Friday Homestead Dispatch

Week Number Twenty-Five

“As a democracy, the people are supposed to be the rulers. The people are supposed to be leading in terms of the policies and the way in which our government operates. The more that people are engaged with our institutions, the better.” — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

1.
Have you heard about the controversial Project Blue, a plan to build several data centers on South Houghton road near the fairgrounds? The Tucson Sentinel reported in June that the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to allow a developer to purchase public land for a planned $3.6 billion data center just southeast of Tucson, and approved a rezoning of the parcel to allow for the construction project.

Keri Silvyn, an attorney for the developers, said “Project Blue has been studying our regional sustainability plans and the importance of water, and has developed a multifaceted, regionally specific approach partnered with Tucson Water to be a responsible development.”

Of course they are going to say that.

BUT, the developer, San Francisco-based Beale Infrastructure, will not be the operator of the facility once it is constructed. That company has not yet been publicly disclosed.

What could possibly go wrong?

Melanie Cooley & Charlie Alcorn, Sustainable Desert Living Educators, wrote a piece for the Watershed Management Group where they pose the question, “So how will a data center complex’s water use impact our efforts towards a sustainable water future? One of the many unanswered questions about Project Blue is how much water it plans to use. A single data center uses between 300,000 and 5 million gallons of water a day. Project Blue plans to build up to ten of them on this site. That’s the water use equivalent to adding 25,000 - 657,895 residents to Pima County. For reference, the population of Tucson is 547,239 people, as of 2023. And according to recent reporting from the Arizona Daily Star, this site is just the first of three data center complexes that are being planned.”

According to Pima County’s FAQs, Project Blue’s use of reclaimed water will not impact Tucson’s existing Santa Cruz River Heritage Project. That’s good news. For years, that project has been releasing reclaimed water into the Santa Cruz to restore flow, creating habitat for wildlife and beautiful riverbanks for people to enjoy. WMG is focused on restoring, among others, Sabino Creek, Tanque Verde Creek, the Rillito River, and additional stretches of the Santa Cruz River.

Imagine for a moment what else we could do to restore our watershed and replenish our shallow groundwater area wetlands with the millions of gallons of water that Project Blue will consume every year. Instead, we are faced with a proposition from an energy and water intensive industry that does not align with our community’s goals and values. Now is the time to apply our values and choose economic growth that supports our water and energy resilience for generations to come. Project Blue isn’t it.

What can we pawns and peons do? You can start by voicing your concerns with the Mayor and Council. Find your ward here.

Secondly, you can show up at the Mayor and Council study session on August 5th and the vote date on August 19th to voice your opinion.

2.
The *rump administration has put on hold $6.8 billion in federal funds for K-12 schools, notifying states just a day ahead of July 1 — the date these funds are typically sent out as educators plan for the coming school year.

Our government is perfectly capable of funding schools. This is not about Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, a catch-all phrase the *rump administration uses for dismantling our social structures.

It is, of course, about the cruelty, and the hatred and degrading of all those with darker skin pigment…and owning the libs. A spokesperson for the Office of Budget and Management said, “Initial findings have shown that many of these grant programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.” 

In Oklahoma alone, the mobster admin is indefinitely withholding more than $70 million in federal education programs meant for Oklahoma students and educators, including money for teacher development, English learners, after-care programs and migrant children.

But no problem allocating BILLIONS to masked thugs posing as law enforcement. What world is this?

Look! We just fucked up these kids’ lives and they don’t even know it!

3.
Now that the racists can walk amongst civilized folks in broad daylight, thanks to the MAGA movement, how about that Ann Coulter?

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist, author, historian and nationally recognized child advocate whose research focuses on the intersections of race and parenting in American life, child welfare issues, education, corporal punishment in homes and schools, and the foster care and school-to-prison pipelines. 

She writes that Coulter’s words are the purest distillation of settler-colonial logic: if you can’t silence them, kill them. If you can’t erase the truth, erase the people who hold it. And she also writes that she’s not alone. This is mainstream in white America. It’s the same genocidal impulse that leads to Texas governors calling immigration an “invasion,” Trump describing immigrants as “animals,” or Florida politicians bragging about shooting suspected “cartel members” dead without trial. It’s the same rot that led a Texas law student to win an award for writing a paper arguing Border Patrol should have shoot-to-kill orders at the border.

We protest because racists have taken over the government and they are handily dismantling it bit by bit. And speaking of just spewing racism out loud…never forget and always remember how suspicious all those who ‘don’t speak American.’ American. For the love of Gawd… (UPDATE: this meme below was a scam post. I usually fact-check the stuff I send out so I apologize for this one…sounded too much like him)

4.
And more on racists now in full display…Hamilton Nolan writes that every extremist movement needs a smooth and polished front man to sooth the media and create rhetoric that makes their every move seem acceptable to the masses.

