#Substack planing

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 5

Editorial Excellence and Practical Tips for Self-Editing Newsletters for Cost Effectiveness and Reader Satisfaction Image designed by Dr Mehmet Yildiz at digitalmehmet as the artifacts of Substack Mastery Book Dear beta readers, thank you for your valuable feedback, which will refine this book and help me create a valuable information source for fellow writers. Now that you have learned the…

[iamrhyme]

Listen 🎧 to, download ⬇️, click the heart-shaped ♥️ like button, comment 🗨️ on, and share 🔄 episode 442 of the Narrative Podcast across all social media platforms at the link 🔗 below 👇https://www.spreaker.com/episode/episode-442-the-narrative-podcast--64448829

The Narrative Podcast promotes positive reinforcement of original people and original people culture.

The Narrative Podcast provides positive frames of reference about original people and original people culture.

The Narrative Podcast: Changing the Narrative one episode at a time by destroying negative stereotypes about original people and original people and culture one episode at a time.

Visit the virtual online bookstore on Poetizer.com and purchase my original book of poetry "The Black Card.'

Purchase The Black Card today or get your black card revoked!

Visual content creators shout-out the Narrative Podcast on your"visual' content platforms.

[carolmunro]

300 Characters or Less

Tiny stories originally posted on Spoutible Carols Substack Airplane

[steveyockey]

I paid $5 to access séamus malekafzali’s latest substack on palestine, here’s the full text,

It is easy to be lulled into a state of complacency, even with military occupation.

Israel’s occupation of Palestine has gone on longer than many of us on Earth have been alive, now going on 75 years. The levels of that deplacement, blockading, and violence have ebbed and flowed over years and decades, but that hand around the neck has always remained, even if how much it constricts has a tendency to loosen and tighten. Over 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israel this year in its occupation. News bulletins of them dying, oftentimes teenagers, come up through the headlines of Palestinian newspapers and channels as often as the weather. These deaths at the hands of Israeli security personnel are not isolated incidents, with soldiers materializing on roadsides and at checkpoints as unfortunate coincidence. They are constant spikes in the waveform of an incessant low-grade hum of humiliation, imprisonment, and destruction that has made daily life a forced agreement to constantly exist on the precipice of death.

This framing is not meant to be a tired retread of the conflict between Israel and Palestine or the nature of the Israeli occupation. This is meant to be a bulwark against the inevitable framing of this latest battle unfolding around Gaza, as it will appear in the Western media in the days to come.

There is a tendency, a deep-set one, to report Israel and Palestine as two countries that are on roughly the same playing field internationally, as you might report on a war that might involve Israel battling against a place like Jordan or Egypt. This kind of coverage obscures how deeply interlocked Israel’s military operations are with the fabric of the Palestinian society.

In the West Bank, settlements and checkpoints have made Palestinian land into a kind of comical archipelago, where in addition to being separated from Gaza by a huge land border, they are also separated from traveling to communities only a stone’s throw away from them without going through significant anguish. In Gaza, while no Israeli soldiers walk the streets, all their land borders are essentially sealed, their ports almost completely blockaded. Israel’s continued occupation has been so pinpoint and precise that its planes have gone as far as bombing bookstores, and its restrictions did not let up even when the COVID-19 pandemic reduced one health organization to carrying only as many tests of the deadly disease as could fit in a car.

This is not a matter of moral justification; one does not need to constantly busy themselves with having to make a full ideological conversion before understanding this. This is a matter of cause and effect.

What is the logical expectation, regardless of politics, ideology, culture, and creed, when a population of people is thrust into conditions that can only be described as an open-air prison, where every individual is a criminal in the eyes of the military occupying power regardless if they pick up a rifle or not, because there is supposedly always the threat that they will one day?

These are the basic conditions that have preceded the initiation of Operation al-Aqsa Storm this morning. As dawn broke on the morning of October 7, only one day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas’ military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, launched a military operation of unprecedented scope in its history. Hamas fighters would not only attempt to enter Israeli territory proper with ground troops, already in of itself an intensely bold action (though not without precedent in the past decade). This operation would be a combined incursion into Israel by both land, sea, and even air. Ground forces would cut the border fence into settlements surrounding Gaza, speedboats would make landings in southern Israel, and fighters from a newly-inaugurated paraglider division would fly over the border fortifications and then further inland.

Threats of an invasion of Israeli territory proper have been a staple of speeches from Hamas and Hezbollah and groups like it for years. There was a long-standing perception by outside observers that it was fanciful. An intentionally lofty piece of propaganda that fires up supporters while the real military wheeling and dealing is done under far more subtle and controlled terms, as with most militant organizations. After all, no Israeli-administered town, the ones occupied in Palestine during the initial 1948 war, had ever been taken in any war against the Jewish state since its creation, even by a combined force of multiple Arab national militaries.

That notion now can no longer exist.

At sunrise, Hamas fired a gigantic barrage of rockets into Israeli territory, a staggering 5,000 in the first wave alone. As Israeli military and police forces were distracted by fires and rocket destruction in residential areas of the country, Palestinian forces in Gaza proceeded to make their primary move.

After the sun rose, Hamas cut through the border fence surrounding Israel and sent both fighters on foot and on motorcycles into Israel. Images released by the group seem to tell a story in frozen figures. Israeli soldiers, strewn dead, caught by surprise, one having even rushed out so quickly that he put on his military gear but no other clothes except his underwear. An even grimmer story could be found in one of the IDF military dormitories, where an entire room full of soldiers had been massacred, only having perhaps seconds earlier gotten the alarm that Hamas had breached the perimeter, many of them seemingly mid-way through getting out of bed.

From there, Hamas made unprecedented move after unprecedented move. Hamas fighters moved as far north into Zikim, built on the former Palestinian village of Hiribya, and moved as far east as Ofakim, built on the former hamlet of Khirbat Futais. The Erez Crossing, for years the only legal border crossing that Israel operated with the Gaza Strip, came under full Palestinian control. Sderot, a city where Israelis had once gathered on couches dragged to high peaks to watch the bombardment of Palestinians, now found themselves facing down Palestinian fighters in their own streets.

