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klbmsw · 5 years

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“Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified’

By Carol D. Leonnig, Shane Harris and Josh Dawsey October 4, 2019 at 7:19 PM EDT nytimes.com

“In one of his first calls with a head of state, President Trump fawned over Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling the man who ordered interference in America’s 2016 election that he was a great leader and apologizing profusely for not calling him sooner.”

He pledged to Saudi officials in another call that he would help the monarchy enter the elite Group of Seven, an alliance of the world’s leading democratic economies.”

“He promised the president of Peru that he would deliver to his country a C-130 military cargo plane overnight, a logistical nightmare that set off a herculean scramble in the West Wing and Pentagon.”

“And in a later call with Putin, Trump asked the former KGB officer for his guidance in forging a friendship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — a fellow authoritarian hostile to the United States.”

“Starting long before revelations about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president rocked Washington, Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders were an anxiety-ridden set of events for his aides and members of the administration, according to former and current officials. They worried that Trump would make promises he shouldn’t keep, endorse policies the United States long opposed, commit a diplomatic blunder that jeopardized a critical alliance or simply pressure a counterpart for a personal favor.”

“There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls,” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations. “Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet.”

“But Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went beyond whether the leader of the free world had committed a faux pas, and into grave concerns, he had engaged in a possible crime or impeachable offense. The release last week of a whistleblower complaint alleging Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals as well as the release of a rough transcript of the July call led to House Democrats launching an impeachment inquiry against Trump.”

“The Ukraine controversy has put a renewed focus on Trump’s unorthodox way of interacting with fellow world leaders in diplomatic calls. Critics, including some former administration officials, contend that Trump’s behavior on calls with foreign leaders has at times created unneeded tensions with allies and sent troubling signals to adversaries or authoritarians that the United States supports or at least does not care about human rights or their aggressive behavior elsewhere in the world.”

“Joel Willett, a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, said he was concerned both by the descriptions of a president winging it, and the realization that the president’s behavior disturbs and frightens career civil servants.”

“What a burden it must be to be stuck between your position of trust in the White House and another obligation you may feel to the American people to say something,” he said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment Thursday or Friday.”

“Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said the president speaks his mind and diverges from other presidents who follow protocol. Graham said he saw nothing distressing in the president’s July 25 call with Zelensky and said he expected it to be worse, partially given his own experience with Trump on the phone.”

“If you take half of my phone calls with him, it wouldn’t read as cleanly and nicely,” he said, adding that the president sounded like a “normal person.”

“This story is based on interviews with 12 former or current officials with knowledge of the president’s foreign calls. These officials had direct involvement in the calls, were briefed on them or read the transcripts afterward. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s private conversations with world leaders.”

“The first call Trump made that set off alarm bells came less than two weeks after his inauguration. On Jan. 28, Trump called Putin for what should have been a routine formality: accepting a foreign leader’s congratulations. Former White House officials described Trump as “obsequious” and “fawning,” but said he also rambled off into different topics without any clear point, while Putin appeared to stick to formal talking points for a first official exchange.”

“He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my people didn’t tell me you wanted to talk to me,’ ” said one person with direct knowledge of the call.”

“Trump has been consistently cozy with authoritarian leaders, sparking anxiety among aides about the solicitous tones he struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin.”

“We couldn’t figure out early on why he was being so nice to Russia,” one former senior administration official said. H.R. McMaster, the president’s then-national security adviser, launched an internal campaign to get Trump to be more skeptical of the Russians. Officials expressed surprise in both of his early Putin calls at why he was so friendly.”

“In another call, in April 2017, Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had overseen a brutal campaign that has resulted in the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers, that he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

“Trump’s personal goals seeped into calls. He pestered Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for help in recommending him for a Nobel Prize, according to an official familiar with the call. “People who could do things for him — he was nice too,” said one former security official. “Leaders with trade deficits, strong female leaders, members of NATO — those tended to go badly.”

“Aides bristled at the dismissive way he sometimes addressed longtime U.S. allies, especially women. In a summer 2018 call with Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump harangued the British leader about her country’s contribution to NATO. He then disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder and poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.”

“Trump was totally bought into the idea there was credible doubt about the poisoning,” said one person briefed on the call. “A solid 10 minutes of the conversation is spent with May saying it’s highly likely and him saying he’s not sure.”

“Trump would sometimes make commitments to foreign leaders that flew in the face of U.S. policy and international agreements, as when he told a Saudi royal that he would support their country’s entry into the G-7.”

“The G-7 is supposed to be the allies with whom we share the most common values and the deepest commitment to upholding the rules-based order,” the former official said.”

“Russia was kicked out of the group in 2014 for violating international law when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Trump has publicly advocated for Russia to be allowed back in. Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and has a record of human rights abuses, wasn’t a fit candidate for membership, the former official said.”

“Saudi Arabia was not admitted to the group. Calls with foreign leaders have often been highly orchestrated events in past administrations.”

“When I was at the White House, there was a very deliberative process of the president absorbing information from people who had deep substantive knowledge of the countries and relationships with these leaders. Preparation for these calls was taken very seriously,” Willett said. “It appears to be freestyle and ad-libbed now.”

“Trump has rejected much of the protocol and preparation associated with foreign calls, even as his national security team tried to establish goals for each conversation.”

“Instead, Trump often sought to use calls as a way to befriend whoever he was talking to, one current senior administration official said, defending the president. “So he might say something that sounds terrible to the outside, but in his mind, he’s trying to build a relationship with that person and sees flattery as the way to do it.”

“The president resisted long briefings before calls or reading in preparation, several former officials said. McMaster, who preferred providing the president with the information he could use to make decisions, resigned himself to giving Trump small notecards with bulleted highlights and talking points.”

“You had two to three minutes max,” said one former senior administration official. “And then he was still usually going to say whatever he wanted to say.”

“As a result, staff fretted that Trump came across ill-informed in some calls, and even oafish. In a conversation with China’s Xi, Trump repeated numerous times how much he liked a kind of chocolate cake, one former official said. The president publicly described the dessert the two had in April 2017 when Trump and Xi met at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you have ever seen.”

“Trump preferred to make calls from the residence, which frustrated some NSC staff and West Wing aides who wanted to be on hand to give the president real-time advice. If he held the call in the Oval Office, aides would gather around the desk and pass him notes to try to keep the calls on point. On a few occasions, then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly muted the call to try to get the president back on track, two officials said.”

“Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, and critic, said the calls fit Trump’s style as a business leader. “When he had to get on calls with investors on a publicly-traded company, they had to worry that he would break securities laws and lie about the company’s profits,” O’Brien said. “When he would go and meet with regulators with the casino control commission, his lawyers were always worried under oath, in a public setting, that he would say something that would be legally damaging.”

“Though calls with foreign leaders are routinely planned in advance, Trump a few times called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron unannounced as if they were friends, a former administration official said.”

“After some early summaries of Trump calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia leaked to the press in 2017, the White House tightened restrictions on who could access the transcripts and kept better track of who had custody of copies. For example, Vice President Pence still received a courtesy copy of any foreign-leader call, but his staff now had to sign off when they transported it to his office and also sign off when they returned or destroyed the document.”

“Some former officials said that over time staff became used to the oddity of some calls even if they still found them troubling.”

“People had gotten really numb to him blurting out something he shouldn’t have,” one former national security staffer remarked.”

“But officials who had served in the White House through the end of 2018 were still shocked by the whistleblower complaint about the effort to “lockdown” records of Trump’s July 25 call. The complaint said White House officials ordered the transcript moved into a highly secure computer system, known as NICE, which is normally reserved only for information about the most sensitive code-word-level intelligence programs.”

“Unheard of,” said one former official who handled foreign calls. “That just blew me away.”

nytimes.com

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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COVID 19, Exposing the Very Worst of America On the evening of March 10, 2020, US President Donald Trump made a speech few would forget. His demeanor was bizarre, his speech halting, confused and his words often hesitant and contradictory. Few knew that many that Trump and his daughter Ivanka had met with at their Mar-a-Lago retreat, including the president of Brazil, would come down with COVID 19. From the UK Independent: “Mr. Trump announced he was shutting down “all travel from Europe’, except the UK, in a speech as notable for the underlying tones of nationalism in the president’s reference to a ‘foreign virus’ as it was for his apparent unease. The 73-year-old sniffed heavily, suppressed several coughs and appeared to be struggling with the teleprompter throughout his short but laboured speech, which immediately saw members of his administration scramble to correct his errors. First, the president risked sending markets tumbling even further when he announced, seemingly by accident, that ‘these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval’.” When the stock markets crashed the next morning, it wasn’t over economic issues but rather a total lack of trust and confidence in Donald Trump the person. You see, two of the nations, Ireland and Great Britain, that were left off the travel ban have very high rates of infection and everyone knows it. They also have Trump owned golf courses. This story spread like wildfire, one of dozens of such stories, more each day, a total lack of confidence by not only America’s financial sector but the American people as well, in Trump and his family cabal that has been sorely tested and has failed so miserably. His callous remarks, poor spelling, lack of knowledge and endless stream of childish lies, making him the hero of both barroom and bowling alley, has, predictably, done more damage to the US than over 200 years of wars. The real “killer” was Trump’s closure of the Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense, part of the National Security Council. Trump has lied about this fact over and over. From Beth Cameron, former Senior Director of that now defunct agency, published in the Washington Post, March 13, 2020: “When President Trump took office in 2017, the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense survived the transition intact. Its mission was the same as when I was asked to lead the office, established after the Ebola epidemic of 2014: to do everything possible within the vast powers and resources of the U.S. government to prepare for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic. One year later, I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like covid-19. The U.S. government’s slow and inadequate response to the new coronavirus underscores the need for organized, accountable leadership to prepare for and respond to pandemic threats. It’s impossible to assess the full impact of the 2018 decision to disband the White House office responsible for this work. Biological experts do remain in the White House and in our government. But it is clear that eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response. What’s especially concerning about the absence of this office today is that it was originally set up because a previous epidemic made the need for it quite clear. In 2016, after the formidable U.S.-led Ebola response, the Obama White House established the global health security office at the National Security Council and asked me to lead the team. We were to prepare for and, if possible, prevent the next outbreak from becoming an epidemic or pandemic. Our team reported to a senior-level response coordinator on the National Security staff who could rally the government at the highest levels, as well as to the national security adviser and the homeland security adviser. This high-level domestic and global reporting structure wasn’t an accident. It was a recognition that epidemics know no borders and that a serious, fast response is crucial. Our job was to be the smoke alarm — keeping watch to get ahead of emergencies, sounding a warning at the earliest sign of fire — all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm blaze.” Trump closed the pandemic response capability for one reason, it was set up by President Obama. Trump claimed, however, that he saved $150,000,000 in doing so. Thus far, the cost of Trump’s blunder has been $35,000,000,000,000. The ratio expressing negative ROI (return on investment) can only be expressed in scientific notation, to the sixth power. This is a guy who went bankrupt six times, who has now lost more money than, corrected to today’s currency, it would cost to fight World War II eight times. When we heard that Donald Trump, who refuses to be tested after serial exposure to COVID 19, has asked his son in law to take over the effort against the current pandemic, we were flabbergasted. Jared Kushner, a New Jersey slumlord and embarrassment, barely got into college, requiring a massive bribe from his family’s mob backed enterprises. Now he is responsible for America, and to an extent, the world’s survival. Kushner immediately called a doctor he knows who works in an emergency room, someone with no experience in epidemiology but at least a medical license of some kind. That doctor turned to Facebook and posted: “The person who is advising the president asked me to come up with ideas, can anyone tell me what to do?” The last time Trump turned to Facebook, he launched missiles at Syria over a fake gas attack. China, it seems, has beat the disease and is now aiding Italy in its efforts. They did so with leadership and will. In the US, the head of the CDC (Center for Disease Control), Dr. Robert Redfield, who has a heavily edited Wikipedia page hiding his history of religion based treatment for AIDS which may have led to the deaths of many thousands, is partially responsible for the total failure to address the current threat. He replaced Brenda Fitzgerald, another Trump appointee, who resigned in 2018 when her ties to drug and tobacco companies were exposed. Then it gets worse, with the initial appointment by Trump of Vice President Mike Pence to head the US initiative in response to COVID 19. Pence, who as governor of Indiana, advocated prayer to cure “gayness,” also, as governor advocated the same as a cure for HIV, opposing all programs, enacted at the advice of medical professionals, that other states implemented. Thus, Indiana ended up a “hot zone” of HIV under his leadership. But then we haven’t heard anything from Pence though 28-year-old Katie Waldman, now married to Trump’s advisor and primary contact to neo-Nazi political groups, Stephen Miller, has made a few nasty comments to reporters who mistakenly have asked pointed questions that Pence is unable to answer. Pence, in fact, hasn’t been seen since a Sunday, March 8, 2020 television interview during which he was unable to answer rudimentary questions on COVID 19 testing. Now we have something much more insidious than simply an incompetent government. China now accuses the US of bringing the virus to China. As reported in Veterans Today by this author: “In October 2019, the US brought 172 (really 369) military athletes to Wuhan for the World Military Games. Despite having the largest military in the world, tenfold, the US came in 35th behind nations like Iran, Finland and Slovenia. No video or photos exist of the US team, no records were kept, a huge team but a pitiful performance for the best military in the world. The US team did so badly that they were called “Soy Sauce Soldiers” by the Chinese. In fact, many never participated in any event and were housed near the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the disease is said to have originated only days after the US left the area. The US team went home on October 28, 2019 and within 2 weeks, the first human contact cases of COVID 19 were seen in Wuhan. The Chinese have not been able to find “patient zero” and believe he or she was a member of the US team. They also have sources that say the US had misrepresented influenza that Trump claims has killed thousands, an influenza carried to China by the US team, an influenza that was really COVID 19, a disease developed in a military bio-warfare facility in the state of Washington, now “ground zero” in the US for COVID 19. Evidence of this aspect of China’s claim is scant. The Chinese claim, something censored in the US, that the inattentive attitude and disproportionately below average results of American athletes in the game indicate they might have been in for other purposes and they might actually be bio-warfare operatives, and that their place of residence during their stay in Wuhan was also close to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first known cluster of cases occurred.” Past this is another observation, also potentially coincidental, that the major outbreaks in China, Iran and Italy, the primary hubs in the Silk Road that threatens traditional Western controlled world trade, are proof of COVID 19 as a bio-warfare agent. Under other circumstances and in other times, such conspiratorial claims could be easily denied, but no longer. From New Eastern Outlook: “We can make some blanket statements about COVID 19 and will do so now: The capability to create COVID 19 exists The will to create COVID 19 exists The intelligence and humanity required to not create COVID 19 does not exist The will to experiment through infecting the general public with a pathogen such as COVID 19 exists and has extensive historical precedent “Black funded” laboratories operating under cover of animal diseases research or biological warfare defense facilities, run by the US, British, Israeli and other governments, are not only capable of creating COVID 19 but are evidenced as being funded for exactly this type of program Simply put, there are actors out there that can and would unleash a global pandemic as a component in a long term “chaos theory” operation.” Conclusion It is clear that Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK represent a “perfect storm” of bumbling incompetence and paralytic policymaking in the face of the current global pandemic threat. It is also clear that both Trump and Johnson are Deep State puppets, an assertion supportable through examination of their personal history, their paths to power and their unique attributes for theatricality and prevarication. The questions that remain relate to solutions. Can there be solutions in the US, Britain as well, when government incompetence and inaction arrives served as a toxic soup of leadership malaise and conspiratorial complicity?

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lastsonlost · 5 years

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I needed Marvel to stand by me with more work opportunities to show the trolls that I was more than a diversity hire. “

Sina Grace on Writing Iceman at Marvel: “I Was Surrounded by Cowards”

Posted by Jude Terror June 28, 2019 48 Comments

As has been documented in various Bleeding Cool articles throughout the course of the book’s two series, one of my personal favorite X-Men comics of the past few years was Iceman, written by Sina Grace, and drawn it its first volume by Alessandro Vitti and Robert Gill and in its second and concluding one-shot by Nathan Stockman. The book breathed new life into a character who it could be argued hadn’t really received significant character development since his days in X-Factor in the 1980s. It’s true that it was “The Great One” Brian Bendis who wrote Iceman outed by Jean Grey’s invasive telepathy, but it was Grace who wrote adult Iceman coming to grips with this and learning to be himself and love himself, alongside, of course, lots of mutant action and drama. The book ended too soon, when it was really just getting going, IMHO.

