America’s Fingers-Crossed Strategy for Hurricane Season | The MAGA Internet Calls for War | The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer, and more

So what’s going to happen next? Right now, probably nothing. There is always the possibility of people taking inspiration from online posts and engaging in real-world violence—such as when a conspiracy theory about pedophilia prompted a man to show up with a gun to a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., in 2016, or when a white-supremacist shooter in Buffalo, New York, killed 10 people in 2022. But mass mobilizations are hard and require work. There’s usually a pattern that precedes them. MAGA faithful and the far right did not wake up on January 6, 2021, and decide to storm the Capitol. The foundations for it didn’t even come in the days or weeks beforehand. Instead it was a process that bore out over the course of months. And that process could be tracked, in part, in the ever more heated rhetoric and violent memes that MAGA world spread across the web.

Trump’s Online MAGA Army Calls Guilty Verdict a Declaration of War  (Tess Owen, Wired)
The words “RIP America” trended on X minutes after a jury in Manhattan found former president Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in connection to a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Images of an upside-down American flag—a symbol of distress that became co-opted by the 2020 Stop the Steal movement—flooded social media, as Trump supporters, fringe extremists, right-wing pundits, and politicians voiced their anger.
Ever since the trial began, pro-Trump commentators—and Trump himself—have been priming MAGA online ecosystems to claim foul play if the jury found him guilty. The response to his felony conviction was predictably swift, with many characterizing it as a declaration of “war” from the “deep state.” Incendiary rhetoric about how the guilty verdict was a sign of America’s collapse reverberated from the mainstream right all the way to the fringes.

How 2024 Could Transform American Elections  (Russell Berman, The Artlantic)
The nation’s tiniest legislative chamber has been unusually prolific lately. In its most recent session, Alaska’s Senate overcame years of acrimony and deadlock to pass major bills to increase spending on public schools, combat climate change and a state energy shortage, and strengthen penalties for drug dealers. “The universal feeling,” Cathy Giessel, the senate’s majority leader, told me, “was that this was the most productive two years that we have experienced.”
Giessel, a Republican who first took office in 2010, attributes this success not to her colleagues, exactly, but to how they were chosen. In 2022, Alaska became the first state to experiment with a new kind of election. All candidates—regardless of party—competed against one another in the primary, and the top four vote-getters advanced. In November, the winner was determined by ranked-choice voting, in which people list candidates by order of preference. The system—called Final Four Voting—gave a substantial boost to moderates from both parties. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski won a fourth term, and a centrist Democrat defeated Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, capturing a House seat that Republicans had held for a half century.
But Final Four had an even bigger impact in the state Senate, where Democrats narrowed the GOP’s long-standing majority. Giessel, who had lost in a traditional primary two years earlier, won her seat back. She and seven of her colleagues ditched three far-right GOP lawmakers to form a governing coalition with Democrats. The group decided to set aside divisive social issues such as abortion and gender identity and focus exclusively on areas where they could find common ground.
Final Four isn’t inherently ideological, but it appeals most to voters frustrated with polarization—“normal people who want normal things done,” as Scott Kendall, a former Murkowski aide who led the 2020 campaign to adopt Final Four in Alaska, put it to me.
The ideas that make up Alaska’s system aren’t new. California and Washington State have had nonpartisan primaries for years, and South Dakota voters could approve them in November. Maine has ranked-choice voting for federal elections; Oregon could adopt ranked voting this fall. But Alaska is the first state to combine the two reforms. Final Four backers hope that many more will follow, and they are pouring millions of dollars into ballot initiatives this year to expand it to Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana.
A sweep for Final Four would reshape not only state capitols but also Washington, D.C., where the system would, in the coming years, elect up to 10 of the U.S. Senate’s 100 members. Representing a combination of red and blue states, they could “form a problem-solving fulcrum” to address challenges that typically resist compromise, Katherine Gehl, who devised Final Four Voting and has spent millions of dollars campaigning for it, told me. “You really can see in Congress a difference with as few as 10 senators,” she said, citing comprehensive immigration reform as an example.

America’s Fingers-Crossed Strategy for Hurricane Season  (Juliette Kayyem, The Atlantic)
According to forecasts from a range of sources, the hurricane season that begins today could be the direst in recorded history. Abnormally warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with the persistently strong winds formed by an emerging La Niña weather front, create dangerous conditions that could lead to as many as 25 named storms in the North Atlantic, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Amid the continuing threat of climate change, Americans can easily become inured to alarming projections year after year. Both the potential size of this year’s hurricanes and their expected frequency threaten to overwhelm society’s ability to help those in danger and make whole anyone who suffers losses.
America’s disaster-preparedness system doesn’t consist only of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and state and local first-response agencies; it also involves logistics supply chains, private and public insurers, and the regulators who shape the built environment. But none of these entities has the muscle or the resources to prepare for disasters that keep on coming—one after another after another.
People are not particularly attentive to risks that get a little bit worse every year, even when they add up, over the course of decades or generations, to a massive problem. And even when insurers jack up rates or drop coverage for people at elevated risk from climate-related disasters, public officials—including those, as I have previously noted, who claim to acknowledge the danger of a warming planet—do their best to dampen the signals that the market is trying to send.

All of which means that, especially if you live in a vulnerable area, the question isn’t whether society is ready for what this year’s weather may hold. It’s whether you are.

The Ticketmaster Data Breach May Be Just the Beginning  (Matt Burgess, Wired)
One of the biggest hacks of the year may have started to unfold. Late on Friday, embattled events business Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, confirmed it suffered a data breach after criminal hackers claimed to be selling half a billion customer records online. Banking firm Santander also confirmed it had suffered a data breach impacting millions of customers and staff after its data was advertised by the same group of hackers.
While the specific circumstances of the breaches—including exactly what information was stolen and how it was accessed—remain unclear, the incidents may be linked to attacks against company accounts with cloud hosting provider Snowflake. The US-based cloud firm has thousands of customers, including Adobe, Canva, and Mastercard, which can store and analyze vast amounts of data in its systems.
Security experts say that as more details become clear about hackers’ attempts to access and take data from Snowflake’s systems, it is possible that other companies will reveal they had data stolen. At present, though, the developing situation is messy and complicated.

The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer  (Jordan Pearson, Wired)
The United States Department of Justice is quietly prosecuting a novel Espionage Act case involving a drone, a Chinese national, and classified nuclear submarines.
The case is such a rarity that it appears to be the first known prosecution under a World War II–era law that bans photographing vital military installations using aircraft, showing how new technologies are leading to fresh national security and First Amendment issues.
“This is definitely not something that the law has addressed to any significant degree,” Emily Berman, a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in national security, tells WIRED. “There’s definitely no reported cases.”