u/Previous_Basis_84

Tropical Storm Bertha was coming ashore Wednesday afternoon. Jeff Landry and Liz Murrill stood at a podium at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness in Baton Rouge — the building where this state coordinates its response when people are in danger.

They did not use it to talk about the storm.

Hours earlier, special prosecutor Laurie White had dismissed all sixteen felony counts against the attorney general. Mayor Helena Moreno, retired Judge Calvin Johnson and five council members had written asking her to end it. Moreno said the request wasn’t driven by fear or politics — that the public interest was better served by moving on.

That was the off-ramp.

Instead, the governor started naming who should be investigated.

Here’s how a society actually falls apart.

Not with tanks in the street. Not with a mushroom cloud. It falls apart when it can’t do two simple things anymore — make enough energy to feed and power its people, and fix its own problems.

Joseph Tainter spent his life digging through dead civilizations. Rome, the Maya, the Bronze Age. And that’s the pattern he found. Collapse isn’t a battle. It’s an energy bill the society can’t pay. The power gets expensive. The food gets expensive. The people at the top keep skimming. And one ordinary Tuesday, the whole thing just stops working.

We are closer to that Tuesday than anyone is telling you.

Let me show you who’s doing it. Then let me show you what it feels like when it lands on your street.

Start with the guys draining the tank.

America’s emergency oil reserve — the stash we keep for the worst possible day — just hit its lowest level since 1983. They burned through it this spring, propping up gas prices during the fight with Iran. What’s left is about six weeks of usable fuel before it drops to a floor you physically can’t pump below.

Six weeks. That’s the whole cushion, for a country of 340 million people.

Now the other end. Every tech giant on earth is racing to build data centers that each swallow as much electricity as a small city, to run the AI they keep shoving down your throat. Power demand is spiking for the first time in a generation.

So what did they do about supply? They destroyed it. This administration took a chainsaw to clean energy — $83 billion in power projects canceled or frozen, right as the grid starts to strain. Solar, wind, batteries you could’ve had running in a year. Done.

Add it up. Demand exploding. Supply murdered. Emergency tank on fumes.

Now the guys who won’t fix any of it, because they’re too busy getting rich off it.

Meet Dean Ball. He wrote AI rules inside the Trump administration, then took a fat job at OpenAI, and now he wants the government to ban his competition. His enemy is free software. China is giving away AI models as good as OpenAI’s for nothing, and American startups build their own the same open way — because open source is the only way a little guy gets in the ring at all. Ball wants Washington to outlaw it and call it national security. Translation: a rich company that can’t win on price is buying a law instead.

And it’s not one company. It’s the whole club — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI. They fight over headlines and agree on everything that counts. When Trump got sworn in, they lined up with checks. Altman gave a million. Zuckerberg gave a million. Bezos gave two. Musk had already dropped $277 million to put the man in the chair. Nobody hands over a million dollars out of patriotism. They’re buying access — a direct line to the President for the day they need a rule killed, a competitor blocked, or an investigation to quietly disappear.

But here is what we still don’t really fully understand. The thing they’re strangling the country to protect might be a mirage. Ed Zitron calls OpenAI the Lehman Brothers of the whole bubble — “the greatest capital misallocation in history.” Trillions poured in. Real profits nobody can find.

These are the same men who swore they’d cure disease and save the world. Don’t believe them. Watch what they actually do. Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google, is spending $35 million right now to kill a California tax on billionaires — a tax that would’ve sent ninety cents on the dollar to health care. He’s paying people fifteen bucks a signature to stop other people from getting to a doctor. He is worth more than most countries.

Oligarchs in America are not going to fix your problems. Your problems are how they got rich.

Summertime done, come and gone, my, oh, my.

I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am; Been hidin' out in a rock and roll band.

Shake the hand that shook the hand of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan.

Shine your shoes, light your fuse. Can you use them ol' U.S. Blues?

I'll drink your health, share your wealth, run your life, steal your wife. Wave that flag, wave it wide and high.