With all of that in mind, it’s sad but not surprising to read Sina Grace’s comments, posted to his Tumblr, about his time at Marvel writing the book and what he says was a lack of support from Marvel while he dealt with online bullying as well as a lack of support and promotion for Iceman itself.

Grace writes:

As Pride Month comes to a close, it’s time I spoke candidly about my experience at Marvel Comics.

To date, I’ve always been honest about the joy of writing Iceman’s journey as an out gay superhero, but I’ve skirted around the challenges that came along with it. This is partially because I prefer to give off an upbeat vibe, and there’s also a fear that my truth will affect my career. With more corporations patting themselves on the back for profit-led partnerships wherein celebrities take selfies in rainbow apparel, and with buzz that Marvel Studios is preparing to debut their first gay character in the upcoming Eternals movie, there is an urgency to discuss the realities of creating queer pop culture in a hostile or ambivalent environment. Hopefully, my takeaways will serve as a guide for people in positions of power to consider when advocating for more nuanced and rich representation. In an ideal world, embracing our stories and empowering us to tell them will yield far more profitable (and way less messy) results than what I encountered while writing Iceman.

Stand by your people

It’s no surprise that I got the attention of trolls and irate fans for taking on this job. There was already backlash around the manner in which Bobby Drake aka Iceman came out, and Marvel needed to smooth that landing and put a “so what” to the decision. After a point, I could almost laugh off people making light of my death, saying they have “cancerous AIDS” from my book, or insinuating I’m capable of sexual assault… almost. Between Iceman’s cancellation and its subsequent revival, Marvel reached out and said they noticed threatening behavior on my Twitter account (only after asking me to send proof of all the nasty shit popping up online). An editor called, these conversations always happen over the phone, offering to provide “tips and tricks” to deal with the cyber bullying. I cut him off. All he was going to do was tell me how to fend for myself.

I needed Marvel to stand by me with more work opportunities to show the trolls that I was more than a diversity hire.

“We’ll keep you in mind.”

I got so tired of that sentence.

Even after a year of the new editor-in-chief saying I was talented and needed to be on a book that wasn’t “the gay character,” the only assignment I got outside of Iceman was six pages along, about a version of Wolverine where he had diamond claws. Fabulous, yes. Heterosexual, yes. Still kind of the gay character, though.

We as creators are strongly encouraged to build a platform on social media and use it to promote work-for-hire projects owned by massive corporations… but when the going gets tough, these dudes get going real quick.

Believe in the work

You may be asking if my Iceman book was any good, or if I’m just being sour grapes over a bad work experience. Believe me, I asked that, too. From the get-go, my first editor asserted that Iceman would be DOA if it were “too gay,” while also telling me to prepare for a cancellation anyway, given that most solo X-Men titles don’t last beyond a year. Never mind that my work on Iceman had gotten positive press in the New York Times (in-print), or that in spite of (since-deleted) critical sandbagging, the series nets glowing reviews on Amazon… Marvel still treated me as someone to be contained, and the book as something to be nervous about. Do you know how hard it is to not argue with a publicist when he’s explaining the value of announcing Iceman’s revival via the Marvel homepage? Sis, that’s a burial. Instead of clapping back, I just went and got myself more press from the New York Times. From there, they tightened my leash. I had to get all opportunities pre-approved, and all interviews pre-reviewed. This would be fine if it was the standard, but I assure you: none of my straight male colleagues seek permission to go on podcasts promoting their books.

What Marvel should have done is assign me a special projects editor. They should have worked with a specialty PR firm, rather than repeat a tiresome cycle of treating the book like a square peg, and getting confused when it’s a hit.

Give us a real seat at the table

There was a moment before Iceman was cancelled where I wrote then-editor-in-chief Axel Alonso an email, pleading for a Hail Mary arc. I explained that Icemanwas landing with a newer generation of readers who focused more on binge-reading than month-to-month periodicals. The series needed time in the book market before its true strength could be assessed. To Axel’s credit, he was warm to the idea and even gave me an extra month, but when he left Marvel that idea got brushed away. Of course I was right. The first two volumes sold like gangbusters thanks to word-of-mouth, librarian love, and support from retailers big and small.

When the series returned, no one at Marvel asked me: “What do you think landed with readers?” Nor did they ask the question that Axel did: “What matters to your community?” So when I wrote what I thought the fans would be into, a story about a man learning to be a better ally in the war against hate, editorial totally missed its value.

Seat at the table pt II: The Shade of it all

All of the weird drama I put up with crystallized when I created a drag queen mutant, first called Shade, now called Darkveil. I told my editor that Shade would be a big deal for X-Fans, and asked how we should promote her. He said: “leave it up to the reader’s interpretation.” Everyone at Marvel shrugged off two years of goodwill and acted like I’d coordinated behind their backs on an announcement that made headlines. Beyond mentioning on Instagram the queens who inspired the character, I didn’t coordinate shit. Of course, their head publicist can’t admit that my quotes were pre-approved from an unreleased interview. At this point, I stopped believing that there’d be any more work for me. There were so many shady moves on their end that I’m still having trouble putting into language, but it all aligned with an experience I had in retail where a corrupt manager kept lying and moving the goal posts in order to keep me selling in a department I didn’t want to work in. I offered to give Darkveil a proper character bio, and I walked away.

I recognize that some of my complaints can be filed under “this is freelance life.” I am aware that it was not a queer person of color who joked to me that “it’s not a matter of if Marvel fucks you over, it’s a matter of when.” That came from a cis white male. The same-day turn-arounds without warning, the work emails on Christmas week… that’s the freelance bullshit. Truly, I don’t even think of this as discrimination, I call it general ineptness. It is my belief that if we are telling stories about heroes doing the right thing in the face of adversity, wouldn’t the hope be to embody those ideals as individuals? Instead of feeling like I worked with some of the most inspiring and brave people in comics, I was surrounded by cowards.

Truly, I hate writing this. In keeping with Pride Month, I am proud of the work I did on Iceman… I love the book! It sucks that I may be tarnishing its legacy going public about how the cookies were made. That said, the time for self-congratulating is over, and folks should be earnestly listening when they ask: what could we have done better?

so what’s my take.....

Personally I think the kid got used, plain and simple. Also this should not have come as a shock to anyone.

Look at how badly they treat their customers that pay them money, OF COURSE THEY’RE GOING TO FUCK THEIR EMPLOYEES EVERY CHANCE THEY GET. A box full of scorpions would have had more loyalty.

@thespectacularspider-girl

______________________________

little history lesson for you kids: tokyopop did practically the same thing with the rising stars of manga. They snatched up young Talent, use them, and drop them.

#Marvel Comics #don't believe the hype #social justice is not your friend

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cupric-solution · 7 years

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An Open Rupture (Turn Fic)

I’m really anxious about posting this but here is my first Turn: Washington’s Spies fanfic. It’s fairly self contained but it also sort of fits into a larger story idea I’ve been playing with that features Ben Tallmadge, Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens.

This is set after the mutiny seen in S4E4 of Turn and in the immediate aftermath of Hamilton’s infamous fight with Washington on the stairs. Laurens is on his way to France at this point so he doesn’t appear but is mentioned. Tench Tilghman appears, though, as he’s been sent as an envoy of peace from Washington to Hamilton.

On his way to headquarters, Ben Tallmadge found Alexander Hamilton pacing around the perimeter of the mutineers’ makeshift burial ground. It had been more than two weeks since the execution and the first time he’d caught Hamilton on his own.

“I’ve been having nightmares,” he confessed, refusing to meet Ben’s eyes.

“That’s understandable.”

Ben reached out a hand to squeeze his friend’s shoulder but Alexander flinched away from the touch.

“I didn’t look away.”

“I know. Alex, you know you can talk to-”

“You did.” A harsh accusation of betrayal. “I felt you turn around.”

“To watch him.”

Alexander raised his head. Eyes bright, voice desperate, he asked, “Well? Did he look away?”

“Yes.”

“He disgusts me sometimes.”

Ben fought back the temptation to agree. He swallowed, wondered what he could say without his anger showing through.

He settled on, “He’s human.”

“I’ve noticed.”

