A Day Late And A Dollar Short

June 17, 2025

They’re Coming Right For Us!

Consistently, my drum beat has been that the next wave of violence won’t arrive strictly as a command. It will arrive as a rhythm or tone. It rides in on specific patterns of speech rehearsed so often it no longer needs words. While there will eventually be that Yarvinesque call to arms moment. It is this build up of cues, dropped as subtle as a flaming bag of shit on your porch that lay the groundwork.

Take for instance this woman in Florida was happily filming herself thanking “Daddy DeSantis” for what she described as legalizing “car bowling.” Not coyly, either. The wink has become a glare. Of course, she is talking about driving into a crowd of protesters and getting away with it. She was smiling when she said it.

Because she wasn’t wrong.

In 2021, DeSantis signed Florida’s “Combatting Public Disorder” Act, which includes legal immunity for drivers who hit protesters blocking a road. Later, he spelled it out even more clearly: if a “mob surrounds your vehicle,” you can plow through it. “That is not going to end with you being prosecuted.” The law doesn’t require proof of actual danger. It just needs you to say you felt scared.

This is where we are now. They are designing laws that treat perceived fear as a defense for vehicular assault, so long as the people you're afraid of are politically inconvenient.

We’ve gone from Spinal Tap to South Park.

For those not familiar; ‘He’s coming right for us!’ was an oft quoted line from South Park, Season 1. Basically, Uncle Jimbo took these kids out hunting and they wanted to circumvent laws that kept them from shooting certain animals. So, every time the hunters wanted to shoot something they weren’t supposed to, they’d yell it. It became a running gag as they obliterated a rabbit, a bear or a deer that blinked funny.

They shot anything that moved and it didn’t matter what it was doing because once they said those magic words, it was open season. At that time, it was parody and was meant to mock the absurdity of “I feared for my life” as a legal shield.

But it’s not a joke or a meme anymore. It’s not even a metaphor. That woman laughing about “car bowling” is hard to shake. Not because it’s surprising, but because it’s exactly what we’ve built. The state send out official signals that some people are ‘fair game’. The movement repeats it and the pundits laugh about it, then base absorbs it.

And eventually, someone acts.

This is not random or unforeseeable. It’s called stochastic violence. And it’s not just some vague academic term.

Here’s the plain version: Stochastic violence is what happens when people with massive platforms, power, or prestige routinely describe certain groups as dangerous, subhuman, corrupt, or evil. They do this specifically while knowing that at least some portion of their audience will take that as a tacit cue to commit violence. It doesn’t require coordination or conspiracy. And it doesn’t require a chain of command. It only needs a steady, public narrative that implies: something must be done.

Trump has been doing this for a decade.

He does it from the stage. He does it from the teleprompter. He does it from the golf cart and the tarmac and the courthouse steps. He understands exactly who and what his audience is. And he speaks directly to the part of it that hears things on a different frequency.

That’s what makes this man more than recklessness. He isn’t just a man with poor impulse control. He is a man with a platform, a cult-like following, and a known habit of doubling down when he sees violence emerging on his behalf. Any responsible person with that kind of influence would do the opposite. They’d walk it back. Clarif and disavow. When they see flashes of insanity in the crowd, they aim their words at putting the brakes on.

Trump does the opposite. Every. Time.

When he sees someone frothing at the mouth, he stokes it. He catches that rabid foam in a cup and drinks it up. He gets drunk on it. When he sees violence that vaguely resembles what he wants, he celebrates it. And when it escalates, he raises the stakes.

He’s famous for saying he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose support. That was always presented as a hypothetical. But the part that should’ve made people pause wasn’t the gun, it was the certainty. The unshakable confidence that no matter what he did, his followers wouldn’t blink.

He might still try that. I don’t know if he could truly get away with it or not. But I do know this: he doesn’t need to.

What he can get away with every day, is this:

He can say that “Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind.”
That they “hate our country.”
That they “actually want to destroy our cities.”

