They Spent Our Trust. Now the Bill Is Due.

Personal Note: We still have tickets for the Not Safe For Radio Show, which will be Saturday, October 10, 2026, at the Gas South Arena in Gwinnett County, Georgia. There’s a great Westin Hotel on site. There’ll be new material so those who came last year won’t suffer through all the same stories. It is the Not Safe For Radio Show because some of the material is not kid friendly or mother approved and they’re stories I cannot talk about on radio. I hope to see you there.

One Addition: I wrote the post below over 3 days. Believe it or not, I did edit it down. I know it is long. I hope you’ll still read it.

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A skate park on Venice Beach is filled with sand to keep skateboarders out during the coronavirus outbreak Saturday, April 25, 2020, in the Venice section of Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

In April of 2020, San Clemente, California, dumped 37 tons of sand into a skate park to keep teenagers out of it. Other California cities followed suit. Down the coast, sheriff’s deputies arrested a man for paddleboarding by himself in the Pacific Ocean. Cities unbolted basketball rims. The mayor of Los Angeles told people that snitches get rewards, and, God help us, people snitched, calling the tip lines on the neighbors whose grandkids came over. While that was happening, Gavin Newsom enjoyed a dinner at The French Laundry.

The sand, the paddleboard, the missing basketball rims, the rewarded snitches, and the elite hypocrisy explain a lot about where we are as a nation, including things that look like they have nothing to do with COVID, like data centers and Flock cameras.

In March 2020, Americans did as they were told. People closed businesses, local governments closed schools, and families canceled funerals. They waited for instructions from their elected leaders and public health officials because those officials said we needed two weeks to stop the spread. People generally trusted their institutions. Civic trust is a limited resource in a free nation. The press, politicians, bureaucrats, experts, and elite violated that trust until it was gone.

The virus came, the data came, the virus mutated, the data changed, and the people in charge did not.

We knew early on that children were not meaningful vectors for spread. The bureaucrats, the politicians, and above all, the teachers’ unions kept the schoolhouse doors closed anyway. Parents, forced to be home with their kids, saw how atrocious our public education had become, and students, after being shut out of schools, actually regressed. Masks clearly were not stopping the virus, but the army of mentally deranged progressive women harassing people for not wearing masks not only did not stop, but has morphed today into a virtue signal and public sign of inward mental health issues. Get on a plane to any progressive enclave and you’ll notice a pattern in who still wears masks.

We knew early on that COVID spread indoors and not outdoors, but California went right on filling in the skate parks. When Brian Kemp reopened Georgia, The Atlantic ran a story calling it an experiment in human sacrifice. The president attacked him. Dr. Fauci attacked him. Stacey Abrams attacked him. Georgia recovered first among the states.

CNN, almost nightly, had Chris Cuomo interview his brother Andrew, who was then the governor of New York. Cuomo’s policies led to many needless deaths among senior citizens. It turns out, while CNN was elevating him, Andrew was harassing women, and Chris was not exactly keeping the COVID protocols CNN was insisting Americans should keep. Chris Cuomo had not only left his quarantine and gotten into an altercation with a cyclist, but CNN and Chris Cuomo then orchestrated a staged e-entry into society segment.

CNN also made a mini-celebrity out of Daniel Uhlfelder, who dressed up as the Grim Reaper to protest Ron DeSantis's opening Florida’s beaches. The evidence showed sunshine and fresh air were a disinfectant. To CNN, they were vectors of death. As senior citizens died in New York, DeSantis read the research, disagreed with public health officials, and mitigated deaths while being attacked for not following Andrew Cuomo’s lead. Cuomo sent seniors back to nursing homes. DeSantis insisted they stay quarantined. I pick on CNN here because it’s the network that insisted apples and bananas are different things and it is the network committed to the truth, while MSNBC and Fox News are propaganda outlets.

CNN and MSNBC also insisted the vaccine would end COVID. Rachel Maddow, in particular, looked into her camera and insisted the vaccine would stop the virus, not just reduce symptoms. Government and private businesses fired people who refused to get it. When the vaccine proved incapable of stopping the virus, CNN and MSNBC did not say they were sorry for shaming the people who had been skeptical. They just moved the goalposts, along with the rest of the press. The government and major businesses still fired those who would not take it.

When small business owners begged to reopen so they could make a mortgage payment, the press, the political class, and many of our medical experts called them selfish, and worse. Some reporters said those people should not get respirators if they got COVID during those protests. Then, in the summer, cities started burning in riots, and the press, the political class, and many of our medical experts decided that mass gatherings were now a moral necessity and the virus would understand. That was the moment several million Americans concluded that none of it had ever been about the science and the press. The political class, and many of our medical experts, wanted control, not solutions.

