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Like many Chattanoogans, I am following the upcoming Chattanooga mayors race with interest.Do I know whom I am voting for, or have I gone through and read every one of the candidates profiles or watched any Zoom campaign forums? The answer to both of those is no, but I hope to do some homework between now and the March 2 election.The same is true for the City Council race. I live on the north end of District 2, and my wife, Laura, and I actually had two candidates stop by our house on successive cold Saturdays in January pitching their qualifications. One person came by when we were both here, and we decided we would vote for that person primarily on campaigning effort amid the cold alone.And then the next Saturday, while I was home alone, another candidate came by in a winter coat and seemed like a good candidate as well, so I am actually still debating on that race.It is always healthy when there are seemingly a lot of good candidates for a local office and who represent a variety of views, as seems to be the case in the mayors race.Part of my interest in the race this year is that this is the first mayor/City Council election I have been able to vote in since Bob Corker was elected in 2001.I moved to Cleveland in 2003 due to my wifes career as a United Methodist minister and then spent 12 years in Knoxville before moving back here in 2017 just after the last mayoral/City Council election. So, I am ready to cast my vote.And the race has seemed refreshing so far in that there are a lot of upbeat TV ads by those who have enough campaign funds to run them. And there is genuine interest in serving the community by the vast majority of the candidates.I like Tim Kellys ad about fixing a few potholes as well as mentioning his other qualifications, and I find myself trying to guess all the places where Kim White is filming her ads. I have picked out Heritage Park in East Brainerd, Coolidge Park, and the retail alley area between Market and Cherry streets. And I want to guess and say the football stadium is at Hixson High School.And who cannot like Chris Longs four-sign storyboard found along busy highway intersections about his candidacy. Or at least you can admire the creativity that went into it.All the campaigning has been upbeat so far for the mayors race, which is nice after last falls ridiculously dirty presidential and federal elections. Lets hope that continues, although who knows if the race appears tight late or goes into a runoff, and what a candidate did in 1993 suddenly comes to the forefront.Politics can obviously be dirty and brutal, and I admire anyone who sticks their neck out to run for office, although I know running is part ego buildup for many and not just all serving my community or giving back, as candidates like to always say.One time when I was living in Knoxville, I saw that former mayor candidate Ann Coulter was to be there in connection with her private consulting/planning work on the Cumberland Avenue Strip area of Knoxville by the UT campus.I contacted her about interviewing her while she was there regarding her 2005 mayor campaign against Ron Littlefield that had concluded a year or so earlier. I did end up having a nice interview with her about the Knoxville work, but she was reluctant to go back and revisit that bitter race due to the personal toll, which I understood.Like Kim White, she had also been involved with the RiverCity non-profit downtown redevelopment company. And some initially thought Ms. Coulter might become the first woman mayor, a feat Ms. White and Dr. Elenora Woods are trying to accomplish.Knoxvilles last two mayors have been women. I occasionally covered the first one, Madeline Rogero. One time she spoke at our church and gave a nice talk about some of the citys accomplishments, many of which had already been well documented in TV and newspaper reports.I was tempted to ask her, While all of these accomplishments are nice and have been documented in the media, I was wondering what a typical day as mayor is like, or do you ever pinch yourself that you are the mayor, or the first woman mayor?The current Knoxville mayor is Indya Kincannon, whose father had been a top U.S education official.Besides electing Chattanoogas first woman mayor, some would also like to see Chattanooga elect its first Black mayor.Chattanoogas city electorate is diverse enough that both conservative-leaning and liberal-leaning candidates have been elected mayor in the recent past, even though the candidates dont represent a political party in theory.Among some of the candidates, Ms. White graduated from Hixson High not too long after I graduated from Baylor School in 1978. As someone who lived less than a mile from Hixson High growing up, I know a lot of Hixson graduates from that