He can say that just days after the political murder of 2 democratic lawmakers at the hands of a MAGA zealot.

He can say that they are pedophiles, traitors, and criminals.
That something must be done.
And then, almost as a casual afterthought, he adds:
“Oh, by the way, they’re standing in the middle of 5th Avenue right now. Just looking evil. Planning something. You can tell.”

Everyone paying attention knows exactly what that’s doing.

This isn’t theoretical or literary. It’s strategic and everyone on the right pretending to be horrified by the results should be laughed out of the room. No one with a microphone and a mass audience can plead ignorance. Parasocial dynamics are real. They are measurable. We know that millions of people treat Trump like he’s a family member, a prophet, a father figure, or a war general. And in a group that large, some percentage of them will act. Every time.

Responsible people mitigate that. They aim their words to de-escalate, knowing someone unstable is always listening. But Trump? Trump does the opposite. He keeps feeding the crazy because the crazy claps the loudest.

This is stochastic terrorism. Every day. In every rally. Every post. Every speech where he calls his enemies sick, says they must be stopped, and leaves just enough unsaid to keep it technically legal. I don’t know if this is a prosecutable crime. I don’t know what statute it would fall under. I’ve tried to look it up but it’s complicated. But I do know what it is and I can see clearly that is what they are doing.

When people like that woman in Florida laugh about hitting protesters, they’re not just responding to policy, they’re following a script.

The laws are one part. The message is the other.

And the next scene will begin the same way:

“They’re coming right for us.”

And here is what I want you to understand, very clearly.

They are coming right for us.

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Broke ICE Goes For Broke

While the movement trains its base with memes, dog whistles and not so subtle nods of approval, the state is busy editing its own highlight reel. ICE, an agency that was already bloated with post-9/11 cash and unchecked power, is now blowing through its fiscal ceiling going more than $1 billion over budget this year. And they’ve decided the best use of dwindling public money is to film themselves.

Specifically, they are making flashy hype videos that have a very specific message.

One of them, circulated across social media this week, opens like a recruitment ad. Throbbing music, jump cuts of men in fatigues pushing protesters to the ground, drone footage of tactical rollouts, and a looping hook behind it all: “Ready or not, here I come.” Ironically, a song by the band The Fugeees. As in ‘Refugees’ again and again. I believe this is meant to be taken literally as a threat and a promise.

Importantly, it’s not footage of immigration enforcement or raids. They aren’t showing footage purporting to be of dangerous gang interdiction. It’s quick cuts of bystanders laughing at them and then a shot of them firing tear gas. It’s a shot of a guy on a motorcycle flipping them the bird and then a shot of fully masked up fully armed squadrons of agents meeting aggressive protesters on the front line. This is a hype video of ICE engaging in protest suppression.

Specifically, domestic, public-facing protest suppression. Filmed, edited, and scored like a commercial for war except the war is happening in your city, and the enemy is anyone holding a sign.

That’s where their bloated and over saturated budget went.

It didn’t go to audits or oversight. Or, god forbid, training to reduce harm. It didn’t go to community relations, or internal reforms, or better technology. It went to a camera crew and a soundtrack. Because ICE doesn’t exist to serve anymore. It exists to perform and theatrics are their currency. The fiscal cliff it’s about to drive off is irrelevant because the agency is no longer measured by function. It’s measured by fear.

If you've been reading, this shouldn’t surprise you. The federal enforcement structure consisting of ICE, CBP, fusion centers, surveillance contractors and more isn’t spiraling out of control. It’s consolidating its identity. The days of “immigration enforcement” as a fig leaf are over. This is a domestic political army now. It goes where the enemies are said to be. And it films the whole thing. With Dr. Phil riding along as a mascot. I wish I was kidding.

They’re not hunting criminals. They’re building a mythos.

That ICE is over budget isn’t a failure of logistics, it’s a flex. It’s proof that they’re needed, they’ll say. It’s “proof” that the “enemy” is overwhelming, ever-growing, and worthy of blank checks. The image of a bankrupt agency burning gas on promotional edits doesn’t embarrass them, it energizes them. They’re not chasing solvency. They’re chasing narrative.

