JD Vance Teases MAGA Fanatics With Bizarre Epstein Files Pledge
Big Oil is making $30 million an hour off the Iran war, a Nepali student chose to self-deport rather than spend another day in an ICE facility, and even in deep red military towns are turning on Trump
Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.
JD Vance went to Georgia to revive his image and instead revived Pizzagate. Big Oil is making $30 million an hour off the Iran war. A Nepali student chose to self-deport rather than spend another day in an ICE facility where guards pepper-sprayed an entire dormitory. And Donald Trump is losing support even in deep red military towns
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JD Vance Distracts From the Epstein Files… By Bringing Up Pizzagate
The Epstein files are tearing MAGA world apart, and JD Vance went to Georgia on Tuesday to weigh in — by calling to investigate Pizzagate instead.
Vance appeared at a sparsely attended Turning Point USA event at Akins Ford Arena, where he faced questions from a crowd still furious about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files. What followed was not a gaffe.
Vance defended Trump from Epstein-related questions, insisting there was “no evidence of misconduct” on the president’s part and calling the suggestion that the two men were close friends “a hoax.” A New York Times analysis of the released files found more than 5,300 files containing over 38,000 references to Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club, and related terms.
Vance made sure to throw the crowd some red meat. He told the audience he had read an email in which someone had written to the convicted sex offender about what sounded like “some really nice, like, pizzas and grape sodas or something like that.”
He acknowledged the language “sounded like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory” — and then said we should investigate it anyway.
Pizzagate was a debunked 2016 conspiracy theory that falsely claimed a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant was the center of a child trafficking operation linked to prominent Democratic politicians. The conspiracy spread rapidly on social media and had real-world consequences when a man fired a rifle inside the restaurant while "self-investigating" the claims.
All of this came at a bruising moment. CNN’s chief data analyst recently found Vance to be the least popular VP in modern history at this point in his tenure, with his net approval plunging 21 points since taking office. When your numbers look like that, Epstein truthers start to look like an opportunity.
Big Oil Is Making $30 Million an Hour Off the Iran War
The U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has been ongoing for about six weeks. You may have noticed that gas is more expensive. You may not have noticed exactly how much more expensive it is for the people selling it to you.
An analysis by The Guardian found that the world’s largest oil and gas companies recorded more than $30 million per hour in profits in the first month of the conflict alone. If oil prices continue averaging around $100 per barrel, the world’s top 100 oil and gas companies stand to make an extra $234 billion by year’s end.
Since the beginning of the war, oil prices have increased from under $70 a barrel to about $100 a barrel. National average gasoline prices have risen from $2.94 the week before the war to well above $3.80 today.
That’s not the market at work. That’s a transfer of wealth from your wallet to Exxon’s quarterly earnings, facilitated by a war you didn’t vote for.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Congressman Ro Khanna have reintroduced the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which would impose a per-barrel tax and return the proceeds directly to consumers as a quarterly rebate. At $100 per barrel, the tax would raise roughly $33 billion a year, with individual filers receiving approximately $216 annually.
The bill will almost certainly go nowhere in a Republican-controlled Congress. The oil companies spent a great deal of money ensuring that would be the case.
A Nepali Student Would Rather Self-Deport Than Spend Another Day in ICE Custody
Prabesh Thapa Chettri came to America on a student visa, married a U.S. citizen, and was in the middle of getting his green card when a neighbor called the police over an argument. Officers asked for his ID. That was that.
While in ICE detention, Thapa Chettri described conditions in a phone call: “Their guards, they pepper sprayed the whole dorm. So everyone– everyone started coughing, and it was hard to breathe. We couldn’t see. It was burning our eyes, and they wouldn’t let us outside of the door.”
One detainee reportedly fainted and was foaming at the mouth. Thapa Chettri told reporters: “I don’t have a criminal background. I’m not a criminal, but I’m kept here with criminals, and that’s why I feel like I don’t belong here.”
He has since self-deported. His wife, a U.S. citizen, spent $3,000 on phone calls just to stay in contact with him during his detention. The green card petition she filed was delayed because USCIS had her birthday wrong in their system.
Nobody was charged with a crime. A man who married an American, followed the legal process, and hit a bureaucratic snag lost his future in this country because a neighbor called the police. The administration calls this a success.
Deep Red Military Towns Are Turning on Trump Over Iran Threats
The New York Times sent reporters to the places Trump needs most: Colorado Springs and Fayetteville. These deep-red military towns are where a bumper sticker isn’t just politics, it’s biography.
More than three dozen voters in deep-red military communities spoke with the Times about Trump’s handling of the Iran war. The word that kept surfacing wasn’t “frustrated” or “disappointed.” It was “disturbed.”
Emmelia Lorenzen, a Trump voter from Fayetteville — home to Fort Liberty, one of the largest military installations in the world — said she was disturbed specifically by Trump’s threat to annihilate Iranian civilization in order to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“One of Trump’s biggest campaign motives was that he is not a man of war,” she said. “And then you see us moving to war so quickly after saying that. It just doesn’t really make sense.”
In military towns, that contradiction isn’t abstract. It has a name and a unit and a deployment date.
Mark Nelson, an Iowa farmer who voted for Trump, put the broader concern plainly: “The amount of money and resources that have gone into this war is ridiculous. I don’t think there was any imminent danger.”
If Trump is losing the argument in military towns, he isn’t losing it to the left. He’s losing them to his own campaign promises, which have aged about as well as his Truth Social posts from 12:43 in the morning.
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