Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching the President of the United States sign an executive order renaming Lake Ontario, because he was angry at Canada, here’s everything else you might have missed. A quarter mile of Yosemite is for sale. Career soldiers are filing to get out over what they’re being ordered to do. A reporter’s phone records, ten thousand calls and texts, taken under a customs law. An autopsy that says the National Guard shot a twenty year old in the back. And a mail ballot rule that flipped three times in five days. Let’s get into it.

Yosemite for Sale

Start with the park, because he spent the week renaming a lake he does not own while his Interior Department worked out how to give away a piece of a park he does.

Anna Kramer at NOTUS reported Friday that for the last year and a half, the administration has been negotiating to hand a quarter mile strip inside Yosemite to a Nevada investment firm called Kingsbarn Realty Capital, which bought eighty three acres outside the park’s western boundary through a shell company they named Sanctuary at Yosemite. Bold thing to call the vehicle you’re using to punch a road through Yosemite.

That’s the whole deal. A road. CEO Jeff Pori wants a private driveway to Highway 120, five miles from one of the park’s ancient sequoia groves. Right now he has to drive an hour and a half around, like a person who chose to develop in the middle of nowhere. The previous owner asked Bush for that same road, then Obama, then sued and lost in 2012, because the court found the property already had legal access. Two presidents and a federal judge said no. It took the Orange Menace to say sure.

Park Service staff told NOTUS that Interior’s leadership is leaning on them. One said, “The political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual.” And Pori had no record of donating to a national campaign in his life until October of 2024, when he started giving to Donald Trump.

Then the lobbyist identified himself. Unprompted. Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton’s old lawyer, told NOTUS, “It wasn’t Donald Trump; it was me, liberal Democrat Lanny Davis, former counsel to President Clinton.” My dude, nobody asked.

Conscientious Objector Requests Skyrocket

Now the one I want you to hear from me, because I wore the uniform.

MS NOW reported this week that applications to leave the military as a conscientious objector are running six times normal, the highest in twenty five years. The Center on Conscience and War usually handles about fifty a year. Since the Iran war started in February, a hundred and forty.

Conscientious objectors are usually kids. Nineteen, twenty, first enlistment, in over their heads. Mike Prysner, who runs the GI Rights Hotline, says the people calling now have a decade in, every rank up through major, some of them academy grads. People with a pension in sight, setting it on fire on purpose.

Five of them talked to Priya Sidhar at MS NOW. One believes they were ordered to bomb civilian bridges. One said, “if the president wants to blow up bridges, the lawyers will find a way to say that it is OK to do it, and nobody anywhere up or down the chain of command ever stops and says no.” Another, on the boat strikes: “there’s at least one innocent person that I feel like I indirectly hurt.”

Eighteen killed, more than seven hundred and fifty wounded, and Prysner says fear of dying is not what’s driving this. They’re afraid of what they’re being made to do. When your senior sergeants start putting that in writing, the problem isn’t morale. It’s the orders.

Homeland Security Uses Customs Law to Seize Journalist’s Phone

Homeland Security spent this week reading a journalist’s phone records under a law written to check whether you paid duty on your cargo.

Georgia Fort is an independent journalist in Minneapolis. In January she covered a protest at a Minneapolis church, and she and former CN