—US Blues, Song by Hunter/Garcia and the Grateful Dead

I grew up celebrating the Fourth of July in Los Alamos, and it wasn’t so different from how we do it down here in New Orleans — fireworks, family, somebody’s cousin with a lighter. The one real difference was fire. Up on the mesa, you couldn’t shoot the big rockets, because a single spark in that dry timber could take the whole mountain. When I was a kid, a fire tore through Bandelier, and it was the kind of terrifying that stays with you.

But what I keep coming back to are the coins.

If you were a kid in 1976, you remember them. I got a whole Bicentennial coin set that year — a half dollar with Independence Hall, the quarters with the colonial drummer, dimes and nickels rounding it out, the big pieces stamped 1776–1976. There was a book of commemorative stamps too, and a little flag. School made a point of it: this was historic, the country’s 200th birthday, something you were meant to hold onto. We were two hundred years old, and we made sure the children were holding it in their hands.

Most people in Louisiana are working harder than their parents did and falling further behind.

That’s not a feeling. It’s in the numbers. And when you lay the numbers out one after another, they stop looking like bad luck and start looking like a decision — a state finishing last, going backwards, and choosing policies that keep it there.

Let the charts tell it.

I want to say something about the Farm Bureau itself, because I had never been part of it before and felt honored to be invited.

The American Farm Bureau Federation was founded in 1919. The Louisiana chapter started in 1922, on the Dodson farm near Baton Rouge. One of the founders was State Senator Norris Williamson of East Carroll Parish — Delta country, the same northeast Louisiana stretch where Tensas Parish sits. The state federation has about 145,000 members today.

Nationally, the Farm Bureau is one of the largest lobbying organizations in American agriculture. It is conservative. It is well-aligned with Republican farm-state politics. Its leadership has spent decades recruiting candidates of a certain stripe and helping them win.

But the federation is built parish by parish. The people at the convention were not the lobbyists. They were the farmers. They sat through long policy sessions and listened.

The Farm Bureau has earned the trust of that room by being useful to them.
This is also why Jamie’s presence at these conventions matters.
He is a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate showing up at a Republican-leaning organization. A Black farmer at a federation that grew up in the Jim Crow Delta. And he has been showing up here for years — not as a candidate, as a farmer.

The other side of the aisle has been writing off rooms like this one for a generation. Jamie has been walking into them.
That’s the standing the Tensas farmer came to check in on. That’s how rural votes get organized that nobody on the Democratic side has organized for since I’ve been in Louisiana.

The policy lunch was a panel. Two FSA officials, one NRCS, and one Rural Development.

Craig McCain runs FSA for Louisiana. A Trump appointee.
He told the room he came back to the agency a year ago and kept hearing it was different from what it had been in 2021. He looked. What he found was that a whole generation of FSA employees had left — the ones who’d started with him in the mid-1980s farm bill crisis, the ones who carried the institutional knowledge of the place.

He said the quiet part out loud. When you have less people and less experience, frankly, customer service, it’s easy for customer service to fail.
He didn’t have to be that honest. He was.

The numbers behind what he said: more than 24,000 people have left the USDA since January 2025. About a 27 percent reduction. Roughly 15,000 took Musk’s “fork in the road” buyout that paid them through September to leave. Others were terminated. FSA alone lost at least 1,200. The staff who walked out averaged 18.6 years of service.

A generation. In one year.

McCain inherited that. So did everyone in the room.
It sounded like they had fired many of the experienced, good people who knew the farmers of the state.

Chris Justin walked me through a Shell refinery without leaving the chair across from me.

He is a process engineer. He moved to Louisiana in 2009 and started at the Shell Norco refinery. The job is what it sounds like — making sure complex industrial systems run as efficiently and safely as possible. Chemistry. Distillation. Reaction kinetics. He calls refinery work the pinnacle of chemical engineering.

When I asked him what made him qualified to be a utility regulator, he almost laughed.

“The processes that go on at a refinery were way more complicated than the processes that go on for a public service commission. A combined cycle combustion turbine plant is the simplest thing. That would be the simplest unit at a refinery.”

He is running for District 1 of the Louisiana Public Service Commission. No party.

The Public Service Commission regulates Entergy and the other utility companies in Louisiana. Five elected commissioners. They set your electric rate. They approve new plants. They decide what the utilities can charge you and what they cannot.