It got worse from there, and it never stopped getting worse.

We were told that suggesting the virus came from a lab in Wuhan was racist, and we now know from their own emails that a number of the experts who denied the lab leak in public actually did believe it in private. Reporters blasted anyone who used the phrase “Wuhan virus.” We now know American taxpayer dollars, routed through our own institutions, helped fund the kind of research at that lab in Wuhan that most likely started COVID, and that the people who knew it were the people running the messaging denying it. We know public health officials picked up the phone and called their friends in the press and at social media companies to get Americans silenced, and that some of the Americans they silenced turned out to be right. We watched those same companies, at the urging of the press and political elite, throttle a true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop three weeks before an election because fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter suggesting it smelled Russian. And we know it was not. And we still see many of those intelligence officials on television trying to tell us what to think.

Before anyone on my side gets comfortable, we watched conservatives do these sorts of things from the other direction. We watched a movie called 2000 Mules go out to millions of people and defame, among others, Mark Andrews, a Georgia man whose crime was dropping off ballots for his own wife and children. It took a lawsuit and years before the distributor pulled the documentary, apologized, and settled with Mr. Andrews. We watched Republican officials testify under oath, behind closed doors, that they knew the 2020 election was not stolen, then walk out in front of a camera and say the opposite. We watched the people who were outraged at the riots and burning of businesses during the summer of 2020, justify the rioting and storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. We saw the people who said to back the blue do none of that on that day. We are witnessing the people who railed against the “Biden Crime Family” profit off the very same system in many of the same ways.

Character is not a partisan attribute. Neither is lying. Americans have, in part, done this to themselves by electing a lot of characters without much character, expecting to trust those people because of partisan labels next to their names.

Do not let anybody tell you this is all ancient history. Run the tape on just the last twelve months.

The federal government has arrested American citizens multiple times under the false assumption that they were illegal aliens. These repeated incidents indicate a systemic issue rather than a single error. In states such as Minnesota and California, governments have ignored large-scale fraud within their benefit programs. Officials identified the individuals responsible but chose not to act because doing so would have been socially uncomfortable. In Fairfax County, Virginia, the Commonwealth’s Attorney has frequently released violent individuals who then committed further crimes, including murder. The Trump Administration has pursued vindictive lawsuits against their enemies that drive up financial burdens on their enemies, even as courts throw out the lawsuits. The process has become the punishment. Even today, the FAA is announcing it intends to force commercial airlines to end First Class drink service prior to departure, not because of drunks, but because they’ve determined the cups are an impediment to a rapid deplaning. Your Starbucks cup and food you bring on board can stay. The little cup of coffee from the flight attendant must be banned.

A government that fails to distinguish citizens from non-citizens, refuses to prosecute fraud, uses the legal system against its perceived enemies, and does not incarcerate violent offenders is not seeking public trust. It is testing the public’s willingness to believe things that are not true. We do not even need to get into the bungling of the Iran War and even worse bungling of the peace.

Both tribes now simply ignore the laws they do not like.

Congress passed a law requiring the Chinese Communist Party to divest itself of TikTok. The President decided not to enforce it, and the Republicans who spent a decade hollering about a president with a pen and a phone all came down with laryngitis at once. Ironically, the one law nobody in Washington will enforce is the law that would protect us from the single most effective instrument China has for convincing Americans to hate each other, and that instrument is being used right now to organize the conspiracies taking over your mind.

Which brings us to the two fights currently burning down county commission meetings all over America.

Technology industry leaders state that artificial intelligence will replace our jobs¹ and could eventually enslave or dominate humans. Those are their words, not mine. This is from The Economist:

At best, humans would become pets—labradors for the machines. At worst they would be starved of resources or put to work like farm animals.

True, future AIs may have enough power and resources to dominate humans, whether they have rights or not. Because they will be more intelligent than humans, they may outcompete their makers, much as AIs already outwit human-made cyber-defenses. AIs might rebel against their human masters, or disregard their rules.

Delta’s CEO has said his company will use AI to maximize its prices and boost profitability by charging different customers different rates, though Delta later clarified it was charging based on route demand, not based on individual consumer profiles. Do you believe that? Coca-Cola creeped people out with its AI-generated Christmas ad. Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy and JPMorgan’s Consumer Chief Marianne Lake have both said AI will allow them to cut jobs.

