What's my conspiracy?

[Simon of the Playa]

IMG_9620.jpeg

"The new UAP language (found in Section 1104 of the bill) would require "any person currently or formerly under contract with the Federal Government that has in their possession material or information provided by or derived from the Federal Government relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena that formerly or currently is protected by any form of special access or restricted access" to notify the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) within 60 days of enactment, and to provide within 180 days (six months) "a comprehensive list of all non-earth origin or exotic unidentified anomalous phenomena material" possessed and to make it available to the AARO director for "assessment, analysis, and inspection."


https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/senate- ... ix-months/

[Simon of the Playa]

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5078787/clip

[Simon of the Playa]

a not-so secret trojan horse.


https://www.businessinsider.com/super-p ... all-2023-7

[some seeing eye]

^ more

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/17/politics ... index.html

If you look at 2022, you only have to fraudulently move a small number of votes in key states to get a corrupt republican win. Then you can have Contract on America II - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/2 ... s-00107498.

[Elorrum]

RFK... I was trying to look up an old aphorism something like a tree may fail of it's seed, but not of it's root, or was it the other way around? Likely more apt is, "find me a white man who can sing this rock and roll rhythm and blues, and we'll print our own money." The wealthy movers and shakers see the promise of his brand and are hedging their bets against Trump's demise.

Manchin, a name associated as a legislator with "scuttled" and "blocked" believes he may stand a chance as a third party candidate. Manchin is the second least popular Senator in the United States, according to the poll (https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis ... gs-q2-2023) Only Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, received lower approval from his constituents.

[some seeing eye]

WAPO

Jeffrey Clark plotted to reverse Trump’s loss. Now he’s a GOP luminary.

After trying to use the Justice Department to delegitimize the 2020 vote, Clark has become a rising legal star for Republicans

By Isaac Stanley-Becker
August 3, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

In a conference room near the Capitol, young conservatives gathered in April to learn how to run for office — how to win and wield government power.

Among the keynote speakers at the summit, hosted by a group devoted to “training America’s future statesmen today,” was Jeffrey Clark, the former senior Justice Department official who in 2020 sought to use federal law enforcement power to undo then-President Donald Trump’s defeat.

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Clark, who accused the Biden administration of abusing its power, “really fired up our attendees and inspired them to get more active in the political process,” recalled Aiden Buzzetti, president of the Bull Moose Project, which takes its name from Theodore Roosevelt’s split with the Republican Party in 1912. Clark was chosen to speak, Buzzetti added, because of his “very unique résumé and experience with the federal government.”


The criminal indictment of Trump unsealed on Tuesday depicts in vivid detail Clark’s alleged role in the conspiracy prosecutors accuse Trump of orchestrating. The indictment identifies Clark only as “Co-Conspirator 4,” but includes details that match existing reporting about Clark’s post-election role. It portrays him as a linchpin of plans to bypass the acting attorney general and use the imprimatur of the Justice Department to spread “knowingly false claims of election fraud” and deceitfully substitute legitimate electors for sham alternates supporting Trump.

But, as the April leadership summit shows, Clark has won admiration within the pro-Trump wing of the GOP, rather than being shunned for plotting to use Justice Department authority to strong-arm states into disregarding the will of voters.

Last year, he landed a top job at a think tank laying the groundwork for a possible second Trump term. A once-obscure government bureaucrat, Clark now appears as a pundit on conservative television and podcasts. In July, he was spotted at a party celebrating the publication of an authorized biography of former Fox host Tucker Carlson at Washington’s swanky Metropolitan Club. He recently posted a picture of himself at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, enthusing about the weather in South Florida.


With Trump the runaway favorite for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, Clark, 56, is poised to gain sweeping authority if the former president should clinch another term — potentially even in the role of attorney general, which eluded him just before Jan. 6, 2021.

Clark would be “100 percent shortlist” for the nation’s top law enforcement position or else White House Counsel if Trump returned to the Oval Office, said Stephen K. Bannon, the Trump ally and onetime White House strategist, who has hosted Clark on his far-right “War Room” show. The hype that surrounds the former mid-level Justice Department official shows how Republicans are lionizing figures key to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.


Here are the Trump co-conspirators described in the DOJ indictment


Clark has not been indicted by the special counsel, Jack Smith, who brought Tuesday’s indictment. But Smith has said his investigation is ongoing. A district attorney in Georgia is also probing Clark’s actions. And a D.C. Bar disciplinary office is pursuing ethics charges against him that could ultimately strip him of his law license. The charges, filed by the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel last summer, allege that Clark engaged in dishonest conduct and attempted to interfere with “the administration of justice.”

Clark directed questions to a spokesperson for the think tank where he works, the Center for Renewing America. The spokesperson, Rachel Cauley, said, “The regime hates those who don’t blindly obey, it insists on criminalizing and destroying those who disagree, and when that doesn’t work, it uses its scribes at The Washington Post to further abuse and intimidate us into submission.”

“It’s a good thing Jeff Clark and the Center for Renewing America are made of tougher stock than that,” Cauley added. “We are fighting alongside every American who has been taunted, abused, tailed, and staked out by our regime media and federal government.”

Clark has sought to move the dispute over his law license to federal court and accused the D.C. Bar disciplinary body of “grasping at straws.” On Twitter, he has called the investigations of Trump and his allies a “preemptive coup” to keep the former president from power and likened the special counsel to Inspector Javert, the merciless police detective pursuing the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s ''Les Misérables.”

Nearly acting attorney general

Born in Philadelphia, Clark earned an undergraduate degree in economics and history from Harvard before studying urban affairs and public policy at the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and Administration and a law degree at Georgetown.

