Twitter is permanently shuttering the accounts of Alex Jones and his conspiracy minded site InfoWars. The timing of the move is curious. Twitter has been much slower to go after Jones than other social media. The trigger for the ban seems to have been Jones’s mockery of CNN reporter Oliver Darcy.

As BuzzFeed reports, “The incident that inspired Twitter to action appears to have been a series of tweets containing a 9-minute Periscope video of Jones confronting CNN reporter Oliver Darcy. In the video, Jones and his camera men confront Darcy while Jones lambastes him as ‘the equivalent of like the Hitler Youth’ and accuses him of ‘smiling like a possum that crawled out of the rear end of a dead cow.’”

While Jones’s treatment of Darcy is undeniably obnoxious, it is also fairly mild by Jones’s standards. After all, InfoWars is infamous for spreading the falsehood that the Sandy Hook massacre was a false flag operation, a lie that caused Jones’s fans to harass families of the mass shooting.

As CNN noted in early August:

Content that appears to violate Twitter’s rules appears over and over again in the hundreds of hours of video available on the accounts that Jones and InfoWars maintain on Twitter and Periscope, a livestreaming video service that Twitter owns. Jones has repeatedly degraded individuals of the Muslim faith. He has attacked people on the basis of gender identity. And he has engaged in the harassment of individuals.

In banning Jones and InfoWars after they insulted of Oliver Darcy, Twitter is suggesting a curious double standard. You can apparently harass ordinary people all you want, but shouldn’t go after high-profile reporters.

From television origins (Gunsmoke), Reynolds became one of the most recognizable faces of 1970s American film. After negligible early roles in movies like Shark! (1969), he broke out (sans mustache) as archery ace Lewis Medlock in Deliverance (1972). That same year he also played “Sperm Switchboard Operator” in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).

Those two roles express something at the heart of the Reynolds mystique: He was macho, lusty, and funny.

Aside from Deliverance, Reynolds’s most iconic roles were in movies that eventually took on cult status. In Smokey and the Bandit (1971), The Longest Yard (1974), and 1981’s Sharky’s Machine (which he also directed), he played charming funsters with hearts of gold and biceps of steel. These roles turned Burt Reynolds into a symbol for a butch American sexuality.

The 1990s saw a Reynolds reprise, with turns in Striptease (1996) and Boogie Nights (1997). From the 2000s onward he seemed to enjoy playing up to the typecasting that arguably limited his career, cropping up in a heroic total of 37 movies this century, mostly in comic works like the Dukes of Hazzard remake. In 2019 he will appear posthumously in the Manson family dramatization, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

His long career included a 1973 album, featuring songs like “The First One That I Lay With” and “She’s Taken A Gentle Lover.” He winkingly embodied an American masculinity that women laughed over and men sought to emulate. With Reynolds’s death, America has lost its least subtle and most charismatic old-school Adonis. With a wink and a grin, he has disappeared into the sunset.

Mediaite is reporting that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, employs as a factotum Chrystal Clanton, who was fired last year from Turning Points USA for racist text messages. “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE,” Clanton texted. “Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” This racist text message was first reported by The New Yorker. Mediate has also discovered that Clanton made frequent Islamophobic comments on Snapchat, including a caption of an Arab-looking man that reads, “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”

On Facebook, Ginni Thomas has praised Clanton as someone “who makes every day better and more fun!” The two frequently travel together to right-wing speaking engagements. According to Mediaite, Clanton “flaunts her relationship with the Thomases to conservative friends as a way to prove that the New Yorker’s publication of her racist text messages did not ruin her career. In July, Clanton shared a photo on Instagram of herself, Thomas, and Ginni Thomas having a ‘great weekend’ together.”

Over the last decade, Ginni Thomas has been increasingly vocal as a strident advocate of right-wing politics. She recently posted a Facebook message mocking Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg as exhibiting “a special kind of stupid.”

The country’s Supreme Court today struck down a British-era law from 1861 that criminalized gay sex. “Consensual sex between adults in the private space, which is not harmful to women or children, cannot be denied as it is a matter of individual choice,” the court wrote in a unanimous opinion. “The law had become a weapon for harassment for the LGBT community,” said chief justice Dipak Misra. “Any discrimination on the basis of sexuality amounts to a violation of fundamental rights.” India is now one of more than 120 countries where homosexuality is decriminalized.

Politicians were divided over the ruling. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party has said it would respect the court’s decision, but BJP Member of Parliament Subramanian Swamy criticized the ruling, saying that it “could give rise to an increase in the number of HIV cases” and that homosexuality is “a genetic flaw like having six fingers on your hand.” The main opposition party, the Congress Party, tweeted that they “hope this is the beginning of a more equal and inclusive society.”

According to a poll from 2016, 40 percent of Indians agreed at least in part that private consensual same-sex relationships should not be allowed, and 71 percent said they would be somewhat or very upset if one of their children was in love with someone of the same sex. This enduring resistance to gay couples is indicative of the challenges facing Indians seeking equal rights for LGBT people, including legalized gay marriage. According to the same 2016 poll, 35 percent of Indians said same-sex marriage should not be legal, and another 30 percent were unsure.

