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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 22 days

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Daniel Boris, Vladimir Putin's Nesting Dolls

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 8, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 09, 2024

On Sunday, Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Turner was being questioned about an interview in which Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Russia specialist Julia Ioffe that “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul blamed right-wing media. When asked which Republicans he was talking about, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.”

Catherine Belton and Joseph Menn reviewed more than 100 internal Kremlin documents from 2022 and 2023 obtained by a European intelligence service and reported in the Washington Post today that the Russian government is running “an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment.” Kremlin-backed trolls write fake “news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions” while claiming that “Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”

Aaron Blake pointed out in the Washington Post that Republicans are increasingly warning that Russian propaganda has fouled their party. Blake notes that Russia specialist Fiona Hill publicly told Republicans during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into Trump that they were repeating “politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” but Republicans angrily objected.

Now Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John Cornyn (R-TX) and a top aide to Senator Todd Young (R-IN), as well as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and even Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, have warned about the party’s ties to Russia. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) has said the Republican Party now has “a Putin wing.”

Trump has hinted that he has a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Birnbaum reported in the Washington Post on the details of that plan: he would accept Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the Donbas region. He refuses to say how he would negotiate with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been adamant that Ukraine will not give up its territory to an invader, or Russia president Vladmir Putin, who has claimed all of Ukraine, but after meeting with Trump last month, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said Trump told him he would accomplish “peace” by cutting off funds to Ukraine.

Trump’s team said Orbán’s comment was false, but it is worth noting that this plan echoes the one acknowledged by Trump’s 2016 campaign director Paul Manafort as the goal of Russian aid to Trump’s campaign.

Fiona Hill told the Washington Post reporters that Trump’s team “is thinking…that this is just a Ukraine-Russia thing…rather than one about the whole future of European security and the world order.”

Trump’s MAGA loyalists in the House of Representatives have held up funding for Ukraine for six months. Although a national security supplemental bill that would fund Ukraine has passed the Senate and would pass the House if it were brought to the floor, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring it to the floor. The House returns to work tomorrow after a two-week recess but is so backed up on work that Johnson is not expected to bring up the Ukraine measure this week.

Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told the Washington Post’s Belton and Menn: “The impact of the Russian program over the last decade…is seen in the U.S. congressional debate over Ukraine aid…. They have had an impact in a strategic aggregate way.”

The Trump loyalists echoing Russia who have taken control of the Republican Party appear to be hardening into a phalanx around the former president, but even as they do so, Trump himself appears to be crumbling.

In the week since Trump posted a $175 million appeals bond, halting the seizure of his properties to satisfy the $454 million judgment against him and the Trump Organization, multiple problems with that bond have come to light. It is possible the bond isn’t worth anything at all, and New York attorney general Letitia James has filed papers to require Trump’s lawyers or the bond underwriter to show that it’s good within ten days. A hearing is set for April 22.

Meanwhile, Trump’s trial for election interference in 2016, when he paid people with damaging information to keep quiet before the election and falsified business records to hide those payments, is set to begin on April 15. Evidently very worried about this trial, Trump has already tried eight times to delay it until after November’s election, and today his lawyers tried yet again by requesting a delay so he could fight to get the trial moved to a different venue, but an appeals judge rejected the attempt.

Aside from Trump’s personal problems as a presidential candidate, the Republicans face strong headwinds because of their deeply unpopular opposition to abortion rights. Trump has openly bragged about being the instrument for ending the rights recognized in the United States since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since then, abortion bans are galvanizing opposition, and the Republicans are trying to find a message that can bring back angry voters without antagonizing the antiabortion white evangelicals who make up their base.

After months of waffling on the issue, Trump today released a video trying to thread that needle by echoing the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump said in the video that states will decide the issue for themselves, a statement that simply reflects the Dobbs decision.

This was a dodge. In the video, Trump appealed to the antiabortion loyalists by telling the ghoulish lie that women are “executing” their babies even after birth. He also ignored that Republicans are already calling for a national ban, extremist antiabortion Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has tried to take the common abortion drug mifepristone off the national market by challenging its FDA approval, and legislatures in many Republican-dominated states are refusing to implement the will of the people to protect abortion rights even after they have voted for such protections.

Still, antiabortion leaders, including Mike Pence, immediately slammed Trump’s statement.

The video did, though, make an enormously interesting and unintended point: Trump is communicating with voters outside his carefully curated bubble almost exclusively through videos, even on a topic as important as abortion. At rallies, his speeches have become erratic and wandering, with occasional slurred words, and observers have wondered how he would present to more general audiences. It appears that his team has concluded that he will not present well and that general audiences must see him in carefully curated settings, like this apparently heavily edited video.

The Trump takeover of the Republican National Committee (RNC) also appears to be in trouble. This weekend, Trump claimed to have raised $50 million in a single night from billionaires, but that number is conveniently a little more than double the new record of what President Joe Biden raised at an event last week with former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and it is long past time for everyone to stop believing anything Trump says about money.