Again, Alexander affixed his eyes to the ground and once more Ben reached out to him. It was the ghost of a touch, fingertips barely brushing against Alexander’s cheek and resting under his chin just long enough to tilt it up. Alex kept his head lifted but his eyes followed the retreat of Ben’s hand.

Ben kept his eyes fixed on his friend’s face and at last Alex met his gaze. From the pain Ben read in those pale blue eyes, he began to piece together a story although the details were blurred.

“Something’s happened. Between you and the General.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Unusual for you.”

This comment raised a rueful smile that lasted almost an entire second. Then Alexander spotted something over Ben’s shoulder that elicited an angry sigh.

“Sends another man to do his dirty work. As always.”

Ben turned to see Lieutenant Colonel Tilghman approaching them. Hamilton’s fellow aide looked tired and was shivering badly, despite being bundled up in a heavy cloak.

“I think you can guess why I’m here,” Tilghman said, his voice hoarse and despondent, quite the contrast from his usual joviality.

Hamilton’s response sounded rehearsed. “If he seeks an interview, I prefer to decline. Unless he orders it, in which case I won’t refuse. I am resolute in my decision and attempting to explain the reasons will only serve to drive the wedge further between us.”

“I agree. I’ll convey your wishes to him and then my duty concerning this matter will be done.”

Tilghman made to leave but was stopped in his tracks by Hamilton calling him back to them.

“Tench. I’m sorry he’s assigned you as our go between. You’ve enough real work to be getting on with.”

“I happy to play your peacekeeper and I’m not the only one. Lafayette is with him now pleading your case for a new position outside of the family. Some of us have taken your particular cause to heart. Haven’t we, Tallmadge?”

“Yes, sir,” Ben said as he straightened his posture, unsure what to add now he’d been drawn into the conversation.

“How many times do I have to say it, Tallmadge? You don’t have to ‘sir’ me, not when we’re alone. You’ve earned your rank, mine came with the position.”

“Actually mine did too. Apparently, I couldn’t be head of intelligence as a mere captain.”

“You should understand, then.” Tilghman’s tone turned teasing as he went on, “Or maybe you’re like Ham and enjoy people ‘sir’-ing you. Ham, you surely don’t go on letting Tallmadge ‘sir’ you after all these years?”

“Only in certain situations.” There was a note of laughter in Hamilton’s voice.

Ben looked at him and was relieved to receive a genuine smile from Alex, the dimples showing in his cheeks and some of his old warmth returning to his eyes. Ben returned a smile of his own.

The moment was broken by a loud sneeze from Tilghman. Hamilton rushed to his side, wrapping an arm about him and grumbling loudly about getting the poor man back inside before he froze to death. Ben noted Tilghman’s grateful expression and marvelled at how well Alexander managed to mother a man twelve years his senior.

Perhaps Ben ought to beg his help in solving the puzzle of Caleb’s current mood. He also harboured a more selfish desire to have his own foul temper soothed by a soft touch and eloquent words.

He wanted his friend back. He wanted all his friends back, wanted to see them safe and happy. He would settle for just safe, though. At this point happy seemed out of the question.

Ben had seen glimpses of the Alex he’d been sure he’d lost. Not Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton, the aide-de-camp who got more done than anyone realised. Not Ham who would fuss over his friends’ mild ailments but make light of his own brushes with death. Not even Betsey Hamilton’s darling Alexander.

His Alex, who he shared with but one other person. Another distant friend, still more distant now. Could they be content together with the sea separating them from their dear companion? Their brief reunion with their dear Laurens had only made them feel more keenly his absence.

Yet now Alex was determined to leave as well. Leave Ben alone with a quiet, broken Caleb and two women he feared would prove themselves far more capable at spy craft than he was. If Mary and Anna were men, the battle between them would surely have been over Ben’s job rather than Abe’s affection. Though those two desires needn’t be exclusive. Remembering his own petty jealously before he’d grown to trust and love Laurens, Ben wondered if that war would have been waged regardless of their sex.

His reverie was broken by someone pulling him into a hug. Ben was too startled to return it but Alex didn’t seem too offended for he stayed close after he broke the contact.

“What was that for?” Ben asked.

“I expected you to follow us inside. Instead I find you standing out here looking lost.”

“And you thought a hug would help?”

“It worked, didn’t it? I have you back with me and no longer adrift in a silent sea of thought.” Alex clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t you have business at headquarters? We’ll go in together.”

“Would you believe I was only headed up here in the hopes of running into to you? It’s been a while since we last talked.”

Alex smiled again and nodded toward Ben’s tent. “Let’s talk then.”

#turn #turn washington's spies #my fanfiction #ben tallmadge #alexander hamilton #John Laurens #tench tilghman #turn fanfic #turn fanfiction #turn fanworks #turn fandom #my fanfic #benjamin tallmadge #Ben and Alex #turn washington's spies fanfiction #my writing

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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I am posting a series of articles on the misinformation campaign being waged by the Trump campaign and other nafarious actors including Russia, Iran and China..Its important we recognize, educate and share this information ahead of the 2020 election. The misinformation is 20 fold to the misinformation campaign waged in 2016. WE MUST DEFEAT DONALD TRUMP FOR THE SAKE OF OUR DEMOCRACY. PLEASE SHARE!!! TY🙏🏻🙏🙏🏼🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

THE BILLION-DOLLAR DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN TO REELECT THE PRESIDENT..... How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 Election

By McKay Coppins | Published MARCH 2020 Issue | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted February 13, 2020 |

(**Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.)

(PART 1 /2)

One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.

The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

'THE DEATH STAR'

The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as “the Death Star.”

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Parscale didn’t become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office—and his efforts will shape this year’s election.

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple “farm boy from Kansas” (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an “Ivy League” school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds—claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his “last $500” (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice—including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. “I just made up a price,” he later told The Washington Post. “I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.” The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.

Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures—a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale—a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience—was running the Republican front-runner’s digital operation from his personal laptop.

Parscale slid comfortably into Trump’s orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious—with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives—but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate’s. “Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of,” says a former colleague from the campaign.

Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending—none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.

The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale’s most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising—amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton’s criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism—Parscale’s team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. “He was a get-shit-done type of person,” says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. “He was probably better at managing up,” Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump’s digital ignorance to flatter him. “Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn’t need to listen to the polls, because he’d crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,” one former campaign staffer told me. “I was like, ‘Come on, man, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ ” But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)

James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale’s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform’s new tools. “Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist who’d been around the block a few times might say, ‘Oh, that will never work,’ Brad’s predisposition was to say, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’ ” From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump’s surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a “genius” and the campaign’s “secret weapon,” and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president’s 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.

Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. “When I give a speech, I tell it like a story,” he said. “My story is my story.”

'DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE'

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls “P.” In college, P had studied the “Little Albert experiment,” in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture”—which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers—that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to “an invisible radiation” that takes effect while “the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon.”) But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology—muddy the waters; alternative facts—but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn’t invent this practice—Barack Obama’s campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton’s followed suit. But Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its “psychographic” targeting really had. But Wylie—who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster—said the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

“What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?” he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election. “There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do … and make it much more sophisticated.” These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

"Shady political actors are discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text message."

To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launched—and publicly accessible—“library” where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency.

The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they’re most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful—and Trump’s advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of “illegal aliens”—a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use—and the corruption of the “swamp.”

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps—including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser—a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump’s reelection strategy. The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign’s texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas (“They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear—and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. The texts—written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent from a friend—were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

'WAR ON THE PRESS'

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president’s son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter’s credibility.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this gloating—people in Trump’s circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger’s “history of intense Trump hatred.” The story was based on a series of Instagram posts—all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider—in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were “not appropriate.” Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, “was bizarre and unsettling.”

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. (The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it’s been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair—or politically damaging—to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president’s eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up—a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views—Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)

Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting—but the effort has yielded fruit.

"PASCALE HAS SAID THE CAMPAIGN INTENDS TO TRAIN “SWARMS OF SURROGATES” TO UNDERMINE COVERAGE FROM LOCAL TV STATIONS AND NEWSPAPERS."

In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they’re planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. “This is innovative shit,” said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. “They’re appropriating call-out culture.”

What’s notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complaining—with some merit—about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”

It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”

This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. “They’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”

Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.”

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas—which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm—instead of paying the sites directly—candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

'DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS'

Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots” in Louisville.

