A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the major abortion drug rulings, the expulsion (and return) of lawmakers in the Tennessee House and Senator Bob Casey’s (D-PA) announcement of his reelection run.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Late yesterday evening, The Washington Post published the first detailed look at just how the currently unfolding and massive leak of classified U.S. intelligence happened. It’s an almost literally incredible story and some of it does strain credulity. The gist of the story is that an early-to-mid 20s member of the U.S. military with wide-ranging access to highly classified intelligence set up a Discord chat group made up of pandemic-bored gamers in which he operated as something between a guru and a cult leader. The group was a few dozen men, many of them teens and some from abroad. The Post describes him as a “young, charismatic gun enthusiast.”

He sketched out a quasi-paranoid anti-statist worldview, and mixed garden variety far-right and racist memes with emotional support and guidance. Gun worship was also central. He claimed to be able to foretell events and in some cases appeared able to do so. At the center of his enterprise was sharing classified material, which, over the last month, started spreading from the original Discord server and shaking up international relations around the world. The classified documents were the validator of his inside status, his role at the center of the overbearing American state. In a sense he was running his own private Q cult, with a small group of bored-depressed gamer teens. Only in this case, “OG,” as he was called in this tiny community, really did have access to some of the U.S. government’s most closely guarded secrets.

If this sounds unreal, you’ve got it about right. One surreal passage in the Post story describes getting the permission of the parents of one of its sources since the source is still a minor and apparently came into “OG’s” orbit as a young teen.