The court explicitly said that its ruling only concerned the constitutional validity of the 1861 law and not other rights, such as those related to marriage or inheritance.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine recently announced that Kavanaugh, now embroiled in a raucous Senate confirmation hearing, assured her that he believed the landmark abortion case was “settled law.” But an email written by Kavanaugh in 2003 and published by The New York Times on Thursday indicates he may have misrepresented his views. During his time as the White House counsel for President George W. Bush, he expressed skepticism about the majority opinion in Roe:

Judge Kavanaugh was considering a draft opinion piece that supporters of one of Mr. Bush’s conservative appeals court nominees hoped they could persuade anti-abortion women to submit under their names. It stated that “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land.”

Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

If Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, he will be in a position to overturn Roe. According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week, Kavanaugh is the most unpopular Supreme Court nominee in decades. “Only two nominees have had weaker public support: Harriet Miers, who withdrew her nomination, in 2005; and Robert Bork, rejected by the Senate in 1987,” pollsters concluded.

The president is not laughing off an unsigned critique of his presidency allegedly written by a senior administration official which was published by The New York Times on Wednesday.

Trump has responded with four angry tweets:

Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, echoed many of these points in her own statement. “Nearly 62 million people voted for President Donald J. Trump n 2016, earning him 306 electoral college votes—versus 232 for his opponent,” Sanders claimed (strangely understating Trump’s victory of nearly 63 million votes). “None of them voted for a gutless, anonymous source to the failing New York Times.”

The New York Times reports that the combined impact of the new Bob Woodward expose with the anonymous op-ed is starting to unnerve the president: “Mr. Trump’s mood vacillated from fury to calm throughout Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday. Some of his top aides worked the phones to figure out who was leaking or who might have spoken, and his daughter Ivanka Trump and other advisers tried to quell his distress.”

In an interview with The Daily Caller posted Tuesday, the president continued to chew over an event that occurred two years ago: the release of the Access Hollywood tape where he was heard boasting, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”

Asked about rumors that “NBC leadership” deliberately leaked the tape, Trump responded:

A lot of people say that what they did — OK, so I had a lawsuit prepared, I had a lawsuit that was prepared to be filed against NBC because they leaked that tape. First of all, that was done, that tape was, there are even questions about this tape, there’s many things going on. But it was also done in a dressing room — real questions about that whole process. And they gave it to the Washington Post because they couldn’t put it out there themselves ’cause they would’ve had tremendous liability so they gave it to the Washington Post to put out. OK. I had a lawyer hired to bring a suit right after the election ended. But one problem arose — I won the election. OK, and they were going to say, ‘what was your damages?’ The damages was I lost the election, but now I won the election. So what were the damages? I won the election. I was going to sue because what they did — that was done in the dressing room. You know those trailers are really luxury, beautiful, actually. That was done in a trailer. It ruined Billy Bush’s career. And that was done in a trailer secretly. That was illegal what they did.

There’s much to say about these comments.

The president has a long history of threatening lawsuits that are never carried out. It’s by no means clear what Trump could sue for. Following his usual pattern of kettle logic, Trump is here suggesting that the tape was both faked (“there are even questions about this tape”) and a violation of his privacy (“done in a trailer secretly”). The idea that the tape is fake is an old Trump standby, one that he raised soon after it was released.

But it’s heartening to see that Trump, in the midst of it all, still has time to comment on decor (“those trailers are really luxury, beautiful, actually”).

The Senate hearings to evaluate Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court nominee are turning into a reunion of the more louche elements of the conspiratorial far right. Among those seen in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday were Laura Loomer, Chuck Johnson, and Jack Posobiec. Also present was America’s foremost purveyor of paranoid fantasies, Alex Jones, who heckled Senator Marco Rubio at a press gaggle. 

While Rubio was trying to talk about the security threat posed by China interfering in the American election, Jones stood in the sidelines and mouthed off about big tech companies “shadow banning” conservatives. “The Democrats are doing what you say China does,” Jones barked. “It’s happening here but you say I don’t exist.” 

Rubio tried to laugh it off. “I just don’t know who you are, man.” Jones mimicked, floridly but recognizably, Rubio’s braying giggle and called the senator “a little frat boy.” Rubio then asked, “Who are you?” 

After Jones tapped Rubio on the shoulder, the Republican politician said, “Don’t touch me again man. I’m asking you not to touch me.” Jones accused Rubio of “trying to get me arrested.”

Rubio replied, “You’re not going to get arrested, man.  You’re not going to get arrested. I’ll take care of it myself.” Jones then bellowed, “Oh, he’ll beat me up!”

After the gaggle ended, Jones started holding court with the remaining reporters, making homophobic insinuations about Rubio and spouting off about how he was being censored.