AcidiclyBasicGlitch

They were both 37 years old, murdered by federal agents in Minneapolis, less than three weeks apart. On January 7, Renee Good was sitting in her car when she was shot three times, including once in the head. On January 24, Alex Pretti was filming federal agents with his cell phone, exercising his First Amendment right to protest their presence peacefully. They shoved him to the ground and several of them beat him. An agent removed a handgun from Alex’s waistband, which he carried legally, and a few seconds after disarming him, 10 shots were fired in five seconds into his prone body on the ground.

Senior administration officials quickly labeled both Renee and Alex “domestic terrorists,” claiming that federal agents were defending their lives. Go watch the videos online. Alex never drew his weapon. Renee was unarmed, moving her vehicle very slowly. Once shot, agents did not attempt to stop their bleeding or resuscitate them. Administration officials swiftly declared the shootings “justified,” without even investigating them; didn’t start investigating until public outcry proved too much. You can find plenty of videos online of peaceful protesters being shoved to the ground or beaten by a mob of agents or pepper-sprayed in the face.

There’s a pattern building here of arbitrary and gratuitous violence, of lies and cover-ups.

“Equal under the law” apparently no longer applies to anyone anymore; neither does the idea that no one is above the law. Is this who we’ve become? Where will it lead? Are we being groomed for much worse to come, being desensitized into a new normal, like the proverbial frog being boiled in water?

For those who will accuse me later of preaching a “political” sermon, a “partisan” sermon, this transcends politics. Our federal government, by sanctioning unwarranted lethal force, has made this a matter of faith, of basic morality and decency. This goes well beyond politics. We worship Jesus Christ, an innocent man arrested, beaten, and then put to death by the Roman state on false charges just because it wanted to, because it could, because killing him was more convenient.

Jesus was mocked too by those who tortured him, who took perverse pleasure in his suffering, arrogantly assuming they were untouchable. In their lifetimes, they probably assumed correctly. But I wonder how they fared before the great judgment seat of Christ, where all will answer for their sins.

It leaves us wondering what to do now, and what to do next? How can we possibly respond in a way that’s both effective and reflective of who we are as faithful followers of Jesus? Where do we even start? We start where we always start, with Scripture, and we’ll go to the Gospel first.

Mary and Joseph presented Jesus at the Temple, an important moment in their family’s life. Imagine their surprise when they were accosted without warning by two elderly prophets, Simeon and Anna, whose wisdom, gleaned from long faithful lives, gave them insight. They saw how special Jesus was and shared what they saw, in word and deed, with Mary and Joseph. The words of Anna aren’t recorded, just her joy. But we hear Simeon declaring, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed.”

These dark words might feel inappropriate on such an auspicious occasion, but prophets influenced by the Holy Spirit tend to tell it like it is, and Simeon, even in his great joy, saw what was to be: the struggle, the sacrifice to be suffered by Jesus and his parents—“and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” And indeed, Simeon’s prophecy proved true.

Many resisted Jesus’s message, especially those who had the most to lose, those obsessed with domination and control. To them, Jesus was a threat because they knew that their lies would not long survive the light of his liberating truth. His message of unconditional love was a menace, and they would go and did go to great lengths to smother what he brought to give, but they failed.

They tried Jesus falsely, humiliated him publicly, told lies to undermine him, and finally killed him, but he rose again on the third day, proving that the love of God always wins. Those who oppose the truth of love, who rely on lies and cruelty and brutality, strive to induce us to abandon our principles, and they do it slyly by contriving to make us hate instead of love.

We all know the temptation. We watch the videos and read the stories. Our outrage rises rightly at the injustice, and before we know it, the consuming fire of hatred surges in our hearts. We despise the people responsible, and maybe even fantasize about vengeance, which is precisely what the hateful in our world want most from us and for us. The hateful want us to hate so that we can be miserable and puny just like them. It’s also the only game they know how to play. Refusing to hate confuses and disorients the hateful.

We must stay disciplined in Christ’s unconditional love, disciplined in prayer for those who persecute us and others, disciplined in our desire for the repentance and redemption of the hateful and cruel and brutal, disciplined in our witness that there is a different way, a way of forgiveness and reconciliation given to us by Jesus, who died on a cross and rose again.

