The Secret Police Are Here

While the Professional Moderates Clutch Their Pearls

Photo by Denley Photography on Unsplash

How perfectly, exquisitely American. While the United States Congress authorizes the largest domestic police force in our nation’s history—one with a budget exceeding the military expenditures of most sovereign nations—while Marines stand guard at detention centers where human beings drink from toilets because they’re dying of thirst, while American citizens are tackled by unmarked federal agents for the crime of appearing Hispanic—the supposed guardians of our democratic discourse have discovered the truly urgent crisis of our time.

A progressive might become mayor of New York City.

The pearl-clutching is audible from here. The same people who’ve spent years wringing their hands about “norms” and “institutions” while watching them systematically dismantled have found their voice at last. Not to denounce the construction of a police state funded like a small nation’s military. Not to sound alarms about the deployment of Marines for domestic law enforcement. Not to express concern about the disappearance of legal immigrants into foreign prisons without due process.

No, they’ve discovered moral urgency in whether Zohran Mamdani accurately filled out demographic boxes on a college application years ago.

This isn’t political disagreement. This is moral invertebrate behavior so complete, so shameless, that it would make a Vichy collaborator blush. These people have revealed themselves to be exactly what they are: enablers of authoritarianism who worry more about municipal rent control than federal police state construction.

Let us examine what Congress has actually authorized, since apparently no one else wishes to do so with any precision. ICE now commands resources that would make it the sixteenth largest military force on the planet. The $150 billion allocated for immigration enforcement through 2029 exceeds the annual military budgets of Canada, Italy, and Israel combined.

This isn’t immigration policy. This is the systematic construction of a domestic terror apparatus funded at the level of a regional superpower’s defense establishment.

But the money is only the beginning. Internal emails obtained by The Guardian reveal the operational reality: senior ICE officials instructing rank-and-file officers to “turn the creative knob up to 11” when it comes to enforcement. To arrest “collaterals”—innocent bystanders who happen to be present during enforcement actions. To operate under the principle that “if it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing.”

“All collaterals encounters need to be interviewed and anyone that is found to be amenable to removal needs to be arrested,” wrote Marcos Charles, ICE’s acting executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations. The agency operates under arrest quotas of 3,000 people per day, one million per year, with constitutional compliance treated as an administrative suggestion rather than legal requirement.

This is the language of systematic state terror operating under the banner of law enforcement. When federal agents are explicitly encouraged to arrest innocent people to meet numerical targets, when constitutional protections become negotiable based on bureaucratic convenience, when American citizenship provides no protection against unmarked federal kidnapping—we have moved decisively beyond the realm of policy disagreement into territory that has a very specific historical designation.

And how has this transformation been accomplished? Not through dramatic coups or emergency declarations, but through the steady application of Hannah Arendt’s insight about the banality of evil. The deployment of 200 Marines to Florida to support ICE operations—described as the “first wave” of planned military support “in several states”—has been covered as routine administrative coordination.

The Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military forces from domestic law enforcement, has been shredded through bureaucratic euphemism. We’re told the Marines are “specifically prohibited from direct contact with individuals in ICE custody”—as if this semantic fig leaf somehow preserves constitutional principle rather than merely providing cover for its systematic violation.

But semantic games cannot disguise operational reality. Marines are standing guard at detention centers where people are reduced to drinking from toilets because they’re so desperately thirsty. Where families wait for hours outside basement processing centers only to be told their loved ones have been “lost” in the system. Where children ask “Is Papa going to pick me up from school?” while their fathers disappear into an archipelago of detention facilities guarded by the United States military.

At a federal building in downtown Los Angeles—guarded by U.S. Marines—families make their way to an underground garage and line up at a door with a buzzer at the end of a dirty, dark stairwell. This is where American democracy sends people to search for relatives who have been disappeared by federal agents operating like professional kidnappers.

The cases document themselves with the precision of an indictment: Andrea Velez, a Cal Poly graduate and American citizen, tackled by unmarked federal agents while walking to work, with local police refusing to intervene because they “don’t interfere with federal operations.” At least fifty Venezuelan nationals who entered legally and violated no laws shipped to El Salvador’s prison system based on executive decree. Jordin Alexander Melgar-Salmeron deported thirty minutes after a federal court explicitly ruled he could not be removed, with the government claiming they subsequently “lost” him when ordered to return him.

These aren’t policy failures or bureaucratic inefficiencies. They are the systematic implementation of a doctrine that treats constitutional rights as optional, due process as inefficient, and human dignity as negotiable.