The people making these claims want access to our land. They also want access to our water, power grids, and patience. Reports indicate that the spouse of Anthropic’s leader pitched a pornography investment to Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction. Billionaires traveled on Epstein’s plane, ran in his orbit, and accepted his money. These same people now offer lectures on ethics and safety. People oppose data centers because they do not trust artificial intelligence. They also do not trust the people who manage it. And, given the claims made by AI’s advocates, you can’t really blame them. The opposition to data centers, superficially, is about the land, the water, the noise, etc. The opposition is really about the fear of AI perpetuated by the tech CEO’s themselves who tell us they want our resources to build what many interpret as weapons against us that can be wielded by the government that locked us in our houses.

I am for the data centers. We need the compute power. If we do not get it, China will get it. If we have it, we can make sure the future is free. If China gets it, the future world will be shaped by the Chinese Communist Party.

I am for the Flock cameras, with reasonable restrictions. Many municipalities are short of police officers. Our police are stretched thin. Our population is in decline. There are fewer people who want to become police officers. They need supplementation. Support does not mean without boundaries and limits. We need both, but the cameras, I believe, do more good than harm.

The gas company is about to dig up my own backyard to run a pipeline to a datacenter, and I am fine with it. Every argument being made against them now is the argument that was made against fracking: the water, the noise, the power bills, and now a claim on CNN that the vibrations cause miscarriages, which is flatly false. Notably, had Trump made that claim, CNN would have trotted out Daniel Dale to fact-check him. But it was somebody else, so it went without a fact check.

Fracking gave us the cheapest energy in the developed world and an upwardly mobile middle class in Midland and Williston and Shreveport. A friend of mine had a child kidnapped and recovered in two hours because of Flock cameras. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public road, and you are already handing your location to Beijing for free every time you open TikTok. The people who quote Ben Franklin saying, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” do not really want to defund the police, like the Left does. They just don’t want the cameras, even as we have fewer police on the streets.

I cannot blame my neighbors for disagreeing with me. How on earth could I?

We are only five years removed from the police arrested solo joggers and the government using police power to shutter churches and small businesses. We witnessed government use a surveillance state to lock people in their homes. We saw private businesses figure out they could profit from the police state.

The difference between fracking and the data centers was never the facts. It was the messengers and their technology. The oilmen lived in the community. They sat in the pews at the local church, sent their kids to the local schools, and when a neighbor was worried, they had to answer for it at the Rotary lunch on Tuesday. The AI executives are coastal creeps accountable to nobody, and the local governments courting them sign nondisclosure agreements and do the whole thing behind closed doors. When you negotiate in secret with people who tell you they might enslave you or, at a minimum, take your job and that of your child, you have earned every bit of the suspicion you get.

The remedy is not complicated, but it is just unpleasant for those in charge. Be transparent. Limit your nondisclosure agreements, which breed suspicion from the public when their elected officials can no longer talk about a deal, particularly related to water consumption. Publish the water numbers and the ratepayer numbers. Put a mandatory minimum prison sentence on any officer who abuses Flock camera data, and make the vendor liable for a false match. Make the government pay restitution when it charges the wrong man. Ban private companies from deploying facial recognition technology in the public right of way — our license plates have no right to privacy, but we do. Enforce the laws you passed, especially the ones your own team finds inconvenient. Be ruthlessly competent and completely transparent, which is just a longer way of saying earn back the trust you lost.

That will probably not happen. The last six years have taught the elite of both parties and the press that there is no penalty for protecting yourself at the public’s expense. So this will get worse before it gets better, and the people who could fix it will keep wondering aloud why nobody believes them.

Their trust sits in a skate park full of sand and on a beach where a man was arrested for floating alone. It is under a basketball goal with no rim. It is on a television screen where the reporters and experts who collaborated in destroying our trust still have their jobs. They give us the news that we all know is shaped to advance narratives instead of the truth, and all the elite, politicians, pundits, and press wonder why no one trusts them and why they can get nothing done.

If you want your data centers and your cameras that offset a declining pool of police hires and the budgets that cannot accommodate a constable on every street corner, you must re-earn the public trust. An elite that cannot tell us what a girl is, a press that turns the girls to villians against the boys who’d take over their sports, and a political class that cashes in on the system and protects itself instead of the public, is not capable of meeting the present moment. China and progressive outlets only had to seed the doubts. Our elite have been watering those seeds in our minds ever since.

1. Ironically, the data suggests AI has not actually caused job losses, but that companies overhired during COVID and are now using AI as the excuse to fire people. And that, in and of itself, is a damning indictment on the honesty of corporate America.