Leigh McGowan - Politics Girl - with Teri Kanefield
Why did he want it released when it makes him look bad? Trump always makes things worse for Trump (thank you, Bob Cesca) ..."because no publicity is bad publicity" is his mantra. Exactly what Ms Kanefield said - to him, it's just a matter of keeping himself at the center of the conversation. The consequences don't matter because most people won't remember any of it 3 days from now anyway, and by then, he'll have given us 5 other things to worry about.
It's episodic. He puts on his little pageant, intended to create confusion, and the reaction to it (good or bad) helps him find an opportunity to cash in on whatever comes of it, which in turn drives the script for the next episode.
"In confusion there is opportunity" --Tony Curtis as Lt Holden, Operation Petticoat - 1959
...or maybe it was Sun Tzu - ca 6th Century BCE(?)
I won't say he gets it, because he didn't commit to voting against these bills, or trying to amend existing laws - he just lodged his complaints. And while that's a start - a pretty good start considering what some of these yahoos are doing and saying - it's one guy in one small-ish state.
I don't know how you read some amendments to the US Constitution and not come away with the idea that privacy is at the center of the debate over what rights we do and don't have here in USAmerica Inc.
A1: My private thoughts are my own and the government can go suck eggs.
A3: I get to decide who does and who doesn't stay in my own private housing.
A4: My person and my place and my stuff are private and nobody else's business.
A5: I'll keep my answers to myself so the government can't use my words against me.
A6: Government can't strip me of my privacy without due process.
We’re About to Find Out What Happens When Privacy Is All but Gone
Whenever I see one of those billboards that read: “Privacy. That’s iPhone,” I’m overcome by the urge to cast my own iPhone into a river. Of lava.
That’s not because the iPhone is any better or worse than other smartphones when it comes to digital privacy. (I’d take an iPhone over an Android phone in a second; I enjoy the illusion of control over my digital life as much as the next person.)
What’s infuriating is the idea that carrying around the most sophisticated tracking and monitoring device ever forged by the hand of man is consistent with any understanding of privacy. It’s not. At least not with any conception of privacy our species had pre-iPhone.
Reconciling the idea of privacy with our digital world demands embracing a profound cognitive dissonance. To exist in 2022 is to be surveilled, tracked, tagged and monitored — most often for profit. Short of going off the grid, there’s no way around it.
Consider just last week: Apple released a surprise software update for its iPhones, iPads and Macs meant to remove vulnerabilities the company says may have been exploited by sophisticated hackers. The week before that, a former Google engineer discovered that Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was using a piece of code to track users of the Facebook and Instagram apps across the internet without their knowledge. In Greece, the prime minister and his government have been consumed by a widening scandal in which they are accused of spying on the smartphones of an opposition leader and a journalist.
And this month Amazon announced that it was creating a show called “Ring Nation” — a sort of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” made up of footage recorded by the company’s Ring doorbells. These video doorbells, sold by Amazon and other companies, are now watching millions of American homes, and they are often used by police departments as, effectively, surveillance networks. All in the name of fighting crime, of course.
Step back, and what we’re looking at is a world where privacy simply doesn’t exist anymore. Instead of talking about old notions of privacy, and how to defend or get back to that ideal state, we should start talking about what comes next.
That reality is becoming clearer to Americans after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, which eliminated the federal right to abortion. They now understand that their phone location data, internet searches and purchase history are all fair game for the police — especially in states that do not protect abortion rights, and where women can be hunted down for their health care choices. If the courts once defended the right to have an abortion as part of a broader right to privacy, by vaporizing that right, the Roberts court shattered many of Americans’ conceptions of privacy as well.
In 2019, Times Opinion investigated the location tracking industry. Whistleblowers gave us a data set that included millions of pings from individual cellphones around daily commutes, churches and mosques, abortion clinics, the Pentagon, even the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. “If the government ordered Americans to continuously provide such precise, real-time information about themselves, there would be a revolt,” the editorial board wrote.
Yet despite years of talk, Congress is no closer to passing robust privacy legislation than it was two decades ago when the idea first came up. Even their baby steps aren’t encouraging. Two bills in the current session aim to roll back some of this mass monitoring around abortion and reproductive health in particular, although neither one is likely to pass.
