Deniability Quotes

You have fallen into the homoerotic queer girl friendship. It’s all cute at first, and then you catch feelings, and it’s impossible to tell if the joke flirting is actual flirting and if the platonic cuddling is romantic cuddling, and next thing you know, three years have gone by, and you’re obsessed with her, and you haven’t done anything about it because you’re too terrified to fuck up the friendship by guessing it wrong, so instead you send each other horny plausible deniability love letters until you’re both dead.

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

How many times do I have to tell y’all not to discuss your murder plots in front of a sitting president?” their mother interrupts. “Plausible deniability. Come on.

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.

No one talked about the questions, because talking ruined plausible deniability. Talking burst the bubble of innocence. Talking ended the happily ever after. These were the truths they believed. And they were lies. They should have talked while there was still something to say.

If you sanction it, you'll horrify them. If you denounce it, they'll resent you. But if you keep quiet, you get plausible deniability.

It's called obfuscation in the interest of deniability. You might say it's our lingua franca.

Americans are addicted to plausible deniability. If we can't even think critically about something as relatively insignificant as an internet cat or admit that a person might give a pet an offensive name or apologize honestly for small, careless slights, how are we ever going to reckon with the fact that our country was built by slaves on land stolen from people on whom we perpetrated a genocide? What the f*ck are we going to do? Our propensity for always, always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and surreal moment in US history.

Western journalists are also taught to report various interpretations of the facts. The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis. He positioned himself as a side of the story while mocking factuality. “I am lying to you openly and we both know it” is not a side of the story. It is a trap.

The true purpose of the various directives, regulations, and pocket-sized codes of conduct handed out to troops was not to implement genuine safeguards for noncombatants, but to give the military a paper trail of plausible deniability.

So much of college is girls labeling other girls terrible things when they don't like their behavior, but using concerned language so they have plausible deniability is they get accused of being bitches: That girl is not cheerfully doing what the rest of us are doing, so she is probably 'depressed' or 'has an eating disorder' or 'is weird with guys,' and so on.

According to these new rules, the U.S. government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability—only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution.

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.

No man is, perhaps, until he experiences it himself and deniability is no longer plausible. What were we, then? In ten years I have not found an adequate word to describe us.

Americans are addicted to plausible deniability.

Plausible deniability.

Do I even want to know what you're doing in here?" I whirled to face Campbell. "Tampons," I said. Plausible deniability, thy name is feminine hygiene. "I need one." I paused. "Possibly two." Campbell frowned. "Why would you need two?

And if she doesn't--" "Like all of you, she's a deniable asset, agent. This isn't the Red Cross,

Pale fields of grass twitch and shiver in the wind. These things make the fact of a murder distant and unseemly. Beauty allows for plausible deniability. Maybe that’s beauty’s entire function in the world, Cole thinks: that you can blind yourself with it.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

We live in a time where increasingly our national leaders are more like dons of crime than statesmen, where notions of plausible deniability replace truth, and claims that politicians never knew of evil done in their own names by others are commonplace. It is the age of unbridled arrogance and video showmanship, where the challenge ' prove what I knew and when I knew it ' has become a national motto.

He harbored a hidden inclination toward poetry but in the hard boiled world of adjusting, reading a sonnet seemed like something that could get a guy killed. It was perfect, Ben had told him. Like a book with a compartment cut out of the pages to hide a flask of whiskey, this one also let a guy hide a secret vice: the cover was bound upside down. So he could read the book, and if anyone saw him, it would look like he was posing. Plausible deniability.

it can be masked with a veneer of legality, it can be cloaked with plausible deniability. It is always possible to justify each incremental step.

Beauty allows for plausible deniability. Maybe that's beauty's entire function in the world, Cole thinks: that you can blind yourself with it.

Plausible deniability can be a useful tool when facing interrogation from further up the chain of command perhaps, Chief Inspector?

