To Swim Against The Flood
June 18, 2025
Then They Came for the Comptroller
They took Brad Lander off the street like a mob snatch. Charged with ‘assault’ and ‘impeding’. Goons wearing masks (of course) and using undue force with the federal seal stamped on a black vest.
Brad Lander isn’t just another guy in a suit with a Twitter account and a yard sign. He’s New York City’s Comptroller and currently opposing Eric Adams for Mayor. You know the trump cronie who created his own ‘secret police’ that still hasn’t faced any consequences and operates basically with impunity? This means that Lander is one of the last people in government (at least NY State government) with both a public platform and real leverage. It’s his job to audit agencies, track city spending, manage the $250 billion pension funds for public workers, and sign off on every major contract the city enters into. He’s not there to opine, he’s there to pull receipts.
And he has been.
Lander’s office flagged a $432 million no-bid emergency contract between the city and a shady migrant services vendor called DocGo. The audit revealed millions wasted, including money spent on empty hotel rooms and substandard care. He recommended the city claw back over $11 million and publicly revoked the mayor’s sweeping emergency spending powers. It forced every major contract to go back through the Comptroller’s office. And just like that, Eric Adams’ blank check got torn in half.
He also dug into NYPD overtime abuse, something that’s ballooned into a multi-billion dollar black hole. Remember those secret police squads? While most officials sidestep that topic for fear of blowback from the unions or the tabloids, Lander released an audit detailing the fraud and offered fixes. Nobody listened, of course. But he wrote it down and it’s on the record.
Lander published a public “Employer Wall of Shame” logging over 225,000 labor infractions by city contractors. That’s what it looks like to use the office. So you can imagine that he is not a popular guy in right wing circles.
Meanwhile, the rest of city leadership keeps flinching. Council members pass symbolic resolutions, then backtrack when donors call. The mayor throws up press conferences about crime while handing out contracts like candy. And state officials? They’ll “monitor the situation” from a safe distance, preferably on camera.
So when Lander stood outside immigration court last week, he wasn’t freelancing. He was doing the job. And when ICE agents in tactical gear put him in cuffs and drove him off like a hostage, that wasn’t an accident. There was no case of feigned mistaken identity as there was with Padilla. This was fully targeted and intentional with the aim of punishing oversight, isolating dissent, and making it look routine.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say he was released a few hours later. That the charges were dropped. That no one was hurt. Fine. But the damage is done.
The government sent masked and armed agents to detain an elected city official for refusing to walk away from an undocumented man named Edgardo. And whether it was a stunt, a misfire, or a test case, it worked. It sent a message. Not just to other city leaders, but to every person who might consider standing in the way of mass detention.
This isn’t covert intimidation. It’s the start of a public conditioning cycle. Make arresting city leaders look routine and deserved. Reframe solidarity as obstruction. Put even the white guys in handcuffs to prove a point: no one is untouchable. Not even you.
So while Governor Hochul called it “bullshit,” and a few Senate Democrats shook their fists online, the whole fascist scaffolding just got another bolt added. They’re not even bothering with legal pretense. And the press? Half of them are still asking whether Lander crossed a line, because you have to print something right? Gotta get the people talking and drive those engagement numbers.
But you know maybe he did cross some kind of line. Maybe he did. Maybe he shoudl have. Maybe we all should.
Selective Enforcement and Domestic Occupation
Just days after the political assassination of two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, Donald Trump issued a Truth Social post that referred to America’s major urban centers such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York as “Democrat Power Centers,” blaming them for election fraud, job theft, and the decline of “our Inner Cities.” He didn’t just reference illegal immigration; he linked it to trans rights, women’s sports, and what he called a Democrat effort to “destroy” the country. “There is something wrong with them,” he wrote. “They are sick of mind” and “They HATE our country.”
Forget the ‘dog whistle’. This is an air raid siren.
The post, which explicitly called on ICE, Border Patrol, and “Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers” to “FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities,” came the same week Trump ordered the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history, explicitly prioritizing Democratic-led cities. According to the AP, this decision followed weeks of increased enforcement and large protests in those same cities. As Trump headed to the G7 summit, he bragged to reporters that the National Guard deployments to Los Angeles were the only reason the protests didn’t “rip Los Angeles apart.” This claim stood in stark contrast to statements from both the mayor and the LAPD chief, who said they did not request the Guard and had the situation under control. On top of that, the National Guard’s presence appears largely symbolic so far, as their operational scope remains entangled in legal challenges and jurisdictional disputes.
Simultaneously, enforcement was paused at farms, hotels, and restaurants—industries that had lobbied Trump privately, complaining his policies were costing them workers. Many of these industries are concentrated in rural or suburban areas that tend to vote Republican, raising further questions about the political calculus behind selective enforcement. ICE was instructed to back off these sectors, despite no change in the official public narrative. According to the AP and internal ICE communications, arrests at job sites serving corporate interests were halted the same day deportation raids were ramped up in urban, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.
This is not national security nor is it border enforcement. It’s straight up political warfare waged deliberately and geographically targeted. The enemies aren’t foreign. They are domestic and partisan. The language of annihilation has now been deployed. And the structure of the state will soon follow suit.
