Germany’s foreign minister: Parts of China trip ‘more than shocking’
Alexander Ratz – April 19, 2023
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visits ChinaGerman Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visits China
BERLIN (Reuters) – German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Wednesday described parts of her recent trip to China as “more than shocking” and said Beijing was increasingly becoming a systemic rival more than a trade partner and competitor.
The blunt remarks followed Baerbock’s visit to Beijing last week where she warned that any attempt by China to control Taiwan would be unacceptable.
Beijing claims democratically governed Taiwan as a Chinese province and has never ruled out the use of force to bring the island under its control.
Baerbock had also said China wanted to follow its own rules at the expense of the international rules-based order. Beijing in turn asked Germany to support Taiwan’s “reunification” and said China and Germany were not adversaries but partners.
Speaking to the German Bundestag (lower house of parliament) on Wednesday about her China trip, Baerbock said “some of it was really more than shocking”.
She did not elaborate on specifics, although her remark came after she said China was becoming more repressive internally as well as aggressive externally.
For Germany, she said, China is a partner, competitor and systemic rival, but her impression is now “that the systemic rivals aspect is increasing more and more”.
China is Germany’s largest trading partner, said Baerbock, but this did not mean Beijing was also Germany’s most important trading partner.
The German government wants to work with China but does not want to repeat past mistakes, for example the notion of “change through trade”, she said, that the West can achieve political shifts in authoritarian regimes through commerce.
Baerbock also said China had a responsibility to work towards peace in the world, in particular using its influence over Russia in the war in Ukraine.
She welcomed Beijing’s promise not to supply weapons to Russia, including dual use items, though added that Berlin would see how such a promise worked in practice.
In a departure from the policies of former chancellor Angela Merkel, Olaf Scholz’s government is developing a new China strategy to reduce dependence on Asia’s economic superpower, a vital export market for German goods.
(Writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Striking before-and-after satellite photos show the great California snowmelt underway
Terry Castleman – April 19, 2023
Cars on Highway 395 along the east side of the Sierra Nevada near Lone Pine, Calif., on March 22, 2023. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
As California’s wet winter has given way to warmer spring weather, the state’s record snowpack has begun to melt.
Though the accumulated snow still measures 249% of normal as of April 18, new satellite photos show that the white blankets enveloping mountains across the state have started to recede.
The Southern Sierra continues to be the standout region, with snow levels on slopes there at more than 300% of normal.
Satellite images seen below from NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System, or EOSDIS, show the snowy Sierra on March 16 (left), and a month later (right).
While the snowpack remains substantial in the more recent image , it has dissipated significantly at lower elevations. The Mendocino Range, seen in the top left of the image, also shows significant snow loss.
In Southern California, the change has been even more dramatic.
The San Gabriel, San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains were blanketed in snow on March 24, but by April 8 much of the snow had melted away.
Images below from a European Space Agency satellite captured the snow melt.
While the Southern California snowpacks have caused relatively little flooding as they melt, the snow in the Sierra may be a different story.
Farm equipment stands in floodwater just South of Tulare River Road. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Flood danger could last through the year in the adjacent San Joaquin Valley, officials told the Times. The valley has already endured significant flooding this year, with excessive rains wreaking havoc in small towns and fueling the renaissance of Tulare Lake.
Tulare Lake continues to rise along its northern border. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Typically, about a quarter of snow melt takes place in April, with the majority coming in May and June as the weather warms up.
But the remarkably wet winter means flooding could linger through much of the year, the latest outlooks show.
View from aboard a whitewater raft during a tour of the upper Kern River in Kernville. (Jack Dolan / Los Angeles Times)
The Tulare Lake basin and the San Joaquin River basin remain the areas of top concern, as record-deep snowpack in the southern Sierra Nevada is expected to send a cascade of water down into the San Joaquin Valley as it melts.
Isabella Lake as seen from Wofford Heights on April 7, 2023. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Though most of the focus is on the Central Valley, officials in L.A. are also keeping an eye on on spring and summer flooding as it could cause additional damage to the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
At the beginning of March, Aria Babu quit her job at a think tank to dedicate herself to something most people have never heard of. Having worked in public policy for several years, the 26-year-old Londoner had come to an alarming realisation about the future of the UK, the world – and the human species.
‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says. ‘Considering this is such a massive part of people’s lives, the fact that they were not able to fulfil this want was clearly indicative that something was wrong.’
The new focus of Babu’s career is a philosophy known as pronatalism, literally meaning pro-birth. Its core tenet is deceptively simple: our future depends on having enough children, and yet life in developed countries has become hostile to this basic biological imperative. Linked to the subcultures of rationalism and ‘effective altruism’ (EA), and bolstered by declining birth rates, it has been gaining currency in Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry – especially its more conservative corners.
‘I’ve been in various text threads with technology entrepreneurs who share that view… there are really smart people that have real concern around this,’ says Ben Lamm, a Texas biotech entrepreneur whose company Colossal is developing artificial wombs and other reproductive tech (or ‘reprotech’) that could boost future fertility.
‘We are quite familiar with the pronatalist movement and are supporters of it,’ says Jake Kozloski, the Miami-based co-founder of an AI matchmaking service called Keeper, which aims to address the ‘fertility crisis fueled by a marriage crisis’ by helping clients find the other parent of their future children.
‘I encourage people who are responsible and smart and conscientious to have children, because they’re going to make the future better,’ says Diana Fleischman, a pronatalist psychology professor at the University of New Mexico and consultant for an embryo-selection start-up (she is currently pregnant with her second child).
Easily the most famous person to espouse pronatalist ideas is Elon Musk, the galaxy’s richest human being, who has had 10 children with three different women. ‘If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble. Mark my words,’ Musk told a business summit in December 2021. He has described population collapse as ‘the biggest danger’ to humanity (exceeding climate change) and warned that Japan, which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, ‘will eventually cease to exist’.
In an Insider article last November that helped bring the movement to wider attention, 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey acknowledged its influence on the Texan tech scene, while the managing director of an exclusive retreat, Dialog, co-founded by arch-conservative investor and PayPal pioneer Peter Thiel, said population decline was a frequent topic there.
Babu, who hopes to join or create a pronatalist organisation in the UK, says it is still ‘niche’ here but gaining ground on both the ‘swashbuckling intellectual Right’ and the more family-focused and Blue-Labour-tinged segments of the Left.
