This Week in Tyranny: Yosemite Traded for a Driveway, Soldiers Want Out, Reporter’s Phone Seized

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 SaleStart 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 PhoneHomeland 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 CNN anchor Don Lemon were both charged over it.In February, prosecutors asked a judge for warrants on their YouTube accounts. The judge said no. They asked again. He said no again, told them they hadn’t shown probable cause of any crime, and said he wanted Fort and Lemon informed so they could fight it.So Homeland Security went looking for a law that didn’t involve a judge, and came back with one about cargo. Less than a month later they served Google directly. No judge, no probable cause, no notice. A summons under 19 USC 1509, signed off by a DHS official. And it told Google to keep it secret.Google said no. Told DHS it hadn’t shown what any of this had to do with customs. T-Mobile said yes, and handed over six months of Georgia Fort’s phone records, more than ten thousand calls and text messages. She found out in July, when government lawyers handed the log to her own lawyers, who wrote that they were stunned. T-Mobile will not say why it complied. Are you fecking kidding me. If you’re with T-Mobile, now might be the time to switch carriers.They also served the YouTube accounts of Democracy Now, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and Megyn Kelly. Then they pulled financial records from the Sunrise Movement, two unions, and the Venmo of a nonprofit called Voices for Racial Justice. None of them are charged with anything. John Roth ran the DHS inspector general’s office for three years. “It’s outrageous conduct on so many levels. This is not a customs case; it is not a customs violation.”National Guard Shot Man in the BackOn the fifth of July, around four in the morning in downtown Memphis, two National Guard soldiers on a joint task force shot and killed a twenty year old named Tyrin Johnson.Police said he turned toward them with a gun. The autopsy came back Thursday. The bullet went into the right side of his back. No soot, no stippling, so it wasn’t fired at close range. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide.Lucci Chambless, a family friend who also worked with the family of Tyre Nichols, said the angle makes it impossible that Johnson was turning toward anyone. The family says a bystander recorded it, and that the video shows him running away, an unmarked van pulling up behind him, and soldiers firing almost as soon as they were out of it.Mail-In Ballot Rule Off & On Like Celeb CoupleAnd the mail ballot rule had a week.The mail ballot rule was blocked, unblocked, switched on, and blocked again, all inside five days.Monday the Supreme Court lifted an injunction on procedural grounds, while going out of its way to say it wasn’t ruling on whether any of this is legal. Wednesday Judge Indira Talwani vacated her own nationwide block, and the Postal Service had the rule live so fast you’d think somebody was standing by with a stopwatch. Thursday she blocked it again, finding that complying before November third was practically impossible.And that thirty percent error rate everyone keeps citing is not a Democratic talking point. That’s the Postal Service’s own people, saying up to one ballot in three could go wrong, and that is the argument for doing it. First ballots go out in about a week. And the rule still puts your ballot in the same category as cremated human remains and replica explosives.Speed RoundAn ICE officer named Christian Castro shot a man through a closed door in Minneapolis and lied about it. Texas has spent five months determining whether a man who fled to Texas to avoid charges meets the definition of a fugitive. They have not reached a conclusion. Castro walked out of jail Thursday. Senator Ron Wyden wants a criminal investigation of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior for lying to the Senate about his trip to Samoa during a measles outbreak, in the same week this country recorded its first measles deaths of the year. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the publisher, editor in chief and Middle East reporter of Stars and Stripes for insubordination, the insubordination being a CBS interview five and a half weeks earlier, on the same day the Pentagon put in writing that the paper must stay free from censorship or propaganda. They’re suing. That paper has published since the Civil War.That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.Sources:https://www.notus.org/agencies/trump-administration-yosemite-private-developer-dealhttps://www.rawstory.com/conscientious-objector-iran/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/29/trump-dhs-1509-summons-records-journalists-nonprofitshttps://www.wsmv.com/2026/08/27/autopsy-man-killed-by-national-guard-was-shot-back/https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-again-blocks-trump-mail-ballot-executive-order-in-ruling-thats-likely-to-be-swiftly-appealedhttps://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/26/2026-17238/ballot-mail-for-federal-electionshttps://minnesotareformer.com/2026/08/27/ice-agent-christian-castro-charged-in-minneapolis-shooting-released-from-texas-jail/https://truthout.org/articles/democrat-calls-for-criminal-probe-of-rfk-jr-for-lying-in-confirmation-hearing/https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-27/fired-stripes-employees-lawsuit-pentagon-22676947.html Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe