#american government everybody | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

solarsturniolo · 5 months

Text

𝕮𝖗𝖊𝖊𝖕 // 𝕸.𝕾. // 𝕺𝖓𝖊

𝕾𝖚𝖒𝖒𝖆𝖗𝖞: in which Matt is failing his classes and at risk of having to repeat the semester, and his tutor is the reason behind it.

𝕯𝖎𝖘𝖈𝖑𝖆𝖎𝖒𝖊𝖗: This is a collaborative story that me and @bambi-slxt started on, but I am in charge of it now :) All characters in this story are of age. None of the characters are minors.

𝖂𝖆𝖗𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖌𝖘: cursing / smut / switch!matt / switch!fem reader / male masturbation / wet dreams / use of good boy / virgin!matt / p in v / oral (fem receiving) / oral (male receiving) / overstimulation / breeding kink / praise kink / mommy kink / scenes mentioning anxiety

𝖂𝖔𝖗𝖉 𝕮𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖙: 5,906

“W-Wait, what?” Matt’s eyes widened, his eyebrows raising. “What do you mean I might not be able to graduate?”

The school counselor sighed, lifting her glasses from the bridge of her nose and placing them onto her desk. She leaned back in her plush swivel chair, looking at the nervous boy sitting across from her. Her office was comforting, a place that Matt had found solace in quite often on his bad days. She never used the overhead light, always opting for the warm glow of her floor lamps and the flicker of light from the flame in a scented candle. Her bookshelves were littered with not only books, but numerous knick-knacks and do-hickeys. Most people would have seen it as clutter, but Matt found comfort in the items she had, which more or less reminded him of his grandmother’s house.

She turned her monitor for him to see, and she visibly saw the blood drain from his face. Her screen glowed with a much harsher light, the gradebook showing Matt’s transcript laid out in front of him. “You’re proficient in your American History class, but the rest of your classes for the semester are in the gutter. Socioeconomics, U.S. Government, European Literature, and Chemistry are all greatly negatively impacting your overall grade point average.” Matt’s head fell, his hands coming up to rub his face. How could I have let it get this bad? How could I be so negligent? How was it even possible? She clasped her hands together and leaned forward, resting her arms on her desk. She had grown to like Matt, he was polite and always greeted her with a smile, he was very open with his thoughts and feelings, and he really did work hard. She empathized with him, because she knew how it felt to be in this spot. “This is a reversible situation - we can fix this. You have options, Matt.”

Matt looked up from his lap, his hands falling onto his thighs. “W-We can?”

“Yes,” she replied with a smile. She swirled her chair around, unlocking one of the drawers in her filing cabinet and opening it to reveal a number of filing folders. She fingered through them before pulling out a sheet, turning her chair back towards her desk and placing it down in front of Matt. “We have a tutoring program available, and I think you would benefit greatly from it.”

“Tutoring?” Matt frowned, staring down at the paper. He never thought in his life that he would need tutoring. How embarrassing. I’m doing so bad in my classes that I need another student to teach me. What if I know them? What if they tell everybody? Matt looked back up at the counselor, hesitation clear on his face. “Are there any other options?”

She sighed, putting her glasses back on and turning the monitor to face her once again. Matt watched intently as she clicked her mouse a few times. Matt instinctively brought his hand to his face, subconsciously beginning to chew on his nails. I can’t choose tutoring. Chris and Nick will never let me hear the end of it. This is so embarrassing. Can’t I just retake a test or something? Why did I let it get this bad?

“Unfortunately, the only other option I have here is for you to retake these classes again…which would also mean repeating senior year.”

Matt hadn’t realized he had chewed his nail off. He dropped his hand back to his lap, discreetly spitting it out when she wasn’t looking at him. “I’ll take the tutoring,” Matt sighed. The thought of not graduating with Nick and Chris made him feel queasy. His stomach turned over just thinking about his brothers walking across that stage while he sat in the audience and watched. His brothers holding their diplomas up with cheesy smiles on their faces for their pictures that would surely be framed and hung on the walls of their parents’ house for the remainder of their lives; all while Matt would have to wait another year to meet the same fate. Another year of high school, this time without his brothers. Without Chris to make him laugh, to make the day move by just a little quicker. Without Nick, who always looked out for Matt, always offering to ask the teacher any questions that Matt had to take the heat off of him, to avoid any anxiety inducing feelings that Matt might have had. I can’t do it. I wouldn’t last a day without them. Any chance to avoid that outcome is one he would take, no questions asked.

x o x o x o

I should have asked some fucking questions. Matt’s heart pounded as he pretended to look at something on his phone, switching between his social media apps anxiously; not that any of them were bustling with activity, he just needed something to make himself look busy. She was here. I wasn’t prepared to see her. Holy fuck.

For the past four years, Monday through Friday, once the bell rang after the final class of the day, Matt had booked it for the locker room. Shuffling through a crowd of boys, shoving Chris (and getting shoved right back), listening to a variety of music through his headphones (mostly Kid Ink, Lil Skies, Mac Miller, and Post Malone), and throwing on his gear for lacrosse. Today, however, he sat awkwardly in the school library, leg bouncing, chewing at the skin around his pinky fingernail. His headphones tucked away in his pocket. No music to drown out his thoughts. Why didn’t I ask more questions? I can’t do this; I can’t be here with her. This can’t be happening. She…looks so pretty.

Across from him, a few tables over, she sat on the table itself, cross-legged and completely at ease. A light blue sweater hung off her shoulders, a pair of khaki cargos crinkled over her legs, worn-out white air forces, and a pair of hoop earrings rounded out the simple, gut-wrenching outfit.

Matt hated feeling this way. She drove him insane, and she had no idea who he was. That was a lie - they had a few classes together. Incidentally, those same classes glowed red in the gradebook. It didn’t take him very long to figure out why.

For the past four years, Matt had walked into school every morning hoping in equal measure that she had shown up and that she had suddenly become homeschooled. Every single class, he would stare at the door just hoping he’d catch a glimpse of her, whether she was walking into the classroom or just passing by in the hallway. He knew where to look for her in the hallways between classes, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel his heart rate pick up when he’d see her in the flood of other students chaotically herding through the halls.

Now she was his tutor. She was the reason he was failing, and she was his tutor. His counselor had no way of knowing, but she had just doomed Matt to repeat senior year. He was not about to sit down with that girl and make a complete idiot out of himself.

Lifting his backpack and hooking the strap over his shoulder, he got up and turned for the door. At that moment she looked up from her book, her eyes locking with his, and he froze.

Her hair fell softly along the edges of her face, and she looked at him with mild curiosity. Matt’s breath hitched in his throat. Years of her never even noticing me, and now she’s looking at me and…smiling. Oh god.

Don’t you dare fuck this up, he heard Chris whisper in the back of his mind. “Fuck off,” he muttered and began to walk towards her.

“Is this where I’m supposed to be for uh…” He didn’t want to say it. Normally people would jump in and finish sentences anyway to avoid uncomfortable silences. She did not. She just continued to look at him with minimal interest, her smile growing a little in amusement. Oh god. This isn’t happening. Somebody please pinch me. Or shoot me.

Matt felt the heat rising to his face, his breath catching in his throat as she stared at him. “Tutoring. I’m here for tutoring.”

She slipped a bookmark between the pages of the book she was reading and pulled a knee up to her chest. Matt caught a glimpse of the cover of the novel, furrowing his eyebrows a bit. A hockey player? I played hockey. Should I say that? Does she like hockey players? Lacrosse is like hockey… in some ways. Should I-

“You’re Matt, right? One of the triplets?”

Matt blinked. “Yeah.”

She smiled again, placing her book down onto the table. Icebreaker? Matt made a mental note to look that up later. “I think we share a few classes, right?”

“We have Socioeconomics, European Literature, and Chemistry together, and when Chorus comes into the auditorium to practice, I run the soundboard for you. You took Workshop with me and Chris, and I could never focus on a single project me and him had together. We had Math and Introduction to Culinary together last year, all of our electives the year before that, and in ninth grade you were in my home room and study hall. You’ve always been in my lunch block, and you like to eat out in the courtyard under the willow tree far away from the picnic benches. You’re in the photography and Yearbook club because you love to take pictures, and you also run the school’s yearbook account on Instagram. You never get breakfast because it hurts your stomach to eat in the mornings but if you forgot to have dinner the night before, you’ll go through the line in the cafeteria and get an old-fashioned donut and a cup of mixed fruit. You prefer peppermint gum over spearmint, you always wear shimmer lip gloss instead of clear, you chew on your lip when you’re thinking really hard, you write sloppily when taking notes, but your papers are written in cursive. You’re terrifyingly beautiful, and I’ve wanted to talk to you for four years.”

That’s what Matt thought about saying. Instead of opting for that particular route of social suicide, however, he simply went with, “Yeah, I think we have one or two together, right?” and sat his bag down.

Don’t fuck this up. You cannot fuck this up.

x o x o x o

“Ms. Coleman said you were behind in some classes,” she said, pulling out her laptop from her bag. “Which ones?”

‘All of them’, He thought to himself. Matt sighed, running a hand through his messy hair. “What am I not behind in?” he mumbled.

She looked up at him through her lashes. Matt felt his stomach twist up in knots. He had imagined her looking at him like this more times than he could count. Usually late at night when he was in bed, his hand wrapped around his cock, his eyes screwed shut as he bit back soft whines and whimpers as his arousal leaked into his fist. He couldn’t help but feel his pants tightening around his crotch as filthy thought after filthy thought played in his head.

She smiled at him again, and Matt suddenly realized that she had been speaking. His stomach dropped. “S-Sorry, what?” he stammered. She laughed softly, a sound that made Matt’s heart leap up into his throat. “I asked if you could be a little more specific.”

