But the work has stopped.

A stop work order was issued to GardaWorld last week, buried in the federal spending database at USAspending.gov with no explanation attached. No reason given, no timeline for resumption, just a quiet bureaucratic notation that something, somewhere, had gone wrong for the people in charge. And now Axios is reporting what the residents of Surprise had already begun to suspect: DHS is evaluating whether to walk away from the entire warehouse detention program. Not just Surprise. All of it. Twenty-four warehouses across the country, a $38 billion vision of industrial-scale human caging, and the whole apparatus is wobbling.

The federal government blinked.

It didn’t blink because of a court order, though AG Kris Mayes’ lawsuit, filed April 24th, didn’t hurt. It didn’t blink because of a congressional intervention. The Democrats who represent this community sent a strongly-worded letter and called it a day. It didn’t blink because Kevin Sartor grew a spine. It blinked because the people of Surprise, Arizona made it politically, logistically, and legally untenable to do anything else, and none of them fought harder, or more visibly, than a seventeen-year-old kid named Cali Overs.

Cali Overs is a senior at Dysart High School, Student Body Vice President, and approximately one mile from the warehouse as the crow flies. She is also the person who, when the federal government purchased a building in her city to use as a mass detention facility for up to 1,500 human beings, did not wait for an adult to handle it.

She circulated a petition. She showed up to city council meetings. She testified. She organized. And on April 24th, she stood in front of that warehouse next to the Attorney General of Arizona and told the press what it was like to watch her classmates become afraid of their own neighborhood.

“Many students have told me that they’re too scared to go past this area,” Overs said, “and are switching to online classes.”

That’s not a political talking point. That’s a seventeen-year-old describing the specific texture of dread that descends on a community when the government turns a building near your school into a detention center. Not a rumor of one, not a zoning proposal, but a done deal, a $70 million cash purchase executed without a single phone call to local officials, without an environmental review, without so much as a courtesy heads-up to the city council member who found out about it from a reporter.

Dysart High School’s student body is over 60 percent Hispanic. The warehouse is half a mile away. The math is not complicated.

The federal government’s strategy, in Surprise as in every other city where it pulled this move, was speed. Buy fast, contract fast, build fast, and present the community with a fait accompli before anyone could organize a response. It worked in other places. It did not work here.

Community members packed city council meetings from the moment news broke in late January. One meeting drew over a thousand people. They filled the room, spilled into the hallway, stood outside in the parking lot, and made it clear that this was not a controversy that was going to quietly dissipate. Northwest Valley Indivisible worked the attorney general’s office for months, meeting twice with staffers, pushing the legal case. Brent Peak of NWV Indivisible had the particular satisfaction of watching it pay off, though he kept his victory speech characteristically dry.

“An MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” he said, back when the mayor was still promising written agreements with DHS would solve everything.

The legal architecture that’s boxing DHS in was built in Maryland first. A federal judge there issued a preliminary injunction on April 15th, finding that ICE had not taken the “hard look” at environmental consequences required by the National Environmental Policy Act, and that the agency’s claim to a categorical exclusion from that law didn’t hold up when the project involved converting an industrial warehouse into a facility housing hundreds of people. Arizona AG Mayes pointed directly at that ruling when she filed her own lawsuit nine days later.

The NEPA argument is good. The INA argument, that the Surprise facility is not and will never be an “appropriate” place to detain human beings, as the law requires, is arguably better. The warehouse is directly across the street from Rinchem, a chemical storage facility handling materials used in semiconductor production. The hazmat warnings are visible from the road. Mayes stood in front of them at her press conference and gestured at two large chemical tankers idling at the curb like props that the government itself had helpfully provided.

“Let this sink in,” she said. “The federal government wants to open a jail inside a documented chemical hazard zone.”

ICE’s response was to say this wasn’t really about the environment.

Which is technically true.

It’s about a lot of things.

It’s about a government that bought a warehouse without telling the city. It’s about students switching to online school. It’s about what happens when you try to build a machine that processes human beings at industrial scale and you forget that the human beings aren’t the only ones with something to say about it.

None of this is over. The warehouse is still there. The contract is still on the books. DHS has not officially announced it’s abandoning the project, only that it’s “paused” and “evaluating.” The federal government has a long history of pausing things and then quietly resuming them once attention drifts elsewhere. The lawsuit is still working its way through the courts. The stop work order has no stated expiration.

But something has shifted.

The broader warehouse detention program, all 24 facilities, the entire $38 billion architecture of it, is now described by sources close to DHS as a plan under review, with discussions underway about selling properties back. CoreCivic, one of the country’s largest private prison operators, is in talks to sell the agency “turnkey” facilities instead. Existing detention infrastructure, already built for the purpose, no retrofitting required. The warehouse gambit, the whole audacious vision of converting America’s surplus industrial real estate into a nationwide detention network, appears to be failing on the merits.

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The record is called Live from Alligator Alcatraz.

Download it right now. I'll wait.

This is the Album of the Summer. Not one of the albums. Not in contention. Not a dark horse. THE album. The only album. The album that was always going to exist because this country was always going to get this stupid and someone was always going to have to be insane enough and brave enough and sick enough and funny enough to document it while wearimg a giraffe suit.

That someone is Robby Roadsteamer. Born Louis Robert Potylo. Salem, Massachusetts. Two kidneys the size of angry cantaloupes trying to murder him from the inside. Three arrests. Six pepper balls. Zero fucks remaining.

He wanted to make this like a Jimi Hendrix estate release — with photos of his arrests as the cover art. He got his wish. The cover is two tactical officers in full military kit flanking a giraffe. It looks like a bootleg. It looks like a federal exhibit. It looks like the only honest document of America in 2026 because it is the only honest document of America in 2026.

14 songs. 47 minutes. Every single one of them a weapon. Every single one a laugh that turns into something colder halfway through, something that sits in your chest after the joke is over and won't leave. This is what the best political art does. It gets in through the joke and stays through the truth.

Roadsteamer has been doing this — at CPAC, at AmericaFest, at the Capitol steps, at ICE facilities in Portland and Los Angeles and Broadview, Illinois, at the No Kings rally in Saint Paul where 125,000 people sang back — with a karaoke machine and a giraffe suit and the specific fury of a man who knows his time here is limited and has decided to spend every minute of it making the government of the United States answer for itself.

They threw him out of CPAC. They arrested him at Whipple. They pepper-balled him in Portland and he kept singing. They detained him in Minneapolis and when they let him out he went and did it again. The citation they handed him on the way out of Portland looked, he noted, like a CVS receipt.

He is now suing ICE.

He made an album.

He won.

"We do not fight absurdity with valor," he told the Boston Globe from a recording studio couch, drinking a Shirley Temple and two orange sodas in succession to force function. "We fight it with more absurdity."

14 songs. 47 minutes. The whole absurd empire of American cruelty, made to stand there and take it while a man in a giraffe onesie sings Rod Stewart at the snipers and the snipers can't do a goddamn thing about it that isn't going to cost them dearly in court.

Download the album. Stream it all day. Stream it at work. Stream it in the parking lot of your nearest federal building with the windows down. Download it on a different device. Buy the vinyl when it drops and hold it like a relic, because that is exactly what it is.

No political violence.

Just the giraffe.

Just the truth.

Download it again.

Closer to the Edge is sustained by readers who believe in punching up.

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“Fraud!” they scream.

Yes. Correct. There was fraud. An astonishing amount of it.

The federal government estimates roughly $64 billion in potentially fraudulent PPP loans alone. Broader pandemic relief fraud estimates climb north of $200 billion. That is not corruption in the abstract. That is an entire parallel economy built out of fake LLCs, invented employees, strip-mall accounting firms, and men named Chad buying lifted pickup trucks with “payroll protection” money while insisting they are rugged individualists. America essentially threw cash from helicopters during COVID because the alternative was economic collapse. Some of that money genuinely saved restaurants, payrolls, and small businesses. Some of it purchased jet skis for people whose “consulting company” operated out of a mailbox next to a vape store in Tampa.

And yet somehow, mysteriously, almost magically, the people who spent years treating PPP fraud like an unfortunate side effect of emergency governance suddenly rediscovered moral outrage the moment the word “Minnesota” entered the conversation. Now fraud was the defining crisis of the republic. Now every daycare was a potential criminal enterprise. Now every Somali nonprofit became evidence that civilization itself was under attack.

Curious.

Because the Minnesota fraud cases are real. Feeding Our Future was real. Roughly $250 million allegedly stolen from child nutrition programs is not a hallucination cooked up in a Facebook comment section at two in the morning. Federal prosecutors brought cases. Convictions happened. Money disappeared into shell organizations and fake meal counts while pandemic-era oversight systems buckled under pressure.

That happened.

But here is where the fraud conversation itself becomes fraudulent.

PPP fraud was roughly two hundred and fifty-six times larger than Feeding Our Future. Two hundred and fifty-six. That is not a discrepancy. That is the distance between a backyard kiddie pool and the Atlantic Ocean. Yet MAGA media talks about Minnesota like it was the financial equivalent of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs while PPP fraud gets treated like an unfortunate accounting hiccup that accidentally resulted in somebody buying a Range Rover with taxpayer money.

Why?

Because PPP fraud implicates the mythology America worships. PPP fraud involved “job creators,” business owners, lenders, financiers, entrepreneurs, and every sacred LinkedIn sociopath who believes opening an LLC makes them Ayn Rand with a Bluetooth headset. Minnesota fraud, meanwhile, could be packaged into something emotionally and politically useful. It could be urban. It could be immigrant. It could be Somali. It could be Democratic. It could be transformed into a full-spectrum panic attack about blue cities and “woke corruption.”

The outrage machine saw a narrative sitting unattended on the sidewalk and stole it like a catalytic converter.