The professional, polished public face is an archetype of extremist movements. For every hollering Hitler or Mussolini or Nathan Bedford Forrest whipping up the faithful, there must be a smoother, calmer emissary whose job it is to sand down the message to make it sound palatable to the wider world. In today’s Republican Party, America’s biggest extremist movement, that role is played by JD Vance. If Trump is the MAGA fascism’s deranged id, Vance is its ego, grooming himself carefully in order to smile and reinterpret the latest insane fascist rambling for a more intellectual crowd.

In a recent speech to the Claremont Institute, a right wing think tank in California, Vance performed a master class in always accusing your enemy of what you yourself are doing.

“What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big Pharma lobbyists?” Vance asked (enumerating, of course, the major components of the New York City Democratic Party). “It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the President of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that President of the United States. This is the animating principle of the American far left.”

The fear-mongering is palpable, born out of the Christian Nationalist movement. “Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood, they share the same church, they send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally,” Vance said. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”

Straight out of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ playbook. The Klan is still the Klan whether you’re dressed in a hood, suit, or camo.

And this…Joseph Boakai, the president of Liberia where English is the official language, was asked by *rump during a White House meeting of various African leaders this week, “Such good English, such beautiful …Where did you learn to speak so beautifully? Where were you educated?”

5.
MAGA supporters are not going to change their minds, no matter what. Witness Arpineh Masihi, a Christian Armenian Iranian, now being held in ICE custody in Los Angeles. Talking to the BBC over the phone from the Adelanto immigrant detention centre in California's Mojave Desert she said, "He's doing the right thing because lots of these people don't deserve to be here, I will support him until the day I die. He's making America great again." Uhhhhh, some people are just not right in the head.

What we DO need is get the non-voters and the undecideds onboard the train to take back the House and Senate. Jennifer Rubin writes in her recent Substack that unlike the MAGA cult, Democrats must tolerate a range of views to build a governing coalition. The urgent need to unify behind the common goal of dislodging a neo-fascist party from power must take precedence over every internal squabble. Frankly, if safe blue districts want super-progressive representatives, the rest of the party should not care. If moderate Democrats have the best shot to win back swing seats, they should prevail in primaries.

She also says It is time to tie every Republican incumbent on the ballot to the monstrous human results of the bill. Alaskan Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Rep. Nick Begich III, for example, will be responsible for every hospital closed in Alaska, every family thrown off of Medicaid or SNAP, every person priced out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges, every scientific researcher or green energy worker thrown out of work, and every family who cannot afford to heat their home or keep their electricity on that result from the hideous bill. (And that is merely within the borders of their state.) They are responsible for the worst excesses of ICE, which has been given tens of billions to terrorize immigrants.

I’ve written many times in the last couple months of the consequences of the Stupid Damn Bill signed into law on July 4th, but Rubin says it best: The worst piece of legislation since the Slave Fugitive Act passed 175 years ago rips a gash in the social safety net, delivers the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in memory, and supercharges a violent, reckless, and cruel deportation machine—one which approves of “spending tens of billions of dollars to expand the unconstitutional kidnapping, trafficking, and confinement of people who’ve committed no crime,” as Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it. It strangles our soft power in the world (hollowing out foreign aid, demolishing the State Department); guts investment in science and green energy; and consigns millions—many of them children—to a life bereft of decent nutrition and medical care. It piles unsustainable, stupefying debt on future generations. In total, the American people will have less access to healthcare, nutrition, education, and economic opportunity.

This MAGA assault on working and middle-class Americans will reverberate for years, if not decades. As dire as that reality is, however, the monstrous legislation also could provide the unity and solidarity Democrats will need to regain power, remove the source of so many Americans’ suffering, and reform our democracy.

So join the crowd and show up on July 17 for Good Trouble Lives On, a national day of nonviolent action to respond to the attacks posed on our civil and human rights by the Trump administration and to remind them that in America, the power lies with the people.

It’s happening once again in Reid Park, starting at the bandshell with a few speakers at 8am. The rally will continue on Country Club south to 22nd St as far as Alvernon (we hope!).

6.
SO MUCH more news this last week. For further reading, HCR covered how social service cuts related to lives lost in Texas (even more here), the firing of large numbers of employees at 19 different federal agencies, the Internal Revenue Service changing longstanding policy to say that churches can now endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status, and *rump’s notion of ’taking over’ NYC and Washington, DC. And Joyce Vance covered Mahmoud Khalil’s lawsuit claiming he’s entitled to $20 million in damages from the Trump administration, birthright citizenship lawsuits bouncing around, the Erez Reuveni whistleblower matter, and the latest on the Alligator Alcatraz prison.

Onward!

7.
For those of you attending Sunday Sessions at Sonora Moonshine, we are switching up the times. New summer hours will be 4-6:30 in the hopes of beating the heat a bit. Hope to see you there!

And now…