When faced with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America's ruling class has been choosing the lie for four hundred years. White Americans hunger for plausible deniability and swaddle themselves in it and always have - for the sublime relief of deferred responsibility, the soft violence of willful ignorance, the barbaric fiction of rugged individualism. The worst among us have deployed it to seduce and herd the vast, complacent center: It's okay. You didn't do anything wrong. You earned everything you have. Benefiting from genocide is fine if it was a long time ago. The scientists will figure out climate change. The cat's name is Tardar Sauce. We have to kick this addition if we're going to give our children any kind of future.

there had to be a way of maintaining full deniability of the flying disk phenomenon while actually preparing the public for a disclosure by gradually desensitizing them to the potential terror of confronting a more powerful biological entity from a different world. It would have to be, General Twining suggested, at the same time both the greatest cover-up and greatest public relations program ever undertaken. The

My lady, When in difficulty, remember the words of our mutual friend Stephen Armstrong: "You can always swim out of quicksand as long as you don't panic." Or send for me, and I'll come throw you a rope. -W. R. Every time Phoebe had read those words- at least a dozen times since they'd left Eversby Priory- a giddy sensation rushed through her. It had hardly escaped her notice that West had marked sections of the book with x's, just as she had marked Henry's book so long ago. A sly bit of flirtation, those x's- she was welcome to interpret them as kisses, while he could still maintain deniability. Infuriating, complicated man.

If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook. And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone. If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault. That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. 'I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.' What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.

Though relying on rides is a hassle, Adina likes the moment before getting dropped off. The reserved people she grew up with only seemed comfortable sharing after they pulled to a halt and before she got out. The space’s brevity allowed candor, the rare remark that contradicted the phoniness that comprised the everyday behavior of whoever was driving—the friend’s parent, older brother, or sister, the teacher—could even contradict whole ways of living. Maybe the certain end point furnished a deniability both parties could use if anyone dared call the other out in other, more visible places like family rooms and kitchen tables. The confiding party could say that Adina hadn’t heard correctly or that they never said it

IC, which tends to focus less on deniability and more on never getting caught in the first place. Instead, the primary purpose served by IC contracting is much more mundane: it’s a workaround, a loophole, a hack that lets agencies circumvent federal caps on hiring.

It is very bad in America to be right too early. It is considered a sin in journalism to tell the public what you have learned in real time, both because you are going against the tide of profit motive, but mostly because it destroys plausible deniability for the corrupt and powerful.

She had s feeling the adults were going to let the kids do whatever they could think of short of murder and mayhem.She remembered a term from a program she had seen on television: plausible deniability. This way, if things went wrong somehow, the adults could all say they hadn't known about any of it.

You see, sometimes when you work by yourself in a field such as ours, it helps to share knowledge among professionals. I'm not saying that we watch one another's back or anything, because we don't. It's more of a back-scratching than a back-watching affair, as in, "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." Officially, none of us has ever heard of any of us.

Mrs. Ishida smirked at the other parents. “Told you she could see demons.” Ayden gaped. “You knew?” “Duh,” Mr. Ishida snorted. “Why does no one say anything?” I said. “Plausible deniability,” they all chorused. “Oh.” A & E Kirk (2014-05-26). Drop Dead Demons: The Divinicus Nex Chronicles: Book 2 (Divinicus Nex Chronicles series) (p. 510). A&E Kirk. Kindle Edition.

A woman will rarely do anything during a pickup that makes her feel responsible for what may happen between the two of you. To whatever degree she feels responsible, her anti-slut defense will be activated. Thus she has a need for plausible deniability. For example, if you were to say to her, "Hey, let's go back to my place and have sex," she would have to say no, even though she wanted to say yes, because saying yes would make her responsible for what is happen——which she was never be. But if instead you were to say, "Hey, let's stop by my place on the way to that party; I have to show you my tropical fish," now she has an excuse and plausbile deniability to stop by your place and then—oopsie!—have sex with you. "One thing led to another...

You can say things over and over to yourself, but the moment you say them out loud to someone else, they become something different, like you’re taking a fear and giving it a solid shape so it can actually hurt you. And when someone else says the things you’re saying in your head—that has the same effect. It should feel better to be sharing it, but it also makes it less deniable.

if the joke flirting is actual flirting and if the platonic cuddling is romantic cuddling, and next thing you know, three years have gone by, and you’re obsessed with her, and you haven’t done anything about it because you’re too terrified to fuck up the friendship by guessing it wrong, so instead you send each other horny plausible deniability love letters until you’re both dead.

