I’ve Met This Man Before: The Epstein Files and the Familiarity of Power

What my father taught me about men who can’t tolerate limits (This essay contains content that may be triggering to some readers)

SHANLEY HURT FEB 2 ∙ PAID Reprinted from MaryGeddry.com

When Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator, I couldn’t quite name the feeling I had. I was seventeen, watching a man descend into applause, and I felt, beneath the noise and the jokes and the spectacle, a small internal cry. Something in my soul recognized the performance. Not the politics, but the posture, the certainty, and the way the room bent around him like gravity.

But today, as headlines surrounding the Epstein Files continue to circulate and documents are released and names surface in new combinations, that old feeling returned with a sharper edge. It wasn’t surprise, or outrage, not exactly. It was familiarity.

My father was born in 1943 in Decatur, Illinois. If you read the official version of his life, he grew up in a normal house with a normal family, relocated to the Sacramento area as a child, graduated from El Camino High School, and went on to college to earn a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. If you believe his obituary, he later earned a PhD in Scientific and Technology Writing and Artificial Intelligence from U.C. Davis in 1968. Which is interesting, considering those fields, alone or stitched together, did not exist the way he claimed they did. At least, not then, or like that.

But my father was not a man who lived inside ordinary limits. He lived inside stories. He wrapped himself in clout the way other people wore coats: something to make him look larger, warmer, untouchable. When I was a child I would have told you, without hesitation, that he had a PhD in physics and a two-hundred IQ, because that’s what he told me. I would have told you he was a genius inventor and businessman, an environmentalist, a man destined to change the world. I would have told you he was special, different from the rest. And if he would’ve told me so, I would’ve told you that he created “the hottest economy in the history of the world.” I was a little girl. I believed my father was a superhero because children are built to believe that the hands that feed them will not also harm them.

The belief began to thin the way fabric thins: not all at once, but in places of repeated friction. The more I asked questions, the more I heard the way adults talked about him when they believed no one was listening. The more I overheard conversations from the hallway, the kitchen, the edge of a doorway where I wasn’t supposed to be listening. And then there was how he spoke to my sister.

The way he put her down with a casualness that made it feel like weather, inevitable, unremarkable, something you endured. The way she would crumple and then stand back up, smoothing herself, telling herself she deserved it. Watching her taught me something early: that love, in his house, could be used as a leash. I was ferocious as a kid. Too much mouth, too much heat. The kind of child who didn’t know yet that survival sometimes requires silence. I couldn’t stand the way he talked to her. I couldn’t stand that she took it like it was true. So, one day I decided to stand up to him. I don’t remember what he said to her. I don’t remember what I said back. What I remember is what followed. Darkness. Bath water.

My body stuck in his lap while the house slept around us. The chair, old, creaky, “pleblon” fabric, rocking and rocking. My wet hair. My skin cold where the air met it. A towel wrapped around me that was meant to look like comfort, like safety, like something a good father would do. As if fabric could change what had happened. I stared out the window and watched birds move through the earliest light as the sun rose. I watched the world keep turning without me. I watched morning arrive like it always did, indifferent, inevitable.

He knew what he was doing. He had tried other ways to break me, anger, shame. The long lectures that never ended, the ones that made you forget what the original accusation was. The contempt that could fill a room, but none of it worked the way he wanted. I was too much like my mother, unwilling to accept the false narrative. But that morning he found something that worked.

He found a way to put me in my place. To strip me of my will. To teach me that he was more powerful, and I shouldn’t have dared to think otherwise. The part that still makes my stomach turn, even now, is how clean the logic was. It wasn’t about love, it wasn’t even about desire, not in the way people want to imagine when they try to make sense of the unspeakable. It was about punishment, about control. It was about the moment I stepped between him and my sister and refused his script.

