cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/20726

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https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2026/roll028.xml

What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We’re all finding out.

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The plan was never to become an ICE agent.

The plan, when I went to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Career Expo in Texas last August, was to learn what it was like to apply to be an ICE agent. Who wouldn't be curious? The event promised on-the-spot hiring for would-be deportation officers: Walk in unemployed, walk out with a sweet $50k signing bonus, a retirement account, and a license to brutalize the country's most vulnerable residents without consequence---all while wrapped in the warm glow of patriotism.

At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America's Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82^nd^ Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé---one which omitted my current occupation---I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.

The catch, however, is that there's only one "Laura Jedeed" with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country's general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump's unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you'll find articles with titles like "What I Saw in LA Wasn't an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot" and "Inside Mike Johnson's Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution." Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.

In short, I figured---at least back then---that my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICE's application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.

The ICE expo in the Dallas area, where my application journey began, required attendees to register for a specific time slot, presumably to prevent throngs of eager patriots from flooding the event and overwhelming the recruiters. But when I showed up at 9 a.m., the flood was notably absent: there was no line to check in and no line to go through security. I walked down nearly empty hallways, past a nearly empty drug testing station, and into the event proper, where a man directed me to a line to wait in for an interview. I took my spot at the end; there were only six people ahead of me.

While I waited, I looked around the ESports Stadium Arlington---an enormous blacked-out event space optimized for video game tournaments that has a capacity of 2,500. During my visit, there couldn't have been more than 150 people there.

Hopeful hires stood in tiny groups or found seats in the endless rows of cheap folding chairs that faced a stage ripped straight from Tron. Everything was bright-blue and lit-up and sci-fi-future angular. Above the monolithic platform hung three large monitors. The side monitors displayed static propaganda posters that urged the viewer to DEFEND THE HOMELAND and JOIN ICE TODAY, while the large central monitor played two short videos on loop: about 10 minutes of propaganda footage, again and again and again.

After about 15 minutes of waiting, an extraordinarily normal-looking middle-aged woman waved me forward. I sat across the black folding table from her on one of the uncomfortable black chairs. She asked for my name and date of birth, then whether I am over 40 (I am 38). Did I have law enforcement experience? No. Military experience? Yes. Did I retire from the military at 20+ years, or leave once my enlistment was up? The latter, I told her, then repeated my carefully rehearsed, completely true explanation for why the résumé I'd submitted had a large gap. "I had a little bit of a quarter-life crisis. Ended up going to college for part of that time, and since then I've been kind of---gig economy stuff."

She was spectacularly uninterested: "OK. And what location is your preference?"

After some dithering, I settled on my home state of New York. That was the last question; the entire process took less than six minutes. The woman took my résumé and placed the form she'd been filling out on top. "They are prioritizing current law enforcement first. They're going to adjudicate your résumé," she told me. If my application passed muster, I'd receive an email about next steps, which could arrive in the next few hours but would likely take a few days. I left, thanked her for her time, and prepared to hear back never.

The expo event was part of ICE's massive recruitment campaign for the foot soldiers it needs to execute the administration's dream of a deportation campaign large enough to shift America's demographic balance back whiteward. You've probably seen evidence of it yourself: ICE's "Defend the homeland" propaganda is ubiquitous enough to be the Uncle Sam "I Want You" poster of our day, though somewhere in there our nation lost the plot about the correct posture toward Nazis.

When Donald Trump took office, ICE numbered approximately 10,000. Despite this event's lackluster attendance, their recruitment push is reportedly going well; the agency reported 12,000 new recruits in 2025, which means the agency has more new recruits than old hands. That's the kind of growth that changes the culture of an agency.

Many of ICE's critics worry that the agency is hoovering up pro-Trump thugs---Jan. 6 insurrectionists, white nationalists, etc.---for a domestic security force loyal to the president. The truth, my experience suggests, is perhaps even scarier: ICE's recruitment push is so sloppy that the administration effectively has no idea who's joining the agency's ranks. We're all, collectively, in the dark about whom the state is arming, tasking with the most sensitive of law enforcement work, and then sending into America's streets.

And we are all, collectively, discovering just how deadly of an arrangement that really is.

At the end of my brief interview, the recruiter mentioned I could talk to a current deportation officer about what the job would be like. There was no line to talk to a deportation officer (did I mention how empty the place was?) and so I walked up, introduced myself to one of them, and asked about day-to-day duties.

I shouldn't expect to hit the streets right away, the agent told me. Odds were good I'd get a support position first---something like the Criminal Alien Program office. "Let's say a local police officer arrests someone out in the field for a DUI. Extremely common. Or beating their wife or whatever---all the typical crimes they commit," he said. (The "they" here being "undocumented immigrants," and while it's extremely difficult to measure, evidence suggests that "they" actually commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens.)

If the cops suspect they're dealing with an immigrant who doesn't have permanent legal status, they alert ICE, whose agents conduct interviews and run record checks.
If this preliminary investigation suggests that status, the person ends up in the Criminal Alien Program office for processing---which is where I would come in. "What you see on TV, with us arresting people and doing all kinds of crazy things, that's maybe 10 percent. The other 90 percent is essentially doing a bunch of paperwork," the agent said. "It takes a lot to remove somebody from the United States. Some people are subject to due process."

The officer ran down other departments I might end up in: Prosecutions, Removal Coordination Unit, or Detention. The point being that I should not expect to be a badass street officer on Day 1. "I have so many guys that come over to me, they're like, 'I'm gonna put cuffs on somebody. I'm gonna arrest somebody.' Well, you need to master this first and then we'll see about getting you on the field."

I told him that I was fine with office work---with my analyst background, it seemed like a better fit for my skill set anyway. His attitude shift was subtle, but instant and unmistakable; this was the wrong attitude and the wrong answer. "Just to be upfront, the goal is to put as many guns and badges out in the field as possible," he said.

The agent then told me a bit about his own background. Like me, he enlisted straight out of high school, then got out and vowed to get as far away from the violence of the military as possible. Like a lot of veterans, he had trouble assimilating into the civilian world. "After about six months, I was like, 'These people aren't like me. I want to be around like-minded people.' " He found his way into law enforcement. That was well over a decade ago---he's on his way to a very comfortable retirement, and he enjoys the work. "I like that instant gratification of Hey, that guy committed this crime, these X, Y, and Z, he's not even supposed to be here," he said.

I do not agree with his framing, but have no trouble understanding the appeal. Hell, it's why I enlisted in the first place. Thankfully, Afghanistan beat it out of me. If I believed what he believed, I would surely do the same thing he's doing.

I thanked him for the information and time, shook his hand, and took a seat on one of those uncomfortable folding chairs. I had a few hours before my flight back to New York City, and it made more sense to hang out than to flee the building and get good and airport drunk, regardless of how desperately I would have preferred the latter. Instead, I settled in to do what everyone does at the DMV: check my phone and people-watch. The aspiring officers fall broadly into three categories: thick-necked law enforcement types who look like they do steroids but don't know how to work out, bearded spec-ops wannabes who look like they take steroids and do know how to work out, and dorks. Pencil-necked misfits. I couldn't tell whether there were more white or Hispanic people waiting for their email, but it was close. A few Black applicants rounded out the overwhelmingly male group.

I'd been sitting around for about an hour when the video suddenly stopped and a bearded man in a black suit stepped onto the stage. He did not introduce himself---we were, I gathered, supposed to already know who he was---but it became clear he's a senior agent of some sort. "I figured it would be best if I break up the same video you've been watching for the last four hours," he said, and offered to answer any questions we might have.

One person asked about work/life balance, which the agent said is possible but not the route he's chosen. Someone else wanted to know about travel opportunities and he talked about the many places he's gone as part of the job.

Every other question during the 45 minutes the agent stood onstage pertained to the hiring process or what we could expect in training. Law enforcement types seemed especially concerned about the painful parts: Would they have to get pepper sprayed again? Would they have to get shot with a taser if they'd already qualified? Yes and probably not, respectively. The agent took the opportunity to gush about ICE's new state-of-the-art semi-automatic tasers and brand-new pepper-ball guns. "It's mostly very liberal cities---San Francisco, Los Angeles---where groups will come and try to stop ICE officers from arresting somebody. They're like, 'We're going to form a human wall against you,' " he said. "When they do that, you can just pop 'em up. Let them disperse and cry about it."

When, during a moment of protracted silence, the agent threatened to put the video back on if no one had questions, I asked about harassment and doxing. "We will prosecute people to the fullest extent of the law," he assured me, "and then people like myself will go on TV and publicly talk about how that person is now in prison to dissuade other people from doing it."

As empty as the place had been when I'd arrived, it was even emptier by the time the senior agent ended the Q&A. Somebody vastly overestimated the number of Americans willing to take a job brutalizing and disappearing hard-working men and women---even with a potential $50K bonus, even in this economy.

That may have something to do with what happened to me next.

I completely missed the email when it came. I'd kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I'd grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.

"Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment," the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I'd need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver's license information, an affidavit that I've never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: "If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below."

As I mentioned, I'd missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.

