#steve being a propaganda pawn

[heli0s-writes]

forget your perfect offering*

summary: Captain America hasn’t been home in years and it’s turned him into something a little lost, a little broken.

a/n: Hi hi!! Guess who's back on the Nomad Steve angst/smut train after 5 months??? 3k words. Please stop reading if you're not 18+ This is very Clumsy adjacent.

--

Captain America hasn’t been home in years and it’s turned him into something a little lost, a little broken. Going dark on the United States government when it’s put a price on your head will do that, he supposes. He’s even picked up a new habit of flinching at shadows despite maneuvering in them for eternity.

Not eternity, but he’s dramatic and full throttle. Never once learned that some things can be half-measures, can be compromised on. He’s got his handful of soldiers—friends— and he can’t forget that they’re friends because soldiers are pawns and friends are crucial.

Back then, he was just a newly reanimated statuette, a votive figurine to justice rendered flesh and bone and so damn brittle. And how could he believe it would last? The entire thing fell apart within a few years—a team scattered to pieces; an entire nation’s vision discarded on the side of the road.

A lot of Americans are angry with him for that, and most days he tries not to be angry at himself, which is stupid according to you and Sam and Nat. But being angry at propaganda and history and circumstances is too intangible to do much with, so at least being angry with himself means he can kneel into a fight, leave too little in the tank for the trip back, find a way to be punished for his transgressions.

He’d always been reckless, but it’s becoming a flag much to red to ignore.

You tell him he’s got a death wish. Plain and simple: keep it up and you’ll die, and nothing more, leaving the jet ride in silence, everyone averting their eyes. But he just wipes the blood out of his mouth and says, “Hasn’t seemed to work out for me yet.”

Back at the house—the house, not his house, or anybody’s house, certainly not a home in its unremarkable exterior, interior, living spaces cobbled together with rickety, mismatched furniture and chipped ceramic kitchenware—he returns to his book. Sinks himself into the reading nook and opens it up to a page he’s been pretending to pay attention to.

Natasha showers first, Sam crashes into his bed face-down, and you linger by the old T.V., poking at the adjacent radio.

“Hey, death boy.”

He looks up, startled. “Death boy?”

“Yeah,” you grin, glancing over your shoulder. “Death boy. Your new superhero name.”

You say it breezily, eyes half-mast because it’s been a real dog-shit kind of day and even Steve can hardly focus.

Sam’s dead to the world and Nat’s going on 30 minutes under water, so it’s a fair estimate to say that it’s to the point where he can feel how powered-down his brain is, and that if he tries to speak more than three phrases at a time, it’ll hardly make any damn sense. Or, inevitably, make matters worse.

He tries for controlled, comes out not so much. “It’s a little morbid, don’t you think?”

You gasp, scandalized. “Silly me, you haven’t been morbid at all recently. Gosh, it’s not like you were trying to get gutted—he was swinging so wide and slow, how could I think you’d manage dodging in time?” You clasp your hands over your mouth dramatically, “How could I suggest—”

“That’s enough.” Steve pinches his nose-bridge with one hand and closes the book with the other. He’s going to drown himself in the bathtub when Natasha’s finished—go drama—but he’s grinning a little bit, not dumb enough to hide when he’s been caught out.

You punch a button on the radio, tune it to a station that’s only slightly screeching with interference. There’s a discernible piano melody but he doesn’t know the song. You tap along, feeling out the rhythm, and then you cast your eyes to the reading nook he’s crushed into before pointing at the middle of the floor.

For all his miserable ruminating he always forgets to account for you at the end of the day, standing there and waiting for him like he’s got any choice. He declares all sorts of bullshit about how making the right decision can feel like no decision at all when it’s inherently justified; reason should feel like reflex, ethics an extension. But lately, the only reflex he’s felt is closer to vanishing.

He’s disappearing from view a little more each night, reduced to a crumbling idol of an endangered faith because humanity’s stopped believing in him and part of him is following the same course. He’s become an old relic chipped away in the flow of time, and some days he’d rather just be good and gone.

Keep it up and you’ll die.

Part of him already has. Part of him’s already in the ground.

“Come on,” you say with a surprising amount of patience, eyes soft and hand extended. “Are you gonna get up or am I gonna have to drag your ass again?”

The song is plunking away, cutting in and out intermittently, notes quivering on scratches of static. Nat’s started to dry her hair, the sound like a tornado alarm trapped in a bathroom but it’s persistent, fighting the wailing blow-dryer for an audience. She’s probably freezing cold because the house’s water heater is shoddy at best and Sam can fix that but he’s been exhausted lately and no one’s going to complain because they’ve never complained about their situation-- not once.

He bites down, frowns a little deeper, but then he’s on his feet, giving chase like you could take him somewhere whole and unbroken. Somewhere he’s been craving for. His hands around your waist are careful, resting his chin on top of your head as you nuzzle in.

He asks through gritted teeth, “Listening for a heartbeat?”

“I know where your heart is.”

He’s so goddamn maudlin, can’t stop the bitterness from lashing out. “Where’s that?”

“With us, death boy. With me.”

He makes a noncommittal sound, dismissive and very, very rude of him, but he’s on a roll and won’t be appeased. You lazily read the lines of his face with stunned eyes, then touch your nose to his bearded chin as you lean up.

You stroke his scalp, spinning the feathery ends of his long hair. “You want to be hurt so bad, don’t you?” Your nails rake down the length of his strong neck. “Is that what you’re used to? Is it more comfortable that way?”

“Enough,” he murmurs faintly, but makes no move to push you away, only stepping in time, rocking along. When your hand tightens into a fist to pull at him, he bites down, shuts his eyes. You do it again, harder, and then let go, letting your fingers spread at the base of his skull, cradling it like a child.

“You want to be beaten within an inch of your life, want to be pried open so you can check if you’re still capable of dying.” Cold words, but your breath is hot, and he’s starting to feel it—that telltale shiver at the base of his spine at the way you won’t break eye contact.

“I know, I know,” you coo, “it hasn’t happened yet.” You move away, smiling big and dark and glistening with promise. “But listen, Steve, all you have to do is ask.”

He can’t tell what expression he’s making, only that your pupils open to swallow him. You’re staring at him, not through him. Taking in his flesh and the warm blood cascading down his face.

The night is taking its toll, it seems. Collecting on long, hard hours, making the both of you reckless.

He thinks about months ago, and the complication of ethics in the way.

Not sleeping with teammates, not losing the fucking plot no matter how much he craved losing it for a couple of hours. There were several weeks before it went sideways, before Bucharest and the Accords, where he spent doing nothing but dedicating himself to daydreaming. He sank into the quiver of his own body as he imagined you and everything he wanted to know by touch.

There were dances, like this. Swaying back and forth in Sam’s backyard and gala celebrations, onlookers getting a few ideas about what his eyes were communicating when he’d trace the curve of your shoulders or the delicate insides of your wrists. How everyone else might follow Captain America into the jaws of death but he’d follow only you, headlong, beyond, and into the goddamn afterlife if you asked him.

But there was a line he couldn’t cross. A soft, tangerine horizon much too far out of his reach when the dark was at his back, beating him to the ground. Making him flinch from warmth because entanglement was too complicated and love was too kind.

Tony asked him what it felt like to fuck up so astronomically. Nat only clucked her tongue, more disappointment in a single sound than Steve had heard from many grand lectures.

Because you would have been vibrant and glorious, damn it. You would have giggled— giggled— when you made love, crooned his name like a songbird and touched him everywhere, all at once. You would have kissed fire back into him, licked your way into the center of that votive figurine and traced his broken heart. You would have excavated him, clawed him out clean, led him into the light.

So, he knows. He knew then, knows now, knows for the rest of his days when he’s let a beautiful thing slip through his fingers.

But sometimes, this happens and his hands feel like they’ve still held on despite his attempts. Sometimes you brush his knuckles, smile at him small and sweet and come into his makeshift room, sit on the side of his bed and exist side by side. Sometimes there wouldn’t even be conversation.

But when you linger by the door, gaze slowly raking down the length of his body and his throat, his mouth, all ten of his fingertips—god, what he wouldn’t give then, to take you to the floor and declare fuck it.

Fuck ethics and fuck his entire life, if needed, because there was only you, only what he’d been needing for ages, only that brilliant and terrifying afterlife awaiting him.

The reflex, then, is not to disappear anymore, but to kneel in.

You say, both hands come to rest around his throat— because you’ve seen him now, seen him the entire time, “If you want it that much, Steve, I can give it to you. A hundred tiny deaths, so sweet and good, until it hurts so bad you really do feel like you’re dying.”

He gulps, Adam’s apple catching each of your fingers on the way up and back down. Says, “Yeah,” before he even registers it. He blurts, going cold and hot and shell-shocked, “I’d let you do anything you want.”

Just then, the bathroom door clatters open and Natasha steps out, towel wrapped around her as she pads across the living space toward her room.

She looks from you to Steve, briefly studying the single foot of distance between your faces, the forgotten music, the way he can’t seem to keep his breathing in order.

The way you’ve got his throat in your hands.

She doesn’t even stop as she passes by, carding her fingers through her hair for a final act of detangling. “Wilson sleeps heavy,” she yawns, which implies, I don’t, so keep whatever the hell it is you two are doing down.

Then she’s gone with only pressure left in her wake. Only his breath fighting with his lungs, his belly tight and hot and his flavorless mouth so fucking starved for yours.

You raise a judgmental eyebrow after he does nothing for a beat too long, too lost in potential backpedaling to advance the plot.  “That’s not asking, Steve.”

He’s stupid, dizzy, like he’s been dropped on his head, but not that stupid. He can’t keep his eyes off your mouth. Doesn’t even know if he says it, but tries anyway, “Will you please,” and the rest goes out the window. You lean in. You kiss him better than he could ever have imagined.

-

He’s living the teenage years he never had.

You kiss him like you’ve got all the time in the world—like it isn’t past four in the morning and the both of you are one silent minute away from slipping into unconsciousness. You kiss lazy and slow and sublime. You press a thumb at the corner of his mouth, touch inside of him, and he wants to do it back. But he wants it right.

“This,” he starts, almost whimpering when you run your teeth beneath his ear, molding your body to his, the two of you staggering into the wall and the end table and poor Natasha across the house must be digging up her earplugs. “I’m not good with—casual—”

“Yeah, you don’t think I know that?” You only pause for enough air to hassle him before taking his hands, your own so small over them, so much power over him, and place them on your waist. “You don’t think I know you’re an all-in kind of guy?”

Of course, you know. Of course, anyone who’s ever heard of Steven Grant Rogers can figure it out. It’s always going to be full throttle for him. Casual isn’t a word that exists in his dictionary, and he won’t compromise on that. He couldn’t do this any other way because now he wants to do it all—to feel you, inside out, across time and the universe and infinity.

He shucks off your clothes, doesn’t mind the grit of the day on your skin, wants it even, to know what you’re like every hour of every day. He tears off his own tac gear, can’t keep his mouth off yours for even a second as he stumbles across the floor.

When he reaches the bed, you climb on top, warm between your legs and so perfect over his thigh. He’s rocking his hips against yours, mouthing at your breasts, grabbing your ass and waist and snarling into your neck like an animal. Lazy and slow twists into frantic and desperate, him throbbing and throbbing against your skin.

He leans back, takes you down with him, bra strap limp at your elbows, panties to the side and he wedges back between the space of his thigh and your sex. He wants—wants.

“You’re warm,” he breathes.

When he pulls out, there’s a sloppy noise following your moan and he rubs his fingers together, awed at the glistening web slipping down to his palm.

One finger becomes two, the coat of slick up to his knuckles and he’s using too much tongue when he kisses you but you don’t mind that at all.

He’s not any kind of virgin but he really feels like one. In the sense that he’s turned on by everything. Too much stimulation. On his skin, in his brain, he’s immersed in one second while predicting the next, seeing the possible ways it could go. Too much pent-up desire swells up the length of his cock as he palms and presses it against the underside of your thigh for contact. His chest is heaving, breath stuttery, eyes wild and unfocused.

You grab his face, pull him away from your collar. You’re only a slight mess, but Christ, what a sight. He must be about fifty times worse because you’re grinning wide, looking him up and down as he arches forward to get you back.

You tut, “If I really wanted to kill you,” you say, “I’d leave you right now.”

“Please don’t,” he manages hoarsely, the fire in his belly lashing out.

“Because I’m so nice.”

“Yes.” And suddenly, his sunny face turns overcast, all the joyful cacophony from before muting. “Yes, you are.”

“Steve,” you sigh, rubbing your forehead with your hands for something to do with them.