era have done well in their professional lives.Fellow candidate Monty Bruell was a year behind me at Baylor and was the first Black graduate of the independent school. I had an opportunity to interview him in the 1990s about the experiences.Tim Kelly graduated from Baylor in 1985, just one year ahead of current mayor Andy Berke. (And while I am on my Go Big Red kick, Jon Kinsey, the mayor from 1997-2001, graduated from Baylor in 1972.)A few years ago, I had a delightful interview with Tim Kellys mother, Betty Sue, about her memories of Girls Preparatory School classmate and 1958 May queen Grace Moore, who had been tragically killed in an automobile accident in 1960 in North Carolina. Betty Sues father had headed the Ayers auto dealership.I am sure a lot of the other candidates have interesting stories of their various school experiences and other life lessons, and I look forward to learning about them. Other mayoral candidates not yet mentioned are Monty Bell, Lon Cartwright, Christopher Dahl, DAngelo Davis, Russell Gilbert, Wade Hinton, George Ryan Love, Andrew McLaren, Erskine Oglesby, and Robert C. Wilson.Over the years, I have had opportunities to interview several Chattanooga mayors. One time I briefly talked with Rudy Olgiati, the mayor from 1951-63, over the phone.He was older by that time, but I was trying to talk to him about some piece of history and reached him down at a great-nephews house in South Carolina. He did not offer me much information, but I cherished just being able to talk with him, even though I knew he was in declining health.And in the 1990s while at the Chattanooga Free Press, I decided to do a series on former Chattanooga mayors and had nice interviews with Ralph Kelley (1963-69), Robert Kirk Walker (1971-75), and Pat Rose (1975-83).I remember Mr. Kelley proudly told me from his federal bankruptcy judge chambers how he, a white man, had tried hard to connect with the Black community and had no major racial conflicts of note while mayor in the turbulent 1960s. He had graduated from the University of Chattanooga.Mr. Walker, meanwhile, talked about his term from his law office and how he was going to finally take a day off for his birthday after a hard first month or so, and then the major race riots broke out after the cancellation of the Wilson Pickett concert. As a result, the Central High grad and father of former McCallie headmaster Kirk Walker had to work even harder trying to bring peace back to the community over several very tense days.Former Mayor Rose came over to the papers office and very amicably and in a goodwill ambassador style talked about his days in office. The former Atlantan could not have been nicer and more patient with me.Both he and Mayor Kelley had natural charisma that no doubt helped them as politicians.I also later interviewed lower-key Mayor Gene Roberts (1983-97), who was probably as responsible as any mayor for all the downtown redevelopment projects, like the Tennessee Aquarium. Of course, a lot of citizens and other civic leaders were also involved, including philanthropist Jack Lupton and future mayor Ron Littlefield (2005-13), who was head of the Chattanooga Venture non-profit planning group at the time.I have corresponded occasionally via email with former Mayor Littlefield over the years.I also talked with Jon Kinsey briefly, but about a development project after he left office. He seemed easily approachable.In 2001 when I was doing some freelance writing as a Chattanooga correspondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, they asked me to interview Bob Corker right after he had been elected mayor.He kindly agreed, and I went over to his office in the Volunteer Building a day or two after the election and had a nice talk with him before he left on a brief vacation. I remember he kept pacing back and forth while talking to me.As someone who gets a little fidgety as well sitting for too long, I could certainly relate to that.I remember he also indirectly asked me if I was interested in applying to be his press spokesman, as I guess he had not filled that position. Being back in school and enjoying my freelance writing, I did not pursue it.I wrote my story and was surprised when I saw it after it was published. The editors had about doubled it in length with information about his past business dealings or some issues like that. I guess the editors were just trying to give a broader view of him, but I kind of felt like it was no longer my story or in the mostly upbeat tone in which I had written it.I hope Mr. Corker, a City High graduate, did not think any less of me, as I still think fondly of my visit with him, and I enjoyed following his career to the U.S. Senate afterward.And I always wondered if he ever had any meetings on Capitol Hill where he paced back and forth, too!