Which brings us to Nick Shirley, a man who has built a thriving media career on filming himself walking toward ambiguity while dramatic music plays underneath. Nick Shirley did not invent Minnesota fraud. That would actually be easier to debunk. What he did instead was more subtle and, frankly, more dishonest.

He weaponized atmosphere.

That is the trick.

Take a real scandal. Wrap it around unrelated footage. Add ominous narration. Film locked doors. Ask loaded questions. Treat refusal to cooperate with a random YouTuber carrying a camera like proof of guilt. Let viewers emotionally connect dots the evidence never actually connected. In Shirley’s daycare videos, empty hallways became evidence. Closed offices became evidence. People refusing access to children became evidence. The implication floated over every frame like cigar smoke in a backroom poker game.

Later reporting complicated much of the narrative. Multiple outlets found children present at many of the centers highlighted in his videos. Direct evidence supporting some of his broadest insinuations simply was not there. But by then it no longer mattered because the algorithm had already swallowed the narrative whole and moved on to its next emotional support conspiracy.

That is not journalism.

That is vibe laundering.

And now comes Cuba, because every influencer eventually reaches the stage where they begin imagining themselves either as a persecuted dissident or the lead character in a low-budget espionage thriller. Nick arrived in Cuba and quickly began describing spies, danger, surveillance, generals waiting in hotel lobbies, possible hostage situations, and escape routes to the U.S. Embassy. Which sounds incredibly dramatic until another guy named Zach apparently wandered over to the same hotel with a cellphone and started filming people casually eating dinner outside.

That man deserves some credit.

Zach Metzger, better known online as Zach for the People, did something increasingly rare in modern political media: he physically went to the location in question and tested the narrative against observable reality. His footage did not prove Cuba is free or democratic. Cuba absolutely surveils dissidents and foreign political content creators. But Zach’s videos punctured the cinematic mythology Shirley was constructing around himself. No visible siege. No hostage atmosphere. No panicked evacuation scene. No trembling dispatch from a hidden bunker beneath Havana. Just another hotel courtyard with tourists, lights, and people trying to eat dinner in peace while two American content creators conducted an ideological cage match for social media engagement.

And this is the real fraud story.

Not merely stolen money. Stolen perception.

America has entered an era where narrative itself is the grift. PPP scammers forged payroll documents. Influencer propagandists forge emotional certainty. Both understand the same fundamental truth: if you move fast enough, yell loudly enough, and trigger the correct fears, most people will never stop to audit the books.

MAGA wants to talk about fraud?

Excellent.

Let’s talk about the $64 billion PPP disaster. Let’s talk about fake businesses vacuuming up taxpayer money while the same political movement now screaming about Minnesota voted to blast pandemic money out the door with minimal oversight. Let’s talk about fintech lenders rubber-stamping loans like drunken blackjack dealers at three in the morning. Let’s talk about why white-collar pandemic fraud became background noise while every Somali-run nonprofit in Minneapolis became a national morality play.

And let’s talk about influencers who discovered that outrage itself is a business model. Because Nick Shirley may not be a financial fraudster, but narrative fraud is still fraud. Dressing implication up as evidence is fraud. Manufacturing panic from ambiguity is fraud. Turning vibes into accusations is fraud.

America became so obsessed with catching scammers that it accidentally turned scamming into the dominant communication strategy of the age.

Which, honestly, feels about right.

The main pass, the one for Americans, the one that says this land is your land, has a Trump’s face on it. One visitor described it as a mugshot slapped onto natural beauty. A lawsuit was filed. Sticker campaigns launched. The Interior Department updated its alteration policy to make covered passes potentially void at the gate, which is the federal government using its enforcement apparatus to protect a portrait of Donald Trump from the menace of wildlife stickers.

Chance Meeting’s response to all of this was surgical. Somewhere on the highway between Holbrook and Tucson he produced a penknife and carved Xs through Trump’s eyes on our pass — not frantically, not with performance, but with the calm focused precision of a filmmaker who has spent considerable time thinking about what deserves to be in the frame and what doesn’t. When I presented the pass at Saguaro National Park, I was wearing my embroidered DEPORT MELANIA hat. My friend, Chelsea Gods, had gifted it to me earlier in the year. The ranger looked at the Xs on the pass. Looked at my hat. Paused in the way that people pause when they are deciding whether today is the day they want to have a particular conversation and concluding that it is not. She waved us through without issue.

A few people in line behind me were smiling. Nobody said a word. Nobody seemed to care. The machinery of authoritarian aesthetic enforcement, it turns out, is a little wobbly when it meets a penknife and a hat with a strong position.

The saguaro cactus also does not care about you. It does not care about the news cycle or the quarterly projections or who is currently posting on Truth Social or what the Department of the Interior has decided this week about the definition of alteration. The saguaro — Carnegiea gigantea, the largest cactus in the United States — has been standing in this desert since before humans arrived in this hemisphere, doing exactly what it does, which is survive in a place that should not be survivable, with a calm and total indifference to outside opinion that the rest of us can only aspire to.

A saguaro doesn’t grow its first arm until it’s seventy-five years old. The oldest ones in the park are a hundred and fifty to two hundred years old. They were here before Arizona was a state. They watched the Civil War happen from a distance. They have now survived long enough to watch someone staple a president’s vanity project to a laminated card and call it patriotism. They are unmoved.

If you ever get the opportunity, I suggest walking the trails at dawn. The light is lateral and honest and the javelinas move through the scrub like they own it — because they do, and because they were here first, and because no one has yet tried to put their picture on an eighty-dollar card and call it a tribute to America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday.

The desert is armed. The desert is dangerous. The desert is not taking questions. It built itself for no one’s benefit but its own and it has the thorns, the teeth, the geological record, and the bottomless indifference to prove it.

Put that on a pass.

The people who show up, give it their all to help others and ask nothing in return are among the rarest you can find in a world built on a system of inherent selfishness. And the source of endless frustration for those rare people is looking around at a world of humans unwilling to do the same, knowing that if the inverse were possible – a world where most humans operated at the same level of selflessness – then the world might actually have a chance at becoming a better place instead of barreling towards inevitable catastrophe cultivated from our collective consent in such a selfish, violent and unsustainable system built on the exploitation of the masses.

I have a friend who shows up to help others and asks nothing in return, except occasionally that others show up alongside her. A friend who spreads herself thin in activism and advocacy because of the sheer size of her heart. A friend who, even with the stress of financial turmoil and health issues, goes to the ends of the Earth to lend a hand wherever she can. A friend who has witnessed me spiral in self-doubt and anger at the unfairness of this cruel world, and been there to help me pick up the pieces and continue the fight together.

That friend is .

I met her last year in Washington DC, near the beginning of a protest movement that has morphed into a network of dissent in desperate need of further organization and national unity. She knew of my work documenting the movement and offered me encouragement, honest advice, and the first GoPro I’ve ever owned.

I was baffled at such support. But Courtney believes in people.

She’s worked mobilizing women through the Handmaids of Washington DC, an offshoot of the Handmaid’s Army that derived from seeing other groups pop up nationally. She’s frequented the halls of Congress, advocating for impeachment alongside Flare. But what she said has been the most fulfilling work within this movement has been what has had the most tangible effect: being able to help people get out of detention and save them from deportation.

That is works she does with the Coalition, a group of people who advocate for those wrongfully detained inside these ICE concentration camps, amplify their stories to the media, find legal counsel and maneuver through a cruel system while constantly calling out the injustices that are increasing by the day. She does so much of the necessary work that not many want to or are capable of: organizing the people and the data in order to operate most effectively and help those in need to the highest degree.

And the Free Them Now Coalition is effective, having helped many people who are detained and their loved ones to make their voices heard and get there stories out. And they have been effective in getting people released as well by putting constant pressure on a system that has no ground to justify itself.

“I’m involved with so many things, because I’m not sure which thing will work,” she once told me. And while it’s hard to accept the small wins as moving the needle when up against such a large entity of cruelty, Courtney does what works. She’s helped so many people. She’s even helped me more than she knows and I have to believe that’s worth everything.

It’s all parts to a whole. Everyone has their part to play and Courtney plays many.

Something she’s working on now is the Pay it Forward Program. Something that could be adopted by communities to attempt to offset the violent and unsustainable system of selfishness we all exist in. It’s a system of mutual aid built on trust and cooperation.

“Minneapolis could be the testing ground for it,” she told me. “Since they already have a system of mutual aid and solidarity within their community.”

It’s a solidarity cultivated from the terror they have faced at the hands of authoritarianism.

The Pay it Forward Program is a work in progress. Something that could start out small and blossom into something worthwhile.

Because like I said before, Courtney believes in people. Maybe we can start believing in ourselves and look at the example she sets, and start believing in each other as well.

Courtney Pope helps so many people and often asks nothing in return. So that’s why I’m asking. Below is her GoFundMe for her organization and resistance efforts. If you’re able to lend any help, please do so here:

GoFundMe

Photos by

It also, as it turns out, has agents who will tell a woman they met on Tinder exactly where tomorrow’s raid is going to be if she seems interested enough.

This is the story of how the most expensive law enforcement apparatus in human history got its operational security dismantled by approximately 20 women, a private Facebook group of a thousand people running background checks, and a civil rights attorney in a Honda Fit with a bad transmission. The agency is calling it a felony. We’re calling it Operation Swipe Right. DHS has not addressed the embarrassment, because there are no words in the English language to adequately describe it.

HOW IT WORKED

A woman in Massachusetts organized roughly 20 women into a two-track intelligence operation. The front-end team went on dates with suspected ICE agents. The back-end team — a thousand people in a private Facebook group — ran background checks and built dossiers. The agents, for their part, talked about upcoming raids to women who had already decided what to do with that information.

