Secretary Yellen: Biden ‘Administration Has Done Everything that They Can’ to Reduce Gas Prices WENDELL HUSEB Ø 7 Jun 2022
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday claimed the Biden administration has exhausted efforts to reduce energy costs for American citizens.
Gas soared to a tenth day consecutive record high of $4.91 per gallon on Tuesday. Prices have more than doubled since former President Donald Trump left office.
Speaking at the Senate Finance Committee, Yellen said “the administration has done everything that they can” to reduce energy prices.
Yellen did not mention Biden’s war on American energy, which includes driving up private and public financing costs of oil drilling, halting drilling on public lands, and canceling the Keystone pipeline.
Instead, Yellen claimed the energy price shocks were due to the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine.
“We currently face macroeconomic challenges, including unacceptable levels of inflation as well as the headwinds associated with the disruptions caused by the pandemic’s effect on supply chains, and the effects of supply side disturbances to oil and food markets resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine,” Yellen claimed.
Last week, Yellen also admitted she and the president had failed to accurately assess that inflation would climb to a 40-year-high. “I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,” she said.
According to Bloomberg, inflation will cost American households on average an extra $5,200 in 2022, or $433 per month. Inflation will also delay 25 percent of Americans from retiring, a BMO Real Financial Progress Index survey revealed.
SB, when are you gonna start blasting the oil and gas companies that raised the prices? If the government did anything else, you’d be the first one calling them communist.
You never criticize your corporate slave masters though. Makes me start to think that maybe you’re one of them.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Talk about a slippery slope. Not a fan of this woman. And I'm sure she is to close to the political and criminal POV to realize how FASCIST she sounds.
I'd like to point out to my friend on the right that fascist unAmerican thinking is not an exclusively right-wing thing.
So now you are beginning to see that it is neither a right wing or left wing thing.
If everybody had like minds, we would never learn.
Something tells me the good senator knows the cocaine prices well.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Yeah, he sort of refused to mention that the oil companies are sitting on thousands of leases they refuse to drill on. Their answer? "Give them more leases!" Why, so they can control all of the oil deposits in America and just sit on them and not drill? If they want more leases, exercise the drilling rights on the leases you currently hold. Then and only them you can have more leases.
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
Sara welcomes Washington Times reporter and columnist Bill Gertz to discuss the many ways China is directing threatening us and how the Biden administration wither ignores the threats or projects weakness in response. Gertz explains how U.S. intelligence is flying blind on China while their agents have succeeded in infiltrating high levels of our government. He also discusses the ominous weapons China is developing and how it is deliberately trying to kill Americans by supplying precursor chemicals for fentanyl to the Mexican drug cartels. And he explains a fatal flaw in Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent speech on China policy.
Stumbling before the midterms: Biden trips on the steps of Air Force One after saying Tuesday's progressive election losses prove BOTH parties need to 'step up and do something about crime and gun violence' President Joe Biden left Washington for California on Wednesday Before leaving he addressed the results of votes around the country He said that voters had delivered a message to on Tuesday night 'Both parties have to do something about crime as well as gun violence,' he said He stumbled briefly on the steps as he boarded Air Force One He is hosting the Summit of the Americas By ROB CRILLY, SENIOR U.S. POLITICAL REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 13:21 EDT, 8 June 2022 | UPDATED: 15:42 EDT, 8 June 2022
President Joe Biden said voters had given politicians a clear order in Tuesday night's ballots: It is time to act on crime and gun violence.
He spoke to reporters on Wednesday before boarding Air Force One to fly to California, stumbling on the steps as he did so.
He left after two closely watched votes in California showed how voters were prioritizing rising crime - in San Francisco, where the city's liberal district attorney was recalled and in Los Angeles were a tough-on-crime Republican finished ahead of a progressive Democrat in the race to be mayor.
'The voters sent a clear message last night,' said Biden.
'Both parties have to step up and do something about crime as well as gun violence.'
He added that states and cities must hire more officers and reform police departments.
'The first major bill we passed ... we gave the states and localities billions of dollars, billions of dollars and then encouraged them to use it to hire police officers and reform the police department,' he said.
The results pose a challenge to Biden's party, which has focused on criminal justice reform in recent years.
The president added that he had sent to Congress a request for $300 million in the budget to hire and train officers.
'It’s time they move. It's time states and the localities spend the money they have to deal with crime, as well as retrain police officers, as well as provide for more community policing,' he said.
It comes as the nation once again considers how to prevent mass shootings, after 19 children and two teachers were shot dead at a school in Uvalde, Texas.
A University of Berkeley poll in April found that crime and lawlessness were now voters' number one concern in California, putting the issue ahead of race relations, healthcare and the pandemic.
In San Francisco, that meant the removal of DA Chesa Boudin, who was accused of being soft on crime.
'The right-wing billionaires outspent us three to one,' he said in a defiant speech to supporters following news of the recall results, which saw more than 60 percent of San Franciscans vote to recall him.
Boudin, 41, went on to assert that citizens had been 'exploited' by these groups, saying they 'took advantage an environment in which people are appropriately upset.'
'They created an electoral dynamic where we were literally shadowboxing,' Boudin, who narrowly won office in November 2019 as part of a wave of woke prosecutors who vowed to seek alternatives to incarceration, said.
SB, when are you gonna start blasting the oil and gas companies that raised the prices? If the government did anything else, you’d be the first one calling them communist.
You never criticize your corporate slave masters though. Makes me start to think that maybe you’re one of them.
Don't waste your time on the trolls. You might as well try to have a conversation with a brick. The dude's lost.
Your feelings and opinions do not add up to facts.
Biden’s White House Radicalized the Would-Be Kavanaugh Killer as Pelosi Held Up Supreme Court Security Funds. THE ATTACKS ON THE SUPREME COURT BY THE EXTREME LEFT PICKS UP PACE. BY STAFF WRITER JUNE 8, 2022
Joe Biden’s White House intentionally fanned the flames of the violent, irate political left after the recent Democrat leak of a Supreme Court opinion, as well as the latest Uvalde school shooting. The result has been an attempt on the life of a Supreme Court Justice.
In amongst the political fracas, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is said to be holding up a Senate bill which would grant more security for Supreme Court justices. The U.S. Senate fast tracked the new security plans after Democrat extremists leaked an expected Roe v. Wade opinion from the court in May, but Pelosi has thus far refused to bring the legislation up for a vote in the House, stalling more security for Supreme Court justices.
Would-be assassin Nicholas John Roske is believed to have been radicalized by far-left reactions to the abortion issue, as well as the shooting in Uvalde. The aspiring gunman is said to have had a Glock 17 handgun, a knife, pepper spray, zip ties, a nail punch, a crow bar and a hammer, and said he found Kavanaugh’s address on the internet.
And while President Biden himself has failed to condemn the attempted attack, a White House spokesman tepidly said that “any violence, threats of violence, or attempts to intimidate justices have no place in our society.”
But the left’s rhetoric on the run up to the latest incident is indicative of the political climate they seek to create around their “core” issues of abortion and gun control in the run up to the mid term elections.