He hauls himself up on his elbows, starting to feel upset.

You lean back on your palms, head lolling between your shoulder blades, aggrieved.

“Sorry,” he recants.

“Steve.”

He can’t make eye contact, but you don’t ask him to again, only touching his jaw with a finger and erasing the last few minutes with a nuzzle of your nose to his, like saying don’t worry about it, it’s okay.

Then, more kissing, more of that touch he dreamed about and he wants to kick his past self for missing it, for even daring to fantasize when the real thing is so much more.

The night melts away, each hour lasting a blink or an eternity—he can’t be bothered by it now. He figures the sun’s coming up, though, because there’s that haze of early morning past the gauzy, frayed curtain.

Your palms are on his chest, pawing at him for leverage each time you grind down, each time you swallow him back inside of you. You push, like an act of resuscitation— one, two, one, two— a rhythmic, electric, life-giving staccato beat that has him gasping for air, has him keening and groaning without any thought to how loud he might be.

And, fuck it, fuck it all. He is, admittedly, loud.

Sorry, Nat, he winces mentally before his brain’s wiped clear of all thought.

There’s nothing but you, and you, and you.

And that poor, broken heart inside of him, crushed to fine powder, being reworked into brilliance.

He lies there afterwards, gazing into the ceiling as he breathes back down to calm. There’s the thrall of exhaustion behind his eyes but it’s being overridden by a terrible, traitorous voice that’s telling him how he can’t seem to stop fucking up.

He can’t breathe suddenly, the room collapsing into a pinhole, darkness threatening the edges of his sight.

And then you say, because you always know what to say, “It’s okay to be a little broken,” you stroke his chest. “Baby, that’s how the light gets in.”

And the morning is breaking through fully now, streaks of it clearing up his eyes, cutting him to pieces beneath you.

“Yes,” he agrees and meets you for another lengthy kiss, every shrapnel inch of him raw and searing hot. All his exposed parts—the grief and agony and self-hatred—turned to gold. You touch his dark edges with your fingertips. You trace a new dawn’s light in his hair.

[valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn]

Okay, here's another reason Mobius is full of crap. Pretty much no one needed Loki to be "The best version of themselves"

Steve Rogers is Steve Rogers, he was already the best.

Tony Stark, ignoring the the fact he is always kind of low key a garbage person. His development was in his own prior movies. Being captured and seeing first hand the destruction he was causing. Loki insighted no positive growth. In fact because he played a part in Tony's PTSD that actually hurt him and lead to Tony making terrible decisions Loki made Tony worse

Natasha Romanoff, she broke free of heavy indoctrination own her own and was already a part of SHIELD because she felt it was for good.

Clint Barton, again already a part of Shield, was already preselected to be an Avenger

Bruce Banner, maybe you could say the invasion inspired Bruce to fight, but in the long run that didn't fix any of the self loathing issues and being a hero was almost more of obligation than something Bruce actually wanted to do. Also Bruce was already pretty heroic just as a doctor. He never stopped helping people even when it was at risk at himself.

Thor, I guess he made Thor better. So ignoring the fact Odin was the one who created the problem. Sure Loki being the villain made Thor the best of himself.

The Avengers would be heroes with or without Loki. His role is to create conflict so others can solve the conflict.

They would be heroes in their own ways but Loki's actions were necessary. They always act like he's no more than a villain but then praise certain repercussions of his actions and it's so confusing.

Mobius says that line while showing the circle shot from The Avengers: If he's blaming Loki and only Loki for the NYC invasion, then the TVA should be thankful that someone made the Avengers assemble and come together. It's all part of that plan that Renslayer mentions earlier in the ep: the team was supposed to go back in time, therefore they were meant to exist, therefore Loki wasn't really acting on his free will (in more ways than one 🙄).

If being a member of the Avengers is the best version of these characters (according to the TVA) then inevitably, Loki needs to exist and he needs to be sent to NYC. It can't work with anyone else, it has to be him. And it needs to happen.

It's pathetic that this ep is followed by one where Mobius claims Loki might want to "change" and get "tired of his role" in the Sacred Timeline to which Renslayer replies only the Time Keepers "can decree it". So which one is it, then?! "We love that the Avengers exist but we hate the NYC invasion". WTF?!

Either they care about individual incidents or they don't, but they never seem to agree on that. It could be explained as them being no more than pawns who believed HWR's propaganda but in that case the framing should accompany that with a clear stand against the TVA and its agents. Except it doesn't do that at all.

I agree with you that besides forming the team, these characters grow in their own different, separate ways. The only one who is truly changed by Loki is his brother but not because Loki is a villain, it's only because he's a mirror to the family and Asgard's shortcomings that Thor gets to grow up and learn. But I suppose Waldron wanted to make a point that all characters surrounding Loki are good and therefore he's the only one who's bad...

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

Voice, agency and power in the Smithsonian scene in CATWS

I wrote a post yesterday about the symbology of pictures in the Smithsonian scene of CATWS, and I mentioned a topic that now I feel like exploring more.

In yesterday’s post I argued that the scene contrasts how Peggy is seen as older (both in the 50s footage and in the parallel scene where Steve visits her in person), in color, and we actually hear her speak, both in the footage and in person; and how Bucky is seen in pictures and wordless footage, “frozen” (eh) in the 40s, and even when we meet him in person he’s literally muted and stuck in the appearance and age he had in the 40s because he was literally frozen for most of the time that has passed since then.

Then I was chatting with @winterofthedarkestlight​​ and it occurred to me that the contrast goes beyond just Peggy and Bucky.

I once saw a video that analyzed the use of music in the MCU and it argued that the Smithsonian scene should have eliminated the museum voice that narrates Steve’s and Bucky’s story, because it adds unnecessary “noise” since it provides information that we already know from the previous Cap movie (unless they assumed that most people didn’t actually watch it). I personally agreed with that, but yesterday I realized that the unnecessary noise actually serves a function in the logic of the scene.

There are, in fact, a lot of words in the Smithsonian scene. Quotes and captions on the walls and panels, the narrating voice, Peggy’s video. A lot of people are speaking, directly or not: Peggy, the academic team that put on the exhibition and wrote the texts, the President of the US whose quote is featured at the beginning of the scene. Two figures are silent: Steve and Bucky. Steve literally starts the scene putting his finger in front of his mouth, to ask the child who recognized him not to reveal his identity. Bucky is seen first in his solo panel, then in the footage with Steve, who figuratively also “died” in the 40s (just like the Peggy Steve knew “died” and only lives in the black and white picture in Steve’s compass). 

Steve and Bucky are silent while other people talk about them. Steve has lost control over his own narrative: he’s literally in disguise, pretending to be someone else, while the exhibition speaks about him in terms that are not Steve’s. “A symbol to the nation, a hero to the world--the story of Captain America is one of honor, bravery and sacrifice”... blah blah. Steve doesn’t have a voice, and doesn’t have agency over his figure and the meaning of his actions. He’s become a tool in the hands of the dominant power system, that pushes a certain kind of patriotic propaganda of heroism in the war against the Nazis... a shiny surface painted over a much darker reality. That’s why it’s so important that he gives his speech about what courage and heroism means for him over the intercom when they take the headquarters: he stops being silent, he uses his own voice and reclaims agency over his own narrative (in fact, by putting himself in the symbolical place of Pierce, who was the authority that would give the speeches in the building, and replacing that narrative).

Parallel to Steve’s runs Bucky’s narrative, of course. He’s been subjected to the same thing, except obviously in a more horrifying way. He’s been robbed of control over his narrative, stripped of agency and stripped of his own identity to the point he doesn’t know his name (similarly, Steve is called Captain Rogers or Captain America, and when Peggy says his name in the video, she corrects herself: there’s no more space for Steve to exist).

Neither Steve or Bucky, although in (apparently) very different ways (Steve, after all, is also fighting Hydra’s battles at the beginning of the movie, Steve simply doesn’t know...), are not in control of who they are and how others perceive them. (Which is also why Steve starts the movie with a “stealth suit”, monochrome and meant not to be seen, and later picks his old suit which is meant to be seen and recognized, by Bucky but also by everyone else - “if they’re shooting at you they’re bad”, he tells Sam, which also translates in “if they’re shooting at me and you, a walking flag and a giant bird, they’re easily recognizable as Hydra agents”.)

The scene in the Smithsonian, with the “twin” scene afterwards of Steve visiting Peggy, emphasize how the Steve-Peggy relationship can no longer happen (age gap aside), and possibly could not actually happen outside of the war even without Steve’s missed time. Because Peggy has a voice; she’s one of the figures who has agency, and, while she’s no longer in the business because she’s gotten too old and sick for it, she’s held power through a large portion of her life. She’s one of the speakers; she’s been one of those holding control over the narrative (of Steve, among the rest). Again, her responsibility over Hydra’s flourishing (and, more or less indirectly, over what happened to Bucky) inside of Shield through the decades should have been addressed in the third Cap movie, because it’s just something that had a lot of narrative potential. I’m not saying she should have been framed as a villain, but at least re-framed in a more critical way: Fury was not a villain in CATWS but still acknowledged he was part of the problem, and took a step back and handed the reins to Steve. The narrative never acknowledges that the original Shield founders were part of the problem, and CACW instead makes a nonsensical mess of a plot (if we can even call it a plot, because it goes nowhere and is just a pretext for Tonypain) with Howard Stark and just kills Peggy off screen and uses another woman to send through her words because women are interchangeable, so.

Anyway. CATWS suggests, at least, that Peggy is on the sides of the ones who have a voice, thus power. Steve, on the other hand, doesn’t share that experience at all (and you know what Steve thinks about shared life experience and relationships), but he instead shares Bucky’s experience of silence and loss of control over his own identity and purpose. Again, while the ways Hydra uses the two of them are very different, they’re genuinely just two sides of the same coin, because Steve starts the movie just as much as a pawn of the system, he just has the material, physical, emotional and cognitive tools (including the support of Natasha and Sam) to break out of it earlier. (Can you believe CACW doesn’t actually give Bucky a single chance to actually... face... Hydra at all. I’m not saying he should have gotten revenge because that’s not a good narrative, but he deserved to get some closure in regards of his abusers, instead of getting more abuse and just getting to suffer because of what he’s suffered before.)

I’ll finish this post here because I have accidentally entered the not-civil-war-friendly zone and we don’t need me ranting again today, but I just wanted to say how fascinating it is that such a small scene like the Smithsonian visit can hold so many layers. They just don’t make ‘em like they used to, uh.

[gothgirlmahi]

All That’s Best Chapter Six

Dark!Steve x Reader

Masterlist

Warnings: non con, dub con

Steve had no idea how long he had been here. If he had to guess, it had been a week at least, probably more. The lack of sunlight or any other daily cues left him constantly wondering. He lived with no routine. Even your presence wasn’t guaranteed on any given day. But when you were there, you made sure he would never forget. There were times he would black out from the pain you inflicted on him and every time he passed out he went into the darkness knowing he deserved it. You didn’t even want information from him. You were humiliated and hurting from what he had done and wanted to hurt him back.

He was no sadist but the way you touched him drove him mad. Even the way your dug your knife across the hard planes of his chest had him yearning for you when you left. He knew he was a goner and sick for what he had done to you. But didn’t he deserve his happy ending after all he did? After all he gave for the world? And now here he was so absolutely in love with you that he could barely stand to lay here and banter with you and call you names he didn’t really mean. Sure he was angry, he was pissed.

You had set him up. Or maybe he had set himself up. Your mission, as he was starting to assume, was just to get close to him, start a relationship with him. His personal mission was to make you his in every way, make you his wife and the mother of his children because that was what he deserved.

Even in your torture of him, he still loved you. A stupid part of him held out hope that this was a dream or that somehow someway things would work out. He knew you were only human. Of course you wanted revenge. Steve had taken your freedom and your dignity in a matter of hours and expected obedience. Now he was reaping the rewards of his efforts.

When you finally did come back into the room, he was desperate for your presence. He didn’t care if it was one of your torture techniques or a way to mind break him, he would do anything just to be close to you. And sure, you were a HYDRA agent but how bad could you really be? Lots of people in HYDRA were just normal people that had been radicalized by their ideas. If you could be brainwashed one way, he was sure it could be undone. Even Bucky’s conditioning had been destroyed so he had hope for you. For both of you.

You straddled him as you usually did, smiling while you laid your body against him with your face inches from his.

“Guess what?” you asked, entirely too jovial for your surroundings. He didn’t humor you with a response which made you frown a bit, but you immediately recovered.

“I’m pregnant.”