Federal agents. The ones who train immigrant families to say nothing to anyone ever. Talking about their jobs. On dates. That they got on Tinder.

The intel served three purposes. First: unmasking — because agents had been conducting detentions in masks with no visible identification, making it impossible for families to know who took their person or where. The dates produced photographs of their actual faces, which went directly into the folder. Second: operational leaks — raid locations and schedules, pillow-talked directly into the resistance network. Third, and most magnificently: if a honeypotter got burned, the chat logs went to the agent’s wife.

They came for people’s families. The women sent the receipts to their families. There is a poetry to this that no one at DHS is currently in a position to appreciate.

THE GRINDR SITUATION, BRIEFLY

It wasn’t just Tinder. Minneapolis activist “Nina” noticed that Grindr was, in her words, “blowing up with visitors from out of town” — meaning deployed federal agents, on a gay hookup app, on their off hours, in a city they had come to occupy. She called on gay Minnesotans to collect everything and share it widely.

Fox News had a complete breakdown over this, with co-host Joey Jones asking gravely whether protesters were trying to shame agents “who may be homosexual.” This from a network that has spent a decade suggesting gay people are a threat to civilization. The concern for federal agents’ Grindr privacy was, in this moment, apparently Fox News’s most urgent civil liberties issue.

We will leave that there.

WILL STANCIL, ACCIDENTAL SPYMASTER

The alleged coordinator of the Minneapolis honeypot network is Will Stancil, a 40-year-old civil rights attorney previously best known as, per Slate, “the most harassed man in the history of Twitter.” He lost a state house race. He compared himself to Poland in 1939 over an economics argument. He drives a 2011 Honda Fit with an iffy transmission.

He was also, allegedly, running a distributed counter-intelligence operation against the United States Department of Homeland Security out of that Honda Fit while getting tear-gassed every other day.

Economist Noah Smith described the situation as Stancil “running a Tinder honeypot network in Minneapolis to break ICE’s opsec, LMFAO.”

The LMFAO is the only appropriate response. Frame it. Put it in a museum. It is the epitaph of an era.

WHAT THIS IS

When you send masked agents in unmarked vehicles to take people away — no names, no badges, no agency confirmation, no indication of which facility or which state or which country — you have made a choice. You have decided that accountability is optional and that the people left behind can simply wonder. ICE detained American citizens. It transferred people across international borders without due process. It separated parents from American-born children and then argued with federal judges about whether it felt like following court orders.

The women on Tinder understood what that means for a family trying to find someone. So they built a better intelligence network than ICE had. With a Facebook group. In their spare time.

Somewhere in a DHS field office right now, someone is drafting new guidelines on dating app usage during active deployments. That sentence exists in reality. It is a real thing that is happening because it needed to happen, because the agents required guidance on this, because they did not previously understand that operational security applied when a woman on Tinder seemed into them.

The memo. Sixty billion dollars a year.

They did not get the memo.

Keep swiping, gentlemen.

Rook T. Winchester is the founder and editor of Closer to the Edge.

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Accountability Now is a grassroots organization of volunteers maintaining an ongoing, permitted demonstration against the Trump administration. Their overall mission is to hold government officials accountable for their actions.

Randy Kindle is representing Accountability Now in the lawsuit against the National Park Service. Representing them are the big guns. The ACLU.

The American Civil Liberties Union remains a pillar in the ongoing fight for civil liberties, and as the Trump administration continues their attacks on those looking to exercise their constitutionally protected rights, they have shown up to represent a group that has been doing their own part in the fight for civil liberties.

Randy is a friend. I’ve interviewed him many times and have attended multiple protests and events with him. This interview was different though, as it could only be conducted with the ACLU of DC present. Along with Randy, I spoke with Senior Communications Strategist Yvonne Slosarski and the ACLU-DC Staff Attorney Laura Follansbee.

The lawsuit deals with two signs created by Randy and displayed at the Accountability Now encampment. The signs in question allege sexual misconduct by President Trump and his complicity in the criminal content within the Epstein Files.

In April, the National Park Service told the demonstrators to remove the signs and then threatened further action, saying they were legally obscene and therefor not protected by the first amendment.

“Which is untrue,” Laura said. “The signs are not legally obscene and are protected free speech.”

“I’ve seen all manner of signage alleging crimes by the President and those in his administration,” I said. “Graphic photos of war crimes of the worst kind at countless permitted protests that take place in DC without National Park Service taking action against them. Randy, why do you think they singled in on those two signs specifically when I know there’s been signs of mangled bodies of children calling out the Trump administration for genocide and things like that?”

“I think what we’re seeing here is going to be a larger crackdown on the First Amendment rights and rights to protest in DC,” Randy said. “Since Accountability Now has been down at George Meade and prior to that when other organizations have been at, you know, Columbus Circle, really made a huge impact. And, you know, you’re right. The signs are not unique. They’re not, you know, these are not something that hasn’t been said before. If you look at the right to life protest, a lot of them will carry signs of unborn fetuses or things like that. So kind of grotesque things also or what people would would find offensive. But I think this is a larger crackdown on those First Amendment rights. And we are on the corner of Pennsylvania Constitution and Third right outside of the Capitol. All of these politicians, they see our signs all the time. The White House, they’ve seen our signs, you know, so you can’t you really can’t avoid it. And I think with it, you know, even though they are small signs and we’re we’re kind of a small organization, I think by our location, we have a larger voice. And I think we caught their attention and we made them mad.”

I asked Randy if he believed this blatant attack on free speech to be a testament to the organizations effectiveness and level of influence they garnered while being in the area.

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” he said. “We are always going up to Congress, with different groups, you know, lobbying. We go up there. We’ve participated in civil disobedience on the Hill. I’ve been I’ve been arrested for protesting the Iran war. And so, you know, our our protests and our tactics have been effective and we’ve gotten quite a bit of attention. We know we know that Pete Heggseth knows who we are. Right. J.D. Vance knows who we are. Things like that. And Russell Vought knows who we are. Definitely. So, you know, so we definitely have their attention. So I think the way we’re protesting is really getting under their skin and being effective.”

“It’s absolutely wild the amounts of threats against free speech that we’re seeing,” I said while finishing the interview. “If Trump, the President of the United States, with all the responsibility in the world, were innocent of these alleged crimes, you’d think he’d be willing to sit with investigative journalists and answer to these allegations in full, especially with just how extensive those allegations are. But instead we’re seeing things like this.”

“Yeah,” Randy said. “People get upset at the signs and not the crime.”

Before finishing the call, the ACLU representatives told me another first amendment lawsuit they have taken on. One involving a man who, after the deployment of the National Guard, would follow them while playing the Imperial March from Star Wars to protest their presence on civilian streets. A harmless act but nonetheless one that ended in someone being charged.

Yet, another instance of the Trump administration’s constant intent to squash dissent while violating our constitutionally protected rights.

In these unprecedented times, it is our collective responsibility to exercise those rights and continue to fight for them. I, for one, am glad the ACLU is on the case.

The unthinkable happened—the Senate narrowly passed a 50–49 vote to remove protections the Biden administration put in place for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) watershed, opening it up to toxic sulfide ore mining.

That vote cracks the door wide open for Twin Metals, owned by Antofagasta, a foreign Chilean mining conglomerate with a long, ugly track record of pollution, to move forward with its proposed mine south of the Kawishiwi River, on the edge of the Boundary Waters near Ely.

This fight over our most pristine lands has been raging since around 2011, when Twin Metals first completed its operational headquarters on Miners Drive in Ely, MN. Back then, just like now, Iron Rangers and Boundary Waters folk showed up to community meetings in Ely, packing rooms at places like Grand Ely Lodge to question mining executives.

And for the most part, people were pissed.

This proposal is a direct threat to the way of life people in Ely have built and protected for the past 60 years. Many spoke up but others, nostalgic for “the good ol’ days” when a single mining income could support a family on the Range, cheered the mines on.

Never mind that the local economy had already shifted years ago from extraction to a thriving tourism economy of mom-and-pop shops, outfitters, restaurants, and fishing stores, valued at over $850 million and employing 18,000 people.

But as they say in Ely: “You ain’t from here until you have grandparents in the graveyard.”

During that time some of my friends in the area picked up temporary, part-time work photographing rock and soil specimens for Twin Metals for a summer or two. New faces drifted through town—Antofagasta execs, Twin Metals geologists, pro-mining propagandists—sliding into local bars, Lions Club meetings, and Chamber of Commerce boards.

Rubbing elbows. Sponsoring sports teams. Trying, desperately, to become “locals.” They paddled the lakes for photo ops. Bought ads on WELY. Smiled for the camera like they belonged.

“See? We’re just like you. We love fishing. We love the lakes.”

Every PR move aimed at selling the same lie: We have money. We can revitalize your schools. Fund your teams. Jobs. Growth. Prosperity.

But the truth couldn’t be further from their manufactured reality. Sulfide ore mining is one of the most toxic forms of mining on Earth. The tailings react with air and water creating sulfuric acid runoff. And the Boundary Waters has both in abundance. These mines don’t just fail sometimes. They fail every time.

Not a single sulfide ore mine in existence has operated without severe environmental damage. Not one. They leave behind a slow-moving catastrophe: acid drainage seeping into streams, rivers, and lakes. Poison threading its way through entire ecosystems. Superfund sites. Billions in cleanup costs dumped on local communities. And contamination that lasts not years, but centuries.

“NOT THIS MINE.”
“NOT HERE.”
“PROVE IT FIRST.”