In that discipline, fueled by grace, we find strength, a strength that refuses to stay silent. Jesus didn’t stay quiet. He stayed clever, but never quiet, even though his life would have been a lot easier and safer and longer if he would have just shut up. Jesus always advocated for the Kingdom, and brought it to bear against the selfish, tyrannical kingdoms of this world. If we follow him faithfully, then we too need to act and speak out, however we can, when oppressive forces seek to crush the innocent, the weak, and the truth.

Just as the Psalmist first prayed to God millennia ago, we too prayed this morning, “Happy are those people whose strength in in you! Whose hearts are set on the pilgrim’s way. For the Lord God is both sun and shield; he will give grace and glory. No good thing will the Lord withhold from those who walk with integrity.” And integrity cannot be taken away, no matter how much force is brought to bear; integrity is only ever given away.

We can act and speak with Christian integrity, even as we now know that our government might malign, beat, and even kill us for nothing more than simply showing up and asking questions and speaking truth. We can act and speak because we know that Jesus is with us—not only in this sacred space, but in every time and place where we call upon him. And we know that he understands what we’re going through.

That’s part of the whole purpose of Incarnation, of “God with us.” Hebrews is quite clear that “because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested”; “He himself shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”

In Jesus, God walked the earth, in part to know how it feels to be human: to suffer and to be limited, frustrated, apprehensive, intimidated. That’s the quality of love God has for you and me and everyone. The cross was the pinnacle of sacrifice, yet the Incarnation involved a sacrifice too. Just being here with us entailed loss, and by being here with us, Jesus offered a model for how to show up and be present for others, how to resist temptation and evil, how to live faithfully even when it’s hard and scary.

If we fail to act and speak, then who will? It’s tempting to ignore it all and focus on day-to-day exigencies, tempting to be comforted by modest mollifying gestures, tempting to forget how power-hungry governments consistently throughout history have retreated in a crisis, only to surge back with even greater outrages once people are distracted by something else.

Our sole comfort and strength come through Christ. What the months and years to come might bring, no one knows, and things might get worse before they get better, but our hope will not waver, “because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested,” and Christ has proven through his cross and Resurrection that God’s love always wins. Amen.

The Democratic leaders unveiled their official list of demands ahead of the deadline on Wednesday, calling for ending indiscriminate arrests, prohibiting masking, requiring ICE and CBP officer identification, protecting sensitive locations such as churches and schools, halting racial profiling, upholding use of force standards, preserving the ability of states and cities to prosecute DHS misconduct, and requiring the use of body cameras when interacting with the public. (Schumer and Jeffries immediately began watering down one of their clearest demands, suggesting in public comments that they might allow agents to wear masks in some circumstances.)

The biggest split between what Schumer and Jeffries proposed and what more progressive Democrats requested was a reduction of spending on ICE and CBP.

Those agencies received $75 billion and $64 billion, respectively, in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to be spent through 2029. That money came on top of the amounts already available to the agencies through their annual appropriations.

Clawing that money back has been a top priority for advocates, who note that it has been used to supercharge hiring and spending on surveillance technology.

“These demands MUST include cuts in funding,” Heidi Altman, the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said in an email last week. “The money pays for the violence. It has to stop.”

Last month, Sanders proposed an amendment to the DHS appropriations bill that would have redirected the additional ICE funding to Medicaid, which he estimated would prevent 700,000 Americans from losing their health care.

Sanders’s amendment drew the support of every Senate Democrat and two Republicans, but it failed on a 49–51 vote.

Democratic leadership figures like Schatz have described the latest demands as an attempt at reaching consensus.

“They are not a Democratic wish list. We are simply asking that ICE not be held to a different standard than every other law enforcement organization in the country — state, county, and federal,” he told reporters Wednesday.

The requests fell with a thud with Republican leaders, however. Johnson has already ruled out banning masks and requiring warrants.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., the lead GOP negotiator, called the demands “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands for the press.”

Republicans have already floated the idea of another short-term extension of DHS funding to allow further negotiations.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54786961

In almost every instance, President Donald Trump’s administration blamed the injured and dead for the shooting within hours of the incident, raising questions about whether federal officials can fairly and objectively investigate their own. Legal experts and advocates for immigrants say this apparent lack of accountability demands that local authorities step up and exercise their power to investigate and prosecute federal agents who break state laws — from battery to murder.