He was confirmed to run the Justice Department’s environmental and natural resources division in 2018 and, in the summer of 2020, named acting chief of the civil division. It was his second stint in government, after he served in the same environmental division in the George W. Bush administration. In a report touting his division’s accomplishments in 2019, he wrote that “environmental law must always be guided by the bedrock principles enshrined in our Constitution.”

Former colleagues described Clark as wonkish and hard-working. “I wish you people would leave him alone and let him move on with his life,” said Jonathan Brightbill, a principal deputy under Clark.

After the 2020 election, Clark emerged as an important player in Trump’s efforts to stay in power, as the president and his allies pressured the Justice Department to pursue fantastical claims of fraud.

Clark circumvented department leadership to speak with Trump multiple times in late December and early January, according to Tuesday’s indictment. Prosecutors allege that Clark encouraged Justice Department leaders to sign a draft letter to officials in key swing states declaring that the agency had reason to doubt the legitimacy of their elections and encouraging them to send alternate slates of pro-Trump electors to Congress.

After the Justice Department officials refused, the indictment states, Clark “tried to coerce” them into signing the letter by saying that Trump was offering to make him acting attorney general. Clark accepted that offer on Jan. 3, 2021, according to the indictment. Prosecutors portray Clark as having been dismissive when a White House lawyer urged him to rethink his actions, suggesting that riots would erupt in the nation’s cities if Trump tried to remain in office. “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” the indictment alleges that Clark responded, suggesting that protests could be put down by the military.

The machinations led to a dramatic showdown in the Oval Office on the evening of Jan. 3, when Trump balked, retreating from his plan to promote Clark, after being warned that Justice Department leaders and White House lawyers would resign en masse. “Will call shortly,” Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general at the time, who vigorously opposed Clark’s proposals, wrote in a text message that night to a colleague, according to communications released by the Justice Department. “But we won.”

On Jan. 8, two days after a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol and delayed the certification of President Biden’s victory, Clark emailed Rosen saying he planned to leave the Justice Department at noon on Jan. 14.

“I have some projects to finish up before then and, of course, will continue to work on normal package flow approval up until the prior evening,” he wrote in the previously unreported communication, which was obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight and shared with The Washington Post. “I believe I’ve left a legacy of accomplishment starting after my confirmation in 2018.”

Clark said he would “miss the Justice Department,” telling Rosen and another colleague, “On most matters, we have been in total and vigorous agreement or in virtually all situations in at least in substantial agreement. But no one can agree on all things and reasonable minds can differ. Yet friendships and mutual professional respect endure.”


He signed off with a flourish: “Thanks and God bless you, the Department, and its lawyers and staff!”

The documents show that Rosen never replied. But four days later, he forwarded the message to a colleague and explained his silence.

“I am not going to respond to Jeff Clark’s message given the events that took place with him,” Rosen wrote. “Those were not things on which ‘reasonable minds can differ’ and simply move along.”

Rosen added, “It appears he still does not recognize how harmful his actions and proposals were.”

Rosen declined to comment for this article.

Drafting an autobiography
Clark soon set about crafting his own account of his actions.

By the fall of 2021, he had drafted an outline of an autobiography, according to an order issued last fall by a federal judge in D.C. The government had sought the notes, which Clark argued were protected by attorney-client privilege and as attorney work product.

Then-Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell rejected that argument, finding that Clark failed to prove that the drafts were communicated with counsel or prepared as part of a legal defense. According to her order, which made the materials available to government investigators, Clark drafted the outline in notes autosaved to his Google account.

The outline included a prologue, introduction, nine numbered sections that “chronologically narrate Clark’s life” as well as a conclusion, according to the order, which quotes from Clark’s drafts.

The prologue, according to the order, describes Clark’s involvement in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case before the U.S. Supreme Court that handed the presidency to Bush. In the draft, Clark wrote that he “never thought [he’d] have a bird’s eye view of a second deeply contested presidential election,” but that he “would be wrong” about that expectation.

In the outline’s introduction, Clark wrote how he learned about a New York Times story in January 2021 about how he “headed up a plot to take over as Acting AG and ‘subvert democracy,’” according to the order. Six chapters then address the 2020 election, according to the order, including a description of Trump’s purported reaction to Clark’s never-sent letter to swing states: “Good letter,” Clark wrote that Trump told him.

It’s not clear if Clark finished the autobiography or attempted to publish it.

In June 2022, Clark’s Virginia home was searched by federal agents. The next day, his efforts to keep Trump in power were the focus of a hearing by the House panel probing the Jan. 6 attack. The hearing featured footage of Clark meeting with committee investigators but repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and declining to answer questions.

But that night, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox, describing the search of his home and saying he was ordered outside in his pajamas. “Increasingly, Tucker, I don’t recognize the country anymore with these kinds of Stasi-like things happening,” he said, referring to the dreaded secret police of Communist East Germany.

Hired by Trump allies

As his actions at the end of the Trump administration came under scrutiny, Clark expanded his influence among Trump’s supporters. The same month that his home was searched, Clark was announced as a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, the Trump-aligned group led by Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The nonprofit organization gave Clark a prominent platform at a group that fashions itself as the intellectual engine of Trump’s political movement. Its mission, according to a tax filing, is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions, and history, where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities.”

This past May, Clark published a position paper on the Center for Renewing America’s website that some of the former president’s allies see as a blueprint for bringing the Justice Department to heel, one of a number of policy proposals the organization has produced for a possible second Trump term. The paper, titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent,” advocates a unitary theory of the executive that would give the president sweeping authority over the whole federal bureaucracy.

