On Wednesday, police in Orange County, California arrested Forrest Clark, aged 51, on suspicion of arson in regards to a fire that has burned more than 6,000 acres in Southern California. Clark allegedly sent an email last week warning “this place will burn.”

Reporter J.J. MacNab, who is currently a fellow George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, has written a lengthy Twitter thread reporting that Clark’s Facebook page shows that he is a long-time conspiracy theorist “who believes in just about every kooky conspiracy out there, including QAnon, Pizzagate, Jade Helm 15, flat earth theories, NESARA, Jesuit [conspiracies], shape-shifting lizard overlords. You name it, he believes it.” Tied to these conspiracy theories is Clark’s apparent adherence to “sovereign citizen” ideology, an anti-government worldview that has sometimes motivated political violence.

MacNab’s reporting is especially salient in light of ongoing debates about whether social media companies like Twitter should allow conspiracy theorists like Jones to post content.

Here are a few key tweets:

The National Football League kicked off its preseason in earnest last night, marking the imminent return of the nation’s most popular professional sport. This morning, President Donald Trump took the opportunity to revive his campaign against black players who protest racial injustice.

The president’s efforts have had some success over the past two years. Team owners voted this summer to bar players from kneeling during the national anthem, thus exposing protesting players and their teams to fines and other league sanctions. At last night’s games, two players on the Miami Dolphins knelt during the anthem anyways, and a smattering of other players across the league silently raised their fists.

The president’s attempt to intimidate players who demonstrate against racism and police brutality was already an abuse of his bully pulpit. But it’s even more repellent after Trump’s supine performance beside Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Helsinki summit earlier this summer. If kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice is considered unacceptable, where does kowtowing to a foreign dictator who attacked the American democratic system fall?

Among the social media giants, Twitter is the exception in its handling of Jones, a notorious conspiracy theorist who has argued on his show InfoWars that the Sandy Hook massacre was a false flag operation. Whereas YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Spotify have all removed InfoWars content, Twitter has refused to act.

“We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday,” Dorsey tweeted on Tuesday. “We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does.”

A CNN investigation shows that Dorsey’s statement is factually false.

As the cable news network reports, “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.”

Asked to respond by CNN, Twitter went through some bizarre contortions. “A spokesperson at the time said the company had no comment beyond a statement CEO Jack Dorsey made on Tuesday in which he said neither Jones or InfoWars had ‘violated our rules’ and other previous statements by the company,” CNN reports. “When asked if Twitter would be reviewing the videos and content CNN had asked about, the spokesperson declined to answer. On Thursday afternoon, after another request for comment, a different Twitter spokesperson notified CNN that the company was reviewing the content.”

Subsequently, the tweets with the offending content were removed from Twitter. The company denies it did so (likely Jones himself removed them).

The New York Times has published a remarkable reconstruction of the July NATO meeting, the upshot of which is that the staff of President Donald Trump successfully conspired to get him to sign an agreement supporting the troubled alliance against his own policy preferences. The machinations, which were led by national security advisor John Bolton and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, were done to avoid the fiasco of the June G-7 summit in Quebec, where the president ended up not signing the final communiqué.

As the Times notes, “In June, weeks before the meeting, Mr. Bolton sent his demand to Brussels through Kay Bailey Hutchison, the American ambassador to NATO. He wanted the NATO communiqué to be completed early, before the president left for Europe.”

The idea was to reach an agreement that was strongly pro-NATO,and could counteract the president’s tendency to criticize the alliance and to call for greater co-operation with Russia.

The final results certainly met that objective. As summed up by the Times:

Against Russian objections, the military alliance would formally invite Macedonia to join. It would establish an Atlantic Command post, hosted by the United States in Norfolk, Va., to coordinate a swift alliance response in the event of, for instance, a war in Europe between Russia and NATO allies.

And, most important, allies pledged to build up their militaries and provide 30 mechanized battalions, 30 air squadrons and 30 combat vessels, all ready to use in 30 days or less, by 2020 — a force to quickly respond to any attack on an alliance member.

Key to the success of the whole plot was that Trump would be kept in the dark about what he was actually signing. As the Times reports, “Mr. Trump was presented with only the broad outlines of what the meeting would deliver—not details of the document of 79 paragraphs, running 23 pages.”

The thinking behind this strange maneuver is that the document Trump signed would counteract his own words. “The new agreement has given American national security officials the ability to assure the public, and skittish allies, that the country’s commitment to the alliance remains intact—no matter any anti-NATO tweets or interviews or statements from Mr. Trump,” the Times claims.

It’s by no means clear that this manipulation of the president will in fact work. After all, if the president continues to deride NATO, as he has in interviews, why should anyone believe that in a crisis he’ll abide by words that he hasn’t even read?

Avenatti is best known for representing adult film thespian Stephanie Clifford (better known by her stage name Stormy Daniels). The lawyer’s robust advocacy on behalf of Clifford, often done with vim and wit, has made him a fixture on cable news. Now, he’s hoping to leverage his fame into a presidential run.

Interviewed by The Des Moines Register on Thursday, Avenatti acknowledged his visit to Iowa was an exploratory presidential bid. “I’m exploring a run for the presidency of the United States, and I wanted to come to Iowa and listen to people and learn about some issues that are facing the citizens of Iowa and do my homework,” Avenatti told the newspaper.