An additional shock would come in Israel’s initial response. Amidst cataclysmic scenes like hundreds of ravers in the desert near Gaza fleeing on foot, neither the Israeli president nor the prime minister spoke in those early hours in the morning.

The Israeli high command, despite the continuous insistence of Palestinian factions that they would one day attempt to take the fight into Israel itself, had become complacent. They, like many observers of Israel-Palestine, believed the occupation they had constructed could go on forever, unburdened by the need to adapt. Israeli soldiers after all were now more used to sniping reporters and unarmed protesters than engaging in military conflict. Entropy was what was propelling the military occupation complex of the Jewish state, not a wholly active effort.

Despite an ungodly amount of Western military equipment, highly advanced anti-aircraft systems programmed to shoot down thousands of rockets, an international reputation for tenacity and strategic knowhow, and multiple victories against Arab nations again and again and again, all of it ended up being useless against a Hamas fighter flying in on a box fan and a parachute.

This failure is two-fold, and both are closely related. One is the expectation that things could go on as before without addressing the root of the issue (that being a military occupation of an entire state), and the other in expectation that those being occupied had no capacity to learn from experience how Israel’s military strategy operates, people who could then going on to capitalize on that knowledge.

There is a fundamental flaw in the perception of Western powers toward the Middle East in general and Arabs in particular that because the groups fighting with Israel or the United States are irregular, bereft of highly professional uniforms and dedicated gigantic military headquarters, that they do not have the same ability to strategize and to confront the forces that are occupying their countries. Flashes of how faulty this thinking is rear their head again and again, from Iraq to Afghanistan and everywhere in-between and around, but still the idea, unspoken as it may be, remains that they are fundamentally unequipped compared to the might they are fighting against. But Hamas has military strategists of its own, ones that understand the asymmetric situation they are dealing with, and ones that understand what the actual capabilities of Israel are, versus what their perception is.

The perception of Israel’s invulnerability versus what has actually been displayed today could not have been more different. Instead of being forced to immediately pull back, in essence making today a raid, Hamas has instead actually contested several Israeli settlements, which are still being fought over at time of this writing many hours after the initial incursion from Gaza began. A single Israeli soldier captured and held in Gaza used to capture the Israeli imagination for years; now there are believed to be not only tens of soldiers captured by Hamas, but tens of Israeli civilians as well, all now being held within the Strip. Hamas has also brought Israeli military vehicles back into the Strip, the novelty of working IDF equipment now under Palestinian control a source of celebration within the territory. Over 100 Israelis are believed to have been killed in the first day of Hamas’ attack, and nearly 1000 injured, a shocking early casualty count in an ongoing conflict where casualties on the Palestinians’ side are usually far more lopsided.

Israel’s response so far to Hamas’ operation has been to escalate rhetorically, with Netanyahu now calling this a war, and escalating its usual military strategy with Gaza, with carpet bombing now on an intense, concentrated scale. At the time of this writing, almost 200 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in only a few hours, with that number expected to rise significantly in the days to come. Already, news has come in of Israeli planes having leveled Gaza’s second-largest building, the Palestine Tower, which housed a plethora of media offices, in scenes reminiscent of Israel’s bombing of another tower block of media offices in 2021 that infamously took out the local bureau of the Associated Press.

As fighting continues into the night in ways never seen before since 1948, the question remains: after all these decades, why now?

The ostensible justifications of what the clincher was that sparked this operation are innumerable, but two appear to be most clearly illuminated: the recent increased activity of far-right Zionists at the al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem (hence the name of the operation itself), but just as well the indications that the Saudi Arabia and Israel may be close to a normalization deal, which would be the largest such development in the Abraham Accords yet. Hezbollah mentioned this operation as being a “message” and a “decisive response” to Arab nations pursuing the idea of normalization with Israel. Still, it is important to recognize that pinning the undertaking of a completely gigantic operation of this scale as just a simple message to Saudi Arabia would be reductive. As the Los Angeles Times’ international correspondent Nabih Bulos says of the matter:

“To pretend that Hamas did this to be a spoiler of KSA-Israel normalization is just downright epic in its navel-gazing nonsense.”

What is important to always return to is that eternally governing line above everything: the low hum of constant occupation, and who has been causing its spikes. Israel’s government, its most far-right in its history, has been on the warpath almost immediately from its inauguration, with figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, now thrust to the forefront, doing everything large and small to provoke a Palestinian response. The hope is that the inevitable Palestinian response can mobilize the Israeli society, that it can be swiftly defeated by the Israeli military, and that the Israeli state can use such an opportunity to impose its sovereignty over what little of Palestine governed by Palestinians remains, and perhaps even what lies beyond it.

But that formula relies on the Palestinian side only accepting being provoked, themselves having no strategy of their own outside of firing rockets and yelling on television. Military occupation breeds a feeling of annihilation, but that annihilation is enclosed with it inevitable feelings of rabid and desperate hope, inspiring within irregular groups desires to try things never tried before. These are not always guaranteed to be successful: one may look at Aleppo when rebel groups managed to come together and break the siege on the city in the final stages of the battle, only for it to fall in the months to come anyway. Nevertheless, there is a real perception within Israel, communicated out to the world by its media and by its intelligentsia, that it is a nation on the verge of internal collapse, brought to the precipice by far-right forces it has let fester for decades without envisioning its eventual conclusion.

What does looking at how Israel is faring now communicate to Palestinian factions in Gaza? What do young people in Gaza, who make up 47% of the Strip’s population, imagine might lie ahead for them as they see these events unfold? What does a Hamas fighter imagine might be possible when, as the writer Josef Burton says, he exits a 25 by 7-mile space he’s never left in his entire life?

[tomorrowusa]

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written and spoken extensively about democracy over the past nine years. He tells MSNBC's Ali Velshi that Trump's nominees for cabinet positions represent a concerted attempt to disrupt the US government which would benefit America's enemies.

Dr. Snyder says that the likes of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, etc. are not just unqualified but they are "anti-qualified".

He has some excellent advice for all of us. Watch the above video twice and then share it with somebody.

BONUS LINK!: He used his Substack to detail just what Trump and his minders are up to.

Decapitation Strike Preserving America from Trump's Appointments

It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed.  It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts.  It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country. However and by whomever this was organized, the intention of these appointments is clear: to create American horror.  Elected officials should see this for what it is. 