One, the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, would prevent law enforcement and government agencies from purchasing location data and other sensitive information from data brokers. Another, the My Body, My Data Act, would forbid tech companies to keep, use or share some personal health information absent written consent. Neither bill would prevent police officers with a court order from getting such information.
Some tech companies, like Google, have announced voluntary measures to protect some user data around reproductive health care. A group of hundreds of Google employees is circulating a petition to strengthen privacy protections for users who look for information about abortion through its search engine.
But even if those bills pass and some tech companies take more steps, there are simply too many tech companies, government entities, data brokers, internet service providers and others tracking everything we do.
Protecting digital privacy is not in the interest of the government, and voters don’t seem to care much about privacy at all. Nor is it in the interest of tech companies, which sell user private data for a profit to advertisers. There are too many cameras, cell towers and inscrutable artificial intelligence engines in operation to live an unobserved life.
For years, privacy advocates, who foresaw the contours of the surveilled world we now live in, warned that privacy was a necessary prerequisite for democracy, human rights and a flourishing of the human spirit. We’re about to find out what happens when that privacy has all but vanished.
It turns out Trump had taken hundreds of classified documents on his way out of the White House.
The 'why' question has not yet been fully satisfied, except in the "L'tat c'est moi" sense as articulated by Maggie Haberman last week.
And maybe it's just that simple - "Try to resist attributing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence" - but this is Trump, so there's always a few nefarious angles to consider.
Maybe he had to grab those documents to satisfy demands from - oh, I don't know, Putin?
Maybe he decided he might be able to use them against someone else?
Maybe he thought he could use them as leverage against being brought up on charges
Maybe it's strictly commercial - he thought the documents would make for some good auction material?
Who knows?
"No documentation has come to light confirming that Mr. Trump declassified the material, and the potential crimes cited by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago would not hinge on the classification status of the documents."
Trump Had More Than 300 Classified Documents at Mar-a-Lago
The National Archives found more than 150 sensitive documents when it got a first batch of material from the former president in January, helping to explain the Justice Department’s urgent response.
The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.
In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.
The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.
And the extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Mr. Trump left office, suggested to officials that the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators, or both.
The specific nature of the sensitive material that Mr. Trump took from the White House remains unclear. But the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.
Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.
The highly sensitive nature of some of the material in the boxes prompted archives officials to refer the matter to the Justice Department, which within months had convened a grand jury investigation.
Aides to Mr. Trump turned over a few dozen additional sensitive documents during a visit to Mar-a-Lago by Justice Department officials in early June. At the conclusion of the search this month, officials left with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified, comprising scores of additional documents. One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.
The Justice Department investigation is continuing, suggesting that officials are not certain whether they have recovered all the presidential records that Mr. Trump took with him from the White House.
Even after the extraordinary decision by the F.B.I. to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, investigators have sought additional surveillance footage from the club, people familiar with the matter said.
More Coverage of the F.B.I. Search of Trump’s Home
Trump’s Reaction: In the wake of the search, Mr. Trump has accused the nation’s justice system of being exactly what he tried to turn it into: a political weapon for a president.
It was the second such demand for the club’s security tapes, said the people familiar with the matter, and underscored that authorities are still scrutinizing how the classified documents were handled by Mr. Trump and his staff before the search.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.
Mr. Trump’s allies insist that the president had a “standing order” to declassify material that left the Oval Office for the White House residence, and have claimed that the General Services Administration, not Mr. Trump’s staff, packed the boxes with the documents.
No documentation has come to light confirming that Mr. Trump declassified the material, and the potential crimes cited by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago would not hinge on the classification status of the documents.
National Archives officials spent much of 2021 trying to get back material from Mr. Trump, after learning that roughly two dozen boxes of presidential records material had been lingering in the White House residence for several months. Under the Presidential Records Act, all official material remains government property and has to be provided to the archives at the end of a president’s term.
Among the items they knew were missing were Mr. Trump’s original letters from the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and the note that President Barack Obama had left Mr. Trump before he left office.
Two former White House officials, who had been designated as among Mr. Trump’s representatives with the archives, received calls and tried to facilitate the documents’ return.