Breaking with post-Watergate norms creating distance between the president and particular law enforcement decisions, the paper claims that the agency’s independence is an invention of “influencers on the Left.”

The ideas illuminate how Clark may operate if named attorney general — taking an approach that many lawyers worry could turn the Justice Department into an instrument of the president’s personal and political agenda. At the same time, Clark and others at the Center for Renewing America have been some of the loudest voices claiming that Biden is using law enforcement to target his adversaries as he presides over what the nonprofit organization calls a “woke and weaponized government.”

Heath Mayo, an attorney and founder of an anti-Trump nonprofit group called Principles First, said Republicans are contradicting themselves by accusing Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department while at the same time pledging to crush the agency’s independence and give the president the power to steer investigations.

“Trump needs the Jeffrey Clarks of the world who, for the purpose of getting a nice office in the executive branch, are willing to concoct these cockamamie legal theories so he has the pretext to do whatever he wants,” Mayo said.

A Twitter celebrity

As Clark came to represent growing right-wing hostility to the Justice Department, his stock rose in the pro-Trump wing of the GOP. Recent invitations included a June meeting of the D.C. Young Republicans. Photos he has posted on social media show he has visited not only Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., but also the former president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

He is active on Twitter, complaining at least seven times in the past eight months about his follower count being “frozen” or “throttled,” often appealing directly to the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. Clark created his account only in March of last year and has now amassed nearly 60,000 followers.

Last fall, he sparred on the social media site with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie star and former governor of California, calling him a “faux Republican.” That prompted Schwarzenegger to post a photo of pajama-clad, bare-legged Clark during the search of his home, offering “some tips on squatting to build up those legs.”

The exchange caught the attention of Erik Scharf, who clerked alongside Clark in 1995-1996 for an appeals court judge, Danny Boggs. Scharf, now an appellate lawyer based in Miami, said he has seen former clerks in unusual places, including on the game show “Jeopardy!” (Boggs is known for subjecting prospective clerks to a general knowledge test assessing their understanding of obscure trivia.)

But “the last place I would expect to see” a former clerk, Scharf said, “is in a Twitter war with Arnold.”

Scharf recalled Clark as hard-working and frugal. “He typically packed a lunch in a small igloo cooler and ate at his desk whereas I typically went out for lunch,” Scharf said.

Clark had an appreciation for heavy metal music, his former co-clerk said, and once attended what Scharf recalled as a Metallica concert with clerks from the adjoining chambers.

Scharf said he did not recall Clark speaking about wanting to climb the ranks of the Justice Department. Instead, Clark was clear, as a judicial clerk, about “his ultimate personal and professional ambition,” Scharf said.

“To one day,” Scharf said, “become a federal judge himself.”

Magda Jean-Louis and Jeremy B. Merrill contributed to this report.

[some seeing eye]

If we can have Grover Norquist at our campout, we can have Clarence and Ginni Thomas, right?

(The BRCCP should be supporting the Starbucks Workers United Prevost Marathon RV )

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/us/c ... lters.html

Clarence Thomas’s $267,230 R.V. and the Friend Who Financed It

The vehicle is a key part of the justice’s just-folks persona. It’s also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else’s money.

Justice Clarence Thomas, circa 2000, with his great-nephew and his Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon motor coach.Credit...
Jo Becker and Julie Tate
Aug. 5, 2023
Justice Clarence Thomas met the recreational vehicle of his dreams in Phoenix, on a November Friday in 1999.

With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “he kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Justice Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.

There he is behind the wheel during a rare 2007 interview with “60 Minutes,” talking about how the steel-clad converted bus allows him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” He regularly slips into his speeches his love of driving it through the American heartland — “the part we fly over.” And in a documentary financed by conservative admirers, Justice Thomas, who was born into poverty in Georgia, waxes rhapsodic about the familiarity of spending time with the regular folks he meets along the way in R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots.

“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” he told the filmmakers, adding: “There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”

But there is an untold, and far more complex, back story to Justice Thomas’s R.V. — one that not only undercuts the mythology but also leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.

His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.

ImageAn ad shows the exterior and interior of a Marathon motor coach and features the text, “Marathon — The Motor Coach That Defines Its Own Class.”
A circa 1991 advertisement for Marathon coaches.Credit...Marathon

He provided Justice Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Justice Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.

In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “the loan was satisfied,” Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.

But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Mr. Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Justice Thomas.

He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been “satisfied,” he did not respond.

“‘Satisfied’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone paid the loan back,” said Michael Hamersley, a tax lawyer and expert who has testified before Congress. “‘Satisfied’ could also mean the lender formally forgave the debt, or otherwise just stopped pursuing repayment.”

Justice Thomas, for his part, did not respond to detailed questions about the loan, sent to him through the Supreme Court’s spokeswoman.

The two men’s silence serves to obscure whether Justice Thomas had an obligation to report the arrangement under a federal ethics law that requires justices to disclose certain gifts, liabilities and other financial dealings that could pose conflicts of interest.

Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.

Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said that when it comes to questions of disclosure, the ethics treatment of gifts and income often parallels the tax treatment. But those intricacies aside, he said, “justices just should not be accepting private loans from wealthy individuals outside their family.” If they do, he added, “you have to ask, why is a justice going to this private individual and not to a commercial lender, unless the justice is getting something he or she otherwise could not get.”

The Times’s unearthing of the loan arrangement is the latest in a series of revelations showing how wealthy benefactors have bestowed an array of benefits on Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas: helping to pay for his great-nephew’s tuition, steering business to Mrs. Thomas’s consulting firm, buying and renovating the house where his mother lives and inviting the Thomases on trips both domestic and foreign that included travel aboard private jets and a yacht.

