MAGA Granny

For the first time in my memory, a MAGAt has seen the light and escaped from the cult. When "MAGA Granny" was given a pardon by Trump, she didn't want it, and for a very good reason....

Trump Pardoned Her for Storming the Capitol. 'Absolutely No,' She Said.

Pamela Hemphill, 71, of Boise, Idaho, who served 60 days in prison, said it would be “an insult to the Capitol Police” if she accepted the pardon.

Pam Hemphill was sentenced to 60 days in prison and three years of probation for her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.Credit...Matt Kelley/Associated Press

by Michael Levenson

Jan 22, 2025

Many of those convicted of storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have celebrated the pardons or commutations that they received this week from President Trump.

Not Pamela Hemphill. A retired drug and alcohol counselor who lives in Boise, Idaho, she pleaded guilty in January 2022 to a misdemeanor offense for entering the Capitol during the riot and was sentenced to 60 days in prison and three years of probation.

She said she did not want a pardon.

“Absolutely not,” Ms. Hemphill said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s an insult to the Capitol Police, to the rule of law and to the nation. If I accept a pardon, I’m continuing their propaganda, their gaslighting and all their falsehoods they’re putting out there about Jan. 6.”

Ms. Hemphill, 71, who was called “MAGA Granny” in some news headlines, has said that she no longer supports Mr. Trump or believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She said that a therapist had helped change her view of the attack by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”

“I lost my critical thinking,” she said on Wednesday, reflecting on her involvement in the riot and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Now I know it was a cult, and I was in a cult.”

Her wish to reject the pardon was previously reported by The Idaho Statesman. Ms. Hemphill said she had spoken with a lawyer about spurning the grant of clemency but had not taken any legal action to do so.

It is not clear that she can legally reject the pardon.

“It would be a novel act to file a court case to reject a pardon of a misdemeanor, in part because of the low stakes,” Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, said in an interview.

There is some legal precedent, however, suggesting that any such request could face an uphill battle.

In December, two federal prisoners whose death sentences were commuted last year by President Biden asked a judge to block the reduction in their sentences, arguing that it could jeopardize their appeals. Judge James R. Sweeney II of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana dismissed the prisoners’ requests last week, ruling that the prisoners could not reject their commutations, even if they did not ask for them or want them.

Judge Sweeney pointed to a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found that a prisoner who had been sentenced to death could not reject a commutation from President William Howard Taft. (Taft, by then the chief justice, did not take part in the case.)

The prisoner argued that the commutation had been issued without his consent. But Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that the president did not need the prisoner’s consent for the commutation to take effect.

“Just as the original punishment would be imposed without regard to the prisoner’s consent and in the teeth of his will, whether he liked it or not, the public welfare, not his consent, determines what shall be done,” Holmes wrote.

Judge Sweeney wrote that the decision, although nearly a century old, “remains good law.”

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WSJ

Oh, NOW the Wall Street Journal wants us to think that they are shocked, just SHOCKED at Trump's pardon of all of the J6 attackers. In the headline, they ask "Law and order? Back the blue? What happened to that GOP?"

Donald J. Trump happened to that GOP, you assholes. You know it, and you at the Wall Street Journal helped him along. You cannot now act like you are shocked that Trump pardoned every attacker. The WSJ media is just as rotten as most of the other "mainstream" media. They were all so afraid to call Trump out when they had the chance. They sane-washed Trump as much as anyone. And why not? After all, News Corp now owns the paper. Rupert Murdoch, anyone? It may be that the Editorial Board still exercises a wee bit of independence from the slimy clutches of Murdoch, but the paper as a whole falls in line. 

So, now, if and when people get murdered at the hands of these hardened criminals who Trump set free, it is on your heads, Wall Street Journal, as much as anyone's.

Trump Pardons the Jan. 6 Cop Beaters

Law and order? Back the blue? What happened to that GOP?

By 

The Editorial Board

Jan. 21, 2025 at 6:21 pm ET

Republicans are busy denouncing President Biden’s pre-emptive pardons for his family and political allies, and deservedly so. But then it’s a shame you don’t hear many, if any, ruing President Trump’s proclamation to pardon unconditionally nearly all of the people who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This includes those convicted of bludgeoning, chemical spraying, and electroshocking police to try to keep Mr. Trump in power. Now he’s springing them from prison.