These have been the rallying cries from Friends of the Boundary Waters to the tribes whose treaty rights are bound to this land. Who speaks for land that has no voice? Tribal nations fight to protect their right to harvest manoomin, or wild rice, an indicator species that only grows in clean, unpolluted water. These lands are not just scenic. They are sacred. Protected by treaties that promised their preservation in perpetuity. If the wild rice goes, so does a way of life. As the Anishinaabe prophecy says: “Live where the food grows on water.” And if that food dies, something far deeper dies with it.

On Earth Day at the Minnesota State Capitol, we gathered for a rally in the rotunda to demand: SAVE THE BOUNDARY WATERS.

We showed up for the land. For the water. For our Indigenous relatives. For the next seven generations. We called on our representatives to do their jobs, to listen to the people, end Twin Metals’ leases, and pass real protections for clean water. To demand that no mine operates in Minnesota unless it can prove it first. Prove it can operate without poisoning the land, and prove it can fully pay for the damage when it inevitably fails. Because we know the truth.

Seven hundred temporary jobs lasting maybe 10–15 years, many filled by out-of-state workers is a bad deal.

Billions in ecological destruction is a worse one.

A thousand years of toxic runoff? Unforgivable.

And letting a foreign corporation extract our resources, ship to China for processing, and stash the profits in offshore accounts?

That’s not economic development. That’s extraction in its purest, ugliest form.

The billionaire fat cats getting fatter.

Drinking our milkshake.

Ruining our land.

Decimating a tourism economy that actually sustains our communities, and leaving behind the same boom-bust wreckage mining towns have known for generations.

So raise your voice NOW.

Save the Boundary Waters.

Closer to the Edge is powered by readers and subscribers who still give a damn about the environment that future generations will inherit.

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Washington’s entire chattering class spent three years playing guess-the-author with the manic energy of a true crime podcast that just got renewed for a second season. They named senators. They named cabinet officials. They named at least one person who has probably never fully recovered from the accusation.

The whole time, Miles kept showing up to work.

That’s the part that gets me. The man wrote the most explosive anonymous op-ed in modern American political history and went back to the office on Monday. That’s not courage. That’s something stranger — a guy so committed to his decision that it achieved a kind of zen stillness. Everyone else was losing their minds. Taylor was scheduling meetings.

He revealed himself in 2020. The administration revoked his clearances, investigated him, and added him to the president’s informal-but-very-real enemies list, which by that point required its own organizational system. Most people would have bought a dog and disappeared. Taylor called his friend Xander Schultz and built DEFIANCE.org instead.

The name alone tells you everything about the therapeutic journey he’s been on.

DEFIANCE is a membership club that hands members specific, targeted, legal things to do every month. Support this. Call here. Show up there. The model runs on a theory Taylor arrived at through painful empirical observation: Americans aren’t apathetic, they’re overwhelmed, and overwhelmed people don’t need inspiration, they need a task list.

The newest project is called GTFO ICE — a rapid-alert system to track planned detention facilities and organize protests before the concrete gets poured. If you haven't signed up yet, click here.

Underneath all of it, Taylor is genuinely earnest in a way that is almost disarming. He grew up in La Porte, Indiana. Won state debate. Watched the Twin Towers fall at age fourteen and made the kind of decision kids sometimes make and almost never follow through on. Then he actually did it. Oxford. Pentagon. DHS at thirty. He believed, with the whole uncomplicated heart of a kid from Indiana, that the institutions he served were worth serving — and then had the genuinely terrible experience of watching what happens to them when they fall victim to the whims of a feral hog.

What came out the other side isn’t cynicism. It’s fury. Which is different, and significantly more useful.

Somewhere in La Porte, Indiana, there is a debate coach who has absolutely no idea what they started.

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To the Shareholders of Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc.
230 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10003

Dear Shareholders:

On behalf of Closer to the Edge, an independent gonzo journalism publication headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, I am writing to submit a formal offer to acquire the Cable News Network (CNN) and all associated assets currently held by Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc., in connection with the pending acquisition of the company by Paramount Skydance.

Closer to the Edge hereby offers the sum of One Hundred Twelve Billion Dollars ($112,000,000,000.00) for CNN, its brand assets, broadcast infrastructure, international distribution agreements, and all personnel currently employed by the network. This offer exceeds the total consideration offered by Paramount Skydance for the entirety of Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. by One Billion Dollars ($1,000,000,000.00).

We will be direct about what we are actually buying.

It is not the building. It is not the logo. It is not the satellite uplink infrastructure or the licensing agreements or whatever remains of the linear cable business after a decade of managed decline. We are buying Donie O’Sullivan, his editorial instincts, his crew, and the journalism they have been producing together under the banner of Devoted — the only show on your network that is honestly reckoning with what this country has become.

That is the asset. Everything else is overhead.

Mr. O’Sullivan is the host and driving editorial force behind Devoted, CNN’s documentary series in which he embeds with Americans who are searching for meaning, community, and truth in a country that has lost its institutional footing. He has spent a decade at CNN covering misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the fringes of American political culture — not from a safe distance, but from inside. He reported live from the Capitol grounds on January 6th. He traveled to Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium and brought a cybersecurity expert to debunk Lindell’s claims in real time. He does not observe. He goes.

If you only have time to watch one episode we highly recommend “American Kayfabe,” from Season One of Devoted. You can find the series at cnn.com/devoted. Find that episode. Watch it before you vote on this merger.

The premise: in the age of Donald Trump and the attention economy, American politics has ceased to function as policy debate and begun operating as professional wrestling — a performance governed by an unspoken agreement that no one breaks character. Mr. O’Sullivan’s response to this premise was not to write a column about it. He embedded with a group of absurdist protesters outside a federal immigration detention facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he filmed what happened when people decided that the only way to fight the show was to become part of it.

We have a direct editorial interest in what he filmed. We were there alongside Robby Roadsteamer, a man in a giraffe costume who was arrested, subsequently jailed, and forced to watch Dane Cook movies. Mr. O’Sullivan filmed it from one angle. We reported it from another. The fact that we arrived at the same story by different roads is not a coincidence. It is evidence that the story is real, that it matters, and that the journalists covering it are doing their jobs.

“American Kayfabe” is a must-watch for one reason above all others: it takes absurdist political resistance seriously without condescending to it or flattening it into a quirky cable news segment. It asks whether the tools of spectacle — costume, performance, provocation, the willingness to be ridiculous in public on purpose — constitute a legitimate form of political resistance when the institutions of legitimate political resistance have been captured or discredited. It does not answer the question cheaply. It sits with it. That is not what cable news does. That is what journalism does, when journalism is working.

Mr. O’Sullivan’s crew made it work.

This brings us to the matter at hand. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has publicly stated that he looks forward to the day David Ellison takes over CNN. David Ellison has reportedly promised administration officials sweeping editorial changes at the network as a condition of regulatory approval. The Wall Street Journal reported these assurances. No one has denied them.

We ask the shareholders to think carefully about what sweeping changes means for a series hosted by a journalist who embedded with protesters outside a federal immigration detention facility and treated their work as worthy of serious documentary attention.

Closer to the Edge does not have relationships with the Trump administration. We do not have cloud computing contracts with the Air Force. We have not promised anyone anything about CNN’s editorial direction. We have not hired Bari Weiss. We have covered the same streets, the same detention facilities, the same protesters, and we have done so without interference from any government, corporation, or billionaire with a government contract.

In the event this offer is rejected, we request as a secondary matter that CNN release Mr. O’Sullivan and his production team from their contractual obligations so that we may negotiate with them directly. Their continued employment at a Paramount-owned CNN represents a misallocation of some of the most important journalistic assets currently operating in the United States. We are prepared to correct this.

Your network is for sale. The journalism inside it does not have to go down with it. We are asking you to consider the difference.

Respectfully submitted,

Rook T. Winchester
Editor, Publisher, and Primary Writer
Closer to the Edge
St. Paul, Minnesota

Pete, look at my face.

I need you to understand something before we go any further because I have looked into the eyes of men who were about to die — sat right across from them, had full conversations — and not one of those poor, sorry, doomed motherfuckers ever did anything as breathtakingly, catastrophically, historically stupid as the shit you just pulled.

And one of those motherfuckers hid drugs in his dead buddy’s apartment.

You stole my shit, Pete.

Not God’s shit. Not Ezekiel’s shit. Not the shit of any prophet, apostle, or otherwise divinely-inspired author of any motherfuckin’ holy text. My shit. The words I say right before I shoot a motherfucker to death over a briefcase whose contents are never explained — that is the sacred text you chose for your flock.

You built a whole motherfuckin’ church inside the Pentagon. And you filled it with my monologue. And not one motherfucker in that room — not one general, not one admiral, not one person with a combined century of military service between them — raised their hand and said:

Hold on. I’ve seen this movie.

“You will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

That’s the line. You know that motherfuckin’ line.

And you changed it from the Lord to Sandy One.

Sit with what you did for just one motherfuckin’ second.

You took God. The Alpha and the Omega. The I Am That I Am. The Being who parted the Red Sea and spoke to Moses from a burning motherfuckin’ bush — the central figure of the religion you been using as Pentagon interior decorating — and you bumped His ass.

You bumped God, motherfucker.

For a call sign.

The Lord thy God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, replaced in your scripture by Sandy Goddamn One.

I want you to think about what you asked those generals to pray toward. You said bow your heads. You said pray with me.

Sandy One is not God, Pete.

Sandy One is a call sign for a motherfuckin’ pilot of a motherfuckin’ plane.

I know exactly what happened, Pete.

Somebody handed you that prayer and something lit up in your Fox-News-marinating brain. Fire. Thunder. Sacred motherfuckin’ violence. All that righteous-vengeance energy you been trying to bottle since you walked into the Pentagon and decided it needed more Jesus. Those words felt like God talking. I know they did, because I said them to feel exactly like that — I said those words to make a motherfucker feel like the hand of the Almighty just entered the room.