* * *Jcshearer2@comcast.net

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John Shearer: Random Thoughts About Mayoral Candidates And Past Mayors - The Chattanoogan

Hours after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol claimed the lives of five people, including a Capitol police officer, an attorney representing Kyle Rittenhouse sent out an appeal.

Kyle started the process of stopping the tyranny. Others must now follow, tweeted the attorney, John M. Pierce, before making a fundraising plea. We will need resources to take our country back. Help Kyle at FreeKyleUSA.com. And stay tuned for a new organization that will help thousands more who need help like Kyle does. #USA #NeverSurrender.

The combination of legal fundraising, merchandising, and idolizing of Rittenhouse and his shootings continues to provoke a base that is already prone to advocating violence.

Rittenhouse is the Illinois teen who gained national fame and adulation among the far right when he shot three people, two fatally, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25. He has pleaded not guilty to charges that include two counts of first-degree intentional homicide; he remains free until his trial, which is tentatively set to begin in March.

As the United States faces an unprecedented threat of far-right violence, hate groups and organizations continue to celebrate Rittenhouse as a folk hero. While the events of January 6 splintered the American political right, high-profile political figuresas well as anonymous Internet usersare united in using Rittenhouse to fundraise, recruit, and radicalize other young people.

The national spotlight on Kenosha, where a police officer was filmed shooting Jacob Blake seven times in the back on August 23, attracted a dangerous mix of groups to the responding protests and riots. In a massive failure by police and sheriffs deputies from around the state, as well as the National Guard troops stationed in downtown Kenosha, scores of heavily armed white men were allowed to patrol the crowds uncontested after curfew.

Rittenhouse, then seventeen years old, was among this volatile mix of groups coalescing in downtown Kenosha. On the night of August 25, in a flurry of terrible decisions and vile intentions, Rittenhouse shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, thirty-six, and Anthony Huber, twenty-six, and seriously wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, also twenty-six. The assault rifle he used was not legally obtained, bought for him by a friend.

Videos of the shooting were shared widely, and far-right media personalities, sitting politicians, and even some federal law enforcement officials quickly threw support behind Rittenhouses claim that he acted in self-defense. At the same time, white supremacist groups and violent accelerationists online were celebrating Rittenhouse in memes, saying his actions were revolutionaryeven noble.

You know how we begin our rebellion? When the next Rittenhouse happens, how many brave patriots will all at once revolt? wrote one user on the far-right website thedonald.win in December 2020. We would be unstoppable if we overwhelm our opposition. Constitution-hating cops cant stop a million+ patriots if they all act in one day.

Currently out on a $2 million bond funded by close associates of President Trump, Rittenhouse has flaunted his temporary freedom. After Rittenhouses arraignment in early January, his mother drove him to a bar in Racine County in Wisconsin, where he posed for pictures wearing a FREE AS FUCK T-shirt (with the lettering of the last word partially obscured); he also joined alleged members of the white supremacist group Proud Boys in throwing up the white power OK hand sign.

Kenosha prosecutors filed a motion on January 13 barring Rittenhouse from associating with milita or known white supremacist groups. The Proud Boysvocal defenders of Rittenhousehave been tied to the breach of the United States Capitol Building on January 6, prosecutors noted in court records first reported by the Kenosha News.

While Rittenhouses lead defense attorney, Mark D. Richards, was quick to distance his client from any known hate group, online channels associated with the self-titled Western chauvinist Proud Boys celebrated the recent news. And attorney Pierce, who is representing Rittenhouse against potential civil actions, is continuing to raise funds by making inflammatory statements about the case.

In a since-deleted tweet back in early September 2020, Pierce stated that Rittenhouse was akin to the brave unknown patriot at Lexington Green who fired the Shot Heard Round The World on April 19, 1775. A Second American Revolution against Tyranny has begun. #FightBack.

In an interview from late December, Pierce and Kyle Rittenhouses mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, nodded in agreement as InfoWars anchor Owen Shroyer yelled about the deep-state criminal mafia who wants to put Rittenhouse behind bars. Shroyer and his conspiracy-theorist boss Alex Jones marched with the Proud Boys in Washington, D.C., at a rightwing rally on December 12, 2020, when attendees burned Black Lives Matter flags and banners in the streets.

Shroyer would later give a threatening speech to a MAGA crowd the night before the January 6 insurrection, saying the crooked politicians that occupy our Capitol are in fear right now and are hiding in tunnels like rats.

Pierce started his campaign for Rittenhouse under Georgia defamation attorney L. Lin Woods#FightBack Foundation Inc.a slush fundformed in August of 2020 by a rotating door of far-right lawyers and Trump allies. Pierce subsequently stepped back from involvement in Rittenhouses criminal defense amid allegations of fundraising impropriety.

Lin Wood, one of the most prominent supporters of Trumps presidential election conspiracy theories, helped fundraise for Rittenhouses $2 million bail along with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. On January 6, Wood suggested that Vice President Mike Pence be executed by firing squad for certifying the electoral college results in favor of Joe Biden. He has since been banned from Twitter. Lindell visited the White House during Trumps final days in office urging the outgoing President to invoke martial law to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Besides lawyers Wood and Pierce, far-right media personalities including Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter espoused their support and adoration for Rittenhouse after the shooting. Coulter went as far as saying she wanted Rittenhouse as my President.

Even sitting politicians threw their support behind Rittenhouse. In November, Representative Anthony Sabatini, Republican of Florida, tweeted, KYLE RITTENHOUSE FOR CONGRESS. And Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, tweeted the day after the shooting that Rittenhouse was 100% justified. Gosar would go on to become a key player in the Stop the Steal movement.

Indeed, the Stop the Steal movement has been led by some of attorney Pierces closest professional friends. Before financial difficulties and substance abuse problems led him to step away from his ailing law firm Pierce-Bainbridge, he represented high-profile Trump allies like former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani and Trump advisor George Papadopoulos, who eventually received a pardon from Trump.

