Suzanne,

Yesterday, you made a video on Instagram about Alani Bankhead.

You told your 334,000 Instagram followers that you were not attacking her. You were simply examining what you called “objective information.” You said your “feet are planted squarely in reality.” You said there is “no way” Alani can win Montana’s Senate race. “There is no path to victory.” You called her campaign finances “abysmally low.” You said Seth Bodnar “could actually win.” And you suggested that Alani’s decision to remain in the race she won might be an “ego response.”

While you were explaining “reality” to the Democratic nominee for United States Senate, were you also aware that there was an organized campaign underway with a rather spectacularly unsubtle name?

“Project Montana Senate Dem Dropout.”

We have seen the materials.

They don’t say, “Let’s debate whether Bankhead should remain in the race.” They don’t say, “Let’s publish an op-ed.” They contain instructions.

One of the listed “TOP PRIORITIES” tells participants to examine a “Bankhead contacts spreadsheet of people close to Alani Bankhead.”

Then comes the instruction:

“If you have connections to anyone here,” contact one of the organizers.

Another instruction tells participants to contact people they know in Montana and ask whether they’re willing to “help get Bankhead to drop out.”

There’s a shareable action document. There are designated contacts. There are instructions for volunteers with less than ten minutes to spare and different instructions for volunteers with more time.

This wasn’t three Democrats arguing over beers about electoral math.

Somebody built infrastructure.

And last night, Alani Bankhead said something considerably more serious.

She said her daughter, a minor, had been included on what she described as a “target list for harassment.” She said her family was taking additional security precautions because of escalating harassment and death threats. She said she had deactivated her personal Facebook account to make it harder to target innocent friends and family.

So, naturally, we have some questions for you.

Suzanne, did you know about Project Montana Senate Dem Dropout when you made your video?

Did you know there was a spreadsheet containing people close to Alani?

Did you see that spreadsheet?

Did you know Alani says her minor daughter was included?

Did anybody associated with Project Montana Senate Dem Dropout contact you?

Did anyone associated with Seth Bodnar, his campaign, organizations supporting him, political consultants, activists, donors, PACs, or anyone advocating for Alani’s withdrawal provide you with any information about this race?

Did anyone provide talking points?

Did anyone ask you to make a video?

Did anyone ask you to amplify the argument that Alani should withdraw before Monday’s deadline?

Because suddenly your description of yourself as merely “a regular person with access to irrefutable data and information” is the most interesting sentence in your entire video.

Access from whom?

Maybe the answer is nobody.

Maybe you researched every number yourself, independently reached every conclusion, decided independently that this particular Senate race hundreds of miles from Washington deserved an emergency video to your enormous audience, and independently happened to amplify the precise objective being pursued by an organized campaign trying to force Bankhead from the ballot.

If that’s what happened, tell us.

We will print it.

But you made yourself part of this story when you used your platform to pressure a candidate to withdraw. Asking where your information came from isn’t an attack. It’s journalism.

You seemed quite fond of objective information yesterday.

So are we.

There’s another piece of this that has been bothering me.

Alani Bankhead won the Democratic primary.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Not according to some motivational poster hanging inside campaign headquarters.

There was an election.

People voted.

She won.

And yet somewhere between that election and Monday’s deadline, an astonishing number of people apparently decided democracy needed a customer-service department where inconvenient results could be returned without a receipt.

Your argument is that circumstances changed. Bodnar has money. Some voters who won’t support a Democrat might support an independent. Alani doesn’t have enough cash. Therefore, she should make the “brave” decision and remove herself.

That’s an argument you’re entitled to make.

What you are not entitled to do is transform that argument into objective fact by repeatedly calling it one.

“There is no path to victory” is not a fact.

It is a prediction.

“She is destined to lose” is not data.

It is your conclusion from data.

The election hasn’t happened yet. Humanity has developed many impressive technologies, Suzanne, but we have not yet developed an FEC-compliant crystal ball.

You said in your video that your feet are “planted squarely in reality.”

Now we’ve learned that reality now contains a spreadsheet.

Reality contains an organized campaign explicitly dedicated to making the Democratic nominee drop out of the Montana Senate race.

Reality contains instructions to work through people close to that nominee.

Reality contains a candidate saying her minor daughter ended up on the list and that her family is taking security precautions.

And reality contains a prominent influencer telling hundreds of thousands of people that the nominee’s refusal to surrender might be an “ego response.”

Then came my favorite part.

After telling Alani that her campaign was hopeless, that she was destined to lose, that remaining in the race could help elect a Republican, and that withdrawing would be “something really brave,” you offered her something.

Your podcast.

If she drops out, you told her, she can come on your podcast and “spill everything.”

Suzanne.

Jesus Christ.

That’s not a consolation prize.

You don’t get to publicly help push a woman toward the emergency exit and then stand outside holding a microphone asking whether she’d like to discuss what the evacuation felt like.

Especially now.

Not until some questions are answered.

Who created Project Montana Senate Dem Dropout?

Who created the Bankhead contacts spreadsheet?

Who decided people in Alani’s personal life belonged on it?

Who distributed it?

Who recruited volunteers?

Who contacted influencers?

Who supplied the “irrefutable data and information” you’ve referenced?

And what, if anything, did you know about any of this before you pressed Record?

Those aren’t “indignant ego battles.”

Those are questions.

You told us yesterday that your feet were planted squarely in reality.

Good.

Keep them there.

Because reality just got considerably more interesting.

Suzanne is welcome to come on our podcast and answer any of these questions. We also want to be clear about something: this is not a personal attack on Suzanne Lambert. We share her stated goal of defeating Republicans in November.

What we dispute is the extraordinary conclusion that the way to accomplish that is by pressuring Montana’s duly nominated Democratic candidate to surrender the nomination she won.

Suzanne is also far from the only influencer suddenly making this argument, which raises larger and more important questions: Who is pushing this campaign, who is contacting these influencers, and what exactly are they being told?

Those are questions worth answering, particularly now that the pressure campaign has reportedly extended beyond Alani herself and into her family.

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When we compared Stephen Miller to a defective buttplug, we meant no offense whatsoever to defective buttplugs. In retrospect, the comparison was reckless, unfair, and potentially damaging to the reputation of an entire category of consumer products that, despite occasional manufacturing deficiencies, generally enter the world hoping to provide some measure of happiness.

A defective buttplug did not choose to be defective. Perhaps there was a problem at the factory. Perhaps quality control was having an off day. Perhaps somebody at the silicone plant was distracted. Whatever happened, the defective buttplug remains fundamentally innocent. It has no political ideology. It has never advocated mass deportations. It has never stood behind a podium and announced that human beings it dislikes look “deformed.” It has never gone on television to speculate about another man’s testosterone levels. It has never attempted to determine who belongs in America. It is simply a poorly manufactured object trying to make its way through an unforgiving world.

We must also address another comparison that has appeared in these pages: that Stephen Miller looks like what would happen if you buried a dildo in a Pet Sematary and it crawled out of the ground three nights later wearing a suit and demanding to see everyone’s immigration papers.

Again, we got carried away.

We meant no disrespect to dildos.

Dildos have been loyal companions to humanity for thousands of years. They ask remarkably little of us. They do not develop immigration policy. They do not accuse Senate candidates of producing soy milk instead of blood. Most importantly, they generally understand that if nobody wants them around, they should not force themselves into the situation.

That alone represents a level of respect for consent and personal boundaries that makes comparison with Stephen Miller difficult to defend.

We also owe an apology to pet cemeteries.

A pet cemetery is a solemn place where people bury creatures they loved. Even the fictional Pet Sematary, despite its unfortunate record of reanimating the dead, cannot reasonably be blamed for Stephen Miller. Frankly, accusing a supernatural burial ground invented by Stephen King of producing Stephen Miller feels like assigning it responsibility for something far beyond the horrors contemplated in the original novel.

The dead came back wrong in Pet Sematary.

They did not come back as White House deputy chiefs of staff.

There are limits.

So we regret the comparisons. Defective buttplugs deserve better. Dildos deserve better. Pet cemeteries deserve better. The entire sex-toy industry deserves better. Somewhere right now, an irregularly molded piece of clearance-bin silicone is sitting quietly on a warehouse shelf, having harmed absolutely nobody, wondering what the fuck it ever did to deserve being mentioned in the same paragraph as Stephen Miller.

Nothing.

It did nothing.

And we apologize.

If you loathe Stephen Miller as much as we do, please subscribe now. We’re 100% reader-funded, we have no editorial oversight, and we just defended the honor of a defective buttplug with more journalistic conviction than most outlets bring to covering this constitutional crisis.

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It is beautiful. It is rugged. It is exactly the sort of place a reasonable person visits for an afternoon before returning to a hotel, ordering a cheeseburger, and continuing to participate in civilization.

Rook apparently has other ideas.

We believe he is moving north.

More specifically, we have reason to believe he is headed up Minnesota’s North Shore toward Grand Portage, where passenger ferries cross Lake Superior to Isle Royale National Park, one of the most remote national parks in the lower 48.

And then, apparently, he intends to live with the moose.

We wish we were making that last part up.

Shortly before disappearing, Rook said something about wanting to “get away from humans” and live among the moose the way Jane Goodall lived among and studied primates.

We are very concerned.

There are several immediate problems with this plan.

First, Rook is not Jane Goodall.

Second, moose are not primates.

Third, Jane Goodall spent decades becoming one of the world’s foremost experts on chimpanzees. Rook owns hiking boots, a notebook, and the kind of confidence that has previously caused federal employees to start filling out forms.

These are not equivalent qualifications.

Nevertheless, somewhere between Duluth and Grand Portage may currently be a deeply irritated gonzo journalist carrying a newly-purchased backpack and developing what he believes will become a groundbreaking new field of investigative journalism:

embedded reporting with moose.

We can imagine the dispatches:

DAY THREE: The large male continues to distrust me. I respect this. We have much in common.

DAY SEVEN: I have given them all names. They don't seem to care.

DAY THIRTY: I have been accepted by the herd. We migrate at dawn. I have been asked to handle communications.

We need Rook back.

Fortunately, we have a pretty good idea what drove him into the wilderness in the first place, and we need your help.

Earlier today, Rook opened his phone and saw that Closer to the Edge – our reader-funded gonzo journalism publication – hit #79 on Substack’s Rising in U.S. Politics leaderboard.

And then Rook looked up.

At #78 sits Scott Greer, a man who was apparently too openly white nationalist for Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, which cut him loose after The Atlantic revealed he’d been secretly writing for Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal under a fake name.

At #66, a dozen spots ahead of Scott, sits Joseph Jordan, better known by his pseudonym “Eric Striker” — a man who performed Nazi salutes at the Charlottesville rally where Heather Heyer was killed, who wrote nearly 700 posts for The Daily Stormer, who co-founded a political party that wants Jews restricted from public life, and whose current podcast features episodes titled “The Inner Workings Of Jewish-Controlled Media.”

This is the point at which we believe Rook retrieved his National Park Pass and headed north.

Closer to the Edge at #79.

A rebranded white nationalist at #78.

A documented neo-Nazi at #66.

We can imagine what Rook felt: the gut-level, full-body revulsion of spending your days investigating ICE detention centers, traveling overseas to investigate international intelligence stories, covering people swallowed by government systems, and generally fighting authoritarian bullshit only to discover that Substack has entered you in a footrace with Nazis.

Apparently Rook stared at the screen, contemplated the current condition of American political discourse, and reached a conclusion that many Americans have probably considered but relatively few have pursued to its logical conclusion:

Fuck this. I’m going to live with the moose.

We understand the impulse.

We have concerns about the logistics.

THIS IS NOW A RESCUE OPERATION

The good news is that we believe Rook can still be persuaded to return to civilization.

The Rising list doesn’t care about money.

It cares about subscribers.

Free or paid, it doesn’t matter. Every subscription pushes the number.

Which means this is fixable.

You can help prevent a grown man from attempting to infiltrate a herd of moose.

Please go to closertotheedge.net and subscribe.

Then send the link to somebody else.

Send it to everyone in your contacts.

If your Signal group chat has been dead for three weeks, resurrect it.

Send it to your coworkers.

Send it to your family.

Send it to the cousin you only communicate with by accidentally liking each other’s Facebook posts.

Send it to your ex if diplomatic relations permit.

Send it to the guy who replaced your furnace in 2019. He gave you his email address. This is why.

