There is no grand strategy. President Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next.

Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes said that he has armed men on standby outside of Washington, D.C., to supposedly prevent the 2020 presidential election from being stolen from President Donald Trump. Echoing elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory during an appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ program, Rhodes said the only way to prevent his men from engaging in a “bloody fight” would be Trump declassifying information to supposedly expose pedophiles in the “deep state” and allow the president to stay in power. Rhodes also indicated his militia will be involved in a rally to support Trump planned for this weekend in the nation's capital. Rhodes’ Oath Keepers militia, which comprises “former law enforcement officials and military veterans,” is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today.” But, as Rhodes recent public comments have made clear, the organization’s purpose has shifted from opposing the government to instead act as a pro-Trump vigilante group that is willing to violently support Trump’s unjust attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. 

Facebook FB.O Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting on Thursday that former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon had not violated enough of the company's policies to justify his suspension when he urged the beheading of two senior U.S. officials, according to a recording heard by Reuters. Zuckerberg acknowledged criticism of Facebook by President-elect Joe Biden but said the company shared some of the Biden team’s same concerns about social media. He urged employees not to jump to conclusions about how the new administration might approach regulation of social media companies. Bannon suggested in a video posted on Nov. 5 that FBI Director Christopher Wray and government infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, saying they had been disloyal to U.S. President Donald Trump, who last week lost his re-election bid to Biden. “I’d put the heads on pikes. Right. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone,” Bannon said in the video. Facebook removed the video but left up Bannon's page, which has about 175,000 followers. Twitter TWTR.N banned Bannon last week over the same content. “We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely,” Zuckerberg said. “While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line.”

A federal government agency under the Department of Homeland Security says this election was the “most secure in American history.” In a statement from the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, part of DHS, the agency and state elections officials there is no evidence any voting system was compromised. “While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too,” the statement says. “When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”

In 2016, President Donald Trump’s supporters — hardly known as MAGA nation at that point — jeered at the backlash to his election, mocking the pink-hatted anti-Trumpers who’d dubbed themselves “The Resistance” and marched on Washington. On Saturday, it’s their turn to resist. The disparate tribes of MAGA Nation — Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Infowars fanatics, Groypers, Proud Boys, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and the people who would simply call themselves die-hard MAGA — have declared that they are simply going to show up in Washington en masse over the weekend to rally together, with the marquee event on Saturday. The groups have assigned the gathering different names: the Million MAGA March, the March for Trump, Stop the Steal DC. But they’re all set to take place Saturday in the nation’s capital, around noon, with most set to congregate near Freedom Plaza, just east of the White House, though some groups have also suggested the Supreme Court building down the National Mall. It’s unclear how many people may show up, and past promises of massive rallies have sometimes fizzled out. Notably, organizers have not filed for permits, according to a spokesperson for the D.C. Metropolitan Police. But disinformation and extremist researchers have estimated anywhere from several hundred to several thousand may show up.

A law firm representing the Trump campaign in its challenges to the Pennsylvania election results gave notice that it’s withdrawing from one of the cases. Lawyers with Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP submitted a filing late Thursday stating they were withdrawing as counsel in a federal suit seeking to block Pennsylvania from certifying its vote. No reason was given. In a statement issued Friday, the firm confirmed the filing but did not say why it was exiting the case. “We’ve committed to the court to fulfill our obligations as required to ensure transition to substitute counsel and so as not to cause material adverse effect on the client’s interest,” Porter Wright said. “We will have no further comment.” Porter Wright is one of two law firms targeted by the Lincoln Project -- a group of Republicans who oppose President Donald J. Trump -- for their work on lawsuits challenging the election results. The campaign included encouraging people to email the lawyers on the cases.

Brussels has put itself on a collision course with the Polish and Hungarian governments after proposing to criminalise hate speech against LGBTQ+ people under EU law and secure recognition of same-sex partnerships across the bloc’s borders. Věra Jourová, a European commissioner, said the measures followed new “worrying trends”, with the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights reporting that 43% of LGBT people had declared feeling discriminated against in 2019, compared with 37% in 2012. The proposals were announced as part of the commission’s first ever strategy to secure equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, non-binary, intersex and queer people. Jourová cited attacks on Pride marches and the move by more than 100 Polish municipalities to declare themselves as “LGBT-free zones” as further evidence of increased discrimination. A so-called “LGBT ideology” was recently described as “more destructive than communist indoctrination” by Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda. Jourová said the commission was also following events in Hungary, where a constitutional amendment was proposed this week by Viktor Orbán’s rightwing government to ensure that only heterosexual married couples can adopt children.

“Chart throb” Steve Kornacki has been making headlines for his impressive election coverage and his Big Board skills, and now even his fashion choices are getting attention. Kornacki wore the same outfit every day of his election coverage: A button-down, a striped tie, and khakis — and the simple ensemble eventually became iconic enough for fans to emulate. Ever since New York Magazine’s The Strategist revealed that Kornacki gets his “Khornakis” at the GAP, the retailer’s khaki sales have almost doubled. Following Kornacki’s coverage, GAP saw a “dramatic increase in online traffic and within a day” and “around 90% unit sale increase online,” according to the Today Show. 

[The "tough new mandatory face mask order" is one that other states have been doing since March.]

The pandemic has hit restaurants hard, but, we were naïve enough to think that maybe GarfieldEATS, a Toronto pizza place that pays homage to everyone’s favorite cartoon tabby, would survive this terrible year. We were wrong. Earlier this week, The Garf’s marquee restaurant was forced to close in a dispute over rent payments and allegedly shitty landlords. Nothing is sacred. Everything ends.