Rittenhouses family and attorney continue to use his popularity among the far right to fundraise, though accusations of fraud and grifting have marred the public-relations campaign that Pierce runs. Pierce maintains he is sticking around to sue anyone who has called Rittenhouse a white supremacist, including President Joe Biden. Those would be hard lawsuits to win, since the photos of Rittenhouse flashing a white power hand sign while drinking with alleged Proud Boys are now preserved on the Internet.

The Rittenhouse family, aided by Pierce, have faced continuous instances of deplatforming in their fundraising efforts. Before their SquareSpace website FreeKyleUSA.com was temporarily shut down, Rittenhouses family sold merchandise and apparel in an online store with Free Kyle as the slogan. The website is live again, though the store is no longer available.

They reportedly raked in thousands of dollars towards his legal defense fund using the web payment service DonorBox, which has been criticized in the past for providing services to hate groups. Donations apparently go into a trust controlled by Wendy Rittenhouse. DonorBox did not respond to multiple requests for comment. On the reinstated website, donations are now submitted through a PayPal link to the Kyle Rittenhouse Defense Fund.

Several other companies, including Printify, Printiful, and GoFundMe, had previously removed Rittenhouses familys products and funds from their services after receiving complaints. Before the social media app Parler was taken offline due to threats of violence posted posted by users, @FreeKyleUSA solicited donations for Rittenhouses defense.

The combination of legal fundraising, merchandising, and idolizing of Rittenhouse and his shootings continues to provoke a base that is already prone to advocating violence. The Parler accounts associated with the Proud Boys and their members regularly posted in support of Rittenhouse. On Twitter, the @FreeKyleUSA account has gained more than 1,700 followers, and a cult-like fan base. The proprietor of the account is not named.

In less-public spaces online, accelerationists and outright racists idolize Rittenhouse in memes. Telegram channels associated with the Proud Boys amplify messages such as Hail King Kyle, and Free Kyle Rittenhouse. In other far-right Telegram channels, accounts with names such as Zoomer Waffen'' share edited videos of the Rittenhouse shooting with messages like, I need a hero.

On January 7, during an appearance on an obscure live-stream show with Wendy Rittenhouse, Pierce called President-elect Joe Biden a pretender, and praised those who lost their lives during the previous days insurrection as brave souls. Rittenhouses mother nodded in agreement, adding that us patriots have to stick together, we cant back down.

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Making a Martyr Out of a Murderer - Progressive.org - Progressive.org

The day before my interview with the poet, essayist, memoirist and novelist Patricia Lockwood, the attempted coup took place in Washington DC. She, like myself and millions of others, followed it online, scrolling for hours, watching as President Trump continued to incite his fans by posting untruths about the election. Whatever divide ever existed between the real and virtual worlds was as decisively shattered as the Capitols windows.

WHAT A DAY TO BE SITTING ON YOUR BUTT IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER, EH, Lockwood emailed me from her home in Savannah, Georgia, using the all-caps and no-punctuation style that all of us who spend too much time online recognise as meta sarcasm: sarcasm but also sarcastically mocking the obviousness of the sarcasm.

I tell her that Ive spent 127 hours on Twitter. Lockwood is often described as the poet laureate of Twitter and the 38-year-old originally made a name for herself with her joyfully weird tweets, such as her parodies of sexts (I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. Wow, I yell in ecstasy, This makes no sense at all. And asking the Paris Review: So is Paris any good or not (no punctuation, of course.) So I feel no shame in admitting my social media addiction to her.

It was like every hour became somehow cubic and we were chained up in it like a murder basement, she writes back, combining the punchy hyperbole of Twitter (murder basement) with the lyrical originality (every hour became somehow cubic) that has made her a literary star. As well as two poetry collections (Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals), she has published a bestselling memoir, 2017s Priestdaddy, about when she and her husband were forced to move back in with her mother and her raucously eccentric father, who became a Catholic priest after watching The Exorcist 72 times. She is also a contributing editor for the London Review of Books where she wrote about her recent experience with long-term Covid, which she caught when travelling to Harvard last year to give a lecture. She had a bad bout of it: Everyone I know who had Covid says that at some point in the night they felt like, OK, body, you had a good run, were over now. But so many people died who didnt have to, she says. Whereas she used to travel often, she has been largely housebound for the past year, partly due to the lockdown, but mainly becasue of her health. She still cant type due to the arthritis she developed: See how the joints are crazy prominent? she says, holding up her palms, joints pressing through the flesh. So she largely dictates her notes: But I have to consider myself lucky, even though I cant use my hands.