And that might have been where this all ended---an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox---if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. "Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process," it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) "Please complete your required pre-employment drug test**.**"

The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadn't smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, I'd waste a small piece of ICE's gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me I'd failed.

Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.

Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me---not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it---ICE had apparently offered me a job.

According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was "EOD"---Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to "Onboarding" and a helpful pop-up appeared. "Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!"

I clicked through to my application tracking page. They'd sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. "Welcome to Ice. ... Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025."

By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.

Perhaps, if I'd accepted, they would have demanded my pre-employment paperwork, done a basic screening, realized their mistake, and fired me immediately. And yet, the pending and upcoming tasks list suggested a very different outcome. My physical fitness test had been initiated on Oct. 6, it said: three days in the future. My medical check had apparently been completed on Oct. 6.

The portal also listed my background check as completed on Oct. 6. Had I preemptively passed? Was ICE seriously going to let me start training without finding out the first thing about me? I reached out to ICE for an explanation, but never heard back.

The only thing left for me to do was press the green "Accept" button on the home page. And maybe I should have. Maybe no one would have ever checked my name and I could have written the story of a lifetime. Or maybe the agency infamous for brutalizing and disappearing people with no regard for the law or basic human rights would have figured out exactly who I am while I was in one of their facilities with no way to escape. I'm not actually a domestic terrorist sent straight from Antifa headquarters, but to a paranoid fascist regime increasingly high on their own supply, I sure look like one on paper. Self-preservation won out.

I hit "Decline," closed my browser, and took a long, deep breath.

What are we to make of all this? To be clear, I barely applied to ICE. I skipped the steps of the application process that would have clued the agency in on my lack of fitness for the position. I made no effort to hide my public loathing of the agency, what it stands for, and the administration that runs it. And they offered me the job anyway.

It's possible that I'm an aberration---perhaps I experienced some kind of computer glitch that affected my application and no one else's. But given all of the above, it seems far more likely that ICE is running an extremely leaky ship when it comes to recruitment.

With no oversight and with ICE concealing its agents' identities, it'll be extremely difficult for us to know.

There's a temptation to take some comfort in ICE's sloppiness. There's a real argument here that an agency so inept in its recruitment will also be inept at training people and carrying out its mission. We're seeing some very sloppy police work from ICE, including an inability to do basic things like throw someone down and cuff them. On some level, all of this is a reminder that their takeover is neither total nor inevitable.

But if they missed the fact that I was an anti-ICE journalist who didn't fill out her paperwork, what else might they be missing? How many convicted domestic abusers are being given guns and sent into other people's homes? How many people with ties to white supremacist organizations are indiscriminately targeting minorities on principle, regardless of immigration status? How many rapists and pedophiles are working in ICE detention centers with direct and unsupervised access to a population that will be neither believed nor missed? How are we to trust ICE's allegedly thorough investigations of the people they detain and deport when they can't even keep their HR paperwork straight?

And if they're not going to screen me out, what hope is there of figuring out which recruit might one day turn into a trigger-happy agent who would forget that law enforcement officers are trained not to stand in front of vehicles, get jumpy, and shoot a 37-year-old woman to death on the streets of Minneapolis?

That's exactly what happened last week, and why Renee Good will never have a 38^th^ birthday, and why her children will never again be hugged by their mother.

By all appearances, the only thing ICE is screening for is a desire to work for ICE: a very specific kind of person perfectly suited for the kind of mission creep we are currently seeing. Good's murder is not an isolated incident; the American Civil Liberties Union reports a nationwide trend of ICE pointing guns at, brutalizing, and even detaining citizens who stop to film them. A Minneapolis pastor who protested ICE by chanting "We are not afraid" was detained at gunpoint by an agent who reportedly asked him: "Are you afraid now?"

I am. We all should be.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/20330

A US spending bill approving US$300 million in cash assistance for Taiwan’s military has passed the House of Representatives and is expected to become law. On Wednesday, the House passed a two-bill government spending package that would fund the Departments of the Treasury and State through September, along with other federal agencies, bringing the total to eight of 12 annual spending bills needed by January 30, to avoid a government shutdown. The bills must now clear the Senate before they can...

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From China - South China Morning Post via This RSS Feed.

web.archive.org

Personal Details of Thousands of Border Patrol and ICE Goons Allegedly Leaked in Huge Data Breach

Tom Latchem Lead Global CorrespondentPublished Jan. 13 2026 11:56AM EST

5 - 6 minutes

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Sensitive details of around 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees—including almost 2,000 agents working in frontline enforcement—have allegedly been released by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good.

The Jan. 7 killing of the mother by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked nationwide protests and worldwide outrage, including among some DHS employees.

The alleged leak to ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative,” is believed to be the largest ever breach of DHS staff data. It appears to include names, work emails, telephone numbers, roles, and some resumé data, including previous jobs of federal immigration staff.

ICE List founder, Dominick Skinner, told the Daily Beast: “It is a sign that people aren’t happy within the U.S. government, clearly. The shooting [of Good] was the last straw for many people.”

Renee Good had been protesting with her wife, Rachel (L), when she was shot dead by an ICE agent. (Instagram / Renee.n.good, Getty Images / Stephen Maturen)

According to Skinner, who leads the volunteer-run website, the dataset includes about 1,800 on-the-ground agents and 150 supervisors. Early analysis by the organization suggests that around 80 per cent of the staff identified remain employed by DHS.

An initital set of the names from the leak will be posted on Tuesday night, Skinner told the Daily Beast.

He said individual reports from the public have also “spiked” “a lot” since Good’s shooting. “I’ve had hotel staff sending post-it notes, bar staff sending DHS IDs, and loads of people saying their neighbour is an agent,” he said.

Prior to the Monday’s leak, which Skinner said he received on Monday, ICE List had been in possession of details of around 2,000 federal immigration staff, including names it has chosen not to make public.

Roughly 800 of these, he said, are frontline agents or are permitted to deputise for them on the ground. The latest leak brings details of the total number of federal immigration staff in its possession to around 6,500.

Skinner said he plans to list “the majority” of names the project is able to verify, because “ICE and CBP are in clear need of reform, and I believe working for either is a bad move on a moral level.”

A Border Patrol agent detains a man following yet another brutal immigration arrest. ADAM GRAY/Adam GRAY / AFP

He added: “We will make exceptions on a case-by-case basis, the best examples of which will be those who work in childcare within the agency, and nurses. There will be more exceptions, but we will have a discussion once the team flags a position as something we need to think twice about.”

DHS has said it shields the identities of its staff and agents—who famously almost always wear masks—for their own safety. It has previously had similar projects hosted in America taken down—including the ICE tracker app, ICEBlock.

Skinner, who is Irish with American relatives, but lives in the Netherlands, where he hosts the database outside of U.S. jurisdiction, said: “We never began with the goal of creating a large database [and] first just promised to share agent names sent to us, as Kristi Noem threatened Americans would be arrested if they attempted to do so.

ICE List is hosting outside of the U.S so that it cannot be taken down by the Trump administration. ICE List

“That’s now turned into the most recent version of the database, our ICE List Wiki, where we are aiming to have a comprehensive record of incidents, where we hope to be able to record all agents on the scene, all vehicles present, the field office that sent out the agents, and any other relevant information to the incidents.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has, like the rest of the Trump administration, blamed Good for her own death, while refusing to censure Ross, or wait for the investigation to play out. CNN

It was reported on Monday that Jonathan Ross, who has worked for ICE since 2015 and served Border Patrol before that, had lied to his neighbours about what he did for a living. People reported that the 43-year-old had pretended at a 2020 neighborhood garage party that he was a botanist.

Jonathan Ross photographed in 2014. Facebook

Skinner said that, since June, two federal immigration staff members identified by ICE List had reached out to say they had left their posts and had been removed from the site. “We would do the same for any who has quit and has not been identified at a raid,” he added.

He said his project was important because DHS refuses to hold its own agents accountable for violations of the law.

Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Beast that its “law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and rapists,” but that “thanks to the malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians, they are under constant threat from violent agitators.”

She added: “Publicizing their identities puts their lives and the lives of their families at serious risk.”

Gavin Newsom' and his staff have quietly talked to the champion of a controversial wealth tax proposal seeking an off-ramp to defuse a looming ballot measure fight.

The conversations, reported here for the first time, have occurred intermittently for months as SEIU-UHW's ballot initiative targeting billionaires migrated from the backrooms of California politics to the center of a raging debate about Silicon Valley and income inequality, sparking tech titans' wrath and vows to move out of state.

"We've been at this for four months," Newsom said in an interview with POLITICO, describing an "all-hands" effort that has included him meeting one-on-one with SEIU-UHW's leader, Dave Regan.

A compromise does not appear imminent. A union official cast doubt on the possibility of a deal, saying the two sides do not currently have another meeting scheduled and framing a ballot fight as an inevitability.

"Healthcare workers are going to the ballot to prevent California hospitals and emergency rooms from closing," the union's chief of staff, Suzanne Jimenez, said in a statement. "Congress created a $100 billion crisis for California through HR1 last July

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and California voters will solve that problem when they pass the billionaire tax act this November."

