a) the impetus for the investigation is sedition on social media.
b) the investigation starts with a guy named Adam Fox, who, following a meeting in Ohio, reaches out to a militia that has already been infiltrated by the FBI.
According to the Buzzfeed article, the affidavit is backwards.
Buzzfeed’s story starts w/ the militia, called the Wolverine Watchmen. Dan, a veteran, joins it blindly and is alarmed: his new buddies aren’t just interested in fun gun stuff but in potentially killing cops.
Dan tells a cop buddy, who alerts the FBI, who ask Dan to become and informant within the group.
When a protest occupies the Michigan Capitol, the Wolverine Watchmen go along. Dan alerts the FBI, whereupon the cops stand down and let them do it.
Adam Fox, focus of the FBI affidavit, is also at that protest. He doesn’t know the Wolverine Watchmen yet.
Joe Morrison, one of the WWs, is invited to a militia meeting in Dublin, Ohio. He does not go.
Adam Fox, also invited, does.
The meeting sponsor is an FBI informant.
This is the crucial bit: Joe Morrison decides to hook up the Wolverines with Adam Fox, who has radicalized to the extent of wanting to seize the state Capitol and take hostages.
Except *Morrison hadn’t been at the meeting where the FBI obviously had set up him and Fox to meet.*
So here is the crucial question, which doesn’t seem to be answered in Buzzfeed or in the affidavit: *how did Adam Fox — who fantasized about raising 200 men to seize the Capitol — know who the Wolverine Watchmen even were to reach out to them?*
Who connected him & Joe Morrison?
The FBI pretty clearly set up that initial meeting to connect as many people they were investigating as possible under the kind auspices of an informant host, and then see what possibilities for set-ups that offered them so they could pick the most promising ones to roll up.
Also interesting sausage-making: it’s pretty clear they wrote the affidavit’s story of the investigation retroactively. If somebody else had come out of that meeting as a contender, they would have written beginning of the investigation with a different protagonist.
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Watched CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) on @Shudder and dug it — simple story, atmospheric filmmaking, great sense of rising dread.
Also, it made me realize an interesting edge for filmmakers in flyover country (like industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey, who directed): novel locations.
CARNIVAL OF SOULS was shot in studios and on location in Lawrence, Kansas, on location in Salt Lake City, Utah, and at the wildly atmospheric, unforgettable, but never seen on film Saltair Amusement Park in Magna, Utah.
Never seen on film because *it’s in freakin’ Magna, Utah!*
Just shooting in Utah means CARNIVAL OF SOULS offers a great, eerie, memorable location that you’ve never seen!
Think about all the times you’ve seen, say, the Bradbury Building in LA — OUTER LIMITS, BLADE RUNNER, WOLF, you name it. Now imagine you’d *never* seen it.
Very interesting thread (as is Parson's stuff on the early Klan in general), though I disagree w/ her on the elaborateness of the Klan's costumes showing deliberate strategy, any more than (say) drag queens' do. The early Klan did a lot of stuff they just thought was fun & funny.
As Parsons notes in her fascinating book KU-KLUX, the Ku Klux Klan started out as a freakin' band (like, a *literal actual band,* as in *a garage band with musical instruments*) from Tennessee who amused themselves by shitposting in their newspaperman friend's comment sections!
The first Klansman (mostly well-off dudes disenfranchised by Reconstruction) were exactly the sort to figure that if something funny was worth doing, it was worth overdoing.
They’re doing a WALTONS remake over at the CW and the cast looks exactly like what you’d expect the cast of a WALTON’s remake at the CW to look like variety.com/2021/tv/news/t…
Deadline ran a side-by-side picture of the guys playing John Walton, Sr. in 1971 and 2021 and uh holy crap that says something about the two eras, huh
So check this out: THE WALTONS was based on a TV movie with a different cast, meaning John Walton Sr. has three actors. Here they are:
Andrew Duggan (1971, aged 48)
Ralph Waite (1972 series, aged 44)
Ben Lawson (2021 series, aged 41)
A lot of Righties (fringe and mainstream alike) are convinced of that money is the problem, that they could rise up and beat the establishment and the Lefties if only the money were there.
don’t get me wrong, money *helps*
but it won’t magically make you know what you’re doing
Mike Lindell is willing to set hundreds of millions of dollars on fire for his cause when he would have done better to just sit back and quietly fund stuff
The Moose-feeding movie of the last few days: THUNDERHEART (1992), with Val Kilmer as a quarter-Sioux FBI agent sent to be diversity on an Indian reservation murder case despite the fact that he has run as far from his heritage as he can get. With Sam Shepard and Graham Greene!
For most of its length THUNDERHEART is a quiet little mystery drama, but in the last act it goes *off the chain* with a terrific action sequence involving Val Kilmer and Graham Greene in a car chase/shootout with corrupt feds, tribal government thugs, and goons in a technical!
The movie is so heavily inspired by (and enraptured by) American Indian Movement stuff in the seventies that it’s honestly kind of wild that it wound up getting made.
SPONTANEOUS (2020) is on Prime and everybody was right: it is terrific, the HEATHERS of the 2020s in that it’s a bantery movie about teenagers dying horrible deaths, but it’s also not the HEATHERS of the 2020s because it’s not about high school at all.
SPONTANEOUS is a movie that’s about what it’s like to get old. It’s just that it stars young people.
At first one of your contemporaries dies, and it’s a shock.
Then you lose a couple more. You try to stem the tide.
Then people start going in waves.
By telling a story where young people experience the loss of their compatriots in a way that mimics the effect on old people of losing their friends to old age, SPONTANEOUS puts fresh eyes on what that process feels like. It’s a novel way to purify the problem.