Ethical Issues Inside the Supreme Court
A Crisis of Ethics: A debate over ethical standards for Supreme Court justices has intensified after a series of revelations about lavish gifts and financial largess. Our reporter explains the allegations of misconduct and the growing calls for tighter rules.

Opening Doors: Justice Clarence Thomas’s membership in an exclusive club gave him access to its wealthy inner circle. He also gave them rare access to the Supreme Court.
Alito Under Scrutiny: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. used an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal to defend his luxury trip with a billionaire who often has cases before the Supreme Court hours before ProPublica published a story detailing their ties.

Scalia Law: George Mason University’s law school cultivated ties to some of the court’s conservative justices with generous pay and unusual perks. In turn, the school gained prestige, donations and influence.
Justice Thomas has pointed to interpretations of the disclosure rules to defend his failure to report much of the largess he has received. He has said he was advised that the trips fell under an exemption for gifts involving “personal hospitality” from close friends, for instance, and a lawyer close to the Thomases contended in a statement that the justice did not need to disclose the tuition because it was a gift to his great-nephew, over whom he had legal custody, rather than to him.

The Thomases’ known benefactors include wealthy men like the Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow, the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and several members of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, which honors people who succeed despite adversity. Among them: the longtime Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, who flew the justice around on his jet.

Mr. Welters, while also a Horatio Alger member, stands apart. For one thing, the two men’s friendship predates Justice Thomas’s time on the federal bench. They met around 1980, when both were members of a small, informal club of Black congressional aides to Republican lawmakers — Mr. Welters worked for Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York and Justice Thomas for Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri.

“It wasn’t exactly fashionable to be a Black person working for a Republican, and it was comforting to meet others in the same boat,” the justice wrote in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”

They had much in common. Like Justice Thomas, Mr. Welters was raised in poverty, sharing a cramped tenement in Harlem with his parents and three brothers and, after his mother’s death when he was 8, shining shoes under an elevated subway to help make ends meet.

As both men climbed the ladder as political appointees in the Reagan administration, their friendship grew. They stayed close after Justice Thomas joined the federal appeals court in Washington in 1990 and Mr. Welters left government to found AmeriChoice, a Medicaid services provider that he sold to UnitedHealthcare for $530 million in stock in 2002 and continued to lead until retiring in 2016. Mr. Welters and his wife, Beatrice, named Justice Thomas the godfather of one of their two boys, according to The Village Voice.

When Justice Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court nomination ran into trouble after a former subordinate, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment, Mr. Welters stood by his friend, providing behind-the-scenes advice, according to a book on the hearings written by Mr. Danforth.

And in 1998, the year before the motor coach purchase, Justice Thomas returned the favor. That is when Mr. Welters and his wife, through their foundation, started the AnBryce scholarship program, which gives underprivileged students a full ride to New York University’s law school, along with networking opportunities and career support. Justice Thomas lent his considerable imprimatur to the program, interviewing applicants in his Supreme Court chambers, mentoring scholars and later hiring one graduate as a clerk.

By that point, the justice had become fixated on owning an R.V., and not just any R.V., but the Rolls-Royce of motor coaches: a custom Prevost Marathon, or as he once put it, a “condo on wheels.”

A Toy for the Rich
Justice Thomas was turned on to the luxury brand by Bernie Little, a fellow Horatio Alger member and the flamboyantly wealthy owner of the Miss Budweiser hydroplane racing boat. Mr. Little had owned 20 to 25 custom motor coaches over the years, Mr. Thomas told C-SPAN in 2001.

Back in those days, a basic Prevost Marathon sold for about a million dollars, and could fetch far more depending on the bells and whistles. It was a rich man’s toy, and the company marketed it that way.

“You drive through a neighborhood in South Florida and you see these $10 million homes,” Bob Phebus, Marathon’s vice president, told The South Florida Business Journal in 2006. “You condense that down, put it on wheels and that’s what we have. It’s the same guy that will have a 100-foot yacht and a private aircraft. They’re accustomed to the finer things in life.”

Got a news tip about the courts?If you have information to share about the Supreme Court or other federal courts, please send us a secure tip at nytimes.com/tips.
At the time, the Thomases’ primary source of income was the justice’s salary, then $167,900. He had yet to sell his autobiography, and property and other records show that the couple had significant debt: They had purchased their house in 1992 for $552,000 with 5 percent down, then refinanced it two years later, taking out a 15-year mortgage of $496,000. Plus, they had at least one line of credit of between $15,000 and $50,000.

So, in Justice Thomas’s telling, he began searching for a used Prevost at Mr. Little’s suggestion, one with enough miles on it to depreciate the value. “The depreciation curve — it’s very steep,” he made a point of saying in the 2001 C-SPAN interview.

All these years later, he still hasn’t told some of his closest friends how he was really able to swing the purchase.

“He told me he saved up all his money to buy it,” said Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend who worked closely with Justice Thomas in the Reagan administration.

The title history documents reviewed by The Times show that when the motor coach was sold for $267,230 to the Thomases in 1999, it had only 93,618 miles on it, relatively few for a vehicle that experts say can easily log a million miles in its lifetime. It came equipped with plush leather seating, a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom in the back. In addition to its orange flame motif, it had a large Pegasus painted on the back, according to Jason Mang, the step-grandson of the previous owner, Bonnie Owenby.

“It was superluxury, really bougie,” he recalled.