His mind was going a million miles a second. This was exactly what he wanted. Not in these surroundings but that could be fixed. Steve wished he could hold you, just put his arms around you. How long had it been anyway? The first time he fucked you had to have been over a month before he got here and he wasn’t sure how long he had actually been in this facility. He was beaming with joy and you slapped him as hard as you could.

You clearly had the upper hand here along with being a practiced liar and seemingly a sleeper agent. He had to consider that even with how much you all had sex, you could be lying. Another mental torture technique.

“You’re a liar,” he said. He didn’t even believe himself.

“Do I have to explain how babies are made to you? You can’t possibly understand how much you’ve helped me. When you were holding me down and having your way with me, I was so upset. So shocked that the first avenger would do something like this. I hated you. Then I got back here and I started thinking. You might have just given me the opportunity of lifetime.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know how they made you. No one alive does. But I don’t have to waste time reinventing the wheel when I have a live specimen in front of me,” you trailed off, staring him down.

“You want...to use this baby to—“

“Yup.”

“I won’t let my child be a HYDRA pawn.” Steve’s face hardened. You were serious. This was your pet project and you were so invested that you would put yourself up as an incubator. You weren’t just another HYDRA foot soldier, you really believed in their ideology and wanted to see your plans through. Even if it involved innocent children.

“This baby is the property of HYDRA. You are the property of HYDRA. Replace HYDRA with my name and you’re starting to get the picture. Imagine it. Organically made super soldiers. Sounds cool, right? Please drop that pouty face.”

“Why are you doing this? We could be happy together.”

“Oh, you’re right. We will be happy together. Just a few more preparations and we can go home, sweetheart.”

“Preparations?”

“Yup. You’ll see in a couple hours. Well, you won’t remember in a couple hours. Oops, that kind of gave away the secret, huh? Oh well. Rest up, champ. You’ve got a big day ahead of you.”

Your departure was unceremonious. You climbed off of him and out the door, slamming it behind you and letting Steve hear all the mechanical whirring it did when it closed. You were going to wipe him. Do what they did to Bucky. He didn’t know why or what information you were going to try to put in his head. You said that you all would be happy together and you would be going home. That sounded nice but he knew there was more.

He didn’t know exactly what your intentions were for the baby. Of course it was something fucked up because you had called the baby organically made like something you pick up at a farmers market, not a child. Not your child.

......

You weren’t necessarily enthused about what you had to do. Steve was a good man who had kind of lost it. That was easy to see but this wad your new mission, your new idea to preserve your ideology. Things had really fallen into place in your favor. You supposed since no one was having luck recreating the serum, you might as well take a crack at it.

You were setting up to wipe him alone. This particular base was nearly empty except for a few guards and some other researchers. No one else was qualified to do what you did. If Steve did manage to escape that room, you’d all probably be fucked. You had some contingency plans for him but you were only one person and he was faster than you. This had to go quickly and smoothly.

Steve really was his own downfall. He wanted privacy so none of his friends were sure where he lived. Except maybe Bucky, but you weren’t sure. Bucky might be a problem. But it would be easy enough to keep him distracted and away from the house while you all settled in. Besides, it wouldn’t even matter after Steve woke up. He’d be hopelessly dedicated to you and not even remember being here. You could infiltrate the Avengers from the top down. Feed him bits of propaganda, get him to join your cause. He would have no choice but to comply.

Just a little more time and your plan could unfold.

........

Steve was raging, thinking about the ramifications of this situation. If you changed his memories or took some away, there was no telling what he would do. From what he knew, HYDRA could completely change a person. Put new ideas in their head and convince them to do things.

He had seen it firsthand with his best friend. Although Bucky was recovering, things were still hard. There were still memories he didn’t have and things he was still getting used to. And that was after tons of rehab and therapy.

Steve’s prowess as a hero had been used to help people. To save lives and promote justice. Maybe he had done well, maybe he had failed at it, but he had tried. And now it all seemed pointless. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t break the restraints he was in. He wasn’t strong enough and that broke him. Because he wasn’t strong enough, people might get hurt.

No.

Because he was selfish, people might get hurt. None of this would have happened if he hadn’t taken you. Without you being a distraction for him, he would have been more on his guard, waiting for any possible attack. But the attacker was there all along.

The last time he saw you was rough. You had dropped in not long ago, just to screw with him. Despite your claims to the contrary, you seemed happy to terrorize him. Torturing him with patterns drawn into his body with a knife. His healing factor seemed to make you more inclined to mark him up. When you left, Steve memorized the look in your eyes, the stance you took. You were clearly angry, vindictive even. Your departure was accompanied with the promise that you would be back soon to “fix” him.

He had to wonder if you knew about Bucky. Steve hadn’t made any mention of him while you were at his house, but considering you were a HYDRA agent, you probably knew about the Asset. If you were so willing to wipe Steve yourself, you had probably done this before on someone else. Maybe even Bucky. The thought of it made him sick.

The door opened. .......... “Steve, do you love me?” Your eyes were filled with determination, staring fiercely at the man you had recreated. His gaze bore into your own, completely devoted and submissive to your will.

“Of course I do,” he confirmed easily. You nodded.

“You’ll do anything for me?”

“Anything.”

“Would you die for me?”

“Of course.”

“Would you kill for me?”

“Absolutely.”

“There are people that want to keep us apart. They’re afraid of what we could do together. They’d take the baby.”

“I wouldn’t let that happen.”

From behind your back, you produced his shield, all shiny and polished for him. A gun was held in your other hand. You handed both of them over to him. He took them, looking a bit perplexed, while he waited for you to continue.

“Good. I want you to kill everyone in this building except for me and you.”

He gave the briefest of nods before he was out the door.

There weren’t that many people in the base. HYDRA was a dying organization and you supposed you weren’t helping. It would be fine. This was your project, your life and your work. You didn’t want anyone else to jump in and take credit or try to tell you how to accomplish your goals.

The sounds of bullets pinging against walls picked up in the rooms around you. Screaming. Confusion. Chaos. Controlled chaos. Controlled by you. It wasn’t hard to imagine Steve as a killer. He was determined and detrimentally single minded regarding his goals. What he wanted, he got, but now his wants aligned with your own.

The whole affair only took a few minutes. Steve returned to you with fire in his eyes. Blood dripping off of his clothes and even on the gun carried. The stench of his murders permeated the air as he looked to you for guidance, for further instruction. His chest heaved with exertion and adrenaline nearly ran off of him in waves. A look further down and you recognized his killing spree had gotten him worked up in more than one way.

“Are they all gone?”

“Dead. Everyone,” he confirmed. Your hand came to caress his face and he leaned into your touch.

“You did so good for me.”

Hearing your approval drive him wild. So he would listen. Do whatever you pleased. Anything to make you happy, anything to make you look at him like you were now. He would kill a million more people if it would just make you smile at him.

“Let’s go home, honey,” you told him.

....

Taglist: @princessdancingonthesunshine @sllooney @americasass81 @shippers-heart @villanellevi @boinkybornes @imrachellester @xoxabs88xox @momc95

So...there’s a lot happening in this story. Thanks for all the feedback and love you guys give!

Masterlist // Chapter Seven

[allthefilmsiveseenforfree]

Vice

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought, “This is gonna be an amazing story told at the worst time possible.” I know it’s hard to hearken back to the halcyon days of the early 2000s when there was a sociopath in the White House, our money was on fire, and leafy green vegetables were being recalled left and right, but Adam McKay takes us there using his particular brand of sly, can-you-believe-this-fucking-happened direction that he debuted in 2015′s The Big Short. So what do you get when Christian Bale (under layers of latex and makeup) gets a chance to embody Dick Cheney - one of the most secretive, manipulative, power-hungry men that has ever risen through the ranks of the American democracy - during a time when the idea of a functioning American democracy is, itself, a farce? Well...

It's not subtle, but then again, most things in 2019 aren’t. I personally don’t mind McKay’s smug way of speaking truth to power, because it doesn’t bother me when someone is acting like they’re smarter than I am, especially when they’re armed with as much research and due diligence as they can muster. Vice does as good a job as possible of asking the two most important questions about Dick Cheney’s legacy: “Where did this guy come from?” and “How did we end up here?”

The film is told Tarantino-style, jumping forwards and backwards in time to explore particular themes or revisit significant moments. From the beginning, we are presented with the two people who shaped Cheney the most - his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), and his political inspiration, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell). There’s some fourth-wall-breaking, some narrative fake-outs, and even a Shakespearean interlude - much like an episode of SNL, some of these “sketches” work better than others - but the real strength of the film lies in Bale’s performance, and the slow, methodical untangling of the puzzle that is Dick Cheney’s rise to power. 

Some thoughts:

I find it amusing that most of the other reviews I’ve read think the film either goes too far (it’s all liberal propaganda and character assassination) or not far enough (it’s too meta, too scattershot, and doesn’t castigate Cheney strongly enough for the results of his actions as VP). Perhaps it’s impossible for anyone to make anything even remotely political without this type of division of opinion, because I’m not sure why the reviews are so polemically divided based on the merits of the film alone.

Do I even need to say that Christian Bale is a literal goddamn chameleon? He’s flawless in every way. His mannerisms, his blinks, the way he breathes for fuck’s sake - he just disappears and makes someone who on the surface is SO BORING into a fascinating figure to watch and try to dissect. Much like the fly fishing Cheney is so passionate about, Bale’s performance is one that rewards patience and attention to even the tiniest details, and he knocks it out of the park. 

I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast. Sam Rockwell is a hell of a lot of fun as George W. Bush, and I appreciate that he doesn’t stoop to a cartoonish level. He’s not splashing around in the parody pool, which would be so easy to do. But he’s honestly not in the movie that much, so it’s hard to call him a standout. 

Amy Adams is my everything, but this isn’t her best, unfortunately, mainly due to Lynne’s one-note personality. 

Steve Carell is probably the closest thing to a runner-up to Bale, because his Donald Rumsfeld steals every scene he’s in, but he also plays a bit one-note, and doesn’t have much to do for long stretches of the film. No, this is Bale’s world and we’re all just living in it, which fits pretty well given the character he’s playing.

The moments in which the films feels the most human and the least stylized revolve around Cheney’s daughter, Mary (Alison Pill), a lesbian who Cheney refuses to use as a political pawn or punching bag. When she comes out to her parents, Dick embraces her and says “It doesn’t matter, we love you no matter what” and you think you see a glimpse of the man behind the monster. But in 2014, when his eldest daughter Liz (Lily Rabe) is running for Senator in Wyoming, Cheney blesses - nay, encourages - her decision to disavow gay marriage and therefore, her own sister’s marriage. It’s a devastating scene, and one that undercuts any possible reading of Cheney as an antihero. He’s not the amoral career man who is just trying to do whatever it takes to protect his family. He’s ruthless, calculating, and convinced of his own divine right to seize power at all costs. In other words, he’s a mediocre white male politician living in a country that’s basically designed to be DisneyWorld for mediocre white male politicians.

For anyone who lived through the GWB presidency, Vice may not offer a lot of information that is new or unfamiliar. But for those of us who were maybe a bit too young to be glued to the news constantly, this film offers a glimpse into the machinations of a man who seeks the power to govern by any means necessary. The ultimate lesson is to beware the man imbued with too much singular power. Regulations, checks and balances, and transparency are the only ways to thwart them, and if we don’t, the consequences will be felt for generations to come. 

[mara-the-cactupus]

[long post ahead - kind of meta, kind of philosophy; I might rewrite this later but feel free to reblog]

Captain America: The Winter Soldier just... resonates with me on some deeper level, like it’s addressing a hidden part of my subconscious. There’s a tension there, something that has existed under pressure for a long time, and sometimes I forget that exists but other times it feels like it’s just bottled up, boiling over, ready to explode.

.

I think that’s why I love the main suite by Henry Jackman, the “Captain America” theme: it starts out quiet, gradually building, persistent and at times violent, breaking up into the harsh Winter Soldier theme but always keeping that forwards momentum, building up that the deep, theater-rumbling tones of helicarriers crashing into the sea and ideals shattering like shifting cracks in age-old ice, but also bringing in the higher, almost wistful strains of purity and hope, lone notes rising brightly only to die out slowly – and the human voices at the end, falling with achingly numb rawness.

It’s not an uplifting song, but I wouldn’t call it “sad” either. It feels like the rage and despair that I feel simmering under the surface, all the time, but at the same time each note feels drawn-out, allowed to cry out but then be held, suspended, until it fades away under the cries of other notes amid the ever-pressing underlying percussion. Like screaming into a void, without any of the relief.

.

This to me embodies what I love so much about Steve Rogers’ characterization in this film: he is a man out of his time, struggling to adjust to the world around him, and uncertain whether he even belongs there at all.