Newsom has staunchly opposed both the current proposal and earlier versions that surfaced in Sacramento, arguing they would hamstring California's tentpole industries and topple a pillar of the state's tax base. Proponents with SEIU-UHW, a major union representing more than 100,000 workers, argue the measure is the only idea commensurate with the scale of federal cuts that could lead to widespread health care job losses and hospital closures.

Officials with SEIU-UHW have said they are confident Newsom will come around

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an unlikely proposition given Newsom's adamant rejection of such measures.

Yet despite the gulf between them, both Newsom and Regan have ample experience forging deals to clear labor initiatives off the ballot

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including with each other. In 2022, the Newsom administration and a labor coalition that included Regan struck an agreement to raise the state's minimum wage for health care workers to $25 an hour.

Regan is one of Sacramento's most prolific practitioners of ballot measure politics, regularly filing initiatives that force affected industries to the negotiating table in hopes of averting a costly and uncertain campaign. The wealth tax proposal is one of three state initiatives SEIU-UHW has filed this cycle.

The union is still collecting signatures to qualify it for the November ballot, where it would face a fierce and well-funded opposition campaign. Nevertheless, Newsom is highly motivated to halt the initiative.

Beyond his belief that such a tax would harm California's finances, sidelining the idea could help Newsom avert a home-state backlash ahead of an expected 2028 presidential run while bolstering his credibility in Silicon Valley. The governor has deep industry ties that stretch back to his days as an innovation-touting mayor of San Francisco.

In his interview with POLITICO, Newsom said the drumbeat of wealthy tech players making moves to exit California vindicated his warnings about the ballot measure's downsides.

"This is my fear. It's just what I warned against. It's happening," Newsom said.

Opponents of the wealth tax include Ron Conway, an investor and prominent San Francisco political figure who is close with Newsom. Conway has donated $100,000 to an opposition campaign run by political consultants who have previously worked for Newsom.

At the same time, the governor is under mounting pressure from labor unions and other Democratic allies to find more revenue sources as California braces for the full impact of federal cuts.

UKIP leader Nick Tenconi (Image: James Manning)

A NEW party logo proposed by the UK Independence Party (Ukip) has been slammed for being strikingly similar to a Nazi symbol.

The party has bid to replace its purple and yellow logo featuring a gold pound sign with a black and white symbol that appears to mirror the Iron Cross -- a military medal in the Kingdom of Prussia and Nazi Germany.

The logo, which will need to be approved by the Electoral Commission, also features a shield and spear as well as a slogan branding the party "the new right".

The similarity to the Iron Cross has been picked up on by scores of people on social media.

However, the party has claimed the emblem features "the holy lance, the Eucharist and the Cross Pattée" adding it is "outright offensive" to suggest the logo is a "Nazi symbol".

Angus Pargas-Wyatt, director of political engagement at Total Politics, posted on Twitter/X: "UKIP has submitted an application to the Electoral Commission to change its official logo. And it's ever so slightly concerning..."

Sunder Katwala, the director of the British Future think tank, added on BlueSky: "Ukip have submitted a new logo and slogan to the Electoral Commission, swapping the £ pound sterling symbol for a cross, that looks very much like it is modelled on the Iron Cross used by Prussia & Germany 1871-1918 and Hitler's Nazi regime from 1933-45."

The logo has appeared already at protests on supporters' flags but has now been officially proposed to the Electoral Commission.

If approved, it could be used on ballot papers for General Elections.

NEW: @UKIP has submitted an application to the Electoral Commission to change its official logo.

And it's ever so slightly concerning... 👀 pic.twitter.com/Ux6yYe7Nb9

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Angus Parsad-Wyatt (@anguswyatt) January 12, 2026

Another user said: "Ukip go completely mask off. The cross is obviously the huge red flags but a f****** weapon on a political party logo?

"Don't forget the axe and sticks is the reason we call these vermin fascists."

The Eurosceptic, far-right party used to be led by Nigel Farage and gained two MPs in the 2010s, but has rarely made headlines since the UK left the EU.

READ MORE: SNP MP to host Greenland minister in Westminster amid Donald Trump threats

They are now led by Nick Tenconi, the chief operating officer of Turning Point UK, an organisation set up to promote right-wing politics in UK schools and universities.

In October last year, a planned demonstration by Ukip was banned by the Met Police from taking place in an area with a large Muslim population.

The gathering had been due to take place in east London and had been billed as a demo to "reclaim Whitechapel from the Islamists".

A Ukip spokesperson said: "Our new logo features the holy lance, the Eucharist and the Cross Pattée, to show UKIP's commitment to reinstate Christianity into the heart of government.

"The Templar Cross/Cross Pattée is a powerful Christian symbol that symbolises spiritual victory and sacrifice.

"The Cross Pattée has been featured throughout British history and is used as the Victoria Cross, sits on the crown of our monarch, and is also found within the Parliamentary logo. Are critics suggesting that the King, Parliament and our war heroes are all Nazis?

"It is outright offensive, ignorant and Christophobic to suggest that the Cross Pattée is a 'Nazi symbol'. The Cross Pattée is displayed throughout Christian religious texts and these efforts to slander us with vile allegations is simply religious bigotry and discrimination."

If you're a little too online, you likely know that Marco Rubio as a teenager made extra cash working for his late brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. The business imported and sold exotic animals as a front for moving nearly a half million pounds of cocaine and marijuana. It was later said, when kingpin Mario Tabraue became a main character on the monstrously popular documentary series Tiger King, that the cocaine was actually stuffed into the bodies of vipers and boa constrictors, though an 80-page indictment of the enterprise makes no mention of that, and Tabraue has been known to sue those who accuse him of animal cruelty.

"I dealt to support my animal habit," Tabraue humbly told the Netflix documentarians about the drug ring that imported and distributed $79 million worth of drugs between 1976 and 1987. It was Rubio's job, according to Manuel Roig-Franzia's 2012 biography of the then-senator, to build the cages.

More from Maureen Tkacik

Rubio has sworn he knew nothing about the drugs. He was only 16. (Admittedly, one of Cicilia's co-defendants had been only 16 when Tabraue had allegedly ordered him to murder his estranged wife to stop her from telling the feds what they'd done with the body of another guy they'd murdered the year earlier.) Not that it matters, of course: What politician doesn't have a felon relative? But for Rubio in particular, the connection seems too incongruous with his long-cultivated squeaky-cleanness. As a third grader, Rubio convinced his family to convert to Mormonism to better fit in with their wholesome new neighbors during a short stint living in Las Vegas. He spent every spare hour of high school obsessing over football, and his wife attends masses at multiple churches multiple times per week.

When Univision broke the story of his ties to Cicilia's business in 2011, Team Rubio declared war on the entire network, first dispatching surrogates like Ana Navarro to pressure executives to shelve the story, then convincing a host of other Republican politicians to boycott its debate on the nonsensical premise that the network had attempted to use the information about his brother-in-law as "blackmail" for the purposes of "extorting" an interview out of him.

The following year, Rubio's memoir cast Cicilia as a paragon of Old World filial piety, a central presence in his fondest childhood memories. The house where Cicilia cut and stored cocaine into emptied cigarette cartons was depicted as a sanctuary that held his far-flung family together during the difficult Vegas years. Most significantly for the football-obsessed young Rubio, Cicilia paid him enough cash to clean animal cages and bathe his seven Samoyed dogs so he could buy tickets to every Dolphins home game of Dan Marino's 14-2 sophomore season. On the December day in Rubio's junior year of high school that Cicilia was taken away in handcuffs from the home where he'd briefly lived, his entire family was "stunned."

Today, Marco Rubio is the Trump administration's most formidable liar. When Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth or Karoline Leavitt or Stephen Miller refers to an anti-genocide protester or a day laborer or a sandwich hurler or a fisherman clinging to the wreckage of a fishing boat that has just been struck by a Hellfire missile as a "terrorist," they come off as pathological. But Rubio's approval ratings are the highest in the Republican Party, even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump's single most cynical policy: the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country, in the name of fighting drug cartels.

In September, Rubio hailed Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an "incredibly willing partner" who "has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration." Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa's family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022. Rubio has tirelessly promoted the cause of convicted (alas, just-pardoned) drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández. In 2018, Rubio personally and publicly commended Hernández, then president of Honduras, for combating drug traffickers (and supporting Israel), just seven months before his brother was indicted for trafficking 158 tons of cocaine in containers stamped "TH," for Tony Hernández.

Rubio has raved about the crime-fighting efforts of Salvadoran and Argentine junior strongmen Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, in spite of the former's documented alliance with MS-13 and the various Miami cocaine trafficking scandals that enveloped his libertarian political party last fall, as well as both leaders' slavish devotion to the drug cartels' single favorite mode of money laundering. Rubio has been one of the Beltway's biggest backers of newly elected Chilean president José Antonio Kast, the son of a literal Nazi war criminal who has spent his entire political career lionizing, whitewashing, and promising a restoration of the brutal reign of Augusto Pinochet, who personally ordered the Chilean army to build a cocaine laboratory, consolidated the narcotics trade inside his terrifying secret police, and then allegedly "disappeared" key conspirators like his secret police chemist Eugenio Berríos.

