A North Adams man who claims he lost his job because of Marty Walsh's statements urging rightwingers not hold a rally on the Common days after other rightwingers went on a violent rampage in Charlottesville, VA in 2017 had his $100-million libel case thrown out in state court. Now he's trying again in federal court. Read more.

Conservative radio host and noted evil bigot Rush Limbaugh announced on Monday that he isn’t long for this world. Limbaugh told listeners that it seems he’s in the final throes of his stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, saying that he’s more or less facing a “death sentence.” Though he’s continuing his treatment plan, and though the cancer isn’t progressing too rapidly, he said his health is going in the “wrong direction.” “Some days are harder than others,” Limbaugh said, according to the Washington Times. “I do get fatigued now. I do get very, very tired now. I’m not gonna mislead you about that.” :-)

A teenage boy who was naked and covered in ranch dressing crashed a vehicle at a Kansas gas station early Saturday morning.

We met in a bar. Elias is a trim, intelligent man about my dad’s size. He seemed quiet, except for his clothes. He wore a jaunty plaid hat and his wool coat reminded me of a Confederate soldier’s. There were anti-PC pins on it. “I’m fighting the establishment,” he said. (In my mind he added m’lady.) Elias was on a Tinder spree. His heart was torn. His girlfriend broke up with him a year ago so she could explore the world. “I’ve met a lot of women,” he said. “I’ve noticed that the girls in their 20s like to have fun and the women around 30, they want to get more serious…” I gulped my Delirium Tremens. I pointed at his pins. “You’re politically incorrect.” “The values of this society aren’t sustainable,” he told me. “We should promote family values and healthy reproduction.” I thought who the fuck is this? He said “You want a drink?” He got us rum and Jacks. He asked “So who’s the guy?” I’d met up that night for drinks with a fellow Thought Catalog writer. He’d just left. Elias told me he didn’t like mainstream media. I referenced Paglia. He countered with Evola. We both read Robert Greene. We kept going until I pulled the trump card: “I’m reading Jung.” “Good stuff.” He tilted the Pepe on his screensaver towards me. “Have you heard of the Proud Boys?” There’s a point in a girl’s life when she needs it. This was that point. In 2017 I almost got married. I failed. I’d only lived in New York for six months when I met him; I was definitely influenced by Sex and the City. But it was deeper than that. Freud teaches us about the repetition compulsion: how we get used to patterns. Our past. Our families. I grew up listening to a very specific brand of redpilled firespeak. Not about government. About sex. My line is full of bad men and the women who lost their souls to them. I guess my id still thinks that if I can earn the approval of these men full of hate: the men who are least inclined to grant it—then bad men won’t hurt me. I told Elias about my recent borderline personality disorder diagnosis as he walked me home. * * * The next day I sent screenshots of the pages from Man and His Symbols that described the male rite of passage towards marriage. “The novice for initiation is called upon to give up willful ambition and all desire and to submit to the ordeal,” the text portended. “Only by such an act of submission can he experience rebirth.” “Most of the Proud Boys want to get married,” Elias said, answering my question before I asked it. “I think some of us kind of need a father figure to tell us what to do.” Elias has what I’ve found to be a not-uncommon conservative origin story. His parents are divorced. His father was married three times, to progressively younger women. His mother was the second wife. She never loved again. His father’s third wife, a girl in her twenties, left him. Now he’s old and alone, too. The son wants to be better than the father. He wants to know love. Which means, sometimes, that we have to ignore our base instincts. Christianity is as much a set of principles as a man in the sky. “Gavin wants to teach us responsibility,” he said. “We can’t have guys running around in their 40s, trying to act like they’re 20. The Proud Boys are saying ‘hey guys, step up. Marry these girls already.’” I didn’t feel like I was talking to an unreasonable man. He was exploring his shadow. Like me. * * * We met again in another bar. This time he wore houndstooth. He’d gone vegan. He was eating a cucumber. I ordered pumpkin ale and he pulled out a bottle with some purple liquid. “Minerals,” he said. “I’m trying to live a clean lifestyle.” In accordance with the Proud Boys’ steps towards enlightenment, he was also doing No Fap. “Is this like how Victorians used to eat graham crackers to moderate their urges?” I asked. Sort of, he said. But he lived a temperate lifestyle to begin with. Despite believing Christianity is the best moral guide, he’s a Buddhist. He was a Buddhist before he was a Proud Boy. I wondered how deeply he was going to get into this. His room is colorful and full of multicultural tchotchkes. Elias is mixed race and comes from a well-traveled family. He talks about race as identity, and racial differences. He gets really into music. He likes all kinds, but his favorite is ’80s. “It was a more innocent time. When artists talked about love.” We saw an ad for a show called Single Parents on the subway. “See, look at this,” he scoffed. “We’re telling people it’s okay to be single parents. So their children grow up with attachment problems.” I never doubted Elias’ sincerity. The culture wars have stakes. Millennials have the lowest marriage and childbirth rate on record. We’re not connecting. He said women don’t respect men and men don’t take care of women. He said antifa put their women on the front lines in brawls. I had a visceral response to that. I think it’s weak and disgusting if true. He also said that made them fair game. Men, especially young men, are less sure of their place in society now that women are fully expected to take care of ourselves. You could argue that the onus is on them to earn us. But there are darker implications about where this mistrust between the sexes comes from. I didn’t meet many people in psych