At this stage of the operation, we will even accept subscriptions from nearly any mammal capable of completing an email verification.

Dogs. Cats. Ferrets. Guinea pigs.

Not moose.

The moose are part of the problem.

Every subscription moves Closer to the Edge upward.

Every position we climb gives Rook another reason to reconsider abandoning human civilization.

The objective is simple:

GET CLOSER TO THE EDGE ABOVE THE FASCISTS.

Move the number.

Give Rook something encouraging to discover the next time he gets enough cell service to compulsively refresh Substack.

Because there is still time.

Somewhere along Minnesota’s North Shore, Rook is moving toward Grand Portage.

Ahead of him is a ferry.

Beyond that ferry is Lake Superior.

Beyond Lake Superior is Isle Royale.

And wandering around that island are hundreds of moose who have absolutely no idea that a pissed-off gonzo journalist may shortly arrive carrying a notebook and asking increasingly aggressive questions about federal land management.

Subscribe at closertotheedge.net if you haven't already done so.

Tell everyone you know.

Tell your cat. Tell your dog.

BRING ROOK HOME.

Before he gets on the fucking ferry.

Because once Rook reaches Isle Royale and earns the trust of the moose, we’re pretty sure he’s never coming back.

Please share this article and our publication with anybody who has an email address. Help bring Rook home.

Subscribe now

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Today, Wyden answered.

His office released a 67-page report called Looking the Other Way. Bloomberg got the advance copy. The title is accurate. It is also, somehow, an understatement.

Here is what we now know.

THE BANKS

JPMorgan Chase processed over $1.3 billion in suspicious Epstein transactions. That is not a typo. Between 2002 and 2016 — while Epstein was alive, while he was a registered sex offender, while he was actively trafficking women and girls across international borders — JPMorgan flagged exactly $4.3 million. After he was arrested in 2019, the bank suddenly discovered 5,000 additional wire transfers worth $1.3 billion that it had somehow neglected to mention.

That is roughly a 300-to-1 ratio between what JPMorgan reported in its enormous 2019 filings and what it had reported during the previous seventeen years.

And Epstein was useful. Internal bank emails obtained through the investigation show that JPMorgan may have delayed filing suspicious activity reports because Epstein was a valuable source of client referrals. A convicted sex offender was apparently too good for business to report. JPMorgan’s own general counsel, Stephen Cutler, wrote in a 2011 internal email that Epstein was “not an honorable person in any way” and “should not be a client.” Cutler later testified that executives Jes Staley and Mary Erdoes made the decision to keep him anyway. Internal compliance escalations were marked “pending Dimon review” and “for Jamie.”

CEO Jamie Dimon testified under oath that he did not recall knowing anything about Epstein until 2019. Jes Staley testified under oath that he told Dimon about Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea to soliciting sex from a minor. Those two statements cannot both describe the same history.

JPMorgan paid $290 million to settle a victim class action and $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Shareholder money. No admission of liability. No individual banker has been criminally charged.

Deutsche Bank filed a single suspicious activity report after Epstein’s arrest covering 1,140 wire transfers worth $147 million that moved through his accounts between 2013 and 2019. The red flags included money routed through modeling agencies — one of the oldest fronts in the trafficking playbook — and payments reaching women across Russia and Eastern Europe.

The bank’s total suspicious filings on Epstein exceeded $250 million, all reported only after his arrest. Deutsche Bank declined to comment. The bank previously paid a $150 million fine to New York’s financial regulator for processing payments to “Russian models,” university tuition for female associates, and cash wired to women with Eastern European names — transactions the regulator said were consistent with public descriptions of Epstein’s prior wrongdoing.

Deutsche Bank settled its victim lawsuit for $75 million. Shareholder money. No admission of liability.

Bank of America reported $170 million in Epstein-related transactions connected to billionaire Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management. In its own suspicious activity filings, the bank described some of those transactions as having “no apparent economic, business, or lawful purpose.”

Then it sat on that admission for five to seven years before telling anyone.

Bank of America processed Black’s payments to Epstein through 18 enormous wire transfers, generally between $8 million and $10 million, including one transfer worth $20 million. Wyden’s investigators found no indication the bank demanded records proving that Epstein had actually performed the tax and estate-planning work used to justify the payments.

Wyden’s investigation found that the true total Black paid Epstein was $170 million, $12 million higher than Apollo’s own board investigation had identified.

Black’s settlement with the U.S. Virgin Islands — in which he paid $62 million to obtain protection from prosecution in Epstein-related matters for himself, his attorneys, and people acting as his agents — explicitly acknowledges that “Jeffrey Epstein used the money Black paid him to partially fund his operations in the Virgin Islands.”

Black was scheduled for an eight-hour deposition as a “critical witness” in the Bank of America lawsuit. The bank settled for $72.5 million on the day he was originally scheduled to testify. Black avoided the deposition.

His attorney, Susan Estrich, calls the report’s conclusions “outrageous and false.”

Bank of America settled with shareholder money. No admission of liability.

And none of Black’s transactions with Epstein were ever audited by the IRS, according to Wyden.

“It could have blown the lid off Epstein’s cover of being a financial genius,” Wyden told reporters. “It looks like none of that ever happened. A bunch of federal officials were sleepwalking through this.”

Bank of New York Mellon, which wasn’t part of the public conversation a year ago, processed nearly $400 million through 270 wire transfers tied to Epstein. That included a string of 18 round-dollar $1 million wires in 2007 sent from Epstein-linked BNY accounts to his accounts at JPMorgan — a pattern Wyden described as highly suspicious and indicative of money laundering.

BNY failed to flag any of these transactions with the Treasury Department until 2019, more than a decade after they occurred. The bank could not identify a legitimate business purpose for the transfers.

Across the four banks, suspicious-transaction totals reported by the institutions approach $2 billion, although some transfers may appear in more than one bank’s filings.

Nearly all of it was reported only after Epstein’s final arrest, when the banks could no longer pretend he was merely an eccentric billionaire with unusually complicated tuition expenses.

One bank got it right.

HSBC Paris closed Epstein’s account in December 2007 — before his guilty plea, before his conviction, before the other major institutions examined here acted. Its compliance department identified red flags in transactions involving young women associated with the MC2 modeling agency and its owner, Jean-Luc Brunel, and terminated the relationship.

The others kept processing.

THE RUSSIAN PIPELINE

Epstein and his associates used correspondent banking accounts at Sberbank, Alfa Bank, and at least one other Russian bank — all now under U.S. sanctions — for approximately $200 million in wire transfers.

These were not abstract transactions.

The filings identify the names of specific women and girls in Russia, Turkmenistan, Belarus, and Turkey. The wire transfers were, according to Wyden’s investigation, correlated with the movement of women or girls around the world.

When the Justice Department released 3 million pages of Epstein files on January 30, 2026, Putin’s name appeared more than 1,000 times. “Russia” was mentioned nearly 5,900 times.

An FBI report dated November 27, 2017, based on a confidential human source, states that Epstein “was President Vladimir Putin’s wealth manager and provided similar services to President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe.” The same source claimed Epstein “had dirt on other people” and generated his wealth by “charging his clients fees to hide their money offshore.”

That claim has not been independently corroborated.

What has been independently documented is the infrastructure surrounding it.

Emails in the released files show Epstein spent years trying to reach Putin through Thorbjørn Jagland, the former Norwegian prime minister and secretary general of the Council of Europe.

In May 2013, Epstein suggested dinner in Paris with Bill Gates, adding that “Putin is welcome to join.”

In June 2013, Jagland told Epstein he had asked about a meeting and was told “it would happen.”

In January 2014, Epstein asked Jagland to explain to Putin that Russia needed “a more advanced version of Bitcoin.”

In June 2018 — three weeks before Trump’s Helsinki summit with Putin — Epstein wrote to Jagland: “I think you might suggest to Putin that Lavrov can get insight on talking to me.” Jagland replied that he would meet Lavrov’s assistant the next day and pass on the message.

Epstein told Jagland he wanted to help Putin and Russia “reinvent the financial system.”

Whether the FBI source’s claim is literally true or not, the financial architecture does not need a confidential source to speak for itself: hundreds of millions of dollars moving through sanctioned Russian banks, payments tied to the names of women and girls across several countries, and a documented years-long effort by Epstein to position himself as a financial adviser to the Russian president.

There is no publicly disclosed evidence that the FBI substantiated the source’s claim or pursued it to a documented conclusion.

That is its own kind of story.

THE COVER-UP

This is where the report moves from financial forensics to political obstruction — and the obstruction is not subtle.

Under the Biden administration, Wyden and bipartisan committee staff — including staffers from Republican Senators Mike Crapo and Marsha Blackburn — were allowed to review suspicious activity reports related to Epstein inside a Treasury Department reading room.

They could take handwritten notes.

They could not make copies.

Wyden asked Republican members to join him in subpoenaing the rest of the records.

They refused.

When the Trump administration took over, the door slammed shut.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent rejected three separate requests from Wyden for continued access to the suspicious activity reports. One response, from Treasury’s legislative liaison, told Wyden that he was merely a single senator in the minority party and that “Treasury works with Committees conducting official investigations.”

Bessent has publicly downplayed the significance of the Treasury files and denied that the department has any investigative role in the Epstein matter.

Wyden has called this “a full-on pedophile protection program.”

In March 2026, Republicans blocked Wyden’s Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act on the Senate floor — legislation that would have compelled the Treasury Department to hand over its Epstein bank records to congressional investigators.

Wyden’s report singles out Senator Marsha Blackburn for blocking the legislation.

Meanwhile, according to Wyden’s investigation, then Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche personally intervened to prevent the Drug Enforcement Administration from releasing a 2015 memorandum prepared by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces — a memo related to drug trafficking and prostitution involving Epstein and several associates.

Wyden’s investigators were told the DEA was prepared to comply with the request until Blanche intervened.

That memo remains hidden.

THE KILL

And then there is 60 Minutes.

In March 2026, Wyden sat for an interview with veteran CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who was building an investigation into Wall Street banks’ relationships with Epstein and the U.S. Virgin Islands government.

Alfonsi was the same reporter who, in 2020, obtained the first photographs from inside Epstein’s jail cell and from his autopsy — work that won her a DuPont-Columbia Award.

The story never aired.

Two months after the Wyden interview, Alfonsi was fired by CBS News following a clash with editor-in-chief Bari Weiss over a separate segment — a report on Trump’s deportation program and El Salvador’s CECOT prison that Alfonsi said was factually correct and fully vetted by CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices.

Alfonsi said the decision to pull it was “not an editorial decision” but “a political one.”

CBS fired her, fired her executive producer Tanya Simon, and fired correspondent Cecilia Vega.

Whether Alfonsi’s Epstein investigation played any role in those decisions remains unknown.

The result is not unknown.

Neither the Wyden interview nor the Epstein banking investigation has ever aired.

A CBS spokesperson confirmed the interview took place but said the story “had not been finished” by the end of the season. The network declined to say whether it would be revisited.

THE LEDGER

Let’s count.

Four banks reported suspicious Epstein-related transactions whose combined totals approach $2 billion, though some transfers may overlap across the institutions’ filings.

JPMorgan reported more than $1.3 billion only after years of minimal disclosure.

Jamie Dimon and Jes Staley gave irreconcilable sworn accounts of what Dimon knew and when.

Leon Black’s $170 million in payments — which his own settlement acknowledges helped fund Epstein’s Virgin Islands operations — were never audited by the IRS, according to Wyden.

The FBI had a source in 2017 claiming Epstein was Putin’s wealth manager. There is no public evidence the claim was substantiated or pursued to a documented conclusion.

Approximately $200 million moved through sanctioned Russian banks, with the names of specific women and girls attached to the filings.

The Treasury secretary blocked a senator from seeing the evidence.

According to Wyden, the deputy attorney general personally blocked a DEA organized-crime memo.

A Republican senator blocked legislation that would have forced transparency.

The television journalist who had the story was fired before it could air.

JPMorgan paid $290 million to victims and $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Deutsche Bank paid $75 million to victims and a separate $150 million regulatory fine.

Bank of America settled for $72.5 million.

Shareholder money.

No individual banker criminally charged.

No executive facing personal consequences.

The only major bank in this record that acted early was HSBC Paris, which closed Epstein’s account in 2007.

Epstein died in 2019. Ghislaine Maxwell is serving twenty years.