The United States is under direct institutional attack.

Imagine 9/11 when the four hijacked planes had taken off — but before three of the four hit their targets. We need four GOP senators who are willing to put loyalty to American democracy ahead of servility to Donald Trump. Getting four Senate Republicans to block Trump's appointments is the equivalent of taking out all four of the hijacked planes on 9/11.

If your state is represented in the Senate by one or two Republicans, the burden is on you to persuade them not to go along with Trump's anti-qualified nominees.

It's true that about half of Republican senators are zombified Trump cult members. Those like Cotton, Tuberville, Scott, and Johnson are a waste of time. But almost a third of the GOP Senate caucus may be persuadable – under the right circumstances. Two GOP senators, Collins of Maine and Murkowski of Alaska, have already expressed displeasure over the appointments. So we may need as few as two more.

This is your job right now. Get your GOP senator(s) to go on record on Trump's nominees. If they express even the slightest reservations about the nominees, get to work. Flattery and encouragement have a better success rate than threats and name calling. Appeal to patriotism. Even promise to make a small donation to their primary campaigns if they are challenged by MAGA hotheads in 2026.

The real struggle in the US now is between pro-democracy and anti-democracy forces. All other contentions must take a back seat to this.

[mariacallous]

Many people are detained at U.S. airports for reasons they find arbitrary and mysterious. I got lucky—when I was stopped by Customs and Border Protection last week, after flying to Los Angeles from Melbourne, a border agent told me, explicitly and proudly, why I’d been pulled out of the customs line. “Look, we both know why you are here,” the agent told me. He identified himself to me as Adam, though his colleagues referred to him as Officer Martinez. When I said that I didn’t, he looked surprised. “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University,” he said.

They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied.

Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to my Substack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel, of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do differently. (The Department of Homeland Security, which governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been arrested for political beliefs are false.)

Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He asked who fed me “the information” about the protests. He asked me to give up the identities of people I “worked with.”

Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn’t work with anyone. I participated in the protests as an independent student journalist who one day stumbled upon tents on the lawn. My writing, all of which is now publicly available, was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events at Columbia. That, of course, was the problem.

This past February, I booked a trip from Melbourne to New York, with a layover in Los Angeles, so that I could visit some friends for a couple of weeks. In that time, stories of tourists being detained in and denied entry from the U.S. had begun to regularly appear in Australian media. I began to think about what precautions I should take when crossing the U.S. border. I opted against taking a burner phone—a move that some legal experts had advised, in the press—believing it would provoke suspicion, and simply decided to give my phone and social media a superficial clean.

I designed my strategy around the understanding I had developed, after living in the United States for five years and travelling between the States and Australia time and time again, that C.B.P. was fundamentally unsophisticated and ad hoc in its methods, and that I would have to get extremely unlucky to be searched at all. I understood that, if I encountered any difficulty, it would be because the primary-processing officer at the end of that long line at LAX would notice that I had been a Columbia student, and ask to see my phone. If he searched through it, he would encounter the messy and personal digital life of a worryingly single thirty-three-year-old man. But he would not find photographs from protests, Signal conversations, or my Substack posts, which I took down in the week leading up to my flight.

But C.B.P. had prepared for me well before my arrival. They did not need to identify me at LAX as someone worthy of investigation: they had evidently decided that weeks before. My ESTA application—the system by which many tourists become eligible to visit the U.S. under the visa waiver program—must have triggered something on their end. Perhaps C.B.P. now has the technological dexterity to check the web history of every ESTA applicant. Or, perhaps, I was named in a list—provided by the far-right pro-Israel organization Betar US, to representatives of the Trump Administration—of visa holders whom it hoped to see deported. In either case, a U.S. government officer must have read my work and decided that I was not fit to enter the country. Because Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago, he didn’t even know that I had taken all this material down. What this means is that, by the time a foreigner cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too late.

For me, this mistake was a disaster. Because I’d designed my strategy around passing the standard passport line, I was totally ill-equipped for what happened in the interrogation room. Though I did not know it then, I was participating in an interview that I was never going to pass. It didn’t matter that my views on Israel-Palestine seemed to disappoint Officer Martinez in their lack of divisiveness—I told him it is a conflict in which everyone has blood on their hands, but which can and should be brought to an immediate end by the dominant power. He asked if other Australians feel the same, and I told him that yes, most do. This seemed only to perturb him. When he ran out of questions about Israel, he disappeared into the back room to begin downloading the contents of my phone.

He was gone for a long time. I imagined him, in his office, using some new software to surface all the grimy details of my life. Though I’d deleted a lot of material related to the protests from my device, I’d kept plenty of personal content. Presumably Martinez was skimming through all of this—the embarrassing, the shameful, the sexual.

That fear was confirmed. Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented. So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.

When he was done, he disappeared again into the other room. I sat there, trying to understand why, despite my hard-won comfort with myself, and with sexuality in general, I felt so violated. I am proud of my life, of who I am. That didn’t seem to help. I realized then I had no privacy left for them to invade.

This time, Martinez was gone for even longer. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the person who had been left in the room to guard me, a lumbersome, goateed man without a name badge, turned to me and said, “God, dude, what do you have on your phone? This normally takes five minutes.”

This is when I truly knew I was fucked—not because the guard was telling the truth but because I sensed he was not. My feeling then was that he was playing his own part, a part designed to mount pressure, to intimidate.

When Martinez finally came out, he was bouncing toward me excitedly, like a kid with a lollipop. He said that they had found evidence of drug use on my phone. Did I realize that I had failed to acknowledge a history of drug use on my ESTA?

I moved, in seconds, from a desire to be amiable to a desire not to be found lying. In the gray zone between the arrival gate and passport control you are beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution. You have fewer protections than a criminal metres away, inside the border. People with legal standing are much harder, it turns out, to abuse. In the C.B.P. interrogation room, I had not quite fallen to the level of statelessness, but I had fallen below the criminal.