Matt cleared his throat. “Um, Government, English, Socioeconomics, and Chem.” He looked down at his hands in his lap, the thoughts from earlier looming over him. I won’t graduate. Mom will be so disappointed. Dad won’t speak to me for a year. Chris and Nick will move on in life without me. She probably thinks I’m an idiot. Who the fuck fails almost every class in their last semester?

He could have sworn he felt his heart come to a full stop when he felt her hand on his shoulder, his head snapping up in an instant. “Hey,” she cooed as Matt met her gaze once more. “We’ll fix this. We have four months until graduation. You have time.”

Yeah, time to spend my afternoons drooling over you and retaining no information. Four months to sit here and gawk at you every fucking afternoon while my grades continue to plummet. Four months of me rushing home after these tutor sessions to beat off before Nick and Chris get home from their after school extra curriculars. Either way, I’m failing this semester.

“Why don’t we start with English, hm? I’m in that class with you, third period. We have a paper due on Friday.” She opened her laptop, pressing the power button repeatedly. Matt swallowed the lump in his throat – fuck. The paper… he was hoping to avoid it altogether. Sensing his hesitation, she raised her eyebrows. “Have you started it?”

Matt blinked. He licked his lips, suddenly noticing how dry they were. “...No.”

“Me neither,” she grinned, and Matt felt his shoulders relax. She had a beautiful smile, and it so rarely appeared on the Somerville High property, even less so in the classes they’d shared. It made him wonder what else he could do or say to make it stay for longer.

“It’s okay,” she continued, tapping away at her keyboard, urging the ancient relic to awaken and let her log on. “We can write it together.”

“Yeah, sure…together,” he said, taking out his own laptop, proud that he had enough focus to keep his hands steady. He wanted to make her smile again, but he hadn’t the faintest idea how. Matt also wanted to crawl into the floor and sleep for an eternity, but his wishes seemed to have no substance. His grades did, and more than anything, he knew he wouldn’t forgive himself if he made Chris and Nick leave him behind. Punctuating his thoughts with a deep sigh, Matt pulled up the assignment rubric. “Three pages, double spaced - that’s not bad - third page sources cited…” As he scanned the page, she, still waiting on her dinosaur of a computer to come to life, leaned closer to him to see for herself.

Her perfume. Waves of vanilla with floral notes. Undertones of musk. It was strong but intoxicating. Matt used every ounce of self-control to not turn towards her and inhale as much of it as he could. She had been using this perfume for the past three years, and Matt had become obsessed with it. He was like a stoner catching a whiff of weed, he could identify it from a mile away. He could sniff her out like a bloodhound if he really wanted to. Matt begged his brain to behave.

It didn’t.

The aching in his pants grew. Matt pulled his hoodie down to cover his lap, he could not let her see what she did to him. He felt his face heat up as embarrassment flooded his brain. Still, his cock remained half hard and his balls felt heavy with arousal. Despite knowing how wrong it was, he wanted nothing more than to rub one out. Matt used every iota of his self-control to focus on puling the assignment up on his computer. One hour. I just need to get through this one hour.

x o x o x o

“How long have you been tutoring?” Matt wanted to know more about her. It was a near-feverish affliction that kept his leg bouncing continuously, releasing nervous energy at speeds that could power the entire city of Boston.

She didn’t look up at him, pulling up the assignment on her computer. “I started last year…gave me a chance to get out of Johnson’s eighth period. Do you know why you’re falling behind in Philosophy?”

Matt didn’t hear her question at all. The stickers on her laptop were incredibly distracting - he caught a glimpse of Homer Simpson, the Monster logo, a few Pokémon, numerous band logos, Marilyn Monroe, a sick vaporwave statue head, and a plethora of raccoons. I like raccoons. Now is probably not the best time to tell her that. “Huh?”

She glanced over through her lashes, and Matt felt his air supply vaporize. “I asked why you’re failing.”

Because you walk into the room and I forget how to speak my own damn language. Because I want to talk to you so bad, but my throat closes up when you look at me. Because when you smile it makes my legs heavy…But more than anything, because I want you in ways that I have never wanted anyone before, and it is all that I can think about. No matter where I am at or who I am with, you manage to take over every thought in my head. Movie nights with my brothers where I can drown out the movie, daydreaming of what you might look like waking up next to me in one of my shirts. Dinner with my family, wondering if you like whatever it is that we’re eating that night. In the shower, wondering what your routine is like. Late nights in my room, the door locked and the lights off, clothes discarded onto the floor, my hand tugging at my cock. You are always there. You’re the reason why I’m failing, and you don’t even know it.

Matt settled on, “It’s hard to focus in there.” Not a lie. But not even close to the truth.

She nodded. “She talks in circles sometimes.” A pause made his eyes dart up to hers, terrified that he’d missed something again. But no, she was…studying him.

Her head tilted slightly, and her hazy eyes rested on his. He wondered what she was thinking about, and something primitive in his mind was screaming at him to hide. He felt vulnerable, weak under her gaze. His cock throbbed. Matt did his best to bite back the soft groan that fought to escape his throat.

“I think you might just need a body double.”

He blinked.

She continued. “The classes you’re failing, those are the only ones you don’t have with one of your brothers or your other friends, right?”

Matt nodded, wondering how she could possibly know that. He bookmarked that thought for later.

“Well, your brain probably knows that they expect you to do your work, and you don’t want to let them down, so the work gets done. Not in English or History, apparently. So, I’m your body double. And I expect you to do your work.” She grinned. “It’s corny as fuck but you’d be surprised how much you get done. Ready to start?”

Matt decided to process that particular heap of information later. “Yeah, sure.”

“I’m sending you my sources. You know how to cite them?”

His brain couldn’t register her words. It all made sense, but his brain felt too fuzzy to put the pieces together. “Sources, right. Y-Yeah, I uh…yes.”

“Good boy,” she purred. Matt nearly choked, his dick now fully hard. There’s no way she just said that. She gestured to his keyboard, and Matt began to shakily type the name of the website he needed into the search bar. Maybe I just imagined it…It’s been a weird day. Matt could feel her gaze burning into his skin like the heat of a thousand suns. His heart was lodged in his throat, he had begun manually breathing, not wanting his breaths to sound too heavy or too short.

Her hands kept brushing his arm, and Matt realized if he wasn’t careful, she would notice the way his face turned a bright red when she touched him, or worse… she’d see the bulge that could barely even be hidden by his hoodie. He turned away from her, pretending to look for something in his bag. “I um…thanks.”

“Go ahead and read those, throw all the relevant information into a messy doc, and then let me know when you’re done, okay?” Matt looked up and she leaned once more against the concrete column behind her, earbuds in, typing away in her own empty doc for the same assignment. He glanced at the stickers on her laptop, eyeing the one in the dead center with the name of a band he had never heard of. I wonder what she’s listening to. Would she like my music? Would I like hers?

Pulling out his own headphones, Matt shuffled his own playlist, and tried desperately to focus on the article in front of him.

x o x o x o

Forty two minutes later (he counted), Matt finally reached the end of the mind-numbing wall of text. No closer to understanding what the fuck he was doing, he reached out to tap the table near her knee. Her cargos sported faded stitching on their edges, proof of intentional wear as opposed to fashion wear.

When the flash of motion moved into her line of sight, she looked up from her own article, brows raised expectantly and eyes locked onto his. “How’s it going?”

“Well…It’s not perfect but…it’s better than nothing right?.”

“Mhmm.” She leaned forward, staring at his screen. “One and a half pages? Atta boy.”

Matt’s face flushed, his lips parting to speak but silence was all that followed.

“Did you do what I said earlier?”

“Yes ma’am.” Where the FUCK did THAT come from?

She wrinkled her face, her lips tugging up into a smile. “Down, boy.”

Matt almost puked. A lightning bolt struck his lungs, and they withered in his ribcage. “Sorry- sorry,” he stuttered. He ripped his gaze away from hers, blinking rapidly.

She laughed softly, the ghost of a smile passing over her lips. Matt’s head shot up faster than he’d ever admit. “Little weirdo,” she muttered, turning away from him to put her laptop in her bag.

“Oh, are we-”

“Mhm. Bell’s about to ring.”

He blinked again, opening his own backpack.

“Give me your snap.”

“Huh?”

“Your snapchat. So we can talk about your assignments and schedule tutoring for sometime other than boy’s athletics.”

How did she-

“Wouldn’t want you to miss lacrosse.” She tilted her head to punctuate her all-knowing tone, and put her phone in Matt’s hand.

As he typed megamett_44, Matt reevaluated the entirety of his life’s choices, and hoped she’d just…ignore it. Or not see it at all, that was preferable.

Neither of those things happened.

“Mega. Mett. Forty four?” she questioned, raising an eyebrow at him.

“...Yep.”

“You, um…” She gestured, sarcasm beginning to drip from her lips. “You wanna explain?”

“No I do not,” he replied, grinning nervously, avoiding her gaze.

“Hmm…cute,” She smirked. Matt felt his heart swell and his pants tighten even more at the comment she had made, just barely crossing the line of being a praiseful remark. He wanted to ask more about what she meant; Why did she say cute? Does she think I’m cute? Was she just saying the username is cute? But before he could think of something, the bell rang, and in one fluid motion, she swung her bag over her shoulder and slipped off the table. “Later,” she hummed before she disappeared into a river of students escaping school grounds for the weekend.