On Friday, Avenatti will be speaking at the Democratic Wing Ding fundraiser, held annually in Clear Lake. The event often attracts presidential hopefuls. Avenatti is following in the path of politicians like Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

The response from political observers ran the gamut from amusement to despair:

Ever since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman effectively took command of the oil-rich monarchy in June 2017, he’s been the darling of the American foreign policy establishment and much of the media. “It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country,” Tom Friedman of The New York Times gushed. 60 Minutes exclaimed that bin Salman’s “reforms inside Saudi Arabia have been revolutionary. He is emancipating women, introducing music and cinema and cracking down on corruption, in a land with 15,000 princes.” The Trump administration has been giving Saudi Arabia a free hand in foreign policy, supporting it in aggression towards neighbors like Yemen and Qatar. 

This whole-hearted embrace of bin Salman was dubious from the start but is now shaping up to be a full-scale disaster, one harmful to both America’s position in the world and the cause of human rights. 

Consider some recent events:

1. The American-support war in Yemen continues to be a humanitarian nightmare. “Dozens of civilians, mostly children, were killed or injured in an airstrike on Thursday by U.S. allies on a bus in a crowded market in northern Yemen, according to health officials and international aid agencies,” The Washington Post reports. The allies in question are a coalition led by Saudi Arabia. “In a tweet, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the attack targeted a bus carrying children in Dahyan market in Saada province, which borders Saudi Arabia. A hospital supported by the aid group has received ‘scores of dead and wounded,’ it said, adding that ‘under international humanitarian law, civilians must be protected during conflict.’”

2. Bin Salman has initiated a bizarre diplomatic crisis with Canada. Taking offence at tweets from  Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland that criticized Saudi Arabia’s arrest of a woman’s rights activist, bin Salman has sent the Canadian ambassador packing, cancelled trade deals with Canada, and is disrupting the lives thousands of Saudi students and medical residents in Canada by cancelling financial support for their education and calling them back to Saudi Arabia. 

3. On Wednesday, while arguing that Canada doesn’t have the right to criticize Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, bin Salman’s government crucified a man.

Despite all this, America’s alliance with Saudi Arabia remains unshaken. In the dispute between Canada and Saudi Arabia, the United States has taken a position of sedulous neutrality. 

The venerable human rights group announced Thursday morning that their new chairman of the Board is Michael Chertoff, who was Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005 to 2009. As Jesse Walker of Reason points out, Chertoff is an odd pick for an organization that purports to advocate for human rights since he was in the thick of many of the worst civil liberty abuses of the presidency of George W. Bush.

As Walker details, Chertoff as assistant attorney general “helped write the USA Patriot Act; he also played a central role in detaining hundreds of Arabs and Muslims without filing charges against them, a roundup that the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General later called ‘indiscriminate and haphazard.’ After George W. Bush tapped him to run the Department of Homeland Security, Chertoff’s intrusive efforts ranged from warrantless ICE raids to a push for a national ID card. Since leaving office, he has been a vocal advocate of installing full-body scanners in airports—and a lobbyist for the companies that manufacture the scanners.”

Freedom House already has a controversial record. The organization has long received funding from the United States government, and critics have argued it has a double standard of judging the United States and its allies more indulgently than America’s foreign policy foes.

In 2006, The Financial Times reported that Freedom House was involved in clandestine activities inside Iran. These activities, especially as they were in competition with receiving funding from the American government, were widely criticized by other human rights groups, who saw them as delegitimizing democracy promotion.

“The danger is that this is a move towards covert political warfare that will completely stymie the whole idea of democracy-building,” Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, a leader of the West­minster Foundation for Democracy, told The Financial Times.

Chertoff’s new appointment only confirms existing criticism of Freedom House.

Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday laid out the Trump administration’s plans for a United States Space Force by 2020. It will be the sixth branch of the U.S. military, and the first new one since the U.S. Air Force was created in 1947. “Now the time has come to write the next great chapter in the history of our Armed Forces, to prepare for the next battlefield, where America’s best and bravest will be called to deter and defeat a new generation of threats to our people, to our nation,” Pence said.

President Trump first announced his intent to create the Space Force during a speech to the National Space Council in June. He then tasked General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr. with procuring funding for the project. “We got it,” the general said from the crowd.

According to a White House press release, the administration will begin by establishing a Space Development Agency, a Space Operations Force, “an operating structure and accountable civilian oversight,” and United States Space Command—“a unified combatant command, to improve, evolve, and plan space warfighting.”

“We need to address space as a developing war-fighting domain,” Defense Secretary John Mattis said on August 7, “and a combatant command is certainly one thing we can establish.”

The only other country to ever have an independent space-focused military branch is Russia. But as Defense News noted, “in 2015 Russia actually merged its space force with the air force in an attempt to consolidate command authority and replicate the traditional U.S. approach.” Now Trump is going in the opposite direction, replicating what Russia once had—and Moscow isn’t happy about it.

“What makes this piece of news most alarming,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakarhova told TASS, a state news agency, “is the purpose of the instruction was described in very clear terms—dominance in space.”