Mr. Trump resisted those calls, describing the boxes of documents as “mine,” according to three advisers familiar with his comments.
Soon after beginning their investigation early this year, Justice Department officials came to believe there were additional classified documents that they needed to collect. In May, after conducting a series of witness interviews, the department issued a subpoena for the return of remaining classified material, according to people familiar with the episode.
On June 3, Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the national security division of the Justice Department, went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, and retrieve any remaining classified material to satisfy the subpoena. Mr. Corcoran went through the boxes himself to identify classified material beforehand, according to two people familiar with his efforts.
Mr. Corcoran showed Mr. Bratt the basement storage room where, he said, the remaining material had been kept.
Mr. Trump briefly came to see the investigators during the visit.
Mr. Bratt and the agents who joined him were given a sheaf of classified material, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Corcoran then drafted a statement, which Ms. Bobb, who is said to be the custodian of the documents, signed. It asserted that, to the best of her knowledge, all classified material that was there had been returned, according to two people familiar with the statement.
Mr. Corcoran did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Ms. Bobb did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Soon after that visit, investigators, who were interviewing several people in Mr. Trump’s circle about the documents, came to believe that there were other presidential records that had not been turned over, according to the people familiar with the matter.
On June 22, the Justice Department subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage, which included a well-trafficked hallway outside the storage area, the people said.
The club had surveillance footage going back 60 days for some areas of the property, stretching back to late April of this year.
While much of the footage showed hours of club employees walking through the busy corridor, some of it raised concerns for investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. It revealed people moving boxes in and out, and in some cases, appearing to change the containers some documents were held in. The footage also showed other parts of the property.
In seeking a second round of security footage, the Justice Department wants to review tapes for the weeks leading up to the Aug. 8 search.
Federal officials have indicated that their initial goal has been to secure any classified documents Mr. Trump was holding at Mar-a-Lago, a pay-for-membership club where there is little control over who comes in as guests. It remains to be seen whether anyone will face criminal charges stemming from the investigation.
The combination of witness interviews and the initial security footage led Justice Department officials to begin drafting a request for a search warrant, the people familiar with the matter said.
The F.B.I. agents who conducted the search found the additional documents in the storage area in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, as well as in a container in a closet in Mr. Trump’s office, the people said.
Mr. Trump’s allies have attacked the law enforcement agencies, accusing the investigators of being partisan.
The intense public interest has now spurred a legal fight to see the search warrant’s underlying affidavit. On Monday, a federal magistrate issued a formal order directing the Justice Department to send him under seal proposed redactions to the affidavit underlying the warrant used to search Mar-a-Lago by Thursday, accompanied by a memo explaining its justifications.
In the order, the judge, Bruce E. Reinhart, said he was inclined to release portions of the sealed affidavit but wanted to wait until he saw the government’s redactions before making a decision.
"I don't know anything, and I didn't see anything, and if I did, I'm really just too dumb and clumsy to pull it off. Besides, what about Nancy Pelosi? Now excuse me, but I gotta go steal my paycheck and syphon off a few billion tax dollars for Mr Koch."
On the Ongoing Influence of QAnon and Its Self-Made Mythologies
A small crowd gathered on Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on a cool early November day in 2021, full of excitement and powered by secret knowledge. It was almost a year after the last Q drop, and three years into the COVID-19 pandemic. But the people assembled that morning, in the solemn place where John F. Kennedy was assassinated nearly 60 years prior, weren’t worrying about getting sick. They certainly weren’t wearing masks. Those were slaver muzzles designed to make you stupid. What they did have were a few red ties, a plethora of bedazzled homemade signs and shirts, and the certain knowledge that everything in the world was about to change—within minutes.
The 100 people who had come together that morning were mostly older and mostly women. They sang classic pop songs of their youth, often over the interminable and daily livestreams they were putting out on Telegram and Zoom. They shouted various numbers and slogans seemingly at random—inscrutable codes with hidden meaning that only they understood. They broadcast their arguments with the “comatose vertical meatsacks” who accosted them—their smug nickname for the normies who weren’t interested in the beautiful new world that was about to unveil itself.
More than anything, they waited.