treatment who talked about a kind, honest, hardworking, honorable, capable father. He was too cruel or too soft, stoically tolerating more than he should for the sake of the family. He was drunk or sick or a layabout, or (perhaps fortunately) not there at all. The fact is, a lot of us are turned on by bad, superficially strong men before we understand what a good man is. After years of compounded trauma, it’s hard to trust any man at all. My sexual experiences in college drove me to blogs that coined phrases like sexual market value and others too lurid to print. These raunchy, mean-spirited men, while unconcerned with setting a positive example, spoke the unspeakable. They suggested that there is such a thing as too much freedom. Elias and I talked regularly, keeping each other up to date on the news. We hit the town. We went dancing. Afterwards we said goodnight. He invited me to a secret meeting where Milo was in attendance, but I didn’t make it. Elias told me they got mad because there was a girl there. I still wish I went. * * * One night he brought Guinness and oranges. My place is small; I sat on my chair and he sat at the desk. “You look dapper,” I said. His outfit was ASOS. He pulled a yellow compass-looking apparatus out of his canvas messenger bag. “Here, give me your face.” He held it at several angles across my cheekbone. “You’re neotenous,” Elias said approvingly. I raised a brow. He paused, taking a drink. Then he added “You’re cute.” I smiled. “Come up with me.” We climbed the wooden ladder to my loft. “I’m scared,” I told him. “I’ve been watching Jordan Peterson videos.” “Father Peterson is helping you through?” “I watched the one about female heroism. How she knows her children will be in pain and she does it anyway.” “Ah.” He said it knowingly and wisely, like a sage. “So you are paying attention.” I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to be an autistic mother. To have autistic children, at whatever level of functioning they may be. I’ve worked with the lower-functioning kids you hear about. I think about how it would feel to watch my child experience pain. About giving myself fully to another. Like my mother did for me. The intensity of her feelings scares me sometimes. It’s easier to sit alone with my weed and the heroes & villains in my head than face the hard stuff. I told Elias I think that’s another reason I ran out on my man. “I’m afraid of rebirth,” I told him. “You wouldn’t want your child to be like you?” he asked kindly. “You’re weaponized autism!” I sighed. “Hey,” Elias said gently. “Maybe I’ll be a woman next time around. I’d love to experience your side of life.” He leaned in to kiss me. I thought about all the men. The men I’ve had. Air Force and antifa. Bodybuilders and bums. Incels and transhumanists and dozens of other emotional cripples crawling through me for years and years. Our culture makes us addicts. Ever since the sexual revolution. What’s my id going to do to me later in life if I’m incapable of sustained, temperate love? The shadow is easy. You don’t have to fight it. You give in. The kind of shadow the Proud Boys support is a Muslim member Elias told me about, who’s been with over a hundred women and expects his wife to be a virgin. I asked Elias to read a brutally honest dating profile I wrote. It was inspired by Blanche du Bois and Sade. I confessed disease and unemployment and rape. He read the whole thing. He asked questions. “Do you think that’ll scare good men away?” “No.” He smiled. “I like it. It’s a creative way to find a partner.” I wasn’t scared anymore. I could trust him. * * * Elias called the next night to ask if I was okay. “You triggered something in me,” he said. “Something primal.” “Is that why you made me do yoga?” “It was intense,” he continued. “It felt like there was a lot of….” He stopped short of saying microchimerism. But I felt like he wanted to. Instead, he said “pain.” “It makes me wonder what I’m doing, you know? What kind of energy I’m putting into the world.” He went on with his usual bombast about how sex with me showed him the consequences of normalized promiscuity and how he’d rather be a man who makes the world a better place instead of being a parasite on society. But he delivered. He started seeing someone. She’s a musician like him. She’s also a liberal. “She doesn’t like that I’m in the Proud Boys.” He added that he wasn’t so sure how he felt about it anymore, either. “Some of them are vicious.” He isn’t into reactionary masculinity anymore. He said he learned what he needed to learn. Culture is changing. Kanye and Roosh V found God. Elias is serious with his girlfriend now. I believe that he’s faithful. He called me once a few months ago in the middle of the night like he used to, inviting me out. His friends were with him. It sounded like they got in a fight. Like he was getting his stripes and he wanted me to be there. I don’t know how much he still fights about this with his girl. I don’t know what he does. I see posts on Twitter about the Proud Boys harassing female antifa and showing up outside their doors with guns. A fascist on Twitter told me that our cultural hostility towards firm, protective masculinity means that not only do men owe feminists nothing, but they should fight as hard as they can against them to counter their influence over younger girls. This made me wonder about his personal life. I wouldn’t want to catch this man on a bad day. It’s hard to imagine Elias showing up outside a woman’s door with a weapon. I don’t want to think about it. But I do think this vehement contention over the moral future of America has become a kind of war. Men are fighting in the streets. When I was growing up, Ron Paul libertarianism was all the rage. I’ve never seen reactionaries this fired up. And when you look at the statistics I see their point. We’re more divided than my generation has ever seen us. Meanwhile, other countries, with their markedly un-Western conception of freedom, are stronger than ever. I’m learning more about the core differences between liberalism and conservatism, and why these two sides can’t make peace. Elias and I don’t talk much anymore. I’m pretty sure he’s still in the Proud Boys. I hope he continues on his journey, honorably and honestly, as he’s helped set me on mine.