At the centre of it all are Simone and Malcolm Collins, two 30-something American entrepreneurs turned philosophers – and parents – who say they are only the most outspoken proponents of a belief that many prefer to keep private. In 2021 they founded a ‘non-denominational’ campaign group called Pronatalist.org, under the umbrella of their non-profit Pragmatist Foundation. Buoyed by a $482,000 (£385,000) donation from Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian tech billionaire who funds many rationalist and EA organisations, it is now lobbying governments, meeting business leaders, and seeking partnerships with reprotech companies and fertility clinics.
The Collinses did not coin the word ‘pronatalism’, which has long been used (along with ‘natalism’) to describe government policies aimed at increasing birth rates, or mainstream pro-birth positions such as that of the Catholic Church. Its opposite is ‘anti-natalism’, the idea that it is wrong to bring a new person into the world if they are unlikely to have a good life. Lyman Stone, a natalist demographer and research fellow at the US’s Institute for Family Studies, has described the Collinses’ philosophy as ‘a very unusual subculture’ compared to millions of everyday natalists. Yet it is their version – a secular, paradoxically unorthodox reconstruction of arguably the most traditional view on earth, driven by alarm about a looming population catastrophe – that is prospering among the tech elite.
‘I don’t think it’s appealing to [just] Silicon Valley people,’ Malcolm tells me on a long call from his home in Pennsylvania. ‘It’s more like, anyone who is familiar with modern science and familiar with the statistics is aware that this is an issue, and they are focused on it. The reason why you see Silicon Valley people disproportionately being drawn to this is they’re obsessed with data enough, and wealthy enough, to be looking at things – and who also have enough wealth and power that they’re not afraid of being cancelled.’
The Collinses – Winnie Au
The problem, he concedes, is that falling birth rates are also a common preoccupation of neo-Nazis and other ethno-nationalists, who believe they are being outbred and ‘replaced’ by other races. ‘A lot of alleged concerns about fertility decline are really poorly masked racist ideas about what kinds of people they want on the planet,’ says demographer Bernice Kuang of the UK’s Centre for Population Change.
The Collinses strongly disavow racism and reject the idea that any country’s population should be homogenous. Still, Babu finds that many in the rationalist and EA community, which skews pale and male, are wary of exploring pronatalism – lest they be ‘tarred with the brush of another white man who just wants an Aryan trad-wife’.
Another issue is what you might call the Handmaid’s Tale problem. From Nazi Germany’s motherhood medals to the sprawling brood of infamous, Kansas-based ‘God hates fags’ preacher Fred Phelps, a zeal for large families has often been accompanied by patriarchal gender politics. For liberal Westerners, the idea that we need to have more babies – ‘we’ being a loaded pronoun when not all of us would actually bear them – may conjure images of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.
Some more illiberal countries are already shifting in this direction. China has begun restricting abortions after decades of forcing them on anyone who already had one child. Russia has revived a Soviet medal for women with 10 or more children. Hungary, where fertility long ago dropped below 2.1 births per year per woman – the ‘replacement rate’ necessary to sustain a population without immigration – has tightened abortion law while offering new tax breaks and incentives for motherhood. Following the end of Roe v Wade in the US, Texas has proposed tax cuts for each additional child, but only if they are born to or adopted by a married heterosexual couple who have never divorced.
But the Collinses contend that this kind of future is exactly what they are trying to prevent. ‘People often compare our group to Handmaid’s Tale-like thinking,’ says Malcolm, ‘and I’m like: excuse me, do you know what happens if we, the voluntary movement, fails…? Cultures will eventually find a way to fix this; how horrifying those mechanisms are depends on whether or not our group finds an ethical way.’ Though they define themselves politically as conservatives – Malcolm invariably votes Republican – they claim to favour LGBT rights and abortion rights and oppose any attempt to pressure those who don’t want children into parenthood.
Instead, they say, their hope is to preserve a ‘diverse’ range of cultures that might otherwise begin to die out within the next 75 to 100 years. They want to build a movement that can support people of all colours and creeds who already want to have large families, but are stymied by society – so that ‘some iteration of something that looks like modern Western civilisation’ can be saved.
‘We are on the Titanic right now,’ says Malcolm. ‘The Titanic is going to hit the iceberg. There is no way around it at this point. Our goal is not to prevent the Titanic from hitting the iceberg; it’s to ready the life rafts.’
It was on the couple’s second date, sitting on a rooftop and gazing out at the nearby woods, that Malcolm first raised the prospect of children. Simone’s response was not enthusiastic.
‘I was very excited to spend my life alone, to never get married, to never have kids,’ she recalls. ‘People would be like, “Do you want to hold the baby?” I was one of those who’s like, “No, you keep it. I will watch that baby from behind glass and be a lot more comfortable.”’
As she says this, her five-month-old daughter Titan Invictus – the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously – is strapped to her chest, occasionally burbling, while Malcolm has charge of their two sons Torsten, two, and Octavian, three. They live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia, balancing parenthood with full-time jobs as co-chief-executives of a travel company, writing books about pronatalism, and their non-profit projects (to which they donated 44 per cent of their post-tax income last year). They project an image of accentuated preppiness, dressing in ultra-crisp country club, business casual when photographers visit, and are effusive and open to the press. Malcolm starts our interview by saying, ‘Absolutely spectacular to meet you!’
The Collins family – Winnie Au
Both dealt with adversity in their own youths. Malcolm, 36, was held by court order in a centre for ‘troubled’ teenagers, where he was told by staff that if he resisted they would simply invent new infractions to keep him locked up. Simone, 35, now needs hormone therapy to menstruate regularly and IVF to conceive a child due to years of anorexia.
Back then, Simone was a textbook anti-natalist. She grew up as the only child of a failed polyamorous marriage among California hippies, where her understanding of a wedding was ‘everyone puts on masks in the forest and there’s a naked sweat lodge’. She was also a ‘mistake baby’, who watched her mother struggle with shelving her career ambitions.
What changed Simone’s mind was not any kind of Stepfordian conversion but a simple promise from Malcolm that she would not have to surrender her career. So it proved. She took no time off during Octavian’s gestation, answered business calls while in labour, and returned to the office five days after his birth. She stays with each child continuously for their first six months, carrying them in a chest harness while working at a treadmill desk, after which Malcolm handles the bulk of child-raising. She finds she gets a productivity bump with each newborn – ‘You’re up every three hours anyway, so why not knock off some emails?’
