Well, What Did You Expect Would Happen?

June 14, 2025

Political Assassinations

Just yesterday, I wrote that the explosion in law enforcement impersonation wouldn’t stop at illegal detentions or intimidation. I said it would escalate to kidnappings, rape and murder.

But even I didn’t expect the timeline to tighten this quickly.

Late last night, former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in what investigators are calling a targeted political attack. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were also wounded. The suspect was reportedly dressed in tactical gear, posed as law enforcement, and used falsified credentials to gain access.

This is not random violence or singular deranged behavior. This is what it looks like when the rhetoric is continually targeted and aimed at political opponents as a form of deliberate propaganda.

Governor Tim Walz called it “an act of political terror” and Local “No Kings” protests were canceled out of safety concerns. Some law enforcement departments are on high alert. Others have gone dark altogether.

We’ve seen this before in Colombia, Turkey, Hungary where targeted violence begins with impersonators or collapse of authority/law enforcement boundaries. It often, then becomes state‑permitted. First presenting as chaos, then as command.

The groundwork was laid long ago. Immigrants were the test case, relentlessly dehumanized as vermin, as “animals,” as foreign invaders. Voices in the media and politics even flirted with language about shooting them in the head. That test didn’t fail, it metastasized. Then they spent the last few months bringin dissenters, protestors, journalists, teachers or anyone who won’t bend to Trumpism under that same umbrella of enemies of the state and dangerous lunatics who hate America.

This has been the case since the beginning. From day one, Trump repeatedly warned of “the enemy from within”. Radical left lunatics he claimed might need to be stopped by the military or National Guard on Election Day. He’s called American opponents more dangerous than China or Russia.

This past weekend, U.S. troops were deployed in Los Angeles amid immigration protests and ICE raids, forcing a state governor to ask the courts to block the action. The specter of National Guard and Marines on domestic soil, under a president pledging to “liberate” American cities from internal ‘socialist’ enemies, is no longer dystopian fiction.

And Republican leaders don’t get to act shocked. Not after years and especially months of programming the public to see Democrats as radical, America‑hating terrorists. There were impeachment show trials, mass arrests were cheered, dissenters were called traitors en masse. Then they feign surprise when someone takes that rhetoric literally.

Right wing pundits on TV and radio have laughed and encouraged vigilante violence against protesters and lawmakers. Whether they were snorting chocolate milk out of their nose every time a judge or high profile figure got arrested or doing play by plays for vigilantes tackling protesters or sucker punching them. They have encouraged and applauded escalating and increasing violent speech and action for a long time. They can’t suddenly turn around and pretend they didn’t know this would happen.

This is systemic. They stripped away humanity from one group, and now they’re watching bullets land in another. They called immigrants invaders. Now they call protesters insurrectionists. They aim at school board members, journalists, and elected officials alike. And eventually someone showed up, uniformed and armed, to do the rest.

This isn’t about silencing high‑ranking Democrats. It's about silencing everyone: once you're dehumanized, it’s your turn next. That’s how authoritarian cascade works. And now, a homegrown execution is the result.

This will not be the last or worst type of event like this to happen. There is a new rhythm in America and it never stops, it just gets louder and faster. Head on a swivel.

The Reasonable Threats

There is a problem with ‘our people’ online. Too often I see some viral moment that is shared via thousands of accounts, but it’s basically just click bait. Are we that hard up for actual drama? I don’t think so. I don’t know why people do it. Rather, I DO know but I’m not going to spend half of this article dissecting that particular psychology.

What I will do is speak plainly and factually. Sheriff Wayne Ivey did not say that his department will indiscriminately kill protesters. What he did say on video, in full uniform, with his command staff behind him was this:

“You throw a firebomb, you point a weapon at one of my deputies… we will kill you graveyard dead.”

At first glance, it sounds like an obvious boundary. Who wouldn’t expect armed force in response to a direct threat? But that’s exactly what makes the statement dangerous. Because it hides something far more tactical inside something that feels like common sense.

We have to remember the context here. He isn’t addressing a hypothetical mass shooter or referencing a standoff with drug traffickers or a gang war. He said this specifically in the context of the “No Kings” protest movement, which has been so far overwhelmingly nonviolent. He framed his statement as a preemptive warning about protests. About dissent. And then said the word "kill." Not neutralize or respond to threats or defend the public. Kill.

And that framing matters. Because the boundary of what counts as a “weapon” or a “threat” has already been blurred. We’ve watched journalists labeled as violent agitators. We’ve seen protesters charged with felony assault for bumping into cops. We've seen water bottles called ‘projectiles’ and umbrellas described as ‘riot gear’. So when Ivey talks about Molotovs and gunfire, he’s not drawing a line, he’s inviting the expansion of that line.