Matt exhaled and slumped into his chair, hanging his head as he dropped his bag back onto the floor. The visible bulge under the fabric of his shorts and his hoodie taunted him, his mind raced, thinking of all the things he could have done instead of gawking at her and stuttering one or two words at a time in response to whatever she said to him. Matt ran his fingers through his messy hair. His cheeks remained a rosy pink. He rubbed his lips with his fingers, an anxious habit he had picked up over the years in a desperate attempt to help with his nail biting problem, though very little progress had been made there.

“I’m done for,” he said, nodding decisively. “Yep. This is the end of Matthew Sturniolo.” Matt looked down at his phone, numerous texts from his brothers flooding the screen.

Nick: where are you

Chris: where r u ?

Nick: why weren’t you at lacrosse

Chris: coach is not happy with you lmao

Chris: helloooooooo

Chris: the van is still here so we know ur here

Chris: unless 😏

Nick: enough

Chris: man come on nick is grumpy and bitching about the weather

Nick: it’s fucking sweltering out and i’m sweating bullets. I’d appreciate getting into the air conditioned vehicle that we OWN

Matt sighed and shoved his phone into his pocket. He looked around, making sure that nobody was nearby as he stood up. Grabbing his bag, Matt hurried out of the library and pushed his way through the halls to the nearest restroom.

Ensuring that the bathroom was completely empty, he slipped into the closest bathroom stall and locked it behind him. Matt quickly dropped his bag to the floor, lifting the hem of his hoodie up and holding it between his teeth. He pulled the band of his shorts down, groaning softly as the friction sent bolts of pleasure through him. He slipped his hand under the fabric of his boxers, his eyes fluttering closed as his hand wrapped around his shaft. He hummed ever so softly as he gave his cock a few strokes.

He opened his eyes, suddenly realizing what he was doing. No, this isn’t like you. This isn’t right. You don’t do this here. He pulled his cock up into the waistband of his boxers, dissatisfied above all else, but knowing he had to hide his unpleasant erection somehow. This was a new low for him. What kind of a creep can’t even keep it in his pants until he gets home? Matt pulled his shorts back up, dropping the hem of his hoodie from where it had been between his teeth. He stepped out of the bathroom stall, taking a quick once-over in the mirror to make sure he looked put together and not a flustered horny mess, before he slipped out of the bathroom, following the mass of students rushing for the exit out into the student parking lot.

x o x o x o

Matt saw Chris and Nick leaning against the edge of his car. Matt clicked the unlock button on his key, the vehicle chirping in response. Nick opened the door to the backseat, huffing something under his breath as he got into the car. “Where the hell were you?” Chris asked, slinging his bag into the back next to Nick’s foot, closing the door behind him.

“Library,” Matt muttered, clunking into the driverseat. Chris paralleled Matt’s actions, dropping himself into the passenger seat. “Library?” Chris repeated, tasting the word with furrowed eyebrows as he turned to look at Nick, expecting he might know more about Matt’s situation.

He did not. Nick scrunched his face. “Since when do you go to the library?”

Matt groaned. “Can we just go home.”

The other two didn’t ask too many questions after that. What normally would have been a debrief session of their individual experiences from that day while feasting on whatever fast-food place the three of them had voted on, was instead a deafening silence and a painfully tense atmosphere. Matt was secretly very appreciative of this, his mind was too scattered for him to hold a conversation with his brothers, never mind care about what they were discussing.

x o x o x o

When he collapsed onto his bed, Matt checked his phone, brows furrowed in surprise. He’d gotten a notification from Snapchat (a rarity), and his heart shot up into his throat when he saw who it was from. He tapped on the notification to see that she had sent him a photo of herself - her hair fell in waves around her face, and Matt could see the glint of her earrings. She wasn’t even looking at the camera, making the edge of her eyeliner effortlessly severe. Matt’s chest went aflutter, and he stared at that picture for a very long set of minutes. “Here’s my snap”, she had typed, and once he tapped out of the photo, Matt added her back.

But they hadn’t spoken past that.

He laid on his bed trying to think of something to say to keep talking to her, but everything sounded desperate and corny. He had so many things he wanted to say, so many questions he wanted to ask. He wanted to talk to her for hours, about anything and everything. He wanted to know everything about her.

As the sky darkened, Matt scrolled aimlessly on TikTok, then Instagram, then back to TikTok, avoiding Snapchat to the best of his ability. His mind refused to let go of her, and it was starting to piss him off. What is she doing? Does she stay home on school nights? Does she go out? What are her hobbies? Does she play video games? Would she play them with me? Does she like to read outside of school too? When does she go to bed? Does she like to stay up late? Does she go to bed early? Why can't I think of something normal to say to her?

Matt dragged himself out of bed, crumpling slowly to the floor. He leaned his head against the edge of his mattress and sighed - what a fucking day.

A knock at the door had him lifting his head from where it rested against the mattress. “Hi, honey.” Mom. “You eating dinner with us tonight?”

He stood up, crossed the empty floor of his room quickly, and pulled his door open. “Hey Mom.” Matt leaned into her, and Mary Lou slipped her arms around her son.

“Hi baby. Somethin’ on your mind?”

I’m failing.

I’m failing four classes.

You and dad would be so disappointed.

I feel tired and sick all the time.

I just want to go to sleep.

Graduation is in four months.

Nick and Chris are gonna leave me.

I’ll have to repeat senior year.

It’ll all be my fault.

The girl making me fail is the girl trying to help me pass.

I can’t focus on anything.

I’m so fucking tired.

“Just missed ya.” Matt sighed. He hummed when he felt his mother's loving arms embrace him just a little tighter. “I’ll be downstairs in a minute.”

x o x o x o

A dark room. The brush of fingers over silk. A candle flickering shadows against the walls. The faint scent of vanilla. Pleasure flowing through his body. The buzzing hum of a vibrator. More waves of soft tingling flowing from the center of his body.

“Good boy…”

He sighed, lips parted, eyes closed. His hips began to shift upwards, slowly at first, pushing against the vibrator, aching for more. Instead, his leaking, rock-hard cock met a soft hand. He whimpered, digging his pelvis into the pillowy skin. “Awww…d’you wanna hump Mommy’s hand?”

“Yes…” he pleaded, his head lolling to the side, chest heaving. “P-Please, I-I... Please.”

Her fist began to slip around the head of his cock. “Please what?”

“Nnnghh…please let me hump your hand. I need it s-so bad, p-please, it hurts Mommy, I just wanna…jus wanna feel your hand around my…my…”

Another hand cupped his balls, silky-soft thumb rubbing spine-tingling circles over his pleasure-filled skin. “Hmm? What was that, pretty boy? Mommy didn’t quite catch that.”

“My cock, miss, I…p-please reward me…please, I-I’ve been so good…”

She smiled, amused by how easy it was to get him riled up. “Go ahead, baby. You’ve been such a good boy. You deserve a little treat, don’t you?”

Matt didn’t need to be told twice. His hips lifted, his jaw going slack as his shaft slipped through her fist with ease, her hand already sticky with his arousal. A whimper grew at the back of his throat, his hips beginning to buck up into her grasp. Erotic sounds filled the room; heavy panting, his wet cock slipping in and out of her grasp, the bed frame creaking ever so quietly, her quiet praises that she’d whisper to him. “Atta boy, you’ve got it,” she hummed, earning a sound from Matt that he hadn’t even known he was capable of making. A mix between a sob and a whimper, a sound that made her press her thighs together, her core aching for him. “That’s it, baby, hump Mommy’s hand. Doesn’t that feel good?”

His pace quickened, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths as he began to rut against her hand. His desire was primal. It was animalistic. The way he craved her, unlike anything he had ever craved for in his life. His balls, heavy with his arousal, slapping against her wrist as her hand reached the base of his cock with every thrust he made. His tip, swollen and pink, leaking with his desire. She could feel the way his shaft throbbed, practically begging for more. Her hand gently squeezed his tip, a guttural moan falling from his rosy lips.

He began to whine now, desperate pleas pouring from his lips like thick sweet honey. “I’ve been so good, I’ll behave, I promise, I’ll be s-so good for you Mommy, please let me cum, please, I’m b-begging you, please Mommy… y-you’re so sweet and g-good to me, I jus’ wanna make you happy, please let me make you happy…f-fuck!” White-hot liquid spurted from his tip, coating her hand and his abdomen as she continued to stroke his sensitive shaft.. “Mmmph…Mommy…f-fuck…thank you, th-thank you, mmph Mommy…thank you, y-you’re so good to me…”

Breathlessly, he pushed himself up onto his elbows, looking up at the beautiful girl in front of him. His gaze flickered down to her hand, his cock throbbing as he saw how much of a mess he had made. Ropes of thick warm cum coated her hand, and Matt couldn’t help but think of what it’d look like leaking out of her. He watched with a dazed and aroused glisten in his eyes as she brought her hand up to his lips. Obediently he licked his mess off of her fingers, paying no mind to the taste. He didn’t care, he’d do anything she wanted, even if it meant having the lingering taste of his seed in his mouth. Once her hand was cleaned up, he pressed kisses up to her wrist, trailing up her arm, keeping his eyes low in reverence.

She lifted his head with a finger under his jaw. “You’re welcome, baby. You did so good for me, hmm?” she murmured, kissing his forehead. Matt closed his eyes, never wanting to leave this moment. “Were you a good boy for mommy?”

Matt shot up in his bed and his chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. He pulled his duvet cover off of him, and in the dark of his bedroom he could still see his mess leaking through the fabric of his boxers. His torso was slick with a sheen layer of sweat. Despite having already finished, his cock refused to soften.

“Oh fuck me,” he snarled, rubbing his tired face with his hands. This is going to be the hardest four months of my life.