GOP operatives point out a timeline of events that show no remorse or attempt to cool the heated rhetoric around the time Roske was being radicalized by their behavior:
May 5: Press Secretary Jen Psaki refused to condemn activists posting the justices’ home addresses online. May 6: Psaki refused to say if Biden “has a view” on activists harassing justices at their homes. May 6: Nancy Pelosi called on protesters to actively pressure justices to influence their decisions. May 8: Pelosi said “the focus” is to influence and change the Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision on Roe v. Wade. May 9: Psaki refused to condemn protests at justices’ homes even though it is against the law. Psaki also refused to condemn the doxing of justices’ personal information even as threats of violence grew. May 10: Psaki downplayed the harassment, claiming protests “have been peaceful to date and we certainly continue to encourage that outside of judges’ homes.” May 11: Chuck Schumer answered “yes” when asked if he was “comfortable with protests…outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.”
“It’s past time for Biden and Democrats to condemn this violence,” said a GOP spokesman in an e-mail Wednesday.
lmao, does every post has to have those big titles like they are written in crayon on an outhouse wall. I mean, your politics show that you are not very intelligent, but these threads have just become cartoonish. Probably your grand plan though, to turn PP into 4chan at a Q rally.
Your feelings and opinions do not add up to facts.
Don’t want to spend funds to protect our kids? Then don’t spend any money to protect those SC judges too. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Conservatives said F them kids. Well I say F them judges. Oh well.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
National Average Gas Price Surpasses $5 Per-Gallon for First Time Ever
Gas prices over the $8.00 mark are advertised at a Chevron Station in Los Angeles, Calif., May 30, 2022. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)Share By BRITTANY BERNSTEIN June 9, 2022 2:56 PM
The national average price of gas in the U.S. soared to a new record-high on Thursday, surpassing $5 per gallon for the first time ever, according to data from GasBuddy.
The grim milestone comes just two months after the national average price of gas surpassed $4 per-gallon for the first time since 2008. Days later, on March 7, the national average broke the previous all-time record when it hit $4.10 per gallon, according to GasBuddy.
Prices have risen 66 cents per gallon over the past month, the organization reported.
The average price of a gallon of gas is above $4.40 in all 50 states, according to AAA data. Drivers in California are arguably feeling the most pain at the pump, with an average cost of $6.40 per gallon.
GasBuddy said several factors have impacted the skyrocketing price of gas: a global decline in refining capacity due to the pandemic, accelerated demand ahead of the summer season, and the war in the Ukraine.
“It’s been one kink after another this year, and worst of all, demand doesn’t seem to be responding to the surge in gas prices, meaning there is a high probability that prices could go even higher in the weeks ahead,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said in a statement. “It’s a perfect storm of factors all aligning to create a rare environment of rapid price hikes. The situation could become even worse should there be any unexpected issues at the nation’s refineries or a major hurricane that impacts oil production or refineries this summer.”
Gas, here, is going up about 10 cents a gallon per week.
Now, for the wealthy, maybe that doesn't affect you. For the grunts like me, it does. Combine that with the cost of insurance, the cost of food, the cost of propane, the cost of a vehicle. Hey, for those these things don't matter, kudos. To the vast, vast majority of Americans (that work) it IS a big deal.
Just charge more? I'm not lucky enough to be in a business where you "just charge more". I'm not a gas station, nor a food producer, nor do I get any gov't. assistance.
Today was sales tax day (which I DO collect from customers) Income tax (quarterly taxes), property taxes. Almost $5000.
Biden Reboots Obama-Era Green Energy Loan Program That Funded Solyndra And Cost Taxpayers Billions REAGAN REESE June 09, 2022 4:38 PM ET
The Biden administration has rebooted the Energy Department’s green loan program that lent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the Obama-era to the now-defunct green energy company, Solyndra, according to an announcement.
The Advanced Clean Energy Storage project in Utah will receive the loan, leaving $2.5 billion for other clean energy projects, the Department of Energy (DOE) stated Wednesday.
The Loan Programs Office last was active in the Obama administration and granted the solar-call firm Solyndra $500 million, which then went bankrupt in 2011, Politico reported. After breaking ground on the energy company, Solyndra then went bankrupt and could not continue operating, with the burden falling on the taxpayers.
The $504.4 million loan will be used to construct the world’s largest clean hydrogen storage facility, the DOE said in its announcement. (RELATED: GAO: DOE’S Green Energy Loans Won’t Make A Profit)
In total, the loan program is expected to cost taxpayers $2.21 billion over the lifetime of the investments, the Government Accountability Office reported.
The Biden administration introduced in February a series of initiatives designed to make the industrial sector more eco-friendly, TheDCNF reported. The goal is to make the U.S. a global leader in clean energy with the first step of targeting high-polluting manufacturers.
“The industrial sector is also central to tackling the climate crisis, as it is currently responsible for nearly a third of domestic greenhouse gas emissions,” the White House’s fact sheet on the eco-friendly initiatives said. “By helping manufacturers use clean energy, efficiency upgrades, and other innovative technologies to reduce emissions, the Administration is supporting cleaner industry that can produce the next generation of products and materials for a net-zero economy.”
“Since President Biden’s first day in office, DOE has made it a priority to leverage the potential of the Loan Programs Office to fund emerging technologies that will deploy clean and reliable energy to Americans,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. “Accelerating the commercial deployment of clean hydrogen as a zero-emission, long-term energy storage solution is the first step in harnessing its potential to decarbonize our economy, create good paying clean energy jobs and enable more renewables to be added to the grid.”
The Department of Energy did not immediately respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.
ooo that's really cool, and will help bring more jobs into Utah as well! keep it going, Biden!
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Joe Biden Wrecked On YouTube After White House Forgets To Turn Off Comments Infowars.com June 9th 2022, 4:45 pm
Whoever runs the White House YouTube page forgot to turn off the comment section in a video posted Thursday where Joe Biden talked with American retailers about rising shipping costs.
In nearly every other video uploaded to the channel, the comments have been turned off so internet users can’t voice their frustrations with the administration.
Click Here to read the comments while you can!
However, the people were allowed to express their dissent on this rare occasion.
“If you still think this guy is a good idea you probably have a mask on and a nice retirement fund,” a top comment reads.
Another person wrote, “Hey Joe !!! Fuel prices are causing this problem !!!!! Fix the gas demand issue !!!!! LET’S GO BRANDON !!!!!”
DAILY MEMO Biden's embarrassment by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent | | June 08, 2022 03:03 PM
BIDEN'S EMBARRASSMENT. Much of Washington has been fixated on the coming hearing of House Democrats' Jan. 6 committee. That could turn out to be a lucky thing for President Joe Biden if it distracts the public's attention from an embarrassment he, not to mention the United States of America, is experiencing on the West Coast.
Biden is attending the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. A White House news release said he will focus on "pressing challenges, including economic prosperity, climate change, the migration crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic." As important as those might be, the part of the president's trip that has gotten the most coverage is his planned appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. News reports have suggested that Biden's appearance is the result of the president feeling "frustrated" by his low job approval rating and eager to improve his image. How dropping in on the third-rated late-night comedy show will fix that is not entirely clear.
In any event, perhaps the major story from the summit is not that the president is there but that others, quite a few others, are not there. It started when the White House said it would not allow Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to attend because of their records of human rights violations. That set off a wave of other countries saying that if the U.S. excluded Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, then they wouldn't attend, either. The biggest boycotter is Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who insists that every country in the Western Hemisphere be invited. Lopez Obrador is joined by the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Bolivia. For a while, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said he would not attend but then changed his mind.
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Yes, former President Donald Trump canceled a planned appearance at the last Summit of the Americas, in Peru in 2018. But of course Biden promised to reset and improve America's relations with the world. So the number of nations that are refusing to come to Los Angeles, a real snub to Biden, is remarkable.