More to the point, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported today that the RNC’s aggressive purge of the staff to guarantee that positions are held only by Trump loyalists means that “the RNC has been left without people with deep knowledge of election operations at the Republican party’s central committee.” Lowell notes this lack is especially apparent on the RNC’s data team, which is being moved from Washington, D.C., to Palm Beach, Florida, near Mar-a-Lago.

And yet Trump loyalists continue to block aid to Ukraine, threatening the existence of the rules-based international order that has helped to prevent war since World War II. Last week, even Trump’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo warned Speaker Johnson against “abandoning our Allies at this time of great need, when they are staring down enemies of the free world.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political cartoons #Daniel Boris #nesting dolls #Putin #russia #collusion #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #Ukraine #war in Ukraine #House Republicans #Russian Propaganda #election 2024 #election interference #funding for Ukraine

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 10 months

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The Ukrainian oligarch Republicans claim bribed Joe Biden said he never actually talked to Biden, according to an interview transcript made public Thursday by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

Mykola Zlochevsky is a co-founder of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma that employed Biden’s son Hunter for several years. Zlochevsky served as Ukraine’s energy minister, but has been in hiding since fleeing corruption charges.

Republicans claim there’s evidence a Burisma executive — apparently Zlochevsky — paid Joe Biden a $5 million bribe when he was vice president in exchange for an official favor. They’ve demanded the FBI hand over a document reflecting a confidential source’s conversation with Zlochevsky.

Raskin has now countered with a document of his own — a three-page transcript of a 2019 interview between Zlochevsky and an acquaintance of Rudy Giuliani, who at the time was publicly seeking dirt on Biden on behalf of then-President Donald Trump.

“No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement” with Burisma, Zlochevsky says in the transcript.

When asked if the Vice President had assisted him or his company “in any way,” Zlochevsky says no.

In 2015, however, a Burisma executive named Vadym Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden in an email for having had the chance to meet his father at a charity dinner, though other guests told The New York Times they didn’t recall the elder Biden having a substantive conversation with Pozharskyi.

Politico in 2020 reported the contents of the Zlochevsky transcript, and Democrats have repeatedly referred to it in response to Republican claims that the FBI is withholding derogatory material against Biden. Democrats obtained the transcript in 2019 in their impeachment inquiry into Trump for pressuring Ukraine to announce a sham investigation of the Bidens.

Raskin has said FBI officials told him the Justice Department assessed the derogatory material on Biden and found it wasn’t worth formally investigating, but the bureau has declined to make any public statements to that effect. So Raskin has turned to what lawmakers already have on hand from Zlochevsky.

“Despite being interviewed as part of a campaign by Mr. Giuliani and his proxies in 2019 and 2020 to procure damaging information about the Biden family, Mr. Zlochevsky explicitly and unequivocally denied those allegations,” Raskin said in a letter to House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) on Thursday.

“Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements are just one of the many that have debunked the corruption allegations against President Biden that were first leveled by Rudy Giuliani and have been reviewed by former President Trump’s own Justice Department,” Raskin said.

In response, Comer insisted the FBI’s tip from a confidential human source who spoke to the Burisma executive has nothing to do with Giuliani. (He has not explicitly said the source is Zlochevsky, but has noted the source is in hiding. Other Republicans, including Giuliani, have named Zlochevsky.)

“The Burisma executive claims then-Vice President Biden solicited and received a $5 million bribe in exchange for certain actions,” Comer said in a statement on Thursday. “The executive also claims he didn’t pay ‘the big guy’ directly but used so many bank accounts that it would take ten years to unravel.”

State Department officials have said they considered Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board during his father’s vice presidency awkward because it looked like a conflict of interest. Joe Biden at the time was the face of the U.S. government’s Ukraine policy and urged the country to root out corruption, including by firing its top prosecutor.

Trump dispatched Giuliani to find evidence that Biden’s action was designed to protect his son, but Republicans have been unable to substantiate claims that the elder Biden bent U.S. foreign policy in his family’s favor. An investigation by Senate Republicans in 2020 concluded it was “not clear” that Hunter Biden’s position with Burisma affected the U.S. government’s stance toward Ukraine.

Nevertheless, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have kept the story alive this year, seizing on the FBI’s refusal to hand over unverified raw material to argue the bureau is protecting the Bidens.

They have stepped up their efforts following this month’s federal indictment of Donald Trump on Espionage Act charges.

On Wednesday, Comer asked the Treasury Department to hand over any “suspicious activity reports” filed by banks on accounts related to Zlochevsky and other Burisma executives. In his letter to Treasury, Comer claimed his committee “has reviewed government documents that allege President Biden, while serving as Vice President, solicited and received a bribe from a foreign source in return for certain actions.”

Other Republicans have suggested that Zlochevksy might not be a credible source. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), for instance, said earlier this month that the bribery allegation “could be coming from a very corrupt oligarch who could be making this stuff up.”

