Rubber Now, Lead Later

June 19, 2025

Rubber Bullets, For Now.

They shot him in the head.

Michael Nigro was standing off to the side, helmet marked “PRESS” in bold letters, two professional cameras around his neck. Not up in anybody’s face. Not interfering. Just documenting. And still, a round slammed into his helmet. Without warning or cause. Just a crack to the skull because someone decided it was time to get the cameras out of there.

Nigro’s a media veteran. He’s worked in Ukraine. He’s covered riots and firestorms and moments when crowds blur the line between protest and something else. But this one felt different. "It felt very, very intentional," he said.

This is not an isolated incident. The LA Press Club has logged over three dozen like it. Photographers shot, reporters shoved, students hospitalized, and veteran correspondents cuffed and dragged, often while broadcasting live. Most wore press badges and none posed a threat. They were targeted anyway.

This week, the LA Press Club and Status Coup filed a federal lawsuit. They called it what it is; systemic, unlawful targeting. Don’t let anyone tell you this was crowd control or some kind of confusion. It’s a campaign to make documenting these events dangerous enough to discourage it.

And if you think that’s where it ends, check your newsfeed for a glimpse at our future.

Two days ago, Saudi Arabia executed journalist Turki Al-Jasser. There was no real trial and no real charges. It was a secret hearing in a closed room that ended with a government-ordered death. His crime was running a Twitter account that criticized the royal family. They broke into his house in 2018, seized his devices, and disappeared him for the last 7 years. Now he’s dead without closure or justice.

This is the same government that murdered Jamal Khashoggi in an embassy with a bone saw. And who covered for that murder? The U.S. administration at the time, which now finds itself back in power. Trump met with MBS last month and didn’t say a word about press freedom. The message is clear: keep it quiet, and we won’t make noise. Amazing what you can get from the man for the price of a Big Mac.

And then there's El Salvador and this administration’s favorite ‘Coolest Dictator in the World’

Seven journalists from El Faro now face up to ten years prison time under gang laws. Their crime was publishing video interviews that implicate President Nayib Bukele in years-long negotiations with gang leaders. The Salvadoran government says they’re “promoting crime” and “associating unlawfully.” In reality, they reported what they knew, as journalists tend to do. And now the police are preparing warrants, the paper's editor has fled, and spyware has already been found on their phones.

Bukele has already locked up 85,000 people under his emergency crackdown. Constitutional rights have been suspended for over two years. Human rights lawyers are warning that journalism itself is being criminalized. The international community has mostly shrugged.

Trump, of course, praises Bukele constantly. Calls him “tough,” calls him “effective,” as if that’s the whole story, but it’s not. It’s a signal. It’s one strongman nodding to another, both fluent in the language of force. And it’s not only Trump who harbors an unhealthy fascination bordering on the sexual with this thug in a suit. The entire right-wing constellation has lined up to shake Bukele’s hand or borrow his image. Don Jr., Tucker Carlson, Matt Gaetz, Mike Lee; hell, even Marco Rubio called him a ‘liberator’. CPAC gave him a hero’s welcome. The right openly celbrates Bukele’s authoritarianism. They see in him a template and they are taking notes.

So take a moment and step back. Look at the map. In L.A., they shoot you in the head with rubber bullets for covering a protest. In Riyadh, they shoot you in the head with real bullets behind closed doors. In San Salvador, they charge you with gang activity for reporting on the president.

And in Washington, the administration has cozy ties with and open admiration for both of these government.

This is not a coincidence. And it should be a warning sign that forecasts where we are headed.

The crackdown on journalists isn’t a side effect of instability. It is the stability. That absence of accountability is the entire M.O of all authoritarian regimes, this one included. When cops push the press to the ground on live TV, when Marines are deployed to civilian streets, and when a journalist in Koreatown takes a headshot for doing his job and the mayor shrugs, this isn’t chaos. It’s a message.

We are not supposed to see what happens next.

And if we do see it, we’re not supposed to report it.

And if we do report it, we are supposed to feel a shiver of fear and hesitation before you we publish.

That shiver and that pause is the connective tissue between what we see in Los Angeles and what’s already taken root in Riyadh and San Salvador. The moment intimidation becomes normalized, the trajectory is set. It starts with projectiles and ends with prison terms and executions. It begins with harassment and ends in headlines about an tragedies that should never have been possible in any world where freedom of the press still meant something.

These aren’t simply warnings. They’re mile markers and landmarks. As they keep piling up without consequence, the road we’re on doesn’t lead back to civil discourse. It leads to closed courtrooms. To tortured confessions and to funerals for people who dared to publish a fact or shed light on the shadows.

The Permission to Kill

Over the weekend, a sheriff in Pennsylvania posted a photo of a bloodied pickup truck labeled the "Protester Edition". Red streaks smeared across the bumper. The message was obvious: some people are meant to be run over. And the police approve and think it’s kind of funny.

Keep in mind, that post wasn’t some internet troll or burner account. It came from the official social media of an elected law enforcement officer. It was deleted after public backlash, but it doesn’t disappear from the broader atmosphere. It adds to it. The people meant to get that message got it, they heard it loud and clear.

These aren’t gaffes or momentary lapses of judgement. They’re rallying cries, shaped like little ‘jokes’.

In Florida, Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey told a crowd that any protesters who threw bricks or firebombs would be sent home "graveyard dead." That line landed the way all of these do: with just enough plausible deniability to pass as policy, but too much theatricality to ignore as mere rhetoric. It's a clean, viral-ready soundbite that cloaks its escalation in the language of law and order. That’s the entire slight of hand. It's not the obvious chest-puffing that's most dangerous, it's the subtle recalibration of what we find acceptable.

Every time a law enforcement officer says something like this, especially in uniform, especially in front of a camera, especially while on duty; they are doing more than issuing a ‘warning’. They are drawing a blueprint. And the outline of that blueprint gets easier to trace every time it's repeated. The threat is not in the specificity of the words but in how little pushback they generate. The public hears it, media covers it as a partisan spat, and the Overton window quietly slides again.

When an officer equates protest with combat, they aren’t clarifying the rules of engagement, they are reframing protest itself as an act of war. And once that frame settles into the culture, the rest of the script will write itself: helmets come on faster, trigger fingers rest looser, and casualties are filed under maintenance, not tragedy.

Governor DeSantis, never one to miss a beat, explained that if your car gets surrounded by demonstrators, and you run someone over, that’s on them. "You have the right to flee," he said.

This is macabre choreography. It is rehearsed plausible deniability tailored for the camera: strong talk for the base, a nudge to the deputies, and a wink to the shooters. It’s the same tone I wrote about days ago. The rhythm of stochastic violence.

You don’t have to tell people to shoot. You just have to tell them enough times who the enemy is. Describe them as monsters, radicals, degenerates. Call them a threat. And then repeat.

Eventually, someone will act. And when they do, the ones who lit the fuse will be long gone, sipping coffee at CPAC and claiming their words were misinterpreted, while they high five the foreign dictators they so desperately wish to become.

The Flag Beneath the Flag

This week, just below the American flag at the Small Business Administration building in D.C., another banner was flown: the "Appeal to Heaven" flag. It features a lone pine tree on a white field. To the untrained eye, it may look like a harmless throwback. But it’s not.

That flag has become a staple of far-right Christian nationalism. It flew at the Capitol on January 6th. It was carried by those who breached the barricades. Its origins trace back to the Revolutionary War, but its revival in the 21st century isn’t historical. It’s theological. The flag signifies divine endorsement of political rebellion. It’s often paired with rhetoric about spiritual warfare, about governments that have "abandoned God," and about a coming reckoning.

Flying it at a federal agency is wholly inappropriate. But it’s also a threat. A real and credible threat, in plain sight. It cannot be ignored.

The message is this: God is on our side. We will not obey laws made by secular institutions. We answer to a higher authority.

However, when that flag flaps beneath the Stars and Stripes, it’s not a gesture of faith. It’s a declaration of layered and prioritized sovereignty. It’s a not at all subtle way of saying: we still wear the uniform, but our loyalty lies elsewhere.

This is entirely connect to the rest of the violence we’re watching. It’s another piece of the same rhythm. Stochastic violence isn’t just built on words. It’s built on symbols. And when a symbol of divine rebellion flies beneath the national flag at a government agency, it sends a message not just of affiliation, but of permission. It says: we see you, we recognize your cause, and we expect more from you.

Imagine for a moment that same flag flying from every federal building. From the White House lawn. From the Pentagon. Imagine a country where those who claim that flag are the ones writing laws, overseeing trials, determining what counts as fact and what counts as treason. The people who wave that banner do not believe in pluralism. They do not believe in compromise. They believe they are on a mission. And missions do not stop at policy.

In that world, there is no distinction between church and state because there is no state independent of their church. Journalists are not watchdogs; they are heretics. Dissent is not disagreement; it is blasphemy. Elections are not choices; they are rituals to confirm what was already ordained.

The Department of Education mandates prayer before every classroom lesson. Biology texts are vetted by religious councils. School boards quote scripture while banning books and rewriting civics to reflect divine rule. Public libraries are cleared of anything not bearing the seal of doctrinal approval.

Courthouses operate like chapels. Judges do not weigh evidence, they interpret revelations. Defense attorneys cite grace, not law, and prosecutors wear crosses as badges of legitimacy. The First Amendment is gone, rewritten as a pledge of obedience.