This could be seen coming. Last week, CNN published an article headlined, "Potential for a high-profile flop looms over Biden administration's prep for next week's Summit of the Americas." The network reported that officials were "scrambling" to lock in attendees and come up with things for Biden to announce. "It's an unusually last-minute attempt to salvage what officials once described as a top-priority event for relations in the United States' own neighborhood," CNN said. Why was the Biden administration struggling at the last minute? A White House spokeswoman "shrugged off questions about why details were being nailed down a week before the summit begins," the article said.
Biden's initial stand, denying entry to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela on the grounds of human rights, is exposing him to charges of hypocrisy among attendees who wanted to see those nations at the summit. Isn't Biden getting ready to visit Saudi Arabia? Isn't he planning to meet with Mohammed bin Salman, that country's effective leader and noted violator of human rights? Now, what was it Biden wanted to say about standing up for human rights?
Vice President Kamala Harris is looking bad in all this, too, although for different reasons. Remember that Biden put her in charge of something big involving the southern border. In the beginning, there was some confusion over whether Biden had appointed Harris the border czar or whether he just wanted her to deal with the "root causes" of the flood of illegal immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Harris chose the "root causes" assignment and focused on the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. She didn't do a lot, but she did visit the region and attend the inauguration of Honduran President Xiomara Castro in January. And now, the entire Northern Triangle, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, is boycotting the Summit of the Americas. And just yesterday, Harris announced that the U.S. had arranged for $1.9 billion in private aid to head to the three countries, ostensibly to improve conditions so their citizens will not leave for the long trip to the U.S. Such American generosity is not, apparently, enough to convince the three nations to attend the summit.
Meanwhile, what is said to be the largest migrant caravan of the year is on the move in southern Mexico. The caravan "provided a live illustration to regional leaders meeting in Los Angeles ... of the challenges governments face in managing immigration flows," according to an Associated Press account.
But to many people, the caravan, whether or not it makes it all the way to the U.S. border, is just one small part of the huge illegal immigration problem that has arisen since Biden became president. Biden sent a message to would-be illegal border crossers: If you come to the U.S., you will be allowed to stay. Yes, his administration is still turning some away, even though Biden has sought to get rid of Title 42, his main tool for sending migrants back to Mexico. In any event, for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of illegal border crossers, the odds look pretty good. And so they try to come to the U.S.
Perhaps you remember the 2020 campaign, in which Biden presented himself as an experienced hand in international relations, a man who could restore comity and stability to America's dealings with foreign nations after the chaos of the Trump years. Perhaps you heard the same Biden pledge to fix America's "broken" immigration system. Perhaps you even believed him. Now, all that is in the past. If you did believe him then, there is a good chance you do not believe him anymore.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
Colorado governor vetoed a bill that would require new housing developments to include charging stations. So the left want everyone to buy an electric car, but they don't want you to have any place to charge it.
It's supposed to be hard! If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great!
Colorado governor vetoed a bill that would require new housing developments to include charging stations. So the left want everyone to buy an electric car, but they don't want you to have any place to charge it.
??? you do realize that when you buy an EV, you also have the option to purchase the equipment that gets installed at the home.
like, if i were to go get that porsche Taycan, or god forbid a Tesla, i can also order the charging equipment that gets installed in the garage to charge it. to force housing developments to automatically include a charging port would be called communist by people like you.
like honestly, stop being so fake. if he didn't veto the bill, you'd be on here posting that the commie's are forcing companies to charge more for houses with equipment that homeowners don't want, driving up the purchasing price of a home and pricing out first time homebuyers. if he does veto it - like now - the post you just made is exactly what comes out.
the hypocrisy is ridiculous, and also unsurprising.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
We're being told to expect rolling brown outs as it is. Imagine if everyone had an electric vehicle. Your a/c would be out.........but, you'd have an e.v.
Can't keep up with electricity as it is, but yeah, everyone get an e.v. Don't know where the power will come from, but who cares.
Why Peter Navarro is on the Biden Administration’s Hit List by Jennifer Mitchell TownerJune 9, 2022
Peter Navarro is a brave and genuine American patriot. He took it upon himself in he chaos of the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential Election to organize, clarify, and present the myriad of evidence of voting irregularities in six swing states. He published two reports, one as early as December 2020 called The Immaculate Deception, that gave the number and type of suspicious and invalid votes, by state. The states in which election anomalies are investigated, explained, and reported are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
At the time, snippets of information were emerging from testimony on affidavits of those who participated in the election, or in the fraud, unwittingly, and came forward to report to Giuliani and Ellis, Trump’s attorneys, on what they witnessed. Giuliani’s representation of Trump got his law license revoked. This voting information included unconstitutional election law changes, a postal employee’s report of post-dating of invalid ballots by others at the US Postal Service, allegations of election machine internet capability and connectivity, reports of vote flipping by the election machines in Antrim County Michigan, reports of election workers passing the same batch of ballots through scanners multiple times, illegal transport of a truckload of ballots across state lines to Pennsylvania, abuse of poll watchers, reports of training videos for election workers to make them hostile and abusive to Republican poll watchers, cardboard installed to obstruct the view of poll watchers, declarations by candidates that people should move, temporarily, to states to vote, and so change, likely election results, and many more things that should not have occurred in a “free and fair” election.
These “snippets” were raining down on a population that knew something went very wrong with the 2020 “COVID-safe” election. Jane Fonda said it best when she declared that COVID was God’s gift to democrats.
The January 6th committee knows that Peter Navarro is dangerous as an advisor to Congress post-November 2022. He knows too much. He wants to assist with the impeachments of officials responsible for subverting our democratic republic: those who failed to comply with their oaths to defend our constitution, and those who are not acting in good faith, with the best interests of American citizens at heart. His facts are incontrovertible.
In conjunction with True the Vote’s and Dinesh DeSouza’s cell ping evidence revealing 2000 paid “mules” each transporting many ballots to ten or more drop boxes, than which can possibly be legitimate, Navarro’s analysis and understanding of the election anomalies are now just a fraction of the total. Also, recall that Cyber Ninja’s forensic audit in Arizona yielded more than enough evidence to show that the legitimate winner could not be determined in Arizona because the number of illegal ballots counted greatly exceeded the margin of victory for Biden.
Navarro’s indictment came on the heels of his lawsuit alleging that the January 6th committee does not have the authority it purports to have. Its purpose was to serve to enhance the legitimacy of the Committee’s prime time sham to present its findings this Thursday evening.
Ethan Zuckerman delves into how the conspiracist community surrounding QAnon represents a hazardous new form of participatory civics and digital storytelling.
by Ethan Zuckerman
The Grass Valley Charter School in northern California teaches 500 students from kindergarten to eighth grade using principles from Outward Bound and other “active learning” methods. Recently the school has been in the news not because of its pedagogy, but due to the effects of an unusual eruption of unreality.
On May 11, 2019, the school was scheduled to hold its Blue Marble Jubilee annual fundraiser. In the weeks leading up the event, however, school administrators began receiving calls informing them that a “credible source” had issued warnings that the fundraiser would be a target for an unspecified attack. The people calling the school made clear they weren’t threatening an attack—they were warning the school about events they anticipated after deciphering a tweet from former FBI director James Comey.
