Receives Lots of commentary: Support, Suggestions, NFT Requests and Memes
Actress, producer, entrepreneur – and now a recently, new owner and proponent of the Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency. Aside from her characteristically ebullient tweet announcing her purchase there has, as of yet been little verbiage to to expand on her reasoning or perspective on the space.
Also not clear how she arrived at the choice of ETH rather than the obvious #1 crypto BitCoin.
While some twitter reactions were slanted toward the negative, implying that her entry into the space implies some sort of over commercialization that is a sign of impending decline or decay.
This could well be a possibility but there appears to be more going on here beneath the surface.
Though most of the attention toward Cryptocurrencies revolves around speculation on a given coins price vs. the US $, there is much more to the phenom than that very recent trend. Even after the mania and the get-rich-quick schemes are long gone the use and existence of Bitcoin and Blockchain is likely to go on.
A new cryptocurrency called “Pi” (π) allows anyone to “mine” the currency from a cell phone. With over 23 million “Pioneers” mining the goal of 100 million is in sight and when reached the coin will launch. Until then there is no price for the coin and it can only be earned by mining with your phone.
The egalitarian and decentralized concept behind the coin is new and could take cryptocurrency to a whole new level, all without price speculation being the main driver. Learn more about Pi here.
Witherspoon launched Hello Sunshine back in 2016 to provide a digital space to showcase women storytelling.
The company recently sold, earlier this year, for a whopping $900 million. And it sounds like she’s using some of that payout to test the crypto waters.
The “Legally Blonde” actress took to her social media account to trumpet the news, “Just bought my first ETH! Let’s do this #cryptotwitter”. As of this writing the current price of 1 ETH is $3,942.21 (although prices can fluctuate quickly in either direction).
This is not far off the all time high of over $4100 that was breached in May of this year.
Her tweet was liked instantly by 60k and her followers quickly sky rocketed, now at 2.9 million.
Many took the opportunity to comment on her account giving the actress a taste of Crypto Twitter (which as you read the comments, you can see are quite intense).
Vocal Youtuber, social media star, brother to Jake and “boxer” Logan Paul didn’t waste any time by responding to Reese’s tweet offering her a NFT of the World of Women collection (a project aimed to foster diversity within the NFT space).
This is not likely without a self-promoting aspect as Paul launched his new native ZOO” crypto token for his NFT game called CryptoZoo.
welcome to the club Reese 👊🏼 DM me your Eth address, I’d love to gift you this @WorldOfWomenNFT because y’all could be related. And it’d be badass for your first NFT project pic.twitter.com/epA0EZQdXG
Another high profile blonde added to the Crypto Twitterati conversation with her preferred takes in digital coin.
It’s just more evidence that the crypto future is not going to disappear anytime soon – there are just too many strata of society that are taking a stake in the continued existence and growth of blockchain and crypto.
Other crypto coin users were compelled to let Witherspoon know how they feel, flooding her account with tweets explaining the benefits of competing crypto coins, sending unsolicited pitches for a varie f the obvious choices including Bitcoin and Dogecoin.
DogeCoin is likely best known as the crypto alt-coin that Elon Musk has often championed from his twitter account, along with Mark Cuban and others.
During his stint hosting Saturday Night Live the billionaire (Musk) also broadcast his involvement with the Doge, and has received the moniker “DogeFather” as a result.
Hey @ReeseW in case you didn’t know when the founders started eth they kept 70% for themselves. Think of it like a tech company. #bitcoin however, the founders kept nothing and it’s actual fair sound money empowering humanity and way more important than any tech company.
Experts say the privacy promise—ubiquitous in online services and apps—obscures the truth about how companies use personal data
You’ve likely run into this claim from tech giants before: “We do not sell your personal data.”
Companies from Facebook to Google to Twitter repeat versions of this statement in their privacy policies, public statements, and congressional testimony. And when taken very literally, the promise is true: Despite gathering masses of personal data on their users and converting that data into billions of dollars in profits, these tech giants do not directly sell their users’ information the same way data brokers directly sell data in bulk to advertisers.
But the disclaimers are also a distraction from all the other ways tech giants use personal data for profit and, in the process, put users’ privacy at risk, experts say.
Lawmakers, watchdog organizations, and privacy advocates have all pointed out ways that advertisers can still pay for access to data from companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter without directly purchasing it. (Facebook spokesperson Emil Vazquez declined to comment and Twitter spokesperson Laura Pacas referred us to Twitter’s privacy policy. Google did not respond to requests for comment.)
And focusing on the term “sell” is essentially a sleight of hand by tech giants, said Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.
“[Their] saying that they don’t sell data to third parties is like a yogurt company saying they’re gluten-free. Yogurt is naturally gluten-free,” Waldman said. “It’s a misdirection from all the other ways that may be more subtle but still are deep and profound invasions of privacy.”
Those other ways include everything from data collected from real-time bidding streams (more on that later), to targeted ads directing traffic to websites that collect data, to companies using the data internally.
How Is My Data at Risk if It’s Not Being Sold?
Even though companies like Facebook and Google aren’t directly selling your data, they are using it for targeted advertising, which creates plenty of opportunities for advertisers to pay and get your personal information in return.
The simplest way is through an ad that links to a website with its own trackers embedded, which can gather information on visitors including their IP address and their device IDs.
Advertising companies are quick to point out that they sell ads, not data, but don’t disclose that clicking on these ads often results in a website collecting personal data. In other words, you can easily give away your information to companies that have paid to get an ad in front of you.
If the ad is targeted toward a certain demographic, then advertisers would also be able to infer personal information about visitors who came from that ad, Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.
For example, if there’s an ad targeted at expectant mothers on Facebook, the advertiser can infer that everyone who came from that link is someone Facebook believes is expecting a child. Once a person clicks on that link, the website could collect device IDs and an IP address, which can be used to identify a person. Personal information like “expecting parent” could become associated with that IP address.
“You can say, ‘Hey, Google, I want a list of people ages 18–35 who watched the Super Bowl last year.’ They won’t give you that list, but they will let you serve ads to all those people,” Cyphers said. “Some of those people will click on those ads, and you can pretty easily figure out who those people are. You can buy data, in a sense, that way.”
Then there’s the complicated but much more common way that advertisers can pay for data without it being considered a sale, through a process known as “real-time bidding.”
Often, when an ad appears on your screen, it wasn’t already there waiting for you to show up. Digital auctions are happening in milliseconds before the ads load, where websites are selling screen real estate to the highest bidder in an automated process.
Visiting a page kicks off a bidding process where hundreds of advertisers are simultaneously sent data like an IP address, a device ID, the visitor’s interests, demographics, and location. The advertisers use this data to determine how much they’d like to pay to show an ad to that visitor, but even if they don’t make the winning bid, they have already captured what may be a lot of personal information.
With Google ads, for instance, the Google Ad Exchange sends data associated with your Google account during this ad auction process, which can include information like your age, location, and interests.
The advertisers aren’t paying for that data, per se; they’re paying for the right to show an advertisement on a page you visited. But they still get the data as part of the bidding process, and some advertisers compile that information and sell it, privacy advocates said.
In May, a group of Google users filed a federal class action lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging the company is violating its claims to not sell personal information by operating its real-time bidding service.
The lawsuit argues that even though Google wasn’t directly handing over your personal data in exchange for money, its advertising services allowed hundreds of third parties to essentially pay and get access to information on millions of people. The case is ongoing.
“We never sell people’s personal information and we have strict policies specifically prohibiting personalized ads based on sensitive categories,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda told the San Francisco Chronicle in May.
Real-time bidding has also drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and watchdog organizations for its privacy implications.
In January, Simon McDougall, deputy commissioner of the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office, announced in a statement that the agency was continuing its investigation of real-time bidding (RTB), which if not properly disclosed, may violate the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
“The complex system of RTB can use people’s sensitive personal data to serve adverts and requires people’s explicit consent, which is not happening right now,” McDougall said. “Sharing people’s data with potentially hundreds of companies, without properly assessing and addressing the risk of these counterparties, also raises questions around the security and retention of this data.”
And in April, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators sent a letter to ad tech companies involved in real-time bidding, including Google. Their main concern: foreign companies and governments potentially capturing massive amounts of personal data about Americans.
“Few Americans realize that some auction participants are siphoning off and storing ‘bidstream’ data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them,” the letter said. “In turn, these dossiers are being openly sold to anyone with a credit card, including to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to governments.”
On May 4, Google responded to the letter, telling lawmakers that it doesn’t share personally identifiable information in bid requests and doesn’t share demographic information during the process.
“We never sell people’s personal information and all ad buyers using our systems are subject to stringent policies and standards, including restrictions on the use and retention of information they receive,” Mark Isakowitz, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, said in the letter.
What Does It Mean to “Sell” Data?
Advocates have been trying to expand the definition of “sell” beyond a straightforward transaction.
The California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect in January 2020, attempted to cast a wide net when defining “sale,” beyond just exchanging data for money. The law considers it a sale if personal information is sold, rented, released, shared, transferred, or communicated (either orally or in writing) from one business to another for “monetary or other valuable consideration.”