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politicalprof · 6 months

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Now all it takes is 23 Democrats to vote for an election-denying conspiracy theorist who covered up a sexual abuse scandal and is engaging in an impeachment inquiry against a Democratic president for Jim Jordan to become Speaker of the House.

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whinlatter · 8 months

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author's note | chapter 8: bones 🦴

thank you for reading chapter eight of Beasts! this week, it's hotting up politically - ginny meets with the minster of magic, enjoys a hot beverage with all of her ex boyfriends, finds out about the clinton impeachment and rides the east coast mainline from edinburgh to london for free with no cancellations or delays a week before christmas. now that really is magic.

got a bumper author's note this week (and some metas to follow), plus a sneak peek of chapter nine (oh the cameos we've got coming! i've got flashback fever). i am also accepting any and all guesses for who the gang will go as for the grimmauld muggle-themed NYE party. we know anthony's going as tony blair, terry boot's deciding between a terry's chocolate orange or the golden boot, but what will the rest of the DA go as? answers on a postcard/in the askbox pls. ok let's discuss this wet and wintery chapter that i wrote at the beach during a heatwave in august, for some reason

✨ spoilers for this chapter below the cut ✨

writing things and headcanons:

the hogwarts inquiry and graves on the ministry: the chapter opens with graves (himself an ex ministry employee, though we don’t know the circumstances of his exit yet) poking holes in the wizengamot’s approach to justice thus far in the post-war period, suggesting holding individuals accountable - especially someone like thicknesse who was imperiused - misses how the entire wizarding state is implicated in wartime crimes against muggleborns and other persecuted groups. also disillusioned by the way post-war trials are going, kingsley wants to take a different course of action to get to the bottom of what happened at hogwarts during the war. a lot of post-war fics do an amazing job doing post-war justice through criminal trials, and i wanted to do something a bit different for this fic that is explicitly interested in places and institutions and the cultures they foster (hogwarts and the ministry itself, but grimmauld place and, soon, the burrow, home to different kinds of institutions, including families). like a lot of people who grew up in the uk in the early 00s public inquiries - like the leveson inquiry into media culture and phone hacking, or the chilcott inquiry into the iraq war - really left a big impression on me (though i’m sure this is also true in lots of political cultures, not least in the US in things like senate hearings etc). i also really love seeing inquiries and hearings rendered in fiction (in tv, jesse armstrong shows like the thick of it and succession), so knew i wanted to have a go writing these into this fic. there are actually quite a few inquiries of varying scale that happen in the canon series (though none are public), so we know this is a mechanism the ministry has previously used to investigate various breaches of law or accepted norms (in CoS, arthur faces one over the car; over buckbeak in PoA; into percy over crouch; dumbledore asks for one after the dementor attack on harry, which fudge rejects; into bode’s murder at st mungo’s, and into the miscarriage of justice that saw sirius jailed for the potters’ murders). i’m literally just going to quote from taylor_fannon074’s gorgeous comment on this because it’s so well put:

‘The Wizarding World knows that their children have been forcibly put at the center of a war they didn’t know existed for most of it. Children are the first line of attack when it comes to implementing fascist ideologies. People areso sensitive about children and it’s a perfect weapon to utilize against anything that you want. It’s why Dumbledore became headmaster when he could’ve been Minister of Magic. It’s why the Malfoys are Voldemort’s greatest allies. If it were just about the Carrows they’d carry all the blame, now the defendants are the Ministry. Kingsley is using this tactic to direct the people’s anger towards the Ministry’s systemic oppression. He’s giving the kids a platform to talk about how a werewolf was the greatest teacher they ever had and several ministry officials tortured them. It calls the ministry’s competency into question, planting the seeds of doubt. I don’t think Kingsley aiming for a full scale revolution but trying to open the curtains and get wizards more active in their community. He’s going after that statute of secrecy next, I can feel it in my bones!!!!’

kingsley: there are so many really great reads on kingsley as minister after the war, particularly kingsley taking on the ruthless (and manipulative) instincts of a politician, and speculation about that might clash with harry’s worldview and longstanding resentment of ministers carrying about things like public image and making moral compromises to get things done. i don’t disagree with those reads at all, and think they have a ton of basis in canon. what i knew i wanted in beasts, though, was to see if you could write a different kingsley, someone who hasn’t abandoned his principles but instead is trying to centre them. i wanted to play with the idea that all politicians are the same’, asking how kingsley’s contradictions - an avowed progressive, a lifelong ministry insider with more links to the muggle world than most, a resistance fighter turned a minister of magic trusted and admired by the children of the order - would shape his approach to try to capture post-war momentum for rebuilding and make real change, whatever that might look like. i also wanted this dynamic of kingsley and ginny having some familiarity with each other that we don’t see from the canon series that might hint at some wartime interactions we haven’t seen yet. anyway i wrote this scene with kingsley and ginny ages ago and then i read the unfinished but excellent fic about ginny and post-war justice cited below and was crushed to see someone had already written a version of the same scene much better. what a blow! (read that fic)