Were I not fatigued from a long flight and from a long interrogation, and were I not stressed and scared, I would have recalled that my phone does not have clear evidence of drug use. A better version of me, the version I like to think I am, would have called bullshit on this bluff. But at that moment I could not account for every single one of the four thousand-odd photos on my phone. I imagined photographs that do not exist, messages that do not exist, proving that I was some sort of drug kingpin. So I admitted that I had done drugs in the past—in other countries as well as in the U.S., where I had bought THC gummies at a dispensary in New York.

Marijuana is legal in New York, but it is not legal federally, and so it seems that, in the eyes of C.B.P., I had broken federal law for purchasing legal weed in New York, and then perhaps again by failing to declare it on my ESTA. Martinez, who seemed now to be bubbling over with excitement, went back to his supervisor to, in his words, “pitch this.” When he came back, he told me I would be put on the next flight back to Australia.

Martinez and another officer took me in the back, pushed me against the wall and patted me down. Martinez made sure that I carried no weaponry between my penis and my scrotum. They took the shoelaces out of my shoes and the string out of my elastic pants, presumably so that I would not be able to hang myself. This struck me as overly cautious, but as I entered the detention room I changed my mind. We were so deep in the building, and so clearly underground, that the very notion of a window started to feel like something from a half-remembered dream. Three months ago, a Canadian woman was disappeared into the system for nearly two weeks. I did not know then whether I would be out in one hour, one day, or one month. When I was brought into the room, I encountered a young woman, in tears, begging the guard for information. He told her he had no information to give her and that none would be forthcoming. “That woman,” he said, pointing to a bundle of blankets in the corner, “has been here for four days.”

After that I started to spiral. We detainees were banned from talking to one another. There wasn’t anyone I could communicate with, anyway—a barrier in the room separated the men from the women, and I was the only man. There was food—cup noodles mostly—and a vending machine with M&M’s and Coca-Cola that we could use “if we had brought cash,” one of the guards told me. The room was so cold that all of us were wrapped in C.B.P. blankets.

The bulbs buzzed and the air-conditioning hummed throughout the day, or the night, or whenever it now was. I learned then that the detention room is a place where time itself is detained, that the clock behind the guard, who himself sits behind plexiglass, existed mostly to taunt us. We worked hard not to look at that clock, because, though the hands would move, we had no concept of what they were moving toward. The horror of the thing was that no one knew where we were, and we had no way of telling them. We were isolated from one another and also from the world.

It was then, some hours after first being detained, that I realized C.B.P. must be governed by some internal procedure regarding the distribution of information, and I approached the guard to ask if there was any way I was allowed to get word of my detainment to the outside world.

“You can call your consulate,” he said.

I exercised that right immediately. He dialled the number, and I stood there at his desk, talking loudly so that the others, who I doubted had been informed about their right, could hear me. The woman at the other end of the phone told me that in all likelihood I would be on a plane that evening, about six hours from then, and that, if I knew the number of any of my contacts by heart, she would notify them for me. That’s how my mother found out.

About three hours later, after I passed out on a cot in the detention pen, an officer shouted and woke me up. I was taken to another room and subjected to a second interview, one I did not know was coming, in which all the same questions of the first interview were repeated. I lost my patience with this new guy, Officer Woo. “If you are already going to deport me,” I asked him, “why should I answer any of your questions?”

He seemed shocked at that. “We haven’t decided if we are going to deport you yet,” he said. Then he paused. “But looking at your file . . . I can see why the other officer told you you were going home.”

This second interview had a “Groundhog Day” quality to it, except I was glad for the repetition. We encountered errors in Martinez’s notes. At one point, when I told Woo that the demonstrations at Columbia were “pro-peace” protests, he looked at me with real surprise. “I thought they were pro-Hamas protests?” he asked, quite genuinely. I was stunned by the innocence he brought to a question I found violently absurd. He couldn’t seem to bear the look I gave him then, a look somewhere between horror, exasperation, and fury, and, in embarrassment, he started to laugh.

I was put on a plane, eventually. It was indeed the next Qantas flight out, QF94 at 9:50 P.M. on June 12th, roughly twenty-seven hours since I’d first left Melbourne and twelve hours since I’d arrived at LAX. Two heavily armed C.B.P. guards led me out of the detention room and marched me through the bowels of the airport, and then, suddenly, into the bright lights of the duty-free shops, and then finally toward the gate, where, as I stood with guards at the head of the queue, I watched my compatriots board one by one. This gate at LAX is famous to the many Australians who have passed through it on their way home. The armed-guard act from C.B.P. was, I think, supposed to be a kind of shaming, but I felt such a surge of love and respect for my own people that I began to smile and joke with passengers as they passed. The guards did not like this.

When the plane was loaded, I was finally allowed on. The lead guard, Officer Liu, handed an envelope with my passport and phone to the head flight attendant, who, seeing at once what was happening, began to treat me with conspicuous warmth, and the guards, uncomfortable in their contrast, quietly disappeared.

Qantas itself no longer reflects the warmth of its staff—presumably at the request of C.B.P., the airline withheld my phone and passport from me until we landed in Melbourne. In this respect the airline is, in my view, carrying water for the Trump Administration. (Qantas did not respond to a request for comment.) Because I did not have my phone, no one—not me nor the consulate—had informed anyone in Australia that I was on that plane, and I landed back in my home country believing that I would have to make my own way to my house in the bush, nearly two hours from Melbourne.

Every year scores of Australians and thousands of others are denied entry to the United States. C.B.P. has full discretion, after all. There is nothing new about the U.S. ferociously, arbitrarily, and cruelly deploying that discretion in order to keep out people the government does not like. What is new is the politically motivated deployment of that power to exclude speech that the government does not want to hear.

When Mahmoud Khalil was detained, I wrote on my blog that the U.S. had pivoted to a new tactic, one I called “the deportation of dissent.” Then it happened to me. C.B.P. ostensibly marked me for denial of entry before I arrived. Its officers told me explicitly why I had been marked. Then it used the powers at its disposal to make sure I did not enter the country.

I do not yet know if I will be allowed back, or if I have been banned, as can happen to travellers accused of misrepresenting their experience with drugs. But I fear that writing about this, and speaking to the media, as I have done, will trigger further reprisals from the U.S. government. I’m afraid that I will be banned for good, if I haven’t been already, or that the information on my phone, which I handed over to them, will be used against me. But I was targeted for writing honestly about what was in front of me—the same thing I’m doing now. That is worth its price. 

