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May 16, 2025

The Eyes, The Shackles, The Gun

They're laying the tracks in broad daylight. They have dispensed with the curtain and no longer whisper in secrecy. From here on out, it’s just shovels, steam, and the grinning calm of men who know they can’t be stopped. ICE, under the second coming of Trump, has begun outfitting the country like a cattle pen, and they say it’s just for the immigrants. Just for the ones who crossed some line in the dirt drawn by men who never even considered sharing the field. The lie wears thin with repetition. Yet, still they say it.

What they don’t say is that this system is already being built. DOGE, the absurd acronym masking the cruelty of its function, is creating an integrated surveillance apparatus designed to track immigrants, documented or not, in near real-time. According to Wired, DOGE is sweeping data from across the federal government: Social Security, IRS files, Homeland Security databases, and even state voter rolls from Pennsylvania and Florida. This information is being fed into USCIS’s internal databases to create a centralized hub of biometric, legal, and behavioral profiles. A living, breathing archive of people they can find, freeze, or discard at will.

These chucklefucks aren’t even pretending this is about crime prevention. The intent, explicitly stated, is to create economic and logistical pressure until the monitored individuals ‘self-deport.’ Which means the goal isn’t justice, it’s attrition. The creation of a digital border wall around every living room and job site in the country. And when you build that kind of dragnet, you don’t stop at the edge of citizenship. You keep going, because the machine doesn’t know the difference and it doesn’t care. It only knows how to watch. That is its function, and that is what keeps the lights on. The more people it watches, the more money it makes. The more control it grants to the ones pulling the levers.

They're swapping jail bars for digital tethers, but the principle is unchanged: The future of confinement will be constant and quiet. Phones that report your every shiver. Ankle bracelets that don’t jingle but hum. A body tagged like livestock, blinking on a screen in some windowless office halfway across the country. Not criminals or suspects. Just poor folk trying to survive the century. Now they, and soon all of us, will be blips in a system built to outlive the Constitution. And this system, they say, will only ever be used for ‘the others’.

History spits on that idea. Every tool of control, once forged, finds new hands to swing it and new targets to persecute. First the foreigner, then the agitator, then the journalist, then the schoolteacher with an opinion too big for her classroom. The map is written in dust and it always shifts inward. The surveillance is the dry run. The detention flights are the proof of concept. Guantánamo. Tecoluca. Names meant to stay out of your mouth unless you’ve got clearance, but they’re taking people there now. For now it is a bunch of verifiably innocent immigrants. But soon it will be Green card holders. Mothers. Musicians. You, or someone you know. That’s not prophecy. It’s the flight manifest.

This is not some paranoid dream of jackboots and torchlight. It’s the kind of tyranny that files its reports on time and knows how to fill out a personnel form. This is a gulag, not a camp. A camp is a place of smoke and finality. A gulag is the slow choke, the bureaucrat’s torture, the indefinite wait. You don’t get executed. You get misplaced. Misfiled. You get swept under so thoroughly even your absence starts to feel polite.

They are trying to create a global network of such places without us noticing. There’s CECOT, of course. A mega-facility designed for indefinite confinement. Many were removed under the Alien Enemies Act, denied hearings, and dumped into a black site with no lawyers, no contact, no clock. Legal challenges have since confirmed they were entitled to individualized hearings or guilty of nothing at all. They shipped them anyway.

Others were told they’d be sent to Libya. They were held on the tarmac of a Texas military airfield for hours, some coerced into signing their own removal under duress. Libya, where detainees routinely face torture, rape, and starvation. Where there is no functioning legal system. Just cages and uniforms and the permission to disappear.

Guantánamo, too, is expanding. Tens of thousands of beds are planned. Not for captured combatants. For immigrants. A new architecture of exile, backed by executive order, built on an island meant to stay off the books.

This is the infrastructure of total control. A global gulag, exported and enforced, with the United States as administrator and enforcer. The goal is not just to remove people, but to erase them.

And dissent is just a clerical issue now. This week, the Trump administration reminded the country that the intelligence community is no longer a place for intelligence. Officers Mike Collins and Maria Langan-Riekhof were dismissed. But not for misconduct or leaking secrets. They didn’t betray their oaths. In fact, it was the opposite. They were fired for doing their jobs and upholding their oaths. These two officers put to paper the inconvenient observation that Venezuela’s immigrants aren’t an invading criminal horde. That the justification for mass deportation was stitched together with television static and fear. They wrote what the data showed. They were punished for not towing the line.