Before, he had a mission – his whole life in the first movie was dedicated to fighting bullies, becoming a soldier, winning the war. He had ideals, and confidence in his side’s rightness. He had friends.

Coming out of that, and being thrust into the modern era with its high-tech spies and moral complexity, not being able to know for certain that the cause he was fighting for was right, or even respecting of him as an individual and not a pawn – and extending into his personal life, likely not even knowing for certain whether he wanted to continue living in this strange dream-universe of America, isolated from his friends and his sense of identity – that must have caused tremendous mental trauma, and it feels like Steve is still internalizing all of it, still struggling to pick up the pieces and catch up on all of the history and pop culture he’s missed, not really having any time or putting in any effort to make real human connections.

The way he brushes off Nat’s attempts to set him up on a date, the way he can’t trust his own team or his superior, the way he watches Peggy slowly fade away and shies away from Sam’s initial attempts to befriend him – he isn’t really grounded in the world.

He doesn’t have a place.

He seems cool on the outside, but you can hear all of the suppressed rawness at having been ripped out of his world and thrust into a new one through the music of the score.

The Winter Soldier’s theme is much more visceral, with metal screaming at the violation of his bodily autonomy and sense of humanity, at the state of his mind having been wiped and reprogrammed again and again; but Steve’s theme feels numb, drawn out in agonizing quietness, like the ice he was trapped in hasn’t completely thawed.

.

I can empathize with Natasha, as someone watching another person’s struggle from the sidelines, wondering how or even if I can comfort him when I don’t have any of the answers myself. She’s had to come to terms with the nature of her job years before, and understands that the world is too complex to really get attached to a side or hold yourself to a moral standard every time.

I love Sam, who understands this too but chooses to make a difference by building connections with people like Steve, to be better than the system, rather than wallowing in alienation from it.

And I feel that duality of Steve’s numbness and Bucky’s viscerality sharply; they each fight with the instinctual need to survive, to have some sort of autonomy in that moment even though neither of them is really free in their own lives.

That terror that Bucky wears on his face, in his eyes, at not being in control, at being forced to hurt others and do things that he would regret if he could remember them afterwards – the feeling that if he could just remember, there was something important there but it’s floating in and out of view, the tip of an iceberg, and if he gets too close it might gash into his industrially-constructed shell and sink him, drowning under the horror of everything he’s done – although I can’t relate to his physical experiences, that expression of terror embodies the raw mixture of rage, fear, and shame that at times threaten to tear through my conscience, if I spend too much time thinking about the world’s injustices and my role in perpetuating them. I don’t feel in control; the problems are too big.

And even though I’m not actually committing such grave crimes as assassination, sometimes it feels like They are forcing me to drive a knife through the heart of my fellow humans, forcing me to gun down the oppressed people within our society and trigger bombs all over the face of mother earth as I watch from within, trapped inside my own body, not in control.

.

The world is filled with Alexander Pierces and Nick Furys. And like Steve, I really don’t know if we can trust either. There’s a law in social science that states that no matter how good-intentioned people are, all leaders or organizations will inevitably become corrupted into preserving their own power over continuing to prioritize the organization’s goals. I don’t know how true that is, but the reality is that the world today scares me, and sometimes it feels like you really can’t trust anyone.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the people around me, and their good values and kind hearts, when the institutions and stratification loom above us like skyscrapers, casting massive shadows. How do we change all of that, within our lifetimes? How can we stop these deep-rooted problems before they destroy us? Is it even possible?

.

I feel like Steve’s displacement is a metaphor for my mental shift from childhood to adulthood. As a kid, I had lots of stong-held hopes and ideals about how the world worked. I was caught in that “good-old-days” mentality of Steve’s 1940s, aware of some of the ground-level problems but still confident in the idea that we can win the war, and then come home, and at least that will be a victory.

But being thrust into the reality of today, and not just the recent problems but also the realization that these problems have been happening this whole time – like Hydra, present within the very system I thought was pure – and that the people around me, already adults, are numb to these issues and have moved on in accordance with them... that was soul-crushing.

And I started emulating them, building back the walls of my little bubble, alternating between reading the news and then hiding in a shelter of books and dreams: feeling at one moment like the world is beautiful, the ocean and the sun are beautiful, nothing can crush my unbridled happiness – and then feeling the stress of deadlines and my future looming over me the next, and beginning to unpack the problems in society and realize how they work and how they will continue, reeling with the ideas of a journal article still fresh in my head as I walk into a grocery store and am hit with the sheer amount of plastic, the food waste, the low prices that I know come from exploitation but also the pressure to save money in our capitalist society.

And suddenly the thought of the ocean and the sun feels like a distraction, because the ocean is filling with plastic and chemicals and I need to do something to prevent another oil spill, but I can’t, because They’re too powerful and wealthy and I’m still trying to grapple with student loans – and why am I even worrying about this, when we’re bombing the Middle East and no one knows why because they don’t teach us about that in school, because this is America, because our country is founded on that poisonous combination of individuality and go-go-go accumulation, and the way that you win is to exploit the land and the people and anything else that gets in your way, and we all know that deep down but it’s wrapped in that propaganda that says that hey, maybe I can be one of the winners, and we’ve dominated so much of this planet that I don’t know how any alternate system can hope to overcome.

And it’s just one long, drawn-out scream underlying everything I do. Internalized, numb. Like that rawness has been put on ice, hushed, and a glossed-over version has been put on display in an air-conditioned museum: the facts are glorified and the electricity pollutes, but I’m tired of thinking that way so I just embrace the numb Americana of it all. The carpet is muffling, in a comforting sort of way, and the air is cool and smells faintly of cologne. This is not my world, but it’s the ideal that they present to me. I can see through the veil but at the same time I don’t want to... and so I don’t. Until that underlying rage comes back into the picture, and threatens to boil over, and I feel the shriek of metal all over again.

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

Shaking my head at the people calling the Muslim-ban a distraction for the main event of putting propaganda-proprietor and white-supremacist Steve Bannon on the National Security Council.

Like, my guys, my peeps, my pals: a distraction is Trump joining the twitter fray over who’s got the cutest baby animals.  A distraction is dispatching Eric or Ivanka to do something gauche but meaningless.  A distraction is Melania and Barron showing up at some middle-class charter school for education outreach that gets spun as charity work with underprivileged youth.

(I came up under Dubya, who was pretty good at doing shit like landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier with a big old bald-face lie on a banner in red, white, and blue letters five feet high surrounded by news crews willing to report on that instead of the rather boring and technical way Iraq was being turned into a broken libertarian nightmare as an economic experiment, or clowning around on his ranch while Cheney handed out so many contracts to corporate friends that the sucking sound of the treasury being depleted could be heard from space.  Dude was a distraction factory.)

The havoc wrecked across the globe with that executive order was not a distraction.  It was simply another horrible item on this administration’s openly-stated and oft-repeated agenda.  If people start yelling about Bannon’s appointment, they’re not going to give up on the travel ban as a failed gambit or throw up their hands and switch to defending the real goal or anything like that.  This isn’t a chess match where they’re ginning up a bunch of pawns they don’t really care about to sacrifice and get people protesting the wrong stuff.  There’s a checklist of monstrous things they want, and if the first week is any indication, they’re putting them all into play as fast as humanly possible.

Like, I get that it’s exhausting, but they’re serious about all of it.  All of it needs to be protested.

[bountyofbeads]

Excellent in-depth analysis of how the tragic death of Seth Rich turned into a conspiracy (HINT:Russia) and spread on social media finding it's way to (YES) Fox News. ALSO LISTEN 👂 to the Podcast.

Exclusive: The true origins of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. A Yahoo News investigation.

Michael Isikoff | Published July 9, 2019, 10:00 AM UTC | Yahoo News | Posted July 9, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

The purported details in the SVR account seemed improbable on their face: that Rich, a data director in the DNC’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.

Yet in a graphic example of how fake news infects the internet, those precise details popped up the same day on an obscure website, whatdoesitmean.com, that is a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda. The website’s article, which attributed its claims to “Russian intelligence,” was the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.

“To me, having a foreign intelligence agency set up one of my decedents with lies and planting false stories, to me that’s pretty outrageous,” said Deborah Sines, the former assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Rich case until her retirement last year. “Maybe other people don’t think it’s that outrageous. I did ... once it became clear to me that this was coming from the SVR, then that triggers a lot of very serious [questions about] ‘What do I do with this?’”

The previously unreported role of Russian intelligence in creating and fostering one of the most insidious conspiracy theories to arise out of the 2016 election is disclosed in “Yahoo News presents: Conspiracyland,” a six-part series by the news organization’s podcast “Skullduggery” that debuts this week on the third anniversary of Rich’s murder.

The Russian effort to exploit Rich’s tragic death didn’t stop with the fake SVR bulletin. Over the course of the next two and a half years, the Russian government-owned media organizations RT and Sputnik repeatedly played up stories that baselessly alleged that Rich, a relatively junior-level staffer, was the source of Democratic Party emails that had been leaked to WikiLeaks. It was an idea first floated by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who on Aug. 9, 2016, announced a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s murder, saying — somewhat cryptically — that “our sources take risks.”

At the same time, online trolls working in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — the same shadowy outfit that conducted the Russian social media operation during the 2016 election — aggressively boosted the conspiracy theories. IRA-created fake accounts, masquerading as those of American citizens or political groups, tweeted and retweeted more than 2,000 times about Rich, helping to keep the bogus claims about his death in the social media bloodstream, according to an analysis of a database of Russia troll accounts by Yahoo News.

Speaking publicly about the case for the first time, Sines, the former prosecutor, said that the Russian conspiracy-mongering vastly complicated her efforts to solve the murder by forcing her and the Washington, D.C., police department to investigate a blizzard of false allegations in order to make sure there was nothing to any of them. “To waste your time investigating BS is just horrible,” said Sines.

The Russian-inspired conspiracy theories also have had a devastating effect on the Rich family, especially after the theories migrated to alt-right websites and, ultimately, primetime Fox News shows. As they did so, there were repeated suggestions by alt-right commentators that the DNC staffer’s parents and brother were concealing information about his conduct.

“You’re used, you’re lied to, you’re a pawn in your own son’s death,” said Mary Rich, Seth Rich’s mother, who, along with her husband, Joel, was interviewed for the podcast. “I wish they had the chance to experience the hell we have gone through. Because this is worse than losing my son the first time. This is like losing him all over again.”

In her efforts to better understand where the conspiracy theories were coming from, Sines used her security clearance to access copies of two SVR intelligence reports about Seth Rich that had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials. She later wrote a memo documenting the Russian role in fomenting the conspiracy theories that she sent to the Justice Department’s national security division, and personally briefed special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors on her findings.

“It appeared to me that it was a very clear campaign to deflect an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” Sines said. “So then you have to look at why is Russia doing this? … It’s not rocket science before you add it up and you go, ‘Oh, if Seth is the leaker to WikiLeaks — it doesn’t have anything to do with the Russians. So of course Russia’s interest in doing this is incredibly transparent.” The Russian strategy, Sines said, was diabolically simple: “Let’s blame it on Seth Rich. He’s a very convenient target.”

The “Conspiracyland” podcast traces the spread of the conspiracy theories about Rich. From their origins as a Russian disinformation plant, the bogus theories about his murder emerged as a persistent theme on alt-right websites and then were fanned by right-wing conspiracy entrepreneurs such as Alex Jones of Infowars and Matt Couch, the founder of an Arkansas-based group called America First Media, which bills itself as “the leading investigative team in America in the Seth Rich murder.”

Along the way, the idea that Rich was murdered in retaliation for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks was championed by multiple allies of Trump, including Roger Stone. The same day Assange falsely hinted that Rich may have been his source for DNC emails, Stone tweeted a picture of Rich, calling the late DNC staffer in a tweet “another dead body in the Clinton’s wake.” He then added: “Coincidence? I think not.”

Within months, the Rich conspiracy story was also being quietly promoted inside Trump’s White House. Questions about whether the White House pushed the conspiracy theories about Rich have been raised periodically over the last two and a half years — and were consistently denied by White House officials. But the Yahoo News investigation uncovered new evidence that the false claim that Rich was the victim of a political assassination was advanced by one of the White House’s most senior officials at the time.

“Huge story … he was a Bernie guy … it was a contract kill, obviously,” then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon texted to a CBS “60 Minutes” producer about Rich on March 17, 2017, according to some of Bannon’s text messages that were reviewed by Yahoo News. (Bannon did not respond to requests for comment.)