And because it happened to me, and not to the sister I defended, or my older half sisters, I know what it was in his mind: not a compulsion, not an accident, not a “mistake.” It was a decision, simply a tactic, a way to take my strength and prove to himself that he could. Luckily for me, the story didn’t end there, I got away. And now, years later, when I watch a certain kind of man move through the world with manufactured greatness and a crowd eager to believe it, when I see how easily power dresses itself up as inevitability, I recognize the shape of it in my bones. Not because every public performance is the same. But because I learned, very young, what it looks like when someone builds a persona large enough to live inside… and then uses it to make everyone else smaller. That’s the thing about familiarity, it isn’t always a comfort. Sometimes it’s a warning.

Because I’ve met this man before. Not this exact man, different suit, different stage, but the same architecture underneath. The same need to be seen as exceptional, the same insistence that truth is whatever serves him, the same contempt for anyone who won’t clap on command. My father needed me to believe his myth, Trump needs the country to believe his.

My father inflated his credentials the way a drowning man grabs at air, anything to look larger, smarter, untouchable. Trump does it with the amplification of a nation: the superlatives, the certainty that he alone can fix what everyone else has broken, the demand that we accept the performance as reality. And when reality refuses to cooperate, the response isn’t reflection, it’s escalation, it’s punishment, it’s control.

That’s the similarity that matters, not a diagnosis, not a label, but the pattern: a man who cannot tolerate limits will try to remove the people and institutions that enforce them. We’ve watched that posture become policy. We’ve watched the White House assert the right to decide which outlets get the kind of close access that exists specifically so the public can see what power is doing.

We’ve watched journalists barred and punished over language, over refusing to adopt a government‑preferred name, as if words belong to the person in charge, and the truth is something you can order into existence if you’re willing to squeeze hard enough. 

We’ve watched independent watchdogs dismissed in a sweep, quiet, administrative, easy to miss if you don’t know what oversight is for, but devastating if you do.

I’m not saying this to debate politics. I’m saying it because it’s the same physics I grew up under: the need to dominate the room, the reflex to punish resistance, the obsession with being untouchable. My father did it in private. Trump does it in public.

And then there are the Epstein files, this new wave of documents, this new cycle of names and screenshots and speculation, this churn that makes people feel informed while the harmed are treated like collateral. The Justice Department has published an official Epstein library with an explicit warning that parts of it contain descriptions of sexual assault. They also admit, shamelessly, that because of the volume, the site may still contain non‑public personally identifying information or other sensitive content, and they rely on the public to flag it. As if the survivor didn’t give up enough speaking out under the assumption of confidentiality.

Survivors’ attorneys have said names and identifying details appeared unredacted in the release. And the Justice Department has acknowledged taking down thousands of documents and “media” that may have included victim‑identifying information after outcry from victims and their lawyers. Even transparency can become another violation if it forgets who it’s supposed to protect.

Releases like this, at this scale, can include raw tips and allegations alongside genuine communications and evidence, and DOJ officials have said some claims are sensational and lack credibility. So, I am not asking you to take a screenshot and call it certainty. I am not asking you to convict a person in your mind because you’re angry. I’m asking you to notice what happens to your moral instincts when the man is powerful.

Because if you read my story, if you read about a father using his power inside a family to punish a child, most people feel a clean, immediate response: Stop him. Make him pay. Protect her. There is no long philosophical debate, your instincts understand what the mind tries to complicate. And yet when the man is famous, when the man is politically useful, when the man is wrapped in symbols and surrounded by people willing to translate cruelty into strength, suddenly the response changes.

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Suddenly the victims become suspicious and the powerful man becomes fragile.

Suddenly there are endless “what ifs,” endless excuses, endless demands for the kind of perfect proof that trauma rarely produces. Suddenly the same people who would never leave their daughter alone with an ordinary predator will defend an extraordinary one, because defending him protects something in them: a belief, an identity, a team.

So, let me ask it plainly, because dancing around it is part of how this keeps happening: If these accusations, these associations, these patterns of proximity and power, were about any other man, would you defend him the same way? If he lived on your street, would you shrug? If he coached your kid’s team, would you call the accusers liars? If he were your boss, would you say, “well, he’s done some good things?” If he didn’t offer you a sense of belonging, would you still demand the victims prove their pain to your satisfaction?