And companies that sell such data are required to disclose that they’re doing so and allow consumers to opt out.
“We wrote the law trying to reflect how the data economy actually works, where most of the time, unless you’re a data broker, you’re not actually selling a person’s personal information,” said Mary Stone Ross, chief privacy officer at OSOM Products and a co-author of the law. “But you essentially are. If you are a social media company and you’re providing advertising and people pay you a lot of money, you are selling access to them.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s always obvious what sorts of personal data a company collects and sells.
In T-Mobile’s privacy policy, for instance, the company says it sells compiled data in bulk, which it calls “audience segments.” The policy states that audience segment data for sale doesn’t contain identifiers like your name and address but does include your mobile advertising ID.
Nevertheless, T-Mobile’s privacy policy says the company does “not sell information that directly identifies customers.”
T-Mobile spokesperson Taylor Prewitt didn’t provide an answer to why the company doesn’t consider advertising IDs to be personal information but said customers have the right to opt out of that data being sold.
So What Should I Be Looking for in a Privacy Policy?
The next time you look at a privacy policy, which few people ever really do, don’t just focus on whether or not the company says it sells your data. That’s not necessarily the best way to assess how your information is traveling and being used.
And even if a privacy policy says that it doesn’t share private information beyond company walls, the data collected can still be used for purposes you might feel uncomfortable with, like training internal algorithms and machine learning models. (See Facebook’s use of one billion pictures from Instagram, which it owns, to improve its image recognition capability.)
Consumers should look for deletion and retention policies instead, said Lindsey Barrett, a privacy expert and until recently a fellow at Georgetown Law. These are policies that spell out how long companies keep data, and how to get it removed.
She noted that these statements hold a lot more weight than companies promising not to sell your data.
“People don’t have any meaningful transparency into what companies are doing with their data, and too often, there are too few limits on what they can do with it,” Barrett said. “The whole ‘We don’t sell your data’ doesn’t say anything about what the company is doing behind closed doors.”
After Steve Bannon urged his followers to take over local-level GOP positions, the plan went viral across far-right media.
One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”
When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
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The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.
In Wisconsin, for instance, new GOP recruits are becoming poll workers. County clerks who run elections in the state are required to hire parties’ nominees. The parties once passed on suggesting names, but now hardline Republican county chairs are moving to use those powers.
“We’re signing up election inspectors like crazy right now,” said Outagamie County party chair Matt Albert, using the state’s formal term for poll workers. Albert, who held a “Stop the Steal” rally during Wisconsin’s November recount, said Bannon’s podcast had played a role in the burst of enthusiasm.
ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork,” said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it.”
Bannon, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
While party officials largely credited Bannon’s podcast with driving the surge of new precinct officers, it’s impossible to know the motivations of each new recruit. Precinct officers are not centrally tracked anywhere, and it was not possible to examine all 3,000 counties nationwide. ProPublica focused on politically competitive places that were discussed as targets in far-right media.
The tea party backlash to former President Barack Obama’s election foreshadowed Republican gains in the 2010 midterm. Presidential losses often energize party activists, and it would not be the first time that a candidate’s faction tried to consolidate control over the party apparatus with the aim of winning the next election.
What’s different this time is an uncompromising focus on elections themselves. The new movement is built entirely around Trump’s insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can’t let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.
“They feel President Trump was rightfully elected president and it was taken from him,” said Michael Barnett, the GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Florida, who has enthusiastically added 90 executive committee members this year. “They feel their involvement in upcoming elections will prevent something like that from happening again.”
It has only been a few months — too soon to say whether the wave of newcomers will ultimately succeed in reshaping the GOP or how they will affect Republican prospects in upcoming elections. But what’s already clear is that these up-and-coming party officers have notched early wins.
In Michigan, one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned. In Las Vegas, a handful of Proud Boys, part of the extremist group whose members have been charged in attacking the Capitol, supported a bid to topple moderates controlling the county party — a dispute that’s now in court.
In Phoenix, new precinct officers petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of 2020 ballots. Similar audits are now being pursued by new precinct officers in Michigan and the Carolinas. Outside Atlanta, new local party leaders helped elect a state lawmaker who championed Georgia’s sweeping new voting restrictions.
And precinct organizers are hoping to advance candidates such as Matthew DePerno, a Michigan attorney general hopeful who Republican state senators said in a report had spread “misleading and irresponsible” misinformation about the election, and Mark Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers militia who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and is now running to be Arizona’s top elections official. DePerno did not respond to requests for comment, and Finchem asked for questions to be sent by email and then did not respond. Finchem has said he did not enter the Capitol or have anything to do with the violence. He has also said the Oath Keepers are not anti-government.
When Bannon interviewed Finchem on an April podcast, he wrapped up a segment about Arizona Republicans’ efforts to reexamine the 2020 results by asking Finchem how listeners could help. Finchem answered by promoting the precinct strategy. “The only way you’re going to see to it this doesn’t happen again is if you get involved,” Finchem said. “Become a precinct committeeman.”
Some of the new precinct officers were in the crowd that marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to interviews and social media posts; one Texas precinct chair was arrested for assaulting police in Washington. He pleaded not guilty. Many of the new activists have said publicly that they support QAnon, the online conspiracy theory that believes Trump was working to root out a global child sex trafficking ring. Organizers of the movement have encouraged supporters to bring weapons to demonstrations. In Las Vegas and Savannah, Georgia, newcomers were so disruptive that they shut down leadership elections.
“They’re not going to be welcomed with open arms,” Bannon said, addressing the altercations on an April podcast. “But hey, was it nasty at Lexington?” he said, citing the opening battle of the American Revolution. “Was it nasty at Concord? Was it nasty at Bunker Hill?”
Bannon plucked the precinct strategy out of obscurity. For more than a decade, a little-known Arizona tea party activist named Daniel J. Schultz has been preaching the plan. Schultz failed to gain traction, despite winning a $5,000 prize from conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie in 2013 and making a 2015 pitch on Bannon’s far-right website, Breitbart. Schultz did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon’s podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered, beginning to explain his plan. Bannon cut him off, offering to return to the idea another time.
That time came in February. Schultz returned to Bannon’s podcast, immediately preceding Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who spouts baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
“We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz said. “I can’t guarantee you that we’ll save the republic, but I can guarantee you this: We’ll lose it if we conservatives don’t take over the Republican Party.”
Bannon endorsed Schultz’s plan, telling “all the unwashed masses in the MAGA movement, the deplorables” to take up this cause. Bannon said he had more than 400,000 listeners, a count that could not be independently verified.
Bannon brought Schultz back on the show at least eight more times, alongside guests such as embattled Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a leading defender of people jailed on Capitol riot charges.
The exposure launched Schultz into a full-blown far-right media tour. In February, Schultz spoke on a podcast with Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, a leading popularizer of QAnon. In an episode titled “THIS Is How We Win,” Diaz said of Schultz, “I was waiting, I was wishing and hoping for the universe to deliver someone like him.”
Schultz himself calls QAnon “a joke.” Nevertheless, he promoted his precinct strategy on at least three more QAnon programs in recent months, according to Media Matters, a Democratic-aligned group tracking right-wing content. “I want to see many of you going and doing this,” host Zak Paine said on one of the shows in May.
Schultz’s strategy also got a boost from another prominent QAnon promoter: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law and “rerun” the election. On a May online talk show, Flynn told listeners to fill “thousands of positions that are vacant at the local level.”
Precinct recruitment is now “the forefront of our mission” for Turning Point Action, according to the right-wing organization’s website. The group’s parent organization bussed Trump supporters to Washington for Jan. 6, including at least one person who was later charged with assaulting police. He pleaded not guilty. In July, Turning Point brought Trump to speak in Phoenix, where he called the 2020 election “the greatest crime in history.” Outside, red-capped volunteers signed people up to become precinct chairs.
Organizers from around the country started huddling with Schultz for weekly Zoom meetings. The meetings’ host, far-right blogger Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati, kicked off a July call by describing the precinct strategy as the last alternative to violence. “It’s the only idea,” Condit said, “unless you want to pick up guns like the Founding Fathers did in 1776 and start to try to take back our country by the Second Amendment, which none of us want to do.”
By the next week, though, Schultz suggested the new precinct officials might not stay peaceful. Schultz belonged to a mailing list for a group of military, law enforcement and intelligence veterans called the “1st Amendment Praetorian” that organizes security for Flynn and other pro-Trump figures. Back in the 1990s, Schultz wrote an article defending armed anti-government militias like those involved in that decade’s deadly clashes with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.
“Make sure everybody’s got a baseball bat,” Schultz said on the July strategy conference call, which was posted on YouTube. “I’m serious about this. Make sure you’ve got people who are armed.”
The sudden demand for low-profile precinct positions baffled some party leaders. In Fort Worth, county chair Rick Barnes said numerous callers asked about becoming a “precinct committeeman,” quoting the term used on Bannon’s podcast. That suggested that out-of-state encouragement played a role in prompting the calls, since Texas’s term for the position is “precinct chair.” Tarrant County has added 61 precinct chairs this year, about a 24% increase since February. “Those podcasts actually paid off,” Barnes said.