American officials in China, Cuba and Russia say U.S. agencies are concealing the true extent of the episodes, leaving colleagues vulnerable to hostile actions abroad. The strange sound came at night: a crack like a marble striking the floor of the apartment above them. Mark Lenzi and his wife had lightheadedness, sleep issues and headaches, and their children were waking up with bloody noses — symptoms they thought might be from the smog in Guangzhou, China, where Mr. Lenzi worked for the State Department. But air pollution could not explain his sudden memory loss, including forgetting names of work tools. What began as strange sounds and symptoms among more than a dozen American officials and their family members in China in 2018 has turned into a diplomatic mystery spanning multiple countries and involving speculation about secret high-tech weapons and foreign attacks. One of the biggest questions centers on whether Trump administration officials believe that Mr. Lenzi and other diplomats in China experienced the same mysterious affliction as dozens of diplomats and spies at the American Embassy in Cuba in 2016 and 2017, which came to be known as Havana Syndrome. American employees in the two countries reported hearing strange sounds, followed by headaches, dizziness, blurred vision and memory loss. But the government’s treatment of the episodes has been radically different. The State Department, which oversaw the cases, has produced inconsistent assessments of patients and events, ignored outside medical diagnoses and withheld basic information from Congress, a New York Times investigation found. In Cuba, the Trump administration withdrew most of its staff members from the embassy and issued a travel warning, saying U.S. diplomats had experienced “targeted attacks.” President Trump expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from Washington and started an independent review, though Cuba denied any involvement.