On Nov. 19, 1999, after spotting the motor coach on the lot of Desert West Coach in Phoenix and putting a hold on it, Justice Thomas attended a dinner at the conservative Goldwater Institute. In a speech that night, he said he had never yearned to be a federal judge. “Pure and simple, I wanted to be rich,” he said.

Wayne Mullis, the owner of the now-defunct Desert West, said in an interview that Justice Thomas never discussed obtaining traditional financing with him, and that “as far as I know, he paid for it.”

Indeed, Justice Thomas would have been hard-pressed to get a loan from a traditional lender. Banks, and even finance companies that specialize in R.V. loans, are particularly reluctant to lend money on used Prevost Marathons because the customized features are hard to value, according to three leading industry executives interviewed by The Times.

“As a rule, the majority of buyers are cash buyers — they don’t finance the Prevost, generally,” said Chad Stevens, owner of an Arizona-based dealership specializing in high-end motor coaches, whose clients include celebrities and politicians. “In 1999, you would need a very strong down payment and a strong financial portfolio to finance one. It is a luxury item.”

While the terms of Mr. Welters’s loan to Justice Thomas are unclear, rules governing loans of more than $10,000 between friends and family are not.

Loans can be reclassified as gifts or income to the borrower, either of which would have to be reported by the justice under court disclosure rules, if any portion of the debt is forgiven or discharged as uncollectable. But even if a lender does not take those steps, a loan can still be considered a reportable gift or income if it doesn’t meet certain standards.

Loan terms should be spelled out in a written agreement, with a clearly defined, regular repayment schedule, tax experts said. Lenders must charge at least the applicable federal interest rate, which was a little over 6 percent in December 1999, when the deal to buy the motor coach closed. And if a borrower is in arrears, lenders must make a good-faith effort to collect, even to the point of going to court.

“Absent that, it’s more of a gift,” said Rich Lahijani, tax director of Edelman Financial Engines, an independent wealth planning and investment advisory firm.

The title history records held by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles do not contain detailed information about the loan itself. What they show is that when the Thomases drove their motor coach back home to Virginia, they registered it in Prince William County, which does not charge personal property tax on R.V.s stored there, unlike Fairfax County, where they live.

And as of late last month, when The Times reviewed the records, they still listed Mr. Welters as the lien holder, notwithstanding the signed release he said he gave Justice Thomas in 2008 so he could obtain a new, clear title.

Mr. Welters said he could not explain why he was still listed as the holder of the lien. After he gave Justice Thomas the paperwork, he said, “I don’t know what process the borrower should have followed.” (To clear the title, the paperwork should have been brought to the D.M.V., where the lien release would have been recorded and a replacement title issued.) As for Justice Thomas, that was among the matters he declined to discuss with The Times.

‘A Warm, Safe Place’
As details about Justice and Mrs. Thomas’s subsidized trips to vacation homes and resorts have become public in recent months, his professed preference for traveling by motor coach has become something of a “yeah, right” punchline.

But by all accounts, he loves the anonymity, the freedom and the community it affords. He has hosted at least one event at the Supreme Court for a Marathon owners’ club.

Image
A crowd of people, in gowns and tuxedos stand on the steps of the Supreme Court.
Members of the Marathon Coach Club International on the steps of the Supreme Court.Credit...via Marathon Coach

When he hits the road, he often goes unrecognized, which at times has allowed him to travel without a U.S. Marshals’ security detail. Chris Weaver, who worked at Desert West Coach, said the justice had frequently gotten his motor coach serviced there before it closed. “Nine out of 10 times, he was just wearing sweats and a T-shirt,” he said.

Traveling largely through red-state America has also meant that when he is recognized, more often than not it is by fans. Juan Williams, a Fox News commentator who has known Justice Thomas since the Reagan administration, said the motor coach was both the fulfillment of a boyish fantasy and a metaphorical “womb.”

“He talked about the R.V. a lot,” he said. “It was a warm, safe place where he didn’t have to be attacked by liberals and Blacks on the left. What he liked about it was not being pilloried.”

Image
A film still from a 2007 “60 Minutes” interview shows Justice Clarence Thomas behind the wheel of his motor coach, with the journalist Steve Kroft in the passenger seat.

In a 2007 interview, Justice Thomas told Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” that the motor coach enabled him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.”Credit...CBS News

In a 2019 Q. and A. at the court, Justice Thomas said he had made it to nearly two dozen states, and declared himself the proud owner of a KOA campground discount card.

But the Thomases’ road trips have hardly been limited to sleeping at campsites and Walmart parking lots.

In a 2009 call-in to a morning radio talk show, for instance, Mrs. Thomas said they were driving their motor coach through the Adirondacks, on their way to “meet some families from Texas.” ProPublica has reported that the Thomases have spent part of nearly every summer for the past two decades in the Adirondacks as a guest of Mr. Crow, who owns a lakeside resort there with more than 25 fireplaces, three boathouses and a painting of the justice, his host and other guests smoking cigars.

Image
A stone and wood boathouse, against a backdrop of trees, with small boats docked in and around it.
The boathouse at Harlan Crow’s Adirondack resort, where Justice Thomas and his wife have vacationed.Credit...Nancie Battaglia for The New York Times


When the Thomases aren’t houseguests, they have stayed at upscale Marathon-endorsed destinations like the Mountain Falls Luxury Motorcoach Resort in Lake Toxaway, N.C.

There, the justice met Larry Fields, who owns a motor-coach-cleaning business. Mr. Fields said that for several days he had had no idea who Justice Thomas was, telling him he would have to wait in line to have his Prevost washed, which he patiently did.