For weeks, about five people a day called to become precinct chairs in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, southwest of Green Bay. Albert, the county party chair, said he would explain that Wisconsin has no precinct chairs, but newcomers could join the county party — and then become poll workers. “We’re trying to make sure that our voice is now being reinserted into the process,” Albert said.
Similarly, the GOP in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, is fielding a surge of volunteers for precinct committee members, but also for election judges or inspectors, which are party-affiliated elected positions in that state. “Who knows what happened on Election Day for real,” county chair Lou Capozzi said in an interview. The county GOP sent two busloads of people to Washington for Jan. 6 and Capozzi said they stayed peaceful. “People want to make sure elections remain honest.”
Elsewhere, activists inspired by the precinct strategy have targeted local election boards. In DeKalb County, east of Atlanta, the GOP censured a long-serving Republican board member who rejected claims of widespread fraud in 2020. To replace him, new party chair Marci McCarthy tapped a far-right activist known for false, offensive statements. The party nominees to the election board have to be approved by a judge, and the judge in this case rejected McCarthy’s pick, citing an “extraordinary” public outcry. McCarthy defended her choice but ultimately settled for someone less controversial.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 1,000 people attended the county GOP convention in March, up from the typical 300 to 400. The chair they elected, Alan Swain, swiftly formed an “election integrity committee” that’s lobbying lawmakers to restrict voting and audit the 2020 results. “We’re all about voter and election integrity,” Swain said in an interview.
In the rural western part of the state, too, a wave of people who heard Bannon’s podcast or were furious about perceived election fraud swept into county parties, according to the new district chair, Michele Woodhouse. The district’s member of Congress, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, addressed a crowd at one county headquarters on Aug. 29, at an event that included a raffle for a shotgun.
“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed,” Cawthorn said, in remarks livestreamed on Facebook, shortly after holding the prize shotgun, which he autographed. “That’s right,” the audience cheered. Cawthorn went on, “As much as I’m willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American, and the way we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”
After Cawthorn referred to people arrested on Jan. 6 charges as “political hostages,” someone asked, “When are you going to call us to Washington again?” The crowd laughed and clapped as Cawthorn answered, “We are actively working on that one.”
Schultz has offered his own state of Arizona as a proof of concept for how precinct officers can reshape the party. The result, Schultz has said, is actions like the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots. The “audit,” conducted by a private firm with no experience in elections and whose CEO has spread conspiracy theories, has included efforts to identify fraudulent ballots from Asia by searching for traces of bamboo. Schultz has urged activists demanding similar audits in other states to start by becoming precinct officers.
“Because we’ve got the audit, there’s very heightened and intense public interest in the last campaign, and of course making sure election laws are tightened,” said Sandra Dowling, a district chair in northwest Maricopa and northern Yuma County whose precinct roster grew by 63% in less than six months. Though Dowling says some other district chairs screen their applicants, she doesn’t. “I don’t care,” she said.
One chair who does screen applicants is Kathy Petsas, a lifelong Republican whose district spans Phoenix and Paradise Valley. She also saw applications explode earlier this year. Many told her that Schultz had recruited them, and some said they believed in QAnon. “Being motivated by conspiracy theories is no way to go through life, and no way for us to build a high-functioning party,” Petsas said. “That attitude can’t prevail.”
As waves of new precinct officers flooded into the county party, Petsas was dismayed to see some petitioning to recall their own Republican county supervisors for refusing to cooperate with the Senate GOP’s audit.
“It is not helpful to our democracy when you have people who stand up and do the right thing and are honest communicators about what’s going on, and they get lambasted by our own party,” Petsas said. “That’s a problem.”
This spring, a team of disaffected Republican operatives put Schultz’s precinct strategy into action in South Carolina, a state that plays an outsize role in choosing presidents because of its early primaries. The operatives’ goal was to secure enough delegates to the party’s state convention to elect a new chair: far-right celebrity lawyer Lin Wood.
Wood was involved with some of the lawsuits to overturn the presidential election that courts repeatedly ruled meritless, or even sanctionable. After the election, Wood said on Bannon’s podcast, “I think the audience has to do what the people that were our Founding Fathers did in 1776.” On Twitter, Wood called for executing Vice President Mike Pence by firing squad. Wood later said it was “rhetorical hyperbole,” but that and other incendiary language got him banned from mainstream social media. He switched to Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by deplatformed right-wing influencers, amassing roughly 830,000 followers while repeatedly promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Asked for comment about his political efforts, Wood responded, “Most of your ‘facts’ are either false or misrepresent the truth.” He declined to cite specifics.
Typically, precinct meetings were “a yawner,” according to Mike Connett, a longtime party member in Horry County, best known for its popular beach towns. But in April, Connett and other establishment Republicans were caught off guard when 369 people, many of them newcomers, showed up for the county convention in North Myrtle Beach. Connett lost a race for a leadership role to Diaz, the prominent QAnon supporter, and Wood’s faction captured the county’s other executive positions plus 35 of 48 delegate slots, enabling them to cast most of the county’s votes for Wood at the state convention. “It seemed like a pretty clean takeover,” Connett told ProPublica.
In Greenville, the state’s most populous county, Wood campaign organizers Jeff Davis and Pressley Stutts mobilized a surge of supporters at the county convention — about 1,400 delegates, up from roughly 550 in 2019 — and swept almost all of the 79 delegate positions. That gave Wood’s faction the vast majority of the votes in two of South Carolina’s biggest delegations.
Across the state, the precinct strategy was contributing to an unprecedented surge in local party participation, according to data provided by a state GOP spokeswoman. In 2019, 4,296 people participated. This year, 8,524 did.
“It’s a prairie fire down there in Greenville, South Carolina, brought on by the MAGA posse,” Bannon said on his podcast.
Establishment party leaders realized they had to take Wood’s challenge seriously. The incumbent chair, Drew McKissick, had Trump’s endorsement three times over — including twice after Wood entered the race. But Wood fought back by repeatedly implying that McKissick and other prominent state Republicans were corrupt and involved in various conspiracies that seemed related to QAnon. The race became heated enough that after one event, Wood and McKissick exchanged angry words face-to-face.
Wood’s rallies were raucous affairs packed with hundreds of people, energized by right-wing celebrities like Flynn and Lindell. In interviews, many attendees described the events as their first foray into politics, sometimes referencing Schultz and always citing Trump’s stolen election myth. Some said they’d resort to violence if they felt an election was stolen again.
Wood’s campaign wobbled in counties that the precinct strategy had not yet reached. At the state convention in May, Wood won about 30% of the delegates, commanding Horry, Greenville and some surrounding counties, but faltering elsewhere. A triumphant McKissick called Wood’s supporters “a fringe, rogue group” and vowed to turn them into a “leper colony” by building parallel Republican organizations in their territory.
But Wood and his partisans did not act defeated. The chairmanship election, they argued, was as rigged as the 2020 presidential race. Wood threw a lavish party at his roughly 2,000-acre low-country estate, secured by armed guards and surveillance cameras. From a stage fit for a rock concert on the lawn of one of his three mansions, Wood promised the fight would continue.
Diaz and her allies in Horry County voted to censure McKissick. The county’s longtime Republicans tried, but failed, to oust Diaz and her cohort after one of the people involved in drafting Wood tackled a protester at a Flynn speech in Greenville. (This incident, the details of which are disputed, prompted Schultz to encourage precinct strategy activists to arm themselves.) Wood continued promoting the precinct strategy to his Telegram followers, and scores replied that they were signing up.
In late July, Stutts and Davis forced out Greenville County GOP’s few remaining establishment leaders, claiming that they had cheated in the first election. Then Stutts, Davis and an ally won a new election to fill those vacant seats. “They sound like Democrats, right?” Bannon asked Stutts in a podcast interview. Stutts replied, “They taught the Democrats how to cheat, Steve.”
Stutts’ group quickly pushed for an investigation of the 2020 presidential election, planning a rally featuring Davis and Wood at the end of August, and began campaigning against vaccine and school mask mandates. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” Stutts had previously posted on Facebook, quoting Thomas Jefferson. Stutts continued posting messages skeptical of vaccine and mask mandates even after he entered the hospital with a severe case of COVID-19. He died on Aug. 19.
The hubbub got so loud inside the Cobb County, Georgia, Republican headquarters that it took several shouts and whistles to get everyone’s attention. It was a full house for Salleigh Grubbs’ first meeting as the county’s party chair. Grubbs ran on a vow to “clean house” in the election system, highlighting her December testimony to state lawmakers in which she raised unsubstantiated fraud allegations. Supporters praised Grubbs’ courage for following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence. She attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally as a VIP. She won the chairmanship decisively at an April county convention packed with an estimated 50% first-time participants.
In May, Grubbs opened her first meeting by asking everyone munching on bacon and eggs to listen to her recite the Gettysburg Address. “Think of the battle for freedom that Americans have before them today,” Grubbs said. “Those people fought and died so that you could be the precinct chair.” After the reading, first-time precinct officers stood for applause and cheers.