And for at least a decade, Rubio has lauded, strategized with, and viciously condemned the multitude of criminal investigations into former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whom some describe as a kind of Kissingerian figure to the former Florida senator. A 1991 Pentagon analysis described Uribe, whom Rubio depicts as a kind of paradigmatic drug warrior, as one of the 100 most important Colombian narco-terrorists, a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar and a political figure "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels."

That brings us to Rubio's current campaign of state-sponsored terrorism against Venezuela and fisherman emanating from there, on the pretense that Nicolás Maduro runs something called the "Cartel of the Suns," which has flooded the United States with cheap cocaine. The case that this is anything but a fairy tale is laid out in a 2020 indictment whose insanity I hope to explore soon, but its flimsiness is also underscored by the puny vessels SOCOM has chosen to drone-strike into oblivion.

Last week, Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott wrote a letter to The New York Times disputing the newspaper's characterization of "a remarkable dissonance" between Trump's simultaneous massacres of subsistence traffickers and pardoning of a convicted trafficker of more than 400 tons of cocaine. Actually, he pointed out, the "contradiction" was markedly unremarkable: "The ill-conceived and deliberately misnamed 'War on Drugs' has been a cover for contradictory CIA involvement with drug​-traffickers for decades." This is especially true in Venezuela, Scott noted. Customs Service investigators probing a 998-pound cocaine seizure in the country in 1990 discovered the Agency had been operating a joint venture with top military generals to traffic cocaine as a purported means of "infiltrating" Colombian cartels. The venture had been nicknamed "Cartel de los Soles," and the Times itself reported that it had successfully smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States with virtually no accountability until Hugo Chávez imprisoned the general who had spearheaded the cartel and expelled the DEA from Venezuela, at which point it became fashionable to finance industrial sabotage, military coups, and ultimately terror attack projects, under the premise that it was a "narco-state."

As historian Greg Grandin pointed out in a recent podcast appearance, whereas in many realms the scale and breadth of the Trump administration plunge into mafia rule is truly unprecedented, in Latin America it is more of a continuation of policy that dates back at least a century. "Behind every single horror that Donald Trump represents exists a long train of U.S. presidents that have first put in the policies that make what Trump does today possible," Grandin said. Few Americans learned this lesson the hard way at so tender an age as Marco Rubio.

THE LABYRINTHINE SCANDAL KNOWN AS "IRAN-CONTRA" began to unravel in 1986 when the Nicaraguan Air Force lobbed a missile at a suspicious Fairchild cargo plane. As the fuselage packed full of grenade launchers, AK-47s and ammunition, two pilots, and a radio crewman plunged to the Earth, a lone white guy from Wisconsin (who died just weeks ago) parachuted down intact and quickly admitted he worked for a CIA project with a guy named "Max Gomez." Gomez turned out to be Félix Rodríguez, one of Mario Tabraue's dad Guillermo's old comrades from the Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria, or MRR, the crew of anti-communist revolutionaries led by physician Manuel Artime that carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion and various subsequent terror attacks and sabotage operations in Cuba for years afterward.

The plane turned out to have belonged to Barry Seal, a Special Forces pilot turned prolific cocaine trafficker who had just been murdered by cartel hit men. Following a conviction for smuggling quaaludes, Seal had let the CIA install hidden cameras on the plane and set out on a covert sting operation to "frame" Nicaragua's Sandinista government for drug trafficking by capturing images of Pablo Escobar stuffing cocaine into duffel bags in Managua alongside a titular top aide to a Sandinista general, which thereupon became the basis for the Reagan administration's renewed appeal for funds to finance regime change in the Central American country. "I know every American parent concerned about the drug problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking," President Reagan said in a 1986 televised speech. "There seems to be no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop."

But the "Sandinista official" turned out to be a former U.S. embassy staffer, and Seal seemed to be a longtime CIA asset who appears to have participated at the Bay of Pigs and was even photographed in 1963 with the same Félix Rodríguez who would later become his Agency handler. Rodríguez was not known for a soft touch: Three officials involved in the investigation of the gruesome 1985 cartel execution of Kiki Camarena, a Mexico-based DEA agent, have repeatedly claimed Rodríguez ordered the hit after the young agent uncovered evidence revealing the extent of the agency's collaboration with Mexican cartels, an accusation the Miami stalwart, who currently stars in a series of YouTube shorts and recently hosted former Colombian president Uribe for a Bay of Pigs anniversary event, denies.

The genesis of the MRR's conquest of the Latin American underworld dates back at least to 1964, when the CIA reportedly got hold of pornographic photos of Manuel Artime's lesbian wife, who his bosses learned had been a mistress to both Fulgencio Batista and former Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Around the same time, the MRR accidentally killed three Spanish sailors off the coast of Cuba. To contain the PR fallout, Artime was advised to spend more time in Managua, where the right-wing dictatorship of Luis Somoza could nurture his projects more unreservedly. But Artime was soon in the news for a different scandal: A young Cuban immigrant from New Jersey whose husband had been recruited to one of his Central American training camps had received an anonymous letter advising her that Artime had hired assassins to murder her husband because he "did not approve of the immoral activities in the camps; among them the smuggling of liquor which took place on the boat of Artime, in collusion with an official of the Nicaraguan Government." Costa Rican customs officials around the same time discovered an abandoned plane full of tens of thousands of dollars' worth of contraband whiskey and women's clothing in the jungle near what appeared to be an unauthorized guerrilla camp. An FBI informant "advised that different Cuban exile leaders continued to claim that Artime and the MRR were making a living off the cuban revolutionary activities; were engaged in smuggling instead of anticommunist warfare; and were misappropriating funds designed for commando and infiltration activity ... it was claimed that Artime's men returned from Central America very disenchanted, or with large sums of money earned through illegal activity." Guillermo Tabraue served as the MRR's "paymaster" during these years, and there would soon be little ambiguity about which camp he fell into.

In 1970, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs carried out a blitzkrieg seven-city drug bust they called the "largest roundup of major drug traffickers" in recorded history, noting in a press conference that none of the 150 men arrested was a "known member of organized crime," but declining to mention that most---as many as 70 percent, by one estimate---belonged to Artime's Bay of Pigs veteran organization. Just two years later, the state attorney's office opened an investigation into Tabraue's jewelry shop after discovering he'd given cufflinks to a municipal judge who had reduced sentences for two young women convicted of "loitering" and sold various items to the chief of police. The following year, Artime recruited a 23-year-old accounting whiz named Ramon Milian-Rodriguez, who would rise to become the top accountant to the Medellín cartel and a close confidant of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, to begin laundering money into Nicaraguan banks to assist the legal defense funds of four Bay of Pigs alumni who had participated in the Watergate burglary.

In 1972, the CIA offered to detail a team of its own covert operations specialists to assist the Bureau at keeping an eye on its old assets, while ensuring that drug investigations did not conflict with "national security" concerns. The BNDD put together a sophisticated database called the Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network---later renamed DEACON when the Bureau was absorbed into the DEA---and hired Tabraue as its first big recruit to flesh out its intelligence network. The CIA paid Tabraue $1,400 a month during the 1970s for his intel on rival drug traffickers.

The scheme worked exactly as intended: Drug traffickers who were allied with the CIA's ideological objectives were protected, assisted and/or recruited as assets, while drug traffickers who bribed or cooperated with leftists, crossed the Agency, or outlived their usefulness were set up for prosecution or discarded. Prosecutions were a low priority, and the DEACON team reportedly contributed no admissible evidence whatsoever to DEA drug prosecutions in the 1970s. (As the former DEA official Dennis Dayle lamented in 1986: "In my 30 years of experience with the DEA and related agencies, the main objectives of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be CIA workers.") In the CIA's "defense," those drug revenues financed terrorist attacks, assassinations, and infiltrations that arguably intensified the atmosphere of fear, distrust, and hopelessness that eased the challenge of repressing the left. In 1975, Bay of Pigs veterans were involved in nearly half the terrorist attacks that took place, though they chose their battles wisely. During the Watergate investigation, Artime testified that CIA agent-turned-Nixon operative E. Howard Hunt had recruited him to assassinate Panamanian populist Omar Torrijos because "the Nixon Administration was highly concerned that the flow of narcotics into the United States was being filtered through Panama," according to a report written by a private investigator confidant of the Cuban exile leader, who died suddenly in the weeks before he was slated to testify before the House Subcommittee on Assassinations.

Twin Operations Condor set the tone of the era: a clandestine continental program officially launched in 1975 by Augusto Pinochet and the Argentine junta (and only revealed two decades later by the discovery of a top secret Paraguayan "terror archive") to unleash cocaine-financed death squads to disappear left-wing activists, dissidents, whistleblowers, and other inconvenient persons across South America. Some scholars now argue based on more recently discovered documents that Condor's true genesis was the 1967 operation overseen by the ubiquitous Félix Rodríguez and another MRR veteran to hunt down and execute Che Guevara. "The idea ... is that frontiers don't terminate with the individual geography of each state but that it is necessary to defend Western politics wherever necessary," explained an Argentine intelligence officer quoted in the aforementioned Berkeley emeritus professor Scott's canonical survey of the Iran-Contra era. "It is therefore necessary to act against those who could become a second Cuba, and to collaborate with the United States directly and indirectly."