There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he’d misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim.

The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting “irregularities.” When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.)

The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourse—posing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: “I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.”)

But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentucky’s election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in America—a sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.

Of course, dirty tricks aren’t new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.

Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created “sock puppet” accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. “It’s almost as if there’s a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West,” he said.

Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, “I don’t think [they] work.” He may be right—it’s unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.

According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. Regardless of where they’re coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.

Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a “hall of mirrors.” He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an O’Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton.

Flaherty said he didn’t know who was behind the efforts targeting O’Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. “But you can’t watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someone’s fucking with something,” he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden’s campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidate’s legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary—opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War—and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.

'FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE'

As the president’s reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama’s special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two “false flag” operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate’s account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed “Dry Alabama,” was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he unaware of the Russian bot effort and does not support the use of misinformation.)

When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” Osborne said. “You have a moral imperative to do this—to do whatever it takes.”

Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. “It’s just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters,” Flaherty told me. “I know there’s this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they’re like, ‘Lie!’ ” Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. “I don’t think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump,” Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. “They can stick to things that are true.”

"EVENTUALLY, THE FEAR OF COVERT PROPAGANDA INFLICTS AS MUCH DAMAGE AS THE PROPAGANDA ITSELF."

One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the president’s campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowan’s plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creative—and controversial—measures in mind.

For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning “hometown news” stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that they’re paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.

When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the “super-predator” ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were “fair game” because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to vote—a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was joking—but said she would pursue any strategy that was “in the bounds of the law.”

“We are in a radically disruptive moment right now,” McGowan told me. “We have a president that lies every day, unabashedly … I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him.”

This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and “deepfakes” (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their party’s values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge.

Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last year’s presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake news—an approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S.

Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. “It’s not going to solve the whole problem,” he told me, “but it’s going to help with volume.”

There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

Once you internalize the possibility that you’re being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’re too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.

'POWERS OF INCUMBENCY'

If there’s one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, it’s that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facility—but Parscale put an end to the practice: He didn’t want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they weren’t supposed to see.

Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicans—inside the organization or out—hesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism.

Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “He knows he has the confidence of the family,” one former colleague told me, “which gives him more swagger.” When the U.K.’s Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscale’s spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. “The president is an excellent businessman,” he told the tabloid, “and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family.”

But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscale’s standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trump’s attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.)

Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale’s digital expertise, he doesn’t have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trump’s message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? “People start to ask the question—you’re building this apparatus, and that’s great, but what’s the overarching narrative?” said a former campaign staffer.

But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn’t have in 2016—the powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he’s willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming “invasion” and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members.

Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safe—but within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the “crisis” having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line?

It doesn’t require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what they’re injecting into the bloodstream.

After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC.

The votes haven’t even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

'NOTHING IS TRUE '

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal—the one in which Joe Biden is the villain—and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to “give illegal aliens the right to vote.” At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that “the governor of Virginia executed a baby”—prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, “Murderer!”

This incendiary fabrication didn’t seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case—that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally “executed a baby.”

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor’s abortion comments to back up Trump’s smear.

After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal—if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president’s accomplishments, she didn’t care if he “fabricates a little bit.” A man responded to my questions about Trump’s dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media “ought to try telling the truth once in a while.” Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear—not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

______

This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The 2020 Disinformation War.”

______

MCKAY COPPINS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

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incendiaryplottwist-blog · 6 years

Text

Other People’s Children

Speeding through the subway station at five-thirty on a Tuesday, the wheels of Corey’s power wheelchair whirred under them while their best friend, Bailey, talked their ear off, the words a welcome balm. This was an early evening ritual continued as always, recounting the ridiculous bullshit that laced every work day--

“He swore he’d seen me there before. He wouldn’t leave me alone all night. Swore up and down I was his cousin’s friend in a wheelchair. Maybe I just forgot,” Bailey said.

Corey listened and smiled the smile the two of them knew as the reflex one kept at hand for the times it was needed badly enough.

Together they considered the facts. A strange man insisting he knew Corey’s very closest friend and took it all a step further by refusing to listen when he was told this was not the case. Horrible and invasive, but still not the weirdest gripe of the day, week or even this year alone. This was fairly standard in either of their lives, actually.

“Fuck him,” Corey said with false cheer. “May his teeth fall out. My train’s here, I’ll call you back.” “Seeya!” the reply was a relieved sing-song. The call had done what it was meant to do, for now. Corey and Bailey each knew who the other was and what they’d need at any given time. The smile on Corey’s face softened and brightened as the line clicked off. They took a deep breath, then moved forward and drove onto the train, a maneuver which required concentration, and another fake look, one of patience and gratitude that able bodied people felt was required for the slightest acknowledgment of a disabled person’s presence.

This was not horror. This was every single day. This was an okay day. Maybe even a good one. On this day, Corey felt human.

*~*~* The walk home had been pleasant as Corey swept through the fall air. There was always more wind resistance in a speeding chair, meaning it was best to travel bundled up a bit more than the average bear but the weather wasn’t something Corey minded one bit. This day was still counting as a good one when Corey arrived at the building and the warmth of home, definitely worth appreciating after the temperature outside. This was almost worth a real smile. For a little while, at least.

Corey had hired and paid a woman to work as a personal care assistant in the evenings. She was meant to assist with daily living tasks based on the level of help needed to mitigate disability. Her name was Beatrice and she was twenty minutes late. This was a common occurrence in the world of disability services and assistance, but not typical of this employee.

Dealing with many unreliable employees over the years meant the task of seeking their help came with a constant low thrum of anxiety. When someone was late, running through hypothetical scenarios of what might have happened was also typical. Things could go from standard and dependable to simply having no one available on zero notice with stunning regularity, an actual norm of needing this type of assistance, even with pay. Respect for employers was the exception and not the rule for so many people who looked at such work as charity done out of the good of their hearts, even if it came with a paycheck. This had never been a problem with Bea before. Corey thought about what may have happened to Bea. Maybe a hit and run, a sudden medical crisis, an emergency with her neighbor. Any of these and many other possible scenarios could easily take away reliable access to assistance, hope of a hot meal or a relatively clean house. Yet the reality of what was about to happen was something else entirely. Something mundane, a minute and predictable disaster that was nevertheless unexpected. Beatrice walked into work as if being late wasn’t even on her radar for the evening and Corey’s stomach was already growling when the door opened and Bea was finally there. There was a determined look on her face that made caused recognition to dawn for Corey. Beatrice was about to say something very uncharacteristic, at least for her. Dozens of other employees over a lifetime of workers, yes, but not Bea. “I’m leaving,” is all she said. Corey’s attention was suddenly taken up with trying not to panic. Getting out of bed, out of the house and to work were all still on the table. Hot meals and a sense of security less so. Corey started brainstorming about takeout food and badly-made sandwiches that barely tasted like anything but bread. “Tomorrow has to be my last day,” Bea said, and Corey’s stomach lurched, hunger evaporating in an instant. There was a dull feeling of betrayal, but this was not unfamiliar territory. Being seen as a person at all was a luxury often not afforded to Corey. The sting came only from the fact that it was Bea who proved this right yet again.

Corey thought about calling Bailey back but exhaustion seeped in and paused that plan. Waiting a little while to do it seemed the wiser course of action. Corey decided instead to eat a few Oreos and grab an iced coffee from the corner. They would be a consolation prize for suddenly losing the person who had once been the best personal care assistant in quite some time with no notice or consideration. Bea was not the literal best who had ever been, of course, but the best that was available then. Now there was no way to get around replacing her with someone whose reliability would remain to be seen.