Most people do not know they exist.

That is not an accident. The job is technical. The hearings are dry. The decisions are buried in dockets and rule changes most reporters will not cover. The people who run for these seats are not amateurs, and they are not confused. They take utility money on the way in, and they deliver utility outcomes once they are seated. Skrmetta has been on the commission since the early 2000s. Coussan wrote the Lightning Amendment himself. Foster Campbell, the District 5 Democrat now retiring, said publicly he was “for it 1,000 percent.”

That is the entire game.

In December 2025, the Public Service Commission passed a rule called the Lightning Amendment.

It was authored by Commissioner Jean-Paul Coussan, a Republican from Lafayette. It was inspired by Governor Jeff Landry’s “Lightning Speed” executive order. It creates a fast-track approval process — eight months instead of the usual four years — for new large customers like AI data centers to plug into the grid.

The rule requires the customer to pay for fifty percent of the infrastructure costs that come with serving them. For fifteen years.

Here is the catch: the rule does not advertise.

Meta’s contract is fifteen years. The gas plants Entergy is building to serve Meta have operational lifespans of thirty to forty years. The Blue Owl ownership structure that finances the data center lets Meta exit its lease as early as 2033, in four-year increments after that. If Meta walks, the remaining twenty-plus years of plant costs sit on your electric bill.

When Meta builds a data center in Richland Parish that uses three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans, Entergy builds the gas plants to power it. Three plants under construction. Seven more are pending approval. A transmission line at five hundred and forty-six million dollars by Entergy’s published estimate, with Entergy staff testifying in hearings that overruns could push it past a billion.

What does Louisiana get for that arrangement? From Entergy’s own announcement of the Meta power infrastructure: fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred construction jobs at the generation units, three to five thousand more construction jobs across substations and transmission, and forty-four permanent jobs.

Forty-four.

That is the math. That is the cost per permanent job. That is what is being sold to you.

The vote was four to one.

The one was Davante Lewis, the Democratic commissioner from Baton Rouge. After the vote, he said the commission had “tied our hands behind our back, put an eyepatch over one eye, and then gave a wink to the utilities and these large hyperscalers with the other eye.” Earlier in the meeting, Chair Mike Francis cut him off mid-question. Commissioner Eric Skrmetta — the man whose District 1 seat is now on the November ballot — muttered “I didn’t say s---” under his breath while Lewis tried to ask the consultant questions.

That is the room where your electric bill is decided.

Greg Bovino came to New Orleans first.

He was on our streets. In our neighborhoods. With federal authority, armed agents, and the full backing of the United States government.

Then, a few days ago, he flew to Portugal to speak at a neo-Nazi conference and teach Europeans how we did it.

You may remember the coat.

Long. Olive green. Boxy at the shoulders. The kind of coat that communicates something before the man wearing it opens his mouth.

Gavin Newsom said it looked like Bovino had gone on eBay and bought SS garb. Protesters in Minneapolis made signs with him in a Nazi salute. Social media called it Nazi cosplay.

Bovino said they were all wrong.

A man does not dress like that by accident. Not when he’s the public face of a federal operation. Not when every agent around him is in standard gear. Not when cameras are rolling in every city he enters.

He wore it here.

He wore it while his agents moved through New Orleans neighborhoods. While parents hid their kids. While schools sent children home. While our community watched federal forces arrive — not for the people who are actually dangerous, but for the immigrants.

He was not here to catch criminals. He was here to intimidate. To show Black New Orleans, immigrant New Orleans, the New Orleans that organizes and marches and refuses to disappear, that the Gestapo was operating on our streets with no apology and no disguise.

That’s what the coat was for.

Then he went to Minneapolis.

Two Americans died under his command. Renee Nicole Good — shot by an ICE agent while sitting in her car. Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse — shot at a protest. Bovino called Pretti a domestic terrorist planning to massacre officers. Surveillance footage contradicted him.

They removed Bovino from Minneapolis. Did not charge him with anything. Moved him.

On May 29, he posted a photo on X.

Arm extended. Hand open. Fingers pointing upward and outward.

The salute from the photographs you have seen from Nuremberg.