Around the same time and under the same name, an official collaboration of the American DEA, the Mexican army, and the Mexican police eradicated thousands of acres of poppy and marijuana plants, devastating many small farmers and unleashing an epidemic of murder and grotesque violence that persists to this day. The scholar Adela Cedillo argues that the Mexican Operation Condor's real purpose was to eradicate the populist left by essentially criminalizing small-scale agriculture while reorganizing and centralizing the Mexican military to the benefit of a handful of dominant players; in other words, to serve a hidden agenda near-identical to that of its namesake. When Marco Rubio maligns the efficacy of interdiction and other traditional law enforcement approaches to mitigating narco-trafficking in favor of "military" operations, as he did in a recent speech on Trump's speedboat bombings, he is contradicting every empirical evaluation of drug war efficacy that exists, yes, but he is also pining for a kind of Cold War--era blanket license to commit dirty war in the name of some bigger goal.

"They're bringing back Operation Condor," an emerging market bond investor told me casually in October after the Trump administration pledged $40 billion to stabilize the Argentine peso but warned that the money would vanish if Milei's party lost its majority in the country's midterm elections. And perhaps it never ended: Earlier this month, the longtime CIA agent Bob Sensi was indicted for conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism alongside a former high-ranking DEA official for laundering $750,000 and agreeing to procure grenade launchers and commercial drones capable of carrying six kilograms of C-4 for a government informant posing as an agent of a Mexican cartel. The duo advised the informant to "create the perception that they are moving fentanyl operations from Mexico to Colombia to divert attention from Mexico" and toward the center-left government of Gustavo Petro. Perhaps notably, the scheme launched just weeks after the November 2024 election.

A memoir titled America at Night by a CIA acquaintance of Sensi's named Larry Kolb describes the alleged money launderer as a cunning all-purpose fixer who was personally introduced to him by George H.W. Bush in 1985 and said he reported directly to then CIA director Bill Casey. Sensi was at the time deeply immersed in the Middle Eastern back-channel elements of Iran-Contra, in which shadowy operatives and informal surrogates met clandestinely with officials of Hezbollah and Iran to negotiate secret ransoms for various hostages, but was indicted for skimming funds from a "cover" job at Kuwait Airways---and, according to the book, out for revenge ever since. A former intelligence officer predicted to the Prospect that Sensi's current legal troubles would not last long, because the Trump administration would find him useful, as previous administrations have most Iran-Contra major players who made it out of the early 1990s alive.

Which brings us back to the Tabraue family, who in the 1970s belonged to a sprawling drug trafficking organization associated with Rolls-Royce-driving hairdresser and MRR veteran José Medardo Alvero Cruz. When Cruz and a whole raft of the Tabraues' collaborators were busted in 1979, a related group of Bay of Pigs vets got involved with Operation Condor's first big success story of the 1980s, the "cocaine coup" in Bolivia, in which the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and the Israeli-trained Argentine psyop guru-turned-cocaine trafficker Alfredo Mario Mingolla collaborated in the weeks following the election of a left-leaning presidential candidate to install one of the world's most unabashed narcocracies. As a right-wing military junta raced to release drug traffickers from prison and even open a cocaine factory that the country's pre-eminent cartel boss claimed was "controlled by the DEA," the traffickers raced to collaborate with the new regime, in a cycle that repeated itself the following year with the sudden death of Torrijos and installation of the narco-friendly Manuel Noriega in Panama. But Nicaragua, where the Somoza family had been such accommodating hosts to anti-communist mercenaries throughout the Cold War, had been conquered by the Sandinistas in 1979, and the old MRR rank and file took it personally. To fight the Sandinistas, the CIA and the thriving drug traffickers bankrolled a confederation of anti-communist militias known as the "Contras" with bases in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama, who torched oil storage tanks and planted magnetic mines in the ports and bombed the Managua Airport, all with the idea, as verbalized by one State Department official, of turning Nicaragua into "the Albania of Latin America." Meanwhile, draconian crackdowns on users and subsistence entrepreneurs sent the prison population surging by 250 percent between 1975 and 1990, permanently traumatizing families and communities.

Because Congress worked a little differently back then, it passed a series of five laws attempting to prevent the Reagan administration from using tax dollars to fund the Contras. The CIA's sprawling network of drug traffickers had already done so, but the tightening restrictions led to an intense off-the-books fundraising effort. Tabraue hosted fundraisers for "anti-communist struggle" in Nicaragua at a social club he owned called Club Olympo, and the Unification Church cult hosted anti-communist speaking tours with Contra leaders. The Contras sought out traffickers with legal problems to offer to trade deep-state lobbying services for cash and weapons. Manuel Artime's old protégé Milian-Rodriguez pitched in just under $10 million on behalf of the Medellín cartel, delivered directly to Félix Rodríguez.

ORLANDO CICILIA EMIGRATED TO MIAMI the year after Marco Rubio was born, started dating Rubio's sister not long afterward, and featured prominently in the young boy's childhood; an especially memorable moment of his memoir describes the guilt-stricken terror on Cicilia's face when a second-grade Marco walked in on him assembling a bicycle that was supposed to be from Santa. About three years after that, when the Rubios were living in Las Vegas, Cicilia began working for the Tabraue family business.

Just one year earlier, the untimely death of Ricardo Morales and the apparent sloppiness of future attorney general Janet Reno had unraveled a cluster of interrelated drug trafficking cases against Mario Tabraue and about five dozen other mostly Miami Cubans. Morales was yet another Bay of Pigs guy and self-confessed terrorist suspected of involvement in the Kennedy assassination, though he always told his son he showed up in Dallas in November 1963 only to find himself "ghosted" by handlers who never ordered him to do anything.

That the Tabraue family was dealing drugs was something of an open secret, according to law enforcement memos from the 1970s and also Guillermo Tabraue's 1981 registry of a business at the jewelry store address by the name of "Mota Import Corp Inc." But it was also an open secret that Tabraue was essentially untouchable: Dozens of Miami and Florida Keys law enforcement officers spent time on his payroll during the 1980s. But Morales and other informants told the feds that greed and infighting had sent the enterprise spiraling out of control and left a trail of bodies, among them Tabraue's estranged wife and an ATF informant named Larry Nash. By 1981, prosecutors had put together an indictment. A raid of Tabraue's residence and safe houses alone had yielded 12,000 pounds of weed and more than 150 assault rifles and submachine guns.

But all the cases began to collapse when defense attorneys began homing in on the wiretaps. They argued that Morales had no credibility, not only because he was a career criminal himself but because he was associated with a rogue cadre of CIA agents who had gone to work for Muammar Gaddafi, then also schemed to assassinate the Libyan leader. And they found a section of surveillance tape in which detectives assumed a conversation about an ailing toucan was code for narcotics, when actually the body of the late toucan in question could "prove" Tabraue and his lawyer had been talking literally.

Then Morales was shot dead by an off-duty police officer during a bar fight in the Florida Keys in what authorities concluded was justifiable homicide for which no one should be charged. "If you believe that, I've got a piece of expressway I'll sell you cheap," said one of Morales's attorneys, John Komorowski. "Somebody needed Mоrales dead and just executed him ... Who? God only knows. It could have been the Cubans, the anti-Castro Cubans, the druggers, the CIA, anybody." (Morales was hardly the intelligence community's only victim of this brutal calculus: Just months earlier, a Mexico-based DEA agent had been elaborately tortured and executed in a crime three government investigators claimed to have been orchestrated by none other than Félix Rodríguez, who has claimed he was not involved.) Incredibly, a splashy Miami Herald feature on the crime wave's impact on Little Havana published in the months between the raid and his case's dismissal featured as its lead protagonist none other than ... Guillermo Tabraue, lamenting the toll exacted upon his store by the "bad guys" who had migrated to Florida from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift.

The year Cicilia joined the Tabraue pet shop, another Tabraue named Jorge, who was also a business partner of Guillermo's, was indicted in Detroit along with a Dade County detective the ring had hired for trafficking "much of the [marijuana] sold in Michigan over the past five years" through a network of RVs and mobile homes; an informant in that case said the crew had unloaded its weed in Louisiana in full view of Coast Guard officials who had been paid off. Then in 1985, a third Tabraue named Lazaro was indicted alongside Alberto Rodriguez, a newspaper publisher who was (yet) another pillar of the Cuban exile community, for selling $90,000 worth of cocaine to an undercover cop near the jewelry store parking lot. And in 1987, the whole racket finally went down in a multi-agency sting dubbed "Operation Cobra," in which Guillermo Tabraue was described as the "patriarch" of the operation, his son Mario as "chairman of the board," and Orlando Cicilia the "front man" and "number two."