Comey had participated in an online meme, #FiveJobsIveHad, which has served as an opportunity for famous people to display their blue collar roots (and, perhaps, reveal answers to commonly asked online security questions). Followers of the QAnon conspiracy knew better than to take Comey’s tweet about his past experience as a grocery store clerk at face value. They turned #FiveJobsIveHad into #FiveJihad and read his five jobs as an acrostic spelling “GVCSF,” which online sleuths then determined stood for “Grass Valley Charter School Foundation,” the hosts of the jubilee. Cue the phone calls from concerned patriots warning the school of the threat to their fundraiser, warnings that led police to urge the school to call off the event, lest someone show up to “protect the school” and cause mayhem. That fear was not entirely unwarranted—in December of 2016, a conspiracy theorist showed up at a Washington, DC pizza parlor to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory spread online, and discharged a semi-automatic rifle in the restaurant before being arrested.
It is perhaps too easy to dismiss QAnon as the craziest manifestation of a crazy time in history, when global narratives about the spread of liberal democracy are rapidly reversing, authoritarian nationalism is re-emerging, and every established political norm seems negotiable. By embracing the most bloody and absurd theories with a credulity that’s more easily parodied than examined, QAnon makes it hard for us to take them seriously. But it’s a mistake to look at the Grass Valley Charter School episode and shrug.
In 2018, Time magazine declared “Q” one of the 25 most influential people on the Internet, alongside more recognizable figures like Donald Trump, Kanye West and Matthew Drudge. It’s a reasonable argument to make. Q’s “drops”—thousands of cryptic posts posted on image boards 4chan and 8chan—have led to countless YouTube videos, podcasts, and an explosion of online and offline writing trying to interpret the utterances of the anonymous “Q Clearance Patriot.” In March of 2019, QAnon: An Invitation to a Great Awakening, a book written by QAnon followers and supporters, peaked at #2 on Amazon’s list of best selling books.
QAnon is interesting not because its predictions of political revolution are correct—they are not. And while some believers in QAnon have been linked to violence—in particular, the former US Marine who held a one-man standoff at the Hoover Dam, armed with an AR-15 rifle, and who referred explicitly to the QAnon conspiracy—threats of violence are not the main reason to pay attention to this community. Instead, QAnon is important because it is a harbinger of things to come.
A movement like QAnon is an inevitable outgrowth of the Unreal, an approach to politics that forsakes interpretation of a common set of facts in favor of creating closed universes of mutually reinforcing facts and interpretations. Whether the QAnon community flourishes as Donald Trump seeks their approval in his quest for a second term or sputters out as their predictions grow ever more fantastical, the dynamics that make QAnon possible are the same dynamics that are reshaping our politics more broadly.
How is this conspiracy theory different from other conspiracy theories?
QAnon is a big tent conspiracy theory, a meta narrative that knits together contemporary politics and hoary racist tropes with centuries of history behind them. At its core is the idea that all American presidents between John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump have been working with a cabal of globalist elites called “The Cabal” to undermine American democracy and forward their own nefarious agenda. (Predictably, the cabal includes investor/philanthropist George Soros and the Rothschild family, but the theory is more anti-elite than explicitly anti-Semitic.) In all versions of the mythos, the Cabal seeks to destroy American freedom and subjugate the nation to the wills of a world government. In some versions of the mythos, the agenda also includes pedophilia, blood sacrifice, Satanism and other attention-getting transgressions.
Ultimately, QAnon is a hopeful conspiracy theory. “The Storm” is coming. Donald Trump is secretly working in league with Robert Mueller to arrest Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other members of the Deep State who are working to destroy our nation. Sealed indictments have already been filed, and arrests—followed by military trials, and possibly executions—are coming any day now.
In many ways, QAnon behaves the way most conspiracy theories do. Its core appeal is its sense of a master narrative, an explanation for otherwise disturbing and confusing events that assures believers that they understand the big picture in ways non-believers do not. This master narrative gives believers a sense of control over uncontrollable events. QAnon followers continually remind each other to “trust the plan,” that Trump and his team have reasons for the steps they are taking, including their decision to reveal their plans only through the Internet’s shadiest message boards.
Like all successful conspiracy theories, QAnon is self-sealing. Any objection or disproof can be turned into support for the theory, usually by explaining that information is being withheld to prevent the panic of an unprepared and potentially hysterical public. Thus events that would seem to doom the theory, like the end of the Mueller investigation, are turned into evidence that those behind the conspiracy—Trump and his allies, including the author of the Q drops—are clever beyond our understanding.
Cass Sunstein understands conspiracies as the product of “crippled epistemologies,” which accept only a limited set of sources as authoritative. Here, Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on the mainstream media have helped constrain the range of sources QAnon supporters are willing to believe, dismissing virtually any conventional journalistic authorities as part of the globalist elite responsible for all societal ills. The authoritative voices in QAnon are those most dedicated to understanding Q’s missives.
But QAnon departs from the pattern of conventional conspiracy theories in some novel ways. Traditionally, the audience for conspiracy theories are those who feel marginalized from ordinary politics and are disengaged. Now the most prominent conspiracy proponent is, arguably, the world’s most powerful person. Donald Trump returned to political prominence in 2010, promoting the “birther” conspiracy theory speculating that Barack Obama was not a US citizen. Trump surfaced the idea of running for president in 2011, referring specifically to his belief that Obama’s presidency was illegitimate due to his citizenship. Since taking office he has relentlessly attacked mainstream media, which is a core actor in QAnon’s unreality, and his voluble conflicts with government agencies like the FBI gives apparent support to the idea that he is at war with a “deep state” determined to unseat him.
Furthermore, Trump frequently amplifies conspiracy theorists, including prominent QAnon believers, especially through his Twitter feed. A generous reading of this behavior is that Trump is amplifying anyone who vocally supports his policies, some of whom happen to be conspiracy theorists. Another interpretation, offered by Dr. Joseph Uscinski, is that Trump saw conspiracy theorists as an “underserved market” during the primaries for the 2016 election and that Trump continues “dancing with the one who brought him to the prom.” More disturbing is the possibility that Trump genuinely sees himself as a victim of forces beyond his control and the chief actor in a battle for the soul and future of a nation. Whether Donald Trump is a conspiracy theorist or a skilled manipulator of conspiracy theorists, the peculiar logic of “deep state” narratives is a shaping influence on his presidency.
The radically participatory conspiracy
Trump’s apparent alignment with some of QAnon’s ideas isn’t the only distinguishing feature of this conspiracy. QAnon may be the first conspiracy to have fully embraced the participatory nature of the contemporary internet.
The core texts of the QAnon movement are a set of more than 3,000 brief messages posted on Internet message boards 4chan and 8chan. These message boards are anonymous, chaotic and ephemeral, all characteristics that would seem to mitigate against the broad transmission of these missives. Why would “Q Clearance Patriot” (the person or persons who claim proximity to Trump and who have detailed understanding of the conspiracy) share valuable insights in such an unlikely venue? Anonymity, of course, as well as a belief that the open-minded denizens of those fora would be readers capable of assembling the “crumbs” dropped by Q. (Q:#6)
The other reason, of course, is that the process of deciphering and interpreting these vague clues is a hell of a lot more interesting than reading the rantings of a paranoid mind. Author Walter Kirn identifies Q as a storyteller who has mastered a fundamental truth of narrative on the internet: “The audience for internet narratives doesn’t want to read, it wants to write. It doesn’t want answers provided, it wants to search for them.” Members of the QAnon aren’t just readers of Q’s “drops”—they are the “bakers,” assembling crumbs into coherent narratives and predictions. And while assembling and re-baking crumbs is unlikely to yield anything culinarily appealing, participation in constructing the Q narrative is clearly a fascinating pursuit for thousands of co-creators.