Tags: @mattsturniololoverr @oversturn @mattslolita @simplysturn @flowerxbunnie @soursturniolo @megamett44-lover @sturnybabes @jjmaybankswifes-blog @plasticferal @cupidsword @liz-stxrn @sturniolosreads @bernardsleftbootycheek @egirlshit @matthemunch44 @nonamegirlxsturniolo @chrizz333 @sturniolopowers @mattsleftnipple03 @worldlxvlys @hearts4chriss @tillies33ssss @janiellasblog @creamoncreamoncream2 @breeloveschris @meg-sturniolo @lustfulslxt @braindead4l @xtravrgnoliveoil @ghostlythinggoingaround @rootbeerworshiper @querenciasturniolo @whicked-hazlatwhore @m4ttslvr @sturnioloblogs @mqttittude @bewtyschooldropout @taekwite @itzdarling

938 notes · View notes

qqueenofhades · 4 months

Note

Is it foolish of me to sympathize with how marginalized people on the far-left are incredibly frustrated that the Democratic establishment isn't as scared of/desperate to please them as the Republican establishment are toward the MAGA fringe? I guess from their perspective, voting feels like begging - most of the people who hear you won't even glance at you, let alone drop you a coin. But you still have to do it, or else you (or worse, your family) are *guaranteed* to starve.

Okay, a few thoughts here. Note: for you and the other people who have recently sent politics asks, I have been very deliberately NOT talking about it for the last few months. I had to break it yesterday because of the Orange Menace finally getting fucking convicted, but I do want to go back to not doing that (at least for the next few weeks/months/until whatever else stupid happens). So while I will answer this, I am generally not going to answer others and my apologies for that, but yeah. It's just so much and I have GOT to keep myself sane until November somehow. (Or God forbid, afterward, but you know.)

First off, most members of the American far left aren't actually marginalized people, or at least not marginalized enough that their personal well-being seems in any way likely to be affected by their loud and ceaseless campaign to tell other people not to vote. Actual marginalized people who have lived in America for any length of time are *well* aware of how the government and the state can be weaponized against them; witness how black community organizers will voice well-deserved criticisms of the Democratic establishment or other aspects of American party politics that are frustrating for everyone, but they will still always tell people to vote. Black people are also extremely aware that earning the right to vote was an incredibly long, difficult, and bloody battle that they were never given it for free, and the white power establishment fought them having it at every turn. They are thus far more aware than your average white online leftist that voting matters, because they had to work so hard to get it (and still to defend it as various red states launch openly racist assaults on voting rights, especially aimed at disenfranchising people of color). Witness how Bernie also got literally zero traction with African American voters, despite being the darling of the (white) online left.

Hispanic people are also (rightfully) frustrated at how both American parties can use Latino immigrants as a political football, but they're still backing Biden by 30-point margins. We hear a lot of chatter about Trump supposedly gaining ground with voters of color -- maybe he has, though I doubt it, but that's still incremental gains from the massive holes he was in before, and where he generally remains. Arab Americans are (rightfully) angry with Biden over Gaza, but even in the much-hyped Michigan primary, he got roughly the same amount of "uncommitted" voters as Obama did as an uncontested incumbent in 2012, and most of them have said they'll grit their teeth and vote for him in the general election anyway. Yes, a few of them have decided not to, but they are not the size of the Black and Latino populations in America insofar as electoral power, and many of them have grudgingly decided that as bad as Biden might be on this particular issue (though far less so than the social media groupthink would paint him) the alternative (i.e. Trump openly promising to deport everybody who's not white and crack down on pro-Palestinian protests and anything else) is much, much worse.

And yet, white leftists seem utterly incapable of making these same calculations. Frankly, I'm not sure they actually care about Gaza, let alone anything else they say, because if so, they wouldn't be slavering at the mouth to let Trump back in there to "teach a lesson" to Biden, Democrats, and everyone else who was not Smart And Clever Enough to sanctimoniously sit on their hands and let the fascists take over. I know this because they spent all their time lying about Biden and distorting his record and insisting people not vote even before October of last year, and then it only got ten thousand times worse. I'm not saying that all leftist or leftist-identified people are white, but they are disproportionately predominant in leftist spaces and in pushing the idea that there's "no difference" between the parties and somehow Trump and Biden are morally equivalent or will have the same amount of impact on what will happen after one of them is elected. That is, yes, because they are white and they have the privilege of assuming that a weaponized fascist government will not go after them for that reason (even though Trump and his surrogates are now claiming that "everyone" who opposes Trump has to be "dealt with.") As such, when you say that marginalized far-left people are frustrated with the Democrats, I'm... not entirely sure that's true. Marginalized people AND the far left are both frustrated with the Democrats, but one of those groups has generally still decided not to voluntarily disenfranchise themselves, and the other is pumping out Vladimir Putin-wet-dream anti-voting propaganda at every chance they get.

There is also the fact that America is not a left-wing country in any sense of the word, and that while it's easy for the MAGA Republicans to go ever further far-right and promise to be even more outrageously cruel and stupid and fascist than ever before, but that's not an actual policy or a plan. It is also a strategy of diminishing returns; witness the fact that for all the cruelty and stupidity Republicans have pumped into the public arena since 2016, they haven't actually been that good at winning elections, and most of their major successes have come from Trump winning in 2016 and thus being able to stack SCOTUS and the district and circuit courts with hand-picked right-wing nut jobs, who are functioning exactly as they were designed to do. (Which Hillary Clinton warned about, along with everyone else, and yet she was taken out by the exact same dirtbag leftist disinformation moral purity machine that is working overtime to handicap Biden for the exact same reasons.) Mainstream Democrats warned about this before the 2016 election and were scorned and laughed off. Indeed, the entire Online Left continues to resolutely deny that the extremist SCOTUS is responsible for anything (It's Biden's Fault) and thus are likewise identical to Trumpies. And since they also want Trump to get back in there and teach a lesson to the Democrats, they're just as anti-democratic, dangerous, stupid, and deliberately short-sighted as actual MAGATs, and can by no means be considered allies to the singular movement of keeping fascists out of power. That is our only present goal.

If Democrats bent over to everything the far left asks for (which is often a combination of tankie gobbledygook, various vague ideas about Communism utopia where capitalism magically vanishes with no consequences, half-baked revolution cosplays, and other stuff that is functionally equivalent to the wildest lunacies of MAGA) they would never win an election again, and that would be exactly what the fascists want. Witness how they struggled when they were branded "defunders of the police" and "socialists" and other effective responses to the mildest milquetoast efforts for reform or accountability. And the political climate right now is just far too dangerous to throw everything to the wind and prance out some pipe-dream perfect-utopia plan. I'm sure you've heard about Project 2025 and how the far-right Heritage Foundation is planning to systematically implement fascism at all levels of the country, the instant they have a compliant Republican president and congress. I would take all these people crying about Biden even a fraction more seriously if they weren't openly jonesing for something that is so unbelievably, incredibly worse.

For example: I currently have major beefs with literally the entire foreign policy of the Biden administration right now. I think they're being too hard on Ukraine (forbidding them to strike targets on Russian soil with American weapons, which would end the war faster) and, despite some promising signs and open displeasure, still far too easy on Israel. They looked foolish after insisting that Rafah was a red line and then essentially making up an excuse that what's going on now is not a "major operation." Secretary of State Blinken floating the idea of helping Congress censure or neuter the International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued for Netanyahu and co. was also one of the fucking stupidest things I've heard from a serious (i.e. non-Trumpist) American diplomat in a long time. So we respect the ICC when it issues warrants for tyrants we don't like (Putin), but when it issues one for tyrants we still do, apparently (Netanyahu), then bingo, it's back to the bad old habit of ignoring international law like we're special and it doesn't apply to us, and allows all the other bad actors around the world to do the same by pointing at America and correctly pointing out that we ignore it when it doesn't suit our purposes. I think this is wrong and I don't agree. So? What am I going to do?

Well, you see. I'm going to vote for Biden and I am going to give him money and I am going to remind everyone I know that they have no moral option but to do the same. I do this because I am aware that despite my disagreements, Biden is acting from a cautious anti-interventionist standpoint and does not want to throw American military might around recklessly or dangerously like good ol' George Dubya or Trump or even Obama and the drones. He is listening to sober mainstream advisors who have (however incorrect and useless) ideas about "avoiding escalation" and trying to bring conflict to a managed end. He is doing this with a realistic appraisal of the power of the office of American presidency and he's not going to capriciously end democracy and become a full-blown fascist dictator on day one, as Trump has openly and repeatedly promised to do. Yes, if there was a viable option apart from Biden, maybe I would think about voting for them, but there is not, and literally everyone who does not actively vote for him is helping Trump. I do not care about any other contrived and disingenuous online squealing. I know that Biden does not want the war in Gaza to go on for no reason and for maximum carnage; Netanyahu and Trump both do. That is just to name one thing.

