Books author interviews An Interview With Anne de Marcken, Author of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over De Marcken’s novella is not your average zombie story… By Christina Orlando | Published on November 4, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share I am thrilled to speak with Anne de Marcken, this years recipient of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which celebrates work of imaginative fiction that shares the ideals and themes of Le Guin’s work, including “hope, equity, and freedom; non-violence and alternatives to conflict; and a holistic view of humanity’s place in the natural world.” De Marcken’s novella, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is not your average zombie story—with exquisite prose, it explores hunger, grief, memory, and our place in the natural world. The unnamed protagonist’s afterlife includes both a reverence for nature and a deep sense of loss as she recalls moments of her life before and the love she has since lost. This year’s selection panel, which consisted of authors Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado, called the novel “[h]aunting, poignant, and surprisingly funny, Anne de Marcken’s book is a tightly written tour de force about what it is to be human.” Congratulations on receiving this year’s Ursula K. Le Guin prize! Can you tell me about your relationship with Le Guin’s work? Do you see any thematic overlap between her work and yours? Thank you, Christina! I am honored and deeply moved by receiving this award. It matters a great deal to me that it bears Ursula K. Le Guin’s name. Her writing—and her thinking about writing—are important to my own, though on the surface our work may not appear to have much in common. I think I share with her a kind of optimism that is so intimate in its orientation that it can survive grim realities. A relational optimism. Also I think our work has in common a place-based-ness—a sense that all of the climatic, sentient, leafy, mineral, moldering, fleeting, and permanent-seeming aspects of where we are go into who we are. It is an ecological way of apprehending human existence, which also is political in that it challenges anthropocentrism, and, at the level of narrative, the idea of the hero and what is heroic. In your artist’s statement, you describe yourself as being the same artist no matter where you’re sitting. How does your work as an editor and publisher affect your work as a writer, and vice versa? What about your work in other mediums?  It’s nice to be reminded of that artist’s statement. That kind of thing can be removed from the day-in-day-out reality of work, but actually it does feel pretty true and helpful to remember. In the same paragraph, I say that I have two desks, and that I move my chair back and forth between them—which is literally the case. Often I am caught up in feeling that I am spending too much time at one desk or another, one kind of work taking my attention from another, but really both desks are crowded with books I’m referencing for writing projects and publishing projects (sometimes the same books), with manuscripts I’m writing and the ones I’m editing, with sketches, index cards, bottles of ink, paint brushes, stones…and cats. So my study is a bit more boundaryless than I suggest, as is my creative practice. I think a lot of interdisciplinary artists can feel frustrated by the apparent discontinuity of their work from project to project and over time. But even though artists—like everyone else—are expected to fashion a legible and coherent persona (through artists statements, for example), how useful to creative work (or life) is a coherent persona…or an incoherent one, for that matter? So maybe a combined effect of these different ways of working has been to focus me on the work at hand, rather than on who or what I am—writer, filmmaker, printmaker, editor, publisher, teacher, etc. I tend to reach for the medium, the tool, the collaborator, the way of working that best serves a particular creative impulse. I started the The 3rd Thing (the press) in response to an urge I have to foster things that are bigger than I am, things that get away from me, to be in community, and also to do work that meets a need. Am I answering the question yet? Maybe not. The influence of one way of working on the others is just so vast and varied and nuanced, I hardly know where to begin…and then how would I stop? Fundamentally, in whatever the medium or role, whether I am tuning into the voice and language and material technologies of someone else’s work or of my own, the work requires me to listen very closely. It requires patience, stillness, discernment, exactitude—a rigorous and spacious attention to the congruity of intention and execution…to the wobbles and kinks, the moments of hesitation or distraction, that can interfere with a work achieving its wholeness, and to the emergent possibilities that give it life. Also it all requires a certain wildness—almost recklessness. Practicing this at one desk, so to speak, makes it more possible at the other…and in the rest of life. Author and one of this year’s prize selectors Ken Liu has spoken frequently about the relationship between speculative fiction and metaphor—that speculative fiction is where metaphors are made true and tangible. Your narrative seems very aware of the metaphors at play. How would you describe your approach to making metaphor real in the world of this novel?  