Why is the standard higher for the harmed and lower for the powerful? My father had no money, no influence, no name. He didn’t have handlers or lawyers or a cheering section trained to call consequences “persecution.” He was a powerless man in the world. And still, what he did to me nearly destroyed my life.

I remember the dark. The bath water. My wet hair cooling in the air. I remember that towel wrapped around me like a costume, like if it looked enough like comfort, it could become comfort. I remember the creak of that chair as it rocked and rocked, and I remember the sunrise arriving anyway, indifferent and inevitable, birds moving through the first light as if nothing had happened. That’s what power counts on: that morning will come, and everyone will carry on, and the harmed will be expected to swallow it in silence.

So, when I look at men who move through the world with money and networks and influence, men who can reshape institutions, punish scrutiny, and turn accountability into a punchline, I can’t help but think about what I lived through, scaled up. Not because my story is the same as anyone else’s. Because I know this truth in my bones: if a powerless man can do that much damage, what does power make possible? And what does it say about us, about who we are willing to crown, when we let men like that represent us to the world? Think of former Prince Andrew, title removed, no longer allowed to walk palace grounds, this is how countries with morals deal with the abuse of women and children.

So here is my call to action, and I mean it as a refusal to participate in the same old cycle: Don’t wrap harm in a towel and call it safety, don’t rock yourself back and forth in the creaky chair of denial because facing the truth is uncomfortable, step into the light, into the part of the day where we can actually see.

Protect survivors like they are real people, not content, donate to a local rape crisis center, a child advocacy group, or a victims legal fund. Don’t circulate unredacted names. Don’t share the most graphic screenshots like there isn’t someone’s trauma behind it. If you need to share a document for accountability, crop it, blur it, warn for it, link to responsible reporting instead of distributing someone’s pain raw. And when you see identifying information that shouldn’t be public, report it. Defend the institutions that make predators nervous: a free press, independent watchdogs, oversight with teeth, because darkness is where impunity grows. Help independent journalists and free press keep the lights on, subscribe to the newsletters and the YouTube channels, support the investigative journalists.

And hold the line in conversation, especially with people you love: ask them, gently but directly, whether they would say the same things if these allegations were about any other man. Ask them why the victims are always asked to be perfect, while the powerful are allowed to be monstrous and still be called “strong.” Because men like this don’t run on competence, they run on belief.

And every time we excuse the cruelty, swallow the lie, or confuse “untouchable” with “innocent,” we give them exactly what they are looking for: “I can do whatever I want, and no one can touch me.” 

America's Youth Rise to the Occasion in Response to ICE Violence.

By Mark Provost

 

I spent a couple hours last night, and a couple more today, reviewing countless photos from the massive protests around the country on Friday. 

 

Few people grasp the size, spread, and significance of these protests led by high school and college students. Legacy media can't adequately cover these events (even if they wanted to) so I'm going to give it a shot. 

 

To see spontaneous and organic protests organized by young people is to behold collective joy. I've reviewed thousands of images and videos. You don't see a single student scrolling their phone. They are living in the present and exuberant. They link arms, hug, and support each other. 

 

Some of the walkouts were organized by the senior class; other times by freshmen. These young people are forming their identities and have made the decision to become active subjects in the American story. They appear determined to turn a new chapter. 

 

A few of the signs adopt familiar messaging from previous protests like NoKings. Other signs are direct communiques to the adults who are supposed to be protecting them.

 

One of the more popular signs read: "We're skipping our lessons today to teach you one." Another sign said, "My immigrant parents work harder than your president." Signs featured curses that aren't permitted at home or school.

 

I noticed the boys who climbed the highest light poles and edifices proudly waved Mexican flags. The physical liberation of their bodies against artificial constraints betrays their spiritual and moral development. 

 

I pause on the images to reflect and zoom in on their expressions, homemade signs, and take in the camaraderie. These kids and young adults are making history and they're more aware of that than anyone else. 

