A set of audio recordings is circulating across Latin America right now. They have been forensically authenticated. They document sitting heads of state coordinating a funded disinformation operation targeting elected governments in the region. The operation is being built on American soil.
You probably haven’t heard about it.
Arizona’s constitution gives residents a direct tool for pushing back against decisions their government makes on their behalf: the referendum. In January 2026, Marana residents used it.
The Marana Town Council voted unanimously to rezone 600 acres of farmland adjacent to the Arizona Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery and a groundwater recharge zone for a data center campus known as Project Blue. The developer is Beale Infrastructure, controlled by Blue Owl Capital, a $295 billion investment firm. The projected scale: 550 to 750 megawatts of continuous power — enough to supply roughly 57,000 homes.
Residents had specific, documented concerns. The energy demand required new generating capacity, the costs of which would be passed to ratepayers. Water usage drew particular concern in a desert community whose aquifers do not replenish on any timeline relevant to human planning. Hundreds of backup generators raised noise and air quality concerns in a largely agricultural landscape. Residents questioned whether the promised $5 billion investment and $145 million in tax revenue over ten years would materialize, or whether the primary beneficiary would be a $295 billion investment firm. Some critics argued the project supports an AI industry that facilitates surveillance and data extraction for private profit.
These are the concerns that drove nearly 6,000 Marana residents to sign referendum petitions in a matter of days. The constitutional tool was available. They used it. The rest of this piece documents what was done to stop them.
The American presidency, in the wrong hands, with every institutional check removed, is powerful enough to destroy countries and break the interdependent global systems the modern world runs on.
I never fully understood how powerful the President of the United States actually is until now. When that position is held by a man with no capacity for consequence, no institutional check left to slow him down, and a circle of people who know exactly how to use him — he can destroy a country.
Chaco Canyon needs your help. The Bureau of Land Management is considering revoking the Chaco Withdrawal, which would reopen the surrounding landscape to oil and gas development. Public comments are open now. I’ve written a comment you can copy and paste — just follow the link to submit it. Five minutes of your time protects one of the most significant cultural landscapes in North America.
I live in Arizona, and for six years we have been targeted by a coordinated national campaign to scare voters with propaganda about election fraud. It has never produced a shred of evidence, because there was never any evidence to find. The Department of Justice is now demanding the voter files of five million Arizonans. … Read more
In March 2026, the VA and the Department of Justice signed an agreement to put homeless veterans under permanent legal guardianship. They called it protection.
It isn’t.
Americans tend to think about the economy in sectors. The defense industry. The oil industry. The banking sector. The tech giants. This is a useful shorthand for what these industries produce — weapons systems, energy, credit, software — but it describes function, not ownership. The question this piece examines is a different one: at the level where the money actually accumulates, do these sectors exist as separate things at all?
The answer the ownership record suggests is largely no. The same concentrated pools of capital sit at the top of the shareholder lists across industries that are supposed to be distinct, supposed to compete, supposed to be governed by separate regulatory frameworks built around their differences. This piece assembles that picture — not sector by sector, but all at once — and asks whether economic activity at that scale is better described as productive or extractive.
I once reposted a meme showing a hospital patient in an ICE mask with the caption “ICE agents still hospitalized after being shot with cell phone.” It was funny.
Facebook deleted it, and I’ve discovered this is common. Reports from civil liberties and digital rights groups show this is a real pattern: content critical of ICE routinely disappears from major platforms.
ICE detention has been restructured into a large-scale system of wealth extraction. Government authority is used to move public money to private corporations, while enforcement practices determine who bears the human and economic costs. In this system, extraction politics—the use of governmental power, budgets, and enforcement authority—works in tandem with extractive capitalism, in which private firms convert public policy into guaranteed revenue.
Ideological brokers provide the narrative framework that makes extractive policies appear reasonable and even necessary. Stephen Miller exemplifies this role by framing immigration as invasion and rights as conditional. His positions supply the justification for enforcement expansion, visa limitations, and resource redirection—enabling wealth extraction through structured policy while limiting political participation for targeted groups.