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I’ve been using the term selective enforcement a lot lately. It seems obvious, but just in case, This is a term for one of the foundational mechanism of authoritarian control. It allows the state to preserve the appearance of law and order while using its power to reward loyalty and punish dissent. In fascist systems, legality is not universal, it’s conditional and applied strategically to reinforce power and terrorize opposition.
What we’re seeing is not simply a policy preference but a redrawing of who qualifies for protection versus punishment under the law. That line is no longer drawn around criminal conduct. It’s drawn around geography, class, and political affiliation. That should worry you. A lot.
Masked Up, Unmarked and Unaccountable
In the past week, videos have begun surfacing that strip away any remaining pretense about the nature of where this is going. One shows ICE officers repeatedly pointing lethal weapons at unarmed protesters. Another, taken in Pico Rivera, begins with a crowd of residents calmly questioning a CBP operation in a Walmart parking lot. Suddenly, an unmarked brown pickup truck barrels in. Out jump several men in plain clothes with assault rifles.
According to witness reports and video corroboration, the incident stemmed from an ICE arrest of a U.S. citizen working at the Walmart. Bystanders intervened. Agents retreated, briefly only to return later with heavier, unmarked reinforcements and arrested the man anyway, leaving only his janitor cart behind, toppled in an empty parking lot.
Seriously, do you think there was a dossier on this guy and they had some big meeting where they planned the take down. It’s like 30 fully armed and masked up military soldiers descending on a single man with a janitor cart.
This isn’t enforcement. It’s a spectacle. It’s choreographed intimidation. It fits within the broader framework already established: selective enforcement, unequal protection, and the normalization of military tactics in civilian space. These agents operate not just without oversight, but beyond what was once considered lawful or even reasonable. These shows of force aren’t deployed where resistance is illegal. They’re sent where resistance is most likely.
Fox News host Will Cain, for his part, scoffed at proposed legislation requiring law enforcement to wear identification and appear unmasked in public. "Hard to believe this is real!" he said of the “No Secret Police Act.”
Not “Hard to believe this is real!” in that he can’t believe that a city would actually have to pass such a law. For him, or at least the people that write his scripts, it’s hard to believe that anyone would oppose state sanctioned secret police violence.
And in this, he inadvertently reveals the entire plot. The masks are the message. The anonymity is the tactic. These aren’t lapses in enforcement protocol, they are the protocol. Impunity thrives in the absence of accountability. And impunity is one of the main supports of authoritarianism.
What begins as selective enforcement calcifies into a culture of permanent exception. One where agents need no warrant, no badge, and no consequences, so long as the target lives in a specific ZIP code, has a specific color skin or supports a specific political party.
The legal system remains, on paper. But operationally, this is something else: affective, symbolic and punitive. It is meant not just to subdue the individual but to dominate the entire geography of dissent they represent.
Do yourself a favor and watch that Pico Rivera video a few times. Even while being outnumbered by heavily armed gestapo, these unarmed citizens still fought back. You can see the tensions rising and it is only a matter of time before someone specifically gets shot and it will be a short time after that when live rounds are being sprayed indiscriminately into dissident crowds.
No Kings, No Silence
A new compilation video shows the true scope of the No Kings protests. There were massive crowds in dozens of cities, stretching for blocks, coordinated and unified in purpose. Verifiable national estimates range from 4 to 6 million participants, with some organizers suggesting as high as 14 million. Although those numbers are not verifiable, that is some real rabble rousing! That’s mass mobilization by any count!
A lot of talk right now about the so called 3.5% rule. This is a paradigm drawn from historical studies of nonviolent resistance and suggests that when roughly 3.5% of a population actively participates in protest, regime change becomes not only possible but probable. Despite many online authors’ and posters’ gusto, it is not a magic number or a silver bullet. But it is a reasonably important benchmark. More importantly, it is a warning sign for entrenched power. A reliable gauge of how uncomfortable ruling forces will become if this movement continues to grow. And how much worse it will get for them as it moves closer to their homes, schools, and donors.
3.5% of the American Population is about 11.5M people, btw. So even at the low estimates, we’re halfway there. Just saying.
There is only one outcome to this. If these protests persist and scale, we are going to see violence. Not from protesters, initially but from the state. Organizers will be arrested. Marches infiltrated. Permits denied. Entire movements branded as domestic threats. The most outrageous possibilities being mass seizures of protester funds, surveillance of family members, military-grade dispersals, or the declaration of protest zones as “terrorist staging grounds” are not remote. They are rehearsed and likely the orders are already drafted and sitting in Stephen Miller or Russell Vought’s desk drawer right now.
Meanwhile, the media machine continues to distort reality. Fox News overlaid canned applause onto Trump’s awkward, under-attended birthday parade speech. The Washington Post ran breathless coverage of tanks and flyovers while glazing over the protests in D.C. and across the country. One of their featured photos is a man in a January 6th hat standing in front of a tank, the image posted without context, essentially normalizing that alignment as if it were editorially neutral. It’s literally right next to a lady wearing a ‘Big Beautiful Military Parade Shirt (made in China)’ with her hand over her heart.
