Sweeney, the director of analytics at Ignite Social Media, in his response to the survey. “Technological evolution has surpassed the evolution of civil discourse. We’ll catch up eventually. I hope. We are in a defining time.”
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Oh, those smooth-talking, self-congratulating white liberals. Listen to them moon over Barack Obama. Look at how widely they open their arms to a black visitor. Don’t be duped. They’re wolves in L. L. Bean clothing. There’s danger under the fleece. That’s a principal theme in the most surprising movie hit of the year so far, “Get Out,” whose box office haul in America crossed the $100 million mark last weekend. Heck, that’s the premise. The black protagonist heads with his white girlfriend from an apartment in the city to a house in the woods, where he’s gushingly welcomed by her parents. But their retreat is no colorblind Walden, not if you peek into the basement. I won’t say what’s down there. I don’t want to spoil the fun or sully the chill. Besides, I’m less fascinated by the movie’s horrors than by its reception. The most ardent fans of “Get Out,” many of them millennials, don’t just recommend it. They urge it, framing it as a “woke” tribe’s message to the slumbering masses, a parable of the hypocrisy that white America harbors and the fear with which black Americans move through it. Photo Daniel Kaluuya as Chris in “Get Out.” Credit Justin Lubin/Universal Pictures The enthusiasm for the movie says a whole lot about how one group of Americans views the other, and it underscores the distance between them. I’m tempted to call “Get Out” a movie for the age of Trump, perhaps the movie for the age of Trump. For his opponents, it has the right timbre of foreboding. For his supporters, it brims with what they surely see as lefty paranoia. If anything ever cried out for a Frank Luntz focus group, it’s “Get Out.” I’ll bring popcorn along with my tape recorder. Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story But the movie’s African-American writer and director, Jordan Peele, conceived and began developing it well before the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency came into focus. He wasn’t responding to stark examples of racism like that infamous tweet last week in which Representative Steve King, the Iowa Republican, warned against trying to “restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” He wasn’t reflecting the fresh currency of the phrases “white nationalism” and “white supremacy.” He was moved by the myth that, with Obama’s election, we were entering some postracial era. No small number of liberals bought into that, and “Get Out” is an all-out assault on their complacency, a bloody mockery of it. Photo Jordan Peele, the writer and director of “Get Out,” on set during filming. Credit Justin Lubin/Universal Pictures “Obama was elected and all of a sudden we weren’t addressing race or there was this feeling like, if we stop talking about it, it will go away,” Peele told National Public Radio’s Terry Gross during an appearance on her program, “Fresh Air,” last week. He added that he was concerned about “a denial of the reality of the African-American experience and the horrors” attached to it. “Get Out” is being categorized as a horror movie, though Peele prefers the neologism “social thriller,” and it’s more eerie than violent, with superb pacing that critics are rightly praising. It’s also a reminder that the best horror movies are intensely topical, putting a fantastical, grotesque spin on the tensions of their times. I could subject you to my whole long riff on Vatican II and “The Exorcist.” (Don’t worry: I won’t.) I could link abortion to “Rosemary’s Baby,” women’s liberation to “The Stepford Wives” and Black Lives Matter to “Get Out,” in which black lives matter to the main white characters in only a ghoulish fashion. The ingeniously plotted details of “Get Out” — not just what’s in the movie, but what’s left out — gather and distill complaints that black activists, writers and intellectuals have brought to the fore over recent years: the objectification and violation of black bodies; white people’s appropriation of black culture; the trope of the white savior. Photo Daniel Kaluuya as Chris and Allison Williams as Rose in the film. Credit Justin Lubin/Universal Pictures “Get Out” has proved to be unusually rich fodder for commentary, a Rorschach test in which shadows and strands of the past and present are visible. It “perfectly captures the terrifying truth about white women,” according to the title of an essay in Cosmopolitan by Kendra James, who wrote, “American history is littered with the bodies of black men jailed, beaten and killed due to the simple words of white women.” ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story An article in The Atlantic theorized that the crucial role of photography in the movie may evoke “how important camera phones and video recordings have been for many African-Americans experiencing police violence.” An article in Vox pondered the “benevolent racism” of “Get Out,” while one in The Muse observed: “The real horror, exemplified many times over, is the weapon of white privilege and pretense.” A BuzzFeed list of “22 secrets” hidden in the movie even noted that Froot Loops cereal in one scene could be symbolic of miscegenation. But to understand fully the feelings that “Get Out” stirs up and the chord it strikes, you have to turn to social media. A typical Twitter post: “What if the blind man in #getout represents white people who claim ‘not to see color’ but still end up contributing to oppression and racism.” It was retweeted more than 1,000 times and liked more than 1,700. Photo Bradley Whitford as Dean and Catherine Keener as Missy in “Get Out.” Credit Justin Lubin/Universal Pictures Kellik Dawson, an 18-year-old freshman at Ithaca College, wrote on Facebook that the “catharsis of watching that black man” fight back against white oppressors “saved my life.” I swapped emails with Dawson, who is black, on Friday, when he told me that he’d seen the movie twice and would probably buy it as soon as it’s available on DVD. He said that “Get Out” meant so much to him because it “shows the dangers of racism from white liberals” and because white audiences were embracing it even though “it rejected the oldest horror movie formula of the black person dying first.” That white audience is a notably young one: Exit polls revealed that nearly half of all the people who saw “Get Out” when it opened on the last weekend in February were under the age of 25. Data from the survey organization CinemaScore suggested that this group of moviegoers was especially taken with “Get Out” — they gave it an average rating of A+. Moviegoers of all ages awarded it an A-, which is still well above the norm for the horror genre. 491 COMMENTS Peele, who is half the TV comedy sketch duo “Key & Peele,” has set a precedent with “Get Out,” becoming the first black writer-director whose debut movie hit that $100 million mark. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story He’s in fact biracial — his mother is white — and he’s married to a white woman. His biography bridges the racial divide, a territory that apparently seethes with more misunderstandings and greater malice than most Americans care to admit. Just check out the basement. I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni) and join me on Facebook. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 19, 2017, on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Horror of Smug Liberals. Today's Paper|Subscribe Continue reading the main story
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