They were waiting for John F. Kennedy’s son, JFK Jr., who, according to their self-made mythology, did not die in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. He was alive, and had been waiting for the right moment to return to public life. And even more exciting, he would return alongside other “dead” celebrities who had gone underground for various reasons—Michael Jackson, Prince, even John John’s long-dead father. Never mind that JFK would be 104 years old in 2021 and had been so riddled with health problems that it’s likely he wouldn’t have lived to see the 1970s. He was coming back. They were all coming back.
And the people waiting in the increasingly intense rain that day knew not only that he was coming back, but exactly when—on November 2, 2021at 12:30 PM local time, if you want to be precise. The prophecy of JFK Jr. returning had been foretold not by Q—Q had simply answered “no” when asked whether JFK Jr. was alive—but by one of Q’s many acolytes who found meaning in the random noise.
The person who persuaded those people in Dealey Plaza to leave their families behind and wait for a dead Kennedy was a Seattle-area demolition contractor with a history of anti-Semitism and an ability to decode the future in random numbers, ironically using a simplified version of the Hebrew-language alphanumeric cipher known as gematria, to create a vast mythology of hidden events and secrets. “A” equaled “1”, “B” equaled “2”, etc. Like many basic concepts in the conspiracy theory world, gematria (pronounced with a hard “G”) is real. But it’s also been twisted and abused by pseudohistorical crankery, first with “The Bible Code,” and now this—100 middle-aged Trumpers singing “Beat It” in the rain, waiting for dead people to return and make America great again.
Calling himself “Negative48”—the “48” being the supposed gematria value of the letters in the word “evil”—Michael Protzman was once just another QAnon influencer with a few thousand followers on Telegram. He was neck-deep in all of Q’s subsidiary conspiracy theories, lecturing his small following about the evils of “Jewish leaders,” promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy films, and telling people to buy worthless Vietnamese currency that would make them rich when it revalued. It was a rap that was instantly familiar to both Q believers and those who studied the movement. But for the same reason we turn up the volume when “Beat It” plays on the radio, Q believers went for it—the familiar brings comfort. So within a few months, a small, devoted following built up around Protzman’s Negative48 character created an entirely new mythology through a combination of gematria, Q drops, and wishful thinking.
The rain poured down and John F. Kennedy Jr. stubbornly failed to emerge. But just as Q believers had been doing for years, the group which came to call itself Negative48 stuck around. (Just like QAnon, the cult often used Protzman’s nickname to refer to itself.) Members swamped a Rolling Stones concert that night, claiming that Mick Jagger would reveal himself to be JFK Jr. They stayed through Thanksgiving, as Protzman began to control even the movements of his followers, telling them when to go outside, when to look up or down, and what to eat. They stayed through Christmas. To keep themselves going, they cranked out dozens of crowd-funding efforts, starting another as soon as one was de-platformed. They were generally ignored by local authorities who couldn’t do anything about the group until it actually broke a law. And they stayed as winter turned to spring. They might still be there now.
In the post-Trump world, the QAnon movement split along two parallel tracks. Sometimes they happened to intersect, but many other times they went their own way. Most believers went down one, a few went down the other. But both are critical to understanding why this movement persisted long after any hope of “The Storm’s” arrival had passed.
One track was a mainstreaming of Q’s core tenets to the point where the basics of QAnon—the drops, the obscure “comms”—were no longer necessary, or even desirable. Q was no longer the cool, secret club that you had speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It was just “conservatism” now. The tenuous coalition of MAGA-devoted Q believers and more progressive pandemic truthers that lurched out of Facebook in 2020 had become one unified front in 2021. In countless school board meetings, city council sessions, protests, “health freedom” conferences, and segments on major right-wing media, the same story was being told, and it was a story that even the most casual Q believer would have no problem embracing.
The other track was much farther on the fringe than even most Trumpists were willing to travel. This was where Michael Protzman and his devoted cultists in Negative48 rode, along with other, even more outwardly racist and ant-Semitic new Q promoters. On this track, Q drops were still gospel and the “comms” still were being decoded for all their secrets. And there were a lot of secrets. Trump and JFK Jr. spoke in number codes with Prince and Elvis, quantum medical beds and NESARA would deliver permanent health and prosperity to all, and Trump was still actually the president of a “devolved” military government. Fewer people were in this part of Q’s big tent, but they got a lot of baffled media attention for their bizarre antics—gematria cultists waiting for JFK and drinking industrial bleach out of a communal bowl to fight COVID will get clicks.