On the ground, journalists filmed police firing non-lethals into peaceful crowds mid-sentence. That sentence specifically being commentary that the protests ‘have been 100% peaceful.’ In one clip, mounted officers begin kettling protesters by advancing as a line, hooves slamming pavement. People are forced to move or be trampled (I lost the video link, sorry, but here is a similar one). In another video, horse cops ride up on marchers from behind, jerk their mounts to a stop, and shout at the crowd to “quit obstructing the sidewalk.” There was no obstruction, only provocation and one officer was so unsteady he appeared to be abusing the horse beneath him. An insult to competent horse riders at the least.
And still, something is shifting. Like those few unarmed men in a WalMart parking lot shoving back against unregulated and out of control armed military enforcers. There is an energy building in these protests that rejects the premise of a subservient public. In Springfield, Missouri, a group of Patriot Front white nationalists were pushed back into their box truck by an overwhelming mass of pro-democracy demonstrators. The video is short, but clear: the fascists are on the retreat. Their sprint-through-the-city act no longer dominates. Their energy is spent. Their theatrics, deflated.
The message from the street is simple: the crowd is bigger now. Stronger and focused. And the more it grows, the more violent the state will become to contain it. But also, the more impossible it will be to contain without revealing exactly what kind of country this has become. Tiananmen tactics aren’t some distant hypothetical. They are already being tested. Is the crowd is ready for nationwide deployment of live ammunition into their ranks? Will the movement hold when the armored trucks stop pretending to be props.
For now we have taken the streets back from the Khaki Klan. But if we budge, even just a little, they will attempt to reclaim our boulevard of broken dreams with a vengeance and a permeance unlike anything we have ever seen.
The only thing worse than a Nazi is a beaten Nazi come back to some kind of small power and prominence. Their egos are weak and fragile but their rage is deep, burning and eternal. They will mercilessly beat, kill and abuse everyone in their path until they forget how pitifully small their penises are. Which is hard to do because every time Stephen Miller gets on TV, they whip it out for a tug and the the cycle starts all over again.
Final Thoughts
I know it’s hard to believe but I kept these segments tight tonight. Honestly, tighter than I’m comfortable with. I'm juggling a tsunami of information, each wave heavier than the last, and nothing feels disposable. I might push to twice-daily reports temporarily (RIP your inbox) because the sheer volume of relevant disasters seems to demand it. We were promised a flood, and here it is, a steady inundation designed to overwhelm resistance by pure saturation.
What we're witnessing now in the shape of masked agents snatching officials, openly targeted political enforcement, and armed intimidation choreographed for maximum viral impact isn't isolated. It's a deliberate escalation. Calibrated and methodical. Brad Lander’s arrest wasn't some fluke or overreach. It was a calculated message aimed at neutralizing accountability and redefining dissent as criminal.
We can't kid ourselves into thinking this stops at selective arrests or masked agents waving rifles in Walmart parking lots. When Trump openly labels Democratic cities as "power centers" of crime and degeneracy, he's painting targets on entire populations. ICE and CBP are no longer performing immigration enforcement; they're carrying out domestic occupation, a political strategy fully weaponized against dissent and diversity. One predicted and propositioned by the people in charge right now. This will happen. This is happening.
Yet, even under these conditions, something vital is shifting. Those No Kings protest, whether four million strong or fourteen, aren't meaningless symbolic gestures. They're vital pressure points. The fabled 3.5% threshold isn’t magical, but it's real enough to send chills down authoritarian spines. It’s the tipping point where rulers start to sweat because suddenly, suppression carries risks as large as the protests themselves. Autocratic and Fascist governments only have one response to that kind of fear and self preservation. Violent Suppression.
Violence from the state is inevitable. Surveillance, arrests, asset seizures, and live ammunition are on standby. But resistance isn't backing down; it's gaining muscle. When ordinary people start shoving back against masked, unaccountable goons, it’s a sign we've entered the next phase. Start preparing yourselves psychologically and emotionally for what comes next. If we let the tragedy of the predictable outcome stall out our momentum then we will be lost for generations upon generations.
Media complicity remains a bitter pill. Fox pumps in applause; WaPo glosses over reality. But real journalism happens on street corners, captured in brief, brave flashes by citizen cameras. That’s where truth holds ground. Some of you have been really critical of my usage of ‘social media’ sources vs. ‘primary sources’ and I’ve taken that to heart and done my best to mitigate the situation, but the truth is it’s about to get real messy and we’ll have to take our information where we can get it and vet it the best we can. I appreciate all of your help on this matter. Please continue to point out inconsistencies or mistakes. I can’t do it alone.
Believe me when I say that Nazis, once humiliated will return is ferocious, petty, brutal. Either in smaller markets with less push back or as part of officially sanctioned federal forces. Small egos wielding big violence. They'll try reclaiming lost ground, desperate to forget their inadequacies. But the streets ain’t theirs anymore. The tide is rising, a human swell of courage and refusal.
So yeah, the flood’s here. But I swear to god it feels like we’re learning how to swim against the current.