He then followed up with the laughable and cringy;

“We’re not California. We’re not going to stand down and let our cities burn.”

That’s pure performance. Because I assume it is well understood by most people that the LAPD is one of the most militarized, aggressive departments in the country. They shoot people with rubber bullets for holding signs. They kettle peaceful crowds and call it dispersal. Ivey’s not rejecting California’s tactics, he’s trying to outflank them. He’s posturing for something more violent, not less.

This isn’t about any specific threat. This is them rehearsing justification. They are setting the stage so that when someone is shot and when a protester dies, they can say, “I told you what would happen.”

That is the real danger. The viral headlines are wrong in a way because it lets people shrug it off. They click, they see the conditionals, and they say, well, obviously if you point a gun at a cop, you get shot. But that’s not the subtext. The subtext is this:

Protest is being framed as inherently violent.
Policing is being framed as inherently fatal.
And that fatality is being framed as normal.

What Sheriff Ivey said isn’t a threat to lawbreakers. It is a conditioning exercise. Say it enough times, calibrate the audience to expect it, and by the time it happens, no one will call it murder. They will simply call it enforcement. And right wing radio hosts will exclaim ‘Well, what did you think was going to happen???’

That’s why this moment matters. It’s not because he said something shocking. It’s because he said something that was just careful enough to be accepted. And once you accept the framing that dissent might require death, the next time someone dies, it won’t even feel like news.

Who The Fuck Is Paying For All Of This?

Washington, DC today is what authoritarian governments think freedom looks like.

More than 6,600 troops. Two thousand civilian marchers. Rows of armored vehicles. Fighter jets. Helicopters. Drones. Blockades. Bands. Uniforms. Choreographed unity.

It’s being billed as a celebration of the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary and of Donald Trump’s 79th birthday, of national strength and a blowjob to ego. But this isn’t about commemoration. It’s about confirmation.

Power, displayed. Power, rehearsed. Power, paraded.

President Eisenhower famously rejected the idea of military parades on U.S. soil. There is a famous meme quote going around that he has said it was something the Soviets did. Something insecure regimes do to project strength they don’t actually possess. In Eisenhower’s view, real power didn’t need to march down Main Street in formation to be believed.

This quote is not verifiable but it does align with many other sourced quotes and known opinions of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during WWII. In America, we only have these kind of displays as exceptional celebrations at the end of major conflicts. We don’t whip our armored dicks out to display to the world in honor of some jello eating shit bag who installed a throne in the Whitehouse and thinks that makes him king.

Trump’s administration sees it differently. This regime wants the optics, it cherises the spotlight like Gollum guarded the ring. They get hard on the domination. They salivate at drone flyovers and orgasm to the sound of tanks rolling past the Capitol. Despite all the flags and language, this isn’t patriotism, it’s not even nationalism anymore, it’s just run of the mill, lowest hanging fruit propaganda. Performance Art.

And like all Trumpian performance art, it comes with a very real price tag. The last time Trump ordered a parade like this in 2018, the Pentagon canceled it after the cost ballooned past $90 million, most of it in logistics, security, and street repair. This time, those costs are being obscured in bundled security appropriations. But between the deployment itself and the physical repairs that will follow, this display will likely match or exceed that price tag.

And all of this while the regime pushes its so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”. A multi-trillion dollar federal overhaul that cuts social safety nets, expands military budgets, and funnels billions into privatized immigration enforcement and surveillance. This bill adds trillions to spending, AT A DEFICIT! This from the part of fiscal conservatism. This is authoritarian accounting: starve the people, feed the spectacle, and tell the crowd it’s strength.

Small caveat, I was informed of the fiscal irresponsibility of this bill from right wing talk radio. They hate it. They make a point to say that they obviously still support trump, but they don’t like this bill. That’s how bad it is.

They say we can't afford public healthcare. We can't afford to fund schools. We can’t afford to cancel medical debt. But today they rolled $100 million worth of military hardware past Pennsylvania Avenue to prove a point. That point being: we will always have money for control. We will never pay for care but we will borrow money to pay for projection. We only destroy, we never repair.

This parade happens while ICE conducts warrantless raids across the Midwest. While republicans and pundits go on and on about “internal enemies.” While sheriffs promise death on camera. It’s meant to make all of that feel normal like red white and blue background noise.

Because that’s what it is for: normalization.
Not celebration. Not defense. Not honor.
Repetition. Ritual. Conditioning.

In a country where political opponents are being shot, and law enforcement is being rebranded as kill squads, this kind of spectacle is a message and a warning.