Their work would start right away: putting up signs, making calls and knocking on doors for a special election for the state House. The district had long leaned Republican, but after the GOP’s devastating losses up and down the ballot in 2020, they didn’t know what to expect.
“There’s so many people out there that are scared, they feel like their vote doesn’t count,” Cooper Guyon, a 17-year-old right-wing podcaster from the Atlanta area who speaks to county parties around the state, told the Cobb Republicans in July. The activists, he said, need to “get out in these communities and tell them that we are fighting to make your vote count by passing the Senate bill, the election-reform bills that are saving our elections in Georgia.”
Of the field’s two Republicans, Devan Seabaugh took the strongest stance in favor of Georgia’s new law restricting ways to vote and giving the Republican-controlled Legislature more power over running elections. “The only people who may be inconvenienced by Senate Bill 202 are those intent on committing fraud,” he wrote in response to a local newspaper’s candidate questionnaire.
Seabaugh led the June special election and won a July runoff. Grubbs cheered the win as a turning point. “We are awake. We are preparing,” she wrote on Facebook. “The conservative citizens of Cobb County are ready to defend our ballots and our county.”
Newcomers did not meet such quick success everywhere. In Savannah, a faction crashed the Chatham County convention with their own microphone, inspired by Bannon’s podcast to try to depose the incumbent party leaders who they accused of betraying Trump. Party officers blocked the newcomers’ candidacies, saying they weren’t officially nominated. Shouting erupted, and the meeting adjourned without a vote. Then the party canceled its districtwide convention.
The state party ultimately sided with the incumbent leaders. District chair Carl Smith said the uprising is bound to fail because the insurgents are mistaken in believing that he and other local leaders didn’t fight hard enough for Trump.
“You can’t build a movement on a lie,” Smith said.
In Michigan, activists who identify with a larger movement working against Republicans willing to accept Trump’s loss have captured the party leadership in about a dozen counties. They’re directly challenging state party leaders, who are trying to harness the grassroots energy without indulging demands to keep fighting over the last election.
Some of the takeovers happened before the rise of the precinct strategy. But the activists are now organizing under the banner “Precinct First” and holding regular events, complete with notaries, to sign people up to run for precinct delegate positions.
“We are reclaiming our party,” Debra Ell, one of the organizers, told ProPublica. “We’re building an ‘America First’ army.”
Under normal rules, the wave of new precinct delegates could force the party to nominate far-right candidates for key state offices. That’s because in Michigan, party nominees for attorney general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor are chosen directly by party delegates rather than in public primaries. But the state party recently voted to hold a special convention earlier next year, which should effectively lock in candidates before the new, more radical delegates are seated.
Activist-led county parties including rural Hillsdale and Detroit-area Macomb are also censuring Republican state legislators for issuing a June report on the 2020 election that found no evidence of systemic fraud and no need for a reexamination of the results like the one in Arizona. (The censures have no enforceable impact beyond being a public rebuke of the politicians.) At the same time, county party leaders in Hillsdale and elsewhere are working on a ballot initiative to force an Arizona-style election review.
Establishment Republicans have their own idea for a ballot initiative — one that could tighten rules for voter ID and provisional ballots while sidestepping the Democratic governor’s veto. If the initiative collects hundreds of thousands of valid signatures, it would be put to a vote by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Under a provision of the state constitution, the state Legislature can adopt the measure and it can’t be vetoed.
State party leaders recently reached out to the activists rallying around the rejection of the presidential election results, including Hillsdale Republican Party Secretary Jon Smith, for help. Smith, Ell and others agreed to join the effort, the two activists said.
“This empowers them,” Jason Roe, the state party executive director whose ouster the activists demanded because he said Trump was responsible for his own loss, told ProPublica. Roe resigned in July, citing unrelated reasons. “It’s important to get them focused on change that can actually impact” future elections, he said, “instead of keeping their feet mired in the conspiracy theories of 2020.”
Jesse Law, who ran the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations in Nevada, sued the Democratic electors, seeking to declare Trump the winner or annul the results. The judge threw out the case, saying Law’s evidence did not meet “any standard of proof,” and the Nevada Supreme Court agreed. When the Electoral College met in December, Law stood outside the state capitol to publicly cast mock votes for Trump.
This year, Law set his sights on taking over the Republican Party in the state’s largest county, Clark, which encompasses Las Vegas. He campaigned on the precinct strategy, promising 1,000 new recruits. His path to winning the county chairmanship — just like Stutts’ team in South Carolina, and Grubbs in Cobb County, Georgia — relied on turning out droves of newcomers to flood the county party and vote for him.
In Law’s case, many of those newcomers came through the Proud Boys, the all-male gang affiliated with more than two dozen people charged in the Capitol riot. The Las Vegas chapter boasted about signing up 500 new party members (not all of them belonging to the Proud Boys) to ensure their takeover of the county party. After briefly advancing their own slate of candidates to lead the Clark GOP, the Proud Boys threw their support to Law. They also helped lead a state party censure of Nevada’s Republican secretary of state, who rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of fraudulent ballots.
Law, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has declined to distance himself from the Las Vegas Proud Boys, citing Trump’s “stand back and stand by” remark at the September 2020 presidential debate. “When the president was asked if he would disavow, he said no,” Law told an independent Nevada journalist in July. “If the president is OK with that, I’m going to take the presidential stance.”
The outgoing county chair, David Sajdak, canceled the first planned vote for his successor. He said he was worried the Proud Boys would resort to violence if their newly recruited members, who Sajdak considered illegitimate, weren’t allowed to vote.
Sajdak tried again to hold a leadership vote in July, with a meeting in a Las Vegas high school theater, secured by police. But the crowd inside descended into shouting, while more people tried to storm past the cops guarding the back entrance, leading to scuffles. “Let us in! Let us in!” some chanted. Riling them up was at least one Proud Boy, according to multiple videos of the meeting.
At the microphone, Sajdak was running out of patience. “I’m done covering for you awful people,” he bellowed. Unable to restore order, Sajdak ended the meeting without a vote and resigned a few hours later. He’d had enough.
“They want to create mayhem,” Sajdak said.
Soon after, Law’s faction held their own meeting at a hotel-casino and overwhelmingly voted for Law as county chairman. Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, a longtime ally of Law who helped lead Trump’s futile effort to overturn the Nevada results, recognized Law as the new county chair and promoted a fundraiser to celebrate. The existing county leaders sued, seeking a court order to block Law’s “fraudulent, rogue election.” The judge preliminarily sided with the moderates, but told them to hold off on their own election until a court hearing in September.
To Sajdak, agonizing over 2020 is pointless because “there’s no mechanism for overturning an election.” Asked if Law’s allies are determined to create one, Sajdak said: “It’s a scary thought, isn’t it.”
This article was originally published by ProPublica via Creative Commons and written by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon
Extreme Weather Accelerates in Frequency and Destructive Power
Ida hit Louisiana with extreme force, causing damage and mayhem, and leaving hundreds of thousands without power earlier this week. The remnants of that destruction have now moved Northeast. Next, Hurricane Larry is expected to become a major storm by Friday according to the National Hurricane Center.
Effects of Hurricane Ida unloaded in the New York City metro area, creating, unprecedented extreme rainfall. So much so that for the first time ever, a “flash flood emergency” was initiated and both New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy declared states of emergency starting late Wednesday.
“This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!,” the National Weather Service wrote. And example of the extreme nature of the deluge comes via the stat that Central Park got more rain in one hour than it normally would in the entire month of September. More than 2.5 times the previous highest count even, which was tallied just recently.
Parts of New York City and the Tri-State, covering a population of where near 9 million people reside have been affected. Roads flooded, transforming the paths to looks more like raging rivers and rendering subways, cars, and basements of homes useless.
At least 9 people have been reported dead as a result of storm.
Images posted throughout social media overnight showed the insane amount of watering surging over roads as public transportations attempt to navigate and cars get stuck in the water. Even a frightening video of tornado happening in real time in Mullica Hill, New Jersey.
All too familiar the Elephant in the room needs acknowledgment
Although barely mentioned in the midst of chaos and people desperately trying to get to work on Thursday, climate change is giving a kind of early warning signal via extreme weather evens like this, as well as influencing the severity of the massive drought worsening daily in the west, immense wildfires and natural disasters that are being seen with unprecedented frequency and intensity.
If there was ever a wake up call to change and respond with speed and action, this is it.
On twitter there was a thread that likened the photos and videos to the prescient sci-fi film “The Day After Tomorrow” which depicted an ice-age occurring as a result of climate change, and also had scenes of massive flooding (due to the sea level rising which is currently happening, day by day).
The comparison is a stark one, with the Hollywood generated special effects stills not nearly as chilling as the current reality showed in photos being shared and tweeted.
There’s an all too familiar thread building here – larger more intense and devastating events that many keep saying are a coincidence or “random”. I think any child can see (@gretathunberg ?) that there is zero chance anymore that coincidence plays any more that a minuscule role in these tragedies growing, expanding and increasing exponentially.