So you picked it up.

You didn’t Google it. You didn’t call a chaplain. You didn’t ask one single solitary motherfucker whether those words had any connection to the religion you claim to represent.

You just carried that shit to the altar.

Do you understand what it means, Pete?

Have you thought about it for one motherfuckin’ second?

I walked away from the life. Put down the gun. Saw something in that apartment I cannot fully explain — Vincent didn’t believe me, Vincent is dead now so Vincent don’t get a vote — but I saw something, and I walked away, and I have been tryin’. Tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd.

I’m a mushroom-cloud-layin’ motherfucker, Pete.

And I have never — not once, not for one single motherfuckin’ second — stood in front of a congregation and handed those people a hitman’s pre-murder monologue and called it the Word of God.

That’s all you, Pete.

That accomplishment belongs entirely to your ass.

“The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides.”

Yeah, Pete.

Beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men and by a Secretary of War who cannot tell the Bible from a Miramax production, who built a church inside the motherfuckin’ Pentagon and filled it with my material, who bumped God Almighty for a call sign.

From now on, keep my motherfuckin’ words out of your motherfuckin’ mouth.

Don't test me, motherfucker.

Don't even fuckin’ think about it.

Sleep tight, Pete.

Jules Winnfield is a fictional character created by Quentin Tarantino and portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson, neither of whom have officially endorsed this message. Pete Hegseth is, unfortunately, not fictional.

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You and nine strangers agree — bone-deep, beyond debate — that you hate the same thing. You’re going to do something about it. Together. The only question that matters before you take a single step is this: do you spend your energy fighting the thing you hate, or do you spend it arguing with each other about the correct way to fight the thing you hate?

If you answered “the second one,” congratulations. You have just described American progressive activism for roughly forty years, several revolutions that ended in firing squads, and every group project you did in school where one person did everything and everyone else argued about the font.

This is not a character flaw. It is a structural problem. And structural problems — unlike your uncle’s politics, your group chat, or the American healthcare system — can actually be fixed.

Enter the St. Paul Principles.

Born from the organizing chaos surrounding the 2008 Republican National Convention — when St. Paul, Minnesota became a temporary surveillance state and activists of wildly different flavors had to figure out how to coexist without eating each other alive — these four principles became one of the most quietly powerful frameworks in modern American movement history. They have no celebrity spokesperson. No Super PAC. No merch table. They just work.

Here’s what they say. Here’s why they matter. And here’s why, if your organization isn’t operating by them, you are — with full sincerity and zero pleasure in saying it — doing the government’s job for free.

Principle One: Respect for a Diversity of Tactics

“Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.”

Translation: your way of fighting is not the only way of fighting, and it would be genuinely embarrassing if the state didn’t have to neutralize your movement because you neutralized it yourself.

Some people make art. Some people make noise. Some people write court filings and some people generate the kind of scenes that end up in court filings. Some people pray, some people picket, some people block traffic, and some people dress in ridiculous costumes and hand out protest dildos.

The person who believes that only their tactic is valid is not a strategist. They’re a hobbyist who got political. A general with one move isn’t running a campaign — they’re running a play, and when the defense adjusts, they’re done.

Every successful social movement in recorded history operated as a broad coalition with diverse methods. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the sit-ins and the freedom rides were not the same tactic. The legal challenges, the street heat, the economic pressure of the Civil Rights Movement were not interchangeable. They were a symphony. Every instrument matters. The mistake is auditioning people out of the orchestra because their instrument sounds different from yours.

You don’t have to love every tactic. You don’t have to participate in every tactic. You are allowed to have opinions about every tactic — and you are encouraged to share them in the room, at the meeting, over bad coffee and worse folding chairs. What you are not allowed to do, under any framework that has ever actually worked, is take those opinions public in a way that feeds the opposition’s narrative and hands the state a pretext.

Principle Two: Separation of Time or Space

“The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.”

This is the operational one. It’s the one most often mistaken for bureaucratic fussiness by people who have never had to explain to a lawyer why they were at a location they technically weren’t supposed to be at while someone else was doing something they technically weren’t supposed to do.

It is not fussiness. It is architecture.

You do not hold a candlelight vigil directly adjacent to a building occupation. You do not run a legal permitted march and a direct action from the same organizing infrastructure, the same Signal group, with the same names on the permit application. Not because either is wrong. Because when they bleed together, everyone gets painted with the same brush — by the state, by the media, by the prosecutors actively looking for reasons to expand the scope of an indictment.

Consider the current landscape. The FBI is actively investigating Minnesota Signal groups used to track ICE movements. ICE has deployed facial recognition in the field. Surveillance contractors are building “day-in-the-life” profiles of activists from social media, location data, and cell tower records. Federal agents are knocking on doors asking who paid for protest signs. This is not paranoia. This is the documented news cycle of the last six months.

Separation of time and space is not a formality. It is load-bearing infrastructure. It is how movements survive contact with a state that has significantly more resources than they do.

Principle Three: Keep Criticism Internal

“Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.”

Oh, this one. This one.

This is the principle every activist organization learns the hard way — usually around the time someone posts a seventeen-part thread denouncing a sister organization’s tactics, which gets picked up by a right-wing account with four hundred thousand followers, which gets screenshot by a journalist looking for an “activists divided” story, which becomes the entire news cycle about your movement instead of the thing your movement was actually trying to achieve.

Let’s be precise about what this principle is and isn’t. It is not a gag order. It is not a demand for compliance or the suppression of legitimate grievance. Movements that cannot self-critique calcify and die, and nothing in the St. Paul Principles suggests otherwise. The principle is not “shut up.” The principle is: have the argument in private, not in the press.

There is a difference between accountability and ammunition. When you publicly denounce a fellow activist in a way that can be — and will be — used by the state or hostile media to discredit the broader movement, you are not performing accountability. You are doing the opposition’s communications strategy. For free. Without a contract. Without benefits. Without even the dignity of being paid to undermine your own cause.

“People have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods or tactics or strategy to reach a common goal.”

— Malcolm X

COINTELPRO didn’t try to destroy the Black Panthers by being stronger than them. It destroyed them by being inside them — manufacturing conflict, feeding paranoia, forging letters, turning the movement’s energy inward until there was nothing left to aim outward. The lesson is not “don’t have internal conflict.” The lesson is: keep internal conflict internal, or someone else will use it as a weapon against you.

The movement has real enemies. They have resources, lawyers, databases, surveillance contracts, and a Justice Department that is classifying protest as potential domestic terrorism. What they cannot manufacture and cannot buy is your solidarity. Do not give it away for the temporary satisfaction of being publicly right.

Principle Four: Oppose State Repression. Full Stop.

“We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.”

This is the one that makes some people squirm, and the squirming is almost always a reliable indicator of how thoroughly the system has been internalized.

“But what if an activist does something actually bad?” you ask, reasonably. And the answer is: there is a court system. There are lawyers. There is a whole elaborate apparatus designed, in theory, to adjudicate human behavior. What there is not, and should not be, is you providing law enforcement with operational intelligence about fellow organizers because you disagreed with their methods, because you found them embarrassing, because a federal agent knocked on your door and seemed genuinely understanding about the whole thing.

They are trained for that knock. You are not.

Law enforcement officers are legally permitted to lie to you. Enthusiastically. With a straight face and a business card. Federal agents can threaten your family. They can present false evidence. They can tell you your friend already talked, so you might as well. They can make a situation feel so inevitable that cooperation seems like the only rational choice. None of this is hypothetical. All of it is documented. All of it is legal.

The best defense is to say nothing and call a lawyer.

“Don’t assist law enforcement actions against activists” is not moral cover for anything. It is a clear-eyed recognition that the legal system, when deployed against social movements, is not primarily interested in justice. It is interested in disruption. It is interested in chilling effect. It is interested in making the cost of organizing feel prohibitive.

Don’t be a mechanism of that interest, even inadvertently, even with good intentions, even under pressure.

Why This Is Imperative, Not Merely Advisable

The St. Paul Principles are not romantic. They do not make for a stirring speech. They will not trend. They are the unglamorous, load-bearing plumbing of a movement that wants to last longer than one news cycle, survive one election cycle, outlast one administration’s particular brand of repression, and actually change something instead of becoming a beautifully documented episode of noble failure.

The state doesn’t need to beat you. It just needs you to beat yourself.

Adopt these principles. Not because they’re comfortable. Not because they feel good. Because the alternative is losing — slowly, publicly, and almost entirely by your own hand. And frankly, the people on the other side of this are already insufferable enough without giving them the satisfaction of watching you do their work for them.

The thistle — prickled, ornery, impossible to uproot — does not survive by fighting itself. It survives by being rooted deeply enough that nothing from the outside can pull it out.

Cultivate resistance. Keep it internal. Respect the diversity of how it grows.

Rook T. Winchester is the founder and editor of Closer to the Edge, a 100% reader-supported gonzo journalism publication based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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On Monday, April 13th, a 19-year old Hispanic teen was found hanging near the 4D police precinct in Washington DC.

DC Metropolitan Police Department did not release any statement on the death for three days until a journalist from the Washington Informer showed up to their offices.

Investigators quickly ruled out foul play and deemed the hanging a “suicide,” which many residents find hard to believe given the circumstances. A young Hispanic man found hanging outside near a police station notorious for a history of police brutality during a particular time of racist dehumanization and routine circumvention of accountability for law enforcement in this country.

The DC Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression held a rally on Friday the 17th, to demand transparency and justice for the young man who was found hanging. I had the opportunity to speak to filmmaker and one of the lead organizers, Merawi Gerima.