When Lockwood was a young unknown, her poems occasionally getting plucked from the slush piles of literary magazines, posting online taught her how to let her personality shine through in her writing. She has always had an almost synaesthetic reaction to words: When I read the words moonlit swim I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word sunshine had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it, she writes in Priestdaddy, something she puts down to being, she says, not a neurotypical person. Whether shes writing a poem about Shirley Temple (Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do / you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand / in a circle and whisper to her, Shirley Temple / there will be war. Shirley Temple youll get no / lunch) or describing the decor of a restaurant in Priestdaddy (a fake cactus threw up its helpless arms, as if my father were holding it at gunpoint), there is the impression that Lockwood is getting as much of a kick out of her gleefully unique prose as the reader.

Absolutely Im the Barbra Streisand of tasting my own voice. I dont have any problems with procrastination where writing is concerned, she says. Writing on the internet helped her to find that pleasure in her originality. But in around 2012, she noticed there was increasingly a conformity in online writing: the hyperbole, the all-caps, the meta sarcasm, the coining of a universal internet-speak. Her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, published in the UK next month, has already garnered praise from Sally Rooney and was extracted in the New Yorker last year (Now everyone is talking about this, an American writer emailed me, deliberately invoking the excitement around the extract, and also, less deliberately, his jealousy of the size of the literary spotlight accorded to Lockwood.) The novel began as a diary in which she wrote about being on the internet and the feeling my thoughts were being dictated.

You have to look for where the language goes crunchy, where everybody starts saying the same things and formulating their reactions in the same way and step out of it, Lockwood says. The result of this stepping out is an extraordinarily original novel about interplay between the online and real worlds, one which would have felt bitingly relevant anyway, but now feels almost painfully so. On the day of our interview which we, inevitably, conduct online the newspaper headlines are that Trump will be banned from Twitter. In Lockwoods book he is referred to ironically-but-also-not-ironically as the dictator.

We could all see [how Trump used Twitter] and that lets people take a book about Twitter more seriously. But good luck describing the book! she laughs.

Here goes. The first half is about the unnamed and extremely online (Extremely Online, as extremely online people put it) protagonists life on social media, where she communicates in memes (SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS), talks in the new shared sense of humour (ironic, doomy, deliberately exclusive) and makes herself care about the things that they care about (Every fiber in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police). She watches how peoples behaviour changes online, individually and collectively (A man who three years ago only ever posted things like Im a retard with butt aids was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way). She also explains the reason for those changes in passages that evoke proper laughter as opposed to merely an emoji laughing face:

White people, who had the political educations of potatoes, were suddenly feeling compelled to speak about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.

The book is formatted into bite-sized paragraphs, so it feels as if you are scrolling down a social media timeline. It is also largely autobiographical and in the second half a devastating family tragedy occurs, and the protagonist mentally returns to the offline world. Whereas in the first half of the book the narrators biological sex is irrelevant, in the second half the offline part it is inescapable as she is forced to confront issues such as abortion rights, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. On the internet people send her memes, in the real world they ask her why she hasnt had a baby yet.

Ive always felt like a grey alien whos forced to wear a bikini in summer, and I dont know if Im capable of having children, which disqualifies me from traditional womanhood to a lot of people. I think that is what is so attractive about the internet to me and people like me: you can exist there as a spirit in the void, Lockwood says.

Lockwood is all too aware that books about the internet have a bad reputation: [They] had the strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement, she writes in Nobody Is Talking About This. There is no boner pressure here. The novel captures better than anything Ive ever read what its like to be online, which is not a surprise, given how enmeshed Lockwoods life is with the internet: as well as originally coming to prominence on Twitter, she met her husband Jason Kendall online (in a poetry chatroom so innocent). Lockwood had no doubt that she could pull off this high-wire act of a book: I have never experienced a lack of confidence, because Im an extreme megalomaniac, she says, ironically-but-not-ironically. I think this is something I inherited from my dad. This is a guy who believes he has the vocation to be a Catholic priest, so maybe if you grow up seeing something like that you get weird ideas about what youre set on Earth to do.

As deeply enjoyable as Nobody Is Talking About This is, as I read it I wondered if this ephemeral thing Twitter was a worthy subject for Lockwoods enduring talent. So many people are spending all their time on it, and its a worthwhile topic just for that reason, she says. Even politicians communicate in internet-speak now: Hillary Clinton tweeted the meme Delete your account at Trump and Barack Obama teases Joe Biden with visual memes. It is wallpapering the brains of those of us who use it too much, as much as its warping our politics, so Lockwood is right: it is absurd to treat Twitter as irrelevant. But was she worried that those who arent Extremely Online would be put off by the books Extreme Online-ness?