POLITICS Videos From Right-Wing Site That Preaches 'The Left Ruins Everything' Assigned In Ohio School PragerU videos were recently assigned in an Ohio classroom. Turns out, the right-wing site is looking to further its influence in K-12 settings. By Rebecca Klein 10/19/2020 04:34 PM ET Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk are some of the personalities who host PragerU videos. Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk are some of the personalities who host PragerU videos. (Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty) An Ohio public school has been giving students extra credit for watching videos from PragerU, a right-wing website that produces clips of talking heads such as Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro discussing conservative viewpoints, HuffPost has learned. The PragerU videos — with titles such as “Build the Wall,” “Why the Right Was Right” and “The Left Ruins Everything” — were assigned to a 10th-grade history class at Maumee High School, along with a series of questions about the videos’ “most important messages.” The assignment came at the same time that the website has tried to gain further influence in K-12 classrooms. Earlier this month, the organization launched a program directly aimed at parents and educators, complete with study guides with sections such as “Conservatives Are the Real Environmentalists” and “The Ferguson Lie,” based on a HuffPost review of the materials. ... The homework assignment appeared unrelated to PragerU’s latest venture, called PragerU Educators and Parents, or PREP, which launched several weeks ago. The inception of such a program suggested that these types of assignments may become more prevalent in schools. Already, “2,000 parents and educators have already signed up for PREP,” Craig Strazzeri, chief marketing officer of PragerU, said in an email to HuffPost.

The University of Virginia promised reforms but has stopped short of announcing them, while hospital giant VCU Health has freed tens of thousands from property liens. Doris Hutchinson wanted to use money from the sale of her late mother’s house to help her grandchildren go to college. Then she learned the University of Virginia Health System was taking $38,000 of the proceeds because a 13-year-old medical bill owed by her deceased brother had somehow turned into a lien on the property. Over six years, the state institution filed 36,000 lawsuits against patients seeking a total of more than $106 million in unpaid bills, a KHN analysis finds. “It was a mess,” she said. “There are bills I could pay with that money. I could pay off my car, for one thing.” Property liens are the hidden icebergs of patient medical debt, legal experts say, lying unseen, often for decades, before they surface to claim hard-won family savings or inheritance proceeds. An ongoing examination by KHN into hospital billing and collections in Virginia shows just how widespread and destructive they can be. KHN reported a year ago that UVA Health had sued patients 36,000 times over six years for more than $100 million, often for amounts far higher than what an insurer would have paid for their care. In response to the articles, the system temporarily suspended patient lawsuits and wage garnishments, increased discounts for the uninsured and broadened financial assistance, including for cases dating to 2017. Those changes were “a first step” in reforming billing and collection practices, university officials said at the time. However, UVA Health continues to rely on thousands of property liens to collect old bills, in contrast to VCU Health, another huge, state-owned medical system examined by KHN. VCU Health pledged in March to stop seizing patients’ wages over unpaid bills and to remove all property liens, which are created after a creditor wins a court judgment.

Lee was sitting in the classroom of E. Susan Kellogg, an adjunct business professor, last year when the teacher began talking about her late father, who she said belonged to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1930s. “KKK parties were the best parties ever, they had candy, clowns, games, and meetings were held there,” Kellogg told the class, according to a memo that Lee wrote three days afterward and that she later delivered to administrators and posted on Twitter in June. Then Kellogg, a former Maryland state insurance commissioner, recounted how she and her high school friends in Ohio drove around their all-White neighborhood “looking for people who didn’t belong” — racial minorities — in order to “bop” them on the head, Lee wrote. Kellogg also told the class that she had little to no contact with Black people until she went to college. “I didn’t know if they bathed, what clothes they wore, how they ate, what they ate, if they could read, study, or even had the ability to learn,” Kellogg said, according to Lee’s memo. Lee, the only Black person in the classroom, cried afterward, she said. But she hesitated to complain to VMI authorities for fear she’d face retribution. When she wrote up her account, she asked her White classmates if they’d sign it as witnesses. All of them refused, she said. Eventually, Lee complained to administrators, and Kellogg was asked to apologize. “How come she couldn’t see I was uncomfortable with her bragging about the KKK who still terrorizes Black people to this day?” Lee asked. “She couldn’t even pronounce my name right. She kept calling me Kenya.” In an interview with The Post, Kellogg, 75, confirmed Lee’s account in her memo, with one exception: She said growing up she did not “bop” minorities, which she described as striking Blacks and other people of color with two-by-four pieces of wood. Instead, her friends did, she said. “I was sorry she was feeling threatened because that was not the intention at all,” Kellogg said. “But I was surprised she was upset. Young people are fairly quick to make judgments. She was lacking in some perspective.”

