The son of the Oath Keepers' leader, Stewart Rhodes, has some things to say about leaving the alt-right cult. The whole thing is wild.

Stewart had been obsessed with the specter of a Clinton presidency, terrified of the FBI unleashed to go after the militia leaders who had slipped away from Bundy Ranch. I was mainly concerned that Federal agents raiding our house to arrest Stewart could end with our dogs being shot. It did, however, mark one important difference from the past: Stewart was losing his mind over this month's Potential Apocalypse and I felt almost totally indifferent to the end-of-world aspect.

I had political anxiety a-plenty, sure, but I had detached myself from the cyclical fear of every headline that had ruled my life until a peak at Jade Helm '15. While Stewart fretted and plotted in insane megalomania, laboring under the self-gratifying delusion that the Clinton dynasty and Bilderberg Group were hinging their plans with bated breath on Stewart's tactical decisions, the first thread in my belief had unraveled.

The bitter thought that Stewart's decisions were putting our dogs in danger of being shot during a standoff at our home would be the beginning of the next step. My belief in The Donald had already peaked, although I did not know it.

My entanglement in Pizzagate and Clinton conspiracy theories would allow me to ignore the pointed fact that no one had been arrested as promised, but I could only ignore the advance of time for so long. This, the forever wait by the Lock Her Up contingent of Trump voters, would become what I mark as the prototype of the eternal 'two more weeks' familiar to anyone who has studied QAnon. I was not down for eternally clinging to scraps of theory and inference, and so my enthusiasm for Trump dwindled to a gray indifference while others were sucked in deeper.

The second step would take longer, a slowly dawning awareness against a backdrop of childish Tweets from the white house and ineffectual media circus leadership. This was largely because I started to see uncomfortable parallels between the way Trump ran his cabinet and the toxic mismanagement style Stewart brought to the Oath Keepers board of directors. Any similarity between my father and Trump was cause for concern, and being raging narcissists the similarities were many, since I was by now completely aware that my father was a psychopathic fraud. I'd begun planning my family's escape, a process that would take nearly two years to complete, and took on myself a world's weight of new responsibility. Online political discourse and conspiracy theory simply took a backseat.

I would jerk back to attention, however, when our country betrayed the Kurds.

Or

A perennial problem in militia and conservative activist orgs is keeping members engaged and money flowing when a Republican is in office, the threat being that many members would assume that all was now well and 'go to sleep' instead of continuing to power Oath Keepers. Taking up position as he who watches the watcher would be one legitimate path to keeping Oath Keepers in circulation as an organization.

However, going full MAGA and setting itself against the shadowy leftist threat would prove to be the path of least resistance. Many militias would make this choice, aligning unquestioningly with MAGA to stay relevant and keep the numbers up despite going against their stated antiauthoritarianism and distrust of government.

If I fully understood this at the time, the events of the BLM riots would have been less of an awful surprise.

This part is going to be hard to imagine, even after getting oriented a bit on what the inside of my younger self's brain was like, but the fact that the entire Constitutionalist militia movement did not turn out in solidarity with Black Lives Matter in 2020 was a massive shock to my entire belief system.

...

In my view, Oath Keepers and many allied militias had more history of sympathy with BLM than of being antagonistic, or at least of general ideological alignment. Oath Keepers had taken great pains to boycott events that also hosted speakers from racist groups, maintained careful separation from alt-right and Identity Europa contingents at the Berkeley protests, and once kicked Randy Weaver out of an Oath Keepers parade after he refused to renounce White Separatism. I saw the militia movement I had lived in as a force loyal to the idea of America, not an ethnic majority.

...

Instead, they stayed at home, laughing at 'the left' for finally getting their turn under the boot (in a very particular view of reality) and actively cheering the black helicopters. The use of state violence against protest movements in modern America moved toward normalization, the president threatened the deployment of US military forces to crush protests, and the anti-government freedom fighters applauded from home.

...

Their excuses when pressed were varied, shallow, and made little sense. The protest was ridiculous because black abortions happened and people protest that less, where was the protest for people killed by illegal immigrants, there's 'intelligence' that Antifa is going to launch a terrorist attack at 7 PM (in which case you absolutely should be standing in the open, clearly identifiable as right wing militia and incredibly predictable in your regular movements while you patrol the venue, you go dude), the killing of George Floyd was a conspiracy because that many cops shouldn't have shown up that quickly for a counterfeit bill call and that meant a false flag engineered to sow social chaos. On and on, bewildering bullshit and empty whataboutisms without any real concrete reasons that had more than a single sentence of depth.