“Local police and the state have gotten a free pass,” said Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the co-founder and director of its Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. “Residents have every right and should be demanding that, ‘Hey, state authorities, police, local police: Protect us. Arrest people who kill us, who batter us, who point guns at us and threaten and assault us without legal cause to do so.’”

Legal experts said they were not aware of recent examples of Illinois law enforcement agencies investigating an on-duty federal agent, though last month a suburban police department obtained misdemeanor charges against an off-duty ICE agent accused of attacking an activist who was filming him while the agent was pumping gas.

Illinois State Police officials said they would investigate federal agents who were accused of breaking the law if they are asked to do so.

Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called on a state accountability commission to examine the roles of key Trump officials in the escalation of aggressive tactics during a monthslong immigration enforcement campaign in Chicago and its suburbs late last year. Pritzker had previously established the commission to gather videos and testimonies about federal agents’ conduct, and to create a public record of what happened. The commission lacks subpoena power but can refer information about potential violations of state law to law enforcement agencies or prosecutors.

“Just imagine if the agents who shot Mr. Villegas González back on Sept. 12 had been publicly disciplined,” Rubén Castillo, a retired federal judge who chairs the commission, said at a hearing Friday. “Maybe, just maybe, the Minnesota shootings would not have occurred, and two people would be alive who are now dead.”

He added: “We will have conversations with those in local law enforcement to suggest prosecutions that should be occurring even as we speak.”

Even when local officials open their own investigations into federal agents, there’s no guarantee they can bring the cases to court. Federal agents can claim immunity in response to state charges, legal experts said, and can move their cases to federal court.

That immunity stems from a Supreme Court ruling more than a century ago. During the Civil Rights Movement, that immunity was used when the federal government wanted to protect its law enforcement officers tasked with enforcing then-controversial efforts like desegregation in hostile states.

Now local officials face the opposite challenge: protecting their constituents’ constitutional rights from what they believe is excessive force at the hands of federal officers.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54622575

emails released by the US Justice Department as part of its Epstein Files disclosures reveal that Jeffrey Epstein emailed Gavin Andresen two days prior to Andresen visiting the CIA headquarters to discuss Bitcoin in June 2011.

Andresen was the successor to Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Nakamoto personally chose Andresen to be the lead maintainer of Bitcoin development and gave him Commit key access.

The newly disclosed sequence of events is remarkably coincidental.

Nakamoto retired on April 26, 2011, one day before Andresen announced that he was going to speak about Bitcoin at the CIA headquarters in June.

Although Nakamoto never blamed Andresen’s decision for prompting his retirement, there’s widespread speculation that he was unhappy about Andresen attracting government attention to Bitcoin development.

Despite Nakamoto’s resignation, Andresen followed-through on his controversial April promise, speaking at the CIA headquarters on June 14, 2011 to discuss Bitcoin.

The week before, on June 6, tech reporter and socialite Jason Calacanis responded to an email from Epstein, promising to send along Andresen’s contact information.

“I would like to get in touch with the Bitcoin guys,” Epstein emailed Calacanis eight days before Andresen’s CIA meeting.

Between 2022 and 2023,” Professor Schwarz reported, U.S. federal contracts for military AI “nearly tripled, with a potential increase in the value of these contracts by 1,200 percent.”

According to J.P. Morgan, VC investment in military and aerospace companies amounted to $48 billion in 2024, and “Through the first half of 2025, venture investments into U.S.-based defense tech startups totaledroughly $38 billion and could very well exceed the 2021 peak ($55 billion) should the pace of investing remain constant through the end of the year.”

Profiting From Israel’s Genocide Many of the largest VCs that are funding cutting edge AI weapons development for the Pentagon — such as Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Hercules Capital, Shield Capital, and Sequoia Capital — are also investing in Israeli high-tech firms, thus profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

These investments are being made in spite of pleas by Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, that all governments and corporations “completely abstain from, or end, their relationship with this [Israeli] economy of the occupation, especially as it has transformed into an economy of genocide.”