My own view, repeated in virtually all of my essays, is that the sense of skepticism engendered by the sciences would be far more appropriately directed toward the sciences than toward anything else.

To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His “color-blind” rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states’ rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability.

A nation not of men but of laws, intoned John Adams as he, among other lawyers, launched what has easily become the most demented society ever consciously devised by intelligent men. We are now enslaves by laws. We are governed by lawyers. We create little but litigate much. Our monuments are the ever-expanding prisons, where millions languish for having committed victimless crimes or for simply not playing the game of plausible deniability (aka lying) with a sufficiently good legal team. What began as a sort of Restoration comedy, The Impeachment of a President, on a frivolous, irrelevant matter, is suddenly turning very black indeed, and all our political arrangements are at risk as superstitious Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation.

Under the doctrine of “plausible deniability” favored by Allen Dulles, the president was sometimes not told things it might be inconvenient or embarrassing for him to know—assassination plots against foreign politicians, for instance. But in this case, plausible deniability for the president would not have been required, for the United States was not doing anything dubious. It looks instead as though crucial intelligence about the activities of key allies was withheld from the president during an international crisis.

No doubt, the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played. The theory is unique among scientific instruments in being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks. There are in Darwin's scheme no biotic laws, no Bauplan as in German natural philosophy, no special creation, no elan vital, no divine guidance or transcendental forces. The theory functions simply as a description of matter in one of its modes, and living creatures are said to be something that the gods of law indifferently sanction and allow.

The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like.

When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one. In one sense, the argument over 'Holocaust denial' ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organising principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany Judenrein, or 'Jew-free.' Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalised and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended—to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia—this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically 'unfit,' whether Jewish or 'Aryan,' was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic 'Nuremberg Laws.' Most ominous of all—and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbours—Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland. None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, 'deniable.

Putin’s method, Steele said, was unseen. “Nothing was written down. Don’t expect me or anyone to produce a piece of paper saying please X bribe Y with this amount in this way. He’s not going to do this.” He added: “Putin is an ex-intelligence officer. Everything he does has to be deniable.” The oligarchs were brought in to disguise the Kremlin’s controlling role, Steele said, according to The Sunday Times.

Laughter may not be nearly as expressive as language, but it has two properties that make it ideal for navigating sensitive topics. First, it’s relatively honest. With words, it’s too easy to pay lip service to rules we don’t really care about, or values that we don’t genuinely feel in our gut. But laughter, because it’s involuntary, doesn’t lie—at least not as much. “In risu veritas,” said James Joyce; “In laughter, there is truth.”51 Second, laughter is deniable. In this way, it gives us safe harbor, an easy out. When someone accuses us of laughing inappropriately, it’s easy to brush off. “Oh, I didn’t really understand what she meant,” we might demur. Or, “Come on, lighten up! It was only a joke!” And we can deliver these denials with great conviction because we really don’t have a clear understanding of what our laughter means or why we find funny things funny. Our brains just figure it out, without burdening “us” with too many damning details.

The principle behind NSAM #57 is absolutely fundamental to the whole concept of clandestine operations. It not only restates the idea that clandestine operations should be secret and deniable, but it goes beyond that to state that they should be small. It plays on the meaning of “small,” in two areas of interest: First, unless they are very small they should not be assigned to the CIA; and second, if they are not as small as possible they have no chance of remaining secret and therefore have no chance, by definition, of being successful clandestine operations.

To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His 'color-blind' rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states' rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi - the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964 - he assured the crowd 'I believe in states' rights,' and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar - arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language.

If it be not destiny, then surely there is plausible deniability, which in the parlance of politics is the same thing.

Do not ask questions you don't want answered, my brother. Remember, ninety percent of survival in this life is plausible deniability.

It is due to a collective human aggregation that we are able to create things of deniably and undeniably inherent nature that would have otherwise surfaced in some other medium and probably not as clearly. Creation is the space in which we are woven. The act of creating is a channel from that space.