In one way, the book is an attempt to un-metaphorize the zombie in order to reclaim what we might like to disavow or relegate to the realm of dystopian fantasy. The received trope of the zombie is so familiar that I had to spend no time at all establishing the unreal, and instead focused on trying to represent the familiar, the small, the subtle, the ordinary. This is where my attention is drawn naturally. Rather than verisimilitude—real-seeming-ness—I am concerned with accurately representing existence as I know it. Less speculative than fantastical, the book hinges on the uncanny—the familiar unfamiliar…the sense we all have had that something is out of place and without reference, which is almost the opposite of the metaphorical premise. Really, I am uneasy with metaphors. I am—in life and in my writing—very caught up with the difficult effort simply to perceive and then to convey what is, and while metaphor can illuminate, it also has a way of obscuring two things at once—the thing you are attempting to represent and the thing you are comparing it to. The characterization and externalization of the “worst” parts of ourselves as monsters, for example, obscures our complexity rather than illuminating it. It reifies ideas of good and bad, worthy and unworthy, kin and outsider, human and sub-human, self and other, around which power consolidates and sustains itself through systematized alienation and oppression. The peril of metaphor emerges as a theme in the book, related to the instability of identity, the ambiguity of boundaries between one thing and another, and the possibility of losing connection with things as themselves…and each other. None of which is to say that I disagree with the idea that fiction is a figurative province, but that my approach is reflexive—that is, it refers to itself—I attempt to deliberately and transparently perform—reveal, question, subvert—my own metaphor/meaning-making. How would you describe your narrator’s state of being at the beginning of this novel?  Neither alive nor dead. Undead. She is outside the processes of energetic exchange: growth, decay, uncertainty, choice, compassion, contingency…. This book grapples with some pretty big questions. When you sat down to write, what were the questions you were initially interested in exploring, and did any others pop up during the writing process?  I was curious about zombies. Our monsters are reflections of ourselves at any given cultural moment. They tell us what we find immanently threatening. We grotesquely distort the unfamiliar or any group that embodies our failings or jeopardizes our status. We carve out and externalize abject aspects of ourselves, shaping a malignant “other” against which we can fight heroically. I am deeply distrustful of this maneuver. I have always been skeptical of both righteousness and evil (and heroism) and have tended to be on the side of the monster, but zombies never held any fascination for me. I began to wonder why. What was I too ready to overlook about myself? I became curious about this ravenous cannibal and what it says about us—about me. Looking for what animates the zombie, so to speak, I focused first on hunger. Why would something that does not need to eat crave so powerfully? I could relate to that, but there was more. Hunger seemed like an expression of rage. Surely, I rage. What, I wondered, is the source of my rage? At the time I was reading Judith Butler’s The Force of Non-Violence. Following up on something Butler writes in that book about the way language can be used to dehumanize, I stumbled across a talk they gave in 2014 (“Speaking of Rage and Grief”). It completely unmade and remade me. In it, she quotes the preface to Grief Lessons, Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides. There Carson writes, “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” I feel this so deeply, so personally. Grief is a thing we avoid so avidly that we put it away from ourselves with disastrous, violent consequences. I am deeply grateful to Butler and Carson for this insight. It led to an exploration of the ways we are made up of our relationships to people and places and what happens to us when we lose them. This is the question at the heart of the book: how much can we lose before we, ourselves, are lost—and then what happens? Buy the Book It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over Anne de Marcken Buy Book It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over Anne de Marcken Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget It struck me that many of the memories our narrator recalls are about being in nature, or her relationship with particular locations. How did you approach balancing a story about supernatural hunger–which can be so destructive—with a bountiful and lush natural setting?  