So much more.

is this jobs report too good? pic.twitter.com/3VE3dTrvml

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2022

There has been a sense in financial circles that the fever among American executives to shorten supply lines and bring production back home would prove short-lived. As soon as the pandemic started to fade, so too would the fad, the thinking went.

And yet, two years in, not only is the trend still alive, it appears to be rapidly accelerating.

Rattled by the most recent wave of strict Covid lockdowns in China, the long-time manufacturing hub of choice for multinationals, CEOs have been highlighting plans to relocate production -- using the buzzwords onshoring, reshoring or nearshoring -- at a greater clip this year than they even did in the first six months of the pandemic, according to a review of earnings call and conference presentations transcribed by Bloomberg. (Compared to pre-pandemic periods, these references are up over 1,000%.)

More importantly, there are concrete signs that many of them are acting on these plans.

The construction of new manufacturing facilities in the US has soared 116% over the past year, dwarfing the 10% gain on all building projects combined, according to Dodge Construction Network. There are massive chip factories going up in Phoenix: Intel is building two just outside the city; Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is constructing one in it. And aluminum and steel plants that are being erected all across the south: in Bay Minette, Alabama (Novelis); in Osceola, Arkansas (US Steel); and in Brandenburg, Kentucky (Nucor). Up near Buffalo, all this new semiconductor and steel output is fueling orders for air compressors that will be cranked out at an Ingersoll Rand plant that had been shuttered for years.

You must buy the Object to protect yourself from people who already have the Object.

Black Mirror episode or the world's best marketing strategy?

Ars explains: How carbon emissions got caught up in a Supreme Court showdown.

SYDNEY (AP) — More than 30,000 residents of Sydney and its surrounds were told to evacuate or prepare to abandon their homes Monday as Australia’s largest city faces its fourth, and possibly worst, round of flooding in less than a year and a half.

Days of torrential rain caused dams to overflow and waterways to break their banks, bringing a new flood emergency to parts of the city of 5 million people.

...

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology manager, Jane Golding, said some areas between Newcastle, north of Sydney, and Wollongong, south of Sydney had received more than a meter (39 inches) of rain in the previous 24 hours. Some has received more than 1.5 meters (59 inches).

Those totals are near the average annual rainfall for coastal areas of New South Wales.

Let's meet Daniel Conkle.

Daniel Conkle is the Robert H. McKinney Professor of Law Emeritus at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he specializes in constitutional law and religious liberty.

He's also a 'contributor' to the Federalist Society.

So, he's a wingnut lawsplainer. And he has a plan!

A Grand Compromise on Abortion
...
A national abortion compromise, to be effective, would require bold congressional action. It would recognize a right to abortion, nationwide, but it also would impose new and significant restrictions on this right, also applicable in every state.

...

To be potentially viable [hah, I see what you did there. very clever, Daniel], a national compromise would include four elements. First, it would permit abortion during a specified period of gestation, without restriction, during the few first months of pregnancy. Second, it would prohibit abortion later in pregnancy. Third, even after this point in pregnancy, there would be exceptions to the abortion prohibition. And fourth, the congressional compromise would be national in scope, with federal law controlling the issue of abortion and preempting state law to the contrary.

This is, of course, Roe v Wade.

There is ample reason to disagree with originalism as a legal philosophy. Should a 21st century society really interpret its Constitution by the standards of 1787 — an era before the introduction of semi-automatic weaponry, steam power, penicillin, automobiles, trains, electric lights and indoor plumbing? In some ways, though, that’s a pointless debate at the moment. With originalists holding six of the Supreme Court’s nine seats, we’re all living in an originalist world.

The functional problem with originalism is that it requires a very, very firm grasp of history — a grasp that none of the nine justices, and certainly few of their 20-something law clerks, freshly minted from J.D. programs, possess.

It’s difficult to become an expert in American political, legal or social history. It’s quite easy, though, to cherry-pick historical examples that prop up an end in search of a rationale — which is precisely what the Supreme Court majority did this week, twice.

Secret Service is specifically denying that an "assault" or "attack" on their agents took place.

Nobody in yesterday's hearing used those words in regards to the incident in question. Hutchinson was very careful in her description. She didn't say 'attack' or 'assault'. Cheney twice used the word "altercation", and she never pushed beyond that characterization. And an altercation can be as trivial as what happened to Rudy. It's entirely possible (and likely) that Trump lunged at the agent in the driver's seat but that the actual contact was so slight that nobody there considered it to be an assault. But the fact that it happened at all made for a good story to tell the pretty girl down the hall.

People in the media are describing it as an assault and an attack. And that's what SS is pushing back against.