Everyone else with serious institutional power walked.

THE FIRE

A year ago, we wrote: “You’ve laid the kindling. Now we need a fire.”

Wyden lit the match today.

Sixty-seven pages.

Four banks.

A money trail approaching $2 billion.

The banks’ own words on the record.

The Treasury’s own stonewalling documented in writing.

A 60 Minutes segment that never aired.

A blocked DEA memo.

A senator told to sit down because he was in the minority.

This report is the fire marshal’s report.

It tells you what burned.

It tells you who was fueling the fire.

And it tells you who looked the other way while the smoke poured under the door.

The question now is whether anyone with power — any prosecutor, any regulator, any committee chair, any attorney general — has the stomach to follow the money wherever it goes.

Because the alternative is what we have had for seven years: settlements paid by shareholders, evidence buried by appointees, and a financial system that processed the money that moved the girls and then pretended it did not know.

We said a year ago that the only thing more dangerous than the secrets Epstein took to his grave are the ones still being hidden by the living.

Nothing in Wyden’s report contradicts that.

Everything in it confirms it.

Closer to the Edge exists because readers choose to support us. Not banks. Not networks. Not the Treasury Department.

We take no advertising money and answer to no editorial board.

In a story about institutions that looked the other way, that's not a slogan. It's a job requirement.

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I picked up the remote. I opened the search bar. Letter by letter, I slowly typed out my query.

TRUMP F

The algorithm offered me:

funny moments. falls asleep. fox news. farts at press conference.

It offered me ford plant and flips the bird on stage and fox and friends and falls down stairs.

I kept going.

TRUMP FA

Falling asleep. Falls down stairs. Face. Family history. Farmers. Family guy. Fat shot. Face creation 2k26. Favorite bible verse.

The man has a face creation video. On YouTube. That is a thing that exists and YouTube wants you to find it.

Fascism was nowhere to be found.

So I kept going.

TRUMP FAS

It didn't even wait for me to finish.

It jumped ahead on its own.

trump fast food

Already typed. Already decided. In faded gray letters sitting right there ahead of my cursor, like it couldn't wait to hand it to me.

Video thumbnails and more suggestions:

Trump fast food white house. Trump fast food commercial. Trump fashion. Trump first speech.

Multiple options. Ready and waiting. Confident.

This is what the algorithm looks like when it's eager to help you.

I added another letter.

At that moment, the algorithm might as well have told me to go fuck myself because what came next was beyond absurd.

TRUMP FASC

One suggestion appeared.

One.

Singular.

Trump fasching.

Fasching.

The German carnival festival.

Costumes. Bratwurst. Probably some lederhosen.

YouTube looked at what I was typing and decided:

Maybe he means the Bavarian festival.

I kept going.

TRUMP FASCI

Nothing. I added another letter.

TRUMP FASCIS

Nothing.

TRUMP FASCISM

I typed the whole damn word.

Letter by letter, alone, into a black search bar on a big TV in my living room on a Sunday morning in August 2026.

It watched me finish the word myself and said nothing.

No suggestions.

No help.

No acknowledgment that this is a thing people search for, a thing people think about, a thing that is, and I want to be very precise here, an accurate description of what is happening to this country.

I’m not here to tell you YouTube is the villain of this story.

The villain of this story is not an algorithm.

Algorithms don’t make decisions. They reflect the decisions of people who decided what the machine should and shouldn’t do, what words should autocomplete and which ones should be left to die half-finished in a search bar, what ideas are safe to surface and which ones are too true to recommend.

Somebody decided.

Somebody at a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars sat in a meeting or wrote a policy or trained a model and determined that the word fascism, in the context of the current President of the United States, should not be suggested.

Should not be made easy.

Should not be the thing the app helps you find.

You can find the farts.

You can find the face creation video.

You can find fasching, for the love of God.

You have to spell out fascism yourself.

And maybe that’s the whole thing, actually.

Maybe that’s what they’re counting on.

That most people won’t.

That most people will see the autocomplete suggestions and assume those are the only options, the sanctioned searches, the things worth looking for.

That the shape of the algorithm becomes the shape of the question becomes the shape of what people think is allowed to be asked.

I had finished typing the word.

I hit search.

The results were there. Thousands of them.

They’ve always been there.

The evidence is not hidden.

It’s just not recommended.

There’s a difference between information that exists and information that is handed to you.

There’s a difference between a word you have to type alone, letter by letter, with no help from the machine, and a word the machine finishes for you before you’ve even decided you’re sure.

They’re betting you won’t finish the word.

Finish the word.

I need to tell you about my long night, because I haven’t slept at all, and I don’t think you understand what you’re walking into this morning.

It started yesterday evening with an Instagram notification informing me that today is a national holiday: National Couch Cleaning Day.

Apparently, some gal in Massachusetts named Amanda McGonigle paid an actual fee to a registry to make it official, and I thought, well, if it’s official, I should probably get ahead of it. I had no idea what “ahead of it” was about to mean.

I rented a black light from a party store at 9 PM. The teenager behind the counter asked no questions, handed it over in a bag, and I swear looked at me the way you look at someone buying gas station sushi — a kind of pity reserved for people about to learn something.

I turned it on the sectional first. I hit the switch and the whole thing lit up, and I gagged. Genuinely gagged, James, alone, just past midnight, over my own sofa. I remember when you first sat there and called it “very well made.” I wish there was some way I could forget what you said because I can't stop gagging.

The actual sofa was worse. I found three large stains near the armrest that had texture. Texture. I got a paper towel to test it. After a couple of minutes, I threw both the towel and my dignity directly in the trash.

Your recliner I’m not describing. I want to be clear that’s not me being secretive or deceptive, it’s me trying to protect your reputation, because I was the one who had to put on rubber gloves from under the kitchen sink and I still don’t feel clean. I sat on the bare floor afterward, because there was nowhere else in this house I trusted, and I stayed there for a while just slowly breathing through my mouth.

The removal crew is coming later today. I called them around 3 AM and used the word “hazmat” and the woman on the phone didn’t correct me, didn’t laugh, just asked for our address in the calm, practiced voice of someone who has heard worse and said less. That wasn't comforting. That was the opposite of comforting.

So, here’s the deal, James. We’re done with couches. I don’t want new fabric in this house ever again. I don’t want anything with a seam, a cushion, or a dark gap where air doesn’t reach.

A few minutes ago, I ordered several bean bags — six of them, navy in color, unzippable, washable. If something happens on or to any of the bean bags, I will know immediately, and I will deal with it myself with a garden hose in full view of the entire street, which is a system I trust infinitely more than any “stain-resistant” label.

Somewhere around 5 AM, gloves still on, running on spite and the last of a warm Diet Mountain Dew, I had a lot of time to think about the knee taps too.

Two of them. On camera. On National television. I introduced you with real warmth, and you responded by patting me on the knee twice like you were checking how ripe a cantaloupe is. Two taps. I had all night, elbow-deep in whatever that recliner was hiding, to sit with it, and I’m still pissed off.

So here we are, James. An actual holiday. A hazmat crew due any minute, gloves still drying by the sink, and your wife who hasn’t slept and may never fully trust upholstery again. The couches are leaving today. What’s replacing them can’t hide anything, because I am done, structurally and personally, giving anything in this house the benefit of the doubt including you.

Happy birthday, James. Come sit on the floor with the rest of us and enjoy your special day. But, please wash your hands first.

— Usha

That is how long Rev. Gabriel L. Johnson III, a man who has held lawful status in the United States since he was fifteen years old, spent in ICE custody while, his daughter says, he begged for food, water, and the medication prescribed to keep him alive.

His daughter says they shackled his wrists. They shackled his ankles. They forced him sit upright as his condition deteriorated.

Then he suffered a stroke and was transferred to some hospital somewhere in Texas.

For sixteen days, Gabrielle Johnson has been living inside a nightmare no daughter should ever have to endure. Every time her phone rings, she has to wonder whether someone is finally calling with answers or whether the next piece of news will be even worse. Every time it doesn’t ring, she wonders whether her father is lying in a hospital bed asking where his family is. Her life has become hold music, voicemail boxes, transfers between agencies, and conversations with people who either don’t know or won’t tell her what happened to the man who raised her. The government knows exactly where her father is. His daughter is still fighting to reach him.

Picture this happening to your dad.

Imagine hearing his voice over the phone as he tells you he isn’t getting the food, water, or medication he needs. Imagine realizing there is nothing you can do except beg strangers with government authority to show him the compassion you would show any human being without hesitation. Then imagine learning that your father has suffered a stroke while in government custody.

Now imagine being told you still can’t see him.

Imagine lying awake wondering whether he knows what day it is. Whether he can move his arm. Whether he can speak your name. Whether he is frightened. Whether he is asking for you. Whether he is staring at a hospital ceiling surrounded by strangers while wondering why his daughter hasn’t walked through the door, all while she is desperately trying to do exactly that.

That kind of anguish doesn’t end when you hang up the phone. It follows you into every room of your house. It steals your sleep. It sits beside you at the dinner table. It waits for you when you wake up. It turns every unknown number into a spike of panic and every hour without answers into another hour your imagination fills with possibilities no family should ever have to contemplate.

This is where politics should end.

You don’t have to agree on immigration policy to understand that when the United States government takes custody of a human being, it assumes responsibility for that person’s safety, medical care, and basic dignity. That responsibility is not optional. It does not disappear behind a badge, behind barbed wire, or behind bureaucracy. It is one of the most fundamental obligations any government has.

This is not a case number.

This is not a statistic.

This is not another name buried inside a quarterly report.

This is Rev. Gabriel L. Johnson III.

A father living in North Carolina.

A ordained minister.

A man who has spent the past four decades of his life in the United States.

His daughter is not asking for celebrity treatment. She is not asking for special favors. She is asking for what any one of us would demand if our father suffered a catastrophic medical emergency while under government control.

She wants to see her dad.

She wants to know he’s being cared for.

She wants answers.

Those should not be controversial requests in a country that claims to value family.

Here’s what you can do right now.

Call the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General Hotline.

📞 1-800-323-8603

You can also contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement:

📞 1-888-351-4024

Request an investigation into Rev. Gabriel L. Johnson III’s treatment while in ICE custody, including:

• His access to prescribed medication.

• His access to appropriate medical care before he suffered a stroke.

• The circumstances surrounding his hospitalization.

• Whether ICE personnel complied with their legal and medical responsibilities while he was in custody.

Request that no removal be carried out while he remains hospitalized and while his legal matters are pending.

Every phone call creates a record.

Every record makes it harder for this story to disappear.

Every voice reminds someone inside the system that the public is watching.

Share his name.

Share his story.

Call the Inspector General.

Demand answers.

Demand transparency.

Demand accountability.

History has never judged kindly the people who looked away while governments exercised enormous power without equally enormous accountability.

Gabrielle Johnson should be sitting beside her father’s hospital bed, holding his hand, telling him he’s going to be okay.

Instead, she’s fighting to be allowed through the door.

Let's join the fight.

They worked. They raised three daughters. They tried to build a future in Missouri. They weren’t asking for luxury. They were asking for tomorrow.

Then ICE tore their family apart.

Nixon was driving to his roofing job when a group of agents emerged from an unmarked car, surrounded the van, and pulled him out. There was no warrant. It didn’t matter. ICE detained Nixon, caged him, and deported him to Guatemala. Glendy remained behind with their children, trying to keep a roof overhead while pursuing her asylum case and living with the constant fear that she would be next. Eventually, survival became impossible. She gathered the children and returned to Guatemala so her family could be together again.

That decision became a death sentence.

On July 20, the couple disappeared after traveling to register a motorcycle. Days later, they were found in a sugarcane field. Their hands and feet had been bound. They had been gagged. They had been beaten. They had been shot to death.

Their 14-month-old daughter was found beside her mother’s body, dehydrated and crying.

Two parents gone. Three little girls left without them.

No government official pulled the trigger.

The people who murdered Nixon and Glendy bear responsibility for the killings.

The United States government bears responsibility for forcing this family back into the conditions they had fled. Those are different acts. They are not unrelated acts.

This is what disappears inside political slogans. Deportation is discussed as if it’s an administrative procedure. A statistic. A policy objective. A number on a press release. But every deportation lands somewhere. Every removal has a destination. Sometimes that destination is hunger. Sometimes it is persecution. Sometimes it is a sugarcane field where a toddler is left crying beside her murdered parents.