The writer and CNN analyst said in a statement to Vice Media that he believed he had muted his video feed and was not visible in the meeting.

President Donald Trump was in the middle of receiving a highly classified briefing on Afghanistan at his New Jersey golf club when he suddenly craved a malted milkshake. “Does anyone want a malt?” he asked the senior defense and intelligence officials gathered around him, an august group that included the head of the CIA’s Special Activities Center, which is responsible for covert operations and paramilitary operations. “We have the best malts, you have to try them,” Trump insisted, as he beckoned a waiter into the room where code-word classified intelligence was being discussed. The malt episode, which took place a few months after Trump took office in 2017, became legendary inside the CIA, said three former officials. It was seen as an early harbinger of Trump’s disinterest in intelligence, which would later be borne out by the new president’s notorious resistance to reading his classified daily briefing, known as the PDB, and his impatience with the briefers, current and former officials said.

Months after the 2018 groundbreaking, the company was racing to hire the 260 people needed to receive the first tranche of payments from the lucrative subsidy package passed by then-Gov. Scott Walker. Recruiters were told to hit the number but given little in the way of job descriptions. Soon, the office began to fill with people who had nothing to do. Many just sat in their cubicles watching Netflix and playing games on their phones. The reality of their situation became impossible to ignore. Multiple employees recall seeing people cry in the office. “The best is when you’re in the elevator with somebody and then they just scream out of nowhere,” said an employee who experienced this several times. “They’ve had enough, because things don’t make sense here.” “Imagine being in a job where you don’t really know if it’s real or not. Or you know it’s not real, but you don’t know it’s not real. It’s a constant thing you’re doing in your head day after day,” said one employee, who returned to the rented building Trump had spoken at, where workers had been assembling TVs, only to find the line shut down and the lights dimmed a couple of weeks after the photo op was over. “I think all of us were on the verge of a major breakdown.”

The city's mayor orders an investigation amid outrage from residents and animal rights groups.

A local tenant at the Ventana student housing complex in Orem is facing eviction after voicing suicidal thoughts to her roommates.

Six months later, in July, Fife launched a campaign to represent West Oakland on the Oakland City Council. She’s again following in the footsteps of her grandfather, who she later learned was one of Muskegon Heights’ first Black city councilors. Yet her run is also quite radical. As a perpetual thorn in the side of moderate progressives on the council, Fife is very clear about one thing: She does not believe that institutions can be changed from the inside. “It’s like those people who go and say, ‘I’m going to go become a cop, and I’m going to change the culture,’” she scoffs. “Shut the fuck up. No, you’re not.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Orkin was taking a break from his evening jog to sit by Prospect Park Lake when he turned around and was startled to see a tangle of wriggling snakes. “And quite a big...

There’s no reason why a rigged Supreme Court should have the final say on the law of our land. It is an almost entirely foregone conclusion that Amy Coney Barrett will be seated on the Supreme Court, cementing a 6–3 conservative majority that will serve as an obstacle to the Biden policy agenda should he and the Democratic Party win full control of government in November. As everyone by now knows, that’s a majority Biden and Democrats could conceivably do something about. Progressives have been pushing court-packing for years at this point—it’s one of the major items of a structural reform agenda that also includes eliminating the Senate filibuster and adding new states. In recent days, a number of more moderate voices have joined in, backing court-packing as a strategy for rebalancing the judiciary specifically justified by Barrett’s nomination. The most prominent members of this camp include Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey of Lawfare, who wrote a piece for The Atlantic arguing that court-packing—an idea they had initially dismissed as “institutionally corrosive and politically unserious”—could force Republicans into making stabilizing concessions, provided Democrats add just two justices capable of winning bipartisan support, preserving a 6–5 conservative majority. “This would change the political environment from a situation in which one party routinely plays hardball and the other party gets rolled, to a situation in which both parties have an incentive to cooperate in order to avoid the disaster of an ever-expanding Supreme Court flipping back and forth between parties as power changes hands,” they wrote. “It also corrects the imbalance of a Court stacked with Republican appointees, returning both parties to something closer to an even playing field.” Joe Biden, no procedural radical himself, has notably refused to reject court-packing outright as an option if Barrett is confirmed, despite having opposed the idea during the Democratic primary. All of this has incensed conservatives, few more so than National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, who contends that court-packing would amount to an embrace of the authoritarianism Democrats have seen and decried in Donald Trump. “If the coverage of the Trump era has featured a prominent theme, it has been that destructive ideas must be countered before they take hold, regardless of whether they are again presented or likely to be brought to fruition when broached,” he wrote. “Irrespective of the era, there are few more destructive ideas than Court-packing, and none so keenly in need of ubiquitous condemnation.” If so, indignant conservatives are late to the game. As Arizona political analyst Hank Stephenson recently noted for Politico Magazine, at least 10 states have seen efforts, led mostly by Republicans, to change the size of their courts over the last 10 years. Additionally, the Supreme Court’s size has been altered seven times in our history; partisan politics influenced most of those occasions, including the very last change—when pro-Reconstruction Republicans who tried to shrink the court under Andrew Johnson expanded it to the current nine seats under Republican President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869.