This is a rotten message from a President about political violence done on his behalf, and it’s a bait and switch. Asked about Jan. 6 pardons in late November, Mr. Trump projected caution. “I’m going to do case-by-case, and if they were nonviolent, I think they’ve been greatly punished,” he said. “We’re going to look at each individual case.”

Taking cues from the boss, last week Vice President JD Vance drew a clear line: “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

So much for that. The President’s clemency proclamation commutes prison sentences to time served for 14 named people, including prominent leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who were organized and ready for violence. Then Mr. Trump tries to wipe Jan. 6 clean, with “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals.” The conceit is that there are hundreds of polite Trump supporters who ended up in the wrong place that day and have since rotted in jail.

Out of roughly 1,600 cases filed by the feds, more than a third included accusations of “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement.” The U.S. Attorney’s office said it declined “hundreds” of prosecutions against people whose only offense was entering restricted grounds near the Capitol. Of the 1,100 sentences handed down by this year, more than a third didn’t involve prison time. The rioters who did get jail often were charged with brutal violence, including:

• Daniel Joseph “DJ” Rodriguez, sentenced to 151 months, who can be seen on video, federal prosecutors said, deploying an “electroshock weapon” against a policeman who was dragged out of the defensive line, by “plunging it into the officer’s neck.” The night before, he promised in a MAGA chat group: “There will be blood.”

• William Lewis, given 37 months, “sprayed streams of Wasp and Hornet Killer spray at multiple police officers on four distinct occasions,” forcing several to flee the line and “seek treatment for their eyes.”

• Isreal James Easterday, 30 months, blasted a cop “in the face with pepper spray at point-blank range,” after which the officer “collapsed and temporarily lost consciousness, which enabled another rioter to steal his baton.”

• Thomas Andrew Casselman, 40 months, hit multiple officers “near their faces” with pepper spray. His later internet searches included, “The statute of limitations for assault on a police officer.”

• Curtis Davis, 24 months, punched two police officers in the head. That night he filmed a video of his fist, in which he bragged: “Them knuckles right there, from one of those m— faces at the Capitol.”

• Ronald Colton McAbee, 70 months, hit a cop while wearing “reinforced brass knuckle gloves,” and he held one down on the ground as “other rioters assailed the officer for over 20 seconds,” causing a concussion.

• Michael Joseph Foy, 40 months, brought a hockey stick with a TRUMP 2020 flag attached, which he swung “over his head and downward at police officers as if he were chopping wood.”

There are more like this, which everyone understood on Jan. 6 and shortly afterward. “There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill,” one GOP official tweeted. “This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.” That was Marco Rubio, now Mr. Trump’s Secretary of State. He was right. What happened that day is a stain on Mr. Trump’s legacy. By setting free the cop beaters, the President adds another.

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Mother Jones

Mother Jones is one of the few independent, indispensable journalistic voices that we have to support. I may not agree with every single thing that they produce, but their voice is going to be even more essential going forward into the Trump fog.

Trump's pardoning of the J6 attackers is way beyond the norm. Even public opinion was 70/30 against pardoning these thugs. Many of them assaulted police officers with baseball bats, clubs, even American flags. All in the name of a LIE. Is this what we should expect from the party of "Law and Order?" Pardoning violent criminals? It does not matter that they believed Trump when he lied that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Ignorance is no excuse. Anyone with a functioning brain, even a partisan, could see that Trump was lying. This absurd act on Day 1 of Trump's presidency must NEVER be forgotten, and any and every Republican should be grilled about it, CONSTANTLY.

Trump Frees Violent January 6 Attackers

Granted impunity for his own conduct, Trump extends it to the rioters.

• 

  DAN FRIEDMAN

  Senior ReporterBio | Follow

President Donald Trump on Monday granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people who joined in the January 6 attack on Congress that he himself caused.

Hours after returning to office, Trump announced he was giving “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to nearly all “individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Trump also announced commutations of prison sentences for the handful of January 6 convicts not given full pardons—14 top members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia and Proud Boys—freeing them from lengthy prison sentences.

These actions mean that Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader who was sentenced to 18 years in prison following his conviction for seditious conspiracy and other crimes for planning violence on January 6, is a free man. 

Trump also freed Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader who was serving a 22-year sentence following his conviction for seditious conspiracy and other crimes for his role in planning the violence on January 6.

Tarrio was the “the ultimate leader, the ultimate person who organized, who was motivated by revolutionary zeal,” US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said in sentencing Tarrio in 2023 after applying an enhancement for terrorism.

Trump himself faced felony charges for allegedly conspiring to use a fake elector scheme as a means to remain in power in 2021. His election victory in November caused special counsel Jack Smith to drop that case to comply with a Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

In pardoning or commuting the sentences of his insurrectionist supporters, Trump has used his newly restored power to extend to his followers the impunity the presidency gives to him. More broadly, Trump is using the clemency authority to try to erase the stain of his botched self-coup attempt as he continues to insist that he actually won in 2020.

In informal, rambling remarks that followed his mostly scripted inaugural speech Wednesday, Trump picked up where he left off four years ago. He called the 2020 election “totally rigged,” claimed the January 6 attack was largely nonviolent, and called the people prosecuted for their role in it “patriots” and “hostages.”

That language signaled that Trump’s clemency grants, more than just a legal effort, are part of a renewed campaign to force government institutions and the American public to accept his false and self-serving version of reality.

Trump’s sweeping actions Monday seemed to be a rejection of suggestions by advisers that he deny clemency to rioters who were convicted of violent acts and that he consider clemency applications on a case-by-case basis.

The pardons came after an inaugural speech in which Trump promised to restore “law and order” in American cities. 

Earlier on Monday, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to public figures who Trump has threatened to use the Justice Department to target. These included former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci and members and staffers of the House January 6 committee, as well as Washington, DC, and Capitol police officers who testified before the committee about the attack. Minutes before leaving office, Biden also issued pardons for members of his family: his brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and their respective spouses. Those pardons follow Biden’s widely criticized pardon last month of his son Hunter, who was convicted last year of lying about his drug use and, through a guilty plea, of tax evasion.

“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement released Monday while Trump’s inauguration ceremony was underway. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”

Trump—who, during his first term, engaged in a historically unprecedented effort to use his pardon power to reward supporters and to undermine investigations into his own alleged crimes—had the chutzpah to crticize Biden’s pardons on Monday.

Taylor Budowich, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff, tweeted that Biden’s pardons “will go down as the greatest attack on America’s justice system in history.” (Budowich personally earned nearly $20,000 from helping to organize protest activity on January 6, I reported last year.)

Trump seemed especially irked that Biden’s pardons covered the two Republican lawmakers who served on the January 6 committee, both of whom he described as tearful. Former Rep. Liz Cheney is a “crying lunatic,” Trump said, adding that former Rep. Adam Kinzinger “is always crying.”

Trump repeated a false claim that the January 6 committee had destroyed evidence gather in its investigation. The committee’s final report, transcripts of hundreds of depositions and other investigative material remain available online—a reminder that Trump, for all his powers, cannot erase the history of January 6. His clemency actions, in fact, deepen his connection to that event.

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Charlie Sykes

Charlie Sykes is another Republican who opposes Donald Trump. They are a small but influential number. We cannot turn away allies like Charlie, Steve Schmidt, Tim Miller, and Rick Wilson just because they were once, and maybe still are, Republicans. At least they have the good sense to reject Donald Trump, unlike most of the Republican Party that marches in goose-step to every Trump utterance. It's still so odd and rather shocking to me that a once-Grand Old Party is now a malevolent, pernicious cult that seems to have no problem with lying fascists. The item below is from Charlie Sykes Substack writing. 

The Senate defines deviancy down

by Charlie Sykes

January 16, 2025

In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his essay, “Defining Deviancy Down” in which he described how society was lowering the standards of acceptable behavior as a response to the increase of deviant behavior in society. Things that were once considered abnormal or immoral, he wrote, were being redefined as “normal” or “acceptable” as society began to adjust its standards so that it could tolerate the previously intolerable. 