Unfortunately, we can expect more of the same, no only here in this country, as mentioned above with Larry queuing up of shore, but around the world with extreme and dangerous droughts, heatwaves, polar vortex episodes, floods, deadly wildfires and more becoming the “norm”.
The time to recognize the origin of these mounting calamities has passed, but any proactive, powerful response by governments and industry has barely begun. Perhaps the images and tragedies now being documented and shared (such as below) can help to harden our resolve to see that a change, toward the drastic measures required to combat this climate emergency will finally begin in earnest.
Queens Boulevard in Maspeth/Corona is a literal river at the moment. Bus fully flooded driving through, multiple cars stuck in the water. Absolutely insane. pic.twitter.com/LuSL9uWCEl
The Caldor Fire had burned 204,390 acres and 20%-contained
The raging Caldor Fire that has already forced thousands of people to evacuate, is now becoming a critical threat to the popular tourist location, South Lake Tahoe. Reports of more than 34,000 structures are at risk.
There are approximately 4,000 firefighters and 1,000 California National Guard members that are helping to fight off the growing fires.
A spokesperson for California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services told CNN that over 53,000 people have been placed under evacuation orders.
The fire has already burned more than 300 square miles and destroyed hundred of residential structures. The city is facing wind gusts blowing at 35 miles per hour and stronger which continues to help the fire spread further down into the Tahoe basin.
Devastating Wildfires – continued reminders of the Climate Crisis
Greta Thunberg, the vocal climate crisis activist retweeted the below the video of the fires in California. There is so much confusion over the question of exactly which of the many, many “extreme weather events” as they are now called, are directly attributable to climate change, global warming and Co2 in the atmosphere.
This is, for Greta Thunberg and anyone reading this with an ounce of sense, a moot point. The larger overarching point is that the threat of total world destruction as a result of buying fossil fuel and other human impacts on the environment has been long settled as a very dangerous and rapidly worsening reality.
Splitting hairs by constantly questioning alternative origins for extreme events, that clearly are increasing in their number and severity, is a kind of “climate denial-lite” that is as ridiculous as it is dangerous. Ultimately it is the perspective of those like Greta, that must be adopted and understood by the millions (billions), before it is too late. Only then, when the threat is faced head on, is there a chance we might prevent a rapid slide into oblivion.
Thunberg tweeted this week “Wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves and other (un)natural disasters rage all over the world. Many now ask “What will it take for people in power to act?”. Well, it will many things, but above all it will take: massive pressure from media and massive pressure from the public.”
One of the country’s most important sources of fresh water is in peril, the latest victim of the accelerating climate crisis.
On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside of Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground. There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth. The machine was carving a cavernous, 3-mile tunnel beneath the bottom of the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead.
Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the Colorado River, supplying fresh water to Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1983. In 2000, it began a steady decline caused by epochal drought. On my visit in 2015, the lake was just about 40% full. A chalky ring on the surrounding cliffs marked where the waterline once reached, like the residue on an empty bathtub. The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop.
For years, experts in the American West have predicted that, unless the steady overuse of water was brought under control, the Colorado River would no longer be able to support all of the 40 million people who depend on it. Over the past two decades, Western states took incremental steps to save water, signed agreements to share what was left and then, like Las Vegas, did what they could to protect themselves. But they believed the tipping point was still a long way off.
Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected. This year, even though rainfall and snowpack high up in the Rocky Mountains were at near-normal levels, the parched soils and plants stricken by intense heat absorbed much of the water, and inflows to Lake Powell were around one-fourth of their usual amount. The Colorado’s flow has already declined by nearly 20%, on average, from its flow throughout the 1900s, and if the current rate of warming continues, the loss could well be 50% by the end of this century.
Earlier this month, federal officials declared an emergency water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time. The shortage declaration forces reductions in water deliveries to specific states, beginning with the abrupt cutoff of nearly one-fifth of Arizona’s supply from the river, and modest cuts for Nevada and Mexico, with more negotiations and cuts to follow. But it also sounded an alarm: one of the country’s most important sources of fresh water is in peril, another victim of the accelerating climate crisis.
Americans are about to face all sorts of difficult choices about how and where to live as the climate continues to heat up. States will be forced to choose which coastlines to abandon as sea levels rise, which wildfire-prone suburbs to retreat from and which small towns cannot afford new infrastructure to protect against floods or heat. What to do in the parts of the country that are losing their essential supply of water may turn out to be the first among those choices.
The Colorado River’s enormous significance extends well beyond the American West. In addition to providing water for the people of seven states, 29 federally recognized tribes and northern Mexico, its water is used to grow everything from the carrots stacked on supermarket shelves in New Jersey to the beef in a hamburger served at a Massachusetts diner. The power generated by its two biggest dams — the Hoover and Glen Canyon — is marketed across an electricity grid that reaches from Arizona to Wyoming.
The formal declaration of the water crisis arrived days after the Census Bureau released numbers showing that, even as the drought worsened over recent decades, hundreds of thousands more people have moved to the regions that depend on the Colorado.
Phoenix expanded more over the past 10 years than any other large American city, while smaller urban areas across Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California each ranked among the fastest-growing places in the country. The river’s water supports roughly 15 million more people today than it did when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. These statistics suggest that the climate crisis and explosive development in the West are on a collision course. And it raises the question: What happens next?
Since about 70% of water delivered from the Colorado River goes to growing crops, not to people in cities, the next step will likely be to demand large-scale reductions for farmers and ranchers across millions of acres of land, forcing wrenching choices about which crops to grow and for whom — an omen that many of America’s food-generating regions might ultimately have to shift someplace else as the climate warms.
California, so far shielded from major cuts, has already agreed to reductions that will take effect if the drought worsens. But it may be asked to do more. Its enormous share of the river, which it uses to irrigate crops across the Imperial Valley and for Los Angeles and other cities, will be in the crosshairs when negotiations over a diminished Colorado begin again. The Imperial Irrigation District there is the largest single water rights holder from the entire basin and has been especially resistant to compromise over the river. It did not sign the drought contingency plan laying out cuts that other big players on the Colorado system agreed to in 2019.
New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — states in the river’s Upper Basin — will most likely also face pressure to use less water. Should that happen, places like Utah that hoped to one day support faster development and economic growth with their share of the river may have to surrender their ambition.
The negotiations that led to the region being even minimally prepared for this latest shortage were agonizing, but they were merely a warm-up for the pain-inflicting cuts and sacrifices that almost certainly will be required if the water shortages persist over the coming decades. The region’s leaders, for all their efforts to compromise, have long avoided these more difficult conversations. One way or another, farms will have to surrender their water, and cities will have to live with less of it. Time has run out for other options.
Western states arrived at this crucible in large part because of their own doing. The original multistate compact that governs the use of the Colorado, which was signed in 1922, was exuberantly optimistic: The states agreed to divide up an estimated total amount of water that turned out to be much more than what would actually flow. Nevertheless, with the building of the Hoover Dam to collect and store river water, and the development of the Colorado’s plumbing system of canals and pipelines to deliver it, the West was able to open a savings account to fund its extraordinary economic growth. Over the years since, those states have overdrawn the river’s average deposits. It should be no surprise that even without the pressures of climate change, such a plan would lead to bankruptcy.
Making a bad situation worse, leaders in Western states have allowed wasteful practices to continue that add to the material threat facing the region. A majority of the water used by farms — and thus much of the river — goes to growing nonessential crops like alfalfa and other grasses that feed cattle for meat production. Much of those grasses are also exported to feed animals in the Middle East and Asia. Short of regulating which types of crops are allowed, which state authorities may not even have the authority to do, it may fall to consumers to drive change. Water usage data suggests that if Americans avoid meat one day each week they could save an amount of water equivalent to the entire flow of the Colorado each year, more than enough water to alleviate the region’s shortages.
Water is also being wasted because of flaws in the laws. The rights to take water from the river are generally distributed — like deeds to property — based on seniority. It is very difficult to take rights away from existing stakeholders, whether cities or individual ranchers, so long as they use the water allocated to them. That system creates a perverse incentive: Across the basin, ranchers often take their maximum allocation each year, even if just to spill it on the ground, for fear that, if they don’t, they could lose the right to take that water in the future. Changes in the laws that remove the threat of penalties for not exercising water rights, or that expand rewards for ranchers who conserve water, could be an easy remedy.
A breathtaking amount of the water from the Colorado — about 10% of the river’s recent total flow — simply evaporates off the sprawling surfaces of large reservoirs as they bake in the sun. Last year, evaporative losses from Lake Mead and Lake Powell alone added up to almost a million acre feet of water — or nearly twice what Arizona will be forced to give up now as a result of this month’s shortage declaration. These losses are increasing as the climate warms. Yet federal officials have so far discounted technological fixes — like covering the water surface to reduce the losses — and they continue to maintain both reservoirs, even though both of them are only around a third full. If the two were combined, some experts argue, much of those losses could be avoided.
For all the hard-won progress made at the negotiating table, it remains to be seen whether the stakeholders can tackle the looming challenges that come next. Over the years, Western states and tribes have agreed on voluntary cuts, which defused much of the political chaos that would otherwise have resulted from this month’s shortage declaration, but they remain disparate and self-interested parties hoping they can miraculously agree on a way to manage the river without truly changing their ways. For all their wishful thinking, climate science suggests there is no future in the region that does not include serious disruptions to its economy, growth trajectory and perhaps even quality of life.