It’s a contradiction we live with here in the United States and in much of the world. We are of this place and yet act on it—extract from it, engineer it, divide it, own it, sell it…consume it—as if we are super-natural, as if it is separate from us and subject to our impulses. This is a violent way of existing, and by now it comes very easily to us in spite of the obvious—if cognitively confounding—consequences. Chief among these, climate change. Anthropocentrism (and its attendant mechanisms—colonialism, capitalism, the many and various ways we rank worth, i.e. human-ness) is killing us and all that we hold dear. It was important to me, as I wrote, to stay in contact all the time with a feeling of connection and love so that I had available the sensation of what it is to lose connection and love, to be without them. I feel powerfully and most readily connected to the “natural” world. My grief over the loss of plant and animal species, of the seasons as I know them, of quiet, of darkness, of places I love and places I have only imagined—this underlies every moment of ease and happiness or even discomfort and impatience. Writing with specificity about place, insisting on the realism of a setting I know well…this kept me in touch with the central question of the book, and the existential stakes of it. Hunger is a driving force in this narrative, and appears as both a physical and spiritual sensation. Why did hunger become a narrative touchstone for you?  The zombie’s perverse expression of hunger is one of the most recognizable and consistent traits of the trope, and to me the most confounding. Can they even digest what they eat? Their hunger is uncanny. It is senseless and pointless. It is vestigial—a kind of phantom urge that is impossible to satisfy. And yet they are compelled by it. Like any compulsion, it is a signal: something else is going on here. It was an easy signal to follow, since I can relate to hunger, and, as I attempted to understand this monster and to identify with it, hunger took me places I might not have gone otherwise. In particular, it made me value horror in a way I hadn’t previously, not as a genre, but as an essential element of human existence and human narratives. Now it is right up there with beauty and ambiguity. How would you describe your narrator’s relationship with her body?  Evolving and complex. On one hand, she feels liberated from the constraints of life, and relates to her body in a much more material and even plastic way than someone concerned with mortality or pain. On the other hand, she characterizes the loss of pain as the loss of her humanity. On a third hand, she is deeply ambivalent about humanity as a category, so that loss is rueful. She is bemused, unsure where exactly to locate her self as distinct from anything—everything—else. One of the (many) lines that struck me was “the end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.” It felt particularly apt given the current state of the world. How do you approach writing a story set after an apocalypse or major disaster while the world we currently inhabit feels so dystopian already?  That line is, in essence, an instruction to myself as much as to the unnamed “you” of the story or to the reader. It is very difficult to grasp this moment. We are in the midst of an extinction event that we caused, but also “life goes on.” To write about this, to suggest that this is the catastrophe we fear, that the very last of a thing—the last summer, the last day with the person you love, the last of a particular kind of bird—does not announce itself, I attempted to drain descriptions of hyperbole and to resist world-building exposition. When I deployed apocalyptic images as such, I attempted to frame them as nostalgic conceptions of the future that are as removed from reality as the chipper theme song of “The Jetsons”—uncanny coincidences of popular imagination and lived experience. What clarity, if any, is there to be found in the afterlife? How does death change your narrator’s outlook?  I think of the afterlife as the mythical province of the dead, and this book is concerned with the experience of undeadness. I haven’t spent concerted time imagining the afterlife, so I can’t say what are the differences and similarities. While the afterlife is debated as a matter of faith—as if it is either real or not real (I come down on the side of not real), the popular version of a zombie (as opposed to the Haitian Vodou zombi) is fantastical; their unreal-ness is a settled matter. This is one reason the zombie was so valuable as an imaginative foil—it exists outside my belief system and funded an exploration that was unencumbered by the constraints of possibility or the rhetoric of faith (though some of the undead in my novel do attempt to situate themselves in a religious framework). I think the death that has changed the narrator’s outlook is not her own. She is grieving the loss of someone—“you”—she loves. That death has rendered her foreign to herself…or perhaps known to herself in a way that is so foreign as to be utterly undoing. Her efforts to avoid encountering the pain of that loss and of her continued existence—and eventually her determination to have exactly that encounter—this results in doubled and dislocated and unresolvable perspectives on herself and others, that are, I think truer—or closer to accurate—than what she approached in life. What advice would you give your 14-year-old self? Don’t ever sell your books. That’s all I can come up with. Really I think I’d rather get advice from that younger self than try to give it. She knew things that I struggle to remember or value in the same way. She knew better how to sit still, how to rest, how to sink into what gives her pleasure, how to suspend disbelief, how to follow an impulse without judgement. I have a lot of questions for her. [end-mark] The post An Interview With Anne de Marcken, Author of <i>It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over</i> appeared first on Reactor.