Take heed.

The Eye In The Sky

While soldiers marched through Washington and armored vehicles paraded past the Capitol, a quieter flex of state power took effect. One written in bureaucratic prose but built for airspace dominance.

Trump’s latest executive order, Unleashing American Drone Dominance, does not outright announce a dragnet but it doesn’t have to. It sets the legal and industrial foundation for permanent, domestic drone presence justified through economic growth, wrapped in efficiency language, and scrubbed clean of anything that might look like a civil liberties concern.

It begins with the plan to accelerate Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone operations. That sounds technical, and it is but what it means is straightforward. Drones will no longer require direct human oversight to fly. They can be dispatched automatically, managed by AI, and operate autonomously over long distances, including across populated areas. Under the EO, the FAA has 240 days to finalize a rule making that routine.

That one shift reshapes what domestic surveillance will look like going forward. It removes the friction of coordination, timing, and visibility. It turns temporary eyes in the sky into a persistent, semi-automated presence.

Next, the order calls for AI tools to expedite the FAA’s waiver process. The intent here is speed. More drones in the air, faster. But it also signals something deeper: the replacement of individualized approval with pattern-based authorization. Drones that resemble “previously safe” operations can be waived in without deeper review. As the process accelerates, oversight weakens. One precedent paves the way for dozens more.

I don’t believe it is exaggeration to say that within a year these drones will be armed as well.

There’s no mention of warrants or civilian oversight. No mention of data limitations. This is dystopian authoritarian infrastructure and technocratic commerce policy. And this is how it moves, under the radar of public scrutiny.

The EO also tasks the Department of Transportation with fully utilizing UAS Test Ranges to support “increasingly autonomous operations” and “advanced air mobility.” That means drones capable of self-guided operation, not just surveillance but transport, soon to be tested over domestic territory in coordination with public-private partnerships. If you think that’s just going to be cargo delivery, you’re not paying attention to how fast language like “public safety” expands.

Then there’s the eVTOL program; electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft which the order ties directly to tribal, local, and territorial governments. This isn’t just vertical integration of industry; it’s horizontal reach. It creates financial and political incentives for communities to adopt aerial infrastructure in exchange for federal support and partnership deals with drone manufacturers.

You thought it was bad when your local Police station in a town of 5,000 people somehow ended up with 6 Humvees and a Rocket Launcher?

And all of it is bound together by procurement language that mandates prioritizing U.S.-manufactured drones. Not only does this order legalize a drone-heavy domestic future, it builds the economy around it. It creates the conditions for permanence by making the industry too big to cut. Like fossil fuels. Like Banks. Like prisons.

Missing from the entire document is any explicit concern about how this infrastructure might be used. For instance on whom, and under what conditions. It does not distinguish between commercial, military, and police use cases. It does not define "public safety." It offers no civil rights guardrails. There are no boundaries for expansion. Just a roadmap for more, faster. And my prediction, deadlier.

This isn’t the exciting and dramatic dystopia Philip K. Dick writes about, but it’s the policy memo that makes that dystopia legal, exportable, and scalable.

The truth is that the drones are already here. This just makes sure they stay. Not just in the sky but in the budget and in the trade agenda. It redefines the way government sees the country it governs. From above.

Final Thoughts

If the government deployed armed Marines to every street corner, most people would know what they were looking at. They’d call it a crackdown. They’d feel that a line had been unequivocally crossed. But replace those soldiers with high-altitude drones that are silent, persistent and faceless and somehow the urgency fades. The violence becomes abstract. The control becomes invisible. One looks like war. The other looks like infrastructure. But they serve the same function. One is a hammer and one is a glove, but they both serve the same hand.

What’s more disorienting than the escalation is how routine it all feels. A military parade gets live-streamed while ICE conducts rural sweeps. A sheriff casually threatens to kill protestors and gets a round of applause. A former House Speaker is assassinated and half the headlines lead with qualifiers. The federal government greenlights aerial surveillance on a scale that would have been unthinkable five years ago but does it through an ‘economic memo’ about airspace and supply chains.

None of this arrives with a single moment of rupture. It’s just a continual, quiet stacking of precedent. Just one more EO. One more policy shift. One more dead official. And each time it happens, the language gets cleaner and the logic gets tighter. The distance between governance and enforcement is closing rapidly and there is not much daylight left.

The danger isn’t the chaos. It’s the disciplined coordination of our oppressors.

And what should terrify us most is not what’s happening in secret, but what’s happening in public. Out in the open in uniform, on paper. With branding and rollout schedules. It’s not because no one’s watching. It’s because it’s being sold as stability.

And there are still too many people that believe it.