Women are monitored. Their movements tracked by apps that double as virtue scorekeepers. Clinics are raided. Contraception is contraband. Miscarriages are investigated. Rape victims are interrogated until they admit guilt for tempting fate.

Queer families vanish from public life. Marriage licenses require church sponsorship. Gender nonconformity is declared a form of sedition. Surveillance targets the different, the uncertain, and the insufficiently devout.

And everywhere there are flags. Pine trees on white fields. In offices, on dashboards, stitched into the uniforms of bureaucrats and bailiffs. A constant signal that the old rules no longer apply. That the holy war is not coming. It is already won. Gilead is basically their dream scenario for America.

This is not theoretical. The symbols are already here. These people who run our government now at the very least are lending full support to the people who do believe these things and at the worst, are those people themselves. The scaffolding is already being built. And if we do not take seriously the intent behind these symbols and the history of violence that follows them then we will find ourselves governed by a theology that never needed to win a war. It only needed to be tolerated long enough to plant a flag.

We have reached a stage where violent cues are coming from every direction. From cops and governors. From sheriffs and senators. From flags and slogans and viral clips. Each one might seem small, even absurd, on its own. But taken together, they form a language.

And that language only has one translation:

Someone, many someones are going to get hurt. Bad. And it won’t be by accident.

The Coronation of Stephen Miller

Kristi Noem, once floated as a rising star and now reportedly demoted to DHS mouthpiece, was rushed to the hospital days after visiting a defunct disease lab. Officially, it was an allergic reaction.

But the real headline here isn’t about Noem. It’s about who’s actually holding the pen. According to former DHS official Miles Taylor, Stephen Miller has effectively taken over the Department of Homeland Security. Not figuratively or politically, but functionally. Behind closed doors, he called it his "coronation."

Stephen Miller, the walking corpse of American compassion, the sentient mildew under the sink of constitutional democracy is likely now officially in charge of DHS.

And the results are immediate. Protest crackdowns. Black site detentions. Guantanamo Bay repurposed as a mass holding center for immigrants, including Europeans, some of whom haven’t even been charged with a crime.

Because of course it’s Miller. The man’s political philosophy is so stripped of empathy it could qualify as a war crime on it’s own. If cruelty were an Olympic event, he'd medal in both freestyle and synchronized dehumanization. This is a guy who makes Dick Cheney look like Bob Ross.

Let’s not forget, ever, that this is the same cretin who pushed for family separations not as a deterrent, but as punishment. The same man who fantasized openly about using wartime powers against asylum seekers. And now he has a blank check and the full backing of a president who stopped pretending he wants plausible deniability a decade ago.

But wait, there’s more! The administration is already moving to ship detainees by the thousands to Guantanamo Bay. Not because they pose a national security threat, but because domestic detention facilities are getting full and apparently they need room for a lot more incoming prisoners. So, to whit, they are turning one of the most notorious torture sites on the planet into a holding pen for overstayed visas and minor immigration violations.

Never mind that it costs over $100,000 a day per detainee to run that place. Rats in the cells. Mold on the walls. Food shortages. No clean clothes. One hour of air per day. It’s actually worse than that fucking Holiday Inn Express I stayed at recently. It's intimidation. It's punishment as message. You know, Miller’s whole ethos summed up as a physical location.

But even that's not the darkest corner of this room.

A video was posted recently from a city council meeting in Sunnyside. A bounty hunter, a real one, not a metaphor stood up and told the council what’s coming: According to him, ICE is right now in the process of contracting squads of freelance enforcers. $1,000 a head. No warrant needed. No badge required. Just bodies for cash. He described a world where bounty hunters were free to abduct anyone they could plausibly claim was undocumented, then get paid handsomely for the delivery.

He said it plainly: "Every human being has a price."

The council was horrified and they kicked him out. But they missed the point. Because he wasn’t guessing. This is his job and he knows what he is talking bout. Sure, he stopped just short of attempting to extort them in a ‘protection racket’, but he was also sending a de facto warning. And he is not along.

There are somewhere between 10,000 to 15,000 active bounty hunters in the U.S. This is a nebulous, barely regulated army of quasi-legal enforcers who live for loopholes. If Miller’s DHS is serious about outsourcing deportation, that number will grow exponentially. It will metastasize into a cottage industry to rival uber eats. These won’t be ICE agents. They won’t wear uniforms. And they won’t follow Miranda. They’re incentivized to hunt. Period. I know, it’s hard to discern if I am talking about current law enforcement/ICE or the future bounty hunters. Do you see the problem?

Imagine the likely scenario in the near future where Miller has built his own informal paramilitary, one contract at a time. Where neighborhoods are patrolled not by police, but by subcontracted mercs in body armor with spreadsheets and quotas. Where your immigration status, your accent, or your skin color, or your ZIP code, or your political affiliation is all it takes to get bundled into a van.