The conspiracy claims reached their zenith in May 2017 — the same week as Mueller’s appointment as special counsel in the Russia probe — when Fox News’ website posted a sensational story claiming that an FBI forensic report had discovered evidence on Rich’s laptop that he had been in communication with WikiLeaks prior to his death. Sean Hannity, the network’s primetime star, treated the account as major news on his nightly broadcast, calling it “explosive” and proclaiming it “might expose the single biggest fraud, lies, perpetrated on the American people by the media and the Democrats in our history.”

Among Hannity’s guests that week who echoed his version of events was conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow. Although neither he nor Hannity mentioned it, Sekulow had just been hired as one of Trump’s lead lawyers in the Russia investigation. “It sure doesn’t look like a robbery,” said Sekulow on Hannity’s show on May 18, 2017, during a segment devoted to the Rich case. “There’s one thing this thing undercuts is this whole Russia argument, [which] is such subterfuge,” he added.

In fact, the Fox story was a “complete fabrication,” said Sines, who consulted with the FBI about the Fox News claims. There was “no connection between Seth and WikiLeaks. And there was no evidence on his work computer of him downloading and disseminating things from the DNC.” (A spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office said the office had never opened an investigation into Rich’s murder, considering it a local crime for which the Washington Metropolitan Police Department had jurisdiction. Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s acting director at the time, said in an interview that he reached out to his agents after he heard about the conspiracy stories about Rich and was told, “There’s no there there.”)

After eight days of controversy, Fox News was forced to retract the story after one of its two key sources, former Washington, D.C., homicide detective Rod Wheeler, backed away from comments he had given the Fox News website reporter Malia Zimmerman and a local Fox affiliate reporter confirming the account. The article, the network said in a statement at the time, “was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.” Fox News later announced it was conducting an internal investigation into how the story came to be posted on its website. The results have never been disclosed, and a spokeswoman for Fox News declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation against the news network brought by the Rich family.

But “Conspiracyland” quotes a source familiar with the network’s investigation saying that Fox executives grew frustrated they were unable to determine the identity of the other, and more important, source for the story: an anonymous “federal investigator” whose agency was never revealed. The Fox editors came to have doubts that the person was in fact who he claimed to be or whether the person actually existed, said the source.

In his recent report, Mueller briefly addressed the questions about Rich, writing that Assange had “implied falsely” that the DNC staffer was the source of the party emails leaked to WikiLeaks. His comments about Rich, Mueller wrote, “were apparently designed to obscure” how WikiLeaks really got them: from Guccifer 2.0, an online persona created by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who sent the group an encrypted file of DNC material on July 14, 2016, four days after Rich’s death.

In the meantime, the barrage of conspiracy theories — implying that Rich was a leaker who betrayed his DNC colleagues — has spawned multiple lawsuits that are still ongoing. Joel and Mary Rich have filed a lawsuit against Fox News and Ed Butowsky, a Dallas financier who played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Zimmerman story, alleging intentional infliction of emotional stress. Aaron Rich, Seth’s older brother, has sued both Butowsky and Couch, the America First Media founder.

(Fox News, Butowsky and Couch have all denied the claims; the cable news network has argued in court papers that its reporting, while retracted, is a “classic case” of journalism protected by the First Amendment. The Rich family’s claim was initially rejected by a federal judge in New York on the grounds, in part, that the parents could not sue for the harm caused by the defamation of their deceased son. The parents are now appealing that decision. Mary Rich, in an interview for the podcast, said the fact that Fox retracted the false story is irrelevant. “It’s blasted across America with Fox and Hannity,” she said. “All they’ve done is taken it down, but it’s still up there on the internet. This can’t be retracted the way they did it.”)

Through interviews with family members and friends, “Conspiracyland” tells the story of Seth Rich. A Creighton University graduate from Omaha, Neb., Rich landed a job at the DNC to work on voting rights issues. Friends described him as an outgoing, fun-loving young man — he once showed up at a friend’s hospital room wearing a polar bear costume — who was nonetheless passionate about his job of expanding voting rights.

“I’ve never encountered someone so genuine in his belief that every American should be able to participate in that political process,” said Donna Brazile, the former interim chair of the DNC.

Contrary to the conspiracy theorists, Rich was not a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter; he never expressed a preference for the Vermont senator in the primary battle with Clinton, according to Pablo Manriquez, a friend and colleague from the DNC, echoing comments made by other friends of his in Washington. Moreover, Rich’s job gave him no access to the emails that were on the DNC server, making it unlikely from the start that he could have been the leaker of the internal party communications to WikiLeaks.

After a night of drinking at Lou’s City Bar, Rich was walking home in the early hours of July 10, 2016, and on the phone with his girlfriend when he was accosted by two assailants about a block and a half from his home. A fight ensued — Rich was found with bruises on his face, knuckles and knees — and he was shot twice in the back before the assailants fled. His billfold, watch and other valuables weren’t taken. But police quickly concluded that the scenario was most likely that of an attempted robbery that was foiled by Rich’s resistance.

The police and Sines, the prosecutor, believe there was good reason to draw that conclusion. In the six weeks prior to Rich’s shooting, there had been seven armed robberies in the same neighborhood, causing residents to complain to local police.

“We’ve had so many holdups on the same corner, with the same method of holdup, where two guys grab the person,” said Mark Mueller, a neighbor of Rich’s (and no relation to the special counsel) who was among the first to rush to the scene the night of the shooting. “They hold a gun to the head, while one person takes the phone and makes the owner of the phone go into the apps and unarm anything that could be traced.”

Agitated local residents took their concerns to the police. “We’ve had meetings with the police days before this, screaming at the police in our civic association meetings, begging for help,” said Mueller.

But over the past three years, it is unclear how much progress, if any, the Washington police has made in solving the case. No suspects in Rich’s murder have ever been identified, and the case was recently moved to Washington police department’s “major case/cold case” squad under the direction of a new detective in an effort to bring a fresh set of eyes to a stale case file.

Sines chalks up the lack of progress to what she calls the anti-snitch culture of the streets in Washington, D.C.

“In Washington, D.C., being a witness to a murder can mean a death sentence,” the former prosecutor said. “I’ve lost witnesses that were murdered because they were witnesses. Because they told me what happened. And it’s — there’s a very strong and anti-snitch culture in Washington, D.C., much stronger than it is in some other areas in the country. Add assassination language, Russians, add all those buzzwords, who wants to be a witness in a case like that?”

Nevertheless, even though she is no longer involved, Sines says she is hopeful that the case will ultimately be cracked.

“So I know that someone is going to talk. I know that,” she said. “It’s a lot easier after a couple of years go by for people to talk about this, because they think they got away with it.”

Sines said she believes there are two culprits at large — a shooter and an “aider and abettor” — and she suspects they are connected to drug-dealing activity in nearby housing projects. “I’m convinced one or both of them will eventually be brought to justice.”

In a recent interview, Seth’s father, Joel, said he was told in a call with the new prosecutor — who replaced Sines and the new detective — that the investigation into his son’s murder remains active. The prosecutor and the detective talk about it every day, Joel said he was told.

But while they wait for signs the murderers will be arrested, the Riches live with a painful reality that they say is reaffirmed on a near daily basis by Google alerts: The lies about their son’s death continue to circulate in the dark recesses of the internet, a powerful reminder that in the new world of social media, even the most discredited of conspiracy theories have a shelf life that never ends.

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[benchgenderstudies]

The communists that dress as republicans.

Traditional Americanism and the Insincere christian acts of oppression,

How the Gavin McInnes’ call for a white revolution-

by Michael Bench

Ever since Reagan called on Mikael Gorbachev to tear down the Berliin wall,the west lived by a rhetoric the Soviets had given up on communism. I tell you now that even if there is no sign of communism in Russia, you can bet on the J Edgar Hoover voodoo doll I keep in my underwear drawer, there is communism in Russia. In fact, J Edgar Hoover will not rest to prosecute any conspired communist existing in contrast of the United States government for they are perpetual agents of the Soviet Union. They are perpetual spies for the communist revolution.  J Edgar Hoover invented Febreeze 3 years after he died.

In Hoovers 1960s book “ On Communism” he describes the communist as a perpetual threat to the American way of life. They have no morals and are being prepared for a revolution that overthrows the government. A Communists “ goal” is to throw a monkey wrench into all function of capitalism and at times when civil rights are being demanded by Americans; they are insincere pawns and puppets of the Communist interest. J Edgar Hoover identified all iterations of “ A New Left” as nearly inseparable of of a communist conspiracy. This leaves a glaring problem for sincere critics of poorly steered freemarket capitalism. When completely unregulated, capitalism moves away from competition. And what do we arrive at without competition? The Communist result of tyranny under a master class of oligarchs!!

At this Moment the collaboration between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin raises the concern of corruption in the traditional communist scare Hoover was familiar with. Trump is accepting help as a gullible sod believing Putin is an agent of a free and capitalist Russia. Communists are allegedly deceitful and will do things for the big picture 'cause”. The communist cause alarms westerners for as a philosophy alone... the American government and Europe have never encountered a pure philosophy they could not mangle into propaganda. The west is scared by a people with a stable formal philosophy; it runs marketing.. Philosophy's role to westerners is insincerity for their own needs. They accuse the communist of being godless. They themselves have only ever used religion, religious books, government constitutions and the snake oil of 'rule of law' to weave a tangled mess of translated morality.. subjectively.. in such a dim setting that god is named but cannot be present; if an integer at all. At the time of Hoover's living author career, he indicated 'Party-line' ism was a very new communist understanding of loyalty. Today the privatized political sector has a high polarized redstate propaganda machine hiding behind the masks of Jesus, god, humanity, womens fertility politics all in the name of megalomania.. And. If Soviet communism is the root of evil we all should be concerned about.. lets also recognize communism is a WHITE RACE SCHISM by which the most misled of christian evangelicals serving their own wants of majoritarianism.. have sacrificed faith message for politics. They live for the cause but they do not know their cause. Consider it; the most significant threat of communism is not “leftist” Progressivism. Instead White traditionalist fundamentalism.

FBI doesn't want to admit this correlation of Race based diversification among whites. The FBI alliance and overlapping interests with conservative xenophobia can't risk breaking up the white majoritarianism card. In that strength is also a failure. Law Enforcement also inherited the bad seed of Willy Rehnquists 'Nonpreferentialism”. Nonpreferentialism invited zionist-christian theocracy to the table to meet the “government”'s interests of regulating the people. Nonpreferentialism also defeats an entire religion like christianity by allowing its political zealots to act outside dogma as artifices of the state. Evangelical (communists) are their own pandoras box of majoritarianism for power's sake; not religious authenticity's sake.

The Newt Gingrich's have faithfully employed the government shutdown to get their party donor's ways. The republican primary vitriol promises their base they will not compromise and they will not permit regulation of the family or business by the government. They do allow regulation of the family by church however and this is quite foolish in its subjective application. Did not the Jews welcome the money lenders into the temple? So firstly if Satan is a fixture of evil and misguided morality, then he certainly seems to arrive with greed in the temple. I promptly rebuttal this matter for the evil of men is its own institution founded with the seven deadly sins of his behaviors; not Satan's. Let's go on here still that even if it is Satan to wonder about.. Communism doesn't believe in that angle either. Communism is atheological. Westerners blame Satan for their shortcomings; their unwillingness to be better people. If today you asked your priest or your pope what would be the policy for regulating the economy.. if a blank stare and silence blasts back at you... Well, the ill prepared clergy were more interested in keep up their own buildings, erecting new buildings and stoking the fires of lying that penalizes our people as the dirty trash of creation for having gender at all. Without sex shaming the church's work is nearly robbed of all fuel in a furnace too cold to harm market malevolence. You would just be an individual body denied your individual purpose seeing the church is only for shaming the poor and middle class as other than sufficient donors.

Communists allegedly have no individual interests or preservation. A Unique lie Hoover spit into his ink.Whites are not the vest bombers and suicide terrorists that Muslim radicals are. The state of violence and shootings rising should signal to us maybe there was a threat of communism. What if there is a threat of two communism strains? That's what I warn you about/. The sincere socialist radical who fights for labor rights and civil rights... The Leftist you all know as smeared and too progressive for American Traditions comforts.. And, there is the new communist redstate.

The Gavin McInnes clans and White Nationalists who even name themselves socialist labor clans. The Proudboys leader went on video proclaiming in so many words the need for a revolution even if it meant his hooligans lose their jobs. A move like that surely isn't white supremacist in nature. It creates a profile for white workers being prone to partisan vandalism and unreliability. Hired one day and gone the next. “Yeah boss, I 'm in jail. I didn't sleep late; I was beating up a tranny that never wronged me. Some guy on the internet told me to? Its Not Slenderman.. No, he had a beard and an Irish sounding name. . Sorry.. I 'm  out of time. “. Lack of individuality. Gavin McInnes is trying to throw a monkey wrench into those young men's work career. He's trying to throw a shadow on any White male who even looks like they might be confident about their person.

