Due to remarkable advances in quantum technology, our current US attorney general time-traveled here from a rural 1950s Alabama sheriff’s office. His name is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, and he’s a man who fervently believes in the rule of law.
A fine example of this conviction is encapsulated in his now-infamous quote “The Ku Klux Klan was OK until I found out they smoked pot.” Coming from him, this is saying a lot. It’s amazing that his affection for the Klan could be shaken by anything. But a law is a law, and such is Jefferson’s commitment to upholding the laws of this nation that even the Klan is unsafe from his ire.
Unbeknownst to many burners, Black Rock City is not a semi-autonomous zone. It’s not even a sanctuary city. The festival is located on federal park land in Nevada.
Nevada happens to have some of the strictest, most draconian drug laws in the country. It also happens to be where a bunch of cyber hippies who represent everything scary and unfamiliar to a 1950s rural Alabama sheriff congregate for a week to get naked and do a bunch of drugs.
And drugs are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the cornucopia of felonies and misdemeanors your average Burning Man attendee commits.
I just got an email containing the official Burning Man newsletter, “The Jackrabbit Speaks — Law Enforcement Edition,” and I’m reading through all the different laws that could be enforced at Burning Man. The email contains a laundry list of infractions, including having your license plates covered by bikes, driving over five miles per hour and forgetting that the federal government does not recognize Nevada’s legalization of pot.
The email outlines all the things to be aware of and to be careful of. Interestingly, something they leave off the list is the fact that indecent exposure in Nevada is a felony that includes lifetime registration as a sex offender. It doesn’t matter if you’re in public or private — even if someone sees you naked through the window of your own home, you can be convicted of indecent exposure. Indecent exposure includes showing genitalia, buttocks or a woman’s breasts (unless she’s breastfeeding).
Drug offenses are also a felony and carry stiff drug sentences. Plus, you can be nabbed for trafficking if they can show you brought the drugs with you over state lines, which you did.
Is this far-fetched? All through the Obama administration, people started getting busted more and more at Burning Man. But that was conservative Nevada officers doing the busting.
There were 46 arrests last year, and 37 of them were drug related — and that was when Eric Holder still held the reins at the Justice Department. You know who is the head of federal law enforcement in our country now? Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions has made it abundantly clear that enforcing our nation’s drug laws and restarting Reagan’s drug war are among his highest priorities. Has the FBI briefed him yet on the drug-infested, anti-American pagan festival that congregates yearly to foment nonconformity and resistance? We have no idea what the FBI has told him. That information is classified.
This article details a new BLM (federal) law-enforcement policy to pee-test Burning Man drivers for pot. If you move your car at Burning Man, or if you’re driving in and out of Burning Man, and they can establish probable cause to test you (of course they can), that could result in a felony. You don’t have to have drugs in your car; there just have to be 10 nanograms of cannabis per milliliter in your urine. That means if you’ve ingested any sort of cannabis during the last few weeks, you’d better get a designated driver, parachute in or—better yet—walk to Burning Man.
If 46 seems like a lot of arrests, imagine 5,000. Or more. I’m not sure how much arresting would have to happen before Burning Man would shut down the festival and send folks home.
And you know what’s even better than enforcing draconian laws and feeding the prison industrial complex? The fact that each of those folks who gets booked and convicted of a felony means one fewer progressive (or libertarian) permanently off the voting rolls.
No, it doesn’t seem far-fetched that these festivalgoers openly flaunting our nation’s laws are gonna get the Sessions smackdown. Imagine the playa dappled with handcuffed burners baking in the hot sun. Tattooed, pierced, dusty denizens being perp-walked into the local courthouse, waiting to be arraigned on an array of sex and drug offenses.
No doubt it would capture the news cycle for a moment, distract us from this unseemly Charlottesville/Russia business, throw chum into the waters of the Trump base and make a certain 1950s sheriff very proud.
