#article recommendations

One of the names listed in the article getting paid is Olivia Juliana who famously claimed loudly she was not a shill for the party and not getting paid for her opinion.

The group in question getting this dark money is called Chorus which looks like is made of multiple popular influencers.

Go read the article it explains a lot of the weird unity on pushing Gavin newson from liberals and other weirdness during the election campaign. Don’t let this story get buried

march 2024

Tim Swarens of the IndyStar has a ten-column series, EXPLOITED: Inside the Dark World of Child Trafficking.  I’ve only read the first piece: Who buys a child for sex?  Otherwise ordinary men.  

Some chilling quotes: 

This project began with a question: Who buys a 15-year-old child for sex?

The answer: Many otherwise ordinary men. They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse.

“They’re in all walks of life,” a 17-year-old survivor from the Midwest, trafficked when she was 15, said about the more than 150 men who purchased her in a month. “Some could be upstanding people in the community. It was mostly people in their 40s, living in the suburbs, who were coming to get the stuff they were missing.”

But sex buyers also are shielded by the same cultural attitudes and biases — men are entitled to sex, victims are somehow to blame — that have long protected powerful men who harass and assault women in the workplace and other settings.

It’s tempting to put buyers who exploit children in a box — to say that all of them are pedophiles, a small percentage of the population driven by a deep sickness. But researchers and survivors say that’s not the case.

ECPAT International researchers found that the great majority of men who pay to exploit children are opportunists. They don’t set out specifically to buy sex with a child, but neither do they walk away when faced with the temptation.

As often happens as nations are attempting to ward off their demise, they take hard right turn, and Americans and countless earthlings are reeling from the current one. It is now obvious that the accelerating collapse in the United States will inevitably include escalating repression of civil liberties and violations of human rights; collective raging against the machine without recognizing it as machine, off the charts racism, deepening economic equality, the destruction of economic safety nets, and despite Trump's proclaimed military isolationism, more war."

Chen’s profile of Megan Phelps-Roper, a former prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church, has some eery similarities to Callimachi’s profile of Alex, a rural, Christian American woman, courted by ISIS on twitter.  The two articles are radically different in tone, obviously, but I think what was most striking is how quickly both Megan and Alex got emotionally involved with their twitter correspondents and the way that twitter--which often feels exclusively like a brand management tool, or like screaming into the wind--genuinely did motivate them to question their deeply-held beliefs.