The time for choosing is tomorrow: The American people will head to the polls Tuesday to choose the next president of the United States. It has been a sprint to the finish for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and the former president has been on an all-out media blitz to make his closing pitch. But these interviews have not been on news programs like “60 Minutes,” “Meet the Press,” or “Face the Nation” or conducted by corporate journalists such as Leslie Stahl, Anderson Cooper, or Lester Holt. Rather, Trump has appeared on shows called “All In,” “This Past Weekend,” “Full Send,” and “Bussin’ With The Boys.” The interviewers have been entrepreneurs, comedians, athletes—even a pro-wrestler. Trump’s podcast appearances, mostly long-form interviews, are part of a broader media strategy by the Trump campaign that has the former president well positioned to win come Election Day. The effort is targeted at low-propensity, non-traditional Republican voters that the Trump campaign needs to turn out to the polls to carry the 2024 presidential election. And it appears that the blitz has managed to reach tens of millions of them. Final polls have Trump and Harris neck and neck, nationally and in the seven crucial swing states needed to win the presidency. In national polling, RealClear Polling’s average has the race at virtually a dead heat with Trump up just 0.1%. Real Clear Polling’s swing state polling averages have Trump leading in Pennsylvania by 0.3%, Nevada by 1%, North Carolina by 1.5%, Georgia by 1.9%, and Arizona by 2.5%. Harris, meanwhile, has a 0.4% edge in Wisconsin and 1.2% edge in Michigan. Nevertheless, these final polls could potentially undercount Trump’s support yet again. This particularly applies to Trump’s level of support among seniors and some low propensity voting demographics, specifically young men and black and Hispanic men. Trump’s Make America Great Again movement has remade the Republican party from a suburbanite party to a party of the working class and their families. Democrats, meanwhile, have leaned into their ties to cultural and financial elites. College graduates and women have followed the Democratic party down that path. An increasing number of young men, union workers, and minority voters have lurched towards the GOP. This is what many have called the realignment, which in some ways is an acceleration of latent trends that preceded the Trump era but the former president gave voice to during the 2016 presidential race. To turn out these voters, the Trump campaign decided to go to the media they consume, rather than hoping these low-propensity voters tune into interviews with corporate media outlets. Taken together, Trump’s podcast interviews and show appearances have accumulated around 100 million views. Logan Paul’s “Impaulsive” interview with Trump has over 6.6 million views, the “All In Podcast” hosted by David Sacks and other entrepreneurs has over 3.4 million views, Andrew Schulz’s “Flagrant” episode with Trump has over 7 million views, and “This Past Weekend with Theo Von” has accumulated 14 million views. The largest get for the Trump campaign’s alternative media strategy was an interview with comedian Joe Rogan on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” The interview, which was released on Oct. 25, has nearly 45 million views on YouTube alone. Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, was also interviewed by Rogan. The Oct. 31 episode has nearly 15 million views. Vance has also been a guest on Von’s and other podcasts. “Podcasts and other alternative media appearances gave us the opportunity to reach tens of millions of Americans who have been disaffected by the mainstream media and tuned out of the political process,” Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz, the architect of Trump’s alternative media strategy, told The Daily Signal. “Trump re-engaged them.” Bruesewitz and others in the Trump campaign, such as communications director Steven Cheung, campaign advisors Danielle Alvarez and Brian Hughes, as well as the former president’s son, Barron Trump, have pushed Trump towards alternative media throughout the campaign. Multiple, independent Trump campaign sources have told The Daily Signal that while the alternative media strategy of Trump’s campaign in 2024 has surely reached tens of millions of voters, the shows, clips, and social media posts have accrued billions of views and impressions. “For the last 8 years, Trump has been demonized by the corporate media. They have constantly taken his words out of context to try to paint a dark image of him,” Bruesewitz said. “That image never made sense to anyone who actually has the unique pleasure of knowing him.” The alternative media strategy has taken aim at the somewhat common refrain, “I love Trump’s policies but don’t love Trump.” “These podcasts gave President Trump the ability to showcase who he really is to tens of millions of Americans, and the more people heard from him in these formats, the more they liked him,” Bruesewitz told The Daily Signal. Simply put, those closest to the former president see Trump’s personality and his view on the major issues as inseparable. The rigorous media and campaign schedule have also compelled the Harris campaign to do more interviews as well. The peak of Harris’ campaign momentum was at the very beginning, when the vice president avoided the media for about a third of her time atop the Democratic ticket. Trump’s momentum in the media, however, has pushed Harris to do interviews with major networks, such as her interview with “60 Minutes” that sparked controversy over apparently edited responses. Nevertheless, Harris has also been compelled to do podcast interviews of her own, namely an appearance on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy.” The divergent media