Q’s literary style is one of relentless questioning, demanding that readers fill in the blanks left in the narrative:
Quote
Where is Huma? Follow Huma.
This has nothing to do w/ Russia (yet).
Why does Potus surround himself w/ generals?
What is military intelligence?
Why go around the 3 letter agencies? (Q:#2)
The “baking” of Q’s crumbs has led to a complex ecosystem that almost resembles Talmudic commentary, with some “researchers” competing to interpret Q’s pronouncements and tie them to breaking events in the news. Other researchers are numerologists, linking the “tripcodes” used in Q’s posts (tripcodes are a weak form of cryptographic signature designed to allow anonymous posters to link authorship of multiple posts) to thousands of books indexed by Google Books. Q’s devotees are incredibly prolific. The leading Q podcasts have published thousands of episodes, and the thousands of videos explaining QAnon routinely register hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
Most commentary on the QAnon phenomenon is so quick to denounce the absurdity of the community’s obsessions that it fails to consider what’s interesting and novel about the movement. A laudable exception are the three authors behind QAnon Anonymous, a Patreon-supported podcast that “chops & screws the best conspiracy theories of the post-truth era.” QAnon Anonymous suggests we understand QAnon as fan fiction: “QAnon has a canon, but the canon is basically this coded language of the drops. The tapestry of the story is done by these amateur researchers...it’s decentralized storytelling, like thousands of different fanfic threads going on at once with very little to chew on at the center.” While we might think this lack of a strong canon would present an obstacle to the strength of QAnon, it actually serves as a strength.
Much as there’s a robust online community extending the narrative of virtually any TV show, movie or beloved work of fiction, QAnon’s bakers are taking the narrative sketches offered by Q and extending them into a rich and detailed fantasy world. While there’s ample fan fiction about well-loved stories like the Harry Potter series or Star Trek, many fanfic aficionados choose to extend flawed texts, fixing their shortcomings and amplifying their strengths. It’s far more fun to write fanfic for a bad show than for a perfect one, and the narrative put forward by Q on 4Chan and 8Chan is deeply flawed. It is filled with events that haven’t transpired and predictions gone wrong. What is perhaps most remarkable about QAnon is how resilient it has been to obvious setbacks, including the inconvenient truth that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama have been arrested.
The QAnon Anonymous team considers QAnon to be “an improvisational game” where the players compete, “looking for an interpretation that will go viral within the QAnon community.” As a result, QAnon bakers are not only co-authors of the narrative, they’re proselytisers, both for the broader conspiracy and their particular interpretive frame. We see the same dynamics in antivax, another conspiracy that’s having a moment in the sun with the return of measles outbreaks in the US. It is insufficient to be persuaded by the antivax or QAnon movements—those who’ve joined the movement feel an obligation to share the truth with those who’ve yet to be enlightened. Those who are most successful in converting others are rewarded with attention, a commodity that is easily convertible into other currencies. Most of the popular QAnon podcasts feature sponsored advertising, notably products like emergency flashlights designed to help listeners survive the social upheavals destined to come about during The Storm. (There is, of course, the inevitable backlash to the commercialization of QAnon, with disaffected movement participants complaining that the conspiracy has been hijacked and is now being exploited for financial gains.)
Participatory media and the new normal
The participatory advocacy that QAnons are engaged in is a phenomenon that’s grown increasingly common as news media and participatory social media have become inextricably intertwined. In the broadcast model of media, the events of the world were interpreted by a group of professionals who selected a subset of possible narratives to amplify, then delivered them to audiences who had extremely limited channels in which to offer feedback and input. That model has been largely replaced by one in which the audience is a full participant, an essential circulator of information by retweeting, sharing and remixing it. The new centers of power in this ecosystem are discovery engines like Google and Facebook, which rely on feedback from users to determine what stories to feature or ignore. Additionally, the people formerly known as the audience are now creators of content, adding new chapters to existing stories, and telling entirely new stories.
The field of Civic Media understands participation in this process as a key form of civic participation. Much of this participation is laudable, and a positive development for making marginalized issues more visible. The use of participatory civic media was how reports of sexual harassment in Hollywood turned into the #metoo movement, with tens of thousands of women joining Alyssa Milano in portraying the sheer volume of women who had personally been harassed or abused. In the Black Lives Matter movement, participatory media was critical in documenting police violence against protesters, in demanding attention to protests and the reasons behind them, and in framing the issue of police violence against people of color as narrative of civil rights violation that links together individual acts of violence. The emergence of spaces where non-professional individuals can report what’s happening in their communities, amplify stories that might have otherwise been missed, and demand attention towards subaltern narratives is, in the main, an enormously positive development for open societies.
But much as QAnon is an understandable consequence of a president who gives credence to conspiracy theories, QAnon is also a predictable outcome of the rise of this new form of participatory civics. The same tools that allow the emergence of narratives that have been subjugated due to racism, sexism and classism allow the emergence of narratives that were previously ignored because they have little overlap with consensus reality.
With revelations about the use of Facebook groups by the Russian Internet Research Agency to create conflicts between groups of Americans and force cleavages within left-wing movements, it’s clear that the social media/news loop is being manipulated. What may be more relevant is the fact that these systems are also useful to those acting “in good faith”—i.e., not misrepresenting their identities or intentions—towards horrific ends. The man who killed 50 Muslims at prayer in New Zealand was not fooled by a Russian plot. Instead, he was recruited by online extremists who believe a conspiracy in which Catholics are being intentionally displaced by Muslims in order to destroy aspects of European culture, a narrative not far from the core QAnon mythos.
Because the Internet is for QAnon and extremists as much as it is for #metoo and Black Lives Matter, the conversation spaces around conspiracies are hard to distinguish at a glance from other forms of newsmaking that happen today. Q comments on the events of the day, linking to YouTube videos and threads on Twitter, and a devoted community interprets and spins his/their commentary in a way that’s similar to the President of the United States commenting and linking on Twitter, with an army of journalists reacting to his every tweet.
This media landscape is the new normal. Its key characteristic is not mis-, dis- or malinformation. Instead, the key feature is that every assertion has a point of view behind it and is supporting someone’s agenda above other possible agendas. Each story reported or ignored, each fact marshaled or forgotten is weaponized. In such a world, Donald Trump’s complaint that the media fails to report on the successes of his presidency is not merely whinging. It is the reason why the media is his most potent antagonist and the “enemy of the people,” because the reality they report is in direct conflict with the one he is selling. The conflict between Trump’s reality and that of the mainstream media leads to the sense that we are no longer arguing a partisan battle over the interpretation of a common set of facts, but over facts from our own realities that both represent and lead inexorably to our own point of view.
I have started to think of this clash of realities as “the Unreal.” I don’t mean to identify a singular unreality—Trump’s, QAnon’s, or anyone else’s—but to make the point that what’s real to you is unreal to someone else. Like conspiracy theories, this is not a new phenomenon. Questions of whether we can share a common reality or whether we will be forever separated by our perceptions and interpretations are the subject of timeless debates in epistemology and phenomenology. What’s different now is that these debates have escaped the philosophy classroom and are now infecting every news story and online discussion.