Stuxnet managed to slip through and infect them anyway, with devastating results. Officially, no country ever took responsibility for the cyberattack. Speculation was rife in the media, but the West maintained plausible deniability. However, Kendra knew better. It was Echelon programmers who had coded the malware, while Israeli agents inside Iran had delivered the actual payload. It was all done in an attempt to prevent Iran from

Plausible deniability is a useful thing in Sinful.

I magine a civilization here on earth that exists covertly inside and alongside of those we know about, with access to the most advanced technologies, technologies straight off the drawing boards of Hollywood production companies and special effects artists, a civilization with nearly bottomless sources of funding, staging events for the gullible, torturing others and driving them into mental and emotional breakdown, and waging a covert war with its own members using its own “apocalyptic technologies,” and masking that war behind the perfect plausible deniability: mother nature. This breakaway civilization, moreover, has its own ideology, and its own dubious “morality”, as was evidenced by its first real incarnation: Nazi Germany. Unlike Nazi Germany, or for that matter, civilizations in general, it has no “core area” where it is centered; it comprises not one nation, but many; its peoples are drawn from all groups and languages, for it speaks but one language, the language of power. It is, in part, the resurrection of Atlantis, and in part, like a bad nightmare version of superhero comic books, with the villains, and not the superheroes, possessing all the superhuman powers and technologies. If the idea of such a breakaway civilization sounds fanciful or even absurd, then hold on, because this book attempts to outline its components, structure, and initial postwar history.

With or without his senior advisers, this was the moment for Trump to make the American interest clear—namely, that the Kremlin’s hacking of the election amounted to ill-considered interference. And that any attempt by Moscow to do the same in 2018 or 2020 would lead to a stringent U.S. response—more sanctions, travel bans, even a cutoff of Russia’s access to the SWIFT banking payments system. Putin would interpret anything less than this as American weakness. And, practically, a green light for his operatives to tamper again in Washington’s affairs. All done, of course, under the same cover of plausible deniability. There was no official hacking, the government wasn’t involved, et cetera. Apparently, Trump said none of this.

the Treasury Department evoked the Presidential Protective Function Privilege knowing full well it wouldn’t work. I suspected it was a part of Mrs. Clinton’s “just get it done” leadership style: She didn’t care how, didn’t know if it would even work, and didn’t get personally involved. She prided herself on plausible deniability, which is how she and her husband gained the presidency by ducking their scandals in Arkansas.

I could have relied on “I don’t recall” or “I don’t remember,” but I would have been a liar. Plausible deniability is talk I reserve for criminals.

Plausible deniability is not a moral code,

sharing knowledge is power.” “I think the actual saying goes, ‘Knowledge is power.’” “Not in Washington. Here, the real power is in deniability. If I share knowledge with you, I take away your deniability. It’s the ultimate power play.

If something went wrong out in the desolate mountains of Iran, that was the end. No one would be coming to rescue them. Their country would refuse to acknowledge that they even existed — that they ever had been her citizens, much less her warriors. That was the whole idea. Deniability. Even if the mission was a success, if they made it back to the extraction zone with the missing archaeologists, they would receive none of the credit for it. They would slip away like wraiths into the night, going back to their jobs until the call came again. Glory was dangerous

One of Haldeman's methods of operation, the reporters knew, was 'deniability.' This was the device of insulating himself from controversial decisions by implementing them through others so that, later, he could deny involvement... Deniability was the rule in the White House staff system; the bosses stood behind an impenetrable beaver dam. If Haldeman stood behind Watergate, it was unlikely he had left tracks.

Fascists praise violence as an instrument of social domination (though often in plausibly deniable terms when such statements are made for public consumption and recruitment) and, as Walter Benjamin showed many decades ago, venerate it as an aesthetic object. By contrast, antifascists must engage in open self-criticism to prevent martial values from superseding political objectives, in other words, to prevent violence from superseding the diversity of tactics.

A “fair review” meant a dozen people second-guessing each other and trying not to make any decision that would force them to put their signature on something. Plausible deniability.

The taskforce members were so invested in his tales none of them noticed the maître d′, whose back was currently turned to them, despatch a short text message on his cell.