[phoenixyfriend]

EDIT: You can almost definitely slot most apps into one of the above options.

School app? Slot in with work app.

Transportation app, whether plane, train, or car? Rewards or financial, depending on if they have a rewards program.

Media hosting? I'll admit I should have thought of something like Libby before I made the post, but substack or spotify will fall into social media.

[rebeccamix]

I turned thirty last week and my "lessons I learned in my twenties" journaling exercise turned into a very long list of writing & publishing lessons learned, so! here are the twenty I feel like made the biggest difference in my craft. (which is also improving, but I'd like to think as a full-time fantasy writer is something I am like, at least somewhat decent at. heavy on the somewhat.)

twenty writing lessons I learned in my twenties:

If you want to write professionally, you have to read.

If you want to write well, you have to read widely.

Finish things. You'll get so much better by taking ten projects to 80% perfect than one project to 100%. (Although in revision, I definitely try to get them in the high 90’s.)

Writing is like a muscle. Train the habit of doing it frequently, even when you don’t want to. (Especially when you don’t want to.)

No story is ever dead.

You need other hobbies. If you can, find something that gets you outside.

Keep an id list. Don’t be afraid to fill drafts with all the weird, specific things you love — someone else out there will love it, too.

It can be helpful to develop rituals that signal to your brain “it’s time to write!” but it’s even more helpful when these rituals are easily transported. I love a candle, but I can’t light one on a plane!

Every book will make you feel stupid at some point, whether it’s your first or your tenth. The only difference is you start to recognize you’ve been here before

Most of the good stuff comes from revision. Like. 95% of it. Learn it, love it, live in it.

If someone “just needs to make it to page 50 for the story to get good”, you haven’t done your job.

Outlining is a skill, and it’s a skill worth learning.

Starting your story from pitch is also a skill — and is really worth learning if you want to do this professionally.

No one will care about your work as much as you do. Ever. Use that as your superpower, but don’t let it make you bitter.

Speaking of valid…there’s always a reason people love something. That giant commercial hit you roll your eyes at has something to teach you. Study it — and then do it better.

If you’re stuck, go for a long walk.

If a trusted critique partner/editor/agent/etc is telling you to change something, their solution is probably wrong, but their instinct something needs to be fixed is probably right.

Taking care of your health on deadline, however you can, will improve the quality of your work and your ability to get back to said work faster. I know, I know. But it's easier to recover from deadline if you didn't burn your life down while on it! Eating well and moving your body has a direct (good) impact on your brain. Sorry!

Never take your ability to write for granted. Ever. Literacy is a gift you can lose in a blink — and not everyone gets it back. Your ability to read and write puts you rare company. Appreciate it.

You have to love it.

originally posted this in my substack newsletter, but sharing here for the one (1) person that might find it helpful lmao

[magdalene-spirit]

The tarot— the space/time drama, Soul & kundalini — part 1

The time/space drama of the Soul unfolds along a pattern that has been named in different ways, for example the mythic journey, individuation or kundalini rising, through stages of outward movement into the world & the return to the Self- on small, as well as large scales; through the events & the circadian rhythm of the day (the states of wake, dream & sleep); & the very large cycles on the spiral of reincarnation.

The outer details of life unfold from causes that are dissolved within the deep inner layers of consciousness, that are on a different plane you could say, & unconscious to our normal state & three dimensional perspective.

To get a Birds Eye view, a panoramic perspective from a sufficient distance we have to take step back as it were or sink deep into the layers of our consciousness from where we can see things with greater clarity & insight- if we can see the patterns of our lives we can also resolve them, so that ultimately we can get free & live from our recognition in Self, & so to guide our lives from our seat in wisdom & not live haphazardly & reactively & aimlessly.

Continued in next post & on Substack, section II of Essay.

[grandhotelabyss]

LOL that 2007 Lynch critique, not because i find his work beyond critique, but why are turbo-leftists so miserable? how can one live like that? would you say that form of discourse was prevalent in your 00's intellectual formation?

That critique, as I was reminded by a recent Substack Note, is a vulgarization of Jameson on Lynch in Postmodernism, which I'd forgotten, since I haven't read that essay (or even seen Blue Velvet) in 20 years. I mention it because the answer to your question is yes, but I also got that style of criticism at its academic source in Marxist literary theory, not just from the first-generation blogosphere. I've long argued, even in my doctoral dissertation, that such criticism promotes too mean a worldview, almost amounting to a Hobbesian vision of life as scramble for power, to address what is beautiful and significant about the art it brings under its "demystifying" gaze. But I also learned something valuable from it—from criticism as practiced by figures like Lukács, Auerbach, Jameson, Eagleton, Armstrong, Žižek, and others—a portable method I could turn to other ends. Of all the theoretical schools one apprentices oneself to in the academic humanities, Marxism handles narrative best. It is best at describing conflictual change over time, whereas most other theoretical schools treat the text as a temporally suspended structure in space or temporally-coated timeless myth. The dialectical method lends itself beautifully to assessing the shifting tides of power and significance between the actors in a narrative and what these shifts mean if you collate them not only with whatever immemorial myth they undoubtedly echo but also with their local historical referents, and all the better—really, this should be the whole goal—if you can explain how these emplotments have their failed or successful corollary in the form of the work, everything from the placement of the commas up to the structure of the narration. I hope you can see how powerful a method that can be; it doesn't have to mean calling everything racist and sexist all the time in some moralistic way. Even in the 2007 critique of Lynch, I note the observation that the dream-logic surface form of the narrative, all its elements "quoted" from prior genres, is homologous with the economic shift toward financialization—value totally untethered from material production, as Lynch's films are not realist dramas aimed at verisimilitude and social change (the classic Marxist preference, of course) but dreamy artifice using cultural myth, rather than observed reality, as their materia. That observation qua observation can be cause for despair or celebration depending on how we regard the political and economic change, and can be used to promote left, right, or center ideologies—Fukuyama uses the dialectical method no less than Jameson—but literary and film critics who can operate on these two levels at once, the plane of the fictional emplotment and the plane of historical change, can produce powerful narratives in their own right. And sometimes, if I don't like a book or movie, I will still dismantle it ideologically with this technique, as with my Substack essay on The Brutalist this weekend.