The Unreal: What does your reality look like? (LEGOS "The Upside Down" from the Netflix show "Stranger Things". )
Throughout QAnon is the idea of discovering that our consensus reality is fraudulent, that a darker but truer reality lurks beneath the surface for those brave enough to look for it. QAnons talk about “red pills” and “blue pills,” adopting the terms from everyone’s favorite mashup of Keanu Reeves and Plato’s Cave, the 1999 film The Matrix. In the film, Reeves’s character is offered a red pill, which will reveal to him the true and horrifying nature of reality, or a blue pill, which will allow him to remain in happy delusion. For QAnons who’ve taken the red pill, the world of MSM is unreal, designed to deceive and prevent us from seeing the truth. For those who don’t take the pill, those in QAnon are simply delusional, incapable of being reached, and residing in an unreality we have no way of influencing or affecting.
(The adoption of the term “redpill” precedes the QAnon movement and reflects an even darker unreality. The term surfaced in the “pickup artist” community, which is an online group of men who believe women want to be subjugated to men and will reward abusive and dominant men who manipulate them in certain ways. For them, redpilling means releasing yourself from the notions of gender equality and feminism and accepting their deeply misogynistic worldview. That QAnon adopted this language is not coincidental—both communities evolved within the dank, fetid swamps of 4chan and 8chan, and there is a non-zero overlap behind the “traditional values” preached by some QAnon patriots and the revanchist anti-feminists of the pickup artist scene.)
Who benefits from the Unreal?
If Unreality is an emergent feature in today’s world, it is worth asking questions about its effects. Who wins and loses in a world of conflicting realities? Some implications are obvious. Political consensus becomes more elusive, because finding a common solution requires accepting a common—or at least compatible—analysis of the situation. Reporting the news is increasingly complicated, as reporters trained to act as neutral conduits are obliged to advocate for their perspective above competing perspectives, a process that may further erode already diminished trust in journalism.
But deeper effects, like who the unreal helps and harms or what sustained exposure to unreality does to us as citizens or as humans, is harder to divine.
Propaganda is a form of unreality—an instrumental unreality created by a state rather than an organically grown unreality, as QAnon appears to be—and we can learn something about the effects of unreality from the history of propaganda. Hannah Arendt argued that one of the goals of totalitarian propaganda was to force us to believe in the manifestly untrue. In declaring our belief in something that we knew not to be true, we showed our allegiance to the leader who put it forward. When the leader would change their mind and alter the reality that we shared, it would be spun as necessary for disinformation purposes. The leader understood why we needed to lie at some moments and reveal the truth in other moments, and in showing our willingness to adopt this reality, we showed ourselves giving up our agency, becoming the equivalent of a dog waiting for a command from his master rather than thinking on his own.
But it is not clear that our contemporary unrealities have been weaponized and directed in the instrumental way in which totalitarian leaders used propaganda in World War II. Our world is characterized by a diversity of communication channels, a choice of different (un)realities, rather than the control of communications sought by dictatorships. A plurality of unreality does not persuade the listener of one set of facts or another, but encourages the listener to doubt everything.
Some actors seem especially comfortable operating in this environment. RT, the Russian state broadcaster, launched its coverage in the United States with a documentary promoting the conspiracy theory that the terror attacks of 9/11 had been an inside job. This theory, not an especially widespread one in the United States, seems an odd way to introduce oneself to a new audience. But RT’s slogan, “Question More,” reveals the logic behind it. The goal was not to persuade American viewers of a specific conspiracy theory, but instead to persuade viewers that they should question any narrative that they had previously encountered.
A world in which we are constantly questioning is a world that demands endless effort to navigate. It becomes exhausting to follow the news, to understand political developments, to navigate whether a set of facts is believable or is a manifestation of someone’s agenda. A logical response to this rise in unreality is to tune out and sit instead on the sidelines. Another response is to cede agency to those who thrive in this climate of unreality, leaders like Putin and Trump, who seem perfectly adapted to this space.
The main byproduct of unreality is doubt, and doubt is dangerous. Doubt makes it difficult to organize—to demand a change—because movements for change require a set of people to agree on a problem and a possible solution. We know from Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in Merchants of Doubt that the strategies employed by tobacco companies about the harms of their product or oil companies about anthropogenic climate change were not designed to sway audiences to the corporate narrative, but to generate sufficient doubt to paralyze effective action. As long as there is doubt it is difficult to reach consensus and to move forward. The merchants of doubt wield their product like a weapon, and the primary product of unreality is perpetual paralysis.
We have a tendency to assume, especially in academic communities, that the acceptance of unrealities, whether they are those of vaccine skeptics or climate change deniers, are the consequence of poor education or emergent technologies. Robert Proctor and Iain Boal coined the term “agnotology” to refer to the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt in order to distinguish ignorance that is consciously created from that which occurs naturally. (I am grateful to danah boyd for introducing me to Proctor’s book with Londa Schiebinger on the topic, which introduced me to the term.) Those who benefit from the stasis caused by imposed doubt are those who are already in positions of power. Those who suffer the most are those who have been excluded from power. In that sense, unreality and the doubt it generates is an inherently conservative force.
What’s worse, perhaps, is that many of our responses to the doubt brought about by emergent unreality have been reactionary. In much of the discussion of mis- and disinformation is the thinly disguised desire to return to a world where there’s a single authoritative voice, a Walter Cronkite to tell us “That’s the way it is.” There is an understandable temptation to hand more power over control of speech to platforms like Facebook in the hopes that they’ll somehow return us to a mutually shared reality. This is an unlikely scenario given their role in allowing these splits to emerge. The alternative, asking governments to regulate and control speech in online spaces, seems equally unwise.
Before we hand control of speech to Facebook or to Congress to free us from the complications of the Unreal, we would benefit from mapping this space more comprehensively. The goal of this issue of the Journal of Design and Science is not to conclusively define the Unreal, but to explore some of its dimensions. The nature of the beast is such that a singular view of the Unreal would always be incomplete, so we should expect these visions to challenge and conflict with one another as much as they mutually reinforce.
Given antecedents in agnotology within the Russian media space, we invited Peter Pomerantsev, a celebrated writer on contemporary Russia, to explore the idea of unreality as a mirror of a society facing a post-ideological world. Pomerantsev argues that understanding the purpose of disinformation is like trying to understand the purpose of art. Propaganda, like art, simply exists. It’s just a reflection of the time.
Masha Gessen, professor at Amherst College, author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and contributor to The New Yorker, has challenged overly simplistic narratives of Putin as a singular architect of Russian media interventions. In conversation, she and I explore the idea that the unreal can still be corrosive to democracy even if there’s no grand plan behind the complex and conflicting forces that lead to Russian strategies in the information space.
Dr. Gregory Asmolov, a scholar of the Russian internet and early career fellow at King’s College London’s Russia Institute, argues that the participatory affordances of digital networks offer novel opportunities for political manipulation. Relying on his research on the use of social networks in Russia and Ukraine, he explores the idea that manipulations of social media seek to divide friends, breaking alliances and leaving individuals isolated, online and offline.
Dr. Joan Donovan, Director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, is one of the nation’s leading scholars on online disinformation. As someone who has watched the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Bureau very closely, her essay with colleague Brian Friedberg, examines the power of pseudonymous identities that adopt the persona of oppressed people to capture their voices and power.
Julia Ebner, an Austrian scholar and researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, whose book The Rage is a leading resource on Islamist and far-right extremists in Europe, uses her knowledge of Neo-Nazi organizing online to give us a tour of alternative infrastructure to support speech that quotidian platforms have rejected.
Unreality can also be routine, as Nina Lutz, an MIT Media Lab researcher on computational geometry and computer graphics explores in an essay that examines how makeup can be used to completely transform identity, and how these transformations impact our understanding of real and fake.