So: yes. I absolutely understand being frustrated with the Democrats and wishing they would push harder and etc. But I am also aware that they can be pushed, that they are the only option right now, and the people who huff and puff and whine and groan about how it's such a moral imposition to vote for them are literally doing the fascists' work for them, and that is not acceptable. If they want a better system or a better world that isn't just useless internet fantasies about magical end-of-days Raptures fixing everything, also a la the crazy fundamentalists, they will have to get off their ass, do the work, and create that change. I will be happy to vote for that candidate when or if they arrive. In the meantime, I will continue to do my damndest to ensure that we even have a chance to get there. So yeah.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #okay back to Not Talking About Politics i go

422 notes · View notes

neechees · 8 months

Text

Like you can't be all for Landback in Turtle Island and then somehow think zionism & the state of Isntreal is a "landback movement" where some of the tenants are that 1. Landback doesn't mean creating an ethnostate (which Isra*l has been trying to do & this was the goal of the State from the beginning) 2. Landback does not mean or require or encourage Kicking everybody else out (which Isntreal is trying to do with the Palestinians and has been doing since 1948 and its government has been saying they explicitly want to do) 3. Landback does not encourage or require "Reverse colonizing" or committing genocide against the settler or any immigrant population (which Isntreal has repeatedly done, is doing, and wants to continue to do, so even if you think that Israelis are "Indigenous" and that the Palestinians or "Arabs" weren't, this is still going directly what Landback is explicitly against) 4. Reintroducing Native plants & wildlife to the area to undo effects of colonization in the ecosystem (& Isntreal has been planting invasive plants to the Levant, colonization has killed off Native species such as the Palestinian crocodile, and made it illegal for Palestinians to forage culturally important plants like Za'atar, the uprooting of Olive trees, or collect RAINWATER under the premise of "ecological preservation" in the same way that National Parks were created specifically to disenfranchise Native Americans under the guise of "ecological preservation", not to mention the terrorizing of Palestinians with bombs & has been polluting the area)

You have to be a special type of stupid & brainwashed if you think the latter is "Landback" when the State is literally doing everything that the Landback movement has specifically said its against

631 notes · View notes

femmeidiot · 1 month

Text

everybody wants to make fun of Americans for all the fun things about us like delicious food and giant beverages like make fun of us for something real like how dependent on cars we are or how stupid the two party government system is and let us have fun with cheeseburgers in peace

155 notes · View notes

what-even-is-thiss · 1 month

Text

It tires me out when people act like immigrants will ruin their national identity or something. How fragile is your national identity? People will bring their own ideas yeah but also when you commit to staying somewhere you usually end up taking on a lot of the local ideas. If your national identity is good and strong people will comfortably integrate themselves into it while also maintaining their own little cultures in small pockets.

Like that’s how it’s almost always worked in the US. Which is why it’s especially stupid when people make those kinds of arguments here. Yeah people have their own distinct cultures but don’t worry about it. We’ll get them on board with baseball and constitutional law and increasingly weird burger combinations. Pretty much everyone picks up on the fundamentals when they live here long enough. Their children certainly do. And they can introduce you to some new ideas as well.

Your identity as a country isn’t a static never changing thing either. Americans used to mostly drink tea but then we dumped a bunch of it in the ocean and started drinking coffee instead in protest. Britaish colonial holdings used to be ginormous and now they’re not. Like whatever your national identity is I can guarantee you it wasn’t exactly the same 200 years ago. If your country even existed as an entity 200 years ago. So many of the systems that make up our governments are pretty new in the grand scheme of things. And so are the components that make up our cultural identities.

Inserting a new group of people isn’t a death knell for your national culture. If anything it’s sharing your culture with a whole new group of people. Your culture just got a bit bigger! How cool is that? You have so many things to share with each other. You have every opportunity to make yourself as a people stronger whenever an influx of immigrants or refugees shows up. Spread your language, learn their language, maybe get some new useful loan words, educate their children about your national philosophy and system of government and turn them into productive citizens, gain an entirely new type of food for your region.

There’s a lot of benefits to letting people move between countries. But everybody wants to make it hard because like national identity or something. You don’t live in a bubble. This is a globalized world. Your “national identity” is influenced by outside forces already. You might as well try to adapt instead of pretending that you’re some isolated pure force of untouched culture. That doesn’t exist anymore if it ever did.

167 notes · View notes

probablyasocialecologist · 9 months

Text

Though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped counting Covid-19 cases, according to wastewater data—which emerged early on as an accurate tracker of the ebbs and flows of the virus—we are currently in one of the biggest surges of the pandemic, amid the spread of a new variant, JN-1, as the virus keeps mutating. More than three-quarters of U.S. hospital beds are currently in use due to Covid hospitalizations. Uptake of the most recent booster shot, which should help to protect against the new variant and lower the risk of severe cases and the odds of getting long Covid, hovers around 19 percent. Meanwhile, the most recent White House response to a question about whether they had any guidance for hospitals, some of which have brought back mitigation protocols in response to the most recent Covid spike, came courtesy of press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: “Hospitals, communities, states, they have to make their own decisions. That’s not something we get involved in,” she replied, appearing exasperated. “We are in possibly the second-biggest surge of the pandemic if you look at wastewater levels,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, who runs a long-Covid clinic at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and has had ongoing Covid symptoms since August 2022. “There is no urgency to this. No news. No discussion in Congress. There is no education.”

[...]

Since the Biden administration declared the end of the national emergency in May, Americans across the political spectrum have largely followed the example set by the government and entirely disposed of any level of Covid precautions. Liberal and left-wing outlets have participated in the normalizing of Covid too, dismissing or even ostracizing people who still take precautions as if they are tin-hat conspiracy theorists. “We can’t be in lockdown forever,” has become a common refrain, as if wearing a mask on the subway constitutes “lockdown.” In September, Biden himself participated in the spread of this kind of harmful disinformation when he declared the pandemic “over” on 60 Minutes. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” he said. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” This is, essentially, governing via “vibes”—so much for “following the science.”

[...]

The consequences of discarding all Covid precautions are becoming clearer, as more people get repeated infections and long-term symptoms, amid an alarming spike in heart problems among healthy young people. People are getting sick more often not due to the myth of “immunity debt,” which posits that the lack of exposure to other people during lockdown has made people less able to fight off infections (three years later), but because Covid weakens the immune system. Each time someone contracts Covid, the odds of long-term complications increase.

#covid19 #coronavirus #usa #democrats #biden

530 notes · View notes

tanadrin · 1 year

Text

Imagine that a century or two from now, the eastern half of the United States is conquered by the Canadian Empire, its intelligentsia deported, its land colonized by Canadian immigrants, and its remaining people mostly gradually absorbed into a Neo-Canadian identity. The West reorganizes, developing a new political and cultural center, and comes to regard itself as the "true" United States, with the remnant culture of the East (by now much changed by Canadian rule) as representing an unchanged tradition stretching back to the time of George Washington. The holdout western half is subsequently conquered by the Reformed Mexican Empire, and while most of the population remains in situ, its elite is taken to Mexico City. There, for three or four generations, they do their best to maintain their distinct American identity, focusing on the American "civil religion," the distinctive political ideals and cultural features that mark them out as Americans, and come up with a new way of interpreting their history that allows America to be a perennial idea, something not directly physically tied to the territory of the United States, which no longer exists. They compose a body of historical works based on Washington Irving's rather fabulistic approach to early American history, the half-remembered popular versions of the stories of Columbus and the Pilgrims, the First Thanksgiving, even the Revolutionary War. They don't have access to the original texts anymore--let's say this is all taking place in a post-Collapse North America where long-range travel and communication is difficult and a lot of history has been lost--but they do their best. They append to these books, or include in their text, of history a copy of the Constitution, big chunks of the United States Code, and Robert's Rules of Order.

Subsequently, the Empire of Gran Columbia invades, conquers southern and central Mexico, and its Emperor lets the captive Americans go home. They return north, mostly to California, find that the version of American history and civics that is remembered there isn't the same as the version they have (not that the Californian one is correct--the Mexican Empire has suppressed English-language education and high culture in its Aztlani provinces), and set about reforming and reorganizing the Western States (as they're now called) to be more in line with the forms they brought back from the exile. In the meantime, other bits of important literature start being kept in libraries next to copies of the received histories: some bits of early American literature, like Hawthorne, the Song of Hiawatha, some highly abridged Herman Melville, Thomas Paine--heck, even some John Locke, and quotes or fragments from Shakespeare. Some traditionalists now argue the capital of the United States has always been located in San Francisco, and that Washington, D.C. only because the capital later, under the influence of Eastern heretics.

In the following centuries, the Western States retain their independence for a time, but eventually become a secondary battleground for a lot of other empires--the Mexicans, the Canadians, the Pan-Pacific Federation, and so forth. American culture remains distinctive, insulted in part by its unique traditions, though now everybody speaks Future Spanish, and only learns English to read the old texts. In this period additional material, including later compositions, continues to accrete, forming a distinct body of sacred American scripture, although it does not exist in a single canonical form. Attempts to reconcile distinct sources, like more literal and historically-grounded accounts versus the simplified narratives of figures like Irving, produce hybrid texts that sometimes are full of internal conflicts.

Oh, and through all this, some institutions of American government like the Supreme Court still function, although their rulings only apply to Americans, and there isn't much in the way of a federal bureaucracy.

Finally the Great and Sublime Brazilian Potentate conquers most of the Americas, sets up an American client state that roughly coincides with the heartland of the old Western States (California, Oregon, most of Washington and Nevada), and allows the Americans to elect their own President (subject, of course, to Brazilian approval). During this period, an apocalyptic street preacher from Los Angeles claims to have inherited the authority and power of George Washington, and is executed by the Brazilians; his later followers point to the prophecies of Emperor Norton, and out-of-context bits of a Quebecois translation of Moby-Dick and some Mark Twain stories to say no, really, he was George Washington. Inexplicably, a version of this religion becomes the dominant faith of the Brazilian Empire before it collapses. But long before then the American state in California fails, crushed when it tries to revolt against Brazilian rule; the remnant Easterners likewise dwindle down to only a few hundred souls living in a village in Alexandria, Virginia. Centuries from now, as the descendants of the descendants of the Brazilians colonize Mars, they will point to the sacred Americanist scriptures, the Neo-Americanist narratives of their prophet's life, and the letters written by the early leaders of Neo-Americanism, and say, "all of this was written by the spirit of George Washington, and is free from contradictions." Meanwhile the remnant Americanists, who have been writing about Americanism and how it applies to their everyday lives in the centuries since, and whose commentary has formed around the copies of the last editions of the U.S. Supreme Court Reporter (SCOTUS managed to outlast the final American state by a hundred years or so) plus the thoughts of the remaining Americanist community in Mexico, continue to regard their traditions as the unbroken and unaltered practice of American culture, politics, and ideals as they existed since the Revolutionary War.