A new communist redstate has bank owners/lenders approving thousands of subprime mortgages and expects the government to bail them out of a toxic loan scandal. During that Scandal the Federal Reserve dropped the rates to criminal lows and allowed banks like Wells Fargo to be the best earning sector in the market during the 'great recession' quarters on end. Wells Fargo also raised its expectations of quarterly credit revenues to such a ridiculous level its workers were coerced as ' TEAM MEMBERS” to commit identity fraud and credit information defamation to meet their expected goals. Those workers were ejected while John Stumpf avoided any accountability. John Stumpf was applauded however for any manuever of his bank (Wells Fargo's) performance on Forbes' February 2012 Cover “The Bank That Works”. Apparently there are sectors of Stumpfs bank working against the bottom line; inefficiency should apparently be wasteful.... but... helping the bottom line? How does that not prove synchronicity with corporate wishes? Forbes magazine et al; Steve Forbes also bangs a gavel for an unregulated market. This is foolishness. Unregulated market will choose against competition and merge, acquire and seek efficiency toward monopoly: a direction that is synchronous with monopoly.

A poorly regulated and unequally accessible political system will veer toward monopoly, A system that offers money a political speech identity but cannot assure that money maintains a domestic anchor is assuring the appearance of corruption and the accessibility of communism.. if communism is in-fact the influence of the Soviet Communist Republic. What might be most difficult for people in the FBI to understand is they've ignored see the proliferation of communism is a result of their own molefarm bias toward republican ideals. By the very manner demanding torte limitations and a return to limited liability judicial settlements,,, the feudalism that once marked America a republic of the wealthy must also not ignore the theoretical communism at work in the Forefathers want of independence. They enlisted men without their consent to the revolution. The Upper class stood above all men of poverty, of Blackness, of unfamiliar immigrant status. The lower class FBI sees as insincere pawns creeping up on capitalism's reputation. Capitalism for the United States is meant to be Democracy 2; the masculine version of it; the uppity well-to-do translation of what Democracy really meant to be.. a distraction from the electoral college's assured continuance.

In the western framers' plans they draw in the 'poor huddled masses' for that's all you'll ever be to the United States government (while you're poor). The west is consumed still by its own oppressor- oligarch staples. Communism didn't invent that. When your tax revenue and interest in party donations send such zeros and commas that can only be mistaken for a bribe; you are not a huddled mass. You are the bribery level, feeding your views into the teleprompter and assuring the Usgovernment doesn't forget who it's a bitch to. It's all oppression and privilege. Still,  it can take on new forms. It can take on communism rather easily when operating as a two tier system. Some Americans will argue there are three classes but there are just two. Binary social systems assure poverty and they assure privilege. Capitalism assures a drift toward monopoly and Communism assures there will be a minimum of two classes; It is most susceptible to the feral privileges of the mammal Sapien. It is weak to infighting and corruption as binary systems like the United States also are.

If we were back in the 1960s right now, J Edgar Hoover's spill of communist-hating would further distract the American public with the problems it made Russia out to be instead of addressing it's own likenesses as a class-privileged republic.  He defined communism all encompassing;being about objective study, sport and art. Capitalism fights and is protected by our domestic partyline government   as if a social system. Western political sectors press adversarialism and rivalry until people actually believe apples and oranges can be compared. When that becomes the case, the society behind that foolish gimmick of Washington DC congressmen and lobbies begin thinking profit is the only thing society exists for.. Not just profit, mind you. Power.. and here we are again passing Go! On the Communist board game of “Monopoly!.”Cheaters edition. What will horrify freemarketers is capitalism is only one property on the larger board of communism. The Labor Rights , when finally seen in a psychological perspective improved workers willingness to work.. insofar as they weren't oppressed to be only machines of the state. Capitalism had to change to be less communist even if Hoover's definitions demonstrate United States Labor ignorance reputation that cannot be escaped as a domestic policy matter.  

What you must not ignore in J Edgar Hoover's red scare is not that communism was tyranny and oppression.. but instead that J Edgar Hoover feared a tyranny whose playbook was unfamiliar and an oppression that would likely benefit and vindicate those Citizens who were previously oppressed by the former order. What you must see is at all times these elements of communism and capitalism are a rather small farm of philosophies the present and past only allow us to see as options. The society of the west is stupid on binary thinking. Male or Female, Jesus or Satan, Profit or poverty, Democrat or Republican.... the American propaganda is an oppression by binarism and yet you've never heard of this enemy while being made fearful of one communism and being corrupted and toppled by those redstaters in Freemarketers clothing.

*

Michael Bench is an Exercise Physiologist, GenderAnthropologist, A Musican, etc.and Author . You can find his newest book ‘ #NativeSupremacy” on Amazon . The Kindle Text contains the unabridged version. The author has provided the citations and extra portions not included to the paper back on his author facebook page and twitter acct .814pgs

[newstfionline]

When a Foreign Government Interfered in a U.S. Election—to Reelect FDR

By Steve Usdin, Politico, January 16, 2017

Covert intelligence operations, propaganda, fake news stories, dirty tricks--all were used in a foreign government’s audacious attempt to influence U.S. elections. It wasn’t 2016; it was 1940, and the operations were employed not by a hostile adversary, but by America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom.

Though technology has advanced, and the two nations’ motives could not have been more different, critical aspects of Russia’s alleged covert efforts to bolster the campaign of Donald Trump echo the tactics that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service pioneered seven decades ago. In 1940, as war raged in Europe, British intel officers in New York and Washington worked to elect candidates who favored U.S. intervention, defeat those who advocated neutrality, and silence or destroy the reputations of American isolationists they deemed a menace to British security. Scores--perhaps hundreds--of Americans who believed that fighting fascism justified unethical and, at times, illegal behavior, worked for British intelligence or cooperated with London’s efforts.

Winston Churchill’s goals were as clear Vladimir Putin’s motives are murky. Churchill, the U.K.’s savvy wartime prime minister, knew that Britain could survive and repel an anticipated German invasion only if it received massive amounts of aid from the U.S., and that ultimate victory over the Nazis would require American military involvement. He also knew that decisions to send food, fuel and weapons across the Atlantic, and to dispatch troop ships to follow in their wake, lay in the hands of the president and a hostile Congress. To pull the U.S. into Britain’s efforts would require first winning public opinion--making newspapers and radio programs the front lines in the battle to persuade Americans to elect politicians willing to back Britain over those who promoted an “America First” agenda. SIS, the British intelligence agency, flooded American newspapers with fake stories, leaked the results of illegal electronic surveillance and deployed October surprises against political candidates.

Over the 18 months between Britain’s humiliation at Dunkirk and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the scale and intensity of the SIS’s efforts in the United States were without parallel in the history of relations between allied democracies.

The SIS and its American collaborators went to great lengths to obscure the ties between their activities and the British government. These links have since come to light largely because William Stephenson, the Canadian businessman who headed British Security Coordination (BSC), the official front for SIS operations in North and South America from 1941–1945, commissioned a history of the organization’s operation. Declassified in 1999, that history provides a remarkably candid picture of London’s espionage and propaganda activities. Alongside other documents available in the U.K. National Archives, this history shows that, as it sought to shift America out of neutrality, British intelligence was restrained only by the certainty that the blowback from public exposure would have been disastrous.

American communists, fascists and isolationists complained bitterly and loudly in 1940 and 1941 that Britain was secretly manipulating the U.S. media as part of a campaign to pull America into the war. These accusations, confidently dismissed by liberal politicians and newspapers as paranoid ravings, were inaccurate only in that they were understated. Even the most alarmist commentators and conspiracy-mongers underestimated the depth and effectiveness of British covert activity.

British intelligence employed the full range of cloak-and-dagger techniques in America in 1940 and 1941: forgeries, seductions, burglaries, electoral dirty tricks, physical surveillance, intercepting and reading letters sent under diplomatic seal, illegally bugging offices and tapping phones. British intelligence even listened in on a telephone call in June 1940 between President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House and his ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. A report on the call was quickly relayed to Churchill, alerting him that the U.S. was making contingency plans in case the U.K. fell to the Nazis.

While the British government strongly backed Roosevelt, it hedged its bets by working behind the scenes to increase the chances that Republicans would pick a presidential candidate in 1940 who would join the fight against fascism.

The Republican Party, lacking a consensus about a standard-bearer or platform, was in disarray in June 1940 as its national convention approached. BSC worked behind the scenes to smooth the path for a nominee who favored intervention. One element of the BSC’s operations surfaced on June 25, when the New York Herald reported on a poll of convention delegates. Surprisingly, given the isolationist positions espoused by GOP stalwarts like Thomas Dewey, Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover, the poll--which the Herald wrote was “conducted by Market Analysts, Inc., an independent research organization”--found that three-fifths of GOP delegates supported helping the allies “with everything short of war.” In fact, Market Analysts, Inc., was anything but independent. Its head, Sanford Griffith, was an American who had secretly been working for British intelligence since the 1930s, and regardless of the population surveyed, its polls consistently advocated U.S. interventionism in Europe.

Among Market Analysts’ clients was the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, a group led by William Allen White, a nationally syndicated columnist influential among liberal Republicans. In his column, White wrote that the GOP delegate poll demonstrated that leading Republican isolationists were out of touch with the party’s members, and that Wendell Willkie--who had not run in the presidential primaries and had switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican only a few months ahead of the national convention--best represented Republicans’ views. While all of the other Republican contenders advocated steering clear of the war in Europe, Willkie argued that “America’s first line of defense is Great Britain.” It is impossible to determine exactly how influential BSC’s assistance was, but Willkie went into the convention an underdog and--to London’s delight, and the astonishment of the Republican establishment--emerged as the GOP candidate.

In addition to Griffith’s operation, BSC funded and coordinated the activities and messaging of a number of American anti-fascist organizations. One of these, an informal group of wealthy businessmen and journalists called the Century Group, operated during the campaign as a liaison between the British government, the White House and the Willkie campaign. It brokered an agreement from Willkie to refrain from criticizing a proposal that allowed Roosevelt to unilaterally authorize the transfer of scores of mothballed destroyers to Britain. As the first president to snub George Washington’s precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two terms, FDR was acutely aware of the threat posed by accusations that he was behaving like a dictator, so even the hint of such an accusation from the Republican candidate may have scuttled the deal. On August 30, 1940, BSC’s agents secured Willkie’s commitment to acquiesce to the transfer. Assured that he wouldn’t pay a devastating political price, Roosevelt announced the deal at a press conference four days later.

The BSC’s work on Willkie’s behalf was an exception. For the most part, it focused not on promoting candidates, but rather on defeating elected officials who opposed American intervention in the war.

Among those opponents was Rep. Hamilton Stuyvesant Fish III, a Republican and leading isolationist who had represented New York’s Hudson Valley in Congress since 1920. By picking a high-profile target, the campaign against Fish was intended to “put the fear of God into every isolationist senator and congressman in the country,” according to a letter a BSC agent sent in fall 1940.

To do this, the BSC created, funded and operated the Non-Partisan Committee to Defeat Hamilton Fish, which among other activities, circulated a pamphlet juxtaposing Fish, Adolf Hitler and Nazis. Another photo appeared to show Fish meeting with Fritz Kuhn, the “American Hitler” who led the German-American Bund and was, at the time, serving a prison sentence for embezzlement. Contrary to the caption--”Hamilton Fish inspecting documents with Fritz Kuhn”--the Republican congressman had never met privately with Bund leader. The photo had been taken at a 1938 public hearing that Congressman Fish had organized to discuss a proposed ban on paramilitary groups like the Bund.

Another bit of British-engineered fake news had an ironic twist, accusing Fish of being a pawn of a foreign power. They alleged that Nazis funneled money to Fish by renting his properties at inflated high rates as a means of subsidizing pro-German propaganda efforts. On October 21, Drew Pearson and Robert Allen reported the story in their hugely influential Washington Merry-go-Round column--a true October surprise.

Though Fish won reelection, his margin of victory was just 9,000 votes, half the size of his win in 1938. In an after-action report to BSC and since archived at FDR’s presidential library, Griffith stated that the local Democratic Party had put practically no effort into defeating Fish, and that an additional “$2,000 or $3,000 … a week or two ahead would have been sufficient to put it over.” Even after the U.S. entered the war, the BSC stayed on Fish’s case, planting scurrilous stories in 1942 that helped cut his margin of victory to 4,000 votes. In 1944, they finally beat him. Fish claimed it had taken “most of the New Deal Administration, half of Moscow, $400,000, and Governor Dewey to defeat me.” As the BSC history later crowed: “He might--with more accuracy--have blamed BSC.”

