The NY Times reports that a young EPA employee went on a tinder date and unbeknownst to him, it was a trap set by a Project Veritas ratfuck operation. He didn’t say anything incriminating but that didn’t stop the Trump administration and its creepy EPA administrator Lee Zeldin fatuously exploited his words to claim that the Biden administration was corrupt. It’s so stupid it gives you a headache but that’s the world we live in now:
Mr. Efron, a passionate believer in the E.P.A.’s mission “to protect human health and the environment,” came up with an analogy to describe what was happening: The agency was a cruise ship that had hit an iceberg. It needed to launch its lifeboats — climate and clean energy projects — right away.
“It truly feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge,” he told Brady.
Brady left after about an hour and Mr. Efron said he barely thought about the date again. Until a video of him appeared on the website of Project Veritas, a right-wing group known for using covert recordings to embarrass political opponents. Brady, who had posed as a politically liberal commercial real estate agent and recent transplant to the capital, was actually a Project Veritas operative with a hidden camera.
The conversation — particularly the phrase “gold bars” — has come to haunt Mr. Efron. Conservative media and Republicans immediately trumpeted those words as supposed evidence that the Biden administration had mishandled funds.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, repeatedly cited the video as he worked to cancel $20 billion that the Biden administration had granted to finance projects like electric vehicle charging stations in low income communities and installing geothermal systems to heat and cool subsidized housing.
Mr. Zeldin has blasted out media releases with headlines like “Administrator Zeldin Terminates Biden-Harris $20B ‘Gold Bar’ Grants” and “EPA Formally Refers Financial Mismanagement of $20B ‘Gold Bars’ to Inspector General.”
“The entire scheme, in my opinion, is criminal,” Mr. Zeldin said on Fox News in February, adding, “We found the gold bars. We want them back.”
The Justice Department found no evidence of any corruption and a federal judge found the allegations unproven. Trump’s own lawyers admit that this whole thing is bogus.
But whatever:
The unfortunate truth, for Mr. Efron, was that he had handed the E.P.A.’s critics a powerful political weapon, and he is still paying a personal price. Since the Project Veritas video aired — but especially since Mr. Zeldin posted it to his X account two days in a row in February, receiving almost three million views — he has been publicly shamed by Elon Musk, obscenely berated by anonymous callers and hauled into an interview with the F.B.I.
This really feels like a social media STASI strategy. Watch what you say.
When Elon posted about this to his 200 million followers, he was harassed, doxxed and threatened, of course. He ended up leaving his job.
In case you were wondering, this is what he meant by the “gold bars” comment:
“…the funding for clean energy projects going to states, cities, tribes and nonprofit groups were like gold bars being tossed into lifeboats to protect some of the Biden administration’s work.”
“What I meant was, we were giving money to protect rural Washington from wildfire smoke, and fund a health clinic in Georgia and a community farm in Missouri and help tribal communities that are falling into the ocean in Alaska,” he said. “Those were lifeboats.”
It’s clunky but it’s typical of Republicans to happily run with something this anodyne as evidence of a nefarious plot, the dumber the better.
The lesson in all this is to be careful of what you say to strangers these days. But that’s the point, isn’t it?