“We got a lot more attention after the action took place,” Merawi said. “The community is doing their own investigating. We’re working on building a campaign to demand justice. So much viciousness happens in the 4D corridor. They have a history of police brutality.”

Merawi spoke of Karon Hylton-Brown, a 20-year-old black man who was murdered by DC Officers Terrence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky in 2020. The officers were convicted of covering up the incident with Sutton convicted of second-degree murder before both being pardoned by Donald Trump in 2025 and reinstated weeks after.

“Karon’s mother is still harassed by local law enforcement in her very neighborhood.”

He also spoke of MPD Commander Jason Bagshaw who fatally shot Lazarus Wilson while off-duty in 2022. The family of Wilson sued the DC Metropolitan Police Department for $25 million dollar lawsuit.

Despite this, Bagshaw remains on the force and was among the officers present during the rally in opposition to the local law enforcement that refused to publicly release information on the hanging until pressured to do so.

Still, the identity of the deceased young man and any further information has not been released.

“We will be planning another action in the coming days,” Merawi said.

Instances like these are part of an increasing pattern of either police violence or the lack of justice regarding it within an increasingly overwhelmed system where those who gravitate towards position of power with the intent to abuse it are further emboldened in that abuse by a culture and government that permits and encourages it.

Despite the quick assessment by “investigators,” this hanging screams nothing less than “foul play.”

Kash Patel stands on the sidewalk outside Ned’s Club at 2:45 A.M. Tie hanging loose. Shirt wrinkled. He’s swaying just enough to notice. He calls Todd Blanche.

Four rings.

Voicemail.

BEEP.

KASH: Todd. It’s — it’s Kash.

Pick up.

Pick up, pick up, pick up.

Don’t — just — listen. I know it’s late. I know. I just — I need a ride. I’m outside Ned’s.

I didn’t — I didn’t get thrown out, by the way. Let’s be clear about that. They overreacted. Marcus overreacted. That’s on him. He threatened to 86 me, and we both know what that means.

I’m fine.

I’m completely fine.

I just needed to step outside. Get some air. Because it — it doesn’t stop, Todd. It just — it doesn’t turn off. You think you can have a drink and it’ll take the edge off, right? That’s the idea. That’s what people do. Normal people. Totally normal thing. You have a drink, you relax, you stop thinking about —

Dildos.

That is my life right now. I went to college. I passed the bar. I ran counterterrorism operations. I have a confirmed security clearance at the highest level this government issues.

And I cannot stop thinking about dildos.

There’s an organization, Todd. The — the Dildo Distribution Delegation. That’s a real thing. I’m not — I didn’t make that up. They have a name. They have over eight thousand — eight thousand — units. That’s not a protest, that’s a fucking supply chain. That’s logistics. That’s more organized than some operations I’ve seen with actual budgets and actual—

That’s classified. Forget I said that.

The point is they’re handing them out at federal buildings. As a statement. About fascism. That’s the thesis. Fascism and phalluses. That is the national conversation right now. That’s where we are.

And I’m supposed to — what? Respond? You want the Director of the FBI to hold a press conference about —

You respond, you lose. You don’t respond, it’s still out there. New shipment, new building, new footage of some — some delegate, whatever they call themselves, unloading boxes in a parking lot and smiling like it’s a bake sale.

It’s not a bake sale, Todd.

It’s humiliation. That’s the whole point. It’s not about fascism. Nobody actually thinks a novelty item stops fascism. The theory of change is you make it so the people in the buildings can’t go home without thinking about it. Can’t stand on a curb at — whatever time this is — without thinking about it.

Because it works. That’s the part nobody says out loud. Not politically. Not in any — but psychologically? Yeah.

Yeah.

Kimmel.

You saw the Kimmel thing. Don’t tell me you didn’t. Everyone saw it. It’s got — I looked up the number of views. I shouldn’t have done that. I keep doing that. I tell myself I’m not going to and then I do it anyway and it’s just — the number is just sitting there and —

He did the whole bit. The footage. The voice. And the audience is just — they’re losing it. And you think okay, it’ll move on. Something else tomorrow. That’s how it works.

Except it doesn’t move on.

Because they keep sending them. And I’m sitting at the bar watching the clip again and Marcus is looking at me and I’m thinking if I just watch it one more time I’ll find — I don’t know. Something. Some angle. Some —

You can’t RICO a dildo, Todd.

I looked into it. Don’t. Just — don’t. I looked into it and you can’t.

And now I’m outside and it’s — it’s cold and it’s still there. That’s the thing. You think you leave it at the bar with the noise and the lights and the — but you don’t. It comes with you. Right here.

So I drink.

Not — not like that. I’ve never been intoxicated on the job. I want to be very clear about that. That is a false and fabricated allegation and anyone saying otherwise should bring their checkbook to court because that’s where we’re going.

I’m having drinks at a bar. After hours. Like a normal person. That’s not a pattern. That’s not — that’s situational. There’s a difference and I know the difference.

Twenty-four anonymous sources, Todd. Twenty-four. Not one on the record. You know what I told them when they called? Print it. All false. See you in court. Bring your checkbook. Because I don’t — I’m not the kind of person who —

The hockey thing. I know you saw the hockey thing. That was a security operation. We won the gold medal. Against Canada. You celebrate that. That’s not evidence of anything, that’s patriotism.

And the rum photo was — that was private. That was a private moment. That has nothing to do with —

It doesn’t matter.

None of it — it doesn’t matter because it’s just — it’s all still there, isn’t it. The clips. The packages. The number under the Kimmel video. You can drink until it goes soft around the edges but you can’t drink until it’s gone because trust me —

He stops.

I’m not saying trust me on that specifically.

That’s not — forget that.

I need a ride. I’m on the curb outside Ned’s. I didn’t get kicked out. Don’t make a face when you get here. I know the face. Don’t make it.

This is situational.

Any reasonable person. My clearance level. These specific conditions. This specific —

Just come get me.

I’m completely fine.

Get the fuck out.

Get the fuck out of Social Circle, Georgia. Get the fuck out of Hutchins, Texas. Get the fuck out of Williamsport, Maryland and Ashland, Virginia and Surprise, Arizona and every other American community where you showed up in the middle of the night with a purchase agreement and the assumption that nobody was paying attention.

Get. The fuck. Out.

Todd Lyons, Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, described his vision for human detention in this country as “Amazon Prime, but with human beings.” He said this out loud. At a conference. In front of contractors who responded not with horror but with their order books open.

Congress gave him $45 billion to make it happen.

GEO Group — one of the two corporations whose entire business model is profiting from human captivity — just reported $254 million in profit for 2025. A 700 percent increase. Their chairman called it “the most successful year for new business wins in our company’s history.” They donated nearly $2 million to Trump before the election. Congress returned $45 billion. CoreCivic nearly doubled its ICE revenue in a single quarter. On their earnings call, an investor complained — actually complained — that ICE wasn’t detaining people fast enough.

Seventy thousand human beings in cages and the complaint was that it wasn’t enough.

I’ve written about the facilities. The Bishop Henry Whipple Building in Minnesota. Broadview in Illinois. Dilley in Texas. I’ve written about the people who were detained – Ayman Soliman, Donna-Hughes Brown, Gabriela Lozano Sousa, and Denis Cabrera Rodríguez, whose story in this publication became Exhibit 7 in his federal habeas corpus petition.

I’ve written about people like Justo Betancourt – still caged inside “Alligator Alcatraz” – while his daughter sat outside a Senate office pleadng for people to give a shit.

And now they want to build more of these facilities.

The plan — the “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative,” which is the most bureaucratic name ever given to the construction of concentration camps — is to buy commercial warehouses across America and convert them into facilities holding up to 10,000 people at a time. Eight mega-centers. Sixteen processing centers. One hundred thousand beds by November 2026, funded by your taxes, operated by corporations that donated millions to make sure the right man won.

Here’s the one thing they didn’t count on:

The warehouses aren’t built yet.

In Hutchins, Texas, community pressure convinced a real estate developer to walk away from a million-square-foot sale. In Social Circle, Georgia, city leaders cut off ICE’s water. In Oklahoma City, a council meeting killed the deal. These aren’t blue cities. These are American communities that looked at what was coming for their backyards and said the same four words this headline says.

The strategy works. Organized local pressure defeats detention profiteers. Every time. The problem has always been knowing where to show up before it’s too late.

GTFOICE.org solves that problem.

Sign up with your zip code. Get an immediate alert the moment ICE eyes a warehouse in your community — before the permits, before the sale, before the first human being gets processed like a two-day delivery.

This isn’t a hashtag. This isn’t a petition. This is a website and an early warning system.

The concrete hasn’t poured yet.

Go to GTFOICE.org. Sign up. Show up. And when ICE comes shopping in your community, give them the same message:

Get the fuck out.

Rook T. Winchester is the founder and editor-in-chief of Closer to the Edge, a gonzo political journalism publication based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Paid subscriptions and continued support from readers are the only things keeping it alive.

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We know about Sergey Belyakov. He is an FSB academy graduate and former Russian Deputy Minister.

We know Jeffrey Epstein contacted Belyakov in connection with a woman later identified in Senate materials as Guzel Ganieva, who has been publicly linked to you. We know he then wrote to the chairman of Paul Weiss asking if she was still being surveilled, confirming her location, and directing that a Russian contact be used. We know he instructed your assistant to set up a private email account off the Apollo server so the correspondence wouldn’t run through company infrastructure.

We know he told you some of what he did would need to remain unknown.

We know you paid him approximately $170 million — a figure cited in recent Senate materials. We know your own settlement with the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands confirms that Epstein used money you paid him to fund his operations. We know you paid him at rates that far exceeded those of the elite advisors you already employed. We know more than $10 million was routed through a charitable structure designed to obscure your name and maximize your deductions.