In addition to secretly intervening in campaigns, BSC funded and coordinated the efforts of pro-intervention American political organizations and of associations of emigres from Nazi-occupied countries that lobbied Congress and the public for a muscular U.S. response to Hitler.

BSC also tried to shape public opinion by feeding a stream of true, partially true and completely fabricated stories to sympathetic reporters and columnists. Some--like Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News and Ulric Bell of the Louisville Courier-Journal--worked directly with British intelligence officers, but most of the journalists who cooperated with BSC did so through American intermediaries. Among them was Walter Winchell, one of the most widely read columnists of the time, who routinely ran BSC items supplied by an intermediary.

Although few of the American reporters and editors who disseminated BSC propaganda were on the British payroll, it is not an exaggeration to characterize them as British agents or “subagents,” the latter being operatives directed by individuals who communicated with professional intelligence officers. In fact, this is precisely how the BSC thought about them. “The conduct of political warfare was entirely dependent on secrecy,” notes the BSC history. “For that reason, the press and radio men with whom BSC maintained contact were comparable with subagents and the intermediaries with agents. They were thus regarded.” In 1991, Edmond Taylor, an American journalist and active collaborator with the Brits during World War II, told a historian that British intelligence agents “connived” with “Americans like myself who were willing to go out of regular (or even legal) channels to try to bend U.S. policy towards objectives that the British, as well as the Americans in question, considered desirable.”

One of the journalists in charge of BSC’s propaganda efforts described his unit’s activities in a 1942 memo to the British Foreign Office without mincing words. He wrote that his remit included “subversive propaganda in the United States for the exposure and destruction of enemy propaganda … [and] countering isolationist and appeasement propaganda which is rapidly taking on the shape of a Fascist movement, conscious or unconscious.” Weekly reports to London from British agents in New York tallied the number of stories that had been planted in American newspapers.

The BSC history draws a straight line from planting pro-British stories in American newspapers to Roosevelt’s decision to send destroyers to England. The transfer happened, according to BSC, because Stephenson had “means at his disposal for influencing American public opinion in favour of aid to Britain. In fact, covert propaganda, one of the most potent weapons which BSC employed against the enemy, was harnessed directly to this task.”

The British government had a well-oiled, coordinated, worldwide strategy during World War II for generating and disseminating rumors, which it called “sibs,” short for sibilare, the Latin word for whisper or hiss. Many of the sibs were silly or outlandish--for example, rumors that man-eating sharks from Australia had been deposited in the English Channel to consume downed German aviators--but British intelligence took them extraordinarily seriously. “The object of propaganda rumours is in no sense to convey the official or semi-official views of H.M.G. [His Majesty’s Government] by covert means to officials in the countries concerned,” read one classified wartime report. “It is rather to induce alarm, despondency and bewilderment among the enemies, and hope and confidence among the friends, to whose ears it comes.”

New sibs were approved by an organization called the Underground Propaganda Committee (UPC), which met weekly in London during the war. While rumors spread in Europe by word of mouth, in the U.S., they were disseminated through a network of friendly reporters and, starting in the spring of 1941, by the Overseas News Agency, a news service that received subsidies from, and was controlled by, the BSC. ONA articles appeared in newspapers around the country. Especially prior to Pearl Harbor, these stories were picked up by newspapers in Germany, Japan and occupied countries.

To cite a typical example, at a meeting of the UPC on August 8, 1941, a decision was made to release a series of sibs that, according to the meeting minutes, were “intended to suggest that the Fuehrer, who is alone responsible in the face of a good deal of opposition for the Russian campaign, is becoming more and more unbalanced as he realises that the vast gamble is miscarrying.” Eight days later, the New York Post ran an article supplied by ONA citing “circumstantial evidence for a belief that Hitler is not at the Russian front, but at Berchtesgaden suffering from a severe nervous breakdown.” The article went on to assert that the Fuehrer’s personal physician had recently traveled to Switzerland to consult with the famed psychiatrist Carl Jung to discuss “the rapid deterioration of Hitler’s mental condition,” which ONA asserted was characterized by delusional rages in which he confused the contemporary battle for Smolensk with a World War I battle in France.

On July 11, 1941, the UPC approved a sib for distribution in the U.S. newspapers, where Japanese diplomats would read it, indicating that if Tokyo attacked Indochina, the Soviet Union would attack Japan by air. The next day, the New York Times and other American newspapers ran an AP story that cited “reliable persons” reporting that Japan was poised to “make a move against French Indo-China soon.” The story noted that “Russia has a large air force within easy range of Japan’s vulnerable centers of population.”

In August 1941, the New York Times published ONA’s report that the death of a 130-year-old Bedouin soothsayer was seen in the Middle East as “a sign of a coming defeat for Hitler.” Also in the soothsaying business, the BSC sponsored a U.S. tour for Louis de Wohl, a Hungarian “astro-philosopher.” In press conferences and an appearance at the annual convention of the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers, de Wohl announced that the stars predicted doom for Hitler and success for Roosevelt. Newspapers credulously reported his statement that a “yogi once told me a man born on the date Hitler came into power would cause his downfall. Hitler rose to power on Jan. 30, and that is Roosevelt’s birth date.”

The BSC operations in the U.S. weren’t all frivolity and fake news; many were much more serious.

The BSC targeted the embassy used by the Vichy French, illegally tapping its phones, burglarizing embassy property and deploying a female operative to seduce Vichy officials. That intel was then used as the basis for a series of newspaper articles revealing Vichy diplomats’ efforts to help Nazi Germany--stories that the BSC then arranged to be printed under the byline of an American journalist. The resulting public furor severely curtailed the Vichy government’s American activities.

With the clarity of hindsight, some may write off as a historical curiosity the extraordinary efforts by Britain to influence American public opinion and the results of elections, arguing that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s impetuous declaration of war vaporized notions of neutrality, rendering efforts to propel America into the war superfluous. But in fact, given the depth and strength of the opposition to FDR’s efforts to support Britain in 1940 and 1941--and the importance of that lifeline, which pro-British propaganda made possible--it is clear that the efforts of British intelligence officers and their American recruits helped change history.

In the summer of 1941, the Roosevelt administration strained its political muscles in an all-out push to persuade Congress to amend an emergency military conscription law and extend mandatory service from one year to 2½ years. After the White House exerted all its strength, on August 12, the House passed the extension by a one-vote margin. It is easy to imagine, though impossible to prove, that the efforts of the BSC’s operatives to bend the public and bully politicians away from isolationism, tipped the balance in favor of the law. If it had not squeaked through Congress, the U.S. military would have had to send tens of thousands of men home, substantially weakening the position of American forces on the verge of war.

Steve Usdin is the author of Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley. This article is adapted from Usdin’s forthcoming book, Spying Between the Lines.

[fandomfluffandfuck]

I may have been reading a bit too much omegaverse but I stumbled upon your stuff on ao3 and uh now it’s not getting out of my head so I’m here

may I request omega!Steve + alpha!Bucky having a sparring session that escalates beautifully?

For reference, my ask box is no longer open for requests, but this is from before I closed it, so I will be writing for this ask.

Also, before we get into it, I semi-recently wrote another lil thing here on Tumblr about Steve and Bucky sparring that you might want to check out, although that prompt fill is much, much angsty-er and not omegaverse specific.

And, lmao, that's fair. I haven't been thinking a lot about omegaverse recently, but every time I am on my omegaverse bullshit I am on it and into it.

And I was really thinking about what I could do with sparring and omegaverse and smut, reading your prompt, but then... I had a thought: omegaverse, fighting not sparring, and something similar to this iconic scene from Captain American: The Winter Soldier.

Then, things got angsty. I'm sorry, lmao. I didn't mean for it to happen! It just did.

So, consider the idea that Steve and Bucky were bonded mates before Bucky fell and "died" during the war. Bucky is Steve's alpha; Steve is Bucky's omega. Yet, when Steve wakes up in the modern world, not only has history been rewritten to say that Captain America was an alpha but, also, his relationship with Bucky has been erased. It had to be because if it weren't, that would mean that either (a) they would have to claim that Steve and Bucky were an alpha-alpha couple which they don't want to do because that'd make them queer and that's not a good propaganda pawn or (b) they would have to claim that Bucky was the omega, swapping Steve and Bucky's designations which is... plausible... but, that would mean admitting that omegas went to war and, that, again, is unpopular and not good propaganda. So, they just destroyed their relationship entirely and reassigned Steve's designation.

Steve isn't sure how to feel about his life being eroded like that. His relationship; his very, very strong feelings about what society tells omegas, especially omega men, they can or can't do; his history; his understanding. But, as fucking confused as he is about all that, warring with himself and trying to figure out where he stands, it is easier to let it be. Without his bonded mate--really, with having just lost his bonded mate according to his body, that doesn't know it's been seventy years, it thinks it's been just a handful of weeks since Bucky "died", his mating cycles haven't started to try and re-calibrate, triggering themselves to get back on tracks. Bucky was the one his heats were synced to. His grief puts a halt to his regular cycles for now anyway. Besides, the suppressants that exist nowadays are so much better than those from Steve's time.

So, yeah, it's much easier to let the world think he is an alpha, using scent-blocking deodorant and body wash and all that, letting people believe that it's just the chivalrous thing Captain America would, of course, do because his alpha scent is so fucking strong, if he didn't, he'd have a multiple-block line of omegas trailing after him throughout New York City.

They don't know the truth.

No one really does. There are just one or two high-security clearance people at S.H.I.E.L.D. in medical that know because they're synthesizing an extra strong heat suppressant for when Steve's body does decide it will try to realign itself without his mate. The secret needs to be kept.

However.

That all fucking changes in the blink of an eye when, finally, fucking finally Sam, Nat, and Steve track down the Winter Soldier, or rather, the soldier tracks them down to a rundown metropolitan area, all empty warehouses, junk cars, and beat up loading docks. They're running (or flying, in Sam's case) through cracked concrete and warped metal, swearing they see the soldier around every corner and hearing him, too. Their coms are haunted by whispers of each of them believing to have heard his footsteps just ahead, the sound of his arm recalibrating just over their shoulder, his weapon cocking behind them, or the eerie, all-around them sound of his breath through his mask, filtered and almost Darth-Vader-esque (Steve knows that reference, thank you, Sam).

It's hours of a wild chase, running in circles.

A death spiral.

Until...

Steve chokes on his own spit, sweating through his stolen museum uniform, as he's rushed from behind.

He's hit.

There's a nanosecond of stunned shock before he registers what's happening--it's the muzzle of a gun shoved into his back unforgivingly and trying to throw him to the ground with the impact. Steve bends under the weight but throws his own mass to the side, not letting himself get pinned to the ground and effectively evading the heavy gun pressed against him. He's lucky that the soldier doesn't just shoot a hole through him.

As he rolls away from the impact. His back stings with hot, vicious pain. He slams his shield to the side and CLANG! rings the dinner bell. Metal on metal. The large, bulky machine gun the soldier is carrying clashing with his vibranium shield. The vibration of the hit rattles Steve's teeth in his jaw. He won't let himself be stunned again, though.

So, he throws more of his mass behind his shield when he gets both feet on the ground and strips the soldier of his biggest gun. But not before he fires off a handful of shots against his shield at point-blank range. The POP, POP, POP of the gun is so loud Steve is momentarily deafened, his ears ringing so badly that there's no sound at all. The heat of the gunpowder combusting radiates through Steve's shield back into his body--he can feel it in his arms. His heart races. The combustion is all he can smell. He doesn't need hearing or smell, though. Not when he's so close. He doesn't mind being burned alive, either. Not in his frantic state of mind. He's right fucking here. This is the closest they've come. They need to make this happen. And they need it now. So, he can take it.

He has to.

Another shove and the soldier loses his grip entirely. The big, heavy gun skids across the ground, scraped up and scratched on the concrete before finally slowing to stillness impressively far away from them. Already, though, the soldier is moving to grab another.

Steve needs to beat him to the punch. Brute force.

And so, he has no choice but to swing the shield away, leaving himself open to be hit, but sacrificing safety to hold onto the muzzle of the next much smaller handgun the soldier rips out of its holster.

Steve can't let him have it.

They struggle in the overcast, humid weather.

Strength-to-strength.

Hand-to-hand.

Breath-for-breath.

