Alaska Official Sends BDSM-Themed Letter To Feds: 'We’re The Sub To EPA’s Dom’

Jason Brune invoked kinky sex to make a point about how he views power dynamics between his state and the federal government.
In case you were curious, Alaska's safe word with the Environmental Protection Agency is "court."
In case you were curious, Alaska's safe word with the Environmental Protection Agency is "court."
Moussa81 via Getty Images/iStockphoto

A high-ranking Alaska environmental official invoked kinky sex to make a point about how he views power dynamics between his state and the federal government under the Biden administration.

In a fiery letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan, Jason Brune, the commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, repeatedly referenced BDSM play and tools — whips, handcuffs, chains, puppets, safe words and more — and lamented that Alaska had become “the sub to EPA’s Dom.”

“BDSM,” which stands for bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism, is a type of consensual sex play that often involves power dynamics, role-playing, restraints and other equipment.

“EPA engages with Alaska belatedly or not at all and speaks in the language of threats, mandates, whips, and handcuffs — State protections be damned!” Brune wrote. “In short? We’re the sub to EPA’s Dom. Wildly inappropriate. Disturbingly, EPA’s latest rule (Tribal Baselines) is only the latest in a chain of denigrating actions taken by EPA.”

The letter, dated May 31, was submitted as an official comment to EPA’s proposed rule to extend federal water quality protections to tribal waters.

Brune, who is second in line to Republican Gov. Michael Dunleavy, accused the EPA of “an alarming lack of understanding of Alaska and a severely distorted perception of the proper role of a federal agency in a democratic republic.”

“The Clean Water Act calls for a cooperative federalism approach, which means ‘a partnership between the States and the Federal Government’ where States take a ‘primary’ role and EPA, a ‘secondary,’” he wrote. “After over two years of interaction with the Biden EPA, however, EPA’s worldview is clear: EPA gets to play Congress, crafting rules of national applicability and leaving the details to be filled in later. And the Great State of Alaska? We’re a puppet, a servant, subordinate to EPA.”

Brune went on to condemn other EPA actions under President Joe Biden, describing the agency’s modus operandi as “Raise the whip…and make States submit.”

“EPA has perverted the role of partnership into something almost too inappropriate to say out loud,” he wrote. “Our only safeword? Sadly: ‘court.’”

Brune’s letter came less than a week after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sackett v. EPA, which gutted EPA’s regulatory authority over at least 59 million acres of wetlands across the U.S., according to an estimate by the environmental group Earthjustice.

Now that Sackett has been issued, EPA’s masochistic streak should be satiated,” Brune wrote. “Going forward, we hope to cultivate a relationship that might one day be described in more wholesome terms.”

For more information on BDSM and expert tips for those interested in getting started, click here.

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