The Coup Will be Privatized

April 9, 2025

Posse Comitatus

A phrase that sounds so absurd that it has been an in-joke with my best friend and I for decades. Absurd, that is, until it wasn’t. For over two decades, we exchanged it casually, a private code substituting for “What’s up?”, as if the semantic weight of a post-Reconstruction legislative firewall against domestic militarization were merely another linguistic bauble in the junk drawer of the English language. But now, in 2025, I unbelievably find myself face-to-face with an executive order whose very subtext echoes through the rafters of a law conceived to keep soldiers out of our streets.

It began in January with a directive as crisp and bloodless as any bureaucratic memo: The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security were to submit a joint report recommending whether the conditions at the southern border merited invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. That sentence alone is eerily calm and conspicuously vague. But it should arrest the attention of anyone not already anesthetized by decades of political pageantry and executive overreach.

The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, was Congress’s attempt to slam the door shut on domestic military enforcement after years of Union troops policing the post-Civil War South. Originally, federal forces were used to uphold civil rights. Then they were politicized. Then they were resented. So Congress, in a rare moment of moral clarity, said: never again. The law forbids the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement, unless explicitly authorized by Congress or the Constitution. The act’s Latin name, meaning “power of the county,” evokes an older idea: that the enforcement of civil order should rest with civilians, not professional warriors.

But laws, like levees, are only as strong as the institutions maintaining them. Enter the executive order, signed with the ceremonial gravity of a man who would very much like to be a Caesar.

Surrounding this EO is the ideological scaffolding of Project 2025, a 900-page grimoire conceived not by Trump himself (an author of nothing but chaos), but by a chorus of post-liberal reactionaries: Including, among others Russ Vought and human shaped stool sample, Stephen Miller.

resisting urge to get distracted with a profanity laden rant… breathe.. ok. I’m good.

These men are not interested in governance. They are interested in architecture. Framed as ‘building’, but it is actually dismantling, centralizing, and reconsecrating power in the image of one man.

Project 2025 does not explicitly call for martial law. That would be too gauche, too loud. Instead, it does what all clever authoritarian blueprints do: it prepares the ground. It replaces independent civil servants with political loyalists. It calls for executive supremacy. It guts checks and balances under the guise of “efficiency.” Analysts from the Center for American Progress and the ACLU note the document’s ambition to “shatter democracy’s guardrails,” giving the president near-unchecked dominion. The military doesn’t need to march down Main Street for martial law to happen. All it takes is a legal fig leaf and a compliant chain of command.

And if the committee returns with a recommendation to invoke the Insurrection Act, the mechanism is already greased. The military’s leadership, once resistant to political theater, has been reshuffled. The purging of top JAG officers and experienced Pentagon officials at the outset of this administration was not incidental—it was preparatory. In 2020, when Trump last floated the Insurrection Act during the George Floyd protests, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper publicly opposed the move. General Mark Milley reminded troops of their constitutional obligations. Even James Mattis, Trump's former Secretary of Defense, denounced the attempt as divisive and dangerous. That firewall has been dismantled.

Now, let’s not indulge in hypotheticals without precedent. Here is a record of when the Insurrection Act has actually been used in modern times:

• 1957: Eisenhower deployed troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock.

• 1962: Kennedy used it to protect James Meredith integrating the University of Mississippi.

• 1965: Johnson invoked it to safeguard the Selma civil rights marchers.

• 1967: Deployed to address the Detroit riots.

• 1968: Used following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination to quell unrest.

• 1989: Bush Sr. used it in the U.S. Virgin Islands post-Hurricane Hugo.

• 1992: Invoked during the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict.

Every instance was rooted in either catastrophic civil unrest or the enforcement of federally guaranteed civil rights. These were not acts of preemption; they were acts of true emergency.

So now we must ask: does today’s America resemble Detroit in 1967? Selma in 1965? Or even Minneapolis in 2020, when cities were literally on fire, entire blocks were ablaze, and police precincts were abandoned to protestors? That was real unrest—raw, chaotic, emotionally charged, and widespread. And yet even then, it was recognized at the highest levels of military leadership that deploying federal troops on domestic civilians would be not just dangerous, but unconstitutional and fundamentally corrosive to democratic norms. The system held, barely, because civilian leadership restrained itself, and military command understood its oath.