Many psychologists have studied the effects of having “plausible deniability.” In one such study, subjects performed a task and were then given a slip of paper and a verbal confirmation of how much they were to be paid. But when they took the slip to another room to get their money, the cashier misread one digit and handed them too much money. Only 20 percent spoke up and corrected the mistake.24

But the story changed when the cashier asked them if the payment was correct. In that case, 60 percent said no and returned the extra money. Being asked directly removes plausible deniability; it would take a direct lie to keep the money. As a result, people are three times more likely to be honest.

I fear women who will do and say anything for attention and money. Who will hate you for calling them out. Who have plausible deniability. Who want to be correct all the time. Who never take any accountability. Who don't take no for an answer. Who always want their way. Those ones are dangerous and are capable of doing unspeakable shocking things.

Africa is not getting better but it is getting worse because its government and leaders are suffering from plausible deniability. That is what is destroying Africa.

Like Darwin’s theory of evolution, Big Bang cosmology has undergone that curious social process in which a scientific theory is promoted to a secular myth. The two theories serve as points of certainty in an intellectual culture that is otherwise disposed to give the benefit of the doubt to doubt itself.

Over the course of his political career, Donald Trump perfected a three-step tango with the radical right—a dance in which he’d pull them close in an embrace, spin away while staying connected, and then pull them back to close quarters. Acknowledge, deny, validate. Lather, rinse, repeat….It was a dance that enabled Trump to court and embrace the radical right with a wink and a nod while maintaining a plausible deniability that he supported them. All of them, Trump and extremists alike, were united in their shared reality: the alternative universe of right-wing conspiracism, founded on the essential belief that the world is being secretly controlled by a cabal of elite “globalists” whose agenda is to place the world, America particularly, under their totalitarian control.

They had lost all sense of the art, always to provide one’s prince with the refuge of credible deniability, what the British called a scintilla of truth.

Unprecedented state secrecy gave the power elite vastly expanded realms in which to pursue desired political ends. Its dimensions and details obscured by state secrecy, exceptionism—the institutionalized abrogation of the rule of law—allowed for the state to decisively influence politics at key moments in a top-down, authoritarian manner while practices of plausible deniability preserved a degree of democratic legitimacy.

You want to tell me what you’re doing in my room?” I demanded, my voice guttural and full of lust that sounded enough like rage for plausible deniability. Those two switches had always been a bit crossed for me.

One table over from where copies of The First American Bible were being sold (for a discounted price of $149.99), Road to Majority attendees crowded around a rack of T-shirts that carried slogans such as “Faith Over Fear” and “This Means War.” The top seller, offered in at least seven different colors, was “Let’s Go Brandon,” a bowdlerized euphemism that conservatives chant as a substitute for “Fuck Joe Biden.” The shirts even included a hashtag—#FJB—that jettisoned any plausible deniability. When I asked Dave Klucken, the booth’s proprietor, what brought him all the way from Loganville, Georgia, to peddle these goods, he replied, “We’ve taken God out of America.” Did he really think #FJB was an appropriate way to bring God back? Klucken shrugged. “People keep on asking for it,” he told me. “You’ve got to give

The words clandestine and covert do not mean the same thing, even though they are often used interchangeably. Clandestinity conceals the operation, while covertness conceals the operator. Most of what has been discussed previously in this book falls into the category of clandestine activities-inter-nal security and intelligence collection operations performed in such a way that they are not publicly visible. Clandestine means secret; something is done so that only those involved in it know it is happening. Most intelligence operations are clandestine, because if they became public, sensitive sources and methods could be damaged or eliminated. However, the sponsoring government does not usually hide its involvement in the operation. For example, when an intelligence service pitches a HUMINT source, the source usually knows for what government he/she is working, unless the service is using a false flag to deliberately misrepresent its affiliation. Covert means the sponsoring government does not reveal its involvement. Although covert operations are usually clandestine in the planning stages, the result of a covert activity often becomes public, even intentionally. That includes covert sabotage, in which an object is damaged: for example, when a bomb explodes or a computer system goes offline. The primary element of covert activities is the phrase "plausible deniability," which means the action is visible, but the perpetrator's identity is hidden.

aren’t sure if it’s genuine or not without further

So much of college is girls labeling other girls terrible things when they don’t like their behavior, but using concerned language so they have plausible deniability if they get accused of being bitches: That girl is not cheerfully doing what the rest of us are doing, so she is probably “depressed” or “has an eating disorder” or “is weird with guys,” and so on.