 

I'd prefer to resume my day but I can feel my soul recharging. I stare into the imagery and no longer feel trapped by impending doom. It is impossible to bear witness to a youth uprising and not feel immense hope about our future — coupled with the commitment to help them make it a reality.

 

The anti-ICE protests mark a definitive turning point in our nation's trajectory, one that began with the emergence of Donald Trump as a force of nature roughly a decade ago. 

 

The walkouts also mark the moment the baton of anti-fascist activism has passed from the nation's oldest generation — who thus far accounted for the bulk of visible protests — to the youngest generation.

 

That corporate media and the commentariat refuse to acknowledge this seismic shift doesn't diminish its historical impact. 

 

The public murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the larger occupation of Minnesota, had the opposite of its intended outcome. The regime wanted to make a glaring example of Minneapolis —a diverse medium-sized Blue island in an ocean of Red — that resistance to their agenda is futile.

 

But by trying to stomp out an active fire in Minneapolis, Trump spread glowing embers to every town and city — the hot coals even hopped generational gaps. The broadening generational participation against the regime is arguably more important than the growing geography of resistance. 

 

That isn't to say the geography of rebellion isn't impressive. One can map concentric circles from the epicenter in Minneapolis across the Midwest: school walkouts in the tiniest towns in rural Minnesota, a massive protest in neighboring Milwaukee and throughout Wisconsin, student walkouts in Michigan and in St Louis, Missouri. I saw photos of students in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Ten thousand took the streets of Chicago. 

 

Across the plains and America's heartland, deep in Trump country, thousands of students poured out from their schools in coordinated and peaceful fashion. At an anti-ICE protest in front of a high school in Fremont, Nebraska, one student in an SUV waving an oversized Trump flag struck a classmate then fled the scene, to the horror of screaming students and faculty.

 

We bear witness to MAGA's violence against children, whether it's little Liam Ramos or a white child participating in their first sidewalk picket. The threat of physical danger and death lurks even in the most unlikely places, which means no protest against the regime can be glibly dismissed as purely performative. The symbolism of a Trumper injuring a fellow student then attempting to escape accountability was likely not lost on their classmates or the community. 
MAGA flees from the crime scene as fast as they dash from relevance; the Quickest Reich.

 

Friday's protests were so widespread I had to cross check common city names to identify which state it was in. For example, there was a huge march near the Bay in Lafayette County, California, as well as a protest in Lafayette, Indiana, home of Purdue University. Students and neighbors hit the streets in Lafayette, North Carolina. Two nights prior, the community of Lafayette, Louisiana protested against local police cooperation with ICE. Students from more than 100 schools in Georgia walked out. 

 

I saw a photo of students in Burlington under swirling storm clouds against a lush green mountainous backdrop wearing only flannels and hoodies and knew it couldn't be Burlington, Vermont, where despite three feet of snow and below freezing temps, saw at least 1,000 people march. That's how I learned of Burlington, Washington nestled in the Skagit Valley, where students lined both sides of the freeway. Students throughout Portland, Oregon led walk outs. I watched a clip of people marching through historic downtown Portland, Maine, accompanied by a brass band, that was so long it went for two minutes.

 

Students in California hit the streets from San Diego to Sacramento and everywhere in between. On the other coast, students walked out at Brooklyn Tech, the largest high school in the nation. 

Trump's invasion and occupation of Minneapolis not only spread the resistance across geographies and generations, but by extension across races. Aside from a few communities which remain mostly white, the majority of US children already live in a multi-racial society, go to diverse schools, and they don't want to see their friends and neighbors abducted, tortured, and deported. 

 

Let me quickly point out the unlikely example of my hometown of Manchester, New Hampshire. When I began school in the early 80s, 90% of the city's student body was white. All the non-white students combined comprised only 10% of the student body. Today, half of Manchester students are non-white. 

 

Many Manchester students are from recently immigrated families as our city is a UN designated relocation sanctuary for displaced refugees. We have immigrants from Sudan, Darfur, and the former Yugoslavia. In our small northern New England former mill town — in the nation's third-whitest state — our residents speak more than 100 languages.