This is, as far as I can tell, approximately how the Bible was composed.

1K notes · View notes

lurkiestvoid · 4 months

Text

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

(This essay was originally by u/walkandtalkk and posted to r/GenZ on Reddit two months ago, and I've crossposted here on Tumblr for convenience because it's relevant and well-written.)

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don't how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you -- individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks' goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners -- especially young ones -- to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don't realize how well it's working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it's much scarier than you think.

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users.

Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States

In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government's first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

Here's what Prigozhin had to say about the IRA's efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

"Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once."

In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter -- but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag, and other platforms -- to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments that incite American users.

In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist's Twitter urged Black Americans: "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote."

Russia plays both sides -- on gender, race, and religion

The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it's not just an effort to boost the right wing; it's an effort to radicalize everybody.

Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men. According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named "My Baby Daddy Aint Shit." It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.

MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.

On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women's March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement. Per the Times:

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.

But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite. Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour. That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked: They drove the Women's March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

Russia doesn't need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.

A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this:

It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore. It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.

As the New York Times reported in 2022,

There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, [Russian disinformation] workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.

China is joining in with AI

[A couple months ago], the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign. "Spamouflage" is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake. Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit

Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika. Fabrika's operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

But how effective are these efforts? By 2020, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn't just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit.

It's not just false facts

The term "disinformation" undersells the problem. Because much of Russia's social media activity is not trying to spread fake news. Instead, the goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme.

Sometimes, through brigading and trolling. Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that's how most people feel. And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.

As the RAND think tank explained, the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them. And it's not just low-quality bots. Per RAND,

Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. ... According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.

What this means for you

You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed. It's not just disinformation; it's also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

It's why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms. And a lot of those trolls are actual, "professional" writers whose job is to sound real.

So what can you do? To quote WarGames: The only winning move is not to play. The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users. Unless you know whom you're talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you -- politically or emotionally.

Here are some thoughts:

Don't accept facts from social media accounts you don't know. Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths. Or they'll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.

Resist groupthink. A key element of manipulate networks is volume. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support. When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it's easy to think the crowd is right. But "the crowd" could be fake accounts, and even if they're not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They'll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.

Don't let social media warp your view of society. This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts -- and the opinions -- you see across social media are not reliable. If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

Edited for typos and clarity. (Tumblr-edited for formatting and to note a sourced article is now older than mentioned in the original post. -LV)

P.S. Apparently, this post was removed several hours ago due to a flood of reports. Thank you to the r/GenZ moderators for re-approving it.

Second edit:

This post is not meant to suggest that r/GenZ is uniquely or especially vulnerable, or to suggest that a lot of challenges people discuss here are not real. It's entirely the opposite: Growing loneliness, political polarization, and increasing social division along gender lines is real. The problem is that disinformation and influence networks expertly, and effectively, hijack those conversations and use those real, serious issues to poison the conversation. This post is not about left or right: Everyone is targeted.

(Further Tumblr notes: since this was posted, there have been several more articles detailing recent discoveries of active disinformation/influence and hacking campaigns by Russia and their allies against several countries and their respective elections, and barely touches on the numerous Tumblr blogs discovered to be troll farms/bad faith actors from pre-2016 through today. This is an ongoing and very real problem, and it's nowhere near over.

A quote from NPR article linked above from 2018 that you might find familiar today: "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we'd surely be better off without voting AT ALL," a post from the account said.")

#propaganda #psyops #disinformation #US politics #election 2024 #us elections #YES we have legitimate criticisms of our politicians and systems #but that makes us EVEN MORE susceptible to radicalization. not immune #no not everyone sharing specific opinions are psyops. but some of them are #and we're more likely to eat it up on all sides if it aligns with our beliefs #the division is the point #sound familiar?#voting #rambles #long post

159 notes · View notes

simply-ivanka · 27 days

Text

Kamala Harris’s ‘Joyful’ War on Entrepreneurs

When Democrats talk about boosting the middle class, what they mean is government employees.

By Allysia Finley Wall Street Journal

Americans who tuned in to Kamala Harris’s coronation last week heard from plenty of celebrities, labor leaders and politicians. Missing from the “joyous” celebration, however, were entrepreneurs who generate middle-class jobs.

No surprise. Cheered on by the crowd, Democrats took turns whacking “oligarchs” and “corporate monopolists.” By the time Ms. Harris took the stage, the pinatas’ pickings had been splattered around. This is what Democrats plan to do if they win: destroy wealth creators so they can spread the booty among their own.

Corporate greed is “the one true enemy,” United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain proclaimed. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders insisted the party “must take on Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tech, and all the other corporate monopolists whose greed is denying progress for working people.” Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey railed against “greedflation” and accused corporations of “extorting families.”

Barack Obama lambasted Donald Trump and his “well-heeled donors.” “For them, one group’s gains is necessarily another group’s loss,” Mr. Obama said. “For them, freedom means that the powerful can do pretty much what they please, whether it’s fire workers trying to organize a union or put poison in our rivers or avoid paying taxes like everybody else has to do.”

Democrats treat wealth as a zero-sum game, and so Mr. Obama’s straw men are rich. They get richer by making everyone else poorer—and taking away from the well-off is the only way to enhance the lives of the poor and middle class. Hence, the left’s plans to raise taxes on “billionaires” and businesses to finance more welfare.

It isn’t enough that the top 1% of earners already pay 45.8% of federal income tax, which funds government services and welfare for the bottom half. As for poisoning rivers, perhaps Mr. Obama forgot that his own Environmental Protection Agency caused the 2015 Gold King Mine disaster, which spilled toxic waste into Colorado’s Animas River.

Quoting Abraham Lincoln, the former president invoked “the better angels of our nature” even as he appealed to America’s darker angels. His speech brought to mind a recent homily by my local parish priest about the dangers of class warfare and envy, one of the seven deadly sins.

Success, the priest explained, isn’t a zero-sum game. When a businessman succeeds, he creates jobs that help the poor. Envying and tearing down the successful makes everyone poorer. Rather than plunder the wealthy, society should celebrate success and try to help everyone prosper.

Democrats derisively refer to such ideas as “trickle-down economics.” They denounce and diminish business success, and claim the wealthy have profited from greed and government support. Who can forget Mr. Obama’s line in 2012 that “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”?

Rather than try to make it easier for businesses to succeed—say, by reducing taxes or easing regulations—Democrats want to do the opposite. They call for “leveling the playing field” and “growing the middle class out,” euphemisms for taxing success so government can hand out money. But government doesn’t create wealth. People do.

While business success isn’t zero-sum, government growth can be. Its expansion makes it more difficult for business to thrive. The result is fewer jobs, lower wages and less tax revenue, which finances essential public services such as law enforcement and the “safety net” for the indigent.

Mr. Trump’s appeal in 2016 partly stemmed from slow economic growth during Mr. Obama’s presidency. The Republican promised to make all Americans richer by liberating businesses from government’s shackles. Mr. Trump’s deregulation and tax cuts worked: Average real wages increased nearly 70% faster during his first three years than during Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Yet most Americans have become poorer under Mr. Biden, as government spending has fueled inflation, which has eroded wages. Job growth has become increasingly concentrated in sectors that depend on government spending. When Democrats talk about boosting the middle class, they mean the class of government workers.

Government, education, healthcare and social assistance account for more than 60% of the new jobs added in the last year. In the 17 states where Democrats boast a “trifecta”—control of the governorship and both legislative chambers—the share is 98%. In the 23 states with Republican trifectas, it’s 47%.

Likewise, average wage growth since the start of the pandemic has been lower in high-tax states such as Illinois (13.6%), New York (14.4%) and California (17.2%) than in low-tax Florida (22.5%), Texas (23.3%) and South Dakota (26.9%). If middle-class Americans want to get richer, they ought to move to Miami, Dallas or Sioux Falls.

“As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty, or to abolish special privilege,” Henry Ford once observed, “we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.” That’s the joyous future Americans can expect during a Harris presidency.

Appeared in the August 26, 2024, print edition as 'Kamala Harris’s ‘Joyful’ War on Entrepreneurs'.

#wall street journal #kamala harris #tim walz #obama #schumer #pelosi #AOC #Democrats #Biden #trump 2024 #trump #president trump #repost #america first #americans first #america #donald trump #ivanka

83 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 2 days

Text

When most Americans think of fascism, they picture a Hitlerian hellscape of dramatic action: police raids, violent coups, mass executions. Indeed, such was the savagery of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Vichy France. But what many people don’t appreciate about tyranny is its “banality,” Timothy Snyder tells me. “We don’t imagine how a regime change is going to be at the dinner table. The regime change is going to be on the sidewalk. It’s going to be in your whole life.”

Snyder, a Yale history professor and leading scholar of Soviet Russia, was patching into Zoom from a hotel room in Kyiv, where the specter of authoritarianism looms large as Ukraine remains steeped in a yearslong military siege by Vladimir Putin. It was late at night and he was still winding down from, and gearing up for, a packed schedule—from launching an institution dedicated to the documentation of the war, to fundraising for robotic-demining development, to organizing a conference for a new Ukrainian history project. “I’ve had kind of a long day and a long week, and if this were going to be my sartorial first appearance in Vanity Fair, I would really want it to go otherwise,” he joked.