This track, the Negative48 track, was quite possibly sending its members to their doom. The other track, the mainstream one, was possibly sending everyone else.
Local Action = National Impact
That slogan was coined by QAnon hero General Michael Flynn. Faced with crushing legal bills and no help from Trump, Flynn often could be found headlining an endless array of gatherings with names like “ReAwaken America” and “God & Country Patriot Revival,” meant to display a folksy middle finger to the COVID-fearful establishment. At these events, which often sold VIP tickets for thousands of dollars, a host of semi-well-known names from a variety of fringes spoke alongside Flynn. A typical conference would offer incendiary speeches from influencers in the stolen election universe, “constitutional sheriffs” claiming that the federal government is an illegal scheme, decodings from the last remaining QAnon promoters, independent media who had been “censored” by the mainstream for their views, and alternative medicine heavyweights spewing conspiracy theories about the government suppressing COVID cures. You even got the occasional serving Republican politician. All of them excelled at separating believers from their money.
When he wasn’t selling Flynn-branded women’s running tank-tops or spreading deranged COVID conspiracy theories on Telegram, Flynn’s apocalyptic ramblings often focused on what he deemed “local action” having a “national impact.” At one June 2021 conference, headlined by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Flynn raged against the school board machine, thundering, “We cannot allow school boards to dictate what is happening in our schools. We dictate that.”
Inspired by the desire of Q promoters that America be “taken back” from what they saw as the godless transgender vaccinator hordes of the left, Q believers began making spectacles of themselves at school board and city council meetings. Using public comment time, they blathered conspiracy theories and threatened baseless lawsuits. The majority didn’t even have kids in their local district.
Q’s encroachment into local politics was its biggest mainstream growth vector in the post-Trump era. The media headlines might have been about Negative48’s antics or the squabbles between major Q promoters fighting over pieces of the same grifting pie. But the story with far more importance was unfolding in the sparely attended and barely observed mechanics of local government. The roots of democracy were being hijacked by fringe activists and conspiracy theory cranks—and they had a message that came straight from figures like Mike Flynn.
In the summer and fall of 2021, “local action” meant rambling speeches spouting Q-approved moral panic about “woke ideology” and Critical Race Theory, vaccines being forced on unsuspecting toddlers, the pandemic being prolonged to enforce the controlling mandates of Dr. Fauci, and masks making it easier for sex traffickers to target kids. Some of these videos went viral, getting millions of views—inflated in some part by liberals passing them around to mock them. Some believers took Flynn’s call even further, as they ran for office at the state, local, and party level. Stolen election believers—many of whom had endorsed QAnon on social media—were running for critical secretary of state positions in swing states, trying to seize the power to overturn elections.
And dozens of candidates who publicly endorsed some part of the Q mythology won elections—for the Clark County School Board, encompassing Las Vegas; the City Council of Huntington Beach, CA; the San Luis Coastal Unified School District’s board in sleepy San Luis Obispo, CA; the mayor of tiny Sequim, WA; and many more. They even got their hands into the mechanisms that ran elections—Q believer Ben Johnson was appointed head of the Spalding County Board of Elections and Registration, helping to set election guidelines in a critical Georgia county. What could go wrong?
Even QAnon luminaries got in on the act, apparently tired of waiting for “The Storm” to usher in utopia. Tracy “Beanz” Diaz had been one of the earliest evangelists of the Q movement, and in 2021, she was elected to the South Carolina GOP’s executive committee. She received only 188 votes, but like so many other barely visible elections, it was enough. And the likeliest candidate to have been the last iteration of Q, Ron Watkins, ran a chaotic and barely-funded candidacy for the Arizona 2nd Congressional District, on a platform centered on defeating “communism” in local schools and slaying the Critical Race Theory beast. (Ron has no school-age children living in the United States.)