The Ideological Conscription

But perhaps the most chilling aspect of this expansion isn’t its size or military support—it’s the personnel who will staff it. The nearly 20,000 new agents Congress has funded will be ideologically screened to ensure loyalty to Trump and Miller rather than to American law or constitutional principle.

This isn’t speculation—it’s the logical extension of a pattern already well-established. The Trump administration has systematically purged career professionals from federal agencies, replacing institutional competence with personal loyalty. From the Justice Department to the Pentagon, the equation is consistent: constitutional fidelity is a liability; devotion to Trump is the only qualification that matters.

Now imagine that same screening process applied to nearly 20,000 armed federal agents with explicit authorization to arrest “collaterals” and operate under numerical quotas rather than legal constraints. These won’t be career law enforcement professionals bound by constitutional oaths and institutional traditions. They’ll be true believers, selected specifically for their enthusiasm in implementing Miller’s vision of domestic policing without the inconvenience of legal scruples or moral reservations.

The agency that already instructs its agents to “turn the creative knob up to 11,” that tells them “if it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,” will soon be staffed entirely by people hired precisely for their enthusiasm for such directives. The systematic constitutional violations we’re witnessing now will be implemented by agents selected specifically because they view such violations as operational features rather than moral bugs.

This is the classic mechanism of authoritarian consolidation: not merely expanding state security forces, but ensuring their loyalty runs to the regime rather than to the law. When federal agents owe their employment to ideological conformity rather than professional competence, when career advancement depends on political reliability rather than constitutional fidelity—you get precisely what Stephen Miller is constructing with his $150 billion budget and military support.

We are witnessing the creation of a domestic force loyal to specific individuals rather than American institutions. These agents will understand that their careers depend not on upholding constitutional principles but on implementing Trump and Miller’s vision of immigration enforcement, however lawless that vision becomes.

The Journalistic Capitulation

What makes this systematic destruction of constitutional governance particularly insidious is the response of those institutions that position themselves as democracy’s defenders. The professional media class has revealed itself to be not merely incompetent, but actively complicit in the normalization of authoritarianism.

Consider The New York Times′ recent coverage of Trump’s speech where he explicitly declared his hatred for political opponents—“I hate them [Democrats]. I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate their country”—while repeating conspiracy theories about election fraud and promising to dismantle federal departments. This is textbook authoritarian rhetoric: the dehumanization of political opposition, the delegitimization of democratic processes, the announcement of institutional destruction.

And how did the Times frame this? As Trump taking “a victory lap” in a “campaign-style speech” where he “celebrated the bill—and himself.” They focused on polling numbers and political strategy, treating explicit hatred of political opponents as so unremarkable it barely merited mention in a story about legislative tactics.

This isn’t journalism—it’s normalization masquerading as objectivity. The Times is systematically training readers to view authoritarian rhetoric as routine political communication requiring balanced coverage rather than moral clarity. They’re teaching the public to interpret fascist talking points as conventional policy disagreements rather than fundamental attacks on democratic governance.

The same media ecosystem that treats systematic constitutional violations as “complex policy challenges” requiring nuanced analysis suddenly discovers infinite capacity for moral outrage over college admissions paperwork. They can forensically analyze someone’s ethnic self-identification but somehow lose all curiosity when federal agents operate like kidnappers. They can produce thousands of words about demographic categories on university forms but find no space to examine ICE’s explicit encouragement of arresting innocent people to meet numerical targets.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the deliberate deflection of attention from institutional collapse toward symbolic controversies that pose no threat to elite interests.

The Intellectual Corruption

The professional moderates who populate our discourse want us to believe we’re witnessing complex policy disagreements requiring sophisticated analysis. But we’re not. We’re documenting systematic constitutional violations designed to terrorize human beings into submission, funded by disaster relief money, implemented through arrest quotas that treat innocent people as acceptable “collateral damage.”

These people demand “respectful discourse” about the disrespectful deployment of federal police against American citizens. They worry about “divisive rhetoric” while remaining silent about the actual division of families through deportation. They fear “extremism” in language while normalizing extremism in policy.

We inhabit a moral universe so inverted that accuracy has become incivility, where calling sedition “sedition” is treated as a greater transgression than committing sedition, where documenting systematic corruption is considered worse than perpetrating it.

This represents the complete intellectual capture of liberal discourse by oligarchic interests. These people have been so thoroughly domesticated that they experience moral clarity as personal attack. They’ve learned that their careers, their social standing, their access to elite circles all depend on maintaining the fiction that we’re dealing with normal political disagreements rather than systematic institutional destruction.