And it’s working.

People see the videos. They see the uniforms. The flashing lights. The soundtracked chaos. They see those men dragging bodies across pavement to the words “Ready or not, here I come”, and something deep inside them, the same something that Trump speaks to, lights up.

This is the machine that we were told to rage against. Culture feeding the state. The state feeding culture. Both trained to see protest not as speech, but as insurgency.

You might ask what comes next. But you already know.

A government agency $1 billion over budget won’t tighten its belt. It will simply justify its appetite. And if protests aren’t happening fast enough, it’ll find another reason to roll. Or it will take film from a previous year’s violence and label it fresh. Or slap a new name on the next crowd.

Don’t be surprised if you see yourself in the background or the star of the next trailer.

They’re coming right for us. Now with a film crew and a soundtrack.

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Persistent AI surveillance and suppression on the Horizon

You might remember the last time I wrote about drones, it was beneath the sound of armored vehicles circling the Capitol while Trump signed an executive order dressed up like a logistics memo. The goal is simple: normalize domestic drone presence. Strip away friction. Make autonomy the default. Make oversight obsolete. And above all, build an industry large enough that even if the public turns against it, the government can’t afford to.

What that order laid out in it’s blase passive voice and regulatory jargon is now taking human form. Four of Silicon Valley’s senior-most figures; Shyam Sankar from Palantir, Andrew Bosworth from Meta, Kevin Weil and Bob McGrew from OpenAI have been sworn in as lieutenant colonels in the U.S. Army Reserve. They will serve as part of Detachment 201, a unit explicitly created to bring private-sector executives into military command structures. They’re not contractors or consultants, They are uniformed officers, sworn in by the Army, tasked with integrating and scaling commercial technology, AI included (of course, if not primary) into defense operations.

This is not a coincidence. It’s a continuation and an escalation.

Sankar helped build Palantir’s predictive policing infrastructure. Which you will notice a note below the break on that link where Palantir prefers to call it “Optimizing Resource Allocating” rather than “Predictive Policing”, but a fascist rose by any other name, I suppose. Bosworth manages the augmented reality division that’s already tied into U.S. military training programs. Weil and McGrew oversaw OpenAI’s product lines during the very moment the company positioned itself as a dual-use general intelligence firm selling safety on one side, and scale on the other. These are not apolitical engineers. These are men who understand exactly how the technologies they build slot into systems of surveillance, control, and force.

And now they have military rank.

That is a crucial point.

They aren't being brought in simply as ‘civilian resources’. They aren't ‘outside experts’ advising from the margins. They're inside the chain of command. When these men speak in a briefing room, they speak not just as developers or technologists but as military officers. Their decisions, recommendations, and frameworks now carry the institutional weight of military authority. That changes the stakes and it changes how their proposals are received. It also changes who gets to question them.

It changes accountability. As civilian advisors, they might be held to disclosure standards, lobbying restrictions or public transparency rules. But inside the uniform, they become insulated by military privilege. They operate within a culture that defaults to secrecy and defers to rank. If something goes wrong, it will be harder to trace, harder to challenge and nearly impossible to stop.

Let’s not forget what these particular companies have built. Palantir’s Gotham system has already been used in counterterrorism and domestic policing. Meta has tested facial recognition tools and built behavioral prediction engines that feed moderation and engagement strategies. OpenAI has scaled language models capable of generating, filtering, and parsing enormous volumes of communication in real time.

These are not neutral tools. They are systems of influence and assessment which are now welded directly into a military machine.

I want you to remember the language from that drone order. “Beyond Visual Line of Sight.” “Expedited approvals.” “Public safety applications.” I said then that the drones were already here. What’s being built now is the ideological runway. The institutional glue. The command culture that teaches the military how to talk like a tech firm, and teaches tech firms how to think like an occupying force.