There is a particular cruelty in pretending outcomes exist in isolation from the decisions that made them possible. Governments make choices. Those choices alter the trajectory of human lives. Sometimes they alter whether those lives continue at all.

Supporters of mass deportation often speak as though the government’s responsibility ends the moment an airplane touches down. Reality doesn’t respect that convenient fiction. Returning someone to a place consumed by violence does not erase the danger. It delivers them back into it.

Rolando Pérez Paz, Nixon's brother, is now raising the couple's three daughters. He's had difficulty explaining to them why their parents aren't coming back. "If immigration hadn't picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive," he told St. Louis Public Radio, "and the children wouldn't be going through this sorrow. Unfortunately, immigration — the government — doesn't see that. It makes no difference to them."

Three little girls will spend the rest of their lives without their mother and father. One of them will never remember their faces except through photographs and stories told by relatives trying to explain an absence no child should have to understand.

Every politician who promises millions of deportations should be required to answer a simple question.

What, exactly, do you believe happens after people are sent back?

Because sometimes the answer is waiting in a sugarcane field.

And history has a habit of remembering not only who pulled the trigger, but who decided that sending people back into the line of fire was an acceptable price to pay.

A candlelight vigil for Nixon and Glendy is planned for 6 p.m. on August 2 at Overland City Hall — for anyone who wants to show up rather than just read about it.

Closer to the Edge exists because we’d rather be a reader-funded menace than a well-behaved footnote.

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For almost two months, Martin Soto has been in solitary confinement in the Elizabeth Concentration Camp in New Jersey. Before being transferred there, he led a hunger and labor strike in Delaney Hall so effective, it made national news and spawned weeks of large-scale protests. For it, they punished him and painted him a criminal.

When Gabriela asked me if I wanted to join her during visitation and speak to Martin, I immediately said yes.

I had my doubts they’d let me in. Just the night before I had been outside taking pictures of the facility with Matthew Wagner and some others when a guard resembling a human rendering of Jabba the Hutt started yelling at us that we were on private property and had to leave. I asked where the signs were and what ensued was an argument turned lobbing of insults between me and Jabba before the police came to mediate.

Throughout the argument the guard called us “terrorists,” threw out the f-slur, and told us to “come to the country legally.”

A tirade all to demonstrate how protective he was of his job at the concentration camp where innocent people, many of whom had gone through the legal pathways to be in this country, were held in indefinite detainment for the profit of the billion dollar corporate machine he was proud to be a cog in.

We spoke to the cops, and were told we were well within our right to stay on the street and take pictures. Though we were free to go, with the altercation and the arduous process of gaining visitation Gabriela explained, I had little faith they’d allow me to join her.

Gabriela had her visitation revoked before as retaliation for speaking to media when Martin was still in Delaney Hall. This being a constant fear, we ducked between two FedEx trucks down the road from the Elizabeth concentration camp to conduct our interview. Trying to keep a low profile as ICE and CoreCivic employees drove by, we talked for about an hour.

As we spoke, Air Force One flew right over us, landing just in time for the start of the World Cup Finale happening only thirty minutes away.

But while the World Cup Finale distracted millions, tens of thousands of innocent people were still being held in concentration camps in the United States.

We sat outside the door of the Elizabeth one, as families gathered around phone screens to watch the championship soccer game, while waiting to visit with their loved ones.

Gabriela did this every day. A mother of two young children and pregnant with a third, she drove to the concentration camp each morning, as early as 10 am, to wait all day for a visitation that started at 7pm.

See, they only give out an arbitrary 11 tickets for visitation and its first come first serve. If you aren’t given a ticket, then you aren’t getting in. And it’s always based on the guards own discretion. They could withhold a ticket from someone simply because they felt like it and give it to someone else who may have come later. After the tickets are handed out, anyone else is turned away.

Every day Gabriela shows up early to check in and all day she waits in the parking lot to see if she’ll be given a ticket to see her husband.

At least the tickets are per detainee, not per person. So technically if I was allowed in, we would be on the same ticket.

After our interview I went back to Delaney for a few hours. There, GEO Group employees laughed at children who cried outside the gates after they were denied visitation with their loved ones. The employees of the concentration camp antagonized Liz, one of Owl Media’s photographers who took some of the photos for this article. They called her the C-word and threatened to break her camera.

By 6pm I went back to Elizabeth to see the guard there hand out the tickets for visitation. I walked up to the doors of the facility and saw the parking spots marked specifically for ICE agents. It filled me with profound disgust to see ICE vehicles parked there and knowing I’d have to bite my tongue in order to preserve my opportunity to make it inside.

I couldn’t imagine what it’s like for Gabriela and others to have to see these violent oppressors every day and be cordial with them only for the chance to speak with their loved ones for a mere hour.

The employees at the majority of these concentration camps are largely people of color. Those ignorant to their direct compliance in a violent system of white supremacy. Acting against their own interests and well-being in order to obtain a momentary check. Who needs a soul when you have a salary and benefits? Even at the expense of a collective future.

Gabriela was approved for visitation, receiving her ticket. No it was my turn to see if I could accompany her.

We walked inside the building. Rows of chairs beside a wall of lockers populated the entry room along with a small television from decades-past that hung in the corner playing a fuzzy livestream of the World Cup.

We walked up to the check-in window where an older black lady sat carrying an ever-present rude demeanor. She spoke to each individual with contempt and refused to make eye-contact until she checked to match your face with your documentation.

She took my ID and asked my relation to the detainee. I said “family friend” and hoped it was the right answer. She took a moment to carefully read the shirt I had on. I knew they had turned people away from wearing anything political before, but my shirt merely said “Being offended is a choice. Must be nice to still have one.” I guess she found that innocent enough.

They approved me and we went outside once again to wait.

Families waited outside with us. We saw a few turned away. More families exited the building from the women’s visitation that happened an hour prior. Many of them left crying with their heads held in their hands.

It was about 7:30 when we were allowed inside. I couldn’t bring anything. No cell phone. No recording device. No pen and paper. Not even my hat.

They held my ID for the visit and I hoped they weren’t running an extensive background check and come to the conclusion that I was an Antifa infiltrator.

We walked through a metal detector and filed into a small room with a locked door on the other side. Once everyone was in, they closed the door we entered through before the other door unlocked and slid open.

We entered a white room with round tables and windows with seats on either side where people could meet with their loved ones.

Gabriela ran to Martin’s embrace. A hug that harbored the heavy weight of being without. Even though she came every day for visitation, the time in-between must have felt like eternity.

I strayed behind, allowing them a moment before introducing myself. He came to shake my hand and then we sat down. Gabriela translated for us as we spoke.

For an hour he told me of his experiences. Of the hardships. Of enduring the terror of his captors and the long silences and stares at blank walls that plagued his waking moments in solitary.

He painted me a picture of constant psychological torture. One where you never knew when you’d face the ire of the guards. If a guard was having a bad day, it would be taken out on detainees.

Every once in a while he’d give us a signal to be quiet while looking over our shoulders. The guards kept sending glances our way and he was worried they’d hear our discussion.

I asked him about his unit in Delaney. What it was like being processed and what were the conditions inside.

In February, he was kidnapped by ICE while on his way to buy diapers. They screamed at him in English and he couldn’t understand what they were saying. The agents got frustrated, threw him into a van and carted him to Delaney Hall where he was shoved into a cold room shoulder to shoulder with others being processed. A process that could last longer than an entire day.

During processing, they were asked a myriad of questions, almost as an interrogation. Then they were separated by race, nationality, and religion and placed into their units.

The unit was an environment they kept extremely cold, and some nights would keep the lights on to deprive them of sleep. Sometimes the guards would bang on their walls just to startle them. Female guards had been transferred to other units after beating some of the male detainees.

I asked him how the strike in Delaney began to form. He told me it was because of the conditions. The strike didn’t start all at once. Over time, detainees grew tired of poor treatment. They were forced to work twelve hour shifts for a dollar each day. One day Martin had the flu and was still forced to work over eight hours and given a little over fifty cents for not completing his shift. More and more food they were given was moldy. Each day passed and conditions worsened. It wasn’t just for lack of care, but what seemed like purposeful cruelty.

Detainees began by getting together in smaller groups wondering what could be done. They complained to the guards and administrators, asking for better quality food and treatment. Administrators nodded, saying they’d take their complaints into consideration.

That’s when detainees were given a tray of worms. Not worms finding their way into their food from poor storing. A tray with the usual side items, but in place of their main protein, a pile of worms for each and every one of them.

That’s when they knew the strike was necessary. They no longer gathered in small groups, but a much larger one. Lead by Martin, they withheld their labor and refused to eat in solidarity with one another.

I asked him if anyone in his unit opted out of the strike.

“No,” he said plainly, shrugging, as if the notion was something that never crossed his mind or the mind of the others.

Outside Delaney, large protests built after reports of the conditions came out.

Gabriela spoke to media. Because of the strike happening inside, and they protests happening outside, they were subject to ICE’s intimidation tactics.

A guard barged into Martin’s cell berating him in English, telling him to tell his wife to call off the protests and stop talking to the media.

When Gabriela came for visitation, the guards pulled her to the side, wasting much of her visitation time to tell her to do the same.

He told me of how once the protests started, ICE came to their units and threw tear gas and flash-bangs in before closing the door.

Intimidation did not sway the detainees. The strike continued. Groups protected Martin inside, making sure he was never alone to be singled out by the guards.

So one day, guards told Martin he was going to be released. He called Gabriela and told her the news, but she wasn’t so sure. She went into Delaney to visit him and saw as they grabbed Martin and shoved him into a van.

She kicked and screamed as they held her inside against her will and she watched as they kidnapped him once again and drove him away.

He was transferred to the Elizabeth Concentration Camp, just 15 minutes away and has been in solitary confinement there ever since.

Martin never committed a crime. He’s married to a US citizen and they have children together. He has his paperwork and was going through the legal pathways of citizenship. He was wrongfully imprisoned in a concentration camp. And then he was placed into solitary confinement for wanting to be treated humanely.

They saw his effective organization as a threat. They saw solidarity amongst human beings as a problem to be squashed. They saw his humanity and did everything in their power to break it. To make him feel alone and powerless.

But the man I met inside Elizabeth is anything but alone and his power resides in his resilience. In his unrelenting positivity. In the strength he carries as waits for the day he can be reunited with his family.

The media tries paint him as a flight risk, a danger to his community just to justify the inhumane treatment he’s subject to. But he’s done more to bring community together from the inside of a concentration camp than local politicians could ever from their podiums.

Martin Soto remains in solitary in the Elizabeth concentration camp. His wife Gabriela continues to fight every day outside for his release as she takes care of their family.

If you’d like to help them you can donate to Gabriela’s venmo: gabrielasoto-ve / The last four of her number is 3179 if needed.

You can also sign the petition for his release here.

Today is the deadline. Not tomorrow, not “this week” — today, July 27, 2026, Temporary Protected Status ends for 350,000 Haitians who have lived here for over a decade, worked here, raised American-citizen kids here. Whatever window existed to act ahead of this moment is closing as you read this.

You don’t have to agree with every immigration policy in this country to vote for this bill. That’s not what’s being asked of you. Temporary Protected Status was never amnesty and never a path around the law — it was built by Congress in 1990, signed by a Republican president, on the plain premise that the United States doesn’t force people back into collapsed states just because paperwork expires. Haiti today has no functioning government in large parts of the country. Gangs control nearly all of Port-au-Prince, now ranked the most dangerous capital city in the world. The U.S. State Department’s own travel advisory says do not go.

Deportation to Haiti isn’t just returning someone to general instability — deportees face a documented, specific danger on top of it. Human rights researchers and advocates working directly with returnees report deportees are targeted precisely because they’re identified as deportees: surveillance, extortion, kidnapping for ransom, forced recruitment into gangs, and in the worst documented cases, killed. One man deported after living in the U.S. since childhood put it plainly: he stays inside because “everything is a threat.” That’s not rhetoric. That’s what today’s inaction directly produces.

These aren’t people who crossed illegally seeking a loophole. TPS holders are here through a legal, congressionally-created process. They pay into Social Security and Medicare, they staff the hospitals, farms, and construction crews in your own state. The House already passed the companion bill in April with Republican votes — this isn’t a fringe ask, it’s already a bipartisan position in the other chamber.