The Oligarchic Calculation

Perhaps most revealing is how completely these supposed defenders of democracy have inverted their threat assessment. The same people who claim to oppose authoritarianism are more terrified of democratic outcomes they dislike than of the actual destruction of democratic institutions.

The prospect of a progressive mayor implementing rent control is treated as an existential crisis. Meanwhile, the deployment of Marines to guard detention centers is discussed as routine administrative coordination. Municipal elections that might produce progressive policy outcomes generate more elite panic than the systematic elimination of constitutional protections.

This reveals the essential truth about our political moment: the people making these arguments aren’t concerned about authoritarianism per se—they’re concerned about economic authoritarianism that might challenge existing arrangements of wealth and power.

They’ll normalize state violence as long as it targets the politically inconvenient, but they’ll shriek about tyranny if someone proposes taxing capital gains at the same rate as wages. They want democracy, but only democracy that consistently produces oligarch-friendly results. They fear revolution, but only the kind that might redistribute wealth rather than the kind that concentrates power in fewer hands.

The cognitive dissonance would be amusing if it weren’t so consequential. The same people who treat systematic constitutional violations as “complex governance challenges” suddenly discover urgent concern about democratic accountability when that accountability might produce outcomes that threaten their economic interests.

The Arithmetic of Escalation

This expansion is designed to make current operations look modest by comparison. ICE will become larger than the FBI, DEA, Bureau of Prisons, and other federal law enforcement agencies combined. We’re not witnessing gradual policy evolution—we’re documenting the rapid construction of a domestic police state with resources that dwarf traditional law enforcement.

When you provide someone who views constitutional rights as administrative suggestions the resources of a regional military power, when you deploy actual military forces to support domestic law enforcement, when you create explicit incentives for agents to arrest innocent people to meet bureaucratic quotas, when you staff that apparatus with ideologically screened loyalists selected for political reliability rather than legal competence—you get exponential escalation.

The infrastructure is operational. The legal framework has been established. The funding has been allocated. The personnel have been deployed. The precedents have been set. The ideological screening process is underway. What we’re witnessing now—American citizens arrested for their appearance, legal immigrants disappeared into foreign prisons, Marines guarding detention centers where people drink from toilets—represents the baseline, not the ceiling.

The professional moderates who refuse to acknowledge this reality, who treat systematic constitutional violations as partisan disagreements, who express more concern about progressive municipal candidates than federal police state construction—these people are not democracy’s defenders. They are authoritarianism’s enablers, and their comfortable salaries depend on maintaining that role.

The Unavoidable Choice

The choice before us is not between order and chaos, security and anarchy, effective governance and progressive excess. The choice is between constitutional government and systematic state terror, between a republic where rights retain meaning and a police state where rights become privileges dispensed at administrative discretion.

Between democracy and whatever Stephen Miller is constructing with his $150 billion budget, military support, and ideologically screened army of loyalists.

The professional moderates have made their choice. They’ve chosen comfort over clarity, access over accuracy, elite consensus over constitutional principle. They’ve chosen to normalize systematic institutional capture while expressing theatrical concern about progressive policy preferences.

But we retain the capacity to choose differently. We can choose to see clearly what is happening, to call it by its proper name, to refuse the comfortable lies that make elite discourse possible. We can choose moral clarity over false charity, accuracy over respectful silence, constitutional principle over oligarchic preference.

The secret police are here. They possess congressional funding, military support, and explicit authorization to treat constitutional rights as administrative conveniences. They operate under arrest quotas that treat innocent people as acceptable collateral damage. They disappear legal immigrants into foreign prisons and assault American citizens based on appearance. They are being staffed by ideologically screened agents whose loyalty runs to Trump and Miller rather than to American law.

This isn’t approaching—it has arrived. The infrastructure of American authoritarianism is operational. The question is whether we’ll acknowledge this reality before it becomes irreversible, or whether we’ll continue debating admissions forms while democracy dies of a thousand bureaucratic cuts.

The professional moderates have chosen their side. They’ve chosen to enable systematic constitutional violations while performing concern about progressive municipal candidates. They’ve chosen to normalize state terror while clutching their pearls about left-wing politics.

The center cannot hold when those charged with defending it have chosen collaboration over resistance. But it can be defended by those who refuse to participate in the gentleman’s agreement that treats fascism as friendly disagreement, who choose accuracy over comfort, who call evil by its proper name.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. Marines guard detention centers where people drink from toilets. Legal immigrants are disappeared into foreign prisons. American citizens are arrested based on appearance. Nearly 20,000 new agents are being hired for ideological loyalty rather than constitutional fidelity.

And the professional moderates are worried about progressive mayors.

The corruption is complete. The choice remains ours.

Remember what’s real.