 

Students rose up across the West, from Denver to Reno, from Tucson to Deep Red Dallas. Their families are from South and Central America. They are Mexican, Chicano, Mexican and Chicano, living alongside and among hundreds of Native American Nations and their communities. Their ancestors have been here and crossed imaginary borders for millennia before Christopher Columbus ever stuck his syphilitic foot on their soil. 

 

This is America and it will take more than chintzy sheet metal concentration camps and masked Rent-A-Goons to erase us. 

 

A sizable chunk of America's youth realize a sizable chunk of American adults are violent, racist, and delusional. Young people aren't waiting until they can vote to make political demands and take political action, something we adults should take a cue from. 

 

It's impossible to look at these brave children and sincerely believe this nation is on the cusp of descending into a fascist hellhole. If the growing demonstrations signify anything, it's that America's future will look dramatically different than the regime envisioned.

Sky’s Shutter

 

Michael Roberts: Kevin Warsh – Wall Street’s man

Kevin Warsh – Wall Street’s man

by Michael Roberts

Kevin Warsh, President Trump’s nominee to replace Jay Powell as Chair of the Federal Reserve next May, is the epitomy of a Wall Street, hedge fund insider.  Educated at Stanford University and currently a fellow of its graduate school, he is also a member of the secretive Bilderberg Group set up in the 1950s to work out strategy for the preservation of ‘Western democracy’ as the Cold War with the Soviet Union intensified. He is married to the heiress of the Estee Lauder company.  As a young man he first worked at Morgan Stanley, the American investment bank (actually at the same time as I did, although I never met him).

A good Republican, he became an adviser to the Bush administration on financial markets. He was heavily involved in the 2008 financial crash, becoming the liaison between the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke and the Wall Street banks.  He advocated that the crashing investment banks should be turned into proper ‘banks’ so that they could receive Fed loans to bail them out.  In this way, he helped save his former employer Morgan Stanley from going the same way as Bear Stearns or Lehman Bros.

So Warsh was the link man for the Fed in ensuring the banks were bailed out of the disaster of their own making.  “He brought a lot of real experience, he knew these people on Wall Street — he knew the difference between when they were arguing their book and when they were bringing us good information — and that was very, very valuable,” said Don Kohn, the former Fed vice-chair.  The then chair of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, the man who claimed he was “doing God’s work” at Goldman Sachs, loved Warsh. “Kevin was unflappable at chaotic moments,”Warsh’s mentor is the billionaire hedge fund boss, Stanley Druckmiller, who also promoted current Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.  Druckmiller maintains regular contact with both Bessent and Warsh. Indeed, Warsh has worked as a partner in Druckmiller’s operations since 2011.

Warsh had been a Federal Reserve governor but resigned after the financial crash bailout when Obama took over the presidency and Fed chair Bernanke began to pursue a policy of ‘quantitative easing’ (QE), where the Fed pumped billions into the banking system to support it and keep interest rates low.  Warsh was opposed to QE. He was a good ‘Austrian school’, free market man.  So he saw the Fed monetary pump as causing “misallocations of capital in the economy and the misallocation of responsibility in our government.”  Warsh has long believed that central banks were addicted to ‘printing money’  and thus encouraged “recklessly large public sector deficits”. He wanted no excessive funding for the economy and no excessive government spending.  Quoting Chris Giles of the FT here, he thinks the Fed governors “should stick to their knitting on inflation and not get distracted by environmental concerns or the distribution of income.”  Reducing inequalities is not on Warsh’s agenda.

As a monetarist a la Milton Friedman, he then claimed that QE would lead to runaway inflation.  As we now know, it did not.  As I have shown in other posts, the monetarist theory of inflation is faulty because it assumes that money drives supply, when it is the opposite; and it fails to account for ‘hoarding’ or increased money supply being used by the financial sector for speculation and not for lending onto the wider economy.  That is what happened after the financial crash in 2008-9 and explains the near-zero inflation during the Long Depression of the 2010s.