But the rest of our conversation was no laughing matter. It largely centered, to little surprise, on Donald Trump and how the former president has put America on a glide path to fascism. Too many commentators were late to realize this. Snyder, however, has been sounding the alarm since the dawn of Trumpism itself, invoking the cautionary tales of fascist history in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, and in The Road to Unfreedom the year after. It’s been six years since the latter, and Snyder is now out with a new book, On Freedom, a personal and philosophical attempt to flip the valence of America’s most lauded—and loaded—word. “We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this,” he writes. “Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Snyder unpacks America’s “strongman fantasy,” encourages Democrats to reclaim the concept of freedom, and critiques journalists for pushing a “war fatigue” narrative about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “There’s just something so odd about Americans being tired of this war. We can get bored of it or whatever, but how can we be tired?” he asks. “We’re not doing a damn thing.”

Vanity Fair: The things we associate with freedom—free speech, religious liberty—have been co-opted by the Republican Party. Do you think you could walk me through how that happened historically and how Democrats could take that word back?

Timothy Snyder: Yeah. I think the way it happened historically is actually quite dark there. There’s an innocent way of talking about this, which is to say, “Oh, some people believe in negative freedom and some people believe in positive freedom—and negative freedom just means less government and positive freedom means more government.” And when you say it like that, it just sounds like a question of taste. And who knows who’s right?

Whereas historically speaking, to answer your question, the reason why people believe in negative freedom is that they’re enslaving other people, or they are oppressing women, or both. The reason why you say freedom is just keeping the government off my back is that the central government is the only force that’s ever going to enfranchise those slaves. It’s the only force which is ever going to give votes to those women. And so that’s where negative freedom comes from. I’m not saying that everybody who believes in negative freedom now owns slaves or oppresses women, but that’s the tradition. That’s the reason why you would think freedom is negative, which on its face is a totally implausible idea. I mean, the notion that you can just be free because there’s no government makes no sense, unless you’re a heavily drugged anarchist.

And so, as the Republican Party has also become the party of race in our country, it’s become the party of small government. Unfortunately, this idea of freedom then goes along for the ride, because freedom becomes freedom from government. And then the next step is freedom becomes freedom for the market. That seems like a small step, but it’s a huge step because if we believe in free markets, that means that we actually have duties to the market. And Americans have by and large accepted that, even pretty far into the center or into the left. If you say that term, “free market,” Americans pretty generally won’t stop you and say, “Oh, there’s something problematic about that.” But there really is: If the market is free, that means that you have a duty to the market, and the duty is to make sure the government doesn’t intervene in it. And once you make that step, you suddenly find yourself willing to accept that, well, everybody of course has a right to advertise, and I don’t have a right to be free of it. Or freedom of speech isn’t really for me; freedom of speech is for the internet.

And that’s, to a large measure, the world we live in.

You have a quote in the book about this that distills it well: “The countries where people tend to think of freedom as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from.”

Yeah, thanks for pulling that out. Even I was a little bit struck by that one. Because if you’re American and you talk about freedom all the time and you also spend all your time judging other countries on freedom, and you decide what the measures are, then you should be close to the top of the list—but you’re not. And then you ask, “Why is that?” When you look at countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, or Ireland—that are way ahead of us—they’re having a different conversation about freedom. They don’t seem to talk about freedom as much as we do, but then when they do, they talk about it in terms of enabling people to do things.

And then you realize that an enabled population, a population that has health care and retirement and reliable schools, may be better at defending things like the right to vote and the right to freedom of religion and the right to freedom of speech—the things that we think are essential to freedom. And then you realize, Oh, wait, there can be a positive loop between freedom to and freedom from. And this is the big thing that Americans get a hundred percent wrong. We think there’s a tragic choice between freedom from and freedom to—that you’ve got to choose between negative freedom and positive freedom. And that’s entirely wrong.

What do you make of Kamala Harris’s attempt to redeem the word?

It makes me happy if it’s at the center of a political discussion. And by the way, going back to your first question, it’s interesting how the American right has actually retreated from freedom. It has been central for them for half a century, but they are now actually retreating from it, and they’ve left the ground open for the Democrats. So, politically, I’m glad they’re seizing it—not just because I want them to win, but also because I think on the center left or wherever she is, there’s more of a chance for the word to take on a fuller meaning. Because so long as the Republicans can control the word, it’s always going to mean negative freedom.

I can’t judge the politics that well, but I think it’s philosophically correct and I think we end up being truer to ourselves. Because my big underlying concern as an American is that we have this word which we’ve boxed into a corner and then beaten the pulp out of, and it really doesn’t mean anything anymore. And yet it’s the only imaginable central concept I can think of for American political theory or American political life.

Yeah, it’s conducive to the joy-and-optimism approach that the Democrats are taking to the campaign. Freedom to is about enfranchisement; it’s about empowerment; it’s about mobility.

Totally. Can I jump in there with another thought?

Of course.

I think JD Vance is the logical extension of where freedom as freedom from gets you. Because one of the things you say when freedom is negative—when it’s just freedom from—is that the government is bad, right? You say the government is bad because it’s suppressive. But then you also say government is bad because it can’t do anything. It’s incompetent and it’s dysfunctional. And it’s a small step from there to a JD Vance–type figure who is a doomer, right? He’s a doomer about everything. His politics is a politics of impotence. His whole idea is that government will fail at everything—that there’s no point using government, and in fact, life is just sort of terrible in general. And the only way to lead in life is to kind of be snarky about other people. That’s the whole JD Vance political philosophy. It’s like, “I’m impotent. You’re impotent. We’re all impotent. And therefore let’s be angry.”

Did you watch the debate?

No, I’m afraid I didn’t. I’m in the wrong time zone.

There was a moment that struck me, and I think it would strike you too: Donald Trump openly praised Viktor Orbán, as he has done repeatedly in the past. But he said, explicitly, Orbán is a good guy because he’s a “strongman,” which is a word that he clearly takes to be a compliment, not derogatory. You’ve written about the strongman fantasy in your Substack, so I’m curious: What do you think Trump is appealing to here?

Well, I’m going to answer it in a slightly different way, and then I’ll go back to the way you mean it. I think he’s tapping into one of his own inner fantasies. I think he looks around the world and he sees that there’s a person like Orbán, who’s taken a constitutional system and climbed out of it and has managed to go from being a normal prime minister to essentially being an extraconstitutional figure. And I think that’s what Trump wants for himself. And then, of course, the next step is a Putin-type figure, where he’s now an unquestioned dictator.

For the rest of us, I think he’s tapping—in a minor key—into inexperience, and that was my strongman piece that you kindly mentioned. Americans don’t really think through what it would mean to have a government without the rule of law and the possibility of throwing the bums out. I think we just haven’t thought that through in all of its banality: the neighbors denouncing you, your kids not having social mobility because you maybe did something wrong, having to be afraid all the damn time. African Americans and some immigrants have a sense of this, but in general, Americans don’t get that. They don’t get what that would be like.

So that’s a minor key. The major key, though, is the 20% or so of Americans who really, I think, authentically do want an authoritarian regime, because they would prefer to identify personally with a leader figure and feel good about it rather than enjoy freedom.

You mentioned the word banality, which makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil.” What would the banality of authoritarianism look like in America?

So let me first talk about the nonbanality of evil, because our version of evil is something like, and I don’t want to be too mean, but it’s something like this: A giant monster rises out of the ocean and then we get it with our F-16s or F-35s or whatever. That’s our version of evil. It’s corporeal, it’s obviously bad, and it can be defeated by dramatic acts of violence.

And we apply that to figures like Hitler or Stalin, and we think, Okay, what happened with Hitler was that he was suddenly defeated by a war. Of course he was defeated by a war, but he did some dramatic and violent things to come to power, but his coming to power also involved a million banalities. It involved a million assimilations, a million changes of what we think of as normal. And it’s our ability to make things normal and abnormal which is so terrifying. It’s like an animal instinct on our part: We can tell what the power wants us to do, and if we don’t think about it, we then do it. In authoritarian conditions, this means that we realize, Oh, the law doesn’t really apply anymore. That means my neighbor could have denounced me for anything, and so I better denounce my neighbor first. And before you know it, you’re in a completely different society, and the banality here is that instead of just walking down the street thinking about your own stuff, you’re thinking, Wait a minute, which of my neighbors is going to denounce me?

Americans think all the time about getting their kids into the right school. What happens in an authoritarian country is that all of that access to social mobility becomes determined by obedience. And as a parent, suddenly you realize you have to be publicly loyal all the time, because one little black mark against you ruins your child’s future. And that’s the banality right there. In Russia, everybody lives like that, because any little thing you do wrong, and your kid has no chance. They get thrown out of school; they can’t go to university.

We don’t imagine how a regime change is going to be at the dinner table. The regime change is going to be on the sidewalk. It’s going to be in your whole life. It’s not going to be some external thing. It’s not like this strongman is just going to be some bad person in the White House, and then eventually the good guys will come and knock him out. When the regime changes, you change and you adapt, and you look around as everyone else is adapting and you realize, Well, everyone else adapting is a new reality for me, and I’m probably going to have to adapt too. Trump wants to be a strongman. He’s already tried a coup d’état. He makes it clear that he wants to be a different regime. And so if you vote him in, you’re basically saying, “Okay, strongman, tell me how to adapt.”

Yeah, we could talk about Project 2025 all day. This new effort to bureaucratize tyranny—which was not in place in 2020—could really make the banal aspect a reality because it’s enforced by the administrative state, which is going to be felt by Americans at a quotidian level.