These personal epiphanies might not have translated into political ones except for Malcolm’s stint as a venture capitalist in South Korea, where the fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.8. He was shocked that nobody seemed to regard this as an emergency.
‘If this was an animal species it would be called endangered,’ says Malcolm. ‘We would be freaking out that they are about to go extinct.’ He begins our interview by speaking without interruption for nearly half an hour, incredibly quickly and with frenetic intensity as if chased by the enormity of what is coming.
Virtually every developed nation is now below replacement rate, and the United Nations predicts that the global average will sink below that line around 2056. By 2100 only seven countries are projected to remain above 2.1, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, meaning developed nations won’t be able to rely on immigration to keep growing.
The impact on actual population will be delayed by decades and hopefully offset by increasing life expectancy, so our species will probably grow through most of the 21st century before holding steady or starting to shrink (estimates vary).
Most demographers do not consider this a crisis, according to Bernice Kuang. ‘In pop culture, there’s so much really alarmist talk about fertility and population implosion, and that just doesn’t really come up in the same way in academia,’ she says, noting that we cannot predict the long-term impact of future ‘reprotech’. Many experts also see overall population decline as a good thing, arguing that it will help prevent or mitigate climate change and other problems.
But pronatalists argue that problems will manifest long before this, as working-age people begin to be outnumbered by older ones. The global economy is predicated on the assumption of continual growth in GDP, which is strongly linked to population growth. ‘If people assume that the economy is going to shrink in future, and shrink indefinitely, then it’s not just a recession – it’s like there’s no point investing in the future,’ says Babu, who defines her politics as economically liberal, feminist, and pro-immigration. ‘If that happens, your pension breaks down because your pension is gambled on the stock market. You withdraw your savings; the government can’t borrow. A lot of these structures just break down.’
Aria Babu – Aria Babu
Take the UK’s current economic doldrums and broken public services, which Babu blames partly on the combination of Britain’s ageing population and the flight of younger immigrants after Brexit. What happens when populations everywhere are ageing or shrinking? One omen is Japan, which is ageing faster than any other nation. A Yale professor called Yusuke Narita, who has become an icon among angry young people, has proposed ‘mass suicide and mass seppuku [ritual disembowelment] of the elderly’ as ‘the only solution’, although he later said that this was merely ‘an abstract metaphor’.
For the Collinses, all of this is only part of the crisis, because the fertility of different cultural groups is not declining uniformly. Research by Pronatalist.org found that higher birth rates are associated with what some psychologists call the ‘Right-wing authoritarian personality’ – or, as Malcolm puts it, ‘an intrinsic dislike and distrust of anybody who is not like them’. That is, says Malcolm, emphatically not his or Simone’s brand of conservatism, which welcomes immigration and wants a pluralistic, multicultural society in which all groups are free to raise their children in their own way of life. By contrast, progressives and environmentalists have fewer children on average, not least because of a widespread despair about climate change among millennials and Gen Z.
There is also emerging evidence that the personality traits thought to undergird political beliefs – such as empathy, risk-taking, and a preference for competition vs cooperation – may be partly inherited. A literature review by New York University and the University of Wisconsin found evidence that political ideology is about 40 per cent genetic. Hence, the Collinses fear that as fertility declines it will not be some racial Other who outbreeds everyone else but each culture’s equivalent of the neo-Nazis. ‘We are literally heading towards global Nazism, but they all hate each other!’ says Malcolm.
What is to be done? ‘Our solution is, uh, we don’t have a solution,’ he admits. He says the only things proven to increase birth rates are poverty and the oppression of women, which are bad and should be stamped out. The only hope is to find those few families that combine liberal, pluralistic politics, such as support for LGBT rights, with high fertility – or create new, hybrid micro-cultures that value both – and help them multiply.
That means creating new educational and childcare institutions, supporting alternative family structures (the nuclear family is historically very unusual, and struggles to support large broods), repealing red tape such as sperm- and egg-freezing regulations, and cutting the cost of fertility treatments.
‘We’re trying to rebuild the high-trust networks that existed before the industrial revolution,’ says Pronatalist.org’s 20-year-old executive director Lillian Tara. ‘Raising children takes a village, and we’re trying to create that village.’ It also means resisting any attempt by what Malcolm calls the ‘woke mind virus’ to assimilate their children into a progressive monoculture.
This is where technology comes in. ‘Many of the groups that we are concerned about disappearing – gay couple couples, lesbian couples – from a traditional organs-bumping-together standpoint, can’t have kids… that are genetically both of theirs,’ says Simone. ‘That certainly dissuades some people from having kids entirely.’ A still-nascent technique called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), which grows eggs and sperm directly from stem cells, could change this. Cheaper egg freezing and IVF could lighten the trade-off between career and motherhood for women.
Then there are those who struggle with inheritable problems such as depression and schizophrenia. Diana Fleischman says she knows many ‘wonderful people’ who are leery about having children for this reason. Such problems could be mitigated by genetic screening and embryo selection. Titan was born through just such a process, the Collinses tell me, winning out over other embryos that had higher estimated risks of traits such as obesity, migraines and anxiety.
The idea of using birth rates to influence future politics is one many will find alarming. It echoes the American ‘Quiverfull’ movement, which dictates that Christians should breed profusely so that over time society will be stuffed full of good believers.
Malcolm is blunt that some techies are trying to do just that. ‘Silicon Valley people, they’ve done the math, and they actually do want to replace the world with their children,’ he says. ‘They’re like, “Oh yeah, I have eight kids, and if those kids have eight kids, and those kids have eight kids, then at the end my kids will make up the majority of the world’s population… I understand these people’s mindset. They’ve been economically successful… they think they’re better than other people.’ (Musk, he insists, is not of this persuasion.)
Fleischman says she has encountered this too: ‘A lot of this is secret, because it’s just not socially acceptable to say, “I’m going to use my wealth to make as many half-copies of myself as possible. I’m going to photocopy myself into the future.”’
While Musk has been open about his pronatalist beliefs, others are staying quiet to maximise their chance of victory, notes Malcolm. ‘They’re like, “Why are you broadcasting this? We all know this, we can fix this on our own, we don’t need the diversity that you seem pathologically obsessed with”… they’re the people you’re not hearing from.’ Musk did not respond to a request to be interviewed.