[asher-writes]

Latest Chapter of The Anthology of Cardinal Sins out now!

Demons, you may have thought, were said to be the agents of Lucifer in the modern texts of Christian mythology. In a sense, this could be true, if one considered the devil not to be a person, but a manifestation of the worst humanity could offer. White – if he were human – would be the worst humanity could offer. The Infernal plane is not a world the living souls may access. It is not below, nor above, it is both there and it isn’t. Schrödinger’s astral plane, if you like.

Continue reading on Substack!

[liquidbird-official]

While primary controls like ailerons, elevators, and rudders handle basic flight movements, secondary controls help fine-tune the aircraft’s performance. These include spoilers, flaps, and slats, which improve control, reduce speed, or generate more lift when needed.

Spoilers are panels on the wings that disrupt airflow to reduce lift. They help slow the plane down during landing and can assist in banking turns. There are two main types: ground spoilers and flight spoilers.

Ground spoilers deploy fully on landing to increase drag and slow the aircraft quickly. Flight spoilers, also called speed brakes, can be used mid-air to reduce speed without changing altitude. Some aircraft also use spoilers to assist ailerons by rolling the aircraft more effectively.

Flaps are located on the trailing edge of the wings and help increase lift at lower speeds. They allow a plane to take off from shorter runways and land safely at slower speeds. There are different types of flaps, each with unique benefits.

Plain flaps simply hinge downward, increasing lift slightly. Split flaps extend downward from the lower wing surface, generating more drag but also extra lift. Slotted flaps have a small gap between the flap and wing, allowing better airflow and greater efficiency. Fowler flaps slide backward before extending down, significantly increasing wing area for maximum lift.

Slats are positioned on the leading edge of the wings and help improve lift during takeoff and landing. They work by creating a smoother airflow over the wing at high angles, preventing stalls. Like flaps, slats can be fixed or movable. Fixed slats stay extended at all times, used in some older aircraft designs. Automatic slats extend when needed, relying on air pressure changes. Powered slats are controlled by the pilot, allowing adjustments based on flight conditions.

Together, these secondary controls make flying smoother, safer, and more efficient. They help planes take off with shorter runways, land safely at slower speeds, and maintain better control during different phases of flight.

Follow for more such educational content daily!

Check, our substack for more in-depth articles on such topics.

[screenrevolt]

I hate airplanes. So I decided to meditate on one for 3 hours

Being on a plane is my least favorite place to be on earth. I hate the jet-fuel smell, it makes me nauseous. I’m terrified of heights and easily motion sick. I have a long torso which makes sitting upright for long periods of time painful. The loud noise of the plane is overstimulating. The sounds of crying children. The claustrophobia of being in close quarters to people coughing and obviously ill. Read more on substack:

[darkmaga-returns]

Plane flips on landing in Toronto. "This Might Be The Biggest Fraud In History". Saudi Arabia to mediate Russia-US talks. The Collapse of Net Zero. Three States Push Social Media Digital ID Laws

Lioness of Judah Ministry

Feb 18, 2025

Plane flips on landing at Toronto airport

Multiple people have sustained injuries, local media has said

A plane flipped upside-down on landing at Toronto Pearson International airport on Monday. At least eight people are injured, according to paramedics. All flights were suspended, the Toronto Star wrote. Videos posted on X show a Delta Air Lines plane overturned on a snow-covered tarmac, with people walking away from it. One of those injured is in critical condition, according to Peel Regional Paramedic Services Supervisor Lawrence Saindon.

NBC Reporter Ties President Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE to Plane Crash in Toronto with Canadian Air Traffic Control (VIDEO)

A reporter for NBC actually tied President Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE to the plane crash in Canada.

A Delta plane crash-landed on a snowy runway at Toronto Pearson Airport in Canada on Monday afternoon. The flight arrived from Minneapolis when it crashed, landed, and flipped upside down. At least 15 people are injured, including one child. It is unclear why the plane crashed. There are no reports of fatalities. The fake news media immediately tied the plane crash, which occurred in a foreign country, to Trump and DOGE.

JUST IN: Trump Admin Fires Hundreds of FAA Employees Amid Reports DEI Policies Led to DCA Crash

The Trump Administration fired approximately 300 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees over the weekend as DOGE works to eliminate DEI and wasteful spending.

Last week it was reported that the Trump Admin was gearing up to fire probationary workers. Hundreds of FAA employees received an email informing them of their termination. David Spero, the national president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), AFL-CIO, blasted the Trump Administration for firing FAA employees.

"This Might Be The Biggest Fraud In History"

"Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security."

Elon Musk was expected to remain offline Sunday night into Monday morning as his xAI team prepared for the highly anticipated debut of "Grok 3," scheduled for release Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST. However, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with streamlining the federal bureaucracy, returned very excited to his social media platform around midnight, unveiling what "might be the biggest fraud in history." Musk posted a spreadsheet of Social Security Administration data showing "numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!"

If You Think That The Left Is Angry Now, Just Wait Until Fraudulent Social Security Payments Stop Going Out

Michael Snyder’s Substack

If You Think That The Left Is Angry Now, Just Wait Until Fraudulent Social Security Payments Stop Going Out

Read more

11 hours ago · 57 likes · 19 comments · Michael Snyder

WHOA! DOGE Reveals $4.7 Trillion of Taxpayer Money Went Into Government Black Hole and is UNTRACEABLE

This is why it is all hands on deck to stop Elon Musk’s DOGE team.

On Monday, Elon Musk’s DOGE revealed the federal government didn’t trace $4.7 trillion in payments. $4.7 trillion dollars in payments were left blank, making it nearly impossible to trace, DOGE said. “The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process),” DOGE explained in a post on X. “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to US Treasury for the great work,” DOGE said.