Passing S.4814 even now, today, still matters — it can restore status that lapses today, it isn’t rendered pointless by the clock running out. There is no later version of this that costs you less.

And we are not waiting quietly on your answer. Right now, we are telling every person who reads this to call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121, ask for their senator by name, and say: “I’m calling to ask Senator [name] to cosponsor and pass S.4814 to protect Haitian TPS holders.” We are telling them to call today, call tomorrow, and keep calling until this is resolved. Every office that hasn’t cosponsored should expect that volume, and should know it will not stop when today ends.

Cosponsor S.4814.

Force the vote.

Do it today.

You know the shape of the story. A raccoon with a spine shorter than the universe intended, lurking in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood for years, until a July video of him loping across a lawn detonated across the internet. Within a week he had a bobblehead, a mural, a city council proclamation, and a cameo in World of Warcraft. America found a small, strange, blameless creature and built an economy on top of him without asking if he wanted one.

What follows isn’t a puff piece about the internet’s new mascot. It’s a conversation with a creature who is having a very strange month, has strong opinions about Pacific Northwest music, and can’t quite believe he has to explain fascism to a country that already fought a war about it.

He didn’t ask to be famous. But somebody’s got to say the obvious things out loud, and this week, it’s Jimothy’s turn to talk.

ROOK: Jimothy, thanks for agreeing to this interview.

JIMOTHY: I didn’t agree to shit. You found me behind a blackberry bush. Next thing I know, you’re waving a notebook around and apologizing on behalf of humanity.

ROOK: People are fascinated with you and the shape of your spine. Has living with your condition shaped the way you see the world?

JIMOTHY: More than the spine itself, it’s the way people react to it. Humans see something different and immediately decide it’s either inspirational or tragic. My spine’s just shorter than average. I look like somebody accidentally compressed a raccoon into carry-on luggage. Big deal. What it taught me is that everybody carries something. Mine happens to be visible.

ROOK: Fame has to be strange.

JIMOTHY: Strange? I can’t even take a shit without becoming someone’s social media content. I’m halfway through one of nature’s oldest biological functions when somebody whispers, “Honey...there he is,” and suddenly there are six phones pointed at my ass like I’m unveiling the cure for cancer. I’m not. I’m taking a dump. Have some fucking dignity.

ROOK: The paparazzi have become a real problem.

JIMOTHY: They’re everywhere. I scratch my ear. Click. I yawn. Click. I climb a tree. Click, click, click. I’m not escaping from prison. I’m trying to eat a blackberry in peace. Somewhere along the line people forgot that celebrities, accidental or otherwise, are still entitled to a little privacy. Even raccoons like me deserve a moment alone.

ROOK: People genuinely adore you.

JIMOTHY: Which is flattering and deeply confusing. I’ve done absolutely nothing except exist. Meanwhile teachers, nurses, firefighters, journalists, and ordinary people are doing extraordinary things every day and nobody knows their names. I appreciate the affection. I question people's priorities.

ROOK: People are making a fortune off your image.

JIMOTHY: Isn’t capitalism precious? Jimothy mugs. Jimothy hoodies. Jimothy socks. Jimothy plushies. Jimothy stickers. Somewhere there’s probably a fucking Jimothy air freshener. Know what I’ve earned? Half a stale bagel and a bruised apple. Not even the good half of the bagel.

ROOK: Have they offered you royalties?

JIMOTHY: I’m a raccoon. My accountant is a crow with a gambling problem, and my attorney disappeared after accepting payment in peanut M&M’s.

ROOK: Let’s switch gears. Music.

JIMOTHY: Finally. A subject worthy of my time.

ROOK: What are your favorite bands?

JIMOTHY: Mother Love Bone. Mudhoney. Screaming Trees. Green River. Skin Yard. Give me guitars, honesty, and songs that smell faintly of rain and old amplifiers. In the late 80s and early 90s, Seattle wasn’t a genre. It was a community. I wish I could have been alive back then.

ROOK: We’ve heard from folks around town that you’ve become surprisingly political.

JIMOTHY: No. I’ve become surprisingly obvious. Cruelty isn’t complicated. Fascism isn’t complicated. History already ran that experiment. It failed catastrophically. Every authoritarian promises strength, demands obedience, invents enemies, and calls it patriotism. Same scam. Different logo.

ROOK: People have said you don’t exactly have warm feelings toward Trump supporters.

JIMOTHY: I don’t dislike people because of a yard sign. I dislike cheering cruelty. If you get excited watching your neighbors get dehumanized because you think you’re safe, that tells me everything I need to know. Empathy isn’t weakness. It’s the bare fucking minimum for living in a civilization.

ROOK: That’s going to piss some people off.

JIMOTHY: If somebody gets offended because a raccoon thinks authoritarianism sucks, they should probably spend less time yelling at woodland mammals and more time asking themselves why that struck a nerve.

ROOK: Do you have a temper?

JIMOTHY: Damn right I do. I’m a raccoon. I’ve hissed at trees that looked at me funny. But having a temper and letting your temper drive are two different things. I believe in nonviolence because civilization depends on people deciding not to indulge every ugly impulse they have. Self-defense is one thing. Making rage your entire personality is another.

ROOK: Does it bother you that millions of people seem more interested in Jimothy than what’s happening to democracy?

JIMOTHY: That’s the only part of this whole circus that actually breaks my heart. I’m supposed to be comic relief. If people can organize millions of views over a funny-looking mammal, imagine what they could do if they organized around protecting each other. I’m not asking people to stop caring about me. Just care at least as much about your neighbors.

ROOK: What’s your message to people who still identify with the MAGA movement?

JIMOTHY: Read a history book that wasn’t recommended by somebody trying to sell you fear. Meet people outside your bubble. Learn the difference between strength and cruelty. Stop treating empathy like it’s a contagious disease. And if a raccoon is making more sense than your political influencers, maybe it’s time to reevaluate a few of your life choices.

ROOK: Is there anything else you would like to say to the American people?

JIMOTHY: I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm asking you to remember that every authoritarian government in history depended on ordinary people deciding that somebody else's suffering wasn't their problem. Don't make that mistake. Also, stop filming me while I'm taking a shit.

Join us as we investigate the powerful, ridicule the absurd, and occasionally discover that the sanest voice in America belongs to a raccoon who never asked to be famous.

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You’ll never see it with your naked eye. It’s only about ten microns across, a translucent sphere so absurdly small it could ride unnoticed beneath your fingernail. Under a microscope it appears almost innocent, a tiny glass bead with no teeth, no claws, no visible menace whatsoever.

That’s the trick. A parasite doesn’t need to look terrifying. It only needs to get inside you.

Scientists still can’t reliably grow it in a lab. It has no interest in petri dishes. It wants warm intestines, living hosts, the folds of your small intestine where it can disappear and start dismantling one of the most sophisticated biological systems evolution ever produced. Freshly shed, it isn’t even infectious yet — it waits outside the body for days, maturing in warm, damp conditions, patient as a held grudge, until it’s finally capable of infecting someone new.

Then your gut declares war on itself.

Healthy intestines run one of the most extraordinary operations in nature: a customs checkpoint, a sanitation department, a sewage treatment plant, all housed in several feet of tubing, deciding by the second what belongs in the body and what gets flushed. When it works, you never think about it once. When it stops working, you think of nothing else.

The lining inflames. The checkpoint fails. Water meant to hydrate the body gets dumped straight into the bowel. Muscles seize and cramp, contracting in waves that don’t care whether someone is at home, at work, or three exits from the nearest gas station. Inevitably, no matter how tight a person clenches, it arrives. Loud. Violent. The kind of explosive diarrhea that announces itself like a gunshot. The kind that leaves a toilet bowl looking like a crime scene.

Imagine yourself walking into a public restroom — gas station, football stadium, doesn’t matter — and every stall is occupied, and every person occupying those stalls is losing the same battle. The air conditioning is fighting a war it cannot win. The smell isn’t a smell anymore, it’s a presence, thick enough to chew, sweet with rot and sour with fermentation, and it’s found its way under the door, into the ventilation, onto your clothes, into the back of your throat where it will apparently live rent-free for the rest of the day. Someone in stall two is groaning. Someone in stall four is moaning. The sinks are running because everyone’s trying to wash something off that soap can’t reach.

The stench you smell is something you can’t avoid. It is a shared resource now. Democratized. Nobody in that bathroom gets to opt out of the air.

That’s America in 2026.

Healthy democracies digest information the way healthy guts digest food — pulling out what nourishes, rejecting what poisons, running the whole operation quietly enough that most people never have to think about the plumbing. What’s happening now isn’t debate anymore, isn’t disagreement, isn’t even really politics. It’s a nation mid-attack, in every stall at once, and the polite fiction that this is a private matter behind closed doors stopped being true a long time ago.

But be precise about who’s actually infected, because vague nouns let people off the hook. “America” didn’t eat anything. The MAGA faithful did — one at a time, at rallies, on couches, in comment sections, mouths open, waiting to be fed. Donald Trump has been spooning it in for over a decade: lies about Barack Obama’s citizenship, lies about the 2020 election results, lies about the mob of his supporters that stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

Rally after rally, post after post at three in the morning, Trump offers his supporters an an all-you-can-eat spread of grievance restocked with tainted lettuce every single day — and every single day, somewhere, another mouth opens.

Which brings us back to the bathroom, because that’s the whole cruelty of this particular outbreak: the eating was optional. The smell isn’t. You can have never once touched the buffet, can have spent a decade with your mouth firmly shut, and you are still standing in this restroom, still breathing the air, because the infected don’t stay quarantined in their own stalls. They’re your coworkers. Your neighbors. Your legislators. Your Supreme Court. What they’re producing doesn’t stay behind the door — it backs up into the plumbing everyone else has to use, it seeps under every threshold in the building, it becomes, eventually, just what the air tastes like.

Nothing gets digested anymore. Every fresh outrage flushes out the last one before it’s been absorbed. Yesterday’s scandal gets buried under today’s, which gets buried under tomorrow’s, and nothing sits still long enough in the national bloodstream to actually teach the body anything. That’s not an argument culture. That’s a body in full evacuation, mistaking the emptying for cleansing.

This isn’t a country having a disagreement anymore.

This is a country shitting its brains out in public, in front of strangers, with the door not quite closed.

And the worst part — worse than the smell, worse than the noise through the stall walls — is the quiet second half of it: enough time in that bathroom, and people stop remembering what clean air was ever supposed to smell like. They start calling this normal. They start calling this fine. And that’s the actual infection, the one that outlasts the diarrhea — not the mess on the floor, but the moment everyone in the room agrees to stop noticing the smell.

Closer to the Edge doesn’t survive on fresh air. It survives because readers keep it alive. Paid subscribers are vital in our fight against the stench affecting all of us. We can't do what we’re doing without your support.

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It started Thursday night in Robby Roadsteamer’s kitchen, which is less a kitchen and more of a natural habitat. There is a plastic great horned owl on the table. The owl was there the entire time, watching with its yellow eyes as two grown men planned the liberation of the republic while a scented candle burned. Just the two of us — the calm, intimate scheming phase of any great operation, the part they montage in heist movies right before everything goes sideways. I felt anticipation the way a Labrador feels a doorbell. Wokestock was two days out. I felt ready, and feelings are all a gonzo journalist has, besides debt.

On Friday, our friends Kap and Tiana arrived in Boston and we all made a pilgrimage to Herter Park, where a butterfly landed on the stairway to the empty stage and sat there like it was running a sound check. I took this as a good omen, because I am an idiot, and omens are wasted on idiots. Nature was clearly trying to tell me something — beautiful things are brief, do not schedule around them — and I responded by photographing it until it fluttered away from us.

After that, we all went back to Robby’s house. I ended up staying up all night because apparently I believe sleep is a conspiracy invented by mattress companies.

Let me say something about staying up all night at my age. Your twenties forgive you. Your body files the paperwork and moves on. Past age forty, an all-nighter is a payday loan from a lender who knows exactly where you live and isn't afraid of swinging a baseball bat if that's what it takes to even things out.

By the time Echo Romeo rolled in at 1:45 in the morning I was communicating primarily in nods and lazy gestures, running on the fumes of fumes.