We know Epstein wrote to you that there is “little I won’t do for you” and that he had already done things — “both known and some things that will need to remain unknown.”

That is not the language of a tax advisor.

We know your son is running the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation while you are under active Senate investigation led by Ron Wyden.

We know reporting has described intervention by Todd Blanche that limited cooperation from the DEA with that investigation. We know Scott Bessent has not produced the Suspicious Activity Reports requested by the Senate Finance Committee — records documenting thousands of transactions, including flows through Russian banking channels.

We know Senator Wyden has been asking for years.

We have questions about the Dechert investigation. Sixty thousand documents reviewed, including materials from Paul Weiss. No public accounting of the surveillance operation, the private email account, or the communications about things that needed to remain unknown. We have questions about what was in those 60,000 documents. We have questions about what wasn’t.

We have questions about what “unknown” means when intelligence-linked contacts are involved, when the locations of women are being tracked, and when vast sums of money move through financial systems tied to Russian institutions.

We also have questions about Jane Doe. A federal lawsuit filed in 2023 alleged that you raped a 16-year-old autistic girl at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2002. The law firm representing her later withdrew. The plaintiff continued on her own. No criminal charges were filed.

We know documents released by the Department of Justice include material described in reporting as a diary containing first-person accounts that align in time and place with those allegations.

We know additional released notes from plaintiff’s former counsel describe multiple abuse allegations connected to that same setting, even as reporting has acknowledged uncertainty about whether those accounts involve one victim or several.

We have questions about why multiple civil complaints have named you in connection with alleged assaults at Epstein’s townhouse.

We have questions about what else is in those files that hasn’t been released.

We have questions about a Justice Department that reviewed all of it and did not bring charges against uncharged third parties.

You deny everything. Your attorneys call the lawsuits frivolous. No criminal conviction exists.

We are not a court.

We are a publication that reads documents.

And the documents keep pointing at you.

The things that need to remain unknown have a way of becoming known anyway.

This is us, becoming aware.

Sincerely,
Closer to the Edge

Five days earlier, she had done something simple and brave: she showed up unannounced. No advance notice to ICE, no coordinated tour, no state minders with time to hose down the cages and swap out the rotten food. Just a congresswoman exercising her legal right to oversight, walking into “Alligator Alcatraz” — and seeing it for what it is.

What she found was more than a thousand men packed into cages, beaten by guards, denied lawyers, and fed meals dated two weeks old. This is what unannounced looks like. This is what oversight is supposed to be. Every member of Congress has the same legal right Wasserman Schultz exercised that day. The question is who else is willing to use it.

What follows is her floor speech, lightly edited for readability.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Last week, I conducted an unannounced oversight visit to the Everglades Detention Camp — the facility the Trump administration and Florida’s government despicably nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. While the employees in charge honored the legal requirement to allow me in, for the 3 hours I was there, they wouldn’t allow me to speak with the people they’d put in cages. Because I arrived without notifying ICE, as federal law allows, they had no time to whitewash the inhumane conditions.

I want to tell Americans the truth about what’s being done in the middle of our Everglades, in our name and on our dime.

When you walk into this facility’s dormitory area — a series of massive tents built on top of a tarmac — all you see are cages. Inside were 32 adult men, from age 18 to 75, all packed into each cage, eight cages per tent, with 1,500 packed in that way in total. The cages are clearly unsanitary. It’s dirty and smells like urine. Men use the toilet inside the cages with only an open-sided, pelvis-level wall a few feet from the beds — toilets that had feces remnants in them.

So who did they put in these cages? Convicted criminals? Some, possibly. And let’s be clear — convicted criminals should be deported. But the vast majority are not that. Do they pose an immediate public threat? Under ICE’s own risk assessments, the vast majority do not. Yet everyone there suffers, and that suffering is very intentional. Because cruelty is the point.

Some have been held in cages for 6 months or more. Detainees report being beaten, taunted, and pepper sprayed. Many have disappeared without a day in court, sent to distant third countries where they don’t speak the language — Haitians dumped in Mexico, Cubans sent to African countries and jailed on arrival.

When I walked through, men cried out for help. An older man was sprawled on his cot, clearly ill. I’m certain more are sick. I’ve seen reports that staff denied access to prescriptions, and several detainees have been hospitalized. They’re served tiny meals marked fresh that were clearly dated two weeks old.

For months, ICE denied detainees access to lawyers or family — including US citizen kids. A court order finally forced them to install unmonitored phone lines so people inside could call their attorneys. Human rights advocates have alleged more violations since then.

One harrowing example came just before my visit. On April 2nd, staff at the facility shut off phones for a full day, cutting contact to the outside world. When detainees protested, officers entered their cages and severely beat them. According to the court filing, one man was thrown to the ground and beaten by multiple guards. He suffered injuries to his shoulder and was kicked in the head. A guard placed their knee on his neck. Reports say that when officers pepper sprayed everyone in the cages, an older gentleman passed out because he could not breathe.

It begs the basic question: who’s in charge there?

ICE argues in court that this is a state facility immune from federal law — which is absurd. Immigration is a federal responsibility. The site is in the middle of a federally protected area, on Miccosukee tribal land, under a federal treaty. But why is ICE hiding behind Florida? So they can try to evade accountability for depriving detained people of basic human rights.

As soon as I arrived, I was met by Florida state employees and contractors. During the tour, I asked if ICE had a permanent presence, and they said yes. Any questions I asked about the detainee population were referred to ICE. Yet ICE personnel not only refused to speak with me — they blocked me from talking to the men caged there for months, despite my having signed privacy releases for specific detainees.

Three things about this facility are crystal clear.

First, while Florida taxpayers bear the cost, ICE is clearly in charge. That means this camp should fall under the same rules as any other ICE facility.

Second, it’s an ecological disaster. Taxpayers spent billions to restore the Everglades, which is a critical water resource and a homeland for the Miccosukee people. Now we’re spending countless tax dollars producing — heaven only knows how much — pollution, because ICE never conducted an environmental assessment.

Third, this facility makes a mockery of our values. It’s an insult to the Bill of Rights, which requires due process and prohibits cruel and unusual punishment for all people — not just citizens. And it’s a gut punch to family members who can only watch loved ones waste away inside dirty cages with no legal recourse.

We know this is wrong. We know it’s un-American. That’s why we must stand up.

I watch with pride as my South Florida neighbors mobilized to hold vigils outside the Everglades internment camp and unite in solidarity. For my part, I led Florida Democrats to sponsor legislation to shut this place down and guarantee every member of Congress can conduct oversight at ICE jails — as I did — to see the truth.

Mr. Speaker, this detention camp must be shut down. Our conscience demands it, and I’ll not rest until the families torn apart by this stain on the state of Florida seek and obtain justice.

I yield back.

He spent ten minutes on his podcast yesterday trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing. Him and comedian John Crist. Riffing. Genuinely baffled. Circling back to the dildos like a dog who found something weird in the yard and can’t quite leave it alone.

Adam. Sit down.

We got you.

The episode is called “Dildos vs ICE Agents.” That’s the actual title. Adam Carolla, who has spent thirty years explaining to anyone who will listen that he is the smartest person in every room he has ever entered, spent his Tuesday morning podcast trying to reverse-engineer a protest movement he doesn’t understand and arriving at approximately nothing.

Ten minutes. No conclusions. More questions than answers.

The man who wrote a book called In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks would like to know what we want.

Okay, Adam. Let’s do this.

“WHAT DO THEY WANT?”

Adam and his guest asked this three times. Three separate times. Like the answer was hiding somewhere in the upholstery of his studio couch and if he just kept asking it would crawl out.

We want ICE out of our communities. We want detention facilities closed. We want families kept together. We want the federal government to stop disappearing human beings in the middle of the night and shipping them to foreign prisons without charges, without lawyers, without due process, without so much as a phone call home.

That’s what we want, Adam.

Sorry it took so long. I know you’ve been up nights.

“NOBODY THREATENING SOMEONE WITH A DILDO IS SOLUTION-ORIENTED.”

Correct. We’re not threatening anyone with a dildo. We’re mocking them with one. There’s a difference. One is assault. The other is constitutionally protected expression.

You know who understood the difference between a threat and a taunt? Abbie Hoffman. You know who else? Every court that’s looked at this so far.

But please, Adam. Tell us more about using dildos as demolition devices. Tell us again about framing dildos versus finishing dildos. Tell us about the waffle head. We’re taking notes over here.

“WHY DILDOS?”

Because signs haven’t worked. Chanting hasn’t work. Candlelight vigils through haven’t worked. We tried all of it. The machine keeps running.

So we asked a different question. Not what makes us feel serious. What makes them look ridiculous.

The answer was dildos.

Consider what ICE has been doing. Raiding workplaces. Snatching people off streets. Loading human beings onto planes in the middle of the night and shipping them to foreign prisons without charges, without lawyers, without a phone call. Detaining legal residents. Deporting American citizens “by accident” and then shrugging about it. Operating with the swagger of an agency that answers to no one.

These people need to be ridiculed. Loudly. In public. With props.

Enter the dildos.

You mock power. You make the enforcers of a detention state stand at attention while American citizens beat a federal fence with rubber phalluses and the whole absurd tableau ends up in the LA Times. Not despite the dildos. Because of them.

ICE spent Saturday in multiple cities trying to look intimidating while people played dildo cornhole outside their detention facilities. Dildo ring toss. Dildo drums. Dildos affixed to cars and stop signs and the general infrastructure of American civic life.

That’s not an accident, Adam. That’s a communications strategy. Maybe you’ve heard of those.

“IS THIS THE END OF DIGNITY IN AMERICA?”

Let’s talk about dignity for a second.