ginny’s card-making: ginny weasley loves to decorate and she loves christmas. canon could not be clearer about this. if you think she wouldn’t spitefully refuse to wish minerva mcgonagall seasons’ greetings then i’m sorry i think you are wrong with a capital W. graves didn’t get a card but he did get an essay because she’s warming up to him a bit but cards are only for those who aren’t on ginny approval probation

writing on the wall: actually this is just me apologising to the anon who sent me this ask ages ago and i didn’t reply because i knew i had this scene in the bank and didn’t want to spoil it but yeah basically anon i could not agree with you more!!! i think it’s really a squandered opportunity in canon not to make more of this - in those old ootp planning notes jkr was going to have ginny write on the wall about umbridge in temper, but then removed it, so clearly was thinking of the DA wall daubing as a parallel with CoS but then… gave the line to neville lol. fuming. anyway! had to be done! thank u so much anon and so sorry again!

beasts, beings and patronuses: my favourite part of this chapter to write! (obviously that’s a lie it was the bit where harry and ginny shagged but second favourite for sure). graves goes all enlightenment subjectivity theory again smh, and then suggests what’s happened with the stag antlers might be something to do with a great disturbance to harry’s soul. @saintsenara think this is me steathily building up a tomarry endgame - other theories are circulating, all theories have me salivating

slughorn: hardcore hinny shipper, we have to stan. what’s he up to? also rina girl get back to school you're making ginny look conscientious

hermione: thank you to the extremely patient romione folks in my inbox - the trouble with this plot is that i have to keep all the romione bits off stage for now (and i have written some hermione and ron pov missing moment scenes that i might drop when this plot is fully developed and the mystery has ended) but for now i’m just sorry that so far in the published chapters the hermione plot is all unhealthy coping mechanisms and no answers!

muggle london: did i go rummaging on the freedom of information requests sent to transport for london to find out adult and child fares for central london weekend travel in 1998? yes i did. you never know when the transport pedants are going to flood your mentions !!! ‘are you a child’ ‘sort of’ could be summary of the entire fic really couldn’t it

the exes: i knew i wanted an unlikely character to speak a bit of truth to ginny, someone she wouldn’t be expecting to call her on her shit. the idea of using one of her exes to do it seemed satisfying for a couple of different reasons. i liked the idea of using a character who knows ginny well and who sees through her a bit, but also has nothing to lose throwing out some tough love to her face because they don’t really have any investment in being in her good books anymore. i also liked the idea of not taking ginny’s canonical descriptions of her relationships with her exes for granted, and using those relationships as an example of previous incidences where this character has kidded themselves, or at least come up with a retroactive narrative of something that has happened to them as a coping mechanism that actually masks a bigger, more complicated truth. (i have a longer meta on ginny and her exes i’ll post this week that isn’t expressly beasts-related where i’ll bang on about my read on what these relationships were to her, but for now suffice to say it seemed important in a fic that is at heart a coming of age ginny character study to draw in characters who were likely formative for her in her teenage years in some way). dean seemed a complicated choice, though (more about him below), so… michael corner it was.

michael corner (or: characterisation when the character has about five whole lines in the whole of canon):

this is michael corner this whole chapter:

i had a ball trying to figure out how to write michael corner, as the discord girlies can attest. michael is a very minor character in the series, with only a handful of scenes/appearances, and he spends most of them being a little dickhead lmao. the man never stops interrupting people to call them out/correct them. in his first scene in canon in ootp, at the hog’s head, michael sasses hermione on her motivations to set up the DA (‘“You want to pass your DADA O.W.L. too though, I bet?”’ - that earns him a snippy clapback) and then interrupts harry when harry’s being modest to both praise him but also correct him lol (‘“Not with the dragon, you didn’t,” said Michael Corner at once. “That was a seriously cool bit of flying...”’.) in DH, he yells at harry for planning to nip in and nip out of hogwarts when all the DA are living in hiding (‘“You’re going to leave us in this mess?” demanded Michael Corner’), and then gets annoyed at luna for being dumb about the diadem (‘“Yeah, but the lost diadem,” said Michael Corner, rolling his eyes, “is lost, Luna. That’s sort of the point.”’) when it comes to ginny, she calls him a ‘fool’ when he almost gives the game away about the DA in the hall, and when they’re paired up at the DA and she’s killin it hexing him he’s “either very bad or unwilling to jinx her”. given his interest in his academics - and that he’s a ravenclaw - i think we can suspect it’s the latter, a display of chivalric concern that was never going to go down well with gin. they then break up after ginny decides he’s too ‘sulky’ about ravenclaw’s loss at quidditch, after which michael immediately goes off to get with cho (michael and harry bonding over their shared type fic when). but. michael’s also someone ginny (someone who does not suffer fools!) went out with for an entire year, so can’t be a total dickhead, clearly knows right from wrong and has moments of real bravery - joining the DA in the first place, but also enduring torture that neville describes as particularly horrific for trying to rescue a chained up first-year during the DH, which would almost certainly make him deserving of ginny’s respect after the war. being in the DA under the carrows must have been an intense bonding experience for all involved, and actually would have forced ginny and michael back into each other’s lives in a way that forced them to develop some kind of working relationship. all this then added up to the decisions i made to write him as he is in beasts: someone who is grouchy, sassy, contrarian, too competitive, a bit jealous of others’ abilities (the sore loser), and fond of calling people out/correcting people, but also someone who speaks his mind and whose heart is, ultimately, in the right place, a bit of an arse but not a baddie. and i think that makes sense as a character ginny weasley would be attracted to, at least initially, and who she can get behind as someone whose opinion she will listen to, with a pinch of salt.