On the tenth week of Guillermo Tabraue's 1989 criminal trial, a man named Gary Mattocks showed up at the courthouse and testified that he'd been Guillermo Tabraue's handler for four years at the CIA's DEACON project inside the DEA. Mattocks had previously been the liaison of Sandinista defector Edén Pastora, a prolific Contra trafficker based in Costa Rica; both had been present during Barry Seal's sting operation. It was rumored George Bush himself had personally ordered Mattocks to disrupt the proceeding.

The revelation that Tabraue was a removedwas at once the least surprising revelation of all time and a "jaw-dropping surprise," in the characterization of Mario Tabraue's lawyer. Prosecutors accused the defense team of purposely withholding their "bombshell" until the moment of maximum impact; the judge accused the government of "not knowing what the left hand was doing." It turned out Tabraue had operated under the pseudonym "Abraham Diaz" during his years as a DEACON informant, though his status as a federal informant had been reported in news stories on the first big Tabraue bust in 1981. The patriarch, by then 65 years old, was ultimately released in March 1990 after just a few months in a minimum security prison camp on the Maxwell Air Force Base.

By that point, the Tabraue gang's prosecutor Dexter Lehtinen had moved on to bigger fish: Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, whose refusal to self-extradite himself on narcotics trafficking and money laundering charges the Bush administration had just used as a pretext to literally invade the country. His star witness was Ramon Milian-Rodriguez, the Medellín cartel accountant who had been Manuel Artime's protégé back in the 1970s and said he'd paid Noriega between $320 million and $350 million to protect shipments of drug cash into Central American banks.

There were some hiccups when Milian-Rodriguez testified that he had also sent some $10 million to the Nicaraguan Contras, care of Félix Rodríguez, in hopes of currying favor with the CIA. Later, Noriega claimed the CIA had paid him tens of millions of dollars for his participation in their dirty drug war---the Agency could only find records it had paid him $330,000. But in general, the campaign to invade a titularly sovereign country so as to throw an erstwhile CIA puppet under the bus for the sins of the CIA, known as Operation Just Cause, was such a smashing success that such giants of Trump's foreign-policy brain trust as Elliott Abrams and Brett McGurk have publicly pleaded with war-weary Americans to understand that it is Panama, not Iraq or Libya, that is their blueprint for regime change in Venezuela.

• Trump's Cargo Cult Imperialism in Venezuela
• The $30 Billion Identity Theft of Venezuela
• The Fossil Fuel Empire Strikes Back

The summer after the invasion, Marcio Rubio scored an internship with Lehtinen's wife Ileana, the daughter of yet another CIA-affiliated anti-communist Cuban exile who had just been elected the first Cuban American member of Congress. That fall, he briefly departed Florida for a "football scholarship" in Missouri but transferred to a community college soon afterward amid revelations that the college itself was a "front" for an elaborate diploma mill scheme to scam the student loan program.

Rubio returned to Miami and never left, any misgivings about his ties to a scary narcotics gang apparently negated by his conspicuous political talent. By the time he ran for city commissioner in the late '90s, Jeb Bush was donating to his campaign, as were a number of executives of the Fanjul sugar empire and a collection of eye doctors including (and likely corralled by) the ophthalmologist and onetime political fixer Alan Mendelsohn, who would later host the first fundraiser for Rubio's first presidential campaign exploratory committee. In one of the more "only in Miami" episodes of recent history, a midsized ship seized by the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean in 2001 turned out to have 12 tons of cocaine concealed inside its fuel tank, along with a cursory paper trail that led investigators to a Miami-based Ponzi scheme that was laundering drug cartel proceeds, whose ringleader had in turn funneled millions into Mendelsohn's various foundations and political action committees in a vain attempt to "fix" his legal problems. But where that scandal took down Rubio's close friend and sometime roommate David Rivera, who was elected to Congress in the 2010 election that sent Liddle Marco to the Senate, he emerged untainted. As one local political consultant told Rubio's biographer, "He was the anointed golden child, even then."

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/19430

The Senate is taking up a spending package passed by the House of Representatives that would cut $125 million in funding promised this year to replace toxic lead pipes.

Including three of 12 appropriations bills, this package will fund parts of the federal government, including the Environmental Protection Agency. The Senate is slated to vote on it later this week. Near the end of more than 400 pages of text, it proposes repurposing some funds previously obligated by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the bipartisan infrastructure law.

That law, advanced by the Biden administration, promised $15 billion over five years to fund the replacement of service lines — pipes routing water into people’s homes and other buildings — that are made of or contain lead, a neurotoxin that can cause cognitive, developmental, reproductive, and cardiovascular harm.

The EPA released 2025 funding allocations in November, months late, obligating nearly $3 billion across the country. Illinois, the state with the most lead pipes in the nation, received the largest share. Another $3 billion was slated to be disbursed this year, the last for the funds.

The slashed $125 million would be repurposed for wildland fire management. Safe drinking water advocates and some lawmakers have called for the funds to be restored, calling them critical for health and safety. Because lead pipes are a public health hazard, the EPA has mandated that all states replace them within about a decade, with some extensions for states with many pipes, like Illinois.

“We are facing a water crisis, and I’m disappointed that money appropriated by the [Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act] for lead pipe replacement is being repurposed by this legislation,” Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, said in a statement to Inside Climate News. “Every American deserves clean water, and we will not stop fighting until we get the lead out.”

The EPA declined to comment on pending legislation, but a spokesperson wrote in an email that the Trump EPA’s work on drinking water is “unmatched,” and said that funding from the agency will “accelerate progress in finding and removing lead pipes that deliver water to homes, schools, and businesses.”

President Donald Trump previously sought to almost completely eliminate a key funding source for drinking water, but the House rejected that proposal, and also refused to cut as much of the EPA’s budget as Trump wanted.

An earlier draft of the bill proposed cutting $250 million in lead pipe replacement funding, and House Democrats fought to protect the funds. In December, Dingell and Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is also a Democrat from Michigan, coordinated a letter to Senate leaders signed by 43 other members of Congress, arguing that the funding is critical for public health.

“Too often, our local communities do not have the resources and capacity to address this health risk without a more aggressive funding approach to this growing crisis,” the letter reads.

Julian Gonzalez, senior legislative counsel at Earthjustice, said the smaller cut is an improvement, but described it as “bittersweet.”

“It’s great that they were able to save $125 million from one version of the appropriations bill to the next, and it’s obviously really unfortunate and disappointing that there’s any clawback at all of these funds,” Gonzalez said.

The cost of replacement varies, but $125 million would pay for thousands of new lines. Any reduction in funding will have a material impact on people’s lives, Gonzalez added.

“If you just think about it as neighborhoods and families, then it becomes evident that it’s actually an enormous deal,” he said.

Mary Grant, water program director at Food & Water Watch, said communities burdened by lead pipes need “every dollar of federal support” to replace the toxic lines.

“I don’t think there is a real justification for cutting back lead service line funding,” Grant said. “At the end of the day, no matter where you live, no matter which party you vote for, everyone wants safe, lead-free water.”

There are millions of lead service lines across the country, and replacing them is an expensive job, with estimates ranging from $45 billion to $90 billion. Cuts to federal funding will likely impact cities with high numbers of pipes, like Chicago, most severely, Grant said. Officials in Illinois have already called for greater financial support from the federal government to replace its hundreds of thousands of lead-containing lines.

The EPA estimated in 2024 that there were about 9 million lead service lines nationwide, but late last year the agency revised its estimate to 4 million. Drinking water advocates have criticized the new methodology, which estimates that the vast majority of the 24 million service lines of unknown material don’t contain lead — a far greater proportion than previous estimates.

In an emailed statement, an EPA spokesperson defended the new methodology and said the critiques are “simply wrong.” The new estimate involves “significantly more robust” data than the previous numbers, the agency statement said, given that all states were required to submit inventories of their service line materials in 2024.

“The EPA’s reduced number of presumed lead service lines may also be a precursor to future efforts to justify cuts in funding for replacement of these lead pipes,” wrote Erik D. Olson, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior strategic director for environmental health, in December. “This is penny-wise and pound-foolish, since the health and economic benefits of removing these lead pipes are more than 14 times the costs. And it does not bode well for the tens of millions of Americans who continue to drink lead-contaminated water from these lead pipes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline States say they need more help replacing lead pipes. Congress may cut the funding instead. on Jan 13, 2026.

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Mamdani stays mum as Tisch defends NYPD gang database during joint appearance

Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood beside NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch at their first joint press conference this week and was silent as she defended the department’s gang database.

Before becoming mayor, Mamdani was clear in his opposition to the database, calling it a “vast dragnet” that punished young New Yorkers of color with only loose connections to gang activity.

But on Tuesday, Mamdani didn’t say a word.

The moment underscored a growing question for the city’s new progressive mayor: Will he follow through on his campaign promise to dismantle the database or quietly let it stand?

Civil rights groups and their allies in the City Council are pressuring him to act. Critics have equated the database with racial profiling. But with a federal civil rights lawsuit underway over the database, and top police officials calling the tracker essential to public safety, Mamdani faces a high-stakes choice that could define his relationship with the NYPD and the city’s broader approach to crime and surveillance.

