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“Clay, you know how I feel about working with others.”
“Well, the first mission I need you for tracks with both your priorities and mine. The Venn diagram of jihadi assholes and leftist assholes overlaps because of a Hezbollah banker who goes by the name ‘Saladin.’ Yeah, Saladin – he’s pretentious all right.
“I’m saying I can’t trust anyone in the bureaucracy to take America’s side instead of his own faction’s side. Their interests and America’s interests no longer necessarily correspond.
“You’re usually a stone-cold cynic, Kelly, but here you’re adorably naive. You think there are still norms and rules, but there aren’t.
All he took on the plane was his stinking self and a copy of the only English language book he could find at the police commando base, a sci-fi paperback called The Paradigm Shifters of Sirius that had a cover showing an androgynous human kissing an alien that was likewise androgynous. The book was in pristine condition.
Many were wearing masks, but less because of the peril of viruses than to make a statement. Mask-wearing meant acceptance of the official expert position that the country was in a state of perpetual pathogen siege and that this justified the government exercising vast emergency powers. The fact that almost no one was still sick that November was irrelevant; to deny the need to wear masks forever was to deny science itself. And science denial was bad, unless the science was inconvenient, in which case science denial became a moral imperative.
Turnbull recognized the man, an actor, from a recent movie titled Love’s Savage Fury that he had watched between missions back at Bagram. He was a fan of Nick Searcy, but the star’s nude scene had been a bit jarring, especially since it was with an equally buck-naked Kate Upton. It had left the audience of Green Berets in the camp with very mixed feelings.
The hostess was the improbably named Amanda Van de Vere. She always regretted taking her second husband’s last name, but considered it a small price to pay for inheriting his estate after he died of heart failure while in action between two Ukrainian hookers whom Hunter Biden had arranged for him to meet while they were both in Kiev on a business deal. Van de Vere was rail thin, heavily botoxed, and she sat in a chair that cost more than the average American earned in six months. She considered herself a huge advocate for such average Americans, although she had not known any personally since
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He was both impressed by the speaker’s complexion – clearly the man had a formidable skin care regimen – and also by his ability to make violence seem not merely necessary but admirable to people singularly incapable of committing any themselves.
“When I am the voice of reason you are totally screwed.
the price of leveraging critical theory to spur the revolution was that some percentage of the resulting revolutionaries would take it far too seriously.
It was the same collection of mostly young men, hopped up on goofballs and screaming incoherently. There were very few of the little princes and princesses who enjoyed their bespoke rebellion while on sabbatical from college. Apparently, they were excused from cannon fodder duty. It amused Turnbull that the class war had finally come and it was the damn Marxists who rigorously observed class distinctions. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, it was the proles who were getting dicked.
he was a physicist from the University of Texas, Austin. Or, rather, at least he had been until he was fired when he stated during a class that science did not allow for the possibility that Newton’s Three Laws of Physics were “structurally racist and fail to reflect the experiences and vision of oppressed people.” Thirty of his students had staged a die-in during the next session – conveniently, when he was holding the midterm – because his “racist hate speech is literally murdering us.”