But as thick as the gloom is, there are glimmers of hope to be found. The national coverage of QAnon believers and conspiracy cranks running for local office inspired candidates to run expressly on anti-conspiracy platforms. One such slate actually won city council seats in Sequim, the same small Washington town roiled by a QAnon-aligned mayor. The grassroots progressive electoral organization Run For Something, which formed in the wake of Trump’s win in 2016, singled out QAnon candidates and publicly vowed to recruit liberal challengers to run against them. And many Q-aligned potential politicos struggled to have their candidacies taken seriously. Ron Watkins may have as much name recognition as anyone running in Arizona, but his campaign had raised just $30,000 as of February 2022—lagging hundreds of thousands of dollars behind the leading GOP candidate in his district.
As the world entered year three of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans responded to the continued upheaval by utterly losing their minds. “Unruly passenger incidents” on airplanes, a euphemism that almost always involved passengers becoming aggressive with airline staff over masks, were at their highest rate on record. Workers at vaccine clinics were attacked and called murderers by COVID deniers. Anti-mask parents physically assaulted teachers over school masking mandates. And in an incident with echoes of the “Grass Valley Charter School Fundraiser” fiasco, Q-driven MAGA diehards forced the National Butterfly Center, located just north of the US-Mexico border in McAllen, TX, to close—because they believed it was a hub of drug smuggling and sex trafficking, and were threatening to storm it, guns in hand.
The madness gripping America wasn’t all linked explicitly to QAnon. But even when there weren’t clear links, it was impossible to deny that the violent chaos touted as the aftermath of “The Storm” (remember Drop #1’s promise of “Marines and National Guard” called up to police the streets after Hillary’s arrest) had seeped into everyday life in COVID-weary, Biden-hating, cancel culture-fearing conservative communities. There never needed to be another Q drop, another decoding thread, or another Q T-shirt printed. The brain worms were loose, and they were hungry.
In particular, Q’s residue was all over the Republican malaise related to COVID. As the omicron variant sent case numbers skyrocketing around the world in the winter of 2021, QAnon promoters were among the most visible anti-vaccine advocates pushing out lies and conspiracy theories meant to dissuade people from getting vaccinated and boosted. Across countless Telegram posts and dozens of their “health freedom” tent revival events, the message was both clear and completely contradicted by the available evidence: they believed the pandemic was over, and any mandates related to vaccines or masks were totalitarian control mechanisms that were what was actually killing people. Only occasionally did reality creep in—as when a spate of virulently COVID-denying right-wing media personalities and conspiracy believers died of COVID, including conspiracy legend and QAnon promoter Robert David Steele.
The stolen election industry and the grift around it were also thriving. They lasted well beyond the shelf life of the actual election, which even Trump seemed to admit he los. Even as they feuded amongst themselves over money and credit, QAnon personalities like Mike Flynn, Lin Wood, and Sidney Powell still pumped out a relentless stream of conspiracy theories about Biden’s election win eventually being undone, promising they would “fix 2020” as a steady stream of donations rolled in. Other new conspiracy promoters found fame and fortune in the Biden-era landscape, using Q as a jumping off point for wherever they wanted to take their fans—and they didn’t all involve JFK Jr. ripping off his Mick Jagger mask.
One was the viral series of blog posts called “Devolution,” which posited that Trump was secretly running the country through a “devolved” military government while Joe Biden doddered away on a fake White House set. Unfolding over dozens of almost incomprehensible blog posts, videos, podcasts, and Telegram posts, “Devolution” was a comforting fiction that netted its creator, a North Dakota school employee who went by “Patel Patriot,” thousands of dollars per month in subscriptions from fans waiting to see what would happen next. Another sect believed that Trump’s election wasn’t legitimate—in fact, no election since 1871 held any validity—because Washington DC had quietly become a corporation that year. The details are vague and meaningless, but the upshot was always the same: The bad guys will get theirs; the good guys will deliver the blow—and the special people will be rewarded for their belief.
That’s what’s kept Q’s mythology alive even as the Q persona itself receded in importance. Because that’s what conspiracy theories have always been about—feeling special. You know the secrets “they” don’t want you to know, you know what “really” happened in some historical event, you know that Fauci and Biden and Gates and all the other liberal do-gooders are actually genocidal maniacs, you know that Q and Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson are patriots, and you know more than “the experts”.