They're shockingly on par with each other, even as the soldier's arm recalibrates with a mechanical war cry, whining sharply through the ringing in Steve's ears. But ultimately, the handgun goes flying, too. Landing on the magazine, jostling it, and making it pop off in a random direction. It doesn't hit either of them. Steve doesn't hear Sam or Natasha close by either, so they're safe for now. He focuses on the fight he has in front of him, trusting they'll keep themselves out of harms way as best they can.

The gun just goes off once and then slides across the ground just as the other one had. The dragging sound of it is sickening like nails on a chalkboard. Steve wants to wince but can't risk it. His eyes have never been more goddamn open.

The soldier has a knife next. Not another gun.

Steve, through his exerted panting, lets out something of a sigh of relief, at least that shit can't make as much terrible, sharp fucking noise. It's also, y'know, good that the threat of having holes shot through him isn't as pressing. A knife is still bad, but he can work with a knife. He can.

He will.

Steve backs up, giving himself room to play. Both side-stepping for real and faux rushing in, Steve blocks every stab, cut, and swing the soldier throws his way, forcing him to make moves he wouldn't if he weren't brawling with Steve.

With more and more missed hits, Steve can see he's getting frustrated. He isn't tiring out because Steve isn't tired out. Not yet. He can do this all day. But the soldier is getting angry--it's the only flash of emotion he's seen on his face. Granted, he's never seen this much of his face before with his goggles gone. His mask is still firmly in place, though. Only his eyes are exposed--especially his eyebrows are exposed, 'cause they're so dark and expressive, furrowing in aggravation with what must be a vicious snarl.

The next thrown stabs are reckless. He's leaving himself open. Steve takes the window he's giving, exploiting it and using it to his advantage. Punching in.

Steve manages to get the knife away from him, too, but not before the soldier strips him of his shield entirely. It rattles against the ground like a coin dropped, rolling around its rim with an obnoxious clang!-groooooiinng-roooooiing-ooooooiinnnng-rnnnnng-rrrrrnnnng.

They're fists to fists then.

It could only be more vulnerable if they were bare knuckles to bare knuckes. That'd suck worse. The soldiers metal arm could surely best his flesh and bone to a bloody pulp easier than Steve could fuck over his metal architecture.

It's a rushing, messy blur of body-weight-thrown-behind-them punches and knee-sweeping kicks, getting knocked down and getting up, rolling and turning and tucking. At some fucking point, Steve's face down on the floor, fist thrown out into nothing but concrete, and he's gasping through his gritted teeth. His ribs hurt. He sees fucking red but it washes out, running pink and then clear like a bloody wound rinsed clean behind a faucet, as soon as he feels the soldier's organic arm wrap around his throat like a boa constrictor.

Shit.

Steve opens his mouth, gasping, not through his teeth this time. He fights that much harder. Motherfucker.

He twists like an alligator in a death roll, except he's not holding onto prey. He is the prey, and he desperately needs not to be. In the soldier's grasp, he lifts his leg and kicks it back hard. The soldier barely grunts, and instead of being deterred by his thrashing and kicking, he hauls Steve's body back as if he weighs nothing at all.

Steve twists harder and harder and harder and ends up with his nose in the soldier's armpit, his neck twisted and strained harshly to the side, tendons screaming at him. His vision is just starting to go fuzzy at the edges without oxygen, getting choked by the soldier so intensely, when--

Steve's choppy, barely successful inhale that fights to happen under the instinctive need for air, his lungs spasming and chest heaving even while his brain knows he won't find any oxygen--that inhale, it brings in the barest hint of a devastingly familiar scent.

Bucky.

The scent that's wafting off of the soldier's underarms is undeniably alpha, and it's choked with the acrid scent of distress and exhaustion. But, deeper, beneath that unpleasant, unwashed scent, it's just... that's... it's-! That's the smell of his alpha. Seventy years long dead. His alpha.

His alpha smells like sweet tobacco and fragrant cigarettes and summer sweat and well-loved leather and deep, old woods. His alpha smells like home. His alpha smells like himself. Bucky. His alpha used to smell, most of the time, like Steve. They were always all over each other, of course.

Steve can't tell if the soldier smells like him. For one, he's always slathered in scent blockers, so he's not even sure what he smells like without them anymore. And for another, the moment is there and then gone, so he doesn't get more than a single, earth-shattering whiff.

It's a faint whiff, even though the soldier's smell is so strong, but Steve knows what he fucking smelled.

He knows the truth.

His body knows the truth, dropping limp beneath Bucky, reacting so viscerally to his alpha. All the fight drops out of him.

Alpha.

His body screams for his alpha.

Steve doesn't even fucking do anything, he can't. His hindbrain works a million times faster than his conscious, logical brain. He folds to his alpha because that's what his innermost omega demands. That's what it wants. That's what it needs.

Bucky.

He needs Bucky.

He needs his alpha.

He misses his alpha so fucking much.

Steve whimpers, the call of his mate's designation right there on his lips, "a-alpha," but it dies before he can get it out. He doesn't have the air for it.

And in a fucking flash, before he's even processed what's happening in his logical brain, he's hard. His body and hindbrain are working overtime to push him. Hitting hyperdrive. He's wet. He's gutted with the sudden onslaught of heat rushing into him.

Heat.

Steve is on the cusp of spilling over like a little Dixie cup beneath a pouring, rushing faucet.

Pheromones. Fever. Slick. Cramps.

Heat.

He's tripping.

He is.

He is spilling over.

Steve is unraveling. Every constructed asset of Captain America peeling away beneath the terror and celebration he exists undeather, knowing that his bondmate is alive. Terror for what's become of him--what's been done to him--and celebration for knowing he's still alive, even if alive may be a stretch. He is a shell.

He is a shell because Steve's Bucky wouldn't choke him intent to kill. But the soldier does.

The soldier is.

The soldier is going to do him in.

The soldier would--the soldier will choke him out. The soldier will kill him. He will because he's been giving the opportunity on a silver platter, Steve's body limp. His instincts can't be overriden. The pure relieve and horror he feels. The rushing, rising tide of his stunted heat suddenly overcoming him. The soldier would murder Steve if not for Sam, who does a flying kick to Bucky's shoulder and knocks him away from Steve.

Bucky growls roughly, even more frustrated than before. But, something in him has changed. His eyes dart between Steve and Sam uncomprehending what's happening. There's the darkness of primal instinct behind those eyes. Steve desperately wishes he knew if it was his natural alpha instincts or whatever perverted, twisted instincts whoever did this to him placed in his broken mind.

This is Bucky, but this isn't Bucky.

Steve watches, heart throbbing in his crushed, hurting throat, as Bucky scrambles to his feet. Body lifting and moving with deadly precision, his metal hand clutches at his flesh and blood shoulder. It's sitting at an awkward angle compared to the rest of his body. Sam's kick must've dislocated it. Steve can't shove down his own growl, territorial over his alpha who's been abruptly dangled in front of his face, just out of reach.

Although Steve's possessive, mate mate mate protective instincts turn into a whine quickly. One of his hands lifts without his conscious input and stretches out toward Bucky. His fingers tremble, aching to soothe the hurt he's masking and aching to be soothed himself. Moments from every heat he's spent with his alpha over their life together flash before his eyes as his alpha's eyes bore into him, confusion plain as day, then realization, then horrified fear, and then he's scurrying away.

Bucky doesn't bother to grab a gun, knife, steal his shield, or anything. He's just high-tailing it out of there--there one moment and then gone the next and leaving Steve to deal with the aftermath.

Alone.

With no mate.

Entirely devastated.

Steve is choking and sputtering after being choked, feeling wet and sticky between his legs as the fever of heat really starts to sink its teeth into him. Jesus Christ. One smell of his alpha and his grieving, out-of-wack body has locked itself into a tailspin. Jesus Christ. He's so fucked. So not fucked. He remembers what his heats were like after the serum. They're unstoppable. Worse than they ever were when he was just a runt omega. He needs his alpha.

How's he going to survive one without him?

What is he supposed to do?

Steve has just begun to comprehend some of what unfolded, and he already feels helpless. He's crushed. There's nothing he can do.

Steve swallows a pathetic cry, stuffing it down his throat.

A cramp roils through Steve's shivering body. He ends up collapsing forward into a ball, his cowl-covered forehead hitting the concrete ground with a desperate, defeated clunk.

His ears are still ringing. His heart is still, of course, pounding. His nose tells him he can still smell his alpha, his perfect, familiar scent crowded by the scent of so much fucking pain. And his eyes squeeze shut that much tighter. So, he can't hear what Sam is saying. He can't see Natasha rush over. He can't parse out the questions they're asking him or the way they're touching him gently, trying to figure out where he's hurt, how badly he's hurt. Steve can do nothing but try and fail to grapple with the impending doom of knowing he's in for a week of agony without his alpha.

His alpha who is alive.

He has to find him.

He needs him.

P.S. if you enjoyed this pain™️ you'll like this orphaned fic, "it's gotta get easier somehow ('coz, i'm falling, i'm falling)"

I forgot about it until I finished this little drabble, but I've had it bookmarked forever, so, it probably inspired this subconsciously!

[fandomfluffandfuck]

Seeing all of the anons whose real world sex lives have been revolutionized by your smut blogging… and then the thought popping into my mind that it would be a cold day in hell before Steve Rogers would ever send smut without his name attached…

Pre-serum Steve as a kinky smut blogger and beefy veteran with PTSD Bucky as the anon who tells him and his followers all his fantasies, and then is inspired to go after them…

It takes both of them a while to figure out that “first time sub anon”, who redwhiteblackandblue inspired to go after his kinky side. is the same sweet, shy, gorgeous hunk who Steve can’t stop taking home from the club…

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Some of the best shit out there (no offense to you, lol, you're thoughts are also incredibly lovely), people out there being kinky as hell, living their lives. 🤌🏻Good shit🤌🏻

Oooooh, that is quite the concept. I love that! And that would work so good with the idea, overall, of Bucky using BDSM to work through recovery. He could easily start messaging Steve on anon, telling him his thoughts, his hesitations, all the way up to telling Steve about, yeah, this handsome, experienced dom that he goes home with, having his first experience with, then subsequently having more and more experiences, getting kinkier and kinkier the longer it goes on...

I wonder how long it will take Steve to put together that the big, pretty guy he keeps playing with in the dungeon or taking home from the dungeon is the same anonymous, shy person in his inbox?

I wonder how long it will take the readers and followers of Steve's blog to put two and two together as Steve posts more experiences himself, his kinky nights, and even posts faceless pictures of this mysterious submissive that he's started casually playing with...?

Real life oblivious idiots. My favorite, lmao.

However, I see your concept of Steve never being nameless with his smut, and raise you:

Anonymous erotica artist Steve Rogers.

It aligns more with canon, pre-war Steve needing money and getting a few gigs drawing gals with full breasts nearly falling out of their bathing suits. Although, those quick gigs slowly turn into what he does to bring home enough money for Bucky and him to eat dinner every night. Even during the worst of the depression.

Can you imagine the way the world would explode when enough people draw parallels between Captain America's known, signed drawings, to these anonymous erotic drawings from... exactly the era when Steve would've been most hurting for cash... huh. And then Steve publicly confirms it, with all but a shrug! He doesn't even blush! He doesn't stammer! He doesn't curl up and die like people that believe the propaganda pawn Captain America is the real Steve Rogers expect him to. He says, *imagine in the same voice as Chris Evans saying, "oh, that's my tush," (3:08)* "oh, yeah, those are mine."

Thank you for this idea 👀

Also your idea of being strangers but also not strangers made me think of one of my all time favorite stucky kinky fics...

"Darling Wolf" by cleo4u2 & xantissa

[fandomfluffandfuck]

Touch starved Steve wants me to wail like a baby because nobody talks about it enough. Imagine retuning from an icy grave only to receive painful punches as touches because nobody seems to see him as human rather than a prop and whatever he can obtain by paying for is a clinical measured one. He becomes touch and emotion starved.

Reminds me of fics where he sleeps around a lot seeking that spark of lust in the other party because that's 'something' more than what he gets. Yet he is left unfulfilled every time. But what other option he has? . So he cries alone in the darkness and goes again.

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R i g h t ?

Like--

Exactly, he's brought back only to be used as a propaganda pawn and weapon yet again. He's a living idol, not a human being. And it's so devastating to watch.

Also, I haven't actually read any fics like that 👀 I can see why that would be how Steve would deal with his loninless and touch starvation, for sure. And if you wouldn't mind... you should link some of those fics.

This reminds me of that meta that was floating around for a while that had canon proof that SHIELD locked Steve up in a remote, isolated "safe house" prison when he was unfrozen. They literally couldn't've done anything worse for him if they tried.

Edit: I just found that post! Right here