If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble. Mark my words,’ Musk told a business summit in December 2021 – (Apex MediaWire Photo by Trevor Cokley/U.S. Air Force
The Collinses aren’t worried about this, because they think it is doomed to fail. They want to build a durable family culture that their descendants will actually want to be part of, not just ‘spam their genes’, and to help other families with different values do the same. ‘You have an 18-year sales pitch to your kids… and if you fail, well f—k you – your kid’s gonna leave,’ says Simone. ‘The people who carry forward their culture and viewpoints are going to be people who love being parents.’
Even so, this project inherently requires making some judgment on which cultures should prosper in future – and therefore, potentially, which genomes. That rings alarm bells for Emile Torres, a philosopher who studies the history of eugenics and its counterpart, dysgenics – the notion that humanity’s gene pool is slowly becoming somehow worse.
‘Dire warnings of an impending dysgenic catastrophe go back to the latter 19th century, when this idea of degeneration became really widespread in the wake of Darwin,’ Torres says. ‘Biologists were warning that degeneration is imminent, and we need to take seriously the fact that intellectually “less capable” individuals are outbreeding.’ Often this meant poor people, disabled people, non-white people, or other groups lacking the political power to contest their designation as inferior, leading to atrocities such as the Nazi sterilisation regime.
The Collinses – despite using embryo selection – say they reject that kind of eugenics, and Malcolm pours scorn on the ‘pseudoscience’ idea that intelligence or political personality traits differ meaningfully between ethnicities. Rather, he argues that they cluster in much smaller cultural groups such as families or like-minded subcultures. When screening their own embryos, the Collinses did not worry about traits such as autism or ADHD. ‘We don’t think humanity can be perfected, we just want to give our kids the best possible roll of the dice,’ says Simone, who herself is autistic and Jewish.
Still, Torres argues that voluntary, ‘liberal’ eugenics can end up having the same effect as the coercive kind by reinforcing whatever traits are seen as desirable by the prevailing ideology, such as lighter skin, mathematical reasoning or competitiveness. Lyman Stone’s verdict last year was scathing: ‘My policy goal is for people to have the kids they want, but these “pronatalists” would abhor that outcome because it would yield higher fertility rates for people they think shouldn’t breed so much.’
Malcolm says he shares those concerns, which is why he is committed to being almost totally agnostic about which families Pronatalist.org works with. ‘If we act as anything other than a beacon, then we are applying our beliefs about the world to the people we recruit, which goes against our value set,’ he says.
The Collins family – Winnie Au
To sceptics, pronatalism’s appeal in Silicon Valley may simply look like the latest messianic project for a community already convinced that they are the best people to colonise space, conquer death and fix the world’s problems. Yet it speaks to a sense of disquiet that is widely shared. You do not need to fear dysgenic doom to feel that something is fundamentally broken about the way we have and raise children – as many recent or aspiring parents are already aware.
‘In almost every low-fertility country, no one is able to have the number of children they want to have. Even in South Korea, people still want to have two children; they don’t want to have 0.8,’ says Kuang. But far from being an inevitable consequence of progress, she contends that it stems from specific choices we force on to families.
‘The first half of the gender revolution was women attaining educational attainment at parity with men, entering the workforce at parity with men,’ she continues. But the second half remains unfinished, leaving many women caught between mutually incompatible expectations at work versus at home – the classic ‘have it all’ problem. In South Korea, where the new president (a man) has declared that structural sexism is ‘a thing of the past’, a government pamphlet advised expecting mothers to prepare frozen meals for their husbands before giving birth and tie up their hair ‘so that you don’t look dishevelled’ in hospital. ‘Wow, you wonder why women aren’t rushing to sign up for that kind of life?’ laughs Kuang.
Partly of the problem is that middle-class parents are now expected to micromanage their children’s upbringings more intensely than ever before. ‘It seems like in the past six- and seven-year-olds were just allowed to be feral… now it would basically be considered abuse to leave your child alone all day,’ says Babu.
Then there is the cost of housing. ‘How are you going to have two children, even if you desperately wanted to, if you can barely afford a one-bedroom apartment?’ asks Kuang, who would love to have three or four kids if only she could square the mortgage. Babu likewise says becoming a parent would be an easy choice if she knew she could still have a high-flying career and make enough money for a decent home. As it is, she’s torn.
Kuang concedes that no government has yet fixed these problems, but she does believe they are fixable. Although cash bonuses, lump sum payments and restricting abortion have all proven ineffective, she says, robust parental leave for all genders could make a difference. So could high-quality, affordable childcare that is available in adequate supply, and begins as soon as parents need to go back to work.
In the meantime, the Collinses hope to have at least four more babies, unless they are thwarted by complications from repeated C-sections. ‘When I look into the eyes of our children,’ says Simone, ‘and I see all the potential they have… and I think about a world in which they didn’t exist because we thought it was inconvenient? I’m like, I can’t. I can’t not try to have more kids.’
All the hype surrounding TV shows like “Tiny House, Big Living” and “Tiny House Nation” have piqued the interest of people looking for a financially and environmentally sustainable lifestyle. But what looks good on reality TV can be much less appealing in real life — especially if you have children.
A home is generally considered tiny if it’s less than 600 square feet. However, the average tiny home is much smaller — just 225 square feet, according to a 2021 survey by Porch Research.
Tiny homes come in several varieties. At the higher end are traditional stick-built or modular homes constructed on permanent foundations. A more common style is built on a mobile trailer using conventional construction materials. It’s also possible to convert a shed or storage container into a tiny house by using the structure as the home’s shell.
But no matter how you construct your tiny home, you might encounter the same problems with it — so, keep reading to see why you should think twice before springing for that purchase.
The difference between a trend and a fad is staying power. Trends endure and evolve, whereas fads are met with wild enthusiasm for a short time, but then they fizzle.
The tiny-home movement might’ve sprung from the trend toward minimalism and experiential lifestyles, but many proponents dive in without considering the significant challenges inherent in living in a tiny space — suggesting that tiny homes are a fad, not a trend.
The small size of tiny homes doesn’t make them much cheaper to build — in fact, the typical tiny house costs more per square foot than larger houses do, in part because larger construction jobs make for more efficient use of resources.
The average 2,600-square-foot home costs about $190 per square foot to build, according to Fixr, whereas the best-selling home constructed by Tumbleweed Tiny House Company — one of the best-known tiny-house builders in America — costs about $326 per square foot.
3. It Might Be a Home, but It’s Probably Not a House
Many tiny homes are built on trailers, which makes them recreational vehicles. In fact, the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company calls its products “tiny house RVs” and builds its homes according to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association certification standards. By Tumbleweed Tiny House Company’s own definition, its products are RVs, not houses.