The uncomfortable truth is that difficult and unpopular decisions are now unavoidable. Prohibiting some water uses as unacceptable — long eschewed as antithetical to personal freedoms and the rules of capitalism — is now what’s needed most.
The laws that determine who gets water in the West, and how much of it, are based on the principle of “beneficial use” — generally the idea that resources should further economic advancement. But whose economic advancement? Do we support the farmers in Arizona who grow alfalfa to feed cows in the United Arab Emirates? Or do we ensure the survival of the Colorado River, which supports some 8% of the nation’s GDP?
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Reclamation released lesser-noticed projections for water levels, and they are sobering. The figures include an estimate for what the bureau calls “minimum probable in flow” — or the low end of expectations. Water levels in Lake Mead could drop by another 40 vertical feet by the middle 2023, ultimately reaching just 1,026 feet above sea level — an elevation that further threatens Lake Mead’s hydroelectric power generation for about 1.3 million people in Arizona, California and Nevada. At 895 feet, the reservoir would become what’s called a “dead pool”; water would no longer be able to flow downstream.
The bureau’s projections mean we are close to uncharted territory. The current shortage agreement, negotiated between the states in 2007, only addresses shortages down to a lake elevation of 1,025 feet. After that, the rules become murky, and there is greater potential for fraught legal conflicts. Northern states in the region, for example, are likely to ask why the vast evaporation losses from Lake Mead, which stores water for the southern states, have never been counted as a part of the water those southern states use. Fantastical and expensive solutions that have previously been dismissed by the federal government — like the desalinization of seawater, towing icebergs from the Arctic or pumping water from the Mississippi River through a pipeline — are likely to be seriously considered. None of this, however, will be enough to solve the problem unless it’s accompanied by serious efforts to lower carbon dioxide emissions, which are ultimately responsible for driving changes to the climate.
Meanwhile, population growth in Arizona and elsewhere in the basin is likely to continue, at least for now, because short-term fixes so far have obscured the seriousness of the risks to the region. Water is still cheap, thanks to the federal subsidies for all those dams and canals that make it seem plentiful. The myth persists that technology can always outrun nature, that the American West holds endless possibility. It may be the region’s undoing. As the author Wallace Stegner once wrote: “One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope.”
Originally published on ProPublica by Abrahm Lustgarten via Creative Commons. This article is co-published with The New York Times.
President Donald Trump’s ban on the visa lottery was ruled to be illegal, but the government says it can’t help hundreds of Afghans who won it for at least another year.
Fakhruddin Akbari is allowing his full name to be published because he is certain he is going to die. Akbari, his wife and his 3-year-old daughter fled their home in Kabul, Afghanistan, two weeks ago. They’ve been hiding with friends in the city, living on bread and water.
He should be among the lucky ones.
Instead, Akbari fears the very thing he was hoping would be his salvation will now make him a target.
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Two years ago, Akbari won a rare spot in the United States’ “visa lottery.” He was chosen at random from a pool of 23 million to get the chance to apply for one of 55,000 visas to immigrate to the U.S. The U.S. was supposed to have finished his case by last fall. The instructions when he registered promised as much. Either he would be safely en route to the U.S., or he would lose his chance and move on.
But with the final U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan just days away — and as Thursday’s bombings have added even more chaos at Kabul’s airport — Akbari has almost certainly lost his chance to get out.
He has already burned the letters of commendation his relatives received for their work with American contractors or allied militaries. The Taliban already know, he says, that he’s part of a pro-American family. His neighbors have told him they’ve been visited by strangers asking about him.
A March 2020 ban signed by President Donald Trump, citing a need to protect the American economy, prevented Akbari and visa lottery winners from entering the U.S. In response to a lawsuit by immigration lawyers, a federal judge ruled earlier this month that the government has to move ahead on processing thousands of last year’s lottery winners. But the U.S. has told the judge it can’t even start until fall 2022 at the earliest.
Several hundred Afghans are in the group. They may be the unluckiest winners in the visa lottery’s 30-year history.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
The lottery isn’t open to everyone. Winners must come from a country that hasn’t had much recent immigration to the U.S. Applicants for the visas must also submit biometric information, pass an interview and medical screening, and complete several security checks.
Nouman, an Afghan lottery winner who asked that his full name not be used over fear of the Taliban, spent months tracking down police documents from the Chinese town where he’d worked for a few years, to prove he had a clean record.
Those requirements are still far less restrictive than other ways to legally immigrate to the U.S., which generally require being closely related to a citizen or green-card holder or having a job offer from an American company. In Afghanistan, interest in the lottery is so great that Nouman said it took him two days to successfully log onto the swamped website where lottery results were posted.
But unlike other visas, diversity visas — the type lottery winners become eligible to receive — are on a tight and unvarying schedule.
Lottery winners are notified in the early summer. After submitting their full application, they can only be interviewed at the nearest U.S. consulate once the federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1. Then the whole process has to be completed within a year. Eligibility for the visa doesn’t roll over.
Usually, most of the annual 55,000 visas have been handed out by that time. But last year, two things happened. First, in mid-March, consulates around the world shut down because of the pandemic. Two weeks later, Trump declared that letting in immigrants would hamper the recovery of the economy, and he signed the order barring most types of immigrants — including diversity visa holders.
When U.S. embassies and consulates began to reopen last summer, a State Department cable disclosed as part of the lawsuit shows they were instructed to handle diversity visas last, even if they met the narrow exemptions to the ban.
Giving someone a visa is legally distinct from letting them enter the U.S., and critics of Trump’s actions — including a group of lawyers who filed lawsuits over the bans — argued that even if the ban were legal, consulates could still prepare visas so that recipients could come after the ban was rescinded, which President Joe Biden did this February.
In early September last year, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the argument and ordered the government to make up for lost time, prioritizing diversity visa applicants ahead of everyone else for the last 26 days of the fiscal year.
The State Department’s bureaucracy took a few days to get into gear. Then it began a process that turned out to be far from efficient.
Officials compiled a spreadsheet of applicants who had joined the now-consolidated suit and were supposed to be prioritized, but it was riddled with misspelled names and incorrect case numbers. In a court declaration, a State Department official from a different office said the spreadsheet took “many queries” from his team to fix.
Once consulates and embassies got the correct names, they rushed appointments, often giving applicants little notice. The Kabul embassy wasn’t participating at all, so any Afghan appointments were set up in different countries — or continents.
At least three Afghan immigrants, including Nouman, were scheduled for interviews in Cameroon. All three were given one day’s notice to get there. (Nouman, at least, was able to get a later appointment in Islamabad, Pakistan.)
Many more weren’t given interviews at all. According to court filings, some State Department employees told applicants who called the office handling the cases that if they hadn’t officially joined the lawsuit, “you lost your chance” — which wasn’t true. When a COVID-19 outbreak hit the office and workers went remote, the help line shut down entirely.
When the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, 2020, more than 40,000 of the 55,000 diversity visas were still unused — and several hundred Afghans were still waiting. Less than 20% of the Afghan lottery winners had gotten visas by the deadline.
That day, Mehta had ordered the State Department to reserve 9,505 slots, based on his estimate of how many diversity visas could have been processed if COVID-19 had existed but the ban didn’t. When the case finally concluded this month, he declared that the government would indeed have to process those visas.
That opinion came down on Aug. 17, two days after Kabul fell.
In a response filed to Mehta on Thursday, the government offered to start processing last year’s visas in October 2022. One reason given for the proposed delay was that processing older visas is “an unprecedented computing demand that will require the Department to implement wide-ranging hardware and software modifications.” Another was that processing diversity visas would take resources away from dealing with the crisis in Afghanistan.
It went unmentioned that some people are affected by both.
Lawyers for the affected immigrants made an emergency filing this week, with testimony from several Afghans worried that they would be targeted by the Taliban precisely because they had sought to immigrate to the U.S. They’re hoping the court will order expedited consideration for Afghan lottery winners.
The lawyers are moving to appeal for the court to order that Afghans get priority in the visa process. The plaintiffs’ lawyers had asked the government to consent to their filing the request. The government’s response — after several days of silence, delaying the filing — was to call it an “unnecessary distraction.”
In a meeting by phone on Monday, according to two people on the call, another government attorney complained that he’d been getting emails from applicants “all over the world” and blamed their lawyers for posting his address online. One of those emails was a desperate cry for help from Akbari. “We are totally hopeless and every knock of the door seems like a call to death for us,” Akbari wrote. “Please help us.”
In the time since sending that email, Akbari and his family have made two attempts to get to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. The first time, he says, they were beaten back by the Taliban. The second time he was stopped by the United States. The Marines guarding the airport said they couldn’t enter. The reason? They did not have visas.
Originally published on ProPublica by Dara Lind via Creative Commons
Reuters reported today that the Withdrawal from Afghanistan has been completed, according to U.S. officials.
The final chaotic airlift was taking place nearly 20 years after the U.S. invaded the country after Sept. 11, 2001, in response to the attack on the World Trade Center.
More than 122,000 were airlifted out of Kabul in the last 16 days, an action that started just one day before the Taliban regained control.
Reuters reported tonight that a drone strike has been confirmed in retaliation for the suicide bombings yesterday that killed 13 American service personal. The military confirmed that a strike was carried out against an “Islamic State attack planner in eastern Afghanistan”.
The strike follows the vow from President Joe Biden that was made on Thursday that the United States would hunt down those responsible for the attack, and that the Pentagon had been tasked to come up with plans to strike back at the perpetrators of the deadly bombings.
The location of the drone strike was Nangahar province, east of Kabul, but no connection was, as of yet, confirmed regarding any direct involvement of the targeted in the airport attack.
“Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties,” a U.S. military statement said.
Ongoing attempts to enable travel between cities within a matter of minutes take form and shape…
A new concept video of the company’s plans for its Hyperloop system has been released, and if realized, the system will be a very fast one. The trains would travel inside a near-vacuum environment within a tube. The absence of air allows for the luxury train-like pods to travel at low power yet at extremely fast speeds, reaching up to 1,080km/hour or 670 mph.
The concept of a Hyperloop system is not a new one, and actually it was Elon Musk that initially brought the idea of developing a hyperloop transportation concept into the mainstream via the Boring Company.
photo / Virgin Hyperloop
Plans to build fully realized systems did not materialize under his watch, perhaps due to his very full agenda with sustainable energy, EVs, the moon and mars all on his plate, and now Virgin appears to be picking up the mantel and aiming for a complete transport system. With jet speeds, comfort of luxury train travel and the flexibility of car individuality the concept projections are, at the very least, beautifully imagined.
While the slick, enjoyable video (below) might make you eager to jump into a pod pronto, the reality, if realized, of the system in some kind of full commercial operations, is projected for 2027 and beyond.
All of this is promised, along with nearly zero emissions. Looking forward using a 30 year time horizon the company’s studies estimated that there could be a reduction CO2 emissions by 2.4 million tons with a connection built between three cities creating $300 billion in overall economic benefits.
This somewhat utopian vision would enable incredibly smooth, clean, cheap transportation between cities and be fast. Really fast. Although it may be easy to scoff at this rosy view of the future – it is exactly the kind of bold utopian vision that will be required if humanity is going to be saved from oblivion. Climate crisis disasters, financial meltdowns, political gridlock and corruption, these are the obvious likely candidates for a believable future.
On the other hand, ideas like universal basic income (paid in bitcoin mined by cell phone), emission free ultra luxurious hi-speed transport systems, powered with renewable energy, a world where scarcity and want are not the measurement of reality, these are the necessities of utopia.
Perhaps it’s time to start thinking it could be possible. Since the alternative is oblivion and extinction, why not?
“It starts off with two people riding a Hyperloop. It ends with hundreds of millions of people riding on a Hyperloop and that’s what the 2020s, the roaring ’20s will be”
Virgin Hyperloop Co-founder and Chief Executive Josh Giegel
One difference between the Virgin Hyperloop and a high-speed maglev train system, for example, is the idea of an individual pod system which would allow for individual pods to break away and head to secondary tubes leading towards a different destination.
Virgin Hyperloop is part of the Virgin empire created by Richard Branson, below he shared the video explaining how travel pods work.
Young students, teacher and faculty are staying home and currently are closing its doors of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) located in Kabul.
The school has accomplished great successes in the realm of culture and arts in Afhanistan, including the all-female Zohra orchestra. Founder and Director of ANIM Ahmad Sarmast said “armed people entered school property” and have attempted to steal cars and have destroyed musical instruments.
Making music can have deadly consequences
According to the NPR report, under the Taliban rule in the 1990’s performing, selling or listening to music was strictly forbidden and could get you in serious trouble if caught.
Yet the art of making music has always been a risky one in Afghanistan. In the past there have been numerous musicians that have been threatened, kidnapped or even killed.
With recent explosions it is unclear whether Taliban will allow for such organizations like the institute of music to continue to exist.
According to CNN based on information from the U.S. Central Command -13 U.S. service members have been killed as a result of the explosion and another 18 were injured.
Based on reports from officials at the Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health that 79 Afghans were killed from blast, and over 200 Afghan citizens have been wounded and more than 170 people killed from attacks.
The attacks are believed to be carried out by ISIS-K (who claimed responsibility), an Islamic State Affiliate and a terrorist group who are enemies of the Taliban. The two militant groups have a long history of engaging in attacks on each other.
NPR reported that Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, in a statement on a briefing President Biden received, “The next few days of this mission will be the most dangerous period to date”.
Additional security and protections are being put into place in the event of another attack, which the U.S. feels is likely.
Despite threats, the U.S. will continue its evacuation mission as the race continues to get people out ahead of the August 31st deadline. Around 105,000 have been airlifted abroad in the last 12 days.
Thousands crowded near the only way out of Afghanistan ahead of U.S. August 31 deadline
It has been reported that at least two explosions and gunfire occurred just outside Kabul airport. The blast happened around one of the entry gates of the Hamid Karzai International Airport on Thursday August 26, 2021.
Based on an AMN report and Pentagon statements, the blast may have been the result of a suicide attack. There have been casualties and injuries, including U.S. service members among Afghan citizens, however no additional details have been confirmed.
This is an emerging, breaking story and various outlets, including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and others have reported multiple, sometimes conflicting totals regarding the dead and wounded.
Fox News reported 10 Marines were killed, up from four, according to U.S. officials
“We can confirm that the explosion at the Abbey Gate was the result of a complex attack that resulted in a number of US & civilian casualties. We can also confirm at least one other explosion at or near the Baron Hotel, a short distance from Abbey Gate. We will continue to update,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby tweeted.
— Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder (@PentagonPresSec) August 26, 2021
The following bullet points were published in the Fox News article cited above:
A suicide bombing outside the Abbey Gate at Kabul’s airport in Afghanistan Thursday has killed at least 10 U.S. Marines and soldiers, U.S. officials tell Fox News.
A U.S. official indicated that the attack set off a firefight at Abbey Gate, where last night, there were 5,000 Afghans and potentially some Americans seeking access to the airport.
A second explosion happened outside the Baron Hotel, sources say.
There are many ways, in hindsight, to explain the seemingly sudden collapse of the local, US backed, forces in Afghanistan. Clearly also plenty of blame to go around and, obviously, huge changes are needed to prevent a repeat of this great, long tragedy.
There are some amazing people who are actively trying to help, such as STELP.eu, based in Germany, and supporting them and others can be a big first step.
Looking further ahead, perhaps now is the time, also, to do something to prevent this from repeating or continuing in the same tragic way.
A war is bad, a “forever war” is something to be prevented in any way possible. The books below, give history, thoughts and ideas, in many cases simple alternatives that could have helped to avoid this terrible outcome.
Learning the mistakes of the past, especially in Afghanistan, can only help to inform and prepare for the great challenges that still lay ahead.
One of the longest armed conflicts in our nation’s history is now winding down with American troops set to fully evacuate at the end of the month. Author Carter Malkasian writes a comprehensive and vivid portrait of the nearly two decade long war.
Malkasian is the leading academic authority on the subject, he spent years working in the Afghan countryside and later went to serve as senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan.
The upcoming investigative story of how three presidents as well as their military commanders deceived the public about the longest war in American History.
Washington Post and three time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Craig Whitlock unearthed documents by President Bush and other administrations and provides readers with a shocking account of everything that went wrong.
This book comes out August 31, if you want to pre-order, check out more information on “The Afghanistan Papers“
The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014
Starting shortly after 9/11, reporter Carlotta Gall has been on the scene, getting an inside scoop from both Afghanistan and Pakistan. With American troops now leaving, the time to reflect and learn about the full history is now.
Gall uses both personal accounts as well as portraits from ordinary Afghanis who have had to endure the terrors of war for more than a decade, she knows first hand the costs to the Afghan people.
According to MacRumors who spoke with DigiTimes, Apple has plans to have a series of events in the month of September. This would clearly deviate from how the company approached the launches of its newest products last year.
In an unusual twist at the time, the launches were spread out into three separate product events that landed during the fall months of September, October and November.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, last year’s event was live-streamed versus in-person, which may have allowed Apple to better adapt its product rollouts in digital form.
There are many new products rumored to be released that include the iPhone 13, Apple Watch Series 7, next generation AirPods, a new baseline iPad, an updated iPad mini, as well as the much anticipated 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro laptops.
Chair of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan posted on her Twitter the official press release of its position against Facebook.
Pulling no punches the language of the filing leaves no doubt as to the direction of the FTC going forward in this case. Illegal, Bribery, “Buy-or-Bury Scheme” these are characterizations that go to the heart of anticompetitive and monopolistic behavior of the giant. FTC Bureau of Competition Acting Director, Holly Vedova, said ““This conduct is no less anticompetitive than if Facebook had bribed emerging app competitors not to compete. The antitrust laws were enacted to prevent precisely this type of illegal activity by monopolists.”
While The Federal Trade Commission’s mandate has traditionally been “to promote competition and protect and educate consumers” the attempt by big tech to appear “helpful” to consumers with hidden costs and deflated pricing is finally at issue with Kahn in the chair. Khan’s famous 2017 article; “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox“ helped to re-define a new direction for antitrust law for the digital age, which appears to be in the early stages of fulfillment at the agency under her leadership.
FTC Alleges Facebook Resorted to Illegal Buy-or-Bury Scheme to Crush Competition After String of Failed Attempts to Innovatehttps://t.co/tR9yokuyFo
As described in the amended case, upon Facebook starting out as an open space for third party developers, the company quickly reversed (pulling a bait-and-switch) by requiring developers to terms that would have prevented successful applications from emerging as competitive threats to the company.
At the end of Tesla’s AI Day presentation, Musk revealed an unexpected new product, the Tesla Bot.
The humanoid robot would be 5’8″ tall and its main purpose, according to Musk, would be to eliminate dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks. The prototype is expected to be available some time next year.
The CEO also made a typically bold statement about the future and AI, saying “Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice. If you want to do it, you can, but you won’t need to do it.”
Elon finished with an invitation for engineers to join the Tesla team to build the robot.
As reported from Reuters, in the 80 page new complaint, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accuses Facebook of illegally monopolizing power. The refiled case includes additional evidence which is intended to support FTC’s case that Facebook dominates the U.S. personal social networking market.
In the headline of its press release, FTC alleges the company resorted to “illegal buy-or-bury- scheme to crush competition after string of failed attempts to innovate”.
“Despite causing significant customer dissatisfaction, Facebook has enjoyed enormous profits for an extended period of time suggesting both that it has monopoly power and that its personal social networking rivals are not able to overcome entry barriers and challenge its dominance,”
AMENDED complaint – federal trade COMMISSION
The FTC voted 3-2 to file the amended lawsuit. They also denied Facebook’s request that Lina Khan be recused, Khan participated in the filing of the new complaint.
Data stolen include names, dob, SSN, and much more!
The investigation of the ongoing T-Mobile data breach has revealed some staggering information regarding the number of customers affected. As per a new article from Engadget, T-Mobile has confirmed roughly 47.8 million current and former customers have been affected by the cyberattack.
The company issued a press statement regarding the data breach and below are some of the immediate steps they are taking:
As a result of this finding, we are taking immediate steps to help protect all of the individuals who may be at risk from this cyberattack. Communications will be issued shortly to customers outlining that T-Mobile is:
Immediately offering 2 years of free identity protection services with McAfee’s ID Theft Protection Service.
Recommending all T-Mobile postpaid customers proactively change their PIN by going online into their T-Mobile account or calling our Customer Care team by dialing 611 on your phone. This precaution is despite the fact that we have no knowledge that any postpaid account PINs were compromised.
Offering an extra step to protect your mobile account with our Account Takeover Protection capabilities for postpaid customers, which makes it harder for customer accounts to be fraudulently ported out and stolen.
Publishing a unique web page later on Wednesday for one stop information and solutions to help customers take steps to further protect themselves.
As a T-Mobile customer myself, this is quite worrisome. The data stolen includes personal information like names (first and last), date of birth, social security numbers and driver license numbers. It is unclear at the moment if the stolen files have information that would contain financial account numbers or passwords.
“We’ve spent billions on war. Now, let’s spend to bring Afghans to safety.”
As the Biden administration faces criticism for not doing enough to assist those fleeing Afghanistan, an analysis released Monday showed that the roughly $19 billion the Pentagon budgeted for the U.S. occupation of the country in 2020 alone could cover initial resettlement costs for 1.2 million refugees.
“We have a duty to save lives—and to do so, we must welcome many, many more refugees as quickly as possible.”
—Rep. Cori Bush
Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project estimated that the $18.6 billion the Pentagon allocated for its 2020 operations in Afghanistan—where the Taliban is in the process of retaking powerafter two decades of deadly U.S. occupation—could pay up-front refugee relocation costs of $15,148 for the more than “250,000 Afghans displaced since the end of May (and growing)” and “a significant chunk of the 3.5 million Afghans who were internally displaced as of July.”
“Refugees typically receive some assistance after their arrival, but even if we expanded to cover an additional four years of the approximately $4,600 in annualized social service aid that refugees typically receive, we could still resettle more than half a million people, for just one year’s worth of the cost of fighting,” Koshgarian noted. “We’d face even lower costs to help resettle Afghans in countries closer to home—all the more reason after 20 years of war to step up with some serious resources and get it done.”
“After twenty years,” she added, “we owe the Afghan people at least that much.”
Resettling 1.2 million Afghan refugees in the U.S. would cost less than one year of war in Afghanistan.
We've spent billions on war. Now, let's spend to bring Afghans to safety.
The analysis came as progressive lawmakers in the U.S. and global humanitarian organizations implored the Biden administration to open the U.S. to vulnerable Afghans attempting to escape a growing humanitarian crisis and Taliban rule. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 80% of those currently trying to flee Afghanistan are women and children.
In a speech on Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden said that “in the coming days, the U.S. military will provide assistance to move more [Special Immigrant Visa]-eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan.” The Pentagon confirmedMonday that it is planning to house up to 22,000 Afghans at two U.S. bases—Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.
“We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who worked for our embassy: U.S. non-governmental agencies—or the U.S. non-governmental organizations; and Afghans who otherwise are at great risk; and U.S. news agencies,” the president added.
Following his remarks, Biden directed the U.S. State Department to use up to $500 million from the nation’s Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund to meet “unexpected urgent refugee and migration needs of refugees, victims of conflict, and other persons at risk as a result of the situation in Afghanistan, including applicants for Special Immigrant Visas.”
But critics have accused the Biden administration of failing to adequately plan for the rapid collapse of the Afghan government that followed the ongoing withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country—a still-deteriorating situation that has left countless people in limbo as they seek safety for themselves and their families.
In his speech Monday, Biden claimed the administration didn’t begin evacuating at-risk civilians sooner “because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, ‘a crisis of confidence.'”
Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department expanded eligibility for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, opening it to tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for U.S. government contractors, U.S.-based media outlets, and U.S.-based non-governmental organizations. The families of eligible Afghans also have access to the program, whose application process consists of an arduous 14 steps.
And as the Wall Street Journalobserved on Monday, the program excludes the poorest Afghans by design. “To claim refugee status,” the Journal noted, “the Afghans must enter through a third country and cover the costs of travel and lodging on their own—a hurdle that is nearly impossible to surmount under the current, chaotic circumstances.”
In a letter to Biden on Monday, the advocacy organization Refugees International called on the administration to “express its willingness initially to resettle up to 200,000 Afghan refugees, as part of an international responsibility-sharing effort to rescue and resettle Afghans at risk.”
“While most would be resettled from countries of asylum,” the group wrote, “a program ultimately could involve direct resettlement from Afghanistan, akin to the Orderly Departure program that resulted in the resettlement of many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese directly from their country of origin.”
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), part of a chorus of progressive lawmakers pushing Biden to do more to welcome refugees—in addition to ending the interventionist foreign policy approach that creates such humanitarian crises—noted in a tweetMonday that the U.S. “welcomed 120,000 refugees in a single year” in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
“Yet the United States has only taken in ~2,000 Afghan refugees thus far,” Bush wrote. “We have a duty to save lives—and to do so, we must welcome many, many more refugees as quickly as possible.”
Evacuations resume with green light from Afghanistan’s new rulers
Although no concrete timetable for the evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies has been solidified with Taliban, according to AP, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan reports that the Taliban has agreed to allow U.S. directed “safe passage” from Afghanistan.
Despite some civilians encountering resistance and even violence as they attempted to reach Kabul international airport, “very large numbers” were reaching destinations. After interruptions (due to Afghans rushing onto tarmac) , per Pentagon officials, the airlift is back on track and schedule being accelerated.
“I cautioned them against interference in our evacuation, and made it clear to them that any attack would be met with overwhelming force in the defense of our forces”
-Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command
A total of more than 6,000 U.S. troops are expected to be involved in securing the airport. The White House reports 13 flights on Tuesday airlifted 1,100 U.S. citizens. President Biden wants the evaluation to be completed by the end of the month, August 31, 2021.
Greg Abbott, the Republican Governor for Texas tested positive for Covid-19. The news comes in the middle of the legal battles over banning vaccination and mask mandates in the state, despite opposition from both local officials and school districts.
According to NBC News, Abbott is fully vaccinated, there are reports he also received a 3rd booster shot and is currently receiving Regeneron’s antibody treatment (usually exclusive to those with compromised immune systems). Per his communication’s director, he is “in good health, and currently experiencing no symptoms.”
“Governor Abbott is in constant communication with his staff, agency heads, and government officials to ensure that state government continues to operate smoothly and efficiently”
-Mark Miner, the governor’s communications director
Perhaps a “bit” hyprocritcal? Abbott has access and benefits from any and all possible medical services necessary. Unfortunately the same privilege is not available to most ordinary Texans, where currently the state is experiencing a surge of new cases and hospitalizations