Q is like every other conspiracy theory in that way. And whatever absorbs and replaces Q will be like that, too. Conspiracy theories will always be popular, because they make you feel like you’re smart, important, and part of a community.
And it’s that sense of community that kept that flock of believers in Dallas, long after the rest of the world had forgotten about them and moved on to the next freak show. These people, like Q’s faithful, were in it together and for the long haul. They were in it for each other. Where we go one, we go all.
US issues western water cuts as drought leaves Colorado River near ‘tipping point’
Arizona, Nevada and Mexico affected as federal government steps in after states failed to reach agreement
After western US states failed to reach agreements to reduce water use from the beleaguered Colorado River, the federal government stepped in on Tuesday, issuing cuts that will affect two states and Mexico.
Officials with the Bureau of Reclamation declared a “tier 2” shortage in the river basin as the drought continues to pummel the American west, pushing its largest reservoirs to new lows. The waning water levels, which have left dramatic "bathtub rings" in reservoirs and unearthed buried bodies and other artifacts, continue to threaten hydroelectric power production, drinking water, and agricultural production.
“The system is approaching a tipping point,” the Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, M Camille Calimlim Touton, said during a news conference on Tuesday, adding that urgent action was required. “Protecting the system means protecting the people of the American west.”
In the middle of that Tier 2 Water Shortage someone decided it'd be a good idea to let a foreign government - an extremely wealthy foreign government - exploit the single most valuable resource anywhere, for free.
When do we acknowledge that the "party of good business" is either incredibly bad at business, or simply too fucking corrupt for words?
Saudi firm has pumped Arizona groundwater for years without paying. Time to pony up
Bruce Babbitt and Robert Lane
The Butler Valley is an empty stretch of desert west of Phoenix, worthy of note for two reasons.
It holds more than 6 million acre-feet of groundwater, strategically located near the Central Arizona Project canal.
And more than 99% of Butler Valley is owned by the state of Arizona in trust for the support of public schools.
In 1982 as the Central Arizona Project canal neared completion, Wes Steiner, the renowned director of the Department of Water Resources, proposed that the state set aside Butler Valley as a groundwater reserve for future use in connection with the CAP.
Acting on his advice, we worked with the federal Bureau of Land Management to transfer the Valley into state ownership to be managed by the State Land Department.
How much water has Fodomonte pumped?
In June, The Arizona Republic uncovered the story of how the State Land Department had recently handed over thousands of acres to a Saudi corporation called Fondomonte, giving it permission to pump unlimited amounts of groundwater to grow alfalfa hay for export to Saudi Arabia.
This tale of official misfeasance began in 2015 when the State Land Department began leasing land to Fondomonte at an annual rental of just $25 per acre.
However, the 2015 lease in addition allowed Fondomonte to pump unlimited amounts of groundwater at no cost whatever.
How much is Fondomonte pumping? The company refuses to disclose how much water it uses each year, and the State Land Department has never bothered to demand reports. That Fondomonte is growing alfalfa year round on approximately 3,500 acres can be verified from aerial photos.
And according to U.S. Geological Survey studies, alfalfa in Butler Valley requires 6.4 acre-feet of water per acre. That means the company has likely been pumping 22,400 acre-feet of water each year for the last 7 years.
Void its lease, charge for past rent
How much should the state be charging for this water? The Arizona Constitution, Article 10, Section 4, requires that land leases and “products of land” … “shall be appraised at their true value.”
The appropriate method for determining true value is hiding in plain sight. The Central Arizona Project sells water to customers throughout Maricopa County for $242 per acre foot delivered through the project canal that passes just south of Butler Valley.
Add these figures, and Fondomonte should have been paying $5.42 million per year for each of the last seven years.
What should be done to clean up this scandal? First, Gov. Doug Ducey should instruct the State Land Department to void the lease and restore Butler Valley to its intended use as a groundwater reserve for the future.
Second, Gov. Ducey should instruct the attorney general to collect past due rentals of about $38 million to be held in trust for the benefit of Arizona school children.
Bruce Babbitt served as governor of Arizona from 1978 to 1987. Robert Lane served as State Land commissioner from 1982 to 1987.