4. Houses — Even Tiny Ones — Must Be Built to Code
Tiny homes built on foundations typically must meet the same code requirements as any other house, but the cost might be disproportionate — and even prohibitive — if you’re working with a bare-bones budget. You might have to prepare the land for construction, pull permits, order inspections and pay to bring utility service to the site.
RyanJLane / Getty Images
5. Many Tiny-Home Owners Aren’t Tiny-Home Dwellers
Owners of tiny homes don’t necessarily live in their houses full time. Often, these owners use their homes as vacation getaways or trade up for larger homes. The challenges that come with living in a tiny home aren’t so challenging if you’re only there for a few nights per year.
kate_sept2004 / Getty Images
6. Millennials Might Regret Their Home Purchase
According to the “Real Estate Witch 2023 Millennial Home Buyer Survey,” Millennials’ biggest homebuying regret is paying too much interest (22%), which could make a case for going tiny. But almost as many (18%) regret not anticipating future needs — a regret that’s likely much more prevalent among tiny-home buyers.
A tiny home that works for individuals might not work for couples. And what works for a couple might not accommodate a baby and the supplies that come along with having one. Even bringing a pet into the mix can overcrowd your tiny space.
While some cities have loosened zoning restrictions to accommodate tiny homes, most cities don’t allow tiny homes on wheels to be parked in residential yards or used as permanent residences without the appropriate permits. You’ll have to research local codes and ordinances before you make any decisions, or park your tiny home in an RV park or other designated area.
Tiny living takes a lot of work. You’ll have to go grocery shopping more often, pick up mail from a post office box and do frequent small loads of laundry in a compact washing machine. You might also have to empty out a composting toilet, climb in and out of a sleeping loft and grapple with multifunction furniture that needs to be opened or closed — or folded and unfolded — every time you use it.
Tiny living looks like a simple lifestyle at first glance, but it can actually be rather chaotic. Tiny houses often have low ceilings and tight transition spaces that require residents to constantly duck and squeeze as they navigate their surroundings, prepare meals, take showers and climb into bed. Even eating takeout becomes a chore when you lack adequate dining space.
AleksandarNakic / iStock.com
11. The Cramped Space Wears On Your Mental Health
An overcrowded home has been linked to increased stress and anxiety in families, likely due to lack of privacy and disrupted sleep. Children might also find it difficult to locate a quiet place to read or complete schoolwork in such close quarters.
Unless you’re allowed to park your tiny home in someone’s backyard, you’ll have to find a place to put it — and that costs money. You can purchase land if you have enough savings or lease a lot — perhaps in an RV park or manufactured home community — for a fixed price per month.
Even if zoning laws allow you to build or park a tiny home, you’re not necessarily out of the woods. Those laws might also mandate the minimum size of the lot that your home sits on — typically 1,000 square feet. Considering that lots cost anywhere from about $6 per square foot in Mississippi to over $110 per square foot in Hawaii, according to Angi, lot requirements could interfere with your dreams of constructing your home on a small budget.
State and local governments have their own building codes for homes built on permanent foundations. Permanent tiny homes often don’t meet those standards, so you’ll need to check the tiny-house ordinances for the specific city you’re living in.
A tiny home built on a trailer isn’t real estate, even if you own the land that it’s parked on. Tiny homes on wheels are personal property, and like other personal property — such as cars and RVs — they depreciate over time. Real estate, on the other hand, usually appreciates over time.
In the event that you want or need to sell your tiny home, finding a buyer won’t be easy. Tiny homeownership has more barriers to entry than traditional homeownership — there simply aren’t as many people willing to live in 400 or fewer square feet.
Unlike tiny homes — which require utility hookups unless they’re made for off-the-grid living — RVs are designed to be self-contained, so they have their own water and power supplies, plus a septic tank to hold waste. Also, RVs are usually lighter and more aerodynamic than tiny homes, so they’re safer and easier to tow.
From built-in vacuum systems that clean up pet hair to rainwater recycling systems to rotation devices that keep tiny homes facing the sun to maximize energy efficiency, construction trends can drive the cost of your tiny home way up.
Unless your tiny home meets zoning and building code standards and is built on a permanent foundation, it won’t qualify for traditional mortgage financing. You’ll need alternative financing, such as an RV loan, a personal loan or a credit card, which can have higher interest rates and might require a better credit score than a mortgage loan.
For example, you can get RV financing from Good Sam with a credit score of 600, but you’ll pay an exorbitant annual percentage rate of 19.95% as of March 24 — more than triple the average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. The minimum credit score jumps to 640 for loans of $50,000 or more, and rates are still double the average mortgage rate.
Construction prices for a completed tiny house average $45,000, according to HomeAdvisor. For about the same price, you can get a 902-square-foot mobile home with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, according to Mobile Homes Direct 4 Less.
There’s a lot to be said for living simply and within your means. You can adopt that lifestyle now by selling extra belongings, vowing not to buy any more unnecessary items or even downsizing to a smaller — but not tiny — home. You’ll have a chance to build equity in your property instead of investing thousands into a potential fad that won’t appreciate.
I Lost My House in the Fort Lauderdale Flood While Ron DeSantis Campaigned in New Hampshire
Elijah Manley – April 18, 2023
Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Getty
Fort Lauderdale last week was inundated with a historic downpour that caused massive floods and catastrophic property damage, upending the lives of thousands of people. According to experts and meteorologists such as Dan DePodwin of AccuWeather, this level of rain was so historic and rare that it is expected to only occur once every thousand years. Some areas saw over 25 inches of rain.
Cars and trucks floated through the city, and artery roads were turned into rivers that can only be passed by swimming through them. Many residents lost their homes, their vehicles, and their every material possession.
I know all this to be true because my family experienced it all.
As I was heading home last Wednesday night, I got a frightening text. It was from my mom, telling me not to come home. “You can’t come home. Water is everywhere, inside and outside. We’re flooded.”
Though it was pouring, I wasn’t gravely concerned. “It’s just a little water,” I thought to myself. I was wrong.
I would have no home to return to that night, but I would swim through two feet of water across the city just to sleep on the ground downtown. When the waters receded days later, I came back to what had been my home to find all my belongings destroyed and the interior of the house flooded.