strategies of the presidential campaigns have also raised the stakes for the American media landscape. If Harris wins, the corporate media that’s propped up Harris’ cause even before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race will feel emboldened, and serious questions about the viability of alternative media ever posing a real threat to the corporate oligarch atop the media will percolate. A Trump victory, however, could very well break the backs of the corporate media. The post Trump’s Podcast Strategy Has Him Well Positioned to Win appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. What started out as the EU’s “voluntary code of practice” concerning “disinformation” – affecting tech/social media companies – is now set to turn into a mandatory code of conduct for the most influential and widely-used ones. The news was revealed by the Irish media regulator, specifically an official of its digital services, Paul Gordon, who spoke to journalists in Brussels. The EU Commission has yet to confirm that January will be the date when the current code will be “formalized” in this way. The legislation that would enable the “transition” is the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), which critics often refer to as the “EU online censorship law,” the enforcement of which started in February of this year. The “voluntary” code is at this time signed by 44 tech companies, and should it become mandatory in January 2025, it will apply to those the EU defines as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) (with at least 45 million monthly active users in the 27-nation bloc). Currently, the number of such platforms is said to be 25. In its present form, the DSA’s provisions obligate online platforms to carry out “disinformation”-related risk assessments and reveal what measures they are taking to mitigate any risks revealed by these assessments. But when the code switches from “voluntary” to mandatory, these obligations will also include other requirements: demonetizing the dissemination of “disinformation”; platforms, civil society groups, and fact-checkers “effectively cooperating” during elections, once again to address “disinformation” – and, “empowering” fact-checkers. This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner. The code was first introduced (in its “voluntary” form) in 2022, with Google, Meta, and TikTok among the prominent signatories – while these rules originate from a “strengthened” EU Code of Practice on Disinformation based on the Commission’s Guidance issued in May 2021. “It is for the signatories to decide which commitments they sign up to and it is their responsibility to ensure the effectiveness of their commitments’ implementation,” the EU said at the time – that would have been the “voluntary” element, while the Commission said the time it had not “endorsed” the code. It appears the EC is now about to “endorse” the code, and then some – there are active preparations to make it mandatory. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Tightens Social Media Censorship Screw With Upcoming Mandatory “Disinformation” Rules appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

On the Final Day Before the Election, Both Campaigns Are in Pennsylvania

ABC’s Good Morning America projected an image of confidence Monday on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris, cheering her strategy of “end[ing] on a positive note” and “hoping to turn out every last voter by convincing them that she’s the candidate who can turn the page” while Donald Trump has hurled “violent and dark rhetoric” catering only to “angry young men.” Co-host Robin Roberts was huffing from the teases, warning that Trump “suggest[ed] he wouldn’t mind if the journalists covering his campaign were shot...and [said] he should never have left the White House in 2020.” Co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos played stenographer in the tease for the Harris team: “Kamala Harris looks to end on a positive note. The Vice President does not mention Trump by name, visiting key constituencies in Michigan...after an appearance on Saturday Night Live.” Idolatrous Trump hater Rachel Scott began with the Trump team, seething that Trump has “only lean[ed] more into violent and dark rhetoric” and claimed he’s discounted talk of the economy and immigration.” Scott, of course, had to keep alive the truly dangerous media disinformation campaign from last week about Trump’s Liz Cheney comments: This was what viewers on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ heard today about the Trump campaign from @RachelVScott (and notice the chyrons): “Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris delivering two vastly different closing arguments. Trump’s advisers have spent months trying to… pic.twitter.com/UBqFsC5caS — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 4, 2024 Scott kept up the doom and gloom, invoking Herschel Walker’s appearance at a Trump rally and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments about the water supply: Here was more from ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ and venom toward Trump campaign from idolatrous Trump hater @RachelVScott: “The former President...going from complaining that President Biden is no longer in the race to calling Democrats demonic...As he tries to win back Georgia,… pic.twitter.com/y0rMQx9vnb — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 4, 2024 In contrast, Mary Bruce lived up to her role as Disney’s in-house North Korean news lady for the Harris campaign, sounding as though she were creating an audition tape to be a hypothetical Harris-Walz White House press secretary: In contrast to what ABC’s @RachelVScott said about Trump on ‘Good Morning America,’ here was how @MaryKBruce talked about Vice President Harris. Whereas