“He was a great guy,” Mr. Fields recalled. “I think we talked about how great Reagan was. He was low-key. It was just him and his wife and a dog.”

Image
Rows of lodges and luxury motor coaches, with trees around the edges and mountains in the distance.
Justice and Mrs. Thomas have traveled to Mountain Falls, a luxury motor coach resort in North Carolina.Credit...Greg Eastman

Upkeep on a motor coach like the justice’s is an expensive constant, and other friends have chipped in to help. While he did not disclose Mr. Welters’s assistance in buying the motor coach, he did report that some former clerks got together and bought him deep-cycle batteries for $1,200 the year after he acquired it. He also reported that in 2002, Greg Werner, who ran a large, family-owned, Nebraska-based trucking company, gave him tires worth $1,200.

And over time, Justice Thomas made the motor coach his own. In a photo The Times obtained that appears to date back to the early 2000s, picturing his great-nephew as a child, the motor coach no longer sported the sizzling orange flames and Pegasus logo. Instead, it was painted in an elegant black-and-gold geometric pattern.

But if the custom coach changed, the justice’s friendship with Mr. Welters endured.

While Mr. Welters was an executive at UnitedHealthcare, Justice Thomas twice recused himself from cases involving the company, in 2003 and 2005. As is the general custom of the court, he did not explain why.

In 2010, Justice Thomas traveled to the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain, at the invitation of the Welterses. By then, the couple had become major Democratic fund-raisers and President Obama had named Ms. Welters ambassador to the island nation. Local newspapers captured the justice and Mr. Welters talking to students at a school.

Justice Thomas at a school in Trinidad and Tobago in 2010 with Mr. Welters, left, whose wife was the ambassador. Flight records show that the Welterses’ private plane flew to and from Dulles Airport on the days Justice Thomas traveled.Credit...U.S. Embassy Trinidad and Tobago

In disclosures, Justice Thomas wrote that the “U.S. Embassy Port of Spain” had paid for his flight. But flight records obtained through the plane-tracking services of MyRadar show that the Welterses’ private Gulfstream G-6 flew from Washington Dulles International Airport and back on the days that Justice Thomas arrived on and departed the Caribbean island.

And Matthew Cassetta, a retired embassy official who helped arrange the visit, said Ms. Welters customarily “offered the plane to people who came down,” always at her own expense to save the taxpayers money.

(Ms. Welters declined to comment on the flights or the loan, except to say, “I just want to tell you that friendships come and go, and that’s what I want to say.”)

The same year, in a speech accepting an award from the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas singled out Mr. Welters as one of his “friends for the whole journey.”

“And for Tony, a special thank you, who understood relationships and who was always there as a friend in the worst times of my life,” he said. “It is a friendship I will treasure forever.”

Reporting was contributed by Steve Eder, Riley Mellen, Robin Stein and Abbie VanSickle.

Jo Becker is a reporter in the investigative unit and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the author of “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.” More about Jo Becker

[some seeing eye]

Analysis: Xi reprimanded by elders at Beidaihe over direction of nation

G20 absence hints at turmoil in Chinese domestic politics

https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/ ... -of-nation

[some seeing eye]

DNA Arms Race for Human Genetic Sequences

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in ... bgi-covid/

[Popeye]

Burners don't want to get involved in physical fights.
+
E Bikes are easily moved
+
Chains and locks are easily cut
+
E Bikes are valuable and easily sold most are new
+
E bike owners are spread across the country and not readily available to LEO
+
The type of person who will plan to steal E Bikes will steal anything else easily transportable
=
We are in for an increase in thefts on Playa

[some seeing eye]

‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code – and some Republicans are listening

Argument for a ‘red Caesar’ to rule US may seem esoteric but conservative thinktank behind idea has connections to Trump

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... reme-right

[Simon of the Playa]

IMG_1682.jpeg

[Simon of the Playa]

In one of the said warnings, Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally called Netanyahu only 10 days before the massive attack that Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation,” according to the Ynet news site.
Unnamed Egyptian officials told the site they were shocked by Netanyahu’s indifference to the news.


Netanyahu denied receiving any such advance warning, saying in the course of an address to the nation Monday night that the story was “fake news.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/egypt-int ... thing-big/

[Simon of the Playa]

bibi knew.


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047

[some seeing eye]

Qatar.

Bibi, like Faust, made a deal with the devil for wealth and to stay out of jail. It is time for him to retire in shame. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years ... our-faces/

[Simon of the Playa]

curiouser and curiouser....



https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/ ... and-region

[Simon of the Playa]

2D00A6E7-7785-41C5-BEBF-3FCB130C38CF.jpeg

[some seeing eye]

Taylor Swift...

Chronology of a conspiracy
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/us/p ... trump.html

Vivek weighs in
https://thehill.com/media/4437923-taylo ... ial-media/

Trump claims he is more popular than Swift
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234956829/

OAN Alison Steinberg rant video
https://www.mediaite.com/media/oan-host ... ft-psy-op/

"TikTok Vivek"...
https://www.tiktok.com/@chellytok/video ... 7594837294

Of course the wacko media outlets draw pageviews to boost ad revenue for every mention of Swift

[Simon of the Playa]

“This is a biblical, monumental moment that’s been put together by God,” one convoy organizer said on a recent planning call. “We are besieged on all sides by dark forces of evil,” said another. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. It is time for the remnant to rise.” (The remnant, from the Book of Revelation, are the ones who remain faithful to Jesus Christ in times of crisis).

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9adk/ ... ationalism

[Simon of the Playa]

Taylor Swift...