Elijah Manley
Pictures, clothes, books, everything: gone. They’re irreplaceable. Everything I spent my life building was gone in one night. It’s like the memory of your identity has been wiped away. I couldn’t help but feel destroyed inside knowing that everything I had to my name is gone. It takes me back to a time in my childhood when my family was homeless. During that time, it was difficult maintaining all of our belongings.
And as I and countless others were experiencing this tragedy, our governor was in other states, far away, hawking his book and hyping up donors for a likely presidential run. In a time of historic crisis, the leader of our state’s government went AWOL.
It was only a few years ago when another Florida Republican governor, Rick Scott, traveled to areas affected by other natural disasters. He’d put partisanship aside and advocate for emergency aid to support affected communities. “We can rebuild homes. We can rebuild businesses. We cannot rebuild your life,” Scott said.
Our current governor, Ron DeSantis, is no Rick Scott.
This angers me beyond words. I’m not rich. My family is working class, and we have been blue-collar all our lives. It hurts my heart to know that my governor couldn’t make time to visit my city, witness our suffering, and demonstrate leadership. He could have promised swift and aggressive relief, pledged to help us rebuild, and looked into our eyes and let us know some things are more important than politics. But he didn’t.
Elijah Manley
Some DeSantis supporters have argued that his book tour and speaking engagements were planned in advance, while these floods could not have been predicted. That excuse might work for a day. Once it became clear there was a catastrophe back home, he could (and should) have hopped on the first jet back to Florida.
Instead, he continued his journey across the country to three states, including the early primary state of New Hampshire.
Yes, you read that correctly: while a major city in the governor’s home state was underwater, Ron DeSantis continued to sell books and campaign across the country.
When he did fly back, it was in the middle of the night for a quick stop at the state Capitol to sign the six-week abortion ban. Then he left again, making no stops in Fort Lauderdale or affected areas. (His campaign and office staff did muster up the energy to attack critics on social media and lambaste the media for pointing out his absence.)
This isn’t about partisanship, this is about responsibility. I have levied the same criticism at President Joe Biden for not visiting East Palestine, Ohio, after the catastrophic train derailment that devastated the working-class region.
If Ron DeSantis is more interested in running for president than being the governor we deserve in difficult times, then he must resign immediately. When we lost everything, our governor was absent. If DeSantis can’t demonstrate basic humanity and offer effective leadership during an emergency as governor, how can we expect him to handle larger crises as president? We shouldn’t.
Southwestern US rivers get boost from winter snowpack
Susan Montoya Bryan – April 18, 2023
In this May 9, 2021, photo a dam along the Rio Grande is seen near San Acacia, N.M. Forecasters with the National Weather Service are delivering good news for cities and farmers who depend on two major rivers in the southwestern U.S. The headwaters of the Rio Grande and the Pecos River recorded some of the best snowfall in years, resulting in spring runoff that will provide a major boost to reservoirs along the rivers. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File)Low water levels are seen at Elephant Butte Reservoir near Truth or Consequences, N.M., on July 10, 2021. Forecasters with the National Weather Service are delivering good news for cities and farmers who depend on two major rivers in the southwestern U.S. The headwaters of the Rio Grande and the Pecos River recorded some of the best snowfall in years, resulting in spring runoff that will provide a major boost to reservoirs along the rivers. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Federal water managers have more room to breathe this spring as two Southwestern rivers that provide New Mexico and Texas with drinking water and irrigation supplies are seeing the benefits of record snowpack and spring runoff.
Forecasters with the National Weather Service delivered the good news Tuesday for water managers, cities and farmers as federal officials rolled out operating plans for the Rio Grande and the Pecos River.
The mountain ranges in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico that serve as headwaters for the two rivers last winter saw nearly double the snowpack of historic averages, resulting in runoff that will provide a major boost to reservoirs.
And even more of that snowmelt will reach streams and rivers since soil moisture levels were able to recover last summer during what was one of the strongest monsoons the region had seen in 130 years.
“This is really good news for us because one of the big things that’s been killing water supply for the last 10, 15 years is really dry soils soaking up a lot of that runoff before we could ever get any of it. That is not going to be the case nearly as much this year,” said Andrew Mangham, a senior hydrologist with the National Weather Service. “We’re going to have a much more efficient runoff coming out of this.”
The same story is playing out around the West. In California, most of that state’s major reservoirs were filled above their historical averages at the start of spring thanks to one of the massive snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. In neighboring Nevada, the snowfall was so overwhelming that the final day of the high school ski championships had to be cancelled.
Many of the officials gathered for Tuesday’s river briefing were combing their collective memories, trying to recall when they last saw hydrology graphs this favorable.
“We’re in better shape than we’ve been for a real long time,” Mangham said.
New Mexico’s largest cities that rely on diverted water from the San Juan and Chama rivers are expected to get a full allocation this year — the first time since 2019.
The Carlsbad Irrigation District on the southern end of the Pecos River opted to allocate a bit more to farmers this year due to the increased runoff.
“With the snowmelt coming in and still the chance for the monsoon season, things are looking pretty good,” said Coley Burgess, the irrigation district’s manager.
Still, he said farmers have had to be economical about how they use what amounts to just a little over half of a full allotment. Some have left fields unplanted so they can shift their share of water to their best alfalfa crops.
On the Rio Grande, managers say they have enough water stored in Elephant Butte — the largest reservoir in New Mexico — to avoid restrictions that prevent storing water in some upstream reservoirs. Under a water sharing agreement with Colorado and Texas, New Mexico is required to deliver a certain amount to Texas each year.
The states also are tangled up in litigation over management of the Rio Grande that is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. A special master is considering a proposed settlement that would resolve the decade-long fight.
Officials with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in New Mexico said whether the state can keep enough water in Elephant Butte later this year will depend on the monsoon season.
Farmers across southern New Mexico and in West Texas will be crossing their fingers, too.
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a pro-democracy opposition leader in Russia — and my friend. He was arrested in April of last year for “discrediting the armed forces” of Russia. His arrest was apparently triggered by a visit he made to Arizona the previous month during which he simply told the truth.
“The entire world sees what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s regime is doing to Ukraine,” Kara-Murza told members of Arizona’s state legislature. “It bombs civilian areas, hospitals and schools.”
In the months that followed his arrest, the Kremlin piled on. He was also charged with using the funds of an “undesirable organization” — the Washington, D.C. -based NGO “Free Russia Foundation” — to convene a conference in support of Russian political prisoners in Moscow in October 2021. Simultaneously, he was accused of “high treason” because he testified before the Helsinki Commission and the NATO Parliamentary assembly, and for allegedly “consulting foreign special services” for $30,000 a month.
