Politics

It's dawning on me more that ICE (itself) is currently a farce. Everyone in it signed up to be a cowboy (which was to be expected) but they don't look any more competent than January 2025. They lack the attention to detail and foresight to actually follow through and be a massively oppressive force. Top to bottom, everyone wants to brandish guns and give orders and brown nose the fascists above them. Nobody actually wants to get hurt or face public backlash.

Their actions are boisterous, aggressive and shocking but fundamentally performative. In a headline they burst in and tackle children and do all kinds of heinous shit, but watching it on camera is usually not so chilling. Nobody knows what to do, nobody knows how to handle their gear, they're scared to take any initiative unless they have a 2:1 numbers advantage or are preying on the weak.

They're shit at crowd control, they look lost when an oppressed civilian doesn't follow the script. They're obese, slow and not too bright. It makes me wonder if this is what the brown-shirts and SS jack boots were like. Would they have been as successful if the German public saw more candid footage?

Now that doesn't make them less dangerous; a gun is still a gun. But they don't scare me nearly as much as some more mature PMCs or the US military/intelligence branches. It takes real precision to dominate a populous, even modern Orwellian surveillance is no substitute for unflinching dogmatic violence.

But on the flip side: those government agencies have also gutted competency for loyalty and the PMCs don't have the legal immunities/authoritarian pedigree. As it currently stands, the administration may be bluffing their strength even farther than it first seemed... Will they find their Goering/Himmler/Heydrich to lubricate the fascist gears or are they all too preoccupied with looting America?