When asked about the tracker on Tuesday, Tisch defended it as critical.

"I have been very clear that the gang database is a tool that has helped us in terms of fighting gun violence," Tisch said.

While campaigning for mayor, Mamdani supported City Council legislation to abolish the database as a counterproductive measure that ensnares young people who may not be involved in criminal activity.

"Whether they go out late, photos they put on social media — so much of the facts of life of being a young New Yorker, and yet it then becomes a mark of suspicion," he said in September.

What is the gang database?

The NYPD's "Criminal Groups Database" contains information on thousands of people police believe are either gang members or associates.

According to the city's Department of Investigation, an estimated 10,000 officers have in-depth access to their profiles that include names, alleged gang affiliations, criminal justice histories and the criteria that led to their inclusion, such as locations associated with groups.

Ninety-eight percent of those listed are Black or Hispanic, and most are men between 18 and 34, according to a 2023 watchdog report, the last available review of the database. The audit said the database included 1,689 minors.

After programming errors were discovered during a DOI audit, the tracker shrank by nearly 40%, dropping from 13,989 people in June 2024 to 8,563 in October 2025.

Why is it controversial?

Critics say the database unfairly targets people of color based on factors unrelated to criminal activity, like the music they listen to or their social acquaintances. Civil rights advocates have argued that it’s used to surveil non-white New Yorkers without transparency or due process.

The NYPD says the database helps prevent shootings. But to Dana Rachlin — founder of We Build The Block, a community group focused on public safety through violence reduction and youth support — it’s a list of kids who need help.

Rachlin said police aren't equipped to address the root causes of gang violence.

"They did not go to school to be social workers," she said. "They cannot create an apartment or a detox bed. They cannot make a resumé or give a grief circle to a group of boys that just lost a friend. That's not their skillset. It's not their job."

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Nov 24, 2025 6:00 AM

The Hard-Left Shooters Leading a Gun Culture Revolution

Earlier this year, I attended a shooting competition for queer, often trans, very online misfits. Then Charlie Kirk was killed.

Trans guntuber Tacticool Girlfriend at the Brutality match in Parma, Idaho.Photograph: Natalie Behring

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This isn't the story I set out to write.

I was going to talk about a pretty feel-good firearms competition I went to earlier this year, where trans and queer people made up about a quarter of participants and the unofficial rule was you're not allowed to be a bigot. I was going to describe the strange and whimsical mix of subcultures people embraced there---like polyamory and Mad Max cosplay---wrapped up in pro-LGBT and Black Lives Matter patches.

Then Charlie Kirk was killed.

Suddenly I found myself wondering if I should write this story at all. If doing so would put my sources---gun-loving trans people in Trump's America---in danger. I'm still going to talk about the things I just mentioned. But this story, even as I write, continues to get darker.

It's late July, and I'm riding bitch in a pseudo golf cart at a gun range in the not-quite-desert that is Parma, Idaho, listening to two competitive shooters jokingly bicker over which one of them is more marginalized. One, a 22-year-old YouTuber who goes by Gun Bunny, is a Russian Jew who is poly-pansexual and has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a disability that makes her joints hurt, along with autism and ADHD. The other, our driver, is an Indigenous-Mexican Slovak Jew who is trans and chronically disabled. As we grind to a halt, dust from the dirt road blowing around us, Gun Bunny declares the other shooter a winner. "You have Slovak Jew, so you do have me beat," she says, to which our driver replies, "even the Russians screwed us." Laughing, Gun Bunny offers a truce and a mission for them both. "So what you're saying is we should team up to defeat Nazis."

A quarter of Brutality match attendees were LGBT+.

Photograph: Natalie Behring

YouTuber Gun Bunny at the Brutality match in Parma, Idaho.

Photograph: NATALIE BEHRING

Quip notwithstanding, the vibes at the High Desert Brutality match are closer to Burning Man than paramilitary. The shooting competition combines marksmanship with tasks like throwing 58-pound kettle bells down a field, lugging heavy jugs, running around in trenches, and hitting targets from a fast-moving postapocalyptic sand buggy, all under the beating hot sun. There's also a leftist theme ("a workers' rights uprising on Mars"), cosplay---Gun Bunny is dressed in a Dune-inspired grey stillsuit made from workout clothes and faux leather---and elaborate set design. It's one of the most intense shooting competitions I've been to and also one of the most queer-friendly events I've attended all year. Almost all of the 135 participants have traveled a long way.

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While America has no dearth of shooting contests, there are only a handful of Brutality matches a year, and again and again I hear there's nothing else like them. A big part of that is the effort that goes into staging and the difficulty of the challenges. But a much bigger part is that minorities aren't made to feel like outsiders. "We will welcome with open arms anyone that isn't hateful," says event organizer Karl Kasarda, a 6-foot-tall firearms content creator on YouTube---aka a "guntuber"---with a salt-and-pepper undercut that flops to the right on top.

Karl Kasarda, who runs the InRange TV YouTube channel, hosts several Brutality matches a year.

Photograph: Natalie Behring

Kasarda is dressed in a sandy acid-wash T-shirt and tartan cargo pants---"postapocalyptic cowboy meets dad," Gun Bunny chimes in. A 51-year-old cis white man whose love of subcultures spans hacking, industrial music, and a stint as a minister with the Satanic Temple, Kasarda eschews the title of "leader." On the contrary, he says he has "a problem with authority" and "flirts" with the idea of anarchy. But there is no question he is largely responsible for building this alternative gun community, which he and others describe as the "punk rock outsiders of the shooting community."

"If you want to learn about guns, ask your spicy trans girlfriends."

His movement started about a decade ago with a YouTube channel, InRange TV, which now has around 930,000 followers. Kasarda's videos frequently focus on firearms history he believes many conservatives in the gun world would love to forget, like slave revolts, members of a Native American tribe kicking the KKK's ass in a standoff in North Carolina in 1958, and a possibly trans midwife in Colonel George Armstrong Custer's cavalry. The channel's description says it's "actively anti-racist, pro human liberation and LGBTQ+ rights," and Kasarda is a champion of "2A For All," the belief that everyone, particularly minorities, should have access to arms. While that might seem like a natural stance for any gun-loving American, Kasarda's views have pissed off right-wing gun nuts so badly that there are years-long angry threads about him on AR15.com and Kiwi Farms, a forum notorious for harassing trans folks. "We don't want to talk about marginalized communities depending on firearms because we don't like the marginalized communities," Kasarda says, of how right-wingers see the issue.

These tensions have gotten worse under Trump 2.0. After the president was reelected, left-leaning and queer-focused firearms organizations and classes like the Liberal Gun Club and the Pink Pistols told me they were seeing major spikes in interest and attendance. In early September, media outlets reported that Justice Department officials were considering a gun ban for trans people. In response, one trans gun content creator recommended trans Americans who'd been planning to purchase firearms "do so now."

Seconds before he was shot to death, Charlie Kirk shared a myth about trans people propagating mass shootings. An attendee at one of his Turning Point USA events asked him, "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?" to which Kirk replied, "Too many." Numbers from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive find that there have been five confirmed trans or nonbinary mass shooters between January 2013 and September 2025, making trans people responsible for less than 0.1 percent of the 5,748 mass shootings the group tracked in that time period.

Neither that data, nor the fact that the suspect in Kirk's killing is not trans, has stopped the right from using his death to further its crusade against transgender Americans. Bolstered by an early Wall Street Journal report, which cited an inaccurate federal memo saying authorities suspected there was "transgender and anti-fascist ideology" carved into some of the bullet casings at the scene, prominent Republicans have said trans people should be locked in mental institutions or not be allowed to use the internet. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, a policy blueprint for the Trump administration, is now calling for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to create a "Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism" category for domestic terrorism.

As with many pro-gun Americans---and I've talked to lots on the left and right---plenty of Brutality match attendees are concerned with self-defense. "People see a threat, they're scared," says Jane Bird, a soft-spoken trans educator in her late thirties. We're chatting inside the clubhouse at the Parma Rod and Gun Club as the shooters prepare for the day. It's a basic shack, equipped with a bathroom and water and swarming with an ungodly number of flies. So is the rest of the range---apparently a result of a local farm's recent fertilizer deployment. Bird is resting before her plan to compete tomorrow in the Roaring 20s division, where she'll be cosplaying as Corporal Betsy, a lesbian character in Fallout: New Vegas. (Other divisions, like Cyberpunk and Space Cowboy, determine what styles of guns people can use---modern or historic.)

Trans educator Jane Bird.

Photograph: NATALIE BEHRING

Photograph: Natalie Behring

Bird lives in Iowa, a state that recently removed gender identity as a protected class from its Civil Rights Act. She doesn't want her real name used here because, as someone who works with kids, she believes it would "be very, very, very easy to end up on the LibsofTikTok or Tucker Carlson." In recent months, Bird and a handful of other progressive shooters have been hosting free self-defense 101 classes for marginalized people. Sometimes, that just means helping people realize that firearms aren't suited for them. "There's almost a stereotype, an in-group stereotype, that if you want to learn about guns, ask your spicy trans girlfriends," she says. "I'm now, I guess, one of those."