This punishment is much harsher than the ones to which the regime’s vengeance has lately subjected members of the opposition. The two other leading opponents of the Kremlin, Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin, were sentenced to nine years and eight-and-a-half years respectively.
Heightened repression is always a sign of fear. Could Kara-Murza’s punishment have had something to do with the fact that Navalny was sentenced a year ago and Yashin last December, when the war in Ukraine may not have looked to the Kremlin as much of an endless bloody slog as it appears today? And also when its prosecution of the war, while dealing with harsh Western sanctions, was not as much fraught with the possibility of popular discontent over gradual impoverishment and casualties in the hundreds of thousands? It seems that the reason the sentence is so harsh is to scare civil society and preclude any chance of organized resistance.
Even in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, the authorities generally avoided charging dissidents with crimes like “high treason,” most often espionage. (The 1977 case of the Jewish refusenik Anatoly Sharansky was an exception.) As Kara-Murza, whom the Kremlin almost certainly tried to poison twice before, pointed out to the kangaroo court this week, his sentence harkens back not just to Soviet times but to the 1930s Stalinist purges of “enemies of the people.”
Kara-Murza is a Cambridge-trained historian, and he was right. Putin’s regime is descending into Stalinism. Sustained by indiscriminate ruthlessness, such regimes do not “evolve”— witness North Korea or Cuba. They can only be destroyed either by an invasion, like Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or exploded from within by a miraculous leader like Mikhail Gorbachev.
Neither outcome is likely in Russia so long as Putin lives. And so the struggle is very personal now between the two Vladimirs, Putin and Kara-Murza, even biological: Only Putin’s death can free my friend Vladimir. Putin is 70, Kara-Murza is 41. But the effective age gap will narrow steadily as Kara-Murza’s jailers will undoubtedly begin grinding him down from day one.
Yet Kara-Murza was defiant and hopeful even as his sentence came down. “I know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will be gone,” he said in his final statement before the court. “When the war will be called a war, and the usurper [in the Kremlin] will be called a usurper; when those who have ignited this war will be called criminals instead of those who tried to stop it… And then our people will open their eyes and shudder at the sight of the horrific crimes committed in their names.”
And that is how Russia’s road back to the community of civilized states will commence, Kara-Murza told the court. Even as he sat in the steel cage in the courtroom, he said he believed that Russia would travel this road.
“Because,” he concluded, despite everything, “I love my country and I have trust in our people.”
‘Time doesn’t heal’: Ukraine’s war widows count the cost
Jonathan Brown and Elizabeth Striy, in Warsaw – April 17, 2023
Olga Slyshyk began to fear the worst in January this year when her husband, Mykhailo, a military engineer serving on the front line in eastern Ukraine, didn’t contact her on her birthday.
It wasn’t unusual for the 40-year-old trained lawyer to be offline for days at a time, but Slyshyk knew he would reach out — one way or another — on January 14 if he was alive and well.
“I was sure he would call or find some way to congratulate me. But I had had a very bad dream and I already knew something was wrong,” she told AFP in Kyiv wearing black and holding her two-year-old son Viktor.
“On January 15, I found out he had died.”
More than one year after Moscow invaded, Slyshyk is among a growing number of women widowed by Russian forces and left to count the cost of Ukraine’s determination to hold out and push Moscow’s invasion back.
Neither side has disclosed the exact figures of troops killed, though recently leaked US intelligence documents suggest as many as 17,500 Ukrainian servicemen have been lost.
Slyshyk said a social media group for war widows she joined had more than 300 members after her husband was killed defending Soledar in the eastern Donetsk region, but it had doubled in size since.
– ‘You learn to live with it’ –
President Volodymyr Zelensky last August hosted widows and their children at an honours ceremony to reassure next of kin their loved ones’ sacrifice had not been in vain.
“They will remain forever at battle. But they live on in the memory of their relatives,” he said, greeting mourning women and their children one by one.
Thirty-year-old Slyshyk, who was born in Mariupol — a port city besieged and captured by Russian forces last spring — said she often evokes the memory of her killed husband.
“All the time. Both in my head and aloud. I’ll be unable to open a tin can, weeping from frustration, and I cry out: ‘Misha, I’m not even able to do this’ and then suddenly, it opens.”
Daria Mazur, 41, said she learned of her husband’s death in 2014 from graphic pictures of his bloodied corpse published on Russian media after fierce fighting with Kremlin-backed separatists.
He was killed while withdrawing from Ilovaisk, an infamous and costly chapter of the conflict for Ukraine that saw hundreds killed that August as Kyiv troops pulled back in the face of advancing pro-Russian forces.
“Time does not heal. You just get used to it. You accept it. You learn to live with it. And that pain just becomes a part of you,” she told AFP in her kitchen in Kyiv, next to pictures showing her husband smiling with their child in his arms.
They met on a beach in2006, fell in love and married in 2010 in the southern region of Kherson, where Mazur fled from when Russia invaded last February. Her home town is currently occupied by Russian forces.
She said her final conversations with her husband, Pavlo, who was 30 when he was killed, betrayed a sense of foreboding. He knew the situation was precarious.
“He told me: ‘please promise me that no matter what happens to me, you will be happy,'” she recounted to AFP.
– ‘I need you by my side’ –
“These guys are giving their lives so we can live on,” she added, referring to Ukrainian servicemen fighting now.
It was precisely this need to go on that pushed Oksana Borkun, who also lost her husband to the Russian invasion, to create “We Have to Live,” an organisation that supports widows — the same group that Slyshyk joined.
Borkun said that while the government offers financial and psychological support, she wanted to go a step further.
“The girls face a huge amount of pain. You can say it’s possible to go crazy from it. Life is going on around you, and you want to talk to those who understand.”
The organisation gathers money for widows, offers logistical and moral support, too, but chiefly it provides a platform — mainly online — for already nearly one thousand widows country-wide to share.
For Slyshyk, her husband’s family has proven a stronger pillar of support than her own.
Her mother, who is also a widow of two years, lives in Donetsk, a pro-Russian stronghold city captured by separatists in 2014 and does not support Ukraine in the war.
The fact they have both lost their husbands has not brought them together, she said.
Months after Mykhailo’s death, Slyshyk is torn when weighing whether his sacrifice was worth it.