In this autocratic system, truth is no longer a finding, it’s a threat. To fire an apolitical analyst for contradicting the preferred storyline is to say that no one inside the machine is safe unless they parrot the myth. It turns every fact-gatherer into a propagandist or a potential target. It hollows out the whole purpose of intelligence work, which was never meant to flatter the throne. Once they start purging the people who speak plainly, they are not gathering intelligence anymore. They are staging a performance. In this pageant of control, every report ends in applause, and the curtain never lifts far enough to see the monsters behind it.

And what is behind it all? The great blueprint: Project 2025. A stack of papers heavier than the Bill of Rights and written with the certainty of kings. Not some mere whisper of policy. An instruction manual for regime change. The Heritage Foundation, among other architects, lays it out plainly: eliminate the Department of Justice’s independence, replace agency heads with political loyalists from day one, and give the president the unchecked ability to direct federal law enforcement at will.

One of the plan’s most radical proposals is to centralize control of local and state law enforcement through the DOJ, empowering the president to override local jurisdictions and deploy force as needed. In practice, this would mean the executive branch could commandeer police departments in cities deemed politically noncompliant, reroute investigations into allies, and suppress protests with federalized officers. The report argues that consent decrees, federal oversight agreements used to reform abusive police departments, “undermine law enforcement morale” and should be abolished. In their place: an emboldened, unrestrained police state, answerable not to courts or communities, but to the Oval Office.

In plain terms: Project 2025 is a scaffold for autocracy. It lays out, step by step, how to dismantle constitutional firewalls, starting with law enforcement. According to the Phoenix New Times, the plan envisions the president personally appointing U.S. attorneys committed to "reforming" law enforcement. Not through accountability, but through obedience. It would allow mass deputizing of local police as federal agents during times of “unrest”. Which is language that, under a Trump regime, could mean any demonstration he doesn't like. Or perhaps a particularly rowdy Bruce Springsteen concert.

This breaks the balance of powers. It builds a new one scaffold where the president not only interprets the law but commands its enforcers directly, with no state, city, or court able to intervene.

And like all empires, it begins with a border. Because immigration gives them the excuse. The invader myth justifies the army. Once the machinery is built, it’s too tempting to keep it idle. First it tracks the migrant, then the dissident, then the citizen who stands too long at the wrong rally. It’s trial run after trial run, each more confident than the last.

There is no subtlety here. No quiet reshaping. Just the full weight of the state bending into form. The leash has been clipped and now it’s only a question of where they pull first. This isn’t about immigration. It never was. It’s about control. The machinery doesn’t sleep, it eats. Constantly.

Now Hiring: Civilian Mercenaries and the Coming Crackdown

RedBalloon isn’t a job board. It’s a sorting hat for the authoritarian workforce. Billed as a “pro-freedom” alternative to mainstream hiring platforms, RedBalloon was founded by Andrew Crapuchettes, a man who claims he was purged from corporate America for being too Christian and too conservative. So he built his own perverse sandbox. One where companies can say out loud what they used to whisper behind HR doors: they want culture warriors, not co-workers.

The site is packed with job postings for people who think COVID was a hoax, DEI is communism, and diversity is a liability. But one post in particular stands out: a “Law Enforcement Talent Network” ad written so vaguely it only makes sense if you already know what it's about. It asks if you’re a former officer looking to “come out of retirement to help secure the nation.” It promises a chance to be “handpicked” by the Trump administration. It talks about “opportunities nationwide” for people willing to stand up for “freedom.” And it never, not once, mentions any actual police department, agency, or role. Because it isn’t recruiting for a job. It’s assembling a force.

And not a small one. The posting outlines a goal of recruiting over 100,000 officers into what it calls “agencies across the country”. That is not a hiring drive. It’s a mobilization. Combine that with Trump’s current push under Project Homecoming and the message is clear: they aren’t preparing for enforcement. They are getting ready for occupation.

Tom Homan, acting direction of ICE, didn’t mince words. When asked on national television if the Trump team plans to arrest leaders of sanctuary cities, he smirked and said, “Wait until you see what’s coming.” Not ‘we’ll work within the law.’ Not ‘we’ll coordinate with local governments.’ Just a thinly veiled threat. Now they’re building the force to make good on it.

What Law Enforcement Today and RedBalloon are really offering is pre-registration for a political loyalty program. A Rolodex of deputies in waiting. As this Redditter points out, this isn’t about “job placement”, it’s about building an enforcement network parallel to traditional law enforcement. One loyal not to law or community, but to a singular political agenda. Think Project Homecoming. Think ICE with even fewer rules and oversight but with more guns. Think the early groundwork of something that looks less like public safety and more like private vengeance with a tin badge.

They aren’t hiding it. They are counting on you not paying attention. But when the day comes to deputize civilians and repurpose sheriffs into stormtroopers, this is where they’ll look first.

You don’t post a job ad for a militia by mistake.

And you certainly don’t do it through a media outlet. Unless the media outlet isn’t really just a media outlet anymore. Law Enforcement Today, the organization behind the listing, bills itself as the largest police-owned news outlet in the country. But since being acquired by Kyle Reyes and The 1776 Project, it's become something else entirely: a staging ground for cultural warfare dressed up as journalism. Reyes, who also founded a conservative marketing agency ‘Silent Partner’. He has openly used LET to push back against “woke” institutions and build out an audience of politically aligned law enforcement hardliners.

There is not a lot of reporting that I have been able to find on this organization, perhaps because it is relatively niche and caters to a very specific audience. Given that they are attempting to build an army via database of explicitly pro MAGA loyalists, it is worth considering

So when LET announces it’s looking for 100,000 officers, it raises a question: why is a media company acting like a federal recruiter, seemingly making promises directly in Trump’s stead? The answer is that it isn’t hiring, it’s curating. It’s not placing people into existing roles, it’s building a list. A ready-made, ideologically vetted registry of “officers” who will say yes when called. The job listing isn’t connected to any city or agency because it’s not about jobs. It’s about infrastructure and leverage. And when Project Homecoming demands foot soldiers or when Trump and Homan need someone to knock on the door of a sanctuary city mayor it will be LET and RedBalloon who hand them the names.

This is enforcement as ideology. It’s propaganda that recruits. As we inch closer to the end of Yarvin’s butterfly revolution, when the loyalists are turned out onto the streets to enforce the regimes policies, this is the pipeline from which the sludge will spew.

American Decline Is Now a Double Feature

Let’s see here… what else… oh yes. Just when you thought the bottom had dropped out they start drilling out the floor.

Trump’s DHS is cooking up a reality show where desperate immigrants battle each other for the honor of licking the boot of American citizenship and our air traffic control systems are collapsing like a dollar store patio set in a hailstorm. That’s where we’re at now. One part dystopia, one part parody, equal parts fucked.

Let’s start with the formally friendly, now dystopian skies;. Two ATC outages in a single week. New York’s JFK. Then Fort Lauderdale. And let’s not forget Denver. These are among the busiest airports in the country. Pilots are flying blind, coordinating landings like it's a CB radio trucker movie from 1974. Planes stacked like pancakes because the screens went dark. We’ve got a trillion-dollar defense budget bu can’t keep the lights on in the control tower. But sure, let’s spend another billion tracking ankle monitors for migrant toddlers. That’s definitely where the priority should be.

And now, for the parody of the year: the Department of Homeland Security, with a straight face, is in talks to produce a reality show where immigrants “compete” for U.S. citizenship. Squid Games on ICE. Hosted by Kristi Noem, of course. This woman whose resume includes killing a puppy and failing basic ethics, this little project is part The Apprentice, part Hunger Games, and somehow still worse than both. Instead of dignity or due process, we’re getting camera angles and confessionals. Want a green card? Smile for the drone footage. Maybe dodge a few Border Patrol quads while you’re at it. What the fuck is this, anyway? American Gladiators where hispanic mothers try to dodge rubber bullets from BPC agents in sparkly leotards?

This is the America they are building. Infrastructure that crumbles on contact, and a government that treats life-or-death rights like a cheap dating show. We used to at least pretend to have institutions. Now we have producers.

And just to make sure everyone’s in on the joke, these disasters are happening at the same time. While one branch of government turns immigrants into contestants, another can’t even manage to keep aircraft from pancaking into each other. But don’t worry, somewhere, Tom Homan is drawing up arrest warrants for mayors or governors who still give a damn about the constitution and rule of law.

You can’t satirize this anymore. You just describe it and people assume it’s satire. I’m not being funny.

We are a collapsed empire held together with zip ties, boot polish and grip tape.

Final Thoughts

There is a reason that they have stopped pretending. Pretending takes effort. Pretending means you still believe someone is watching. I means that there is a line, or a limit, or a public you still fear enough to lie to. We are way past that now.

We are being governed by people who no longer need or seek your consent. All they need is your location. They don’t make policy; they make architecture. Black sites. Loyalty databases. Surveillance grids dressed in the language of safety and order. And if you say something, if you publish a memo, if you give the wrong interview, post something anti-trump or go to an anti-genocide rally? You get erased.

They aren’t hiding the blueprint. They’re printing it right there on the Whitehouse letterhead.

The surveillance is already here. The camps are already open. The list of “officers” is already growing. And while half the country laughs off the news about game show citizenship like it’s a weird late-night SNL sketch, the machinery is continually present. Silent, constant and efficient.