But now in 2026, after the inflationary spike following the end of the pandemic slump, Warsh is not worried about the Fed lowering its policy interest rate and causing inflation because this time AI is going to save the day by boosting productivity so much that it will be a “significant deflationary force”. As his mentor Druckenmiller put it “Kevin right now very much believes you can have growth without inflation.”

The interesting contradiction is that Warsh still wants to stop the Fed expanding the money supply as that is inflationary, in his view. So if the Fed reduces its balance sheet further (which it did for a while under Powell) that could raise government bond yields – unless, of course, the government makes significant cuts in spending and inflation subsides.  Everything will depend on that AI productivity boost.

As Mohamed El-Erian, now an FT columnist and former head of the giant Pimco bond fund, said about Warsh: “I feel he’s much more of a known quantity and I am comfortable with most of his views.”  It seems that financial markets agree: the dollar made a sharp recovery against gold on the news that Warsh had been nominated – as he is one of their own.

Holman, Bovino, Noem Three Peas in the Same Pod

It is important to recognize that the removal of Bovino, and Noem from Minneapolis is a product of the heroic resistance the people of that city have shown in the face of the assault by Trump’s neo-fascist ICE thugs. It is a small victory. But Tom Holman is no step forward as the author explains below. Admin

"Border Czar" Tom Holman

Holman, Bovino, Noem Three Peas in the Same Pod

 

By Mary Scully

 

To calm down the volatile situation created by ICE storm troopers in Minneapolis, Trump sidelined Homeland Security head Kristi Noem and removed Gregory Bovino from his role as head of the Minnesota operation. He also shut down Bovino's social media account where he portrayed immigrants as thugs and boasted of his crimes against them. To replace Bovino, Trump sent in Tom Homan, the former head of ICE whom Trump calls his 'border czar', to assume command of ICE in Minneapolis. It's an act that brings to mind the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Like the scorpion, Homan has a malevolent character and history that will bring no security to immigrants but perhaps some solace to the local politicians.

Homan has been with ICE since it was created in 2003 and was brought into federal immigration control in 2013 by then president Obama. He was brought in because as The Washington Post reported in 2017, "Thomas Homan deports people. And he's really good at it." The Obama White House even honored Homan in 2015 with some kind of award for deporting undocumented immigrants. Over his two terms, Obama deported at least 3 million immigrants--more than any other president in US history according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

Homan's whole white supremacist schtick is the deportation of immigrants. It must be emphasized that it is a wretchedly anti-working class policy because immigrants with means have always been able to immigrate to the US without impediment. It was Homan who cooked up and formally proposed the policy of family separation, of tearing children from their parents and warehousing them in inhumane detention centers to deter people from crossing the border. In that policy, there was no accountability and parents lost contact with where their children were. In other words, Homan is a psychopath.

Homan did well under Obama. He is also the kind of psychopath that ideally suits the ethos of the Trump administration. Trump is a felon with a history of raping young girls. That's why it was no problem to hire a rapist to direct the 'Melania' documentary or to elevate the political status of Homan who in 2024 was caught in an FBI contracts-for-cash sting when he accepted a bag with $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen. He anticipated raking in millions by accepting bribes from border security companies in exchange for government contracts. The FBI sting was a part of investigating the allegations. In 2025, after Trump was elected, his Department of Justice closed down the investigation citing insufficient evidence. 

The 'border czar' was not sent to Minneapolis because Trump is reconsidering mass deportations or planning on toning down the assaults on immigrants. It's a temporizing gesture to calm down politicians and make it look like he's retreating somewhat. But Homan will not stop ICE agents from violating immigrant rights or flouting the Bill of Rights and continuing to hunt them down like wild animals. He will probably stop them from killing protesters.

Immigrants are not safe under the tenure of Tom Homan. They will only be safe when ICE is shut down and the Bill of Rights is enforced. That may take a revolution.

Ken Klippenstein: ICE's Secret Watchlists of Americans

ICE's Secret Watchlists of Americans

Sparta, Reaper and Grapevine track protesters, their friends (+ others) 

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN JAN 28

The common housefly

We’ve broken lots of major stories about ICE this month, but we’re just getting started (I have more leaked documents than time to write them up!) Help make sure we have the resources to get these stories out by becoming a paid subscriber.