He posted it himself. The day before flying to Portugal.

On May 30, Bovino took the stage at the Remigration Summit 2026 in Figueira da Foz, Portugal.

The organizer’s name is Afonso Gonçalves. His group is called Reconquista — named for the medieval mass expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. His opening line: Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions. A direct reference to the conditions that produced Hitler. Said out loud. In the promotional materials.

Also on the program: Dries Van Langenhove, a Belgian man convicted of Holocaust denial — a judge said he “raved about Nazi ideology” and wanted to replace democracy with “a social model of white supremacy.” The founder of a Swiss neo-Nazi group. An AfD lawmaker. Stefano L. Forte, leader of the New York Young Republicans — the man who publicly called for an unconstitutional third term for Trump — is sharing a stage with a convicted Holocaust denier. And Jared Taylor, one of the founding figures of American white nationalism, was listed as a VIP guest.

About 500 people attended.

Bovino was the keynote. He told them mass deportations and ethnic expulsions were “essential to saving both cultures.” He cited Erwin Rommel — Nazi Germany’s leading general — as an inspirational figure.

James Griffith built one of the most successful home care businesses in Hammond. He treated his people fairly. He held a team together through sheer force of goodness and built a small economy around him. When he retired, he built a camp in Amite on the Tangipahoa River — water he’d fished his whole life. He worked thirty years so he could end up on that bank on his own time.

On August 22, 2025, the Smitty’s Supply plant in Roseland exploded.

Millions of gallons of oil poured into the river. The fire burned for two weeks. EPA contractors were still washing petrochemicals off the banks in Amite six weeks later. The state sat on lab reports for months. When released, they showed 24 different forever chemicals in the discharge. Arsenic. Lead. Chromium. Barium.

Before the explosion, Smitty’s Supply had violated its discharge limits 230 times. Seven chemical spills. Over $161,000 in fines.

The plant kept its permit until the day it exploded.

Three days later, the EPA and Louisiana’s own agencies issued a joint statement: no imminent threat to public health. Some of that sampling was done by a contractor hired by Smitty’s Supply.

James’s river is still contaminated. Nobody has been held accountable.

Jeff Landry took office and got to work.

He went to war with the cities. New Orleans was already broke. His answer wasn’t collaboration — it was criminalization. He pushed through a law making it a crime to sleep outside. Can’t pay the fine? Unpaid labor until the debt is cleared.

Then his allies on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana Republicans moved immediately. They eliminated a majority-Black congressional district and threw out 40,000 votes that had already been cast.

Meanwhile, the deals were getting made. Amazon. Meta. Billions of dollars were announced at press conferences with confetti cannons, while the elected officials who knew about them had all signed nondisclosure agreements. You found out when Landry shot off the cannon. Then your electric bill went up. Then the carbon capture pipelines started showing up in the river parishes — private companies seizing the land beneath people’s feet, calling it green energy.

One thing after another. Landing on people.

Farmers are watching their markets collapse. Ratepayers are watching their bills climb. Communities are watching their representation disappear. Landowners are getting lawyers’ letters about property their families have held for generations.

People across the state are slowly reading the same story and arriving at the same conclusion.

This isn’t what they were promised.

What I know is this: six months ago, this race was not supposed to be real. Tonight it is real.

Whatever the final number, the work that was done here does not disappear. We are building the infrastructure of the next fight. We are telling everyone who participated that this state is not lost.

That’s the thing about organizing. It changes the organizers and the community. Then the change catches up.

I’ll be at the CAC tonight at eight at 900 Camp Street. Come if you can.

If you’re watching from somewhere else..

Get involved. Be part of the solution.

Be a part of sending a farmer to Washington.

What I know is this: six months ago, this race was not supposed to be real. Tonight it is real.

Whatever the final number, the work that was done here does not disappear. We are building the infrastructure of the next fight. We are telling everyone who participated that this state is not lost.

That’s the thing about organizing. It changes the organizers and the community. Then the change catches up.

I’ll be at the CAC tonight at eight at 900 Camp Street. Come if you can.

If you’re watching from somewhere else..

Get involved. Be part of the solution.

Be a part of sending a farmer to Washington.