bonus michael headcanons: other characterisation bits that are more headcanons than anything else: michael, terry and anthony’s band. ginny is canonically a fan of the weird sisters, with a poster up in her room. the weird sisters play at the yule ball. michael and ginny meet at the yule ball. like literally nine billion other teenage relationships, wouldn’t be fun if michael and ginny first met/got to chatting because they both liked the same band? then that became: well, dean was artistic - what if ginny’s into creatives? wouldn’t it be a laugh if michael, terry and anthony, this three piece gang of boy besties, were in a band? so that became me imagining them all in a promising but bit-too-clever-for-their-own-good indie band, alt-j or vampire weekend of the 90s, very into the smiths. (the album cover ginny recognises in their flat ‘of a white turreted castle, lush woodland by a sunlit lake’ is blur’s country house - partly because the castle in that album art looks a bit like hogwarts, but also because country house was the single that, as british readers might remember, was in a very famous race for number 1 with oasis in the battle of britpop in august 1995, which became about the middle-class southern band (blur) vs the northern working class equivalent (oasis). in my mind the ravenclaw boys would have been team blur and the gryffindor boys are team oasis lol. 90s lore!) the ravenclaw boys being low key into hallucinogenic potions is literally because michael has a throwaway line in hbp where he asks slughorn about felix felicis lol (‘“Have you ever taken it, sir?” asked Michael Corner with great interest.”). so yeah that was enough to get me imagining michael and the boys as low key stoners but also into experimenting with different psychedelic substances and writing bangin’ tunes. they’re boarding school teenage boys, after all!

dean: ah dean 🥺 one day i’ll finish that damn dean fic. the dean we see here is who i imagine dean would be after the war - more lost and alone than literally any of the other main characters, properly unhappy. unlike the golden trio, or the silver trio, dean spends his deeply traumatic war alone, and i think that would fuck him up. he has to go on the run and leave his muggle family behind, a family he’s lied to about the severity of the war (“My parents are Muggles, mate,” said Dean, shrugging. “They don’t know nothing about no deaths at Hogwarts, because I’m not stupid enough to tell them.”’). he must have struggled, as the trio did, with accessing food and finding places of safety, but also had far fewer protections than the trio (no perkins tent, no invisibility cloak, none of hermione’s abilities). he’d also have had to deal with the fact that he’s a young black boy on the run in majority white racist nineties britain, where he would be hyper visible and vulnerable to the suspicions of muggles as well as the wizarding ministry and snatchers (the police/suspicious members of the public are never going to have treated a black teenage boy who seems homeless well). he briefly has the company of ted tonks, surrogate dad figure, dirk cresswell and the goblins, but then watches all but griphook get murdered. then he’s snatched, rescued, and goes to live at shell cottage with his ex’s brother lol. he would have none of the wartime bonding and sense of group solidarity that the wartime DA seem to have built, and while it seems likely he too would join the aurors if invited to punish the people who persecuted him, i think he would feel intensely isolated and lonely as well as challenged by the demands of that job, one he never really seems to crave in canon. got our first few deamus hints here but yeah basically if michael’s going thru one kind of trauma, dean’s going through another, one that he’s never going to open up to the ex who hurt him about. he doesn’t hate ginny - in DH, when he hears about the sword theft, he shows clearly still wants her to be safe and well - but he’s had none of michael’s time to build a post-relationship working friendship with her, and the emotional trust isn’t there anymore. wow bummed myself out writing that out jesus. he could have offered her a cup of tea, though. that’s just basic brit etiquette

baby’s first almost smut: look. what was i supposed to do. these two haven't shared a bed since august. if you think they’re not fucking immediately on sight i simply do not know what to tell you

(gif courtesy of @uncontainedhybrid)

reading list:

postwar justice (and kingsley as MoM):