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“We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist,” a masked federal agent taunted a protester filming him in Maine last week. 

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin’s response was firm: “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”

There’s just one problem: She’s lying.

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.

Administration officials have alluded to all of this, though contrary to the Hollywood idea of some all-seeing eye, actual government watchlists are more a patchwork system of lists and applications, each of which might have individual justification or even legitimate purpose to aid law enforcement but overall form the basis for massive violations of American civil rights.

“One thing I’m pushing for right now … we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News earlier this month.

Watchlists in general fly in the face of the spirit of the Constitution and the protections it’s supposed to embody against unreasonable search and seizure, and relating to the right of privacy.

“The very essence of the ‘list’ is its secrecy and its lack of any opportunity for the listed to be heard,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said of a Justice Department list of subversives during the Red Scare. “It is the shrouding of the process in a veil of secrecy that is the most offensive to our democratic traditions.”

Now, the national security community has developed an interlocking set of lists and applications that are secret not just to the public but opaque to most who toil in the federal agencies themselves. Asked about the watchlists, a Border Patrol agent recounted to me how they punch their data into their own proprietary application, not really knowing what happens after that.

Again, these watchlists aren’t the all-seeing eye of Sauron that many imagine. They’re more like the compound eye of a fly, a fragmented array of lenses (over 3,000 per eye in the common housefly!) that collectively form a mosaic. That mosaic—the ability to unify all the disparate lists into one master picture—doesn’t yet exist, sources tell me. That, however, is the direction we’re going, especially with software packages like Palantir that can be customized to aggregate all that is collected.

“We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement,” says McLaughlin. “Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.”

Impeding federal law enforcement has emerged as the Trump administration’s primary justification for actions against people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

As part of its new effort to support its operations in places like Minneapolis and Los Angeles, the Homeland Security Department, working with the Justice Department, has started more methodically tracking what it calls “aggressive protesters.” According to one senior official, this is a new designation the agency uses to describe the supposed threat posed by people on the streets.

Both Good and Pretti were considered aggressive protesters; in Good’s case, for criticizing ICE officers while operating a vehicle; and in Pretti’s case, getting up close to immigration officers while filming them.

Alex Pretti filming a Border Patrol agent

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche alluded to the term in a recent CNN interview, saying: “He [Alex Pretti] was not protesting peacefully—he was screaming in the face of ICE, he had a phone up right into ICE’s face. You tell me: is that protesting peacefully?”

When the CNN host pointed out that Pretti wasn’t violent, Blanche actually agreed, but went on to argue that there’s a third category for protest that is neither violent nor peaceful.

“I did not say that he was violent,” Blanche interjected, adding: “I said that he was not protesting peacefully.”

When I asked civil liberties experts what might be the legal justification for the expanded watchlisting, Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program director said that NSPM-7 and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 5 memo implementing the presidential directive “might be their justification.”

Under the Privacy Act, Levinson-Waldman explains, the government is prohibited from collecting and retaining information about Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. There can exceptions to that, but the question is whether DHS and FBI have articulated which exceptions they believe apply here.

The DHS lawyer, who helped to reveal the many secret watchlists and applications that are now being built and used to create the new American dragnet, says that sorting out the data being collected—rather than some explicit order to collect the data—is what’s driving the process. 

“We over collect and everyone agrees we should create this or that list or application to wrestle the information to submission lest we miss something important,” the lawyer said. “So the data people do their thing and pretty soon you actually have Big Brother.”

A senior intelligence official, who confirmed the existence of the watchlists described earlier, characterized the problem another way. 

“Lists of this and that—this social media post, that video taken of someone videoing ICE, the mere attendance at a protest—gets pulsed by federal cops on the beat to check for criminality but eventually just becomes a list itself of criminality, with the cops thinking that indeed they are dealing with criminals and terrorists.”

