Slog AM: Bigfoot Never Happened, the CIA Settled Nazis in Canada, and Don’t Get Your Hopes Up About the Sonics Returning

Our corporate overlords don’t oppose the Millionaires Tax: Or at least, they aren’t spending big to destroy it at the ballot, as they have done to similar income tax proposals in the past, the Seattle Times reports. The lack of oligarch backing means the petite bourgeois small business tyrants must fund the repeal on their own, and they’re being outspent by the big unions. I’ll have more on the why later, but in short, Washington’s major corporations can read the writing on the wall, and know that if we fail to tax the income of millionaires the progressive taxation movement will expand corporate taxation instead. And shifting your tax burden onto someone else is what tax reform is all about.

Prosecutor in Washington’s second-largest city reopens investigation into deadly police shooting after reporting by local media: You can tell it’s an election year because Spokane County’s incumbent prosecutor has reopened an investigation he closed two months ago into local cops who fatally shot a local man. The announcement comes only a few weeks after Spokane-based news outlet RANGE published texts from the officers, such as “So what’s the crime we were investigating yesterday? Unlawful discharge? Haha.”

The WNBA trans panic is a fake campaign amplified by a small network of money-grubbing influencers and pundits: Data analytics company GUDEA analyzed hundreds of thousands of posts on the subject over the summer, and found that only eight of them gained significant traction, and were pushed by influencers trying to make money. “If you take out the eight top posts, this [narrative] didn’t happen. Nobody would be talking about this,” GUDEA told Rolling Stone. So if you believe this nonsense, it is not an original thought—you were programmed by a machine, you live in The Matrix. I’m trying to free your mind, but I can only show you the door.

The WNBA might remain the only game in town for Seattle basketball fans: ESPN and the Seattle Times report the NBA expansion cabal has placed our fair city on the backburner once again, which is why you don’t get your hopes up about the return of a team named after vaporware that failed so spectacularly that it crashed the local economy and documentarians started making films about local child poverty.

Longview Daily News is the latest Washington paper we’re highlighting for trying to replace journalism with AI bullshit: The paper in owned by Lee Enterprises, one of the smaller of the bad national chains of local newspapers, and which you probably haven’t heard of unless you’re from Montana, where they own nearly every major metro daily, or what’s left of them after laying off almost the entire state press corps and selling their printers and buildings for cash. Lee Enterprises’ latest suicidal moneymaking scheme is publishing AI deepfakes and refusing to give their workers contract guarantees that they won’t be replaced by poorly-programmed machines. The Longview NewsGuild (part of the same labor union that reps Stranger workers, by the way) has been bargaining since July to get management to please just act like a normal newspaper.

KUOW reports that yes, that is a Klan robe in the window of the Dexter Horton Building downtown. It’s part of an Afrocentric traveling history museum and was intentionally put in the window to make people uncomfortable. American History Traveling Museum: The Unspoken Truths runs through early December. You can also learn more about the Klan’s history in our state from the dedicated historians of the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project.

They should have sent a cowboy: Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer is one of those libertarian LARPers who thinks they are the highest law of the land and make it everyone else’s problem. The “constitutional” sheriff, infamous for his literal posse, is retiring, and his potential successors are mulling how many of his far-right traditions they should echo to attract voters this election, Investigate West reports.

Why did we ever believe the Yakima grifter behind the world’s most famous Bigfoot footage? If you’re ever tracking a Sasquatch in Klickitat County and worried that bagging it across the county line will expose you to Skamania County’s fascist Bigfoot conservation ordinance, I have good news: Bigfoot is not real. Marq Evans’ new documentary Capturing Bigfoot exposes Washington man Roger Patterson’s famous Klamath River footage as fake by interrogating the man’s life as a stereotypical Pacific Northwest conman, Variety reports.

Hitler News: Declassified report shows CIA resettled Nazis in Canada: If you are an avid Tuesday morning Slog AM reader then you have been waiting with breath as bated as mine for the release of the “Rodal Report” after the Canadian judiciary cleared the investigation into how so many Nazis ended up in their country for publication earlier this year. “Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present,” as the report is officially known, was created in the 1980s when the Canadian government was forced to publicly investigate their Nazi problem, ending with a massive coverup. Read details of the CIA’s rat lines to Canada in the Maple.

US-backed Alberta referendum fails: Transplanting a bunch of Nazis into Canada wasn’t the end of US interference with our neighbors to the north. Alberta has long been the farthest right member of the confederation, evidenced by—what else—one of those aforementioned resettled Nazis becoming the president of the province’s long-ruling Tory party. It’s always been the most American-inflected province, too, due to high US immigration, as well as the influence of the Houston-based oil industry that runs the place the way Marco Rubio runs Venezuela from Mar-a-Lago. If the whole “a Nazi leads our ruling party” didn’t make the reality of Conservative rule in Alberta clear enough, leaders supporting the local independence movement to spite the Liberal prime minister (in the most charitable read) should tell you how serious these people are about providing for their constituents. 

I thought Lance Oppenheim was the same guy as Joshua Oppenheimer, which means my expectations going into You Can See Everything were a bit off. I figured Nathan Fielder’s turn from comedic rehearsal to dark reenactment must have been influenced by Oppenheimer’s use of reenactment to interrogate the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide of communists and Chinese in 1965-66 in his documentary The Act of Killing. But this is not true, because Oppenheim is not Oppenheimer, and I am a fool. Returning to my weekly recommendation of forgotten documentaries from the early 2000s shot on MiniDV tape, Oppenheimer made a prior film about Indonesia, The Globalisation Tapes, which you can watch below.

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