US, Russia To Hold Peace Talks In Saudi Arabia Without Ukraine, Even As Zelensky Visits Gulf

Kyiv 'knew nothing' about US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia & won't recognize their outcome: Zelensky

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has warned on X that "Europe's security is at a turning point." She continued in the statement she wrote while arriving in Paris for "crucial talks" with European counterparts on the Russia-Ukraine war, "Yes, it is about Ukraine – but it is also about us." "We need an urgency mindset. We need a surge in defense," she wrote. "And we need both of them now." The words come immediately on the heels of von der Leyen telling the Munich Security Conference, "I will propose to activate the escape clause for defense investments. This will allow member states to substantially increase their defense expenditure."

[michel-flores08]

Semana 4

Cómo cuarta semana y última vimos acerca de las herramientas didácticas virtuales en las cuales tenemos:

•FORO: son herramientas didácticas que permiten a los estudiantes y docentes debatir, discutir y proponer ideas sobre un tema.

•BLOGS: Es una bitácora interactiva que es actualizada por el creador, añadiendo artículos y noticias.

•WIKI: Herramienta Web 2.0 ideal para crear, reunir, administrar y estructurar contenido de maneracolaborativa.

•WEBQUEST: Es una herramienta que forma parte de un proceso de aprendizaje guiado, con recursos principalmente procedentes de Internet.Vimos las evaluaciones interactivas las cuales nos permite que los estudiantes aprendan mientras ven un video o escuchan un audio, se evalúa su proceso cognitivo y está comprobado que proporciona un mayor efecto en la ingesta de conocimientos.

TIPOS DE EVALUACIONES INTERACTIVAS:

1-Cuestionarios de selección múltiple

2-Preguntas binarias

3-Rellenar espacios en blanco

4-Ejercicios de arrastrar y soltar

5-Emparejamientos

6-Respuestas libres

7-Realidad virtual

8-Cuestionarios multimedia interactivos

El sistema de administración de contenido de aprendizaje es una plataforma que permite crear, administrar, alojar y hacer seguimiento de contenido digital para cursos o programas de aprendizaje.

Cómo segundo tema tenemos los objetos de aprendizaje y pues estos objetos de aprendizaje son recursos educativos digitales diseñados para apoyar y facilitar el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje, se crean para ser reutilizables, modulares y fáciles de adaptar en diferentes contexto educativos, tanto en entornos presenciales como en línea.

Cómo objetos de aprendizaje tenemos más herramientas de auditoría que nos dice que son:

•Entrevistas

•Cuestionarios de satisfacción

•Pruebas de desempeño

•Encuestas

•Observación

•Evaluación de la infraestructura escolar

•Planes de mejora continua

•Sistemas de gestión de aprendizaje (LMS)

•Reuniones

Cómo herramientas de publicación tenemos:

•Medium

•Google Docs

•Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

•Drupal

•Substack

Cómo herramientas de colaboración estan las siguientes:

•Classroom

•Kahoot!

•Zoom

•Edmodo

•Word

•Excel

•PowerPoint

Cómo último tema tenemos Repositorio de objetos de aprendizaje (OA) nos dice que es una plataforma o sistema digital donde se almacenan y organizan recursos educativosdigitales. En este tema también se manejan más herramientas de auditoría, publicación y colaboración.

Cómo herramientas de auditoría tenemos:

•Evaltools

•Rubistar

Estas nos ayudan a generar rúbricas de evaluación personalizables para determinar la calidad de los OA.

Cómo herramientas de publicación están:

•Adobe Captivape

•H5P

La primera permiten la creación de OA interactivos y la segunda ofrece opciones de creación de contenido interactivo gratuito y compatible con plataformas como Moodle.

Cómo herramientas de colaboración están:

•Trello •Microsoft teams

•Google Workspace

Estas herramientas permiten la edición colaborativa y la gestión de proyectos, facilitando la comunicación y organización de tareas entre equipos.

[mariacallous]

In his continued quest to become either the president of the United States or else a very interesting footnote to someone else’s reelection, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has enlisted a number of celebrities and influencers. On Tuesday, he expanded those ranks, confirming to The New York Times that he is “considering” NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura for his vice presidential pick; Politico reported that he’ has also “approached” Senator Rand Paul, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

But it was Rodgers and Ventura who drew the most attention from the press, and it’s their roles in the information ecosystem who most signal what Kennedy is doing. Outside of their careers in the NFL and WWE, Rodgers and Ventura are known for, respectively, promoting anti-vaccine views in conversations with sports podcasters and Joe Rogan, and promoting politically contrarian, occasionally conspiratorial views on cable TV and Substack. By publicizing his interest in them, Kennedy is making overtures to a very specific potential voter: the highly online and politically disaffected young man.

Kennedy, an environmental activist turned anti-vaccine superstar, is already running an extremely online campaign; as WIRED noted recently, the candidate is omnipresent on Instagram, podcasts, and Substack and has used influencers as proxies who will deliver his message to his niche bases. Over the past few months, Kennedy has been seen hanging out with snowboarder Travis Rice, naming a young and persistently bleached-blonde TikToker and aspiring musician named Link Lauren as a “senior adviser” on his campaign, and appearing at a Bitcoin conference.

Online is a comfortable environment for Kennedy, a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist who has promoted anti-vaccine views since 2005. Beyond his many and virulent anti-vaccine campaigns, he’s been especially willing to engage in conspiracy theories that are likely to go viral, most notably suggesting that the CIA may have assassinated his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and promoted long-debunked and extremely dangerous junk science about AIDS not being caused by HIV. He has also tried awkwardly to engage with the conspiracy theories about dead pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, on whose private plane he rode at least twice. In December he said that Epstein’s flight logs should be released, and tweeted, “I’m not hiding anything, but they are!”

His efforts to appeal to both a conspiratorial base and a more mainstream voting bloc have been occasionally clumsy, but persistent—and by shoring up his base among young men, who will be increasingly important this election year, he appears to be figuring out how to bridge that gap. One enormous help was, of course, his own appearance on Rogan’s podcast, where the two engaged in three hours of long-winded conspiracy theories about vaccines, 5G technology, and ivermectin, among Kennedy’s other greatest-hits talking points.

Kennedy’s interest in speaking to very online, purportedly “anti-establishment” spaces also means, necessarily, that the people he’s speaking to have a demonstrable overlap with the so-called manosphere, the broad group of bloggers, podcasters, influencers, and grievance-peddlers speaking to young men. Choosing to align himself with figures like Aaron Rodgers—a mainstream football star who has promoted increasingly fringe beliefs, and declared himself to be very brave for doing so—is an excellent way to appeal to the Venn diagram of young men and the conspiracy-curious, says Derek Beres. “It completely makes sense for what he’s doing.”