Scott seethed, Bruce swooned: “Well, Kamala Harris is finishing out the campaign crisscrossing this all important state. She’s… pic.twitter.com/BwSq8nsMdM — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 4, 2024 Bruce kept the vibes high, swooning over both Harris’s “surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live” (and saying nothing about how this was an FCC violation) as well as her final rally “leaning on big names like Katy Perry, Oprah, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, The Roots, and others”: State-run media from ABC correspondent and Disney’s in-house North Korean news lady for Kamala Harris, Mary Bruce: “The Vice President crisscrossing the key battleground state on her last weekend of campaigning, hoping to get out the vote and reach key constituencies like black… pic.twitter.com/DeILJn5kUI — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 4, 2024 While a segment with political director Rick Klein sought to boost the notion that the race is close, the underlying themes seemed like a way to argue it’s over given the gender gap and so many “divided and super angry” Americans. More anti-Trump invective came with chief Washington correspondent and three-time anti-Trump author Jonathan Karl telling his liberal base that Trump’s “voice sounded weary, a little scratchy” when the two spoke Sunday and said Trump defended himself against “[a]ll the negativity” of his stump speeches “not focusing on the core economic issues that they say he should be focused on.” Stephanopoulos and Karl really tried to drive home the notion of Harris having “hopeful, optimistic” persona being a bigger pull for voters than Trump’s “pretty dark, pessimistic” tone: ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos: “One thing that’s pretty consistent over the last week, Jon, is we saw Donald Trump’s message, pretty dark, pessimistic. At least, in the last day Kamala Harris coming out much more hopeful.… pic.twitter.com/es92Qdb5VH — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 4, 2024 The former ABC hack brought back Scott to kick dirt on Trump’s appeal among men: ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos: “[T]here is some strategy [by Donald Trump], trying to drive out angry young men.” Rachel Scott: “Absolutely. And this is where the former President actually has been really focused in the… pic.twitter.com/Apa778FEMh — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 4, 2024 The second hour included even more campaign coverage, such as a report from correspondent Elizabeth Schulze from Arizona that trumpeted a possible triumph for baby-killing via a state ballot initiative. Schulze — who’s probably still recovering from throwing down with Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt — fear-mongered about Arizona turning violent, noting the tense scenes from 2020 and touted snipers as some new security measures to thwart possible angry Trump supporters. In the second hour, Stephanopoulos dialed up more grist, telling viewers in a tease about Trump’s “dark closing argument” versus Harris’s “positive note.” Always the leftist tool, Stephanopoulos trotted out House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for a series of softballs, starting with a simple question: “Are you confident it’s going to happen?” It got even more ridiculous with Stephanopoulos fear-mongering about post-election violence and what a new Congress under Republican control would look like (click “expand”): Current Speaker Mike Johnson is also hitting the trail hard. He’s promising that Republicans are going to bring the federal government to heel if they take control of the Congress and White House. What is the impact if Republicans maintain control? (....) What’s your biggest concern in this final 36 hours? (....) Former President Trump also appears to be laying the groundwork for contesting again if he loses. And your predecessor, Speaker Pelosi made a [inaudible] yesterday she thinks you need to be the speaker because she’s concerned about what Speaker Johnson would do if he has the gavel on January 6. Do you share that concern? What could he do? (....) Lot of the seats in play to determine the majority in the House are out there in California, so this could take some time before we know who’s controlling the House. (....) You’re heading back on the trail from here? To see the relevant ABC transcript from November 4, click here.

Donald Trump’s afternoon working the fryer at a suburban Philadelphia McDonald’s will go down in history as one of the best political stunts of all time. Not only did it mock Kamala Harris’ unverified claims that she worked at the American multinational fast food chain in the '80s, it also expressed Trump’s appreciation and respect for working-class Americans. And he got some incredible photos to add to the iconic album of his campaign trail. What Trump doesn’t know, however, is that it did a fourth thing: It gave the Pimp on a Blimp the idea to eat McDonald’s French fries out of a 24k gold MAGA hat. “You guys can go to memeranch.com and you can get your own gold MAGA hat,” says Alex, holding up the $5,000, gold-dipped hat to the camera. “In honor of Donald Trump,” Alex dumps McDonald’s French fries into the hat, tops them with mayonnaise, and chows down while he discusses the aftermath of Trump’s day at McDonald’s. “What about the dumba** left-wing media that's coming out and saying, ‘This is a staged photo op!’ No s**t, Sherlock! What in the campaign trail isn't some sort of staged photo op?” he laughs. “Now they're coming after Ronald McDonald; they're saying that we got [E. coli] in the quarter-pounders!” says Alex, pointing to a recent story of an E. coli outbreak at chain. “This is fake news. I’ve had two quarter-pounders today, and I don’t even eat meat.” Want more from Alex Stein?To enjoy more of Alex's culture jamming, comedic monologues, skits, and street segments, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