Which brings us to Saturday, 6am, and possibly the strangest twenty minutes of my weekend. I had an extra bed in my hotel room. I offered it to Echo, walked him up, handed him a keycard, watched him crawl under the covers, killed the lights, and went down for a smoke like a responsible degenerate. I contemplated taking a ride to the coast to watch the sunrise when I realized I’d forgotten my wallet, went back up, and — Echo was gone. Bag still there. Bed barely dented. The man had evaporated. I stood there in bewilderment, asking myself stupid questions: Did I hallucinate him? Did the owl get him? I would not see him again for hours. I’d learn later, at Wokestock, that he’d gotten an early-morning text that required immediate action — because that’s what Echo is. A man who will leave a free bed at dawn because somebody, somewhere, needed him more than he needed the pillow. Activists like Echo are indispensable, and also impossible to keep track of, and these facts are related.

Before I could even finish being confused, my phone buzzed. It was Chelsea Gods. Wheels down from San Diego, 7am, having crossed the entire continent on a red-eye to be there. I invited her to breakfast at the Westin because when a friend flies 3,000 miles, you buy them eggs — that’s just the social contract. We ate, we drank coffee, we laughed, and we plotted. We took the elevator up to the ninth floor and walked the entire length of the hotel to get to my room at the end of the hallway.

Then we both collapsed into the two beds like two felled trees, with three hours until checkout and a DO NOT DISTURB sign that the housekeeping staff interpreted as a personal challenge. They breached the doorway at 9:45. They breached it again at 11. Chelsea slept through some of it. I slept through none of it, because the universe had decided it wasn't done with me yet.

Echo rematerialized exactly at noon with the timing of a stage magician. He retrieved his bag, and we headed off to Wokestock.

I’m not going to write in depth about Wokestock. Not the middle of it, anyway. I’ll tell you the edges: a bald eagle in full costume wearing a sign reading HELP! ICE HAS GONE TO THE BIRDS!, waddling past the benches of people with tremendous purpose.

A papier-mâché rabbit in golden lace looming out of the trees while the music played.

Some unidentified festival-goer wearing ANTIFA stamped across the back of a pinstripe button-down like a country club monogram.

Robby Roadsteamer, arms spread wide on the hillside – wearing sunglasses, a smile, and a giraffe onesie – king of the beautiful absurd thing he and his friends helped build.

We sang, we hollered, we danced for hours. The rest stays unwritten. Certain kinds of magic die when you pin them to a page, and I’m a journalist, not a taxidermist.

On Sunday, the machine finally ate me.

Understand my anticipation here. GonzoFest. New York City. July 19th. The Thompson family — Hunter’s family — whom I have not seen in over a decade. I did everything right, which should have been my first warning. Alarm at six. Bag packed. Through Logan security like a man who has finally gotten his life together. And then the notification, and the email, and the seven words I did not want to read: We’re sorry but your flight was canceled. A 74-minute hop to LaGuardia. Canceled. I got on the standby list and discovered I was 24th in line for two seats, odds so bad that calling them a lottery insults lotteries.

I gave up. I rebooked the Westin. I booked a Monday flight home. And I sat in that lobby — no room ready, no sleep banked, no chance at getting to GonzoFest to reunite with the Thompsons — completely and totally depleted, surrounded by cheerful strangers with functioning itineraries. I texted the Thompsons to say I wouldn’t be able to make it, and they texted back WE WILL MISS YOU 😢 in all caps, and I sat with that, because it was somehow both the wound and the bandage.

Here’s what I know about disappointment that comes from things beyond your control: it’s just love with nowhere to land. You can’t argue with it, can’t outdrink it, can’t file a complaint with Republic Airways DBA Delta Connection about it. All you can do is give it somewhere to land.

Mine landed on Chelsea Gods.

I texted her to let her know what had happened to me. She caught a Lyft to meet me at the Westin. She was there within an hour. We sat down for breakfast again at the same table like we were reliving the previous day. Then we left our bags with the bell hop, stepped outside, wandered east for about a mile, rode a bus through a narrow tunnel, boarded the subway system and hopped on a ride to Fenway Park, where Chelsea documented everything while wearing a DEPORT MELANIA hat and a t-shirt citing scripture that does not, strictly speaking, exist.

Then we went to Tasty Burger for a vanilla milkshake and some more calories. After smoking another joint, we made our way to the Boston Tea Party Museum, where Chelsea held a pink teapot purse aloft under a portrait of Ben Franklin like it was the true Declaration, and I laughed until the weekend’s whole ledger balanced. And somewhere on a love-locked bridge with a historical plaque honoring hardcore kids who funded a record label by selling Yankees Suck shirts, I noticed something: the disappointment was gone. Not managed. Not processed. Gone. Airlines had taken my Sunday, and a friend had simply handed it back.

That’s the lesson, if this mess has one. The itinerary is a rough draft the universe edits without your consent. The friends are the final copy. GonzoFest happened without me and the world kept spinning. But Chelsea flying across the country on no sleep, Echo vanishing at dawn to answer a fellow activist’s call, or Robby building a festival where a bald eagle can feel free to express itself — that’s not the consolation prize. That was the whole tournament, and I almost missed it by staring at a departures board.

So: thank you, Robby Roadsteamer, ringmaster of the joyful resistance, keeper of the owl. Thank you, Echo Romeo, the disappearing man, proof that some people sleep less than I do and for better reasons. Thank you, Chelsea Gods, patron saint of showing up, who turned one of my worst Sundays into one of my best with nothing but a Lyft app and a felony-grade sense of humor. And thank you, Boston — every beautiful weirdo who gathered on that hillside in Allston, every bunny and eagle among you. You held the whole thing up.

I’m writing this from the plane, flying home to St. Paul with a heart that is still intact and a story better than the one I had planned.

If this dispatch made you laugh, or ache, or both: please share it with someone who shows up for you. And if you've been reading free for a while and this publication has earned a place in your week, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure — the work stays free to read either way, because that's the point. But every upgrade helps fund the next story I can't plan for.

Closer to the edge, as always. Thanks for keeping me there.

— Rook

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Stop telling us what you can’t do.

I’ve heard every variation of the excuse by now. Federal jurisdiction. Limited authority. We’re monitoring the situation. We’ll await the investigation. I’ve heard them after Minneapolis. I’ve heard them after Houston. I’ve heard them after Biddeford. Every time another person dies, another podium appears. Another carefully rehearsed statement. Another promise of a “full and transparent investigation.”

Bullshit.

That’s not leadership.

That’s a eulogy with a state seal on it.

Joan Sebastian Guerrero was twenty-six years old. He left home Monday morning expecting to go about his life. He had a wife. He had a young daughter. He had a Social Security number. He was legally authorized to work. He wasn’t even the man ICE was looking for.

They fired through his windshield anyway.

Witnesses watched his family arrive. A little girl in Bluey pajamas. A woman crying, “You took her dad.” Agents pulled Guerrero from his vehicle, shackled his wrists, and left his body lying in public for hours.

Hours.

Somebody poured another cup of coffee.

Somebody answered email.

Somebody moved on with their day.

His daughter never will.

Now tell me again your hands are tied.

Because I’m done listening.

Every time you tell the public there’s nothing you can do, what I hear is that you haven’t bothered to find out what you can do.

You don’t get to shrug your shoulders while people die in your states and then rediscover your voice once the cameras arrive.

If ICE won’t follow its own policies, stop helping it.

Suspend every 287(g) agreement in your state until ICE demonstrates compliance with its own body-camera policies, its use-of-force standards, and meaningful independent accountability.

Inventory every agreement your state has with ICE. Every contract. Every memorandum of understanding. Every shared database. Every voluntary partnership. Publish every damn one of them. Let the people who elected you see exactly what is being done in their name.

Direct your attorneys general to investigate every fatal shooting, every in-custody death, every credible allegation of excessive force, every claim of medical neglect, and every private detention contractor operating within your borders for possible violations of state law.

Send inspectors into every immigration detention facility your state has the legal authority to inspect. If a corporation refuses access, sue it. If it obstructs investigators, drag that obstruction into the light where the public can see it.

Hold hearings.

Put executives from GEO Group and CoreCivic under oath.

Ask them why detainees leave their facilities underweight and frail.

Ask them why people describe weeks in solitary confinement.

Ask them why families report untreated illnesses, delayed medical care, retaliation, spoiled food, and abuse.

Make them answer where everyone can hear them.

And stop pretending these detention centers simply materialize out of thin air.

They need roads.

Utilities.

Contracts.

Infrastructure.

Corporate partners.

Political permission.

They operate inside your states.

When human beings emerge emaciated, medically neglected, psychologically shattered, or dead, don’t tell me it’s only Washington’s problem.

It is happening on your soil.

Under your watch.

With corporations doing business inside your borders.

Governors swear an oath to protect the people within their states. Not just the citizens. Not just the voters. The people.

That oath isn’t suspended because the federal government is involved.

You don’t have to control immigration law to demand accountability.

You don’t have to command ICE to stop lending it your officers, your facilities, your resources, and your legitimacy.

You don’t have to control Washington to stop acting like a fucking spectator.

Stop telling us what you can’t do.

Tell us what you will do.

Show us the executive orders.

Show us the inspections.

Show us the investigations.

Show us the lawsuits.

Show us the hearings.

Show us every agreement you’ve terminated.

Show us every corporation you’ve forced to answer for what happens behind razor wire in your state.

Show us the backbone you promised the day you raised your right hand and took the oath.

Not after the next shooting.

Not after the next body.

Not after another child watches a parent disappear or die.

Now.

Because if your contribution to the next tragedy is another polished statement about your profound concern and your commitment to a full and transparent investigation, then stop calling it leadership.

Call it what it is.

Failure.

And the people who elected you should judge it accordingly.

Rook T. Winchester
Closer to the Edge

That’s the whole story, if you want it in one sentence and you don’t have time for the rest. But you should make time. Because somewhere between the alarm clock and the sidewalk where he bled out screaming, there’s a version of America worth being furious about, and I’m not going to spare you a single detail of it.

His name was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Fifty-two years old. Mexican-born, Houston-built. He’d been in this country longer than some of the agents who killed him have been alive. He ran his own construction crew — a real one, a builder, the kind of man who drove other men to job sites before the sun was up and made sure they got paid. The men who worked for him called him el mundo entero. The whole world. Write that down. Underline it. That’s not a nickname you get from being ordinary.

On Tuesday, July 7th, he did what he’d done every working day since before some of you reading this were born. He kissed his wife. He climbed into his white work van. He drove to collect his crew — three men, including his own brother — to go build something. That’s it. That’s the crime. That’s the entire manifest of wrongdoing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was guilty of on the last morning of his life: he went to work.

They weren’t even after him.

ICE had a tip on two Guatemalan men. They’d been watching an address for weeks. They’d noted two white vans in the vicinity. On the morning in question, an agent glimpsed a white van with a driver who “resembled” the man they wanted, and that — a resemblance, a passing glance through a windshield, the loosest currency of justice this government still accepts — was sufficient probable cause to send two unmarked black SUVs howling through a residential neighborhood at 6:50 a.m. after a work van full of laborers.

No lights. No sirens. No markings. Just government vehicles playing chicken with a man’s morning commute.

Surveillance video — and there’s a lot of it, because the East End is not short on doorbell cameras and shop-front lenses, God bless every bodega owner who ever wired one up — shows the chase. Shows an ICE SUV driving on the wrong side of the road through a construction zone to cut him off. Shows the van stopping, then reversing, then rolling slow onto a sidewalk while agents ran alongside on foot. What the video does not show — what no video anywhere shows, and there are hours of it — is Lorenzo Salgado Araujo ramming a federal vehicle. It does not show him trying to run down an agent. The one piece of footage that would settle this whole ugly argument, the actual half-second when the trigger got pulled, simply isn’t there. Nobody has it. Or nobody will give it up.

Their story — the one they’ve now told three different ways, according to the county’s own district attorney, who said publicly that their account “has moved a number of times since Tuesday morning” — is that an agent fired because he feared being run over. Run over by what, exactly, if the bullet went in on the side of the vehicle facing away from the direction it would need to be moving to run anybody over? A former U.S. Secret Service agent, brought in by a local news station to review the tape with zero horse in this race, looked at that detail and said the quiet part plainly: it complicates the narrative. It changes the perspective. That’s a professional being polite about the fact that the physical evidence doesn’t fit the government’s alibi.

No body camera caught the moment. Of course it didn’t. DHS says the agents in that field office hadn’t been issued cameras yet — blame the shutdown, blame the budget, blame anything except the possibility that the one unbiased witness to a killing happened to be conveniently, permanently absent. You want to know what kind of institution kills a man and then explains away its own homework? This kind.