Dr. Judith Donath, former MIT Media Lab professor and alumna, researcher at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, author of The Social Machine, expands on her current research on signalling theory to explore the idea of the “deep fake” and to examine our relationship with video as an arbiter of truth, arguing that we must move from understanding video as reality to video as testimony.
Pursuing other spaces where the Unreal pokes into our everyday life, entrepreneur, game designer and former MIT Media Lab professor Kevin Slavin looks at how alternative reality games, a space first explored in the late 1990s and early 2000s, may have prefigured some of the fractures in reality we are encountering today.
And finally, Benjamen Walker, whose Theory of Everything podcast has long been one of the most prescient and provocative explorations of internet culture, reflects on a recently completed series, “False Alarm,” that explored the blurry lines between fact and fiction. What happens to a media maker whose practice skates across reality’s boundaries when the shifting of those boundaries becomes a moment of crisis for society at large?
We will be releasing these essays—and hopefully others—in pairs over the summer of 2019 and encouraging readers to react to them online, inviting other scholars in the field to comment specifically, but also taking advantage of this digital platform’s affordances to solicit reactions both to our work and to other voices who should be included in the project.
Keeping firmly in mind the idea that progress is possible through this sort of plurality, I want to return to the question that frequently circulates in the QAnon community: Who is Q?
Is Q a dissident intelligent agent in the President’s inner circle? A team of agents? Or perhaps President Trump himself? Is he (or she or they) a profit-making operation put together by opportunistic 4Chan trolls? A giant prank that has grown wildly out of control? A real-life role play, or LARP, as some QAnons like to describe it? Is Q a Psyops effort, designed to keep up the spirit of Trump’s most ardent supporters as the President struggles to drain the swamp as he promised them he would do? Is Q an international disinformation operation designed to further pull apart the left and the right much as the Internet Research Agency sought to pull apart Black Lives Matter or the LGBTQ community?
The answer: Q is all of this and more. All of this for the simple reason that somewhere, someone believes this interpretation of Q, and is working to impose that reality on the rest of us. This war between realities is the landscape we find ourselves collectively navigating. It is our task to understand how we act as individuals and citizens in a world where the emergent mode of discourse is not to persuade someone of your interpretation of the facts, but to recruit them to your own reality. Our ultimate challenge is not only to navigate this space but, at best, to heal and transform it.
Everyone else, tell me this is not what the right/left divides look like. A mid-2019 article, one of a series, seems to have nailed in pre-2020, pre-covid, pre-big-lie, pre-insurrection, and can easily be followed through covid repercussions, Putin's War in Ukraine, and the crazy inflation-ridden moment we are living in today. Thanks to neither side understanding the driving forces or why our reality seems to have split, here we are. Conservative America and the Republicans have been hijacked by these forces and unless we can figure out a way to get "wQke" to actually WAKE, it will be our undoing.
I think this series may deserve its own thread.
Your feelings and opinions do not add up to facts.
We're being told to expect rolling brown outs as it is. Imagine if everyone had an electric vehicle. Your a/c would be out.........but, you'd have an e.v.
Can't keep up with electricity as it is, but yeah, everyone get an e.v. Don't know where the power will come from, but who cares.
can you please stop acting as if this is a brand new issue?
Texas energy grid, ran by corporations, completely failed northern texas and people died. the vast majority of their power comes from oil and gas, not renewables.
no one is forcing you to buy an EV.
and the AC would be out? people got AC's that don't even work NOW with the current grid, and it ain't because of lack of electricity. it's because they can't maintain their house properly.
yall coming up with the dumbest reasons to be anti-EV. sounding like the guys who were anti-car cause the horse and buggy is tried and true!!!!
i wa JUST old enough to remember my parents (your generation) making fun of the internet cause yall thought it was stupid and not worth the time.
yet here we are...
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
My wife and I had been discussing getting an EC due to the rising gas prices. It's getting old real fast paying that much for gas. I have an Audi S7 and she has an Audi Q5 and I still have my old Caddy XLR. We decided to get her a Honda CR-V hybrid to drive back and forth to work because it's a 45 minute drive each way. It's actually not a bad vehicle, especially for the price and it helps keep the gas costs down.
brooooooooo i love that ride. such a gorgeous ass car, and awesome performance.
look at your post, Vers. last time i checked, that's called adapt and evolve, the thing we're supposed to be doing anyway, changing with the times.
the only reason i haven't pulled the trigger on an EV is because we want to get a bigger crib, and since the housing market is crazy, we're leaning toward building a house. it's dope because i can have the Solar panels with the storage boxes, upgraded electricity inside the house and all that, and it will be included into the mortgage and not have to pay a separate bill for it. imma need to control myself because building a crib allows you to do so much crap and have rolled into the mortgage payment. and that's the only way to keep my wife from trying to get us back to Germany.
and since you're an Audi guy, have you seen the EV they dropped, that E-Tron GT? ooooo weee that ride is dope. i'm want to go all electric in the crib too, no gas lines. and since i got the VA home loan, no down payment either!!! i don't want just the panels on the roof. i want 2 small rows of panels on the ground toward the back of the property line.
i love America. i get to have a crazy ass ride AND help save the planet at the same damn time. i rather adapt and evolve than go extinct like the dinosaurs.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Yeah, got the S7. It's pretty crazy because we went to get my wife the Q5 after her other car had issues w/the warning lights repeatedly coming on despite numerous trips to the dealer. They couldn't figure it out. So, she goes to get the Q5 and I have always liked the looks of the 7 series and loved what I read about the S7 due to the increased performance and we worked out a deal and bought both on the same day.
That's great that you are thinking of building your own home. Do a lot of research on the panels. Our home repair business gets a quite a few calls due to them leaking and that can be a real hassle and expensive to repair. But yeah, evolving is the key.
I saw some advertisements on the EV Audi, but I haven't researched. Looks sharp as hell to me.
Highly Understated Government Inflation Rate Hits 8.6%, Highest Level in Four Decades
US Inflation Jumps to 8.6 Percent, Highest in 40 Years Analysts now predict aggressive Fed response and a bigger economic slowdown By Andrew Moran June 10, 2022 Updated: June 10, 2022
The U.S. annual inflation rate surged to 8.6 percent in May, topping the market estimate of 8.3 percent.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the consumer price index (CPI) rose 1 percent on a month-over-month basis. Key drivers of inflation such as food, energy, and housing showed no signs of slowing last month.
The core inflation rate, which excludes the volatile food and energy sectors, climbed 6 percent year-over-year, higher than economists’ expectations of 5.9 percent. Core inflation jumped 0.6 percent month-over-month.
All of the inflation indexes ran high in May, with food prices soaring 10.1 percent and energy increasing 34.6 percent.
Fuel oil surged 106.7 percent, gasoline rose 48.7 percent, and electricity costs jumped 12 percent year-over-year.
In May, meat prices remained expensive as beef (+10.2 percent), pork (+13.3 percent), ham (+11.1 percent), and chicken (+17.4 percent) have all surged.
Eggs spiked 32.2 percent, while milk advanced 15.9 percent. Fruits and vegetables increased 8.2 percent. And coffee rose at a remarkable pace of 15.3 percent.
Shelter costs swelled 5.5 percent. Airline fares increased 37.8 percent as a result of increasing fuel prices and high travel demand.
New vehicles jumped 12.6 percent, while used cars and trucks rose 16.1 percent. Apparel prices swelled 5 percent.