Two senior national security officials tell me that there are more than a dozen secret and obscure watchlists that homeland security and the FBI are using to track protesters (both anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian), “Antifa,” and others who are promiscuously labeled “domestic terrorists.”

I can reveal for the first time that some of the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).

Some of these, like Hummingbird, were created to vet and track immigrants, in this case Afghans seeking to settle in the United States. Slipstream is a classified social media repository. Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking.

There’s practically nothing available that further describes what these watchlists do, how large they are, or what they entail.

“We came out of 9/11 with the notion that we would have a single ‘terrorist’ watchlist to eliminate confusion, duplication and avoid bad communications, but ever since January 6, not only have we expanded exponentially into purely domestic watchlisting, but we have also created a highly secretive and compartmented superstructure that few even understand,” says a DHS attorney intimately familiar with the subject. The attorney spoke on the agreement that their identity not be disclosed.

Prior to 9/11, there were nine federal agencies that maintained 12 separate watchlists. Now, officially there are just three: a watchlist of 1.1 million international terrorists, a watchlist of more than 10,000 domestic terrorists maintained by the FBI, and a new watchlist of transnational criminals, built up to more than 85,000 over the past decade.

The new domestic-related watchlists—a set of databases and applications—exist inside and outside the FBI and are used by agencies like ICE and the Border Patrol to organize the Niagara of information in possession of the federal government. Collectively, they create ways to sort, analyze, and search information, a task that even artificial intelligence has failed to conquer (so far).

Among other functions, the new watchlists process tips, situation reports and collected photographs and video submitted by both the public and from agents in the field; they create a “common operating picture” in places like Minneapolis; they allow task forces to target individuals for surveillance and arrest; and they create the capacity for intelligence people to link individuals together through geographic proximity or what is labeled “call chaining” by processing telephone numbers, emails, and other contact information.

As authoritarianism accelerates — as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights — people are scrambling for reference points.

But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn’t Afghanistan. This isn’t Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn’t who we are.

These statements are meant to comfort. They are meant to regulate fear, to calm the nervous system with the promise that no matter how bad things get, this country is somehow exempt from the logic of repression. Instead, they reveal how deeply many people still misunderstand both this country and the nature of authoritarian power.

They rest on a dangerous fiction: that large-scale state violence, political terror, and repression belong somewhere else — to “failed states,” to the Global South, to places imagined as perpetually unstable. This is not only historically false; it is how people in the U.S. have been trained not to recognize what is being built in front of them.

Overall, as someone who has been covering this for months, I am struck by how angry homeland security officers with their own agencies, and their blunt dismissal of the Washington leadership. All of the immigration officers I interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Sagging morale and declining standards are a constant theme I picked up, problems that these sources say have been festering long before the deaths of Pretti and Renee Good (and ones that very much contributed to these outcomes).

More than one ICE agent in particular complained about how Washington’s focus on labeling protestors as “impeding” federal functions (and thus breaking the law), and the vilification of “Antifa” and others labeled paid agitators, leftists, radicals, extremists, and terrorists is confusing the ranks while also distracting everyone from the immigration enforcement mission.

“I can go on and on but overall it’s been a ridiculous experience,” one ICE agent told me. He says that many agents on the ground are just going along with the expanded mission because they are more interested in their away-from-home per diem pay and collecting overtime than whatever the mission is.

Others express the cynicism typical of everyone who toils at the bottom of any bureaucratic food chain, pooh-poohing rapid expansion of the ICE army and shaking their heads over the ridiculous budget increases being fought for in Washington that will have no impact where they work.

“The brand new agents are idiots,” an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me. This same sentiment was echoed by virtually everyone I talked to, with several conveying the view that Pretti’s death was the fault of some skittish young recruit who panicked when he heard the word “gun” (if that’s what happened).

Even one of the new ICE recruits agreed with the experienced agent’s low assessment of the Trump freshman class. “A lot of the guys,” he said, referring to the new ICE recruits he worked alongside, “are honestly pretty sketchy.”

The new ICE officer continued: “I thought federal agents were supposed to be clean cut but some of them pass around a flask as we are watching a suspect,” observing as well that the new guys “have some weird tattoos.”