This is a fusing of doctrine. Important if you happen to be following the technocratic playbook of Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel who want nothing more than an AI run techno-authoritarian state.

Detachment 201 isn’t some charm offensive meant to woo tech giants. It’s a framework that grants Silicon Valley actors the ability to shape procurement pipelines, advise on surveillance rollouts, and embed their systems into federal deployments. Not from the outside, but from within. This isn’t lobbying, it’s inscription. It ensures that the next round of protests won’t just be monitored by predictive algorithms, they will be defined by them. Flagged, tagged, routed, suppressed. And not because someone decided you were dangerous, but because the machine labeled you anomalous.

That’s the promise underneath all this: not precision, but inevitability. Not accountability, but automation. The only human component left is how fast the loop closes between data collection and action. And for that, the system now has colonels.

We have entered the doctrine phase. The part where repression isn’t just legislated or imagined. Instead, it’s modeled, iterated, and scaled.

The drone memorandum wasn’t the end of a process. It was the greenlight.
And now they are building the command deck.

They’re coming right for us, but now they have clearance.

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Obedience as Ideology

The person giving that clearance is the one who’s waited his whole life to be saluted without question. And he isn’t hiding what he wants. Trump doesn’t really speak in euphemism. When he said that his best friend Jeffery Epstein likes young girls, he wasn’t lying. Do you think he was lying when he said, plainly, that he wishes his generals were more like Hitler’s. He has also said that he wants “his people” to love him like North Koreans love Kim Jong-un. This isn’t a performance. It’s a wishlist. He’s describing a command structure built on absolute loyalty, not law.

Trump has never cared whether his directives are constitutional, only whether they’re obeyed without question. His goal is not authority that flows through the rule of law, but allegiance that circumvents it. Every drone policy, every AI deployment, every uniformed executive integration is another rung on the scaffolding. A framework for a future in which orders are not questioned, and dissent is not only brutally punished, but preempted.

That’s the psychology being constructed: not just one of fear, but also reflex. The reflex to obey. The reflex to act and the reflex to defer to the machine instead of raging against it. A total deference to the voice and to the flag. This isn’t just about surveillance or suppression. It’s about making obedience ambient and default. The algorithm says move, so you move. The president defines a threat, so you see one. No time for deliberation. No space for doubt.

People keep saying things like ‘we’re sliding into authoritarianism’. No, we’re being engineered for it.

And the machine is basically online as far as I can tell.

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Iran

This section deserves more than I can give it tonight. It needs space. It needs clarity. It also needs honesty about why I’ve waited to write about it, and why I can’t ignore it any longer.

Since the start of these reports, I’ve focused on what’s happening in our own backyard. I’ve tracked the moves that hit closest to home: surveillance orders, police actions, court rulings, and rhetoric that signals domestic collapse. But the escalation with Iran sits at a junction that I don’t believe I can sidestep any longer.

The reason is threefold.

First, there’s this strange rupture happening inside right-wing media. On local radio and fringe outlets, some of the same hosts who have parroted Netanyahu’s every move through the years are now turning critical. Some are even questioning the war. Some are lamenting the fact that they are being flooded with negative criticism from their active listener base over their opinions. I heard one guy unironically complaining that it was absolutely INSANE that he is unable to have a position of ‘anti war with Iran’ without being labeled an ‘anti-semite’. This is the same host that I have heard repeatedly repeat the ongoing conflagration of anti-genocide protest with anti-semitism.

This isn’t widespread yet, but it’s real and, to me, it signals a slowly growing crack in the alliance between evangelical war-hawk posturing and unconditional support for Israel’s current campaign. Combined with frequent criticism of the Big Beautiful Bill on talk radio as well, it may also be one more straw on the camel’s back.

I think this fracture matters. But it’s new terrain and I’m stumbling.

Second, it’s the reality that whether the U.S. puts boots on the ground or not, we’re already entangled. The weapons, the money and the logistics are already flowing. And Israel, with U.S. backing, is now moving swiftly across borders. Lebanon. Syria. Iraq. And now Iran. This isn’t a defensive operation. It’s a blitzkrieg. And America is underwriting it, either out in the open or under the table.