The U.S. financial markets reacted negatively to the inflation data. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 700 points and the Nasdaq Composite Index tumbled more than 3 percent. The S&P 500 dropped about 2.7 percent.
The yield on 2-year U.S. Treasury notes increased more than 17 basis points to 3 percent, reaching its highest level since June 2008.
This is “signaling that investors now expect that the Fed will have to raise the federal funds rate by another 200bps over the next 12 months,” Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research said in an email to clients.
“The 10-year yield remained around 3.10 percent, suggesting that the yield curve is anticipating a significant economic slowdown, which will lower inflation,” he added.
The U.S. Dollar Index (DXY), which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, surged 0.8 percent to 104.02, from an opening of 103.34.
Where’s Inflation Heading? One of the hot topics in recent weeks has been whether or not inflation has peaked.
Over the last couple of months, some components of the U.S. marketplace have eased, particularly used car prices. However, as the May CPI report revealed, many goods and services have continued to increase in cost, especially on the energy front.
The persistent jumps in a broad array of energy commodities, including crude oil, natural gas, gasoline, and diesel, could send the CPI higher in the coming months.
Mohamed El-Erian, a top economist and chief economic advisor at Allianz, has been skeptical of claims that inflation has reached a peak.
He reiterated this stance on Friday, noting that the June month-on-month headline reading could be worse than the May report.
“Amplifying the economic/social/political discomfort, headline is a new high for this inflation cycle,” he wrote on Twitter. “Also, if the first 10 days of June are anything to go by, the next monthly measure would be higher.”
He also suggested that the bond market’s reaction to U.S. inflation data points to a more aggressive Fed response and a bigger economic downturn.
Over the last month, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent crude prices have advanced about 10 percent. Natural gas soared 16 percent. The national average for a gallon of gasoline is nearly $5, while diesel is homing in on $6, data from the American Automobile Association (AAA) show.
Moving forward, inflation will need energy prices to take a breather, says Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst at Swissquote Bank.
“For inflation to ease persistently, we need to see energy prices soften,” she said in a research note on Friday.
Euro Pacific Capital chief economist and strategist Peter Schiff rejected the premise that the U.S. is at peak inflation, telling Fox Business that “inflation is going to get much worse.”
“This inflation is just getting started. I mean, we’ve had it for a long time in financial assets, but now it’s finally moved into consumer goods and it’s got a long way to go,” he said.
Other U.S. policymakers are waiting for more data to determine if the economy has seen the worst of higher prices or if inflationary pressures will subside.
Loretta Mester, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, told CNBC last week that she has not seen enough evidence to suggest inflation has peaked.
“I don’t want to declare victory on inflation before I see really compelling evidence that our actions are beginning to do the work,” Mester stated.
The rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will hold its two-day June policy meeting on June 14–15. According to the CME Group FedWatch tool, it is widely expected that the U.S. central bank will pull the trigger on a 50-basis-point interest rate hike.
During a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen conceded that the United States would endure “unacceptable levels of inflation” for some time, although she “very much hopes that it will be coming down now.”
In separate testimony in front of the House Ways and Means Committee hearing, Yellen acknowledged that she “probably could have used a better term than transitory” when discussing inflation.
‘Nowhere to Hide’ U.S. families are paying an average of $311 more per month for goods and services, according to recent estimates from Moody’s Analytics.
Last month, a CNBC + Acorns Invest in You survey, conducted by Momentive, learned that many consumers are cutting back on dining out, reducing their driving, canceling a trip, and ending monthly subscriptions.
Because inflation is broad-based, post-pandemic economic conditions have “left consumers nowhere to hide,” says Greg McBride, the senior vice president and chief financial analyst at Bankrate.
“The biggest increases are coming in categories that are absolute necessities—shelter, food, and energy,” McBride told The Epoch Times. “This is why we’re beginning to see signs of strain among consumers that are dialing back discretionary spending or looking to economize as much as possible.”
The best strategy that consumers and investors could employ, particularly in a stagflation environment, is turning to gold and silver, says William Stack, a financial advisor at Stack Financial Services.
According to Stack, these precious metals are some of the top-performing assets amid stagflation.
Although silver has tumbled about 7 percent year-to-date, gold has held steady with a gain of nearly 1 percent. Both metal commodities have outperformed the leading U.S. benchmark indexes.
“Historically, gold and silver have continued to do well even in the years immediately following stagflationary periods, increasing 5–8x in price over a 3–5 year period,” Stack told The Epoch Times.
“Conditions appear to be similar in many ways and more extreme in some ways. We recommend clients and retirees protect themselves by owning insured equity-linked accounts that protect their principal from market declines while allowing the earnings potential to keep up with inflation and saving a portion (10-20 percent) of their savings in precious metals as well.”
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s (FRBNY) monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations, one-year median inflation expectations tumbled to 6.3 percent in April, down from 6.6 percent in March.
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Biden’s America: Families Line up on Tarmacs for Baby Formula Amid Biden Supply Crisis AMERICAN NEWS Jun 10, 2022 4:11 PM EST Joshua Young June 10, 2022 4:11 PM SHOCKING: American families line up on tarmacs for baby formula amid Biden supply crisis Emily Gendig is the mother of a 7 month old with a dairy allergy who waited on an Indianapolis tarmac last month to receive a special brand of Nestle formula.
Mother Emily Gendig and her family waited on a tarmac late last month in hopes to find baby formula for her infant child, describing the shortages as a "big panic" and a "terrifying feeling." According to msn.com, Gendig is the mother of a 7 month old with a dairy allergy who waited on an Indianapolis tarmac to receive a special brand of Nestle formula.
She noted in an interview with MSNBC that she "can't just supplement with anything" and could only use one specific brand. "It is a big panic because we just don’t know, Because she has that dairy allergy, we can’t just supplement with anything, and she can’t tolerate Similac, so we can only buy that one brand, and one type for her or she doesn’t sleep and she’s in excruciating pain. So it’s a battle and it’s a terrifying feeling to know that you can’t find it," she said. The infant requires a specific mix of both breast milk and formula, but the family has struggled to keep the formula on hand, with both parents, who travel across central Indiana for their jobs, searching endlessly in their travels for it. Baby formula shortages have been plaguing the nation for months as part of the ongoing supply chain crisis. The disaster was exacerbated in late February when Abbott Laboratories recalled its product following the deaths of two infants who reportedly consumed formula made at the company's plant in Sturgis, Michigan. At the beginning of May, the Biden Administration was facing criticism as 40 to 50 percent of baby formula was out of stock and in at least 26 states while the administration was sending pallets of baby formula to illegal migrants on the southern border. By the end of May the shortages were up to 70 percent. Congress eventually passed a $28 million bill to help combat nationwide baby formula shortage that specified "emergency supplemental appropriations to address the shortage of infant formula in the United States for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2022, and for other purposes." On May 22 Nestlé flew a shipment of formula, including the special brand Gendig needed, into Indianapolis airport. While Gendig described it as a "big relief" the crisis may not abate for some time. The Department of Health and Human Services have said they will assign an Inspector General to investigate the Biden administration's response to America's baby formula shortage.
SuperBrown, I kindly posted an article showing you in real-world facts how what you believe is nothing more than the poison fruit of the internets anus. You should consume those butt nuggets in the privacy of your rabbit hole, or share them with like minds at the anus they originate from because here nobody really gives a damn about the troll spam or the lunatic sources. Please don't take this as an attack. I would really like you to read that articles, maybe it's not too late for you to get help.
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