The Weight of the After by PaperyInk Castles by @pebblysand

the ravenclaw boys:

these three brilliant fics by chaserzachsmith (crikey) Notes from the Ravenclaw Bulletin Board by lost_robin

grimmauld place:

haunted house by @bronzeagepizzeria Grimmauld Place: Azkaban by a Different Name by @artemisia-black

beasts and beings:

this meta by @myrskytuuli on harry potter as colonial fantasy

on the politics of childhood in 20c european politics, especially post-war (not hp fanfiction but historical non-fiction lmao):

the lost children and kidnapped souls, both by tara zahra

songs from the playlist for this chapter:

la jeune fille en feu by para one and arthur simonini | i horó 's na hug òro eile by duncan chisholm | blue ridge mountains by fleet foxes | lull by vraell and rosie h sullivan | if we make it through december by phoebe bridgers | please, please, please let me get what i want by the smiths | wading in waist-high water (solstice version) by fleet foxes | feels like a dream by alice boman and perfume genius

and a sneak peek of chapter 9 because now we're at grimmauld and you know what that means... 🐕‍🦺🐾

‘Wow. What a shithole.’ ‘Fred!’ ‘Don’t lie, Mum, you think it’s a shithole, too, I can see it on your face.’ ‘Well, yes, but don’t be rude, this is someone’s house.' ‘Be as rude as you like,’ says a bored voice. They all jump, turn to see a man standing at the foot of the stairs: tall, gaunt, long hair like curtains framing a ten-thousand galleon face. ‘I assure you,’ says Sirius Black, ‘this house is an insult to shitholes everywhere.’

#beasts #author's note #AN #yes the author's note is as long as the chapter #did someone say... padfoot #hinny #ginny weasley #sirius black #michael corner #meta #ministry of magic #wizarding politics #post-DH #dean thomas #deamus

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feminismisstillahatemovement · 6 months

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Joe Biden sent or received 82,000 pages of private email exchanges through three accounts using fake names when he was serving as vice president, according to the National Archives.

Joe used a series of pseudonyms on emails that were about both official and family business, according to emails found on Hunter Biden's now-infamous laptop and previously reported by DailyMail.com. But this is the first time the sheer volume of the correspondence has been revealed.

The accounts that the over 82,000 pages of emails were sent or received from included: '[email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].' The correspondence apparently spans over the entire eight-year period Joe was serving as Obama's No. 2.

The staggering figure was disclosed Monday by the National Archives as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the conservative nonprofit organization Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The bombshell admission comes as Republicans are seeking records revealing Joe Biden's use of pseudonyms to discuss his activities related to Ukraine with his son Hunter during his time as vice president. It is central to their ongoing impeachment inquiry into the sitting president.

The amount is well above the 33,000 emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deleted off her personal server - causing a nationwide scandal.

Elected officials are required by law to preserve all correspondence conducted during their time in office - including government-related work on a personal server.

#joe biden #should be big news

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1americanconservative · 8 months

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https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1701806830538928388?s=20

BUSTED: Matt Gaetz Rips FBI Director Christopher Wray A New One “Over 200,000 ILLEGAL FISA Inquiries Have Occurred Under Your Watch” This is real documented evidence, how has Christopher Wray not been impeached? “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father. Sounds like a shakedown, doesn't it, Director? ‌ I'm not going to get into commenting on that. You seem deeply uncurious about it, don't you? Almost suspiciously uncurious. Are you protecting the Bidens? Absolutely not. The FBI does not and has no interest in protecting anyone politically. You won't answer the question about whether or not that's a shakedown and everybody knows why you won't answer it. Because to the millions of people who will see this, they know it is. And your inability to acknowledge that is deeply revealing about you. But let's go from the uncurious to the downright nosy. ‌ How many illegal FISA queries have occurred under your leadership of the FBI? ‌ Well, there are reports that have come out with different numbers about compliance incidents. More than a million illegal ones? Because that's what the Inspector General said. The Inspector General said that in the 3.4 million of these queries, more than a million were in error. Do you have any basis to disagree with that assessment by the Inspector General? I'm not sure actually that's a correct characterization of the Inspector General's findings on that. The internet will remind you of that in moments. ‌ But let's now go to what the court said. The court said it was over 200,000 that have occurred on your watch. Do you have any basis to disagree with that assessment? Again, I don't have the numbers I sit here right now. What I can say is- Seems like a number you should know. How many times the FBI's breaking the law under your watch? Especially if it's like over a million to not know that number. And I'm worried about your veracity on the subject as well. ‌ Play the video. ‌ Letters for the capital. I don't believe FISA is remotely implicated in our investigation. So there Senator Lee is asking you whether or not FISA was in any other way involved in your January 6 investigation and you say no. Was that truthful? I said that I did not believe it was. Okay so now let's pull up what the court said, which is something a little different than what you said. So here, nope, that's not the right one. ‌ Yeah, here we go, right there it says, the government has reported additional significant violations of the querying standard, including several relating to the January 6, 2021 breach of the Capitol. So I guess the question, Director Ray, is did you not know when you were answering these questions that the FBI was engaging in these illegal searches, or did you perjure yourself to Senator Lee? ‌ I certainly didn't perjure myself at the time that I testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I didn't have that piece of information. I will add. Well, that was a court order. You didn't have that piece of information because the court hadn't yet rendered a judgment. Did you not know when you gave the untruthful answer before Senator Lee that this was going on? It was a truthful answer. I did not believe FISA had been involved in January 6th. But it was. So you didn't. The answer is the FBI has broken so bad that people can go and engage in queries that when you come before the Congress to answer questions you're like blissfully ignorant. You're blissfully ignorant as to the unlawful queries. You're blissfully ignorant as to the Biden shakedown regime. And it just seems like it gets into a kind of a creepy place as well. Go to our next.” FISA Is The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

