I’ve said a few times that the consistent testimony of all those Venezuelan migrants describes an operation that is simply not a government operation, not an operation managed by government employees: people with business cards with only a first name, fabricated government brochures, contract quotas, all the rest. Governments and government workers can act with horrible callousness and brutality. But they do so in certain formal and bureaucratic ways. These were clearly not government employees. And on this there are actually some clues in DeSantis’ public statements.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar (San Antonio) opened a criminal investigation into DeSantis/Martha’s Vineyard flights. He says he’s working with the lawyers representing the migrants who were shipped to Martha’s Vineyard. “I believe there is some criminal activity involved here, but at present, we are trying to keep an open mind and we are going to investigate to find out and to determine what laws were broken if that does turn out to be the case,” Salazar said in a press conference Monday.

Like the soft piano chords of an old time hymn underscore a fire-and-brimstone tent revival service, the chords of a QAnon ballad filled the arena at a Trump rally this weekend — as the former president angrily bemoaned just how “in decline” our nation is.

At a campaign event for Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance Saturday, Trump delivered a speech about the perceived failures our nation has experienced in the two years since he was booted from the White House. The rally featured a speech from QAnon congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and the event was filled with standard fare MAGAworld grievances.

But toward the end, we witnessed the former President embracing the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory movement more explicitly than he ever has in the past.

The national news media seems to have lost interest entirely in the story of the Venezuelan immigrants shipped off to Martha’s Vineyard as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s reelection campaign. The meta-story of course continues to get some attention — how it plays into the midterm, who it helps or hurts as a political story, etc. But I mean what actually happened. That’s unfortunate both in journalistic and political terms because even the barest look at the details we know make it very unlikely this was an official or on-the-books government operation. And yet it’s one Gov. Desantis has publicly taken credit for and said was paid for with taxpayer funds from Florida.

In the absence of any national press interest the search for answers has been left to a few local news outlets and LULAC, the Latino civil rights organization. Representatives of LULAC, including national president Domingo Garcia, went to Martha’s Vineyard on Friday to talk to the asylum-seekers and get more details about what happened. They were able to flesh out the story about “Perla” and her team in San Antonio. Basically all the stories matched to a T. LULAC has posted a $5,000 reward for information leading to her identification. LULAC is also canvassing this week in San Antonio trying to find out more information.

Another thing I wanted to flag for you. At his rally in Youngstown, Ohio on Saturday Donald Trump appeared to take a decisive new step in embracing the QAnon conspiracy theory. He’s been dog whistling about it for years. But at this rally there was an especially dark and fetid tone and the rally concluded with what was either the Q movement song or one that was so similar as to be indistinguishable from it. (Yes, there’s a movement song.) The crowd responded with an index finger salute — also a Q movement trademark — as they swayed to the music and Trump’s rhythmic incitement. This comes after various posts on Trump’s “Truth Social” Twitter clone site which now openly embrace Q.

Since I’ve noted the “will the polls be wrong again” debate a few times I wanted to share another article with you. This one is by Nate Silver. He basically argues that the confidence that 2022 is likely to see the same kind of hidden GOP strength is misplaced. He doesn’t prove this idea is wrong. And I don’t think he would say he does. (We can’t ‘prove’ anything about a future we don’t know.) What he does is lay out a series of counter-arguments or rather arguments and evidence that leads to the opposite conclusion.