Three stories this morning. DOGE fired the entire State Department team that was supposed to handle a Strait of Hormuz crisis – and then the Strait of Hormuz closed. The SAVE Act is a voter suppression bill dressed up as election security, and the numbers prove it. And Nvidia announced it’s putting AI data centers in orbit, which is exactly as dystopian as it sounds.
They Fired the War-Gamers. Then the War Started.
DOGE fired the entire State Department team whose job was to manage oil and gas relationships in the Middle East. The people who modeled “what happens if the Strait of Hormuz closes,” who tracked sanctioned tankers, who were the U.S. liaison to the International Energy Agency – all gone. July 2025.
Six months later, Iran shut down the strait. Tanker traffic dropped 70%. The IEA released 400 million barrels from global reserves – the most ever – and the State Department’s liaison to that organization was fired eight months ago. Oil company executives are being told to “hire some MAGA lobbyists” if they want to reach someone in government.
Read the full story ->The Fly They Want to Swat
The SAVE Act requires proof of citizenship to register to vote. Sounds reasonable until you look at the actual numbers. Utah audited all 2.1 million voters on its rolls and found one noncitizen. Arizona flagged 0.001%. The Heritage Foundation’s own database found 85 total noncitizen voting cases since 2002 – out of over a billion ballots cast.
Trump said the quiet part out loud: if SAVE passes, Republicans “would never lose a race. For 50 years.” The bill would knock an estimated 21 million eligible U.S. citizens off the rolls – disproportionately people who are already the hardest to register.
Read the full story ->Space, the Final Server Room
Nvidia announced it’s building AI data centers in orbit. Jensen Huang unveiled the Vera Rubin Space-1 Module at GTC – a chip system designed to run AI from low Earth orbit. The pitch is about cooling efficiency and escaping terrestrial power constraints. The reality is that orbital infrastructure sits outside every country’s legal jurisdiction.
No labor laws. No environmental regulations. No subpoenas. If you wanted to build computing infrastructure that no government could meaningfully regulate, putting it in space is exactly how you’d do it.
Read the full story ->All three stories and the full archive are on rachelandthecity. The Suspects page tracks the people. The Connections page maps how they’re linked.
// Go Deeper on rachelandthecity
