In his new book, Tyler Stovall defines white freedom as “the belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.”
Our critic Ilana Masad began reading just after an insurrectionist mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6; she says Stovall “could not have foreseen his book’s release coming on the heels of such a terrifyingly and precisely relevant event.” Find her full review here.
Cohen described being caught in a kind of ideological tag team as early speculation by right-wing QAnon followers that that he was Q evolved into left-wing obsession with proving that he was the fraudster behind the postings, in order to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of a top Trump administration official.
The rumors eventually began to seep into his real-life world. He recalls being approached at a pre-Covid cocktail party in D.C. “Someone came up to me and said, whispering, ‘Are you QAnon?’” he said, calling the incident disturbing.
Online, Cohen faced a slew of social media accounts falsely purporting to be him, tweeting out cryptic messages to QAnon followers. He said Twitter was slow to address the problem.“Twitter did a horrible job of responding to this,” Cohen said. “Twitter is getting very aggressive about the QAnon stuff now. But for a very long time they allowed this to fester. And it’s not like they didn’t know about it — we reported it to them.”
Cohen became so concerned about the proliferation of accounts suggesting links to him that he hired Washington-based lawyer Mark Zaid to investigate and push social media sites to shut them down.
While the first accounts explicitly impersonated Cohen, the next wave were more subtle, set up under vague names like @YourFriendlyE. While those accounts never directly claimed to be Cohen, they would quickly be identified, falsely, as Cohen by other QAnon-focused accounts.
“It was a cat-and-mouse game,” he recalled. “Every time we had an account get shut down, they would re-form and re-gain up to 20,000 followers and even higher within hours. And there would be this chorus of people online saying, ‘This is the new account.’” accounts would then send cryptic, ominous messages that allegedly came from Cohen. “It is only at the precipice that true and lasting change will occur,” one tweet said. “In order to fully expose the ‘Invisible Enemy,’ we had to bait them into a very contentious, bright light.”
A followup to yesterday’s mystifying story about gun enthusiasts posting photos of themselves with unsaftied guns jammed into their own crotches, fingers on the triggers.
The issue apparently stems from resentment at the reification of “trigger discipline” (not putting your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot) and “muzzle discipline” (not pointing your gun at things you don’t intend to shoot).
Normies elevate these practices to a virtue, and routinely praise or condemn other gun owners’ pistol-selfies for their adherence (or lack thereof) to this standard.
To express their resentment, Fudds began photographing themselves with their pistols jammed into their crotches, fingers on the triggers, safety off. So yes, nothing to do with “triggering libs” and everything to do with “triggering normies.”
“Pointing a gun at your own dick” is normie shorthand for the kind of idiotic thing a Fudd might do, so the Fudds concretized the metaphor, by pointing their guns at their own dicks.
But, as Gault points out: “When you ironically point a gun at your dick, you’re still pointing a gun at your dick.”
Boy, this whole post is a fucking mess.
people in favor of responsible gun ownership: only a complete maniac would point a gun at their own dick, safety off, finger on the trigger.
the aptly-named musketfuckers: OH, WHAT, LIKE THIS??
I imagine that the ones who accidentally shot their own dicks as a result didn’t take a selfie of that, or if they did, they didn’t post it