And what happened? Order returned—not by force of arms, but by civic process, negotiation, de-escalation, and yes, local police departments. The republic did not fall. Martial law was not necessary then, and it is certainly not warranted now. So again: Is the military required to restore order today, or are we simply rehearsing for a future where dissent is synonymous with disloyalty?

This will never restrain itself to the border. It is a creeping doctrine: one that says the executive, when cloaked in the language of national emergency, can deploy the state’s most violent apparatus inward. That civilian power is a nuisance to be streamlined. That governance by consent is a quaint tradition.

So yes, I still say “posse comitatus” as a joke to my friends. But there’s nothing funny about a government that resurrects obscure legal machinery not to solve crises, but to manufacture them. The joke, it seems, has curdled into rancid prophecy.

Elsy Noemi Berrios

This doctrine does not stay confined to theory. We are seeing trial runs with the way ICE has begun steamrolling legal rights to kidnap and permanently disappear people just as fast as they can. And unfortunately, I have another name to add to the disappearance tracker.

Just days ago, in a quiet street in Westminster, Maryland, ICE agents surrounded a car occupied by a mother and daughter. The agents, unaccompanied by a judicial warrant, shattered a window and extracted Elsy Noemi Berrios, a 51 year old seamstress and asylum-seeker with a legal and valid work permit, while her daughter screamed and filmed the ordeal. The agents cited no warrant. They provided no documentation. And, after the fact, justified the act with a vague allegation of gang affiliation, unsupported and unverified, against a woman whose only evident crime was fleeing violence and working for her family’s survival. Is this story starting to sound familiar?

This is a perverse distortion of the preservation of law. It is the theater of enforcement without the burden of proof, under the banner of public safety. The administration now proposes to scale this mindset with the gravitas of martial authority. The Insurrection Act, once used to protect civil rights, now looms as a tool to suppress them.

The Uber of Death Trains

The joke curdles further still.

"Prime, but with human beings." That’s how Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons described his vision for the future of American deportation. Delivered with the suave arrogance of a man who thinks he’s innovating, not self incriminating himself for future war crime trials. The statement was made at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix. This is basically a trade show for aspiring authoritarians and the companies that enable them. Lyons envisions a fleet of ICE trucks rounding up immigrants the way Amazon packages are picked, packed, and shipped: efficiently, unemotionally, and at scale.

Not to be outdone, Trump’s loyal architect of cruelty, Tom Homan, informed a ballroom of contractors and military-industrial salesmen that it’s time to "let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff," and let the private sector handle everything else. Admitting that the regime’s main problem with disappearing people is the inefficiency. What they really need, they are saying, is not judicial review but a smoother user interface.

What they are assembling is not a policy, per se, but an apparatus. Meticulously designed and outsourced. And if we’re being honest, highly scalable. Artificial intelligence to comb tax records and social media feeds. Algorithms to fill deportation flights. A dark fantasy of frictionless oppression, delivered not by jackboots but by spreadsheets and procurement forms.

Secretary Kristi Noem, macabre, silicon filled super model for traitorous incels and the hand-picked figurehead of this “civilian” arm of internal control, told the audience they are "extremely close" to "operational control" of the border, an expression that belongs less to a democracy and more to a military campaign. She cheered the use of biometric surveillance deep into the interior, promising a federal apparatus more invasive than anything George Orwell could have conceived without first suffering a head injury.

“We're going to deploy new technologies, not only at the border, but at our ports of entry and in our interior to make sure that we're sharing information with other agencies at all levels.”

Kristi “I am made of plastic” Noem, Homeland Security Secretary

All of this is draped in the reanimated corpse of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law whose last major invocation helped put Japanese-American citizens in internment camps. Now resurrected to target Venezuelans. Tomorrow, who knows? El Salvadorians? Dissenters? Citizens who have too many insults against Stephen Miller in their online posts?

The Expo, far from being an isolated event, is the trade show for doctrine. A sort of corporatized authoritarianism that doesn’t storm the palace, but invoices it. What Project 2025 outlines in theory, this expo begins to operationalize in fact: government not only influenced by corporate interests, but completely intertwined and indistinguishable from them.