She's a good shot. She should be---growing up in Wisconsin, her dad, a competitive shooter since the '70s, was "buying guns for me before I was born," she says. Both the rifle and handgun she's using this weekend were his. She took a break from them in her twenties, due to the mental toll of being closeted. "I didn't want to be around anything that made self-harm easy," she says. The decision to come out also alienated her from certain family members, including her grandfather, who refused to call her by her name.

After she started getting back into shooting around 2019, she came across InRange TV through some friends at a since-defunct Iowa chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association. Her first reaction to a Brutality match was, "I could never do that." Now, she's not only doing it, she's part of InRange's staff, in charge of making their logos and designs. She shows me one of her patches---a mama possum carrying armed babies on her back; her water bottles are decked out in stickered slogans like "Protect Trans Youth."

Bird has been to two Brutality matches this year. (For non-staff, the competition fee is $300 to $400.) She contrasts the vibe at those events with that of a local shooting club. "The last time I tried to show up, there were two other women there, and when the second arrived, the first one said to her, 'I'm glad there's another real woman here for a change,'" Bird says. "I just decided it's really not worth it trying to go to those anymore."

A Brutality match attendee in Parma, Idaho.

Photograph: Natalie Behring

Even before Kirk's death, right-wing personalities like Andy Ngo were sharing images of trans people taking up arms on social media, implying they present a threat. Following the arrest of Kirk shooting suspect Tyler Robinson, that paranoia reached a fever pitch, with many ostensible supporters of the Second Amendment suggesting trans people be stripped of their arms. "How much do you want to bet we are going to find out there is a Trans terror cell that groomed Tyler Robinson and possibly even provided him with the gun to kill Charlie?" asked MAGA influencer Laura Loomer on X on September 13, following up with a slur. "There are literally shooting clubs now where removed meet up to learn how to shoot rifles and they wear shirts that say 'Kill fascists' and 'the 2nd Amendment is for shooting cops.' They are training for war. It's very dangerous."

Reader, they are not training for war. Certainly not at this event.

Instead, I've been getting the tea about how Brutality matches are a kink-friendly space from Deviant Ollam, a 48-year-old hacker and guntuber with an "arm trans women" patch above his right butt cheek and "Abolish ICE" stickers he's handing out freely. Ollam is poly, pansexual, and currently figuring out his status with Gun Bunny. The two of them, who have 180,000 and 22,000 YouTube subscribers, respectively, affectionately hold each other throughout the weekend. Bunny's boyfriend, who is married, poly, and wearing a "Pro Gun, Pro Gay, A Better Way 2A" shirt, is also here.

Gear at the Brutality match.

Photograph: Natalie Behring

Competitors at the event used modern and historic guns.

Photograph: NATALIE BEHRING

I follow Ollam onto a platform about 20 feet up a watch tower to start his challenge---long-distance shooting to take down colonial attack ships on this fantasy version of Mars. But 30 seconds after he pops off a few shots with his rifle, people start shouting "Fire!" They don't mean gunfire. Ollam's shots spark a grass fire in the dry, 90-degree heat. It's spreading fast and wide---huge plumes of smoke blowing into the air---and we all make our way closer to the range's parking lot as we wait for emergency crews to arrive.

With my reporting plan literally up in flames, I decide to meet with Tacticool Girlfriend, one of the few prominent trans guntubers, at her hotel room in nearby Nampa. Earlier in the day, before the event came to a sudden halt, I watched her shoot targets out of an abandoned school bus with an AR-15, later placing third at that stage. I was impressed by her speed and marksmanship. In the poorly lit room, which she's sharing with two fellow trans women shooters, her content-creation prowess comes to life. She knows her angles, and that's harder with a bulky AR-15 involved. She is striking. Her thick, black eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones make her stand out in a crowd, even when her mouth is covered by her keffiyeh, which she wears to hide her identity.

Trans guntuber Tacticool Girlfriend.

Photograph: Natalie Behring

Unlike some of the others, Tacticool Girlfriend, who is also a "straight-up" anarchist, says she's never felt unwelcome at any shooting events. Her friend, whom I'll call Nancy (they both ask that I not use their real names), even jokes that they love coming to small towns because people generally don't "clock" them as trans. But they did get some looks at a gun store, Nancy adds, so they tried to fit in. "As soon as we started talking shit about Gavin Newsom, they got real friendly," Nancy says. "It's annoying, because it's like, yeah, like, you hate liberals and I hate liberals, but not for the same reason."

Tacticool Girlfriend's interest in firearms stems from being a history buff doing Soviet Red Army reenactments, but leading up to Trump's 2016 win, she started training in earnest, with modern guns. "I just kind of saw the writing on the walls, like where America was going," she says. She's also been the target of threats and paranoid accusations. While she carries at all times, to be prepared for a worst-case scenario, she says she knows it doesn't guarantee her safety---and she's not seeking confrontation. "People give us way more credit than we actually deserve," she says. "We're just dressing up in our little costumes and shooting guns for fun."

At a backyard gathering of Brutality match shooters later that evening, Kasarda tells me about his YouTube interview, in January 2021, with Tacticool Girlfriend. At the time, he'd noticed her YouTube channel, which now has almost 67,000 subscribers, and wanted to signal-boost her. They talked about shooting matches and "stuff we liked." They didn't talk about trans issues, or even the fact that she is trans. Still, everyone lost their shit, Kasarda says. "What that boiled down to was a realization that I don't think there was a way to fix the old gun community," he says. There were people he had to ask to leave the InRange community. But he also lost half of his Patreon income and "most" industry contacts. (He doesn't accept sponsors because he feels they're a "corrupting influence.") "We've had to really build our own path forward," Kasarda says.

Kasarda's ability to rally people almost has me feeling a sense of kumbaya about the community he's helped create. One that is about to be tested again.

"Reverend Charles" dressed as a martian at the Brutality match.

Photograph: Natalie Behring

In the weeks following Kirk's killing, everything ramps up. I watch the conservative rage machine deploy against trans people. There's a witch hunt for Robinson's roommate, whom Utah governor Spencer Cox alleged is trans---a rumor that spread quickly. (This despite the fact that the roommate, whom Cox also described as "incredibly cooperative," has not publicly commented on their gender identity.) My editors and I discuss if and how to proceed. I think about the photos and videos of trans people on gun ranges being used to drum up fear, and wonder how---or if---our reporting can avoid the same fate.

I check in with my sources to see how they're reacting to the news. There is a wariness in everyone. A sense that the temperature can't be turned down, that some people cannot be defused of their conviction that we're in an ideological war---or maybe even the beginnings of a real one. There are also nerves about how this piece will come together, but also a desire for their stories to be heard and told accurately; that's about all I can offer, but it seems a worthwhile effort.

Bird tells me that, the week Kirk died, she'd had a range day planned to help a trans woman friend select her first firearm. A couple days after the shooting, she went to a gun store to pick up ammo for the session. "That is the most stared at I have been at a gun store for years," she says. It's a shop she's been to before, where she's normally asked if she needs help finding anything. This time, she says, people edged out of her way and avoided talking to her. Immediately after Kirk's death, she remembers thinking, "Oh, please don't let it be one of us." Even though Robinson isn't trans, she feels people like her are being punished "collectively."

But Bird does offer glimpses of optimism, in small ways. In August, a family member died, and she reconciled with her grandfather---the one who couldn't accept her transition---at the funeral. "The first thing he said to me was 'Jane,' and he gave me a huge hug and called me by my name again, and said, 'Your grandpa's finally come around.'" And despite the fact that she disagrees politically with many of the people she encounters at her local gun range, an instructor recently reminded members that the "Second Amendment has to be for everyone."

Kasarda, meanwhile, is still fighting toxicity within the wider gun community. A few hours after Kirk was shot, he posted on Bluesky denouncing the crime: "Assassinations are not self nor community defense. This country is not at war, and we should all strive for it not to be. Violence begets violence and it is never acceptable to instigate it." Then he sat in his home office and cried. Forums like AR15.com and Kiwi Farms still blamed him and accused him of being in "cya" (cover your ass) mode. Authorities still haven't stated Robinson's motive, though an indictment listing the charges against him, including aggravated murder, includes an interview with his mother saying he started leaning "more to the left," due to his "pro-gay and trans rights" views. Kasarda doesn't think it matters much. "We're headed to some very bad things as a result of this," he says.

The competition combines physically exhausting tasks with marksmanship.

Photograph: Natalie Behring

When I check in on Tacticool Girlfriend, she compares this moment to Italy's Years of Lead, a period of left- and right-wing terrorism from the late 1960s to the 1980s, in which hundreds of people were killed in over 14,000 attacks. If America is going to have another civil war, she predicts, it'll be closer to that than anything else.

Still, she says, she likes the life she's made for herself here, and she doesn't want to give it up. "Being a trans person in the world is inherently dangerous," she says. "There are people who hate us for no good reason, no matter where we go." At the end of the conversation, she tells me she has another shooting competition next weekend.