CBS anchor Margaret Brennan on Sunday repeated false accusations suggesting that Donald Trump threatened Liz Cheney, prompting Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to correct the record.And in the end, Brennan could no longer defend that narrative.'You don't normally give a gun to someone that is going to be facing a firing squad, which is what much of the media made it sound like.'During an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation," Rubio argued that Trump is the presidential candidate who will promote safety and security in the U.S. and abroad. Brennan then used Rubio's assertion to confront him over, in her words, "Donald Trump talking about training guns on the face of Liz Cheney."But Rubio was not interested in playing Brennan's game."That's not what he said," Rubio told Brennan.At first, Brennan defended her assertion because, according to her, CBS producers had played a "sound bite" of Trump's remarks from last Thursday, when he accused Cheney of being a so-called chicken hawk. Notice, though, that CBS played only a sound bite of Trump's remarks — not the full context."Donald Trump doesn't talk like someone who's been in Washington for 30 years," Rubio defended."Training guns on her face?" Brennan pushed back."He doesn't say it the way I would have said it, no, but that's not what he said, Margaret. You guys know that. Come on," Rubio responded. "I mean, everybody knows exactly what he was saying."Instead of acknowledging that Trump was not, in fact, threatening Cheney, Brennan for a third time pushed the media's false narrative about Trump's words."We played the sound bite," Brennan said.For Rubio, that was the straw that broke the camel's back."No, you played a piece of the sound bite, because, in another piece of it, he said he would give her a gun to go stand in conflict as well. You don't normally give a gun to someone that is going to be facing a firing squad, which is what much of the media made it sound like," Rubio said. "The point he was making is not a new point. It is a point that has been made by people in both parties for decades. And that is: You're all for war, and it's easy to be for war when you're in some fancy building and you're safe and sound in Washington, D.C."After Rubio made the facts surrounding Trump's remarks indisputable, Brennan appeared to concede and stopped disagreeing with him."Yep," she said as Rubio continued speaking."Let's see how much you are for war when you yourself get deployed into combat. That's the point that he was making," he said. "That he uses language that maybe is not what we typically hear from someone that works at a think tank —""Yes," Brennan affirmed again."But I think it's not just unfair, it's egregious to see that reported the way that it was," Rubio continued. "I have never seen such a concerted effort."And look, I have always believed there's bias because no one's unbiased, but I have never seen such a concerted effort like what I have seen, especially in the last two weeks, among multiple media outlets in this country to, in some cases, breathlessly distort and lie about what's being said and to create and manufacture these gotcha moments against Donald Trump," he added. "I have never seen it before. It's over the top."Brennan, unfortunately, did not engage Rubio on his observation about the legacy media. Instead, she shifted the interview to a different topic. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A Kentucky high school basketball coach has voluntarily resigned after footage was posted to Facebook showing him cursing more than two dozen times while speaking to young athletes.Lynn Camp High School's boys' basketball coach Tyler Wagner was shown in two videos using explicit language with his team in the locker room, criticizing them for playing fearfully and lacking "common sense" on the court."There's not s*** out there. We're getting f***ed in the ass by a bunch of f***ing kids who want it more than we do," Wagner said in the first video. "That's why they're f***ing top-10 in the region.""That's why we're bottom of the f***ing scale," he continued. "[Because] we think we just deserve it ... that's why you're gettin' your ass kicked every goddamned day," the coach added.In the second video, Wagner specified that his players were being too apprehensive in their defensive play and seemed afraid to go hard at the other team's basket."Don't just f***ing stop! Like, what are we doing?! We have no common sense. We're playing back so far that we can't f***ing do nothing!" he complained."What is it, 12 points, 14 points in a f***ing half? In a f***ing half?! 14 f***ing points! Quit being scared when you go in there and just launching it up."'I allowed the competitive environment to get the best of me.'Wagner apologized in a statement, noting that the video was actually from 2023, as the latest season hasn't started yet."The language that I used in this video is not acceptable in any manner. I allowed the competitive environment to get the best of me and for that I am truly sorry," Wagner wrote, per the Lexington Herald-Leader. "I have fully accepted that what I did was not right, and I pledge to be better."A Knox County, Kentucky, spokesperson said county officials had been "informed of a situation showing a coach inappropriately discussing issues with players.""We are unable to discuss specific personnel matters. The coach has since voluntarily resigned from the position," the spokesperson confirmed.Comments on the Facebook videos were seemingly entirely split between the two sexes, with women generally saying the coach went too far while men chalked it up to tough love. "Coaches lead by example and are supposed to