A year after former Bolivian president Evo Morales was ousted in a military coup that installed a brutal far-right regime, Morales ally Luis Arce declared victory in the South American nation's high-stakes presidential election early Monday after exit polls showed the socialist candidate with a large advantage over his two main competitors. "Democracy has won," Arce, who served as Morales' finance minister, said in an address to the nation after one exit poll showed him leading the race with 52.4% of the vote and former president Carlos Mesa in a distant second with 31.5%. Right-wing candidate Luis Camacho—an ally of unelected interim President Jeanine Añez—won just 14.1% of the vote, according to the survey. The Washington Post reported that "if the exit poll numbers are confirmed by the official count, which was being tabulated slowly late Sunday, it would be more than enough to avoid a November runoff and claim outright victory." Arce characterized his apparently decisive victory, which even Añez was forced to acknowledge, as a mandate to continue the policies of the Morales government, which lifted millions of Bolivians out of poverty and expanded the nation's economy.

IN APRIL 2018, a video appeared on YouTube that changed everything. It was recorded on a cellphone at the Silicon Valley Comic Con, a comic book convention where Stan Lee was a star attraction. In the grainy video, the 95-year-old creator of Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man, Hulk, Black Panther, X-Men and others appears unable to sign his name. Which is important to note, because Lee and his handlers were there to sell his signature for $120 a pop. A dark-haired man in his 40s, dressed like an MTV gangster, in a black skinny suit, black fedora and sunglasses, coached the barely cognizant writer through the task. The man, later identified as Lee’s former business associate Keya Morgan, spoke to Lee as if he were a child, schooling him on how to spell his name. “Stan Lee. S-T-A-N …” Morgan spelled it out again and again as comic book after comic book was slipped in front of the white-haired Lee. In the video, Lee looks unsteady, propped up in a chair, while a line of fans snakes out of the frame, each waiting for a chance to meet their hero. Though only 58 seconds long, the video is painful to watch. In the dark humor of the internet, it came to be known as “Weekend at Stan’s,” after the 1980s cult-comedy film Weekend at Bernie’s, in which two low-level insurance guys drag their dead boss’s body around to persuade his friends he is still alive. Fans who observed this tragedy took to the event’s Facebook page in outrage. “That man is a legend and you shuffled him around like he was a bag of money!” one wrote.

If you’ve noticed an uptick of male frontal nudity in TV and in movies in recent years, you’re onto something.

Aaron Sorkin knows the weight of last words, and his last words to me, as we walk-and-talk out of the HBO press room, are: "Write something nice." He says this in the "Smile, honey" tone of much less successful jerks. It's not advice the Oscar-winning, show-bossing Jonathan Franzen of screenwriting would take himself, thank what gods there be. In Sorkinville, these gods are men. At the short end of a TV season dominated, if not by shows about girls and women, by talk about shows about girls and women, Sorkin's new drama The Newsroom arrives with a "Hey, remember how great America was when it wasn't just a man's world, but a man's man's world?"