Beres is an author, speaker, and podcaster who’s one of the cohosts of Conspirituality, which looks at the overlap between New Age and far-right movements. In that role, Beres has observed Kennedy at close range for years and says, “One of the things that I don’t think is talked about enough but is really smart on RFK’s part is he’s been mobilizing fringe communities since he announced his presidential run.”

Neither Rodgers nor Ventura are what you would call politically serious choices; Rodgers has never held elected office, while Ventura hasn’t in 20 years. Neither man speaks to a base that Kennedy hasn’t already hit; in that role, Paul and Gabbard would make more political sense.

Instead, Kennedy is front-loading two men who the young male voter might find in a late-night TikTok or Instagram scroll and who are known for their own fondness for indulging in conspiracy theories and misinformation. Rodgers is best known lately for making misleading claims about being "immunized for Covid,” later revealing that he was taking fake homeopathic “vaccines,” and for appearing to suggest that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel might appear on a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s associates, for which Kimmel instantly threatened to sue him. He has also become a repeat guest on Rogan’s podcast; in his most recent appearance in February, he nodded along as Rogan claimed that Covid was created in a lab. On Wednesday, it was also reported by CNN that he’d shared Sandy Hook conspiracy theories privately, including in 2013, to Pamela Brown, one of the journalists bylined on the story.

For his part, after Ventura was governor, he had a show called Conspiracy Theory on the outlet TruTV. Clips from the show still occasionally go viral, especially ones purporting to show that the pandemic was “planned.” He then had a show on Russian state-backed news outlet RT America, which focused on purported American hypocrisy wherever he could find it. In a slightly awkward fit for Kennedy, Ventura also decried people who refused to wear masks early in the pandemic. (Kennedy spent a lot of time incorrectly but predictably claiming that mask-wearing was useless and in fact harmful.) Now, Ventura has a Substack with his son, where he delivers political commentary and wrestling stories, a move he claims he made after RT America unceremoniously dumped him for decrying the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And most importantly, both Ventura and Rodgers—as outsize and slightly eccentric sports figures—are heroes largely to young men.

Kennedy, Beres says, “is playing culture war politics,” where someone like Aaron Rodgers would make sense; it’s part of his appeal, Beres says, to the mostly male-dominated online body-optimization space. In addition to doing shirtless pushups (in jeans, for some reason), Kennedy has also made numerous appearances with Aubrey Marcus, a fitness influencer and motivational speaker who has been one of his most enthusiastic proxies. The two men are appearing together this weekend at the grandiosely named American Wellness Summit, a Kennedy campaign event just outside Austin, Texas, where the cheapest tickets are a $1,500 campaign donation.

“We’re in a cultural space where you have Donald Trump, who in the past said that exercise depletes your body,” Beres explains. “Then you have a big conversation around Biden’s age, which the right has been pushing and which has been effective in terms of their propaganda. And then you have RFK, who works out at Gold’s Gym and has been spotted there hanging out with Andrew Huberman,” an astonishingly popular neuroscience podcaster. “The optics alone are going to appeal to a young male crowd.”

For his part, Donald Trump has made his own bid for the young male vote’s affections, showing up at Sneaker Con to hawk $400 Trump-branded shoes, signaling his support for Bitcoin, getting (somewhat) into football, and showing up at a UFC match, where he mainly made headlines for appearing to ignore his own grandson. Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, meanwhile, recently got a coveted endorsement from a coalition of 15 Gen Z and millennial voting groups. But as an MSNBC opinion column noted last month, opinion polls seem to show Kennedy with a slim lead among voters 18–34. And as Gallup noted in January, Biden’s favorability ratings among young and non-white adults has fallen since he became president, while Kennedy has “majority-level favorable rating” across all major gender, race, and age groups. Gallup’s Lydia Saad noted that Kennedy could “appeal to that segment of voters who are resistant to Biden but are also not sold on Trump.”

Kennedy has enjoyed, however, some base of support among women for quite some time. The anti-vaccine movement is powered in large part at the grassroots level by mothers who wrongly believe that their choice to vaccinate their children led to them having conditions like autism; women can often be seen crying, cheering, and frankly swooning when Kennedy speaks in front of those audiences. One of his other prominent campaign proxies is an enormously popular celebrity and lifestyle blogger named Jessica Reed Kraus, better known by her online handle Houseinhabit, who is stumping somewhat equally for Kennedy and Trump. (Kraus, too, went viral for involving herself in two high-profile trials, once claiming that Johnny Depp had confided in her during his defamation trial against Amber Heard, as well as“covering” human trafficker and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial in a fairly sympathetic way.)

Despite that preexisting base of support, Kennedy has done very little to speak further to women, especially young women. After speaking at a recent libertarian forum, he declined to tell The Washington Post whether he would protect abortion access and said initially that he hadn’t read a controversial Alabama IVF ruling. (He later said he had reviewed it and “wholeheartedly” rejected the ruling.) He has said he would support a 15-week abortion ban and later said he wouldn’t, and he has called abortion “a tragedy.” Amidst all this waffling over a core issue affecting young women, he found time to meet with an anti-child-support advocate who presents it as a “war on men,” which was then released as part of a Blacks for Kennedy promotional video. (In his attempt to court Black voters, Kennedy did speak with a panel of women in Atlanta. Politico reported that the meeting was coordinated by Angela Stanton King, a former Blacks for Trump proxy who was pardoned by the former president in 2020 for a previous felony conviction.)

In a way, Beres says, Kennedy is campaigning more as an influencer than as a politician, displaying his lifestyle and his connections in a way that would also appeal to an isolated, online male crowd looking for models of how—and who—to be: “He nails an image,” Beres says, “that a lot of people don’t understand they need a lot of money and connections to acquire.” In the end, promoting a controversial athlete and an ex-governor turned blogger as vice-presidential picks may not signal a coherent political vision. But it does show an enormous hunger to engage with online spaces where the young and disaffected men gather, and wait to be shown the way.