teach them how to be respectable young men," one woman wrote."This is ridiculous. ... You will not make these boys tough or play better cussing them like this," another said."This coach needs to be fired!" a different woman replied.Men's comments were as follows:"[It's so] when/if they go to college they don't get their feelings hurt because college coaches are 10000 times worse than this," a user named Brandon said."So when they become adults and go off to college they know how to handle it," another man wrote as a reason for the coach's language."This is light compared to my coaches coming up," another Facebook user said.More women supported the coach than men who condemned him, with at least one woman stating that she wasn't familiar with the locker-room dynamic of men's sports until it was explained to her."At first I was upset with the whole thing until my husband explained to me. He could dial down the cussing but he's doing what a coach does."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A coach for San Jose State University's women's volleyball team was suspended indefinitely after filing a complaint about her team having a male athlete.Associate head volleyball coach Melissa Batie-Smoose was suspended after she made a Title IX complaint against SJSU, which has a male athlete named Blaire Fleming, born Brayden, on the women's team. Fleming's inclusion on the team has sparked five separate forfeits against SJSU and even caused his own teammate, Brooke Slusser, to speak out against him.SJSU has been hammered over the controversy for months, and now the controversy continues with the suspension of Batie-Smoose, who has made shocking allegations against Fleming.According to her interview with Quillette, Batie-Smoose alleged in her Title IX complaint that Fleming, the male player, conspired with an opposing player at Colorado State University to possibly injure his teammate Slusser.SJSU was visiting CSU in early October when Batie-Smoose learned that Fleming visited the residence of CSU player Malaya Jones, whom he would line up across from on the opposing side during their game the next day.Batie-Smoose said in her complaint that Fleming went on to defy his coaches' instructions during the game by allowing Jones an unhindered hitting lane that exposed Slusser to the ball. The assistant coach further alleged that she saw Fleming and Jones laughing together after targeting Slusser.Fleming's behavior was allegedly so strange that head coach Todd Kress even took Fleming aside for a one-on-one discussion, but he didn't change his behavior."At one point," Batie-Smoose said, "Blaire sent an over pass, perfectly setting up Malaya to kill the ball again in the direction of Brooke Slusser, after [which] Jones blew a kiss toward Fleming and mouthed 'thank you.'"This moment was reportedly caught on video and posted on X.It is alleged that Fleming essentially gave Jones the SJSU playbook and that the two concocted a plan to leave center court open so that Jones could target Slusser with unobstructed powerful strikes. Colorado State University's Malaya Jones [right] is accused of conspiring with Fleming against an SJSU player.Photo by Andrew Wevers/Getty ImagesSJSU responded to allegations made in the article and said the school "takes all reports and complaints seriously and is reviewing them.""Due to federal and state privacy laws, the University is not able to comment on active reports or complaints," the school told Outkick."The University also has concerns about a number of inaccuracies in the article but is not able to comment further on those in light of those privacy laws. In addition, the University has significant concerns about apparent breaches of student and employee privacy and will be addressing those, as appropriate."SJSU's coach Kress has also conspired against Slusser, Batie-Smoose claimed.She said Kress told her that he has filed at least one Title IX complaint against Slusser on the basis that she referred to Fleming with masculine pronouns during media interviews. Kress allegedly described this as a threat to the rights of trans women. SJSU coach Todd Kress reportedly filed a Title IX complaint against his own player for using the wrong pronouns.Photo by Andrew Wevers/Getty ImagesSlusser told Blaze News in an interview that in addition to having to share a changing room with Fleming, team meetings have focused on the transgender athlete's well-being and not that of the female athletes."We've had meetings, and it's a lot of just checking in on Blaire. ... We were like 'what about us?'" Slusser said. "It's mostly just saying you can't be the person to ... identify Blaire's gender identity. 'Blaire needs to do that for himself,'" the girls are told."Everyone above you is telling you you shouldn't be talking for Blaire, you need to make sure the other person is okay; and [the management] is not thinking about, 'Are we okay?'" Slusser explained.Kress, CSU officials, and Jones have not responded to requests for comments from other outlets. This article will be updated should CSU or SJSU officials respond to Blaze News requests for comments.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The first you hear when launching Slitterhead, the debut game from the Silent Hill, Siren, and Gravity Rush alumni at Bokeh Game Studios, is a chorus of voices rising in a dissonant sort of harmony. Some of these voices are deep, groaning in a low invocatory tone, while others are in a higher register, wailing quietly and unnervingly atop their counterparts. The variety of these voices represent a spectrum of characters - a group of people in uneasy communion with one another. Continue reading Slitterhead review - Silent Hill creator’s unique horror game MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Slitterhead review, Best horror games, Best action games