Geo Group was there. Anduril Industries, Palantir’s cousin. Vendors hawking armed buggies like they were selling snow cones. All on the federal dime. All angling to profit from the logistics of incarceration and expulsion. This is the policy of market capture. pun intended.

And here’s the fatal symmetry: as civilian institutions are hollowed out, privatized security architecture blooms. The same firms that build the walls are contracted to guard them. The same companies that create the surveillance tools are hired to deploy them. The state becomes a shell company for its own containment.

At the end of the day it’s only about control. And not the kind of control that preserves order, but rather the kind that rewards obedience, punishes dissent, and turns governance into a one-click, no-returns marketplace of fear.

To invoke the Insurrection Act while simultaneously rolling out the tools of mass expulsion, to float the deportation of citizens while assembling a private-sector enforcement army, this is not a series of coincidences. It is the playbook of post-democracy. It aligns with Yarvin’s Butterfly Revolution and Project 2025 agendas. A constitutional husk with militarized innards. And the law, already fragile, is being retrofitted to suit the needs of its most cynical interpreters.

Within 24 hours, a half-joking musing aboard Air Force One about deporting American citizens to El Salvador, a statement so cartoonishly illegal it should have died of embarrassment, has predictably metastasized into a formal talking point at the White House press podium. When pressed, the administration’s mouthpieces admit they’re unsure whether it’s legal. But if it is, they say, they’ll do it. This is the system now; governance by provocation, policy by trial balloon, accountability buried beneath the rubble of plausible deniability.

And they are still saying that they are unsure what the law is on this. This is the president and the highest levels of his cabinet. The Vice President, J.D. Pants is supposedly a fucking lawyer. Of course, they know the legality! They just want to ‘ask some questions’ and introduce these ideas into the public conversation.

Let’s be perfectly clear, again. Lord give me patience: it’s not legal. Not under the Constitution, not under the Immigration and Nationality Act, not under the Geneva Conventions, not even under the barroom common sense of a half-literate civics student. Deporting U.S. citizens to foreign countries violates not only the 4th, 5th and 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship and citizen sovereignty but every foundational precept of a nation-state governed by laws. The fact that this even needs to be said again is an indictment of how deeply unserious, yet perilously effective and dangerous, this regime has become.

Posse comitatus? The joke is long dead. What remains is its shadow: a phrase that once stood for civilian supremacy, now dangling like a severed tag on a product we never ordered but will be forced to pay for.

And in the next aisle over, the drones are on sale. No returns.

Final Thoughts

I’m not even going to touch on the fucking stock market manipulation. Everyone knows what they are doing, it’s illegal but who the fuck cares anymore, we live in Russia now. This is just how we do things.

There’s nothing stealthy about what’s happening here. They’re gutting democracy in broad daylight, one memo, one handshake, one private-sector contract at a time. These aren't rogue operators in jackboots or comic-book villains twirling mustaches, they are bureaucrats, technocrats, and businessmen in polished shoes likely wearing women’s underwear under their Brooks Brother pinstripes, calmly removing the bolts from the scaffolding of society while we scroll past it on our phones.

Project 2025 isn’t rewriting rules, it’s ignoring them, replacing democratic accountability with managerial efficiency. The idea that a free society can be dismantled by logistics managers and procurement officers is exactly as absurd as it sounds. And exactly as effective. Authoritarianism dressed up as customer service, oppression streamlined into deliverables, deportation reduced to another subscription model. This cruelty by design is sanitized and operationalized until it looks like business as usual.

The real tragedy is how easy it has been to numb everyone to their own exploitation. Forget Orwell’s boot stamping on a face. The new authoritarianism looks more like a smartphone notification: quiet, convenient, swiped away and forgotten. It barely demands your attention, let alone your outrage.

We keep telling ourselves we’ll notice when it matters, but that moment already came and went, buried somewhere between a viral video of government-sanctioned kidnapping and the latest administrative trial balloon on deporting citizens. The system isn’t falling apart, it’s working exactly as intended. At least for the few who built it and profit from it.

We are bleeding out slowly and soon violently. Paperwork by paperwork, quietly stacked on desks in buildings no one ever visits.