I never thought about the non-Extremely Online reactions, she says. But yes, you want [the book] to stand up to the test of time, but also to preserve the vernacular, so thats the line youre walking.

The internet can be a place where you hide yourself behind memes, or post your most intimate thoughts. Lockwood has generally taken the former approach, revealing little of her life online. But in her publishing career, she has gone the other way. In 2012 the website, the Awl, published her poem, Rape Joke, which was far sparser than her previous poems. It was also, unusually, autobiographical, describing when she was raped when she was 19.

My work up to that point was so non-autobiographical, I was like a little Wallace Stevens: Look at this jar, its on a hill! Im barely here! So maybe if you keep the autobiographical dammed up for so long, it emerges in something like Rape Joke, she says.

After years of just scraping by, Rape Joke propelled her to literary celebrity, aided by Lockwoods original support system, the internet, where the poem went viral, as poems rarely do. After that she published Priestdaddy, in which she described her peripatetic childhood in the midwest with her charismatic but also batshit crazy a lot conservative parents, her attempted suicide as a teenager and her adult writing career. She writes about her parents very fondly, but says if she was still living with them Id be back on the mental ward, because of [their] politics. Her father was, she says, an early inhabitant of the rightwing alternate reality and is a fan of conservative figureheads such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter (but not Fox News: Too liberal.)

One of the first experiences I had of someone whose language was going crunchy was when Id hear him say something and think: Thats not something he came up with himself, hes repeating something that someone else told him. That struck me as strange, she says.

On the one hand, Lockwoods rise to fame looks like an eminently 21stcentury story: she made her name on Twitter and she has now written two books that at least touch on the online world. But she also took a more traditional path, achieving literary acclaim by writing about her most personal experiences, something women writers from Nora Ephron to Elizabeth Wurtzel have done for decades.

Priestdaddy came out at the height of the cult of the personal essay, when [publishers] were encouraging young women to write these books of hyper-revealing essay and not protecting them . With Priestdaddy, I recognised all that to be true and also I knew I could write a good book and thats what I had to concentrate on, she says.

Did she feel protected after Rape Joke came out? I dont think you can be protected, and I did feel vulnerable. Still now Ill be caught off guard if Im being introduced somewhere for a reading and the very first thing they say about me is that I wrote Rape Joke, and Im supposed to get up there and make a funny joke. Ill sometimes go completely quiet and you can see Im experiencing something traumatic in real time. But its still a poem that I wrote, she says.

Lockwood is currently working on a collection of short stories. I ask if she had always wanted to write stories and she says she doesnt plan her books that way: When Im working on something, I like to use extremely wet clay rather than chipping from a block of marble. So I start a book by nudging my way into dark corners, she says, taking palpable pleasure from each of the words, possibly picturing a woodland animal, or herself, burrowing through the mud. Eventually, a path reveals itself, she smiles.

What had the beautiful thought been, the bright profundity she had roused herself to write down? She opened her notebook with the sense of anticipation she always felt on such occasions perhaps this would finally be it, the one they would chisel on her gravestone. It read:

chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what

***

After you died, she thought as she carefully washed her legs under the fine needles of water, for she had recently learned that some people didnt, you would see a little pie chart that told you how much of your life had been spent in the shower arguing with people you had never met. Oh but like that was somehow less worthy than spending your time carefully monitoring the thickness of beaver houses for signs of the severity of the coming winter?

***

Was she stimming? She feared very much that she was.

***

Things that were always there:

The sun.

Her body, and the barest riffling at the roots of her hair.An almost music in the air, unarranged and primary and swirling, like yarns laid out in their colors waiting.The theme song of a childhood show where mannequins came to life at night in a department store.Anonymous History Channel footage of gray millions on the march, shark-snouted airplanes, silk deployments of missiles, mushroom clouds.An episode of True Life about a girl who liked to oil herself up, get into a pot with assorted vegetables, and pretend that cannibals were going to eat her. Sexually.The almost-formed unthought, Is there a bug on me???

A great shame about all of it, all of it.

No One Is Talking About This is published by Bloomsbury Circus.

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Patricia Lockwood: 'That's what's so attractive about the internet: you can exist there as a spirit in the void - The Guardian

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Carole Sargent, Georgetown University

(THE CONVERSATION) Years ago I discovered a shocking early English political satirist when a professor urged me not study her. Dismissing what I assumed was his liberal bias, I claimed bipartisan curiosity and dove in anyway. You could say I fell for the clickbait.