Those tattoos, I’m told, are symbolic of the fact that the new recruits tend to be more ideologically motivated than those of the past. This problem is compounded by the fact, raised by several officers, that ICE is relying on volunteers to go to Minneapolis and other Democratic cities on these temporary deployments. This tends to favor new recruits and those who are chasing overtime pay.

It is unclear how these task forces are organized in cities like Minneapolis or indeed “who” is in charge and in control, but those who I interviewed agree that the tide is turning, that some agencies (like the FBI) are increasingly no shows in the field, and others are expressing a reluctance to participate in non-immigration missions.

“Last I heard,” says one ICE officer, “FBI didn’t want to help us out much anymore, especially in Minneapolis, due to the bad press.”

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54083518

At least a couple of protesters were tackled to the ground and arrested before agents drove away from the crowd of at least 30 protesters and observers, some of whom were coughing or vomiting from the smoke, according to witnesses.

Observers took images of a loaded rifle magazine that an agent dropped in the snow and left behind. The magazine was reported and later recovered by the Minneapolis Police Department, a department spokesperson confirmed.

Luhmann took video of one of the empty smoke canisters, which is labeled as “pocket tactical green smoke,” made by the company Defense Technology. The back states that it should be used only by “trained law enforcement, correctional or military personnel.”

Below that, it states that anyone using the canister “should be trained in deployment, decontamination and first aid procedures.”

With Zohran Mamdani’s ascent to Gracie Mansion, a democratic socialist is now chief executive for the largest municipal bureaucracy in the United States, meaning that he oversees the daily activities of roughly 300,000 employees. Most of these employees are what the political scientist Michael Lipsky called “street-level bureaucrats”: the teachers, firefighters, cops, bus drivers, and others whose jobs put them into direct and regular contact with civilians. But they also include the urban planners, economists, analysts, and administrators who operate behind the scenes and at the higher echelons of city government: the people who help write the city’s budget, study traffic patterns, and run grant and incentive programs.

It is this latter category of civil servants that will be tasked with turning the cumbersome machinery of city government in the direction indicated by Mamdani and his political appointees. Implementing a sewer socialist agenda in New York City will be, to a great extent, an enormously complicated technical exercise, carried out by a small army of trained technicians.

So what exactly did Ghori reveal on Relentless? Well, he seemed to tip off the possibility that xAI has been skirting regulations and getting dubious permits when building data centers—specifically, its prized Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. “The lease for the land itself was actually technically temporary. It was the fastest way to get the permitting through and actually start building things,” he said. “I assume that it’ll be permanent at some point, but it’s a very short-term lease at the moment, technically, for all the data centers. It’s the fastest way to get things done.”

When asked how xAI has gone about getting those temporary leases, Ghori explained that they worked with local and state governments to get permits that allow companies to “modify this ground temporarily,” and said they are typically for things like carnivals.

Colossus was not without controversy already. The data center, which xAI brags only took 122 days to build, was powered by at least 35 methane gas turbines that the company reportedly didn’t have the permits to operate. Even the Donald Trump-staffed Environmental Protection Agency declared the turbines to be illegal. Those turbines, which were operating without permission, contributed to the significant amount of air pollution experienced by surrounding communities.

In addition to the indication of other potential legal end-arounds committed by xAI, Ghori also revealed some of the company’s internal operations, including relying significantly on AI agents to complete work. “Right now, we’re doing a big rebuild of our core production APIs. It’s being done by one person with like 20 agents,” he said. “And they’re very good, and they’re capable of doing it, and it’s working well,” though he later stated that the reliance on agents can lead to confusion. “Multiple times I’ve gotten a ping saying, ‘Hey, this guy on the org chart reports to you. Is he not in today or something?’ And it’s an AI. It’s a virtual employee.”

The annual assessment, which has been prepared since 2020, purports to offer a holistic assessment to threats to the Western Hemisphere. These assessments have consistently focused on what you imagine: southern border security, the drug trade, immigration, and critical infrastructure protection in the United States.

But this year’s assessment, marked “For Official Use Only” and not yet released to the public, identifies violent extremism on the part of American citizens as the priority and greatest threat.

One phrase in particular stands out to me as new: potential terrorism based upon “class-based or economic grievances.” (The term has not appeared in any previous assessment.)