ICE agents in full tactical gear surrounding a church. ICE detaining a man for the crime of attending his own immigration hearing. ICE arresting a children’s book author. ICE taking a Army veteran who served this country and dumping him in a country he hasn’t lived in since he was a child. ICE operating a detention facility in the Florida Everglades that lawyers cannot access and journalists cannot enter and where human beings are held in conditions that would embarrass a kennel.

That’s where dignity went, Adam. It didn’t go to the protest line.

We didn’t take dignity out back and shoot it. ICE did. We just showed up to the funeral with the appropriate accessories.

“DO YOU GIVE EVERYONE ONE OR DO THEY CHOOSE FROM THE BAG?”

You choose. We believe in bodily autonomy. It’s kind of our whole thing. You might want to write that down.

“WHAT SIZE?”

We have options. We’re not the government.

“IS SOMEONE GOING TO GET KILLED BECAUSE THEY MISTOOK A DILDO FOR A GUN?”

Adam. I say this with genuine affection. A dildo does not look like a gun. If your law enforcement officers cannot distinguish between a firearm and a novelty sex toy, that is a training issue.

ICE has actual guns. They used them to kill Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and others. The agency that shoots people in American neighborhoods would like you to know it is very concerned about the threat posed by rubber phalluses.

We are happy to help with training. We have materials. We have a lot of materials.

“IS GEORGE SOROS PAYING FOR THE DILDOS?”

No. We bought the first batch from Smitten Kitten, a sex-positive shop in Minneapolis. Like a Kitten donated the next five hundred. The rest were crowd-sourced from people across the country who apparently had strong feelings about ICE and access to a U-Haul.

George Soros had nothing to do with it. This was regular Americans distributing dildos to strangers for the cause. That’s the whole story. That’s the country we live in now and honestly it’s the most patriotic thing we’ve seen in years.

You want in, Adam? We’ll send you one personally. Consider it a gift from the dildo-wielding nihilists you apparently cannot stop thinking about.

“IS THERE NEVER A SOLUTION AT THE END OF THIS?”

There’s a solution. Stop kidnapping people. Release the detainees. Reunite the families. Follow the Constitution you swore an oath to uphold.

That’s the solution, Adam. It fits on a bumper sticker. It fits on a protest sign. It fits, as it turns out, on a dildo.

We’ve been saying it the whole time.

Adam. You spent ten minutes on us yesterday. The episode is called Dildos vs ICE Agents. That’s your title. You named it after us. You did that.

We’re flattered. We’re touched. We’re a little aroused, frankly.

Come to Minneapolis. We’ll show you how it’s done. We’ll give you the tour. We’ll let you pick your own from the bag.

And next time you find yourself asking what do they want — just remember.

You had the answer the whole time.

You just couldn’t stop thinking about the dildos long enough to hear it.

The Justice Department of the United States of America walked into federal court and asked a judge to erase the convictions of men who committed seditious conspiracy against this country.

Not the sentences. They already gutted those. The convictions. The jury verdicts. The legal record that any of it happened at all.

Gone. Because the president they tried to keep in power is back in power. And now he’s handing the keys to the kingdom back to the men who beat cops with flagpoles to get him there.

Let’s be precise about what seditious conspiracy means, since the word is about to vanish from the official record.

It means you didn’t just show up. It means a jury of twelve Americans heard the evidence — the encrypted messages, the operational planning, the coordinated breach — and concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that these men organized a violent plot to stop the transfer of power.

Not a protest. Not a rally that got rowdy. A plot. Those are not my words. Those are the words the Justice Department used when it was still pretending to be the Justice Department.

Now Jeanine Pirro has put her name on a filing that calls erasing those verdicts ”in the interests of justice.”

Jeanine. Pirro.

Here’s the detail every outlet has mentioned and none of them have sat with:

When a conviction is vacated — not pardoned, vacated — the collateral consequences disappear with it. The felon label. The restrictions.

The gun rights.

These men get their firearms back.

The men who smashed Capitol windows with stolen riot shields. Who led coordinated breaches through police lines. Who prosecutors said “participated in every consequential breach at the Capitol.” Who were sentenced to 15, 17, 18 years in federal prison because what they did was that serious.

They get their guns back.

If you’re not sitting with the specific, physical horror of that, sit with it now.

And while you’re sitting there, let me tell you about the other Jan. 6 defendants. The ones Trump called patriots when he handed them pardons on Day One.

One of them just got four years for an “enormous” child pornography collection.

One of them is serving life for molesting children under twelve.

One of them is about to plead guilty to child exploitation involving multiple victims — including a child under twelve.

These are the people for whom the United States government has spent sixteen months systematically dismantling its own legal infrastructure. Conviction by conviction. Record by record. Until the marble is clean and the windows are unbroken and none of it ever happened.

The Constitution has language for this moment. It’s not buried in a footnote. It’s sitting right there in Article III, plain as a punch in the face:

Aid and Comfort.

You don’t have to be the one who threw the punch. You just have to make things easier for the people who did. You just have to hand them back their guns, their clean records, their status as victims of a “weaponized” Justice Department, and send them back out into the country armed and legally laundered and hungry.

That is what is happening.

That is what Jeanine Pirro’s signature means.

That is what “interests of justice” means when the man who benefited from the insurrection is the man now running the Justice Department.

I’ve tried to be precise in these pages. I’ve tried not to reach for the apocalyptic framing when the facts don’t warrant it.

The facts warrant it.

This is not a political dispute. This is not a controversy. This is a government giving aid and comfort to the men who tried to destroy it — openly, in court filings, under the seal of the United States — while the men they pardoned rape children and the record is quietly shredded behind them.

The Constitution has a word for all of this.

We have been too polite to use it.

That ends now.

Donald,

Since your inauguration in 2025, the one where you wouldn’t even touch the Bible, you’ve governed exactly as that moment promised. Hollow ritual. Absolute entitlement. No restraint. You didn’t swear fidelity to anything larger than yourself. You made it clear from the first second that symbols only matter to you as props, that law only matters when it bends, and that truth is something to be bludgeoned until it agrees.

You have checked every box of modern fascism, methodically, almost proudly. You elevated yourself above the state and demanded loyalty to a person instead of allegiance to a constitution. You turned disagreement into treason and criticism into sabotage. You taught your followers that the leader is the nation and the nation is the leader and that anything opposing you is therefore an enemy of America. That is the foundational rot. Once that move is made, everything else becomes just logistics.

You rewarded political violence and rewrote it as virtue. You pardoned it, sanctified it, wrapped it in patriotic language, and erased the people who suffered stopping it. You taught your base that force is acceptable when it serves power, that consequences are optional if the violence is loyal. You did not merely excuse brutality. You normalized it. That is fascism’s heartbeat.

You attacked independent institutions relentlessly. Courts that constrained you became corrupt. Judges became villains. Juries became conspirators. Inspectors who investigated wrongdoing became enemies of the state. Career civil servants became “deep state” traitors for doing their jobs. Oversight itself became the crime. You removed referees and then declared the game fair. That is not reform. That is authoritarian preparation.

You replaced reality with official myth. You weaponized the idea that the press lies, not to correct errors, but to delegitimize documentation itself. You trained millions of people to treat evidence as propaganda and propaganda as truth. You made memory conditional. You made facts partisan. You made loyalty the only metric that mattered. That is not persuasion. That is reality replacement, and it is essential to fascist control.

You scapegoated relentlessly. Immigrants, journalists, judges, doctors, bureaucrats, protesters, teachers, election workers, political opponents. There is always an internal enemy to blame for your failures, always a group to dehumanize so the anger never turns upward. You sold grievance as identity and rage as belonging. That is how movements turn cruel without feeling cruel.

You fused state power with personal grievance. Law enforcement became righteous when it punished your enemies and illegitimate when it investigated your allies. Prosecution was justice when it flowed outward and persecution when it pointed inward. You didn’t end “weaponization.” You rebranded it and claimed exclusive rights to wield it. That is the playbook.

You eroded democratic legitimacy deliberately. Elections you lost were fraud. Elections you won were proof of destiny. Courts that rejected your claims were corrupt by definition. The process itself became optional. Outcome replaced procedure. Power replaced consent. That is the point where democracy stops being a system and becomes a stage set.

You cultivated a cult of masculinity, grievance, and domination. Strength became cruelty. Empathy became weakness. Compromise became betrayal. Humiliation became entertainment. You taught people to cheer at suffering as long as it belonged to the right targets. Fascism always needs an emotional engine, and you chose spite.

You blurred the boundary between the state and yourself until it nearly vanished. The government became your voice, your shield, your cudgel. Official platforms became personal megaphones. National power became personal property. You spoke as if the country belonged to you, as if institutions existed at your pleasure, as if law were a suggestion. That is not leadership. That is personal rule.

You hollowed out civic trust. You taught people that nothing is real unless you say it is, that no institution deserves faith unless it kneels. You left behind a population trained to distrust everything except your word. That damage will outlive you. Fascism does not need permanence to succeed. It only needs to poison the ground long enough that nothing healthy can grow.

This is the full inventory. Leader worship. Violence rewarded. Oversight dismantled. Reality replaced. Enemies manufactured. Institutions delegitimized. Power personalized. Truth treated as treason. Loyalty elevated above law. Cruelty turned into virtue. Every feature present. Every warning sign ignored. Every guardrail kicked loose.

You wanted to be remembered as strong. You will be remembered as corrosive, a man who mistook domination for leadership and noise for authority and thought history could be bullied into submission. History does not negotiate. It records. And what it will record is not your slogans or your tantrums, but the damage, the erosion, the deliberate unraveling of a democracy for the sake of one man’s appetite.

This is not civility.

This is not reconciliation.

This is the record, and it is unforgiving.