What I found went beyond politics. To explain why I later stopped studying her, I said she sounded like the Ann Coulter of 1709, after the modern right-wing commentator. The satirist, London playwright Delarivier Manley, wrote and flourished between 1690 and 1720. In 1709 she anonymously published The New Atalantis, two bestselling books packed with behind-the-scenes political scandals. This gossipy, libelous attack included sex and humor.

Political conservatives like her were called Tories, then an emerging party. Also known as royalists, they stood for a powerful throne, an archbishop-controlled Church of England and nobility ruling the working class. The opposing faction, Whigs, were rough equivalents of todays British Labour party, leaning toward what became representative government with a prime minister. Literary scholar Rachel Carnells new book Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne, with images from my collection of Manleys books, offers context for that complex time.

The American colonies werent yet a country, and their leaders followed London news. As an early Americanist studying English women writers influence on our shores, I noted William Byrd II, founder of Richmond, Virginia, staying up nights decoding Manleys books.

Manleys opinions seemed like standard Tory politics, so at first I didnt see a problem. As I decoded more stories, however, a disturbing subtext emerged.

Brilliant disguises

I missed her more extreme points because she wrote in a kind of storybook code. Strict libel laws might land a writer in prison, so she couldnt attack directly. Instead, Manley used popular songs and fables as strategic cover. When she was arrested, she claimed ignorance and avoided prison.

In one scene I decoded, a poet wife smacks her priest husband in the face with a hot apple pie, followed by butter to cool him again. The scene was vague enough for her to plausibly deny any connection to real people, even under oath in court. Within a generation few understood it.

Three centuries later, I used 21st-century technology to decipher it. Working with a database of 18th-century texts, which computers have only recently been able to scan, and using clues in a footnote from literary scholar Ros Ballaster of Oxford, I searched pye (their spelling), butter and stories of wives beating husbands.

Manley borrowed both characters from famous ballads to disguise a well-known, divorcing couple. She accused the wife, poet Sarah Fyge Egerton, and her rich Whig patrons of being what we now call feminists. Modern far-right provocateur Ann Coulter dubs them angry, man-hating lesbians, and Manley later used the charge of lesbianism as a similar political cudgel. Womens sexual empowerment became a weapon pie upending both the poets marriage and the order of the Church of England.

Humor can normalize bigotry

Manley was an entertaining writer, memorably commenting on controversial issues while escaping serious punishment. But as my digging revealed coded racism, antifeminism, homophobia and fear of immigration, I reconsidered my priorities.

She admitted that she was a perfect bigot, citing untainted lineage. In another story I decoded, she portrayed the new Bank of England in dangerous debt to foreign lenders. She warned they would foreclose, steal jobs, marry into the aristocracy and rule Britannia. Her warnings also influenced American colonial leaders.

Gradually I understood why Winston Churchill had railed against her. Though he was no champion for immigrants, he deplored her tactics. Manley insulted his ancestor the duke of Marlborough, saying he prostituted himself to a kings mistress to buy his military commission. She also claimed Marlborough prolonged a war for personal gain, and bet on the outcome of battles he commanded. Churchill wanted to sweep her back to the cesspool from which she should never have crawled.

The charm offensive

I met Ann Coulter at the National Press Club. She was friendly, but why not? Manley also had personality. Jonathan Swift, famed author of Gullivers Travels and A Modest Proposal, dined with her and hired her to edit his Tory newspaper one summer. But Swift eventually distanced himself, complaining Manley ranted too much. Similarly, the conservative magazine National Review dropped Coulters column after her post-9/11 call to invade (Muslim) countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.

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Manleys will requested her papers be burned, that none ghost like may walk after my decease, but her spirit still rattles around. In 2016 her wraith must have howled in glee over Brexit. In early 2017 I thought I heard her cheering when the immigrant-loathing United States president initiated a Muslim ban.

Instead of Manley, I now study a Whig poet who was influential in early America, Elizabeth Singer Rowe. If my identification of her in The New Atalantis is correct, then Manley attacked her for being a closeted lesbian. I anticipate bringing her, Sarah Fyge Egerton and others to vivid political life for a new generation of readers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/my-research-helped-uncover-a-long-lost-right-wing-provocateur-but-then-i-turned-away-from-her-work-150118.

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My research helped uncover a long-lost right-wing provocateur but then I turned away from her work - Houston Chronicle

In the days leading up to Trumps departure from office, his online followers watched with horror as his pardons that were supposed to go to allies and supporters instead went to people who were inherently swampy: white-collar criminals convicted of tax fraud, family friends, Steve Bannon, even Democrat Kwame Kirkpatrick.