When it was time to call Bailey at last, Corey leaned into this common hell for disabled people and let it seep into the first words of the conversation. “Bea’s gone,” Corey said, shaking slightly with emotion. It wasn’t usually hard to call Bailey. It was just the exhaustion. All reserves were gone. “I was wondering why you called back late,” Bailey said. “I’m sorry. I thought she was one of the good ones.” “So did I.” “Can’t believe she planned to just disappear on you.” “Me either,” Corey said, and admitted, “This one blindsided me,” and a fresh wave of frustration broke over the conversation. All the same, it had been worse before. Much worse. And Bailey had always been there. They would both remember that. It wasn’t worse. “Can I get a round of, ‘Fuck her?’ Kidding. Kidding.” Corey continued, then sighed. Time for bigger person mode, as always. “I’m sure she’s just going through something. So that’s that.” Bailey gave an answering sigh. “I’m sorry. You know what you need? Some wine.” “I’ve got Oreos.” “Sugar. Same thing? Nah. Not the same thing. But close enough, I guess.” “Wine tomorrow.” “I dunno how you do all this with so little social lubrication.” A soft laugh wound its way down the line. “Love you.” “I guess I just enjoy fulfilling the stereotype of the pure and virginal cripple,” Corey teased. “Love you too. Talk to you tomorrow?” “Yeah, unless no one shows up later and I really need a 3 AM shot in the arm.” “Good thing you’re not dealing with Bea.” Bailey’s sardonic smile was evident in her voice. “No kidding. Would the two of us have luck that bad on the same day?” “Let’s try not to find out.” “Indeed, let’s not.”

*~*~*

Being alone at home was sometimes better than the bustle of a work day, even after a string of nights like the ones following Beatrice’s departure. Sometimes things were worse. Sometimes there was employees around for errands and chores to get done and sometimes no one was available for three weeks or more. Sometimes getting to work was fine, but there were times it was impossible between PCA absences and all the side jobs given to disabled people (the job of going to doctors, the job of managing attendant staff) that are really each their own full-time commitment. Corey’s mother had said once between the beatings she doled out that storms were meant to be weathered, and storms were never that scary anyway.

These days there was Bailey, and sure, local contacts worth trusting half as much would be great too, but they were hard to find. Most of Corey’s social circle lived in outer Mongolia (okay, in various other states, but with travel being the pain it was, her people might as well have been on another continent) but they’ve all helped in the ways they could, especially Bailey. Nightly calls from people who knew exactly what to say were priceless. Corey treasured each time Bailey launched into another goofy story about Minx, the emotional support cat, and there was room to laugh together. In those moments the laughter held loneliness at bay, pushing back against the inability to tell who would be forced to be alone and stranded next. *~*~* Two weeks passed without much help at home. The ad Corey placed was garnering lackluster results on Craigslist. There had only been a few dead ends so far. The kitchen floor was sticky, and a light bulb that was unreachable from a seated position had blown out, but work at the office had continued at a steady and productive pace and a performance review came and went the previous week with positive results. All this despite stress from working behind the scenes to replace Miss Gone-Tomorrow.

Pickings were remaining slim, with nothing arriving since the application from someone who gave a number that didn’t work. Corey had run the ad multiple times with no results, but was considering sending an answer to the applicant whose resume arrived that morning. The applicant’s name was Gigi and her qualifications looked decent. CPR and first aid, while not necessary for daily practice on shift, indicated she had been prepping for this sort of job, and nothing about her work experience set off immediate red flags that she wouldn’t be open to suggestions during on-the-job training. That alone was an amazing sign.

Over lunch Corey decided to give Gigi a chance and prepared mentally for another phone interview. They had always been done in the hours after work, offering an idea of the applicant’s demeanor and commitment to the work they are about to be asked to do. A five-minute phone check-in routinely answered a few lingering questions about the applicant as easily as it offered them a platform to ask directions and firm up the timing. Corey had tried to engage with one other applicant this way in the early days of running the ad without any success. Honestly, things are so often this way that none of it had come as a surprise.

“Sure,” someone named Vanessa had said in her phone interview, seeming bubbly and engaged, signs that the check-in might come to fruition. “I’ll see you then,” when they had scheduled a sit-down for two days later. When time had come for the interview, though, she hadn’t come, nor answered her phone or called to offer an excuse.

Corey pulled up Gigi’s email. Her phone number, with a local cell phone area code, was on her resume. It was easy to begin to dial. Rain began overhead and Corey’s head filled with a dull ache. With three digits dialed, the phone was suddenly very heavy and fell back down onto the table. Corey thought about calling later, when the headache had passed. Later. Later. Days passed since the failed attempt to call Gigi. Another light had burnt out, this one in the bathroom. Corey rolled to work all week with a migraine that hadn’t let up since the night of the failed call. The freezer was coming up on empty but it hasn’t mattered much with the migraine stomach from hell. At least there was a small blessing in only being able to handle the lightest of meals. Having more food in the house was not going amiss. The last thing Corey wanted to do was make that call. So an email went out instead. It would have to do.

Gigi arrived on time for her interview, wearing sensible but stylish clothing, and her smile--her smile was the first sign she was happy to be here.

Her smile.

She was happy. Corey smiled back.

It was infectious, that was all, and Corey wanted to give an impression: appreciative that she came, but not desperate.

"Thank you for coming," Corey said. The gratitude was mostly genuine. After all, out of this batch of applicants, Gigi was the first to come to her interview. Corey would never understand job applicants who gave non-working numbers or people who refused to show up to interviews without so much as a single call.

"You're welcome," Gigi said, and when "honey," didn’t follow, nor "sweetie," nor any other false term of endearment, Corey’s smile widened a little bit. One test had just been passed. It would be all right to relax just a fraction and maybe to consider what it would be like to see Gigi Gates’ face most evenings of the week after work.

"It's good to be here," Gigi said, turning that same smile directly toward Corey. “I’d like to see what I can do for you.”

Something, something was gnawing at the back of Corey’s mind as the headache returned, dull but present once more. Gigi’s smile didn’t move. It hadn’t moved once.

Thunk.

Corey kept a tool called a reacher on the hallway table, a long metal tube with a handle and squeezy button on one end which controlled a pincer tool on the other. It was there to offer Corey the option of reaching high enough to throw the chain on the front door. It had not moved.

The chain thudded home on its own. Corey knew because Gigi hadn’t moved either and no one had the reacher in their hand. “It’s good to be here,” she repeated. She dropped a bag in the front hall. It fell with a rather impressive sound, like it was full of bricks. “Don’t you worry,” she said from behind the smile that didn’t move. “I can sleep on the couch. We’re going to have a lot of fun. It’s so good here. I bet you need a lightbulb changed, don’t you.” All the lights in this room were working fine. Bile rose in Corey’s throat.

“Yes.” “Do you have any in the house?” “I’m not sure,” came the answer, something objectively true and yet horrible to admit--except-- “Well, dear, you’ll definitely have to get some. I saw the pharmacy on the corner. Why don’t you go and get some and I’ll be right here when you get back.”

Corey watched the chain on the door slide itself free once more and had to hold back a bout of oh shit I’m fucked uncomfortable laughter. “Now go.”

*~*~* Corey did go and get the light bulbs. The nearby pharmacy was two blocks down and once outside of the apartment the almost-ever-present headache cleared quickly. Getting the bulbs took all of five minutes. Once back inside, all too soon, it was clear Gigi had been true to her word. She was still there. The same smile was still on her face, never moving. “Good job!” It was unclear if this was better or worse than sweetie or honey but given that this person showed no sign of leaving-- “Um. Thanks. So….” “I think we’re going to be a great team,” Gigi said. “You know, just visiting with you, I feel better. Let me change the lightbulbs.” Corey moved to start showing Gigi where the blown bulbs were before stopping to think, but the stranger moved ahead of the chair, cutting off Corey’s path, and found each of them easily. Of course, she has been in the apartment on her own now. Maybe she had already looked around while Corey was down the street. Maybe she had looked through all of Corey’s stuff. “I’ll be right back,” was all Corey said before opening the apartment door and heading into the outer hallway and closing Gigi inside. Once away from her, Corey whirred over to the elevator and headed down into the lobby, slowly thinking over what to do next. The next logical step, as always, was to dial Bailey. It would be fine to just leave a message. It would be fine.

When riding in the chair, Corey carried a bag safely slung across her body so as not to interfere with the joystick. Pulling the phone from the depths of the bag, it was clear that the screen was blank. A moment later it became equally clear that the device was unresponsive as if the battery had run down. It had been at seventy-five percent when Corey was waiting for Gigi before her interview, ready in case anything had come up or she had been lost. Now the phone was dead. There was no denying it. All of the spare chargers were inside the apartment. Inside the apartment with Gigi.

Corey had left a strange woman in her apartment alone. If she hadn’t gone through my stuff before-- The thought did not complete, but then again it didn’t have to. The headache redoubled in strength. Corey leaned forward and to the side and retched onto the linoleum floor of the apartment lobby. She had to get out of here. Into the air. Maybe her phone would work out there.