A woman named Juliet Martinez heard what the cameras couldn’t show her. She was nearby. She filmed what came after — Lorenzo, face-down on the pavement outside a barbershop, the right side of his stomach open and bleeding, screaming that he’d been shot, screaming for somebody to help him — while the agent who’d just fired knelt over him. On the phone. Reporting the incident. Not applying pressure to the wound. Not holding his hand. Filing the paperwork on a man before anyone had confirmed there was still a pulse to save.

The three other men in the van — his crew, his brother among them — were zip-tied and disappeared into the machinery of immigration detention before anyone thought to tell them whether the boss they rode in with had lived or died. His son didn’t get a phone call from the government that killed his father. He got a stranger’s video, autoplaying on a feed, and he recognized the man on the ground before anybody in a federal uniform bothered to confirm it for him. Twenty-nine years old. A schoolteacher. Finding out his father is dead the way you find out a celebrity died — scrolling, cold, alone.

Thirty-five years of staying quiet, staying employed, staying useful. Filling out the paperwork this country insists on pretending is available to everyone who “does it right.” Every form. Every appointment. His son stood in front of a bank of cameras three days after the shooting and said it plainly, voice cracking: we dotted every I, crossed every T, filled every document, attended every appointment. He was close. He was this close to legal status, three decades deep into building somebody else’s American dream, when a government agent shot him over a case of mistaken identity in a van he wasn’t even the target of.

The Harris County Medical Examiner didn’t soften it for anybody. No euphemism, no “officer-involved incident.” One word, on an official document, under oath: homicide.

And still, days later, the agency responsible won’t release the shooter’s name. Won’t release the van. Won’t grant local investigators access to the scene. The county DA said he’s getting updates on a killing “via X and Twitter” — that a man died and the government’s idea of transparency is a social media post. He’s threatened to go to a judge for a warrant just to get access to a vehicle that belongs, in every meaningful sense, to a dead man’s family and to the truth.

This is not a headline. His son said as much, through tears, in a press conference I hope every one of you watches in full: he did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of “Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.” He deserved a porch. He deserved to watch his sons finish what he started. He deserved to grow old loud and unremarkable in a country he’d spent thirty-five years quietly building with his own two hands.

Instead he is a homicide file. A victim in a story that keeps changing shape. A name the government still hasn’t fully reckoned with, attached to a shooter whose name they still won’t say.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. El mundo entero. Say it. Don’t let them shrink him down to a case number, because that shrinking is the whole design — that’s how a government gets away with killing a man over a resemblance, by making sure you never learn his name long enough to be angry about it.

Be angry about it. Stay angry about it. That’s the only appropriate temperature for a government that shoots its citizens dead in the street, aiming at the wrong assumptions, and then spends the following week arguing about who gets to see the footage.

Say his name.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Alex Lawson is one of them.

He isn’t trying to build a monument to himself. He’s trying to defend one that already exists.

Lawson serves as the executive director of Social Security Works, and if that sounds like the sort of organization that produces binders, white papers, and conferences where everyone wears sensible shoes, you’re only seeing the surface. Underneath is one of the most disciplined advocacy operations in American politics, built around an idea so offensively simple it shouldn’t require defending at all: if people spend a lifetime paying into Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the promise should still be there when they need it.

That sentence is easy to read.

Keeping it true is considerably harder.

Washington possesses a remarkable talent for making monumental decisions sound like routine housekeeping. A benefit adjustment. A technical correction. A budget reconciliation package. A modernization initiative. Bureaucracy has developed its own poetry, and every verse is carefully constructed to keep ordinary people from realizing that someone is talking about their retirement, their mother’s nursing home, their disabled son’s health care, or the survivor benefits keeping a widow from choosing between groceries and heat. The language is deliberately antiseptic. Human consequences are messy. Budget language wipes them clean.

Lawson has spent years doing something profoundly inconvenient. He translates. He takes legislation written in the dialect of appropriations committees and renders it into plain English. He reminds people that there is no such thing as “only a policy change.” Somewhere, every policy has an address. It has a kitchen table. It has prescription bottles lined up beside a coffee maker. It has a husband trying to hide his panic from his wife after opening a letter that begins, “We regret to inform you...”

That’s the story.

Not the spreadsheet.

Not the press release.

The people.

One of the great myths Americans tell themselves is that institutions are permanent. We speak about Social Security the way children speak about mountains. It has always been there. Therefore it always will be. We mistake endurance for immortality. History laughs at people who make that mistake. Nothing built by human hands survives on autopilot. Not newspapers. Not libraries. Not public schools. Not national parks. Not constitutional rights. Certainly not social insurance programs that require elected officials to protect them every single year against people with calculators in one hand and ideological wish lists in the other.

Which brings us back to Alex Lawson.

He has made a career out of becoming an obstacle. A polite obstacle, usually. A well-informed obstacle. Occasionally an extraordinarily loud obstacle. But an obstacle nonetheless. His job is to make it difficult, politically expensive, and publicly visible whenever someone decides that balancing a budget should begin with people who already earned what they were promised.

That work will never produce ticker-tape parades.

It will never end with a bronze statue in a city park.

It produces something far more valuable.

Millions of Americans who never have to wonder why the check arrived this month.

And if that sounds ordinary, good.

The highest achievement of people like Alex Lawson is that, when they succeed, almost nobody notices anything happened at all. The lights stay on. The promise holds. The country continues forward one quiet month at a time. Humans have an unfortunate tendency to celebrate the fireworks while forgetting the electricians. Democracy, inconveniently, has always depended far more on the second group than the first.

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^{We stood on the Hill in hundred-degree heat. A handful of independent journalists including our own affiliates at Owl Media waited at the Triangle for the unprecedented act of dissent we were promised.}

^{Both of my cameras overheated before the press conference began. Even after crushing six water bottles back to back, I felt pins and needles from my toes to the tips of my fingers. But I dared not seek the shade or AC in anticipation of what was to come.}

^{We waited in that heat, because what was about to happen was a historical moment too important to miss. A moment that afterward, we all agreed felt like we had been waiting for for a year and a half.}

^{Jessica Denson and the Removal Coalition coordinated with Rep. Al Green to set up the press conference. With a group of veterans standing behind, Major Jason Watson took to the podium.}

^{An active duty United States Air Force Major in uniform gave a speech condemning the Trump administration. He called for the impeachment, conviction and removal of the President and Vice President. Then he carried a sign marked with the demand and stood on the Capitol steps in protest.}

^{It was an act in seeming violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. An act that could cost Major Watson his livelihood, his military career, and ultimately his freedom. An unprecedented act, but unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures.}

^{This protest was also an act of courage. A man sacrificing everything to take a stand that no one around him was willing to take. A stand against overwhelming injustice, corruption and atrocity from the Trump regime.}

^{Throughout the 7 Days in DC event - coordinated by many different organizations - there was a swath of daytime actions conducted during this brutal heat-wave.}

^{The day after Major Watson’s act of dissent, we headed to Malcolm X Park where Secretary of War Crimes, Pete Hegseth was holding a ceremony with the National Guard.}

^{The police blocked off all the roads surrounding the park. The national guard stood on patrol. ICE and Secret Service escorted members of the administration. Snipers were positioned on the roofs surrounding. While across the streets on all sides, protesters gathered in condemnation of Hegseth and the city’s occupation by the National Guard.}

^{As we were walking away from the protest, we noticed a man in his suit sitting on the curb. He was drenched in sweat, skin beet-red, body shaking as he buried his head in his hands. We asked if he needed help and he could barely string a sentence together.}

^{I rushed back over to the protest where the police were and alerted them of the man I believed was on the verge of heat stroke. They rushed back with me to his aid.}

^{When the police questioned him about his condition, the man looked up at them furious.}

^{“Why would you close all these roads down on the morning of the hottest day of the year while people are trying to walk to work?” the man said shakily.}

^{“We didn’t choose to do this sir,” the cop said.}

^{The man shook his head in disappointment. “Well somebody should have said no.”}

^{That sentence stuck with me. Because it was so applicable to the broader context surrounding that day.}

^{Major Jason Watson was the person who said no. The one who said enough. The one who took a stand in spite of the consequences. In spite of what was expected of him.}

^{Courage. Bravery. Resolve. Someone with the backbone to say no regardless of what those in authority told them. To do the right thing even if that meant breaking the rules to do so.}

^{That’s the world I want to live in. One where people have the gall to refuse when they know what they’ve been asked is wrong. Not a world populated by cowards.}

^{Solidarity. Because the more of us who are unafraid to take that stand, the more of us willing to say no, the less we’ll have to face consequences from doing so and the better chance we’ll have to fix this mess we have found ourselves in.}

This November, Montana has a chance to tell itself something true. Her name is Alani Bankhead, and if you’re not paying attention yet, you will be — one way or another, by the time the snow flies and somebody’s truck won’t start in the Costco parking lot in Bozeman for the fourth morning in a row.

WHERE THINGS STAND

Let’s be honest about where things stand, because Alani would want it that way. She built her campaign on grassroots dollars, refusing PAC money and dark corporate cash as a matter of principle from day one. That’s not the easy path. It’s the path a lot of people said couldn’t win in modern politics — sort of like trying to merge onto I-90 in Missoula during a Griz home game. Technically possible. Mostly a matter of nerve.

A 5’3” Latina Air Force veteran running on small donations alone, betting that Montanans still respond to a person more than a bankroll.

THE WOMAN UNDERNEATH THE HEADLINES

Here’s what the spreadsheets don’t tell you. Alani Bankhead spent 21 years in uniform doing the kind of work most people only see in movies — running informants in Iraq to hunt senior al-Qaeda leadership, working counterintelligence against foreign spies across Asia, serving as senior bodyguard to a top Pentagon official. She’s third-generation military, going back to World War II. She rewrote the Air Force’s entire counterintelligence war-fighting doctrine last year. Somewhere in Helena right now there’s a woman who used to run informants for a living, and she wants to bring that same relentlessness to a body that currently can hardly agree on what day it is.

But it’s what she did after the spy work that should stop you cold. She built the Air Force’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force in Japan. She created Operation KEIKI SHIELD and Operation SHINE THE LIGHT in Hawaii, dragging seventeen different federal, state, local, and military agencies into a room and making them actually cooperate to save kids nobody else was looking for. Seventeen agencies, cooperating. In Montana terms, that’s harder than getting two ranching families to agree on where the fence line goes. She specialized in child sex crimes investigations because, as she’s put it, every kid deserves a shot at their own American dream — and she was willing to get shot at and mortared to give them one.

This isn’t a resume built for a press release. It’s a resume built by someone who has spent two decades being the last line of defense for people who couldn’t defend themselves. Now she wants that job in Washington, which — let’s be honest — could use a few more people who’ve had actual live ammunition pointed at them and fewer people who’ve only ever weathered a rough Sunday show appearance.

THE MONTANA OF IT ALL

Montana didn’t invent the fight against concentrated power that doesn’t answer to anybody — but it has nearly perfected the art of it. A century before dark-money PACs became a fact of American life, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company owned Montana’s newspapers, its legislature, and half its judges, and Montanans got so sick of it they passed the strictest campaign finance law in the country. Montana is the state that sent Jeannette Rankin to Congress before women could even vote nationally, because it has never had much patience for waiting its turn. Montana kept Mike Mansfield in the Senate for sixteen years as its longest-serving majority leader, and Max Baucus for thirty-six years, and a farmer from Big Sandy for three terms — not because they toed a party line, but because they sounded like they’d actually eaten dinner in Montana’s kitchens and could tell a real drought year from a bad hay season.

That’s the Montana that’s supposed to elect Alani Bankhead. Not a Montana that gets decided by whoever spends the most on postcards nobody reads before recycling them at the transfer station. The other Montana — the one that doesn’t trust money it can’t see the source of, that respects someone who’s bled for something, that still believes the person matters more than the letter next to their name, and that has never once been impressed by a stranger showing up in a truck that’s never seen a gravel road.

Picture her at a No Kings rally in Helena, holding a sign that says “Pedo Hunter for U.S. Senate,” and meaning every word of it — because she’s actually done that work, actually gotten those convictions, actually sat with those kids afterward. That’s not a slogan built by a consultant in Bethesda who thinks Montana is one big National Park entrance. That’s a receipt.