“He said he was going there for me and Viktor,” she recounted, explaining her husband believed Ukraine had no choice but to fight back and win.
“But if you want me to be safe, to be ok, I need you by my side, not somewhere else,” she added, swallowing back tears.
Ex-Navy Officer Reportedly Probed for Amplifying Pentagon Leak to Russian Channels
Josh Fiallo – April 17, 2023
Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters
The feds are reportedly probing a former U.S. Navy non-commissioned officer who’s accused of overseeing a prominent Russian propaganda account that made leaked documents from the Pentagon go viral this month.
Sarah Bils, 37, was unmasked this weekend as being behind the online persona “Donbass Devushka”—which roughly translates to “Donbass Girl”—despite her being a New Jersey native who lives in Washington state.
Two U.S. defense officials told United States Naval Institute News that Bils is now being probed for potentially sharing four classified docs—allegedly leaked initially by Massachusetts Air Guardsman Jack Teixeira, who was arrested last week—to Donbass Devushka’s 65,000-plus followers on Telegram.
Exact details on the probe—and potential charges for Bils—have not been released.
A Navy biography for Bils says she was an aviation electronics technician who worked out of Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state until November 2022. Speaking from her home, she admitted to The Wall Street Journal that she’s partially behind the Donbass Devushka network, which describes itself on its social media pages—including Twitter, Telegram and YouTube—as engaging in “Russian–style information warfare.”
But Bils told the paper she’s just one of 15 people “all over the world” with access to the propaganda accounts, maintaining that she wasn’t the administrator who posted the classified U.S. intel. Instead, she claims she was the admin who eventually deleted the posts.
The leaked docs quickly went viral in Russia after they were posted by Donbass Devushka on April 5, the Journal reported, with “several large Russian social-media accounts” picking up the documents and reposting. The channel’s posts with the classified documents remained online for days.
“Some very interesting potential intel,” the Telegram channel for Donbass Devushka posted with screenshots of the documents. “The authenticity cannot be confirmed but looks to be very damning nato information.”
It was the virality of this post that alerted U.S. authorities that classified intel was compromised. Previously, Teixeira, 21, had been posting other classified documents to a private Discord channel for months but the docs never went public, group members told The Washington Post.
Bils said she never used her position in the Navy to leak classified intel and that she didn’t work with Teixeira, telling the Journal, “I obviously know the gravity of top-secret classified materials. We didn’t leak them.”
The military and Justice Department have not made a public statement about Bils and her alleged role in amplifying the leak. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Journal that the military has ordered a review of intelligence access, accountability, and control procedures to nix future leakers.
Teixeira has been charged with unauthorized detention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal of classified information and defense materials. The feds allege that he shared classified information on social media starting in December.
Members of Teixeira’s Discord channel told the Post that he shared screenshots of battlefield conditions in Ukraine, highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes, and vivid details on troop movements within Ukraine.
The Donbass Devushka network has basked in the aftermath of this month’s leaks—gaining thousands of new followers. Those new to its multiple social media pages were met with posts advertising pro-Russia merchandise and a promise that proceeds would go to the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian military.
The Journal reported that Bils was honorably discharged from the military in November after a “significant demotion.” Bils told reporters that she’d left the Navy because she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and that she has “some” Russian heritage.
On a podcast that shares the same name as her popular Telegram channel, Bils spoke with a “slight Russian accent,” the Journal reported—an accent other outlets have described as being “phony.” She also posed as being a woman from the Donbas region of Ukraine, one of the bloodiest areas of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Bils told the Journal her old gig gave her clearance to view top-secret information but that she no longer has that access.
“I don’t even know the authenticity of the documents or what they say,” she told the Journal about the leaked intel shared on her page. “I am not very well versed in reading documents like that.”
One of the most prolific pro-Russia propaganda channels is run by a US Navy veteran living in Washington
Hannah Getahun – April 16, 2023
US Navy sailors lining up on the USS Carl Vinson.Getty Images
A popular pro-Russia social-media account is run by a Navy veteran, per reports.
Donbass Devushka, whose real name is Sarah Bils, previously claimed to be from Eastern Europe.
The account helped to spread the leaked Pentagon documents that were posted on Discord.
A social-media account that spread misinformation about the war in Ukraine and pro-Russian war talking points was created by former US Navy non-commissioned officer, The Wall Street Journal confirmed in an exclusive interview.
Sarah Bils is a 37-year-old woman in Oak Harbor, Washington, who served at the US Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island until November of 2022, online Navy records show. Bils’ identity was first uncovered by users on Twitter and Reddit, and first reported by an advocacy site mainly posting about the war known as Malcontent News.
Online, however, Bils goes by the name Donbass Devushka, and her account sometimes posts graphic images of the fighting, praises the brutal wing of the Russian military known as the Wagner group, and sometimes celebrates the death of Ukrainian fighters.
Bils told the Journal that 15 other people help her run the account.
The persona has a YouTube channel, a Twitter, and a Spotify podcast with tens of thousands of followers. On the podcast, Bils, who in previous posts claimed to be from Eastern Europe, appears to put on a phony accent.
On the bio of her Telegram — from which she posts dozens of times a day — Bils says the account is “Russian-style information warfare” that’s “Bringing the multipolar world together.” The account, ironically, once posted a screenshot of the popular meme reading “I’ll serve crack before I serve this country” — meant to signify that someone would never join the US military.
The Telegram account was also recently associated with helping to spread four images of the dozens of leaked US intelligence documents that appeared on a Discord server called Thug Shaker Central. Many of these documents contained information on US intelligence gathering on the war in Ukraine. Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old junior-ranking US National Guard airman, was arrested on Thursday and charged on Friday with possessing classified documents pertaining to national security, and possessing national defense materials.
Bils, who had secret security clearances while serving, told the Journal she did not help to leak the documents. The Journal also noted that the documents posted on her channel were altered versions of the Discord documents, but Bils denied that her team had altered them.
“I obviously know the gravity of top-secret classified materials,” she told the publication.
The documents are no longer on the account, but the Donbass Devushka Telegram channel shared a theory on April 13 that the leaks were actually an intentional effort from US intelligence officials and that Teixeira unknowingly carried out their plan.
Insider reached out to emails associated with Donbass Devushka and Bils but did not immediately receive a response.
The US Navy did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Correction: April 17, 2023 — An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Bils’ position in the Navy. She was a noncommissioned officer, not a commissioned officer.