This is where we’re heading. Hell, this is where we are.

The goal is total submission. The goal is to make sure that people know there are no rules anymore. There are just prices to pay for dissent.

Stephen Miller doesn’t need a title. He got something better: impunity. If we keep treating this as a staffing issue instead of the systematic construction of an internal purge machine, then what comes next will be not only inevitable but completely irreversible.

This isn’t about immigration. It’s about domestic conquest.

Care Denied

This week, the Department of Veterans Affairs quietly stripped language from its medical bylaws. It was language that used to prohibit discrimination based on marital status, political affiliation, or union activity. What was once a clear guardrail against politicized care is now a gray zone. They’re calling it a ‘formality.’

Despite the immediate clickbait hype, I don’t believe any VA doctor is going to hang a sign that says "Democrats not welcome." That’s not how it works. Still, that’s the spin Nearly every post and viral headline jumping straight to "Trump bans care for Democrats." That’s not exactly true. But it’s also not not true.

The real truth lives in the mechanics. It can be seen in what's being removed, what remains unenforceable, and who decides what counts as 'appropriate care.' The point isn't whether the policy literally says to refuse a Biden voter their meds. The point is that it no longer says you can’t.

And that distinction matters. Because we are no longer talking about hypothetical abuse of discretion. We are talking about a system that now permits it by omission. The law doesn’t have to say 'punish dissent.' It simply has to stop protecting dissenters. The rest happens naturally and organically, like mold creeping up a neglected wall. Or Stephen Miller creeping around a public restroom on his hands and knees licking the floor as he chases the fleeting shadow of his humanity.

Make no mistake, this is an intentional tactic. If it works at the VA, an institution people still generally trust, it will be rolled out to every other agency in government. The Department of Education. Social Security. HUD. The DMV. They’ll start cutting clauses and calling it ‘reform’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘meritocracy’. It will be a slow bleed of protections, justified by executive fiat and rubber-stamped with hollow reassurances.

Eventually, political neutrality itself will become the liability. It's not just DEI that vanishes. It’s all dissent, skepticism and even mild opposition. Once you open the door to selective service based on belief, that door never closes. Give them an inch and they will take it all.

And now it’s easier for any staffer with a grudge, or a bias, or a God complex to deny care without violating a single clause.

These rules weren’t changed because there was a problem. They were changed to give cover when the problem shows up or (more likely) is inserted intentionally into the system.

A veteran with a Bernie pin waits longer. A woman raped during service gets redirected. A gay veteran is treated differently. At first subtly, but consistently. Maybe the records get lost. Maybe the follow-up is missed. Maybe they’re told to come back in six months while someone with the right bumper sticker goes to the front of the line.

This is part of the same effort we’ve seen across every agency Trump’s people now control: remove accountability, erase transparency, and force ideology into every system that used to run on law and trust.

We’ve already seen the CDC gutted. The NIH defanged. RFK Jr. fired every single vaccine advisor. And now the VA, a system meant to serve those who risked everything is becoming another tool for sorting the faithful from the expendable.

The message here is not subtle. If you think the wrong thoughts, pray the wrong way, or marry the wrong person, your care may become conditional.

And if you complain? Well, there’s no line in the rulebook that says you were wronged. Just vague assurances from the press secretary that “of course no one will be denied care.” Excuse me while I vomit.

We’ve heard that line before. From ICE. From DHS. From the NSA. Every time the rules change, the defenders say: don’t worry, nothing will really change.

And every time, it does. And then it gets worse. And then it goes beyond anything we could imagine.

The veterans know it and the doctors know it. The only people pretending it’s fine are the ones who wrote the order.

I also want to be ultra clear on this point. This is not an indictment of the men and women currently working at these agencies. Most of them are decent people. They are professionals who swore an oath and believe in serving with integrity. But these rule changes aren’t meant for them. They’re the scaffolding for the next wave. The ones who will sign loyalty pledges. The ones who will write essays praising their Trump. This is about preparing the terrain so that when those people arrive who are ideologically pure and hand-picked for compliance, there will be no need to fire anyone. The infrastructure will already be in place. All all they will have to do is use it.

And they will. Every loophole. Every omission. Every crack in the wall that once held back the flood will be used against us like thousand tiny nukes.

Final Thoughts

Every incident, from assaults on journalists to quiet rule changes in government agencies matters because each chips away at what we take for granted. It doesn't have to be dramatic to be dangerous. Often, subtle changes do the most lasting damage. Protecting freedom means paying close attention to small actions that add up over time. Vigilance isn't glamorous, but right now, it’s necessary.

The report was late again today. Sorry. Gears are slipping. goodnight.