So just to recap: Trump will pardon Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, high profile Jewish fraudsters No pardons for middle class whites who risked their livelihoods by going to war for Trump, fumed a user in a white supremacist channel on Telegram, the encrypted messaging service that has gained thousands of new subscribers since the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Conspiracies flew out of the mouth of Fox News host Tucker Carlson that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had blackmailed Trump out of pardoning Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, further infuriating MAGA hardliners. Trumps anti-immigrant base, whod been with him since his initial run for the presidency in 2015, flipped out when he granted amnesty to tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants.

Please vote to convict, Ann Coulter tweeted to GOP senators.

And the QAnon community, a group that had desperately hoped Trump had one final ploy to stay in power and fight against the nebulous forces of darkness in Washington, erupted in despair as Joe Biden became president of the United States. It got so bad that one prominent QAnon online forum threatened to ban any users who posted negative content.

There's a lot of grief and confusion in Q world over the plan seeming to fizzle out, and feeling as if Q abandoned them, Mike Rothschild, a disinformation researcher working on a book about QAnon, told POLITICO. But I think that will very quickly turn into determination to continue down the path they've committed to.

Taken together, the reactions across MAGA internet reveal a mosaic of anger, denial and disappointment that the former president let them down in his final days.

Without their leader to direct next steps, the MAGA coalition the extremist militants, the hate groups, the conspiracy theorists, and the stans is starting to turn on itself.

The movement is self-driving now, said Shane Creevy, a disinformation researcher at Kinzen, a data analytics firm that tracks online falsehoods and works with social media companies to counter potential threats. With Trump gone, the head has been decapitated, but that doesnt mean this is going away. The big question is what happens next?

Since the Jan. 6 riots, which resulted in five deaths and scores of arrests nationwide, more mainstream right-wing influencers like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino scaled back their support for potential challenges to the results of the November election. But rather than calming their millions of online followers, the efforts have produced a backlash, with posters calling these high-profile personalities traitors for not fully supporting insurrection.

Conspicuously missing was any direction from Trump.

Without his Twitter account, the ability to communicate with his base was muted. The polished videos posted on the White Houses official Twitter account were greeted with suspicion. But in the build up to Inauguration Day, Trump supporters, QAnon acolytes and extremist militias still, at a minimum, held out hope that the outgoing president would stick it to the establishment on the way out the door.

On encrypted message boards and digital apps, followers labeled Jan. 19 as national popcorn day in the hopes that they would have a front-row seat to the mass arrests of Antifa campaigners and, possibly, Trump imposing martial law in an effort to turn the election.

As the hours ticked closer to Bidens swearing in, the online chatter became more tense, with different online users questioning the loyalty of others, while increasingly getting desperate that The Storm, or the violent overthrow of deepstate agents, would never materialize.

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In white supremacist Telegram channelssome of which have tens of thousands of followersthe anger soon spilled over into outright hatred toward Trump, as well as a call-to-arms to the outgoing presidents more mainstream followers that they had been misled.

Let this be a wake-up call for QAnon followers and normies, one post read just ahead of the inauguration. No one is coming to save you. No one man can defeat this evil marxist machine.

Amid accusations and counter-accusations, different parts of Trumps base began to turn on each other. QAnon supporters lashed out at militia groups, claiming they were part of the deep-state plot to undermine Trump and that the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill were part of an elaborate coup attempt, either by parts of the federal government, Black Lives Matter campaigners or, bizarrely, China. They even turned against certain QAnon celebrities Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn for hyping them up.

Elsewhere, mainstream MAGA voters ridiculed QAnon groups unbending belief that Trump was the savior even as he boarded Air Force One for the last time on his departure from the White House.

It's all been a con from the start. Promises made and not kept, one user posted on TheDonald.win, a website that has been flooded with conspiracy theories and calls for violence in recent weeks, in reference to the QAnon movement. You sat on your butt waiting for someone else to do what everyone should have taken care of themselves.

Several members of the QAnon community scrambled to suggest that Biden was now going to execute the conspiracy theorys underlying beliefs, or even that the incoming president had switched faces with Donald Trump. But in a sign that Trumps reign was truly over, former 8kun administrator Ron Watkins, one of the only people who allegedly knew the identity of the mysterious Q, published a post on Telegram surrendering to the inevitable.

We have a new president sworn in and its our responsibility as citizens to respect the Constitution regardless of whether or not we agree with the specific details regarding officials who are sworn in, Watkins wrote.

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Trump leaves QAnon and the online MAGA world crushed and confused - POLITICO