Corey, my dear. The thought pushed through her mind, escalating the pain in her head. When you’re done, come back upstairs, the thoughts that were not her own continued. We have so much more to do. No. No. She wouldn’t go upstairs. She drove haphazardly in her chair through the lobby doors and outside. The further she got from Gigi…. The safer she would be. Right? The air around her was refreshing, a slight breeze buffeting her as she drove away at top speed. When she could see better through the pain, she checked her phone again. Nothing. Bailey. There had to be a way to let Bailey know.

But there was no battery, let alone a signal. The street was completely empty, nothing but spare bits of dirty paper rustling along the sidewalk. Still, Corey kept going, and going, and going, and yet… It felt impossible to get anywhere. First it just seemed that was the panic talking, but then, looking down, Corey considered something else. All the knobs on the power chair were in the right places to be going top speed indeed, thank you very much. That was nowhere near the speed Corey was going, though. Everything was slowing down, like in a movie, and the cool breeze had stopped. No one was anywhere. Corey was alone. Jamming everything as far forward as possible did nothing. The chair was moving, yes, but slower and slower the harder Corey fought for speed. Then, finally, the air shivered and the world pushed back. Not hard enough to send Corey’s 300-pound power chair into a full spin, but enough to be unmistakable. Pushing backward.

Corey, Gigi’s voice called, clawing its way inside, an invading force. Corey, where are you going?

Corey couldn’t see. The sun was suddenly blinding, the pain too intense even to drive the wheelchair. It hardly mattered, though. There was nothing. Nothing else. There was no way forward at all. There was still no wind, no movement in the air, except something was toppling the awnings of the nearby buildings, ripping them down as if the only sign that anyone had been here was nothing more than butcher-paper-thin nothingness. There was only silence, empty concrete, the buildings ripping down, and Corey. Soon the space devoid of people would be devoid of anything else, either. Nothing would be left behind, nothing moving or alive. Just like Gigi’s smile. There was nowhere to go but back inside. Corey experimentally backed the chair a bit further toward the apartment building and the universe allowed it. Corey moved on auto-pilot. The lobby of the building was now completely empty.

A sardonic thought flitted through Corey’s mind. In this world rapidly emptying of color and form, maybe the elevator wouldn’t work. Maybe the button would fall off the wall when pressed. Moving toward the elevator, pushed along by the terrible, empty wind, Corey saw that the bank of elevators had the most structure out of anything visible inside or outside the building. The elevator button engaged and the usual soft ping sounded as it arrived. The doors opened smoothly. Maybe Corey could stay right here. The air shivered once more and pushed.

Come here, dear. I’m your friend. Nowhere else. There was nowhere else.

Corey’s chair whirred, the noise suddenly loud in the sea of no-sound no-form that was whooshing into nothing all around. The elevator engaged and rose to the correct floor, the carpet moving eerily under the wheelchair as Corey headed back to the one remaining apartment door. Once inside, the door shut itself and, of course, the latch slid home. The apartment was dark and getting darker, but Gigi was still there, positively luminous. The air in the tiny living space flowed around her as if she were pulling it in with her very presence. She had also changed her clothes, now wearing a billowing night-dress of sheer fabric Corey couldn’t place. Corey allowed hypervigilance to be a guide in surveying the rest of the apartment. It was dark inside, yes, but more than that, out one tiny window stars were visible, as if the apartment itself had become detached from time. Five minutes ago it had been day, a day losing all of its color but day nonetheless. Hadn’t it? The apartment was dark for another reason too. The relatively empty white walls were no longer white. Wood paneling, or something like it, covered the walls now. This meant the few small pieces of art and photographs Corey had collected over the years were no longer visible. A ladder stood in one corner, alone. This was not something that Corey owned. How much time had passed? While Corey had been desperate to make a phone call to Bailey, it seemed the world had slipped out of time somehow and Gigi had completely redecorated what space there was left.

Corey surveyed the furniture--the same--but suddenly realized that it was strewn with objects.. The contents of the bag Gigi had left in the hall were all over every visible surface. Junk. Clothes. Garbage that had not been there before. Tools, including a claw hammer. A claw hammer? Gigi turned her face to Corey again, her face almost completely featureless except that smile that never moved but was still there. Everything else that had been Gigi--eyes, nose, ears, everything, had gone the way of the rest of the universe, disappeared. That damn smile was still there.

I see you found my hammer, the thing that had been Gigi Gates said in Corey’s mind, then bent and picked it up. Corey’s eyes stayed right on the hammer as darkness descended and less and less of the garbage and other detritus Gigi had brought was visible at all. Corey had to watch the hammer. It’s so good to be home. I feel wonderful here. We make a great team. Just you and me.

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lubdubsworld · 7 years

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Amor Vincit Omnia ( Yoongi/OC)

Chapter 6

"Can you hear me, you little bitch?! If you speak to any guy ever again, I'll rip your fucking gut out!!"

I crouched underneath the bed, stunned and horrified. My father was screaming from the other side of the door. I'd jammed a chair underneath the doorknob and I prayed he wouldn't break it down. It was all my fault. Father had driven to school to pick me up and he'd seen me holding hands with my lab-partner. He'd given the boy a cold glare. When we came home, he made me watch as he fired the boy's father from his company and forced him to pull the kid out of our school.

"All that so called beauty you got from your mother....I'll be damned if your throw it away to the dogs like a whore. You'll marry the guy I ask you to and you'll be a virgin when you do. !!"

The door suddenly banged open and his shadow fell on the faded carpet. I whimpered in terror. He was going to hit me again....

I sat up screaming, hands scrambling for something ...anything...

I ended up tossing myself out of the bed, the impact jarring my ribs so badly I couldn't breathe. I lay on the floor , tears slipping down my face as I tried to even out my breathing. My ribs felt like they were on fire. I was burning up. I lay there for a while, waiting for someone to come. But no one did. Still shuddering, I tried bracing my wrist against the floor to pull myself up. The pain in my rib was growing stronger by the second. But I was used to pain. It's like pulling a band-aid really. You should always just get it over with. Dragging out your own suffering is never productive.

I took a deep breath and sat up quickly, grabbing the bed and getting myself to stand. It's easy to cope with pain once you learn to dissociate yourself from it, mentally. Don't acknowledge it. Focus your mind on something else. It's actually surprisingly effective. I gave the room a quick glance. It looked the same and I was infinitely glad that Hyo Rin was out for the day. She'd started work again and she usually worked from home. But on somedays she left to visit her office.

I quickly moved to the cupboard and pulled out the two suitcases I'd brought along when I got married. Packing my clothes was easy. I had no intention of wearing all these designer label dresses with flimsy fabric that would tear at the lightest touch. I would need sturdy clothes that didn't require a lot of upkeep. I picked out three pairs of jeans and a dozen blouses. They were definitely a bit too dressy to go job hunting but I was running out of time.

I had to get out of here before my husband came home.

It was foolish, trying to run. But it was sort of the only thing I was actually capable of. I couldn't look at him or stand next to him anymore without feeling like I was caving in on myself. I didn't think a conversation with him about why I wanted to leave would be of any use. I couldn't get my thoughts together in front of him. I'd take the coward's way out.

I've read a lot about women's empowerment. I know women , most of them are incredibly strong on the inside. They fight for what they want. They speak up for what they believe in and they always stand up for themselves, no matter what happens.

I wanted to be that woman.

I wanted to be able to stand up to people. But I wasn't built for it. When people look at me they see this sort of fragile beauty that could crumble at the slightest mishandling. I think the first two or three times my father hit me, I really tried hard to fight back. But slowly I realized that when you try to stand up physically to a man who is bigger , rougher and tougher than you, you end up doing more damage to yourself than to him. I would be bruised , not just from the hits my father landed on me, but also from my own attempts to defend myself. Over time i learned to crouch away in a way that would keep me safe. Attacking back was no longer an option.

With Yoongi it was different.

He didn't touch me, not in violence.

But I'd always judged a man based on the potential amount of damage he could inflict on me. And Yoongi topped the charts with that one. He had something else that my father didn't. A sort of calculated cruelty instead of brute force. He could destroy everything I had , without laying a single finger on me. The very prospect was so terrifying, I couldn't breathe when he was around.