“Watchlists, and the whole watchlisting process, should be as transparent as possible, not the other way around. If we don’t explore more why all of these secret lists exist, even more of an environment of paranoia on the ground and more tragic killings.”

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Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

 From Michael Jochum on FB thanks to David Muir.

Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

 

Michael Jochum

 

This is where we are now: a sitting member of Congress is physically attacked in public, at a town hall, in her own city, in front of her constituents, with a syringe of unknown liquid, and the White House responds with silence, smears, and conspiracy theories. Ilhan Omar is sprayed with a brown liquid by a grown man who walks straight up to her in Minneapolis, is tackled by security, arrested, booked, and instead of presidential condemnation, moral clarity, or even the bare minimum of human decency, we get Trump sneering that she probably staged it herself. Not even a dog whistle anymore, just a bullhorn of cruelty, stupidity, and moral rot.

 

Let’s be absolutely clear about the atmosphere this administration has engineered: months of dehumanizing rhetoric, racist caricatures, open contempt for Somali immigrants, public mockery of Omar by name, calling her community “garbage,” calling them “low IQ,” describing Somalia as not even a real country, accusing “Somali gangs” of terrorizing Minnesota, threatening protected status, ranting about them at Cabinet meetings, humiliating them on international stages, and turning an entire immigrant community into a political punching bag. This is not policy. This is incitement culture. This is narrative grooming. This is how you teach unstable people who already hate to feel justified, righteous, and heroic in their violence. This is how stochastic terrorism works, you don’t give the order, you create the permission structure.

 

And then it happens. A syringe. A public attack. A live-streamed assault on a congresswoman at a community meeting held in the shadow of another tragedy, the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal officers, and the president of the United States responds not with leadership, not with condemnation, not with unity, not even with restraint, but with mockery, denial, and lies. “She probably had herself sprayed.” That’s the level of degeneracy we’re dealing with. A sitting president blaming the victim of a political attack. A man who has spent years calling Omar a fraud, a traitor, an outsider, and a target, now pretending innocence while soaking in the chaos he creates.

 

This is the ecosystem of violence Trump has cultivated: demonize, dehumanize, discredit, deny. Rinse and repeat. When violence follows, he shrugs, smirks, and pours more gasoline. His administration doesn’t govern, it radicalizes. It doesn’t lead, it provokes. It doesn’t protect, it targets. And every racist insult, every “low IQ” jab, every dehumanizing slur, every public humiliation of Somali immigrants, every lie about Omar is a brick in the road that leads directly to moments like this.

Ilhan Omar stood back up, unhurt, defiant, resilient, and said she wouldn’t be intimidated. Good. But the fact that she had to is the indictment. The fact that we’re watching elected officials get physically attacked while the president fuels hatred and mocks the victims is the indictment. The fact that entire communities are being painted as criminal, stupid, subhuman, and disposable by the highest office in the country is the indictment.

 

This isn’t politics anymore. It’s moral collapse. It’s leadership failure. It’s state-sponsored cruelty. It’s a culture of incitement masquerading as governance. And the most obscene part is the gaslighting afterward, the pretending that Trump’s words don’t matter, that rhetoric isn’t real, that dehumanization doesn’t translate into action, that violence just “happens” in a vacuum.

 

It doesn’t. It’s built. It’s fed. It’s cultivated. It’s encouraged. And it is owned.

You don’t get to spend months attacking a woman, her faith, her ethnicity, her community, her legitimacy, her humanity, and then act surprised when someone decides to act it out physically. You don’t get to poison the well and pretend the water didn’t make people sick. You don’t get to light the match and deny the fire.

This is what Trump’s America looks like: violence normalized, cruelty excused, racism mainstreamed, victims mocked, and leadership replaced by spite. A president who doesn’t calm the country, he destabilizes it. Who doesn’t protect communities, he weaponizes hatred against them. Who doesn’t condemn violence, he metabolizes it.

 

And a nation watching, horrified, grieving, angry, exhausted, knowing exactly where this came from, even as the man responsible keeps pretending his hands are clean while they drip with rhetorical blood.

 

Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition