It’s just a matter of scaling, and what they think they can get away with.

That’s why they keep probing the system for people who will cooperate with them. Eric Adams says we can use Rikers. El Salvador says we can use CECOT. Presumably they could be using ICE’s detention centers, but they’re already full and then some, so that’s no good. There aren’t really a lot of options. I assume that private prison companies are silently building frantically, getting ready, but that kind of thing takes some time, especially if you want to keep it quiet.

They’re also probing the system for what people will fight back against. They tried ICE going out as they’ve always done, but people have started gathering around ICE, yelling at them, taking video, refusing to open the door or help them find the people they’re trying to snatch. That’s no good. It pokes a hole in their aura of invincibility. Because, at the end of the day, they don’t have warrants, they don’t have the cooperation (mostly) of local law enforcement, nothing they’re doing is legal. And I’m sure that always in the back of their mind is, what happen if people really start to fight back? For real? So, they have to scale it back. Wear masks and plain clothes. Bust a handful of vulnerable people and see what happens from that. Depend on existing pathways (“immigration enforcement” for people on visas, even if it has nothing to do with their immigration status).

It is both heartening how far afield they have to go to find people who will go along with this bullshit, while also being pretty terrifying that no one’s trying to actually stop them. They’re probing the lines of what will get real resistance, because they know they’re too weak to just bluster into big cities busting down all the Democrats’ doors. They don’t want to overreach.

Yet.

Who knows what this year will bring.

• Bill Barr
• John Bolton
• Pat Cipollone
• Cassidy Hutchinson

Somehow these guys never see it coming lol.

They never think their name is going to go on the list in the future. It can’t! After all, Trump is famously consistent and fair. We just have to stay on his good side forever. Easy as pie.

Also:

• Gen. Kenneth McKenzie (Ret.) – Former CENTCOM commander
• Gen. Mark Milley (Ret.) – Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

I fucking implore you man.

It is one of the wild underappreciated facts of Washington is that you have lots of people running around in it who literally used to kill for a living, like in a super professional and highly skilled sense. And now they have tons and tons of friends who still do it and have quite a lot of connections and respect among them. And somehow Kash Patel has lived for so long in his nerf life that he thinks that picking a fight with them is just a matter of making friends with the right people and telling the right other people to go and do it and everything will work itself out more or less without much difficulty beyond all of that.

He’s only still alive after writing this book because not everything in Washington operates according to the kind of Russia-style gangster capitalism he thinks he wants to exist in. But that doesn’t mean they are defenseless against him.