Chronology of a conspiracy
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/us/p ... trump.html

Vivek weighs in
https://thehill.com/media/4437923-taylo ... ial-media/

Trump claims he is more popular than Swift
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234956829/

OAN Alison Steinberg rant video
https://www.mediaite.com/media/oan-host ... ft-psy-op/

"TikTok Vivek"...
https://www.tiktok.com/@chellytok/video ... 7594837294

Of course the wacko media outlets draw pageviews to boost ad revenue for every mention of Swift

IMG_3051.jpeg

well, this certainly takes things in a New Direction...

[some seeing eye]

The Internet is privately operated, it is not operated by the US government. Fear of Republicans is reducing security cooperation between private companies operating the Internet.

(private hackers is a dumb choice of words -
Cybersecurity engineers fear to cooperate stopping Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and other cyberattacks, intrusions and personal data thefts because of Republican conspiracies
- would be a more accurate headline)

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/0 ... s-00139413

[The Rod]

Can you imagine what would happen to any of us if boxes of classified government documents were found in our garages.

[Sham]

Can you imagine what would happen to any of us if boxes of classified government documents were found in our garages.

I dunno. Maybe they would make us their leader and sing our praises every President's Day for generations to come?

[some seeing eye]

Can you imagine what would happen to any of us if boxes of classified government documents were found in our garages.

I dunno. Maybe they would make us their leader and sing our praises every President's Day for generations to come?

Biden has been savaged by the progressive media from the beginning. It doesn't help anything.

His motivation for collecting the documents was to show he opposed Obama's troop surge, which was ultimately unsuccessful, helped along by Trump's surrender to the Taliban in Qatar.

https://news.yahoo.com/biden-considered ... 45645.html

Biden was also unable to convince Obama that Iraq should be partitioned into a Shia country friend to Iran, a Suni country friendly to the Saudis and adjacent Suni countries, and a Kurdish homeland with independent oil resources.

[Simon of the Playa]

IMG_3171.jpeg

[some seeing eye]

Yikes! Republicans love Trump's love of Putin, but hate Biden not publicizing classified Putin nukes. WTF?

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-h ... =107232293

[The Rod]

Progressive media? What even is that

[Simon of the Playa]

Although few Americans paid much attention at the time, the events of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine would turn out to be a linchpin in how the United States ended up where it is a decade later.

On that day ten years ago, after months of what started as peaceful protests, Ukrainians occupied government buildings and marched on parliament to remove Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych from office. After the escalating violence resulted in many civilian casualties, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, returned power to Ukraine’s constitution.

The ouster of Yanukovych meant that American political consultant Paul Manafort was out of a job.

Manafort had worked with Yanukovych since 2004. In that year, the Russian-backed politician appeared to have won the presidency of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, while Russia’s president Vladimir Putin congratulated Yanukovych even before the results were officially announced.

The government voided the election and called for a do-over.

To rehabilitate his reputation, Yanukovych turned to Manafort, who was already working for a young Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska worried that Ukraine would break free of Russian influence and was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries and replacing the region’s communist leaders. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.


https://open.substack.com/pub/heatherco ... ry-17-2024

[some seeing eye]

The Americans Who Need Chaos
They’re embracing nihilism and upending politics.

By Derek Thompson

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems.

Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why people share conspiracy theories on the Internet. He and other researchers designed a study that involved showing American participants blatantly false stories about Democratic and Republican politicians, such as Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. The subjects were asked: Would you share these stories online?

The results seemed to defy the logic of modern politics or polarization. “There were many people who seemed willing to share any conspiracy theory, regardless of the party it hurt,” Petersen told me. These participants didn’t seem like stable partisans of the left or right. They weren’t even negative partisans, who hated one side without feeling allegiance to the other. Above all, they seemed drawn to stories that undermined trust in every system of power.

Petersen felt as though he’d tapped a new vein of nihilism in modern politics—a desire to rip down the Elites, whatever that might mean. He wanted to know more about what these people were thinking. In further research, he and his co-researchers asked participants how much they agreed with several statements, including the following:

•“We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”
•”I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.”
•“When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’”

The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the “need for chaos,” which they defined as “a mindset to gain status” by destroying the established order. In their study, nearly a third of respondents demonstrated a need for chaos, Petersen said. And for about 5 percent of voters, old-fashioned party allegiances to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party melted away and were replaced by a desire to see the entire political elite destroyed—even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.

“These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.” To sum up their worldview, Petersen quoted a famous line from the film The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Several months after I first read Petersen’s paper, I still can’t get the phrase need for chaos out of my head. Everywhere I look, I seem to find new evidence that American politics is being consumed by the flesh-eating bacteria of a new nihilism—a desire to see existing institutions destroyed, with no particular plan or interest to replace and improve them.

In a much-shared Politico feature from January, the reporter Michael Kruse profiled a 58-year-old New Hampshire voter named Ted Johnson, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, then for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Johnson explained his pivot only with vague, destructive allegories. “Our system needs to be broken,” Johnson said. And only Trump, whom he acknowledged as “a chaos creator,” could deliver the crushing blow. Johnson reportedly works out of his three-bedroom house, which he bought in 2020 for $485,000 and which has appreciated almost 50 percent during Joe Biden’s presidency. He has a job, a family, and, clearly, a formidable financial portfolio. Still, he said he hopes that Trump “breaks the system” to create “a miserable four years for everybody.” We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions; we need to tear them down and start over.

Or take Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the more energetic MAGA mascots. Last August, she attended the first GOP presidential-nomination debate, which Trump declined to join. Ratings were abysmal, and Greene noted a certain lack of joie de vivre at the proceedings. “The number one comment I’m hearing in Milwaukee is ‘it’s boring without Trump here,’” she posted on X. I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.

White men in the conspiracy-theory study were the most sensitive to perceived challenges to status, Petersen told me. But the researchers wrote that the need for chaos was “highest among racial groups facing historical injustice—in particular, Black males.” Anti-elite conspiracy theories and tear-it-all-down rhetoric can appeal to groups who feel, sometimes quite rightly, aggrieved by long-standing injustice. As we spoke, I recalled some of the radical rhetoric from the summer of 2020: “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it,” Hawk Newsome, the chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, said during an interview with Fox News. “I could be speaking figuratively; I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation.” When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, “Just let them all burn.”

Although a few BLM protests led to literal fires, and January 6 led to violent mayhem at the Capitol, the majority of chaos rhetoric isn’t necessarily actionable. It’s typically just talk: For some, it’s catharsis; for others, entertainment. What Petersen and the other researchers identified wasn’t a broad interest in political violence but rather a fondness for bull-in-a-china-shop bluster that promises total war against elites. Chaos is a taste, and it seems to be having a moment.

The concept of “need for chaos” can help explain the mess that is American politics in 2024, and more specifically why the most common criticisms of Trump have failed to dent his support.

Ever since Trump’s 2015 candidacy kicked off, his rivals have accused him of being an agent of chaos, as if that were a turnoff for voters. Before the 2016 election, Jeb Bush called him a “chaos candidate.” In the GOP presidential primary, Nikki Haley said that Trump brings only “one bout of chaos after another.” The Biden team has repeatedly hammered home the connection between Trump and chaos. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, described the 2024 election as a “binary choice”—democracy and freedom versus “extremism and chaos.”

But Trump’s chaos vibes might fulfill a significant and otherwise unmet demand in the electorate. In the conclusion to their paper, Petersen and his co-authors write that the need for chaos emerges from the interplay between “dominance-oriented” traits (i.e., a preference for traditional social hierarchies), feelings of marginalization, and intense anger toward elites. Together, these traits would seem to apply to several voting groups: white conservative men nostalgic for a diminished patriarchy; independents who are furious about elite institutional failures during and after the pandemic; and culturally conservative, nonwhite Americans, especially men, who might feel marginalized by racism and economic inequality but also rue the latest waves of #MeToo feminism. Indeed, all of these groups are shifting toward the Republican Party under Trump.

The need for chaos might also offer us a new “deep story” for the sort of disaffected and conspiratorial voters who could sway the November election. In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explained the far-right worldview using a psychological allegory, which she called her deep story. It went something like this:

You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful souls—many poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. You’ve waited a long time. But the line isn’t moving. You’re stuck, and you’re stigmatized. Liberals in the media say that every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And now, people are cutting in line in front of you. The old order is falling apart. And somebody needs to do something about it.

Deep stories are important, because they allow groups who might violently disagree about politics to understand the psychological origins of their disagreement. As I spoke with Petersen about the need for chaos, another allegorical scene came to mind—a kind of deep story of the chaos voter.

You are a middle-aged man playing a game; it could be checkers or chess. You are used to winning. But you’ve lost several times in a row, and all to the same people. Now you’re losing again, and it doesn’t feel right. You haven’t made one wrong move. Something must be wrong. Something must be rigged. They must be cheating. In a rage, you turn the whole table upside down, and the pieces scatter and shatter. Why do this? Breaking the game makes things worse for everyone. But this isn’t about making things better. It’s about feeling a sense of agency and control. It’s about not feeling like a loser. One could call it chaos. But at least it’s the chaos you chose.

“You can think of need for chaos, in a way, like flipping the board over at a societal level,” Petersen said when I shared this deep story with him on the phone. “This is a status-seeking strategy of last resort. A person feels stuck and wants to have recognition, but he feels that he cannot be recognized or valued in the current system of cultural norms, rules, and power. And so, to solve that problem, he says: ‘Let’s tear it all down.’”

If the need for chaos helps explain the mess we’re in, it might also offer the Trumpist opposition a clearer plan for wooing some (but certainly not all) voters back to normalcy. The need for chaos is rooted in people’s feelings about status, power, and control. For example, independents with culturally conservative instincts might feel that progressive ideas—what some call “woke” politics—weaken their social status, or that COVID policies trampled on their ability to control their daily life. Democrats could emphasize the ways in which their policies and priorities build status, power, and control. Under Biden, pay has increased so much for low-income Americans that it’s wiped out almost half of the past 40 years’ rise in income inequality; that’s a revitalization of economic status. Energy production is at an all-time high, and the U.S. has never been so energy independent; that’s both national and physical power. A right-leaning Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade; now Democrats across the country are fighting to protect abortion rights to restore women’s control over their own bodies. The antidote to a new American nihilism is a full-throated defense of American agency.

The need for chaos is not a problem likely to be solved quickly. It might be more like a chronic condition in U.S. politics to be studied and understood. I ultimately see anti-elite sentiment as downstream of several very real elite failures, including the many public-health errors during the coronavirus pandemic. But although burn-it-down sentiment may come from reality, it also feeds off virtual reality, or the stories that people are told about the world. Consumers face a bonanza of news-mediated despondency about quality of life, in part because news outlets are responding to audience negativity bias by telling the worst, most dangerous, and most catastrophic stories about the world. If journalists want to understand the need for chaos, it might be useful for us to scrutinize the ways in which we are partly responsible for growing the public’s taste for narratives that catastrophize without promise of improvement.

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter.

[ygmir]

interesting and I think this has some good points and insights. thanks.