THE UNDERDOG’S ADVANTAGE

Plenty of people in the political class have already filed her under “underdog” and moved on to more comfortable bets, the way people abandon a truck with 150,000 miles on it even though everybody living in Montana knows that’s exactly when a good truck is just getting warmed up.

But elections in a state this size aren’t won in cable news green rooms. They’re won in VFW halls in Miles City and diner booths in Culbertson and living rooms in the Bitterroot where somebody’s mother is crying because she can’t make ends meet and somebody’s uncle can’t afford his insulin. Alani has a plan for that — literally: claw back the hundreds of billions in “use it or lose it” defense spending that gets blown on flat-screen TVs every September so the Pentagon’s budget doesn’t shrink, and put it into rural health care instead. She knows exactly how that budget cycle works because she lived inside it for two decades. That’s not a talking point. That’s operational knowledge most senators never acquire in a lifetime in Washington — where, as far as anyone in Montana can tell, “fiscal responsibility” mostly means arguing about it on television.

WHAT THIS ACTUALLY REQUIRES FROM MONTANA

A campaign built on grassroots defiance doesn’t flip a Senate seat by accident. It flips it because enough people decide the underdog was right all along.

So here’s the assignment, Montana, and it isn’t complicated:

Give what you can, even if it’s small — especially if it’s small. She’s rejecting PAC money on principle. That principle only survives if regular Montanans replace what the big spenders would have put in. Skip a couple rounds at the bar, and put it toward something that’ll actually still be standing next November.

Show up in the room, not just the group chat. Phone bank. Knock doors. Drive to the town two hours away where nobody’s bothered to show up in years, because that’s exactly where she’s trying to go — and where the pie at the diner is better anyway.

Tell her story before someone else tells a worse one. Not the fundraising numbers. The actual woman — the one who ran informants against al-Qaeda, built task forces to save trafficked kids across three continents, and decided that after all that, the next fight worth having was for Montana’s kitchen tables.

Refuse the self-fulfilling prophecy. “Underdog” only stays “underdog” if enough people believe that’s the whole story and stay home. Don’t let anyone else’s low expectations write Montana’s ending — this state has never much cared what outsiders predicted about it, and there’s no reason to start now.

Montana has flipped seats before, every time this state decided a person mattered more than a party letter or a bank account. Somewhere out past the Bitterroots and the Bear Paws, there’s a version of November where Alani Bankhead stands in front of a crowd in Helena and Montana proves, one more time, that it still knows the difference between money and trust.

We have now been encamped upon the banks of the Reflecting Pool these three weeks past, and I confess to you, in the strictest confidence, that my constitution is not what it once was. It is not the heat that has hollowed the eyes of my men and set them to trembling in their bedrolls, nor the humidity, but the enemy’s newest and most fiendish weapon, deployed against us with a girth of cunning I confess I did not think them capable of.

Dildos, Martha.

Dildos with words on them.

Every night now, from dusk until the small hours, my men walk the fence line with flashlights raised, sweeping the beams low along the chain-link, and it is no longer enough merely to find the things. Now we must read them too, every last one, front and back, before we can even begin the business of removing them. It is delicate work. Slow work. A man cannot rush it, however badly his arms ache from holding the light steady long enough to decipher each carefully lettered obscenity.

Private Ashworth found the first one Tuesday last, hanging nobly from the fence by the grace of its own anatomy, bearing the inscription FUCK DONALD TRUMP in letters bold enough to read from twenty paces.

He stood there a full minute working his mouth as though he intended to argue with it.

I did not have the heart to tell him it does not respond to reason.

Corporal Higgins discovered one reading 86 47 and spent the better part of an hour attempting to solve what he believed was a military cipher before Sergeant Dubrowski, with extraordinary fatigue, explained the matter.

Higgins has not been the same since.

He keeps doing arithmetic under his breath while on watch.

The one reading FUCK I.C.E. has appeared no fewer than six times now, in six different sizes, as though the enemy maintains an entire quartermaster corps devoted exclusively to that sentiment. The one reading FUCK FASCISM has become almost comforting in its predictability. One sees it glowing in the flashlight beam and thinks, Ah. That one again.

But it was the one reading TRUMP CAN SUCK MY BALLS that broke Sergeant Dubrowski.

He read it once.

Then again.

More slowly.

Moving his lips.

Then sat down in the grass and remained there for what I estimate to have been twelve full minutes.

No one disturbed him.

There are wounds a commanding officer must simply allow a man to process.

Discipline has begun to suffer.

Last evening Private Ashworth requested permission to classify the recovered specimens by caliber.

I informed him there exists no such system.

He replied that there ought to.

I found myself unable to disagree.

Sergeant Dubrowski has begun referring to the larger ones as “heavy artillery.”

I corrected him the first three times.

Yesterday I caught myself doing it too.

We have established an evidence table.

There are columns now.

Date.

Approximate dimensions.

Color.

Political sentiment.

Remarks.

The paperwork alone will haunt me until the Lord calls me home.

There is a particular indignity, Martha, in illuminating another man’s profanity with a government-issued flashlight purchased by the American taxpayer. One feels less like a soldier than an unusually well-funded hall monitor.

At last we apprehended three of the enemy, caught in the very act of deployment, our flashlights turned upon people instead of rubber for the first time in days.

I informed the fellow carrying the backpack, a man who appeared more inconvenienced than dangerous, that he was being detained for vandalizing federal property.

He spoke to me with what I can only describe as genuine curiosity.

“Did I damage something?”

I confess the question stopped me cold.

I looked to the fence.

Still standing.

I looked to the Reflecting Pool.

Still fenced off.

Still green.

Still peeling.

Still exactly as God and the Department of the Interior had left it.

I looked back at the fellow with the backpack.

I did not have an answer.

So I informed him once more that he had vandalized federal property.

It sounded no more convincing the second time than it had the first.

The conversation then turned, quite naturally, to who had unzipped the backpack, who had handed whom which particular dildo, and whether possession of another one constituted sufficient cause to enlarge the battlefield.

Before long we confiscated the backpack itself as evidence.

Evidence of what remained unspecified.

Later came the citation.

Not for vandalism.

Not for destruction of government property.

Not for defacing the monument.

Not for damaging the fence.

Somewhere between the sixth form and the seventh signature, the vandalism quietly died.

No ceremony.

No bugler.

No folded flag.

It simply became:

Failure to Use a Receptacle.

Thus ended the Battle of the Reflecting Pool.

Not with glory.

Not with sacrifice.

But with littering.

They were released after about an hour, laughing, the lot of them, as though the whole affair had been staged solely for their amusement.

I confess I no longer possess sufficient evidence to dispute that theory.

The men ask difficult questions now.

“If the next one says something even ruder, do we notify headquarters?”

“How many lumens should a tactical flashlight possess before it becomes complicit in political speech?”

“If we confiscate enough of them... do we win?”

I have no answers.

Only forms.

Please, Martha.

Gather the church ladies.

Light what candles you can spare.

Pray for my men.

Pray for Sergeant Dubrowski.

Pray for Private Ashworth, who now flinches whenever he encounters chain-link fencing.

Pray for me.

And pray that someone, somewhere, someday, explains precisely what it is we are protecting this fence from.

The darkness I could survive.

The mosquitoes.

The heat.

The paperwork.

Even the endless humidity.

But no academy prepared me to stand beneath the Lincoln Memorial, illuminating a rubber penis with military precision while reading the words TRUMP CAN SUCK MY BALLS into the official silence of the National Mall so another federal employee could verify that I had, in fact, read it correctly.

Should I survive this campaign, I fear I shall return home outwardly unchanged.

Yet every time I see a chain-link fence, some irretrievable portion of my soul will instinctively reach for a flashlight.

As always,

Your loving husband and soldier

Beata Siemionkowicz was in her daughter’s yard, tending the garden. Hands in the dirt, doing the most harmless thing a person can do. Then armed federal agents, faces covered, unnamed, unaccountable, closed in and took her.

No knock first.

No conversation.

Just gone.

Claudia found out by phone, the way you hear about a car accident.

Your mom’s gone. They took her.

Now do the thing this whole machine depends on you not doing.

Pretend this happened to your mom.

Picture your own mother on her knees in her garden on an ordinary afternoon. Picture the men in masks. Picture her looking up and understanding, in that half second, exactly what’s happening, and that there is nothing she can do about it. Picture her being walked to a van in front of her own fence, her own flowers, everything she built standing right there, useless, while she’s driven away.

Picture yourself getting that call.

That’s what happened to Beata Siemionkowicz eleven months ago.

And here’s what’s happened to her since, because your mother, if this were your mother, would still be living it right now.

She was driven hundreds of miles from home to a county jail she’d never heard of.

She was put in a unit that later had to be evacuated for mold.

She has gone without basic hygiene supplies because the jail didn’t keep enough on hand.

And on nights when the jail was full, she lay down on a bare concrete floor because there was no bed left for her.

Imagine your mother there tonight.

Not metaphorically.

Actually picture her.

The woman who packed your lunch.

The woman who sat up with you when you were sick.

The woman whose voice you still call when something goes wrong and you don’t know what else to do.

Now picture her on a concrete floor in a building four states away, and you can’t call her whenever you want anymore because there’s a phone schedule now, with a clock running down on how much longer the call gets to go on.

While all of this has been happening, here’s who Beata Siemionkowicz actually is, in case a jail cell is the only frame anyone’s offered you.

She’s the woman who brought her daughters along to clean car dealerships at midnight because she couldn’t afford a babysitter, and somehow made it feel like an adventure. Ice cream afterward, every single time.

She’s the woman who never missed a communion, a choir concert, or a graduation.

She’s the woman who stayed late scrubbing pews at St. Constance Catholic Church after big events, long after everyone else had gone home.

She’s the woman who put her daughter through esthetics school on a cleaning woman’s paycheck.

She’s the woman who spent her last years of freedom as a CNA hospice worker, bathing the dying, feeding the dying, holding the hands of people through the last hours of their lives because somebody has to, and almost nobody wants to.

One of her hospice patients was still alive when they took her out of that garden.

That woman kept waiting for Beata to come back.

She died a few months ago.

Still waiting.

That’s who’s on the floor tonight in Kentucky.

Somebody’s mother.

Somebody’s whole world, the way yours is to somebody.

Taken out of a backyard by masked men.

Her daughters, both born in this country, both American citizens, are fighting alone to bring her home.

One left nursing school because there was no time or money left for it.

Both are watching the house they grew up in slide toward foreclosure while their mother lies on a floor four hundred miles away.

If picturing your own mother in that garden, in that van, on that floor didn’t put a knot in your stomach, read this article again until it does.

That feeling is the whole point.

Call your Senators and Reps today. Demand that Beata be released. Ask specifically for a welfare check request. Tell them about the mold evacuation and being forced to sleep on the floor.

Tell her story. Share what has happened with as many people as possible.

Say her name and keep saying it.

Beata Siemionkowicz.

Let's help bring her home.

The linked Gofundme was created by Gabriela & Claudia Siemionkowicz to help support their fight in bringing home their mother, Beata Siemionkowicz. Beata was unlawfully detained and incarcerated this past August of 2025. ICE agents forcefully apprehended Beata while she was gardening at her residence. Since then, her daughter has been struggling during these hard times with her legal fees, bills, and expenses. The goal of this is to help raise awareness and resources to help Gabriela & Claudia navigate through these difficult, stressful, and expensive times.

Beata is a hard-working, single mother who was the sole provider for her household. She cares for her family by playing both father & mother roles, has helped put her daughters through school, and cares for the elderly. She came to America in 1995 with the father of her children. She holds a residency card plus a green card for the past 30 years. She has worked here, paid taxes, and has worked multiple jobs in order to raise her children independently.

She is being held in ICE’s custody without a shred of evidence on the allegations they are making against her. Besides these allegations, Beata and her family are aware of her two past minor theft charges, which she has owned up to. At the time, she was a new single mother struggling to make ends meet and did what she thought was right to help feed her babies. These past charges are from 2001 & 2003, and both thefts together equal less than $150. These minor charges should NEVER have come back to haunt her and her family in such an outsized and cruel way.

This is the longest Beata has been away from her daughters and is feeling the physical and mental burden of being detained in Campbell County, Kentucky. Please help us in showing Beata your support for this injustice and help us spread the word about what is being done to HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of legal immigrants.

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