Moynihan was largely concerned with social breakdowns — the rise of out-of -wedlock births, and criminal and other anti-social behaviors. But if Moynihan were amongst us now, I suspect he would be gobsmacked at the degree we have also normalized deviancy in our politics, including in the august body in which he once served.

**

You will have to take my word for it, but at one time, the U.S. Senate was a serious place.

In March 1989, the U.S. Senate voted 53 to 47 to reject the nomination of John Tower, President George H.W. Bush’s pick for Secretary of Defense.

Tower’s rejection was remarkable on a number of levels: He was former senior member of the Senate — the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction — and a former chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee. No presidential cabinet pick had been voted down in 30 years.

But there were problems. “Concerns about Tower’s personal life played a major role. He was accused of being a drunk and a womanizer.”

“Have I ever drunk to excess? Yes,” he said. “Am I alcohol-dependent? No. Have I always been a good boy? Of course not. But I’ve never done anything disqualifying. That’s the point.”

His former colleagues disagreed. (Bush’s next nominee— Dick Cheney — was confirmed easily.)

**

Fast forward to this week’s absurd hearings for absurd nominees.

After hours of denials, evasions, fumbles, and cliches, we are told that the deeply absurd Pete Hegseth — a man who makes John Tower’s transgressions seem quaint by comparison —emerged “largely unscathed”from his Senate confirmation hearing. His confirmation as the nation’s Secretary of Defense — which just weeks ago seemed improbable — now seems likely.

Hegseth’s hearing was followed by the hearing for AG-designate Pam Bondi, who alone would define the unseriousness of this moment, except in comparison with the egregious Matt Gaetz. 

Thus, the world’s greatest deliberative body defined deviancy down with barely a whimper. 

“What America and the world saw today,” wrote Tom Nichols in the Atlantic, “was not a serious examination of a serious man. Instead, Republicans on the committee showed that they would rather elevate an unqualified and unfitnominee to a position of immense responsibility than cross Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the most ardent Republican voters in their home states. America’s allies should be deeply concerned; America’s enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune….”

How dumbed down was the senate’s charade?

“The words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up today,” notes Lawfare’s Ben Wittes. “The words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed.

“By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’ came up repeatedly.…”

Hegseth was neither an outlier nor an aberration. One of the central tenets of Trumpism, writes Wittes, is “the contempt for expertise and traditional qualifications; the insistence that the only real qualification is authenticity—and that authenticity is somehow wrapped up in performative masculinity; the belief that sounding tough and being tough are the same thing; and the conviction that complexity necessarily reduces to weakness.”

It’s all right there in the nomination of a proudly unqualified individual who frames his lack of qualifications as qualification of a different, more authentic, variety that reflects what he calls a “warrior ethos” America has somehow lost in its infatuation with equity. And this idea has the apparently silent assent of all of the Republican members of the committee and a few, at least, enthusiastic takers.

…This is the philosophical core of the Trump era. And it is interesting to watch it migrating from Trump himself down to his cabinet. In the first term, after all, Trump’s defense secretaries and cabinet officers were, generally speaking, well qualified in the traditional sense of qualifications. The cult of unqualified authenticity was then mostly confined to Trump himself. But in the Hegseth hearing, you can see it trickling downward.

Meanwhile, it’s not immediately self-evident that Trump’s picks for sensitive positions are wildly popular amongst the electorate. “Few think Trump's FBI and Justice Department will act fairly: AP-NORC poll.”

The poll finds that only about 2 in 10 Americans approve of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense… A similarly small share say they “somewhat” or “strongly” approve of Tulsi Gabbard being tapped to serve as intelligence chief and Patel being selected as FBI director. About one-third of Americans disapprove of each of the picks, while the rest either don’t have an opinion or don’t know enough to say.

**

And yet the redefining of deviancy continues apace — by both the GOP and what used to be the mainstream media. Consider the contribution of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, which issued a mass endorsement of nearly every Trump cabinet-level nominee all of whom, according to the Post, are free of “disqualifying deficiencies in competence, temperament or philosophy.”

Jamison Foser offers a list of the worst of the Washington Post’s endorsements — starting with its thumbs up for Pam Bondi (FFS).

On November 22, 2024 the Washington Post editorial board wrote of the relationship between Donald Trump and Pam Bondi:

Mr. Trump’s charity contributed $25,000 to a political group backing Ms. Bondi in 2013, around the time she decided not to pursue fraud complaints against Mr. Trump’s for-profit seminar business, Trump University. Both Mr. Trump and Ms. Bondi denied wrongdoing. […]

More important than any of that, however, is her view about the proper role of the Justice Department. Mr. Trump has been explicit that he doesn’t value or respect the traditional independence of the federal government’s law enforcement function. He soured on both his attorneys general during his first term when they showed independence […]

In contrast, Ms. Bondi led chants of “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton in 2016 and parroted false claims about fraud on television in 2020. She was one of his impeachment defense attorneys and has led the legal arm of the Trump-tied America First Policy Institute.”

Seems bad!

Last month, the news side of The Washington Post published a lengthy report about Bondi’s “baseless claims about election fraud” in 2020, noting “Pennsylvania officials from both parties say there were consequences to her actions, arguing that Bondi spread misinformation that helped wreak long-lasting damage to the electoral system.”

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Biden farewell

Joe Biden gave a farewell address from the Oval Office tonight. So sad that there is such hyper-partisanship running rampant in this country. Just read thru some comments. The blindness of some people is just sad. 

lithium plant

The story below was posted in MiningWeekly.com.  It really chaps my ass that Musk is poisoning another area in Texas, while sucking out about all the freshwater in the area.  His lithium plant near Corpus Christi will need up to 8 MILLION gallons of water per day. That area has been in a bad drought for a long time now. The two lakes in the area are very low on water: Lake Corpus Christi is at 25% of capacity and Choke Canyon Reservoir is at 16%. But you know how it goes: The billionaires get what the billionaires want, especially when there are Republicans in charge. No wonder he left California.

And then we have Boca Chica in deep South Texas, where Musk has built up his "Starbase." Another unincorporated area. The two reservoirs that supply the Rio Grande Vally (RGV) are also very low because of a long-running drought. Falcon Lake is at 14% capacity and Lake Amistad is around 26%. This area is still in a Stage 2 Water Restriction, and we're close to going to Stage 3.

Early on, Musk didn't even plan on a fire trench or water system for his rockets, and one of them really chewed up his launch pad. Having a fire trench and water deluge system is practically a requirement for rocket launches, but I guess Musk didn't think those rules applied to him and his "new thinking." Until a rocket without a trench or water deluge system totally destroyed the launch pad. Reluctantly, he added a water deluge system. However, he now uses up to 150,000 gallons of freshwater for every launch. And the "static fires" where he tests the engines without launching, uses up another 75,000 gallons. And he wants to launch 25 times per year from Boca, and no doubt each launch will be preceeded by a static fire or two. You do the math. Ok, I will. 25 launches will use around 3.75 MILLION gallons of scarce freshwater. Add in 50 static fires, using 75,000 gallons each, and you have another 3.75 MILLION gallons of water. Total? 7.5 MILLION gallons of freshwater. If Musk is such a genius, why can't he figure out how to use saltwater instead? There are BILLIONS of gallons of saltwater available. 

Musk’s massive Tesla lithium plant hunts for water in drought-hit Texas

8th January 2025

By: Bloomberg

Twenty miles outside Corpus Christi, Texas — an area so dry the local water company distributes shower timers at high school football games — the world’s richest man is nearly done building a lithium refinery that could require as much as eight-million gallons of water per day.

In a rare public update on the $1-billion project, Tesla in December said it was starting to test the ability to process lithium through the new factory. But the carmaker still doesn't have a contract for the water needed to operate the facility, presenting a hurdle for CEO Elon Musk’s goal of turning lithium into chemical products used to make electric vehicle batteries.

The factory, where Tesla aspires to start production this year, is part of a broader effort by Musk to ease bottlenecks and build a more robust domestic supply chain of the critical raw material. It has also set off alarm bells among some in the small Texas town who are worried about having enough water to live on, let alone help supply a big factory.

In 2022, Tesla estimated it would need 400,000 gallons per day to run the lithium plant, rising to 800 000 gallons per day at peak usage. Two years later, a Tesla employee told a consulting firm, Raftelis, that the forecast has spiked to as high as eight-million gallons per day, according to South Texas Water Authority records obtained by Bloomberg News through a public records request.

South Texas Water Authority controls the water but doesn’t sell it directly to Tesla, which is negotiating a water contract with Nueces Water Supply, a water utility company. Nueces Water Supply didn’t respond to requests for comment. South Texas Water Authority didn’t provide a comment for this story.

It’s difficult to determine what kind of drain Tesla’s factory would have on the area’s water supply. But the average American family uses about 300 gallons of water per day or 109 500 gallons per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

For Robstown, which had 3 804 households as of 2023, that would equate to about 1.1-million gallons a day. At the high-end estimate of 8 million gallons per day, Tesla would be using eight times Robstown’s average residential water use. That’s enough water to fill eight ten-foot-deep swimming pools that are nearly the size of a football field, according to the US Geological Survey.

DROUGHT LEVELS

It’s always been dry in this hot corner of South Texas best known for its beaches and energy exports — but there’s even less water to go around today than when Tesla first broke ground in May 2023. The area’s drought status was just upgraded to stage 3 — urgent — meaning turning off non-essential water use across facilities and parks and adding new restrictions on washing cars, watering lawns and operating decorative fountains.

“They’re telling us to take shorter showers and turn the faucet off when we’re brushing our teeth,” said Marie Lucio, a resident of the nearby Lost Creek neighborhood. The area already has frequent problems with water quality, including low pressure and a milky-like tint, and she’s worried the area’s aging water pipes won’t be able to keep up with new demand like the Tesla factory. “We’re not equipped to handle getting water to these industries.”

About a year into construction, Tesla’s plant manager Jason Bevan told a county judge that the company had “struggled to advance the discussion” on water agreements, an email obtained by Bloomberg News shows. “I’m at a stage now where we need to escalate the urgency around getting this agreement complete,” he wrote at the time. Tesla didn’t reply to a request for further comment.

Even without a water agreement, Tesla has plowed ahead. In true Musk fashion, the billionaire has pushed forward with building other infrastructure and held an event last month showcasing the plant for the community.

Musk is known for pushing back against regulations, often saying they slow projects down. And he now has a new political ally in President-elect Donald Trump, who has joined the Tesla CEO in railing against government regulation. Trump recently proclaimed that any person or company investing a billion dollars in a US project should receive expedited approvals and permits. Musk reposted the idea with an American flag emoji, a rocket ship emoji and three words: “This is awesome.”

One way he’s been able to expedite projects has been to build factories in Texas’ city buffer zones or unincorporated areas that have fewer rules and government oversight compared with bigger cities.

Musk’s Robstown site fits the bill. The factory sits on former farmland in an unincorporated portion of Nueces County in South Texas. The area is industrializing, with the Port of Corpus Christi and other companies buying up space in the area and driving up water needs.

Even at the lowest estimated demand, Tesla’s water needs are raising concerns for local residents. “It’s just upsetting that we still give water contracts out when we’re in such dire straits,” said Myra Alaniz, a Nueces County resident who lives just outside of Robstown.

Despite the complaints, local officials have made little public pushback.

The facility is expected to bring around 250 permanent jobs, with average salaries around $80 000 in an area where the average income is less than half that. To spur investment, county commissioners in 2022 voted to make the site a tax increment reinvestment zone, a designated area that bookmarks a portion of property taxes for redevelopment. The same year, the Robstown Independent School District passed its own tax abatement extension.

In December, South Texas Water Authority passed an infrastructure deal that will allow Nueces Water Supply to sell rights to the pipe Tesla will need to obtain water, which was one of the hold-ups for a water deal. In a meeting last month, Nueces Water Supply’s board authorized management to “take any and all actions necessary or convenient” to reach an agreement to provide Tesla with the water it needs.

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