We're instant ambassadors. Just add robot body and voila! If they'd told us anything real, they might have had to kill us.

People must be right sometimes, must feel good sometimes, or we’d never have a herd. They would just give up. The occasional rightness fosters false confidence, reinforcing the crowd’s wisdom. It is plausible deniability for TGH. It is how TGH repeatedly sucks the crowd in, makes them ignore negatives, then doles out maximum pain and suffering.

Eric was listening to the managers, who were doing their old-school best to control the flow of information upward (the regurgitation and parsing technique works both ways, as any red-blooded middle manager worth his weight in plausible deniability knows full well). But Larry was listening to the engineers—not directly but via a smart little tool he had implemented called “snippets.” Snippets are like weekly status reports that cover a person’s most important activities for a week, but in a short, pithy format, so they can be written in just a few minutes or compiled (in a doc or draft email) as the week goes on. There is no set format, but a good set of snippets includes the most important activities and achievements of the week and quickly conveys what the person is working on right now, from cryptic (“SMB Framework,” “10% list”) to mundane (“completed quarterly performance reviews,” “started family vacation”). Like OKRs, they are shared with everyone. Snippets are posted on Moma, where anyone can see anyone else’s, and for years Larry received a weekly compendium of the snippets from engineering and product leads. That way he always could get at the truth.

How long did she work for you?” Myron asked. “Oh, I don’t know,” Arthur said. “A year or two, I guess. I really don’t remember. Chance and I weren’t responsible for household help, of course. That was more Mother’s doing.” Already with the “plausible deniability.” Interesting. “Do you remember why she left your family’s employ?” Arthur Bradford’s smile stayed frozen, but something was happening to his eyes. His pupils were expanding, and for a moment it looked like he was having trouble focusing. He turned to Chance. They both looked uncertain now, not sure how to handle this sudden frontal assault, not wanting to answer but not wanting to lose the potentially massive Lock-Horne Securities support either. Arthur took the lead. “No, I don’t remember.” When in doubt, evade. “Do you, Chance?” Chance spread his hands and gave them the boyish smile. “So many people in and out.” He looked to Win as if to say, You know how it is. But Win’s eyes, as usual, offered no solace.

She was, after all, just following the logical progression from the figure-hugging spandex bodysuits that were so popular lately. “Deniably nude” was avant-garde!

Countries such as Iran and North Korea (of which more in the next chapter) cannot hope to match the United States in their ability to project conventional or nuclear force; what the Pentagon describes as “kinetic power.” Cyberattacks, however, present second- and even third-tier military powers with a fresh avenue for projecting force in the heartland of their enemies, all while enjoying that additional element of deniability.

Delores points at me. And now she looks pissed. “That, I believe. Fucking prick.” She holds her hands up. “But it’s okay. Don’t panic. I’ll take care of everything. We have this new fuel at the lab that’s ready for animal testing. He won’t know what hit him—I can slip it right through the vents.” She turns to Billy. “You’re in charge of the garden hose and duct tape.” Then she looks at me. “I’ll need your keys and security code.” I shake my head. “Delores, you can’t gas Drew to death.” “It might not kill him. If I had to guess, I’d say the odds for survival are fifty-fifty.” “Delores . . .” “Okay, thirty-seventy. But still, that gives us plausible deniability.” My mother and George walk into the room, interrupting the diabolical plan. My mom hugs Dee Dee tight. “Hi, honey! It’s so good to see you. Are you hungry?” “Starved.” She looks at George. “Hey George, how they hanging?” I think George Reinhart is a little afraid of Delores. Maybe more than a little. He adjusts his glasses. “They’re . . . hanging well . . . thank you.

For many years, it was assumed that successful racial appeals had to be offered subtly, to provide voters a kind of internal plausible deniability, so that they could tell themselves they weren't being racist when they responded to such appeals. By the time 2016 came around, this was no longer true. White identity had become important enough that Trump could succeed by wearing his bigotry on his sleeve.

Consider a conversation I had with a white friend. She was telling me about a "white) couple she knew who had just moved to New Orleans and bought a house for a mere twenty-five thousand dollars. "Of course," she immediately added, "they also had to buy a gun, and Joan is afraid to leave the house." I immediately knew they had bought a home in a black neighborhood. This was a moment of white racial bonding between this couple who shared the story of racial danger and my friend, and then between my friend and me, as she repeated the story. Through this tale, the four of us fortified familiar images of the horror of black space and drew boundaries between "us" and "them" without ever having to directly name race or openly express our disdain for black space. Notice that the need for a gun is a key part of this story--it would not have the degree of social capital it holds if the emphasis were on the price of the house alone. Rather, the story’s emotional power rests on why a house would be that cheap--because it is in a black neighborhood where white people literally might not get out alive. Yet while very negative and stereotypical representations of blacks were reinforced in that exchange, not naming race provided plausible deniability. In fact, in preparing to share this incident, I texted my friend and asked her the name of the city her friends had moved to. I also wanted to confirm my assumption that she was talking about a black neighborhood. I share the text exchange here: "Hey, what city did you say your friends had bought a house in for $25,000?" "New Orleans. They said they live in a very bad neighborhood and they each have to have a gun to protect themselves. I wouldn’t pay 5 cents for that neighborhood." "I assume it’s a black neighborhood?" "Yes. You get what you pay for. I’d rather pay $500,00 and live somewhere where I wasn’t afraid." "I wasn’t asking because I want to live there. I’m writing about this in my book, the way that white people talk about race without ever coming out and talking about race." "I wouldn’t want you to live there it’s too far away from me!" Notice that when I simply ask what city the house is in, she repeats the story about the neighborhood being so bad that her friends need guns. When I ask if the neighborhood is black, she is comfortable confirming that it is. But when I tell her that I am interested in how whites talks about race without talking about race, she switches the narrative. Now her concern is about not wanting me to live so far away. This is a classic example of aversive racism: holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs. Readers may be asking themselves, "But if the neighborhood is really dangerous, why is acknowledging this danger a sign of racism?" Research in implicit bias has shown that perceptions of criminal activity are influenced by race. White people will perceive danger simply by the presence of black people; we cannot trust our perceptions when it comes to race and crimes. But regardless of whether the neighborhood is actually more or less dangerous than other neighborhoods, what is salient about this exchange is how it functions racially and what that means for the white people engaged in it. For my friend and me, this conversation did not increase our awareness of the danger of some specific neighborhood. Rather, the exchange reinforced our fundamental beliefs about black people. (p. 44-45)

I’m so crazy in love with him, and I just want to be with him… To hold his hand, and buy him Twizzlers, and listen to him talk about reptilians. I want to support him like he’s supported me, and I want to see his eyes sparkle when he’s excited. I’m in love with Avi Vega, wholly, truly, un- fucking- deniably.

THIS GIVES US Dulles in Dallas, scant weeks before the assassination; Al Ulmer, the foreign-based CIA coup expert, in Texas and visiting with Poppy Bush; E. Howard Hunt, top Dulles operative and covert operations specialist, said by his own son to have been in Dallas; and Poppy Bush in Dallas— until he leaves town either the night before or on the very day of the assassination and places his covering alibi phone call from Tyler, Texas.68 Oswald’s all-too-public “friend” George de Mohrenschildt is safely off on important business in Haiti, and D. Harold Byrd is off on a safari. Again, this scenario may mean nothing. It all may just be coincidence. But the confluences among this cast of characters are at the very least remarkable. It does not take a hypercharged imagination to construe a larger story of which they might be part, or to wonder why these people might have gone to such lengths to create “deniability” concerning any connections to the events in Dallas—unless they had a connection.

As they sped northwards, Hawkins texted Lotte on his smartphone, advising her they were on their way.

I know an off-road track just up ahead,

Unfortunately for him, his students knew nothing about football, other than American Football, which was a totally different game,

Wait here, but be ready to back me up if there’s a problem,

steady rate of knots.

Hawkins was pleased to see she’d had the foresight to use a silencer.

rooves,

Radio signals were more reliable than cell phone signals in this remote part of West Africa.

Hawkins was armed with a walkie-talkie, two-day radio

Deniability was next to godliness in Westminster's corridors, and godliness itself second only to an unassailable majority.