Third, there’s the moral and strategic paradox. Iran’s regime is grotesque. It executes dissidents. It crushes women’s rights. It threatens annihilation. These things are true. Iran is also, in my view, a true existential threat to the United States both in rhetoric and capability. At the same time, Israel is carrying out what may be the most calculated, high-tech genocide of the modern era. One that some argue already surpasses the Holocaust in scale and civilian impact. So where does that leave the United States, morally or politically, as its number one patron?

And this is where the paralysis sets in.

Because I am not calling for the dissolution of U.S. defense capabilities. I am not naïve or crazy. We do need military power. We need real deterrents to real threats. Iran doesn’t engage in ideological theater. It is a country with regional influence, asymmetric warfare tactics, and a longstanding willingness to project violence beyond its borders. I believe that. I feel it. I also believe that the current administration is not capable of waging or restraining war in good faith. With a president like this, any military move becomes suspect. Not because action is never warranted, but because judgment can no longer be trusted.

This is the result of polarized politics and the death of subtlety. There’s no nuance left in the discourse. You’re either cheering the drone strike or you’re an apologist for tyranny. You’re either backing our troops or undermining them. There’s no middle ground, no place to stand and say: yes, Iran is a threat, but no, I do not trust Trump to confront it with proportionality or principle. That does not exist in the public square anymore.

And Trump now inserts himself. Declaring that Tehran should evacuate immediately. Claiming “air dominance” over Iranian skies. Posting bizzare text messages from Mike Huckabee that frame him not just as a savior, but as a leader facing “a decision no president has made since Truman.” The implication isn’t subtle. It’s nuclear. And whether or not the intent is to act on that threat, the theater of it. The announcements, the posture, the divine framing is designed to carry political force.

That’s all I can say tonight.

Not enough of it. But enough to mark the thread. This war as it unfolds will not be separate from the domestic authoritarian push. It’s the external face of the same machine. And it will be used to justify every next move: the drones, the detentions, the surveillance, the silence.

I’ll come back to this.

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Final Thoughts

I'm tired. You're tired. Everyone paying attention is tired. Not because we're weak or apathetic, but because we've been handed the impossible job of vigilance while the people entrusted with safeguarding and reporting on our democracy deliberately abdicate their responsibilities for clicks, power, and petty personal gain.

The backlog of critical topics grows daily. From election fraud, industrial buyouts, state-sanctioned violence, authoritarian legislation, to escalating foreign conflicts and still, these pivotal stories are left simmering on the back burner because there's simply not enough time or energy to address them all properly.

We're don’t simply watch history being made; we carry it. Each news cycle is another weight on our backs, each headline another demand on our already fractured attention. It's overwhelming and intentionally so. The constant stream of crises isn't incompetence, it's a calculated strategy. Flood the zone, exhaust resistance, and hope we burn out.

Yet here we are, still writing, still reading and still bearing witness. Because we have to. Because silence is complicity. History isn't written by observers, it's written by the participants. Even when we're exhausted, when it's messy, and especially when we feel least prepared.

This isn't heroism; it's survival. It's self-defense. It's sanity maintenance in insane times. But it's also anger. Anger at being forced into this role, anger at sacrificing personal joys and everyday normalcy because those in power prioritize propaganda, profit, and personal ambition over governance and basic human decency.

But anger is fuel. Anger is clarity. It reminds us of what's at stake. So I keep going. We keep going, even as the machine gears up against us, even as violence shifts from hypothetical to immediate, even as warnings are ignored or mocked by those who should know better.

Tomorrow, I’ll attempt to get up and do it again, not because I enjoy it, but because I must. Because someday, someone will ask what I did while our democracy was dismantled, piece by deliberate piece. And at least I can say that I didn't look away.

At least we can all say that we were paying attention and doing our best to fight back.