I slipped the last of my clothes in and spent an excruciating hour, dragging the suitcase to the service elevator on the floor below. From then, it was actually surprisingly easy to get out of the building. Before I knew it, I was on a bus, travelling to one of the lesser known localities on the outskirts of Seoul.

I'd had a phone interview earlier in the day and the lady had been kind. She was looking for someone to help her with her pottery classes, an assistant. Evn a passing knowledge of pottery would do. She didn't pay much but I could stay at the small room she had over the shop. in return for lodging and food could maybe work overtime with her business.

The pay was beyond dismal. I'd be lucky to buy myself an extra set of clothes. But it was something. I could look for other jobs. I could find a way to ear more.

I would have options. For the first time in my life I could decided what I wanted to do. It felt so liberating I momentarily forgot the fear of running away from my husband.

Would he look for me?

It would be foolish to think he wouldn't. Of course he would. He was a famous guy. People knew of our marriage. He couldn't precisely pretend I never existed. But I just wanted to make sure I had a way to live when I did confront him. Staying in his home, eating his food and demanding a divorce , made me feel a bit awful It would be better when I had my own place, away from him. No doubt he'd come looking for me. When he did , I just wanted to be able to tell him that I was happier without him.

The pottery shop was smaller than I thought . The lodgings even more so. But to me it felt like heaven. I quickly pulled my clothes out and arranged them on the cupboard. That made me feel better. Now the place felt more of a home. My clothes were here. My things were here. It was my place now. I could decide who to let in.

I'd never had a place like that before.

The kind lady offered me a bow of soup and told me I could start work the next day. I nodded enthusiastically, gulping down the flavored broth with enthusiasm. It was actually a bit bland and I gave her a smile.

"Ommeonim, could I make food for you?" I said before I could lose my nerve. She looked surprised but nodded.

An hour later she looked at me with glowing eyes.

She would pay me extra if I made the meals for her.

As it turned out I ended up cooking not just for her but also for the kids who came to learn pottery from her. They were mostly small, ranging from five to ten years in age and they called me unnie or noona and I felt so blissed out happy, watching the way they fumbled with the clay and the kiln trying to form shapes. I made sure to stick with the ones who were nervous or scared of making a mistake. I knew how that felt and I made it a point to let them know that there were no mistakes in pottery. As long as you poured a bit of yourself into it, all art is beautiful.

It was another three days before Min Yoongi turned up at the shop.

It was late evening. The last of the students had gone home and i was bustling around the kitchen when I heard his voice outside.

"Do you have someone working for you here?" His voice was rough and furious and I dropped the pot of water without thinking.

The sound of footsteps and then suddenly he was framed on the doorway of the small kitchen looking like a thundercloud on legs. I stepped back automatically wincing when my hip caught the edge of the granite counter behind me. He stared at me in disbelief, taking in my soup-stained brown apron and the tangled mess that was my hair.

I hadn't worn make up in over a week and I knew I looked like a chimney sweep.

"You've got to be shitting me...." He stared at me , ludicrous anger written all over his face.

I calmly picked up the pot and placed it back, dragging a floor mat to drop it on the small puddle near my foot.

"What are you doing here?" I said, my voice shaking just a little bit.

He shook his head like he couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"What the actual fuck do you think you're doing here? I thought you were fucking murdered you little fool!" He hissed, reaching out and grabbing my upper arm before yanking me out of the kitchen. Outside, Mrs Kim the owner looked scared out of her wits. Furious , i yanked my arm back and glared at him.

"What the hell do you want?" I snapped and he recoiled like I'd slapped him. Then his eyes narrowed and he took a menacing step forward.

"Look who's found her voice again...What the hell kind of explanation is this?" He shouted and waved a bit of paper in my face. I flinched when I recognized the handwriting as my own.

"Min Yoongi ssi....I'm sorry for being a bother. please don't look for me. " He read in a falsetto voice that made me cringe.

"It's not like you listened." I muttered under my breath and he actually went a shade paler.

"Do you think this is a fucking joke?" He said very softly " There are people out there who would happily peel the flesh off your bones if they think it would hurt me in some way. Why the fuck would you put me through this?" He said angrily, his voice shaking. I stared at him, biting my lips.

"I don't want anything to do with you. Leave me alone." i said nervously . He sighed and ran a hand over his face.

"Baby girl, do you honestly think I want to have anything to do with you? But this isn't about what we want, is it? This is about you being a spoilt, reckless little brat with the common sense of a stick. " He snapped. " If you get killed, I'll be the one left to clean up the damn mess. And guess what? I haven't got the time to put up with shit like that. So pack your fucking clothes, we're getting out of here." He said roughly .

I shook my head in protest.

"I don't want to go back there. I want a divorce." I said quickly. Why did my brain, not function when I was around this man? Why could i smell him even when he was six feet away from me?

Yoongi sighed and gave me a look of long suffering.

"Fine. I'll give you a divorce. Once it's finalized and out in the press, you can come back to this...place." He finished with a look of distaste.

I glared at him.

"If you think I'm foolish enough to believe...."

I stopped when one of the men with him stepped forward to say something in his ear. Yoongi's gaze widened in surprise and worry.

"Oh, fuck.....Shit...Quick get the cars ready.." He barked and then reached out and grabbed my wrist roughly yanking me close. I yelped in surprise and pushed him away with all my might, causing him to stumble.

"Let me go, you monster..." I screamed.

A gunshot rang out and I froze in his arms.

"fuck, Fuck, Fuck.... get down.. Get down, woman..." He grabbed the back of my head and pushed me down to a crouch behind the nearest table as something whsizzed right by my ear, hitting the clay pots behind and shattering them to smithereens. I experienced a sort of physical disconnect from my own body , my mind vaguely registering that people were shooting at us.

shooting?

"What's happening?" I screamed at him and he ran a hand over his face, placing one arm around me and ushing me behind hi before settling on his knees, pulling out his gun and removing the safety before reaching over the table to fire a couple of shots. i screamed as someone returned fire, the bullets grazing so close to us , it was a miracle we weren't hit.

"Daegu is an EXO stronghold. they must've found out I was here."

I stared at him in disbelief.

"You drove into your rival gang's stronghold alone?" I gasped in shock. He gave me a glare.

"Guess who's fault that is?" He snapped.

i spluttered in disbelief and he grabbed me around the waist pulling me close till i was flush against his chest. My faces inches from his, I could feel my heart pounding against his chest. Or was it his heart pounding against mine?

"Listen to me. Keep your head buried here and I'm going to get us to the car alright. " He said urgently and I nodded quickly, not really understanding. But then i yelped when he reached out and lifted me up with ease.

"Wrap your legs around my waist. Quick!!" He shouted. I stared in disbelief. He wanted to carry me like I was a toddler but his face looked so furious, i didn't argue, letting myself be carried and wrapping my legs around his strong hips.

"Ready?" He said suddenly.

Ready for what?? I thought, internally screaming but the next second he was rushing out into the medley of sounds and gunshots and shouts and I buried my face into his shoulder as he's told me. The moment we reached the door, a car slid to a halt in front of us, tires screeching and the door got flung open.

He all but tossed me into the backseat, climbing in behind me and squashing me under his weight. I lay there in mute horror while he fumbled with something in his hip. He pulled out a revolver and without any sort of warning he thrust it into my hands.

"Hold this and sit up..." He barked, the tone of his voice scaring me so much, I fumbled with the gun, accidently, pressing down on it.

And ended up shooting Min Yoongi in the process.

For a few seconds he just stared at me.

"You're such a head ache..." He mumbled faintly and I barely heard him, too busy staring at the blooming red on his shirt. I had no idea where I'd shot him exactly but there was so much blood!

"Oh, God..oh god.." I said in horror. What did I just do??!!! I shot my husband , I thought too stunned to think straight.

"I should have shot you instead of your father." He said with a sigh. I bit my lips in genuine distress.

"I'm so sorry." I mumbled.

"Take off your shirt and press it against my shoulder.." He said faintly. I scrambled to obey and pulled my shirt off at once, balling it into a makeshift bandage and pressing it against his shoulder. The blood soaked through my shirt just seconds later.

"If I die, I'm coming back and taking you with me. " He snapped.

And then his head rolled back and he fainted.

#bts fanfics #bts imagine #bts min yoongi #min yoongi #yoongi #min suga #violence #drama #bts gang au

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