A cluster of far-right extremists including neo-fascists, white nationalists and militia members are expected to descend on Washington D.C. Saturday, amidst President Trump’s refusal to accept his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Far-right turnout could be significant. Pro-Trump protesters have already arrived in the thousands at so-called Stop the Steal events, even those staged in smaller cities like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Pro-Trump figures have been promoting the D.C. event for over a week. The Saturday event also coincides with Trump and his allies espousing increasingly anti-democratic views about his loss. The D.C. protest appears to have three titles, all of which appear to represent the same protest: “Million MAGA march,” a name bastardizing Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March in Washington; “Stop the Steal;” and “March for Trump.” “Stop the Steal” is a reboot of a 2016 project launched by convicted felon Roger Stone to dispute votes in multiracial neighborhoods. “March for Trump,” is a brand for the event which was promoted by FOX News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday. Twitter users retweeted Hannity’s post advertising the event over 11,000 times in less than 24 hours, offering an indication of the potential enthusiasm for the event.

The dramatic impact of the virus on the Secret Service’s presidential protection unit comes as growing numbers of prominent Trump allies and White House officials have fallen ill.

But, apparently believing it would be too cruel to cut Trump off from his institutional support base completely, conservatives decided to arrange for him a sort of Make-a-Wish Foundation version of Bush v. Gore. Before he is out of his misery, everyone will expend a lot of energy creating the appearance of challenging the results of the election in order to appease the president. ... To sum up the current situation, the U.S. is experiencing a fake self-coup that requires the administration to do exactly the things a regime would do if it were attempting to stage an actual self-coup, with millions of people sincerely believing the stated justifications for the strongman’s consolidation of power and with the regime’s legislative allies playing along, under the apparent belief that eventually the courts, which are stocked with unqualified loyalists, will soon say the game is done.

The last cool place I went before everything shut down was Death Valley National Park, which in addition to all the famous parts also includes one non-contiguous, 40-acre parcel within the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada. The site is called Devil’s Hole. It is a deep underwater cave system nestled in the crag of a scrubby hill whose name I don’t know offhand but in my opinion should be called Devil’s Hill. The Mansons thought the cave was the entrance to underworld, which is not true, but not so wrong that it requires changing the name. According to the National Park Service, the water in Devil’s Hole is 92-degrees year-round—pretty hot!—and the bottom of the cavern “has never been mapped.” Dun dun dun. Devil’s Hole was protected by the park because it is the only remaining habitat on the planet for a tiny little cyprinodontidae, about the size of a silver dollar, called the Devil’s Hole Pupfish.

It’s not exactly a secret that Elon Musk, billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, self-proclaimed Thai pedophilia expert, and designer of death race trucks, doesn’t give a flying fuck what other people think about his actions. To wit: Musk has endorsed a sex cult’s system for ranking news organizations based on “critical thinking,” regularly railed against media orgs, and angrily cut off journalists on earnings calls. According to a new piece in Vanity Fair, sources say that after Musk’s December 2019 win in a libel lawsuit brought by a Thai cave diver he had smeared as a pedophile, Musk decided in Trumpian style that he would stop pretending to play nice with his perceived enemies. Thus he severed ties with his external PR firm, stopped hiring for openings on his comms team, mass-blocked journalists, and this month disbanded Tesla’s PR department. One longtime employee told the magazine, “Elon is his own communications director now.”

At the height of the pandemic, the city issued $1.4 billion in emergency, no-bid contracts for crucial medical equipment — and got the wrong masks and lost track of deliveries, records show. “Stop this s—t!” one bureaucrat cried during an online meeting.

After 35 years in Australia, the last plates of cheese toast will soon be served at Sizzler's nine remaining outlets across Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia. The family-friendly restaurant, famous for the all-you-can-eat salad bar and cheesy TV ads, was once a suburban dining stalwart. But Sizzler's closure on November 15 isn't just another consequence of COVID-19. Australia's food values and tastes have changed since the chain's heyday of the 1990s. Today, food is much more important in our everyday lives. An era of casual dining Sizzler began in the United States in the late 1950s, opening its first Australian restaurant in 1985 in the Brisbane suburb of Annerley. A novelty of the chain was its salad bar, which the Canberra Times in 1992 described as: 15 metres of salad choices, two soup choices and croutons and rolls, a potato casserole, savoury rice, two types of pasta (with the usual unfortunate consequences for pasta left sitting) with meat, tomato and cream sauces, and four or five desserts. Optional steak, seafood and chicken offerings could be served to your table. When the chain reached its Australian peak in the mid-1990s, our food culture was very different. Cuisine of the era was increasingly multicultural — as food author Cherry Ripe notes in her book Goodbye Culinary Cringe — but food was more often spoken about in utilitarian terms. Sizzler positioned itself as food that was cheap and fast, but not "fast food". Most of those who dined there, alongside the dine-in all-you-can eat Pizza Huts, earned under $60,000 (approximately $110,000 today). But over the past 25 years, the way Australian families dine has dramatically changed. Instead of a large "family friendly" diner, we are more likely to frequent a range of small, culturally diverse eateries.

There’s been a lot of criticism about the new League of Legends champion Seraphine. From her (now reworked) seemingly-genocidal involvement with the Brackern, to critiques of the parasocial advertising that her Twitter and other social media have employed, she’s not without her fair share of controversy. My problem with Seraphine is much more personal. My problem with her is that I think she’s based on me. And not without a pretty good reason — I actually had a brief relationship with a Riot employee last year in early 2019.

Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them.

Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter is known as the most visible marijuana advocate in the band, and clearly the dude has had plenty of seshes where he's gotten deep into conversation, because Carpeneter has some thoughts on things. During a recent interview, he admitted that he is a flat-earther, he doesn't think any vaccine has ever worked and he put doubts on how serious the coronavirus pandemic is.