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qqueenofhades · 8 months

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I saw that now Kevin McCarthy is endorsing a Biden Impeachment inquiry. Is this worrying, or just another 'Sure, whatever' moment?

Kevin McCarthy is a spineless cuck who will do anything to grovel at the feet of the Freedom Caucus/fulfil Trump's delusional revenge fantasies while still desperately trying to stave off any attempts to topple him. I would not read too much into it.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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arpov-blog-blog · 2 months

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..."As Republicans grilled Hunter Biden on Wednesday about his business deals overseas, the president’s son turned the question back on his interrogators.

He asked GOP lawmakers about foreign investments secured by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Trump, shortly after he left the White House, according to Democrats participating in the closed-door deposition.

“He drew the distinction between what he has done in a business world with independent businessmen, versus foreign governments, which he did not do any business with — unlike Jared Kushner,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said during a break in the testimony.

Among other roles, Kushner oversaw Middle East policy in the Trump White House, and he raised plenty of eyebrows when he secured a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia six months after leaving public service.

The scrutiny mounted further when The New York Times reported that the advisory panel for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund had recommended against investing in Kushner’s newly launched private equity firm, citing “the inexperience of the … management.” The advice was overruled by a larger board led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a close ally of the Trump administration.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said the questioning throughout the morning has been largely cordial, but Hunter Biden became “assertive” when invoking the Kushner episode.

“He may be a little bit frustrated by some of the double standards relating to Jared Kushner and money that’s just been openly pocketed by Donald Trump in office,” Raskin said. “And Jared Kushner of course brought back $2 billion from Saudi Arabia. And all of that has been a part of the conversation, and he was assertive about that.”

When Democrats controlled the House, they opened an investigation into Kushner’s deal with Saudi Arabia. It was dropped when Republicans flipped the chamber and Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) took the reins of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, which is now leading the impeachment investigation into Biden.

Still, Democrats said there appeared to be agreement among at least some Republicans when Hunter Biden brought up Kushner’s Saudi deal.

“There’s no cameras in there, [so] Donald Trump ain’t watching, right?” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.). “For the first time Republicans said they do have a problem with that. But they should do something about it.”

Comer and the other Republicans in the room have largely declined to comment during breaks throughout Wednesday’s deposition, including on the topic of Kushner’s overseas business ventures.

Hunter Biden’s appearance on Capitol Hill has been long anticipated and comes months into House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden. That multipronged probe has centered on the younger Biden’s business activities, alleging he used his father’s influence to orchestrate a web of shady overseas business ventures.

In his opening statement, Hunter Biden refuted the allegations.

“I am here today to provide the committees with the one uncontestable fact that should end the false premise of this inquiry: I did not involve my father in my business. Not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist. Never,” Biden said during his opening statement."

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mariacallous · 3 months

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It would have been better for Ukraine if Kyiv had fallen in February 2022, when Putin first sent his forces in, than for Western perfidy to grant Russia victory now.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died. (The Ukrainian government does not release figures but reliable estimates of the size of the butcher’s bill range from 30,000 to 80,000.) Then there are the civilian deaths from the bombing, the murders and rapes in occupied Ukraine, and the ecological catastrophe caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam.

All that pain, all that blood, all for nothing,

The betrayal will be the worst of it. The West would have promised to stand by its ally and then broken its word and abandoned its friends.

Historians will spend decades examining the motives of US right-wingers if Donald Trump succeeds in persuading them to cut aid to Ukraine.

They will want to find rational reasons for the betrayal as rational people like to do.

And to be fair, there will be rationally explicable reasons. When US Senators say that their voters don’t want them to send money to Ukraine, and prefer to deal with problems closer to home, they make sense.

Voters always object to spending blood and treasure on foreign causes, and supporters of overseas aid should never assume that their arguments will triumph.

But rational explanations on their own cannot explain the behaviour of the US right. A dark and malignant hatred of democracy drives them, and we should not underestimate its power.

The quote I always reach for when I find myself in danger of not taking malice and madness seriously enough came from the historian Norman Cohn. He looked at the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged document that inspired Nazism by detailing an imaginary Jewish conspiracy.

You could not understand Europe’s descent into with fascism with purely rational explanations.

Instead, Cohn concluded

“There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people.”

What else is Trumpism but a movement of the crooks and half-educated fanatics that has captured American Conservatism?