I agree with what you say. If I were in business, I would be terrified of Project 2025 because what it’s going to lead to is favoritism. You’re never going to get approvals for your stuff unless you’re politically close to administration. It’s going to push us toward a more Hungary-like situation, where the president’s pals’ or Jared Kushner’s pals’ companies are going to do fine. But everybody else is going to have to pay bribes. Everyone else is going to have to make friends.

It’s anticompetitive.

Yeah, it’s going to generate a very, very uneven playing field where certain people are going to be favored and become oligarchs. And most of the rest of us are going to have a hard time. Also, the 40,000 [loyalists Trump wants to replace the administrative state with] are going to be completely incompetent. When people stop getting their Social Security checks, they’re going to realize that the federal government—which they’ve been told is so dysfunctional—actually did do some things. It’s going to be chaos. The only way to get anything done is to have a phone number where you can call somebody at someplace in the government and say, “Make my thing a priority.” The chaos of the administration state feeds into the strongman thing. And since that’s true, the strongman view starts to become natural for you because it’s the only way to get anything done.

You’ve studied Russian information warfare pretty extensively. A few weeks ago the Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian state media outlet RT for their role in surreptitiously funding a right-wing US media outfit as part of a foreign-influence-peddling scheme, which saw them pull the wool over a bunch of right-wing media personalities. Do you think this type of thing is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Russian information warfare?

Of course. It’s the tip of the iceberg, and I want to refer back to 2016. It was much bigger in 2016 than we recognized at the time. The things that the Obama administration was concerned with—like the actual penetration of state voting systems and stuff—that was really just nothing compared to all of the internet stuff they had going. And we basically caught zilcho of that before the election itself. And I think the federal government is more aware of it this time, but also the Russians are doing different things this time, no doubt.

I’m afraid what I think is that there are probably an awful lot of people who are doing this—including people who are much more important in the media than those guys—and that there’s just no way we’re going to catch very many of them before November. That’s my gut feeling.

While we’re on Russia, I do want to talk about Ukraine, especially since you’re there right now. I think one of the most unfortunate aspects of [the media’s coverage of] foreign wars—the Ukraine war and also the Israel-Hamas war—is just the way they inevitably fade into the background of the American news cycle, especially if no American boots are on the ground. I’m curious if this dynamic frustrates you as a historian.

Oh, a couple points there. One is, I’m going to point out slightly mean-spiritedly that the stories about war fatigue in Ukraine began in March 2022. As a historian, I am a little bit upset at journalists. I don’t mean the good ones. I don’t mean the guys I just saw who just came back from the front. [I mean] the people who are sitting in DC or New York or wherever, who immediately ginned up this notion of war fatigue and kept asking everybody from the beginning, “When are you going to get tired of this war?” We turned war fatigue into a topos almost instantaneously. And I found that really irresponsible because you’re affecting the discourse. But also, I feel like there was a kind of inbuilt laziness into it. If war fatigue sets in right away, then you have an excuse never to go to the country, and you have an excuse never to figure out what’s going on, and you have an excuse never to figure out why it’s important.

So I was really upset by that, and also because there’s just something so odd about Americans being tired of this war. We can get bored of it or whatever, but how can we be tired? We’re not doing a damn thing. We’re doing nothing. I mean, there’s some great individual Americans who are volunteering and giving supplies and stuff, but as a country, we’re not doing a damn thing. I mean, a tiny percentage of our defense budget—which would be going to other stuff anyway—insead goes to Ukraine.

And by the way, Ukrainians understand that Americans have other things to think about. I was not very far from the front three days ago talking to soldiers, and their basic attitude about the election and us was, like, “Yeah, you got your own things to think about. We understand. It’s not your war.” But as a historian, the thing which troubles me is pace, because with time, all kinds of resources wear down. And the most painful is the Ukrainian human resource. That’s probably a terribly euphemistic word, but people die and people get wounded and people get traumatized. Your own side runs out of stuff.

We were played by the Russians, psychologically, about the way wars are fought. And that stretched out the war. That’s the thing which bothers me most. You win wars with pace and you win wars with surprise. You don’t win wars by allowing the other side to dictate what the rules are and stretching everything out, which is basically what’s happened. And with that has come a certain amount of American distraction and changing the subject and impatience. I think journalists have made a mistake by making it into a kind of consumer thing where they’re sort of instructing the public that it’s okay to be bored or fatigued. And then I think the Biden administration made a mistake by not doing things at pace and allowing every decision to take weeks and months and so on.

What do you think another Trump presidency would mean for the war and for America’s commitment to Ukraine?

I think Trump switches sides and puts American power on the Russian side, effectively. I think Trump cuts off. He’s a bad dealmaker—that’s the problem. I mean, he’s a good entertainer. He’s very talented; he’s very charismatic. In his way, he’s very intelligent, but he’s not a good dealmaker. And a) ending wars is not a deal the way that buying a building is a deal, and b) even if it were, he’s consistently made bad deals his whole career and lost out and gone bankrupt.

So you can’t really trust him with something like this, even if his intentions were good—and I don’t think his intentions are good. Going back to the strongman thing, I think he believes that it’s right and good that the strong defeat and dominate the weak. And I think in his instinctual view of the world, Putin is pretty much the paradigmatic strongman—the one that he admires the most. And because he thinks Putin is strong, Putin will win. The sad irony of all this is that we are so much stronger than Russia. And in my view, the only way Russia can really win is if we flip or if we do nothing. So, because Trump himself is so psychologically weak and wants to look up to another strongman, I think he’s going to flip. But even if I’m wrong about that, I think he’s incompetent to deal with a situation like this. Because he wants the quick affirmation of a deal. And if the other side knows you’re in a hurry, then you’ve already lost from the beginning.

51 notes · View notes

dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months

Text

Nobody

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 2, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 03, 2024

Today, Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reported that there is reason to believe that when Trump’s 2016 campaign was running low on funds, Trump accepted a $10 million injection of cash from Egypt’s authoritarian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. It is against the law to accept direct or indirect financial support from foreign nationals or foreign governments for a political campaign in the United States.

In early 2017, CIA officials told Justice Department officials that a confidential informant had told them of such a cash exchange, and those officials handed the matter off to Robert Mueller, the special counsel who was already looking at the links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. FBI agents noted that on September 16, Trump had met with Sisi when the Egyptian leader was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City.

After the meeting, Trump broke with U.S. policy to praise Sisi, calling him a “fantastic guy.”

Trump’s campaign had been dogged with a lack of funds, and his advisers had begged him to put some of his own money into it. He refused until October 28, when he loaned the campaign $10 million.

An FBI investigation took years to get records, but Davis and Leonnig reported that in 2019 the FBI learned of a key withdrawal from an Egypt bank. In January 2017, five days before Trump took office, an organization linked to Egypt’s intelligence service asked a manager at a branch of the state-run National Bank of Egypt to “kindly withdraw” $9,998,000 in U.S. currency. The bundles of $100 bills filled two bags and weighed more than 200 pounds.

Once in office, Trump embraced Sisi and, in a reversal of U.S. policy, invited him to be one of his first guests at the White House. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sissi,” Trump said.

Mueller had gotten that far in pursuit of the connection between Trump and Sisi when he was winding down his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He handed the Egypt investigation off to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D C., where it appears then–attorney general William Barr killed it.

Today, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that Elon Musk and other tech executives are putting their money behind a social media ad campaign for Trump and Vance, and are creating targeted ads in swing states by collecting information about voters under false pretenses. According to Schwartz, their America PAC, or political action committee, says it helps viewers register to vote. And, indeed, the ads direct would-be voters in nonswing states to voter registration sites.

But people responding to the ad in swing states are not sent to registration sites. Instead, they are presented with “a highly detailed personal information form [and] prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age,” handing over “priceless personal data to a political operation” that can then create ads aimed at that person’s demographic and target them personally in door-to-door campaigns. After getting the information, the site simply says, “Thank you,” without directing the viewer toward a registration site.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at more than $235 billion.

In June the Trump Organization announced a $500 million deal with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump International hotel in Oman.

In January 2011, when he was director of the FBI, Robert Mueller gave a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York. He explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. Rather than being regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

In order to corner international markets, Mueller explained, these criminal enterprises "may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat."

In a new book called Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, journalist Anne Applebaum carries that story forward into the present, examining how today’s autocrats work together to undermine democracy. She says that “the language of the democratic world, meaning rights, laws, rule of law, justice, accountability, [and] transparency…[is] harmful to them,” especially as those are the words that their internal opposition uses. “And so they need to undermine the people who use it and, if they can, discredit it.”

Those people, Applebaum says, “believe they are owed power, they deserve power.” When they lose elections, they “come back in a second term and say, right, this time, I'm not going to make that mistake again, and…then change their electoral system, or…change the constitution, change the judicial system, in order to make sure that they never lose.”

Almost exactly a year ago, on August 1, 2023, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor.

The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the government”; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

“Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.”

The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump was randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who was appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Trump pleaded not guilty on August 3, after which his lawyers repeatedly delayed their pretrial motions until, on December 7, Trump asked the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether he was immune from prosecution. Chutkan had to put off her initial trial date of March 4, 2024, and said she would not reschedule until the court decided the question of Trump’s immunity.

In February the appeals court decided he was not immune. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 1, 2024, to decide that Trump enjoys broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts. Today the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Chutkan, almost exactly a year after it was first brought.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#WAPO #bribery #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #corrupt SCOTUS #Chutkan #certification of the presidential election #voting rights #disenfranchising voters #organized crime

56 notes · View notes