Ukraine is its enemy because, when he was president, Trump tried to persuade Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a fake allegation that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine into dropping an inquiry into his son Hunter Biden’s lobbying.

True to his mafia boss character, Trump threatened military aid to Ukraine if Zelensky did not cooperate. There was no evidence that Joe Biden took any action to intentionally benefit his son. To his credit Zelensky refused to agree to set-up Biden, and right-wing America hated him for that.

They hated it too when Democrats tried to impeach Trump for soliciting the help of a foreign country to smear a rival. And I should note in passing here that the supposed isolationists of the Republican party are very keen on foreign entanglements when they provide opportunities for political and financial corruption.

As a result, the pathological fantasies of MAGA world include a hatred of Ukraine, which like so many of the calumnies of the far right (and left) include elements of almost sexual disgust.

Readers who hope for rational explanations should try to explain away Tucker Carlson. Before he flew to Moscow to interview Putin on bended knee, Carlson described Zelensky as being like a “manager of a strip club demanding money”. From what dark closet in his mind, did that strip club come from?

Others described Zelensky as a “welfare queen” or discussed how they wanted to “punch him in the face”.

Republicans are punishing Ukraine for refusing to go along with Trump’s schemes against his rival. Their partisan hatreds are so extreme that anyone who does not do down Biden must be their enemy.

But the malice runs deeper than mere partisanship. Vladimir Putin is explicitly in the mental world of the counter-Enlightenment.

He showed it towards the end of Carlson’s interview, when he turned sentimental, and not only out of gratitude for the easy ride his Quisling questioner offered.

Russians were more natural and less alienated from God and nature than soulless materialistic westerners, Putin said.

“It is in the heart,” the dictator explained. “Our culture is so human-oriented. Dostoevsky, who is very well known in the West as the genius of Russian culture, spoke a lot about this, about the Russian soul…Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.”

The eternally moral Russian people are now on Putin’s orders engaged in mass murder, rape, and the abduction of Ukrainian children in an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic state.

The easy thing to say in these circumstances is that Putin is as great a hypocrite as the evangelical Christians who worship Donald Trump, even though he is intimate with all of the seven deadly sins, and would discover the eighth and the ninth if they were there to find.

But sentimentality is often on reverse side of barbarism’s coin. Like a gangster who loves his dear old mother, Russian nationalism has always combined sickly praise for the Russian soul with the utmost brutality.

Putin was endorsing the sentimentality and barbarity of the 19th century Slavophile movement.

It saw Russians as a pure people uncorrupted by modernity. For Dostoyevsky the most vulgar Russian peasant was better than an intellectual because the peasant feared God.

Meanwhile Tolstoy believed that simple Russians were “less intellectually corrupted” than Westerners. They will “understand at last where the means of salvation lie and will be the first to begin to apply it.”

Quoting Tolstoy and Dostoevsky may seem benign. Who does not occasionally think that the honest peasant knows more than the pretentious intellectual?

In Russia’s case the Slavophile myth of the virtuous Russian soul allowed first the Tsars in the 19th century and now Putin to justify the suppression of democracy. Free societies and human rights were corrupt western imports that would only spoil Russians.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the other early fascist conspiracy theories, which Norman Cohn studied, did not come from Nazi Germany but from Tsarist Russia. Their central propaganda message was that Western democracy, rights, liberties and freedoms were shams that hid a conspiracy of the real rulers of the world.

In the case of tsarism and fascism, and today some versions of Islamism and far leftism, it is a conspiracy of Jews.

In the case of Donald Trump and the Republicans it is a conspiracy of Democrats rigging ballot machines.

In the case of Putin, it is a conspiracy of Western deviants.

As Ian Garner and other scholars have emphasised, the Putin regime now uses homophobia as the Nazis used antisemitism.

For instance, speaking in the Kremlin last year Putin began by denying that Ukraine was a democracy. True to fascist form he said that its “real masters” lay in the “dictatorship of the Western elites”.

These elites were engaged in a “complete denial of humanity [and] the overthrow of faith and traditional values.” They wanted nothing less than “outright satanism.” And the satanism of the West manifests itself in its sexual diversity. Putin would not allow “here, in our country, in Russia, instead of 'mum' and 'dad', to have 'parent No. 1', 'parent No. 2', 'No. 3'?

The American right, of course, is keener on fighting the war on the woke than winning the war in Ukraine.

Get down into the subterranean world and an alliance between Republicans and Russian nationalists can now make sense.

Neither believes in democracy.

Both see it as a sham that hides the influence of the puppet masters who rig elections and control society.

And finally, both think they have a God-given right to rule, quite literally so. Trump’s evangelical base is theocratic rather than democratic, while Putin rules with the blessing of Russian Orthodox church.

Who guessed even 10 years ago that these criminals and fanatics from the sewers of politics would control our future?

But control it they do, and it will take a superhuman effort to rid ourselves of them.

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