February 19 Update: Billionaires Panic at Calif. Wealth Tax; LA DA's Police Amnesty; Brazil's Police Massacre Exposed; ICE Snubs Courts; The CIA's Nordstream 2 Connection; Wagner's Sabotage Ring; Palantir's Federal Billion

River ice like this hits the Hudson only a few times a decade. This is the view south from the northern tip of Manhattan (©Ali Winston)

(This week's update is in memory of Rubi, who fought the good fight and never sought out the limelight)

Hello strangers. 2026 came out of the blocks fast, and I've barely had time to pick my head up. Between the lethal immigration blitz in Minnesota, the widening crackdown on dissent/voting/'domestic terrorism' and the world-swallowing sprawl of the Epstein files, there's barely been a down moment.

A frigid stretch in the Northeast (see above) proved productive and allowed me to make up some ground on my book on policing and counterinsurgency, though it appears that we're witnessing the return end of the imperial boomerang from Iraq and Afghanistan in real time. The murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by "operators" from Homeland Security tactical teams prompted me to dig into those units for WIRED, particularly the Border Patrol's BORTAC and BORSTAR units, and the Immigration & Customs Enforcement 'Special Response Teams' to which the killers of both Good and Pretti belonged. Jake Hanrahan and I discussed Operation Metro Surge and the broader national implications of the Trump regime's immigration blitzes across the United States on a long Popular Front episode in late January. We will do a special episode of Big Terror on the deeper history of Homeland Security in the coming months., following our last episode about the extraordinary rendition & torture program of the 2000s and 2010s.

For Bleeding Edge's paid subscribers, I also explored the trajectory of ICE SRT agent Jonathan Ross, Renee Good's shooter, whose journey from Army grunt in Iraq to Border Patrol Agent to ICE is a fitting encapsulation of post-9/11 America. While digging through federal court filings for a forthcoming project on DHS, I found a deposition from the deputy operations commander for the immigration surges in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis detailing his service as the first Customs & Border Protection liaison to Israel. Many commentators have remarked on the visual similarity between Homeland Security's immigration operations and the daily realities of Israeli military rule in Gaza and the West Bank. Turns out there's a bit more to that...

On other topics, I did a couple podcast appearances about the 764/Com exploitation network (now one of the FBI's favorite promotional props as they carve out all references to LGBQ+ victims and pretend tackling maladjusted teenagers is equivalent to the true anti-terrorism work the Bureau has dropped to participate in immigration sweeps, pursue leak investigations and pursue that elusive Anti-Fascist boogeyman), and the Oakland Police Department's reform saga.

If you'd like to support my work on these topics, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Those court records aren't free, and there's a lot more behind that paywall about police, extremism, Homeland Security, surveillance, rogue informants and the other topics I explore.

Watch this space: I've got forthcoming pieces about Zohran Mamdani's NYPD quandary, Homeland Security, and anti-Fascism in the works in addition to more episodes of Big Terror.

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-As California Governor Gavin Newsom shapes up his inevitable 2028 Presidential Campaign, it's worth keeping an eye on the race for his successor. Particularly the money, as the Golden State weighs a ballot measure to impose a 'billionaire tax' and the state's plutocrats try to buy their way out of some modicum of wealth redistribution. While Gavin may be opposed to this small bit of (overdue) wealth redistribution, it should come as no surprise that Bernie Sanders was in Vermont's far larger Left Coast analogue this week to stump for the ballot measure.

-Nathan Hochman was elected as Los Angeles' District Attorney last year as part of a well-heeled backlash in California against 'progressive' prosecutors. While his predecessor George Gascon, the former SFPD and LAPD chief, had many issues of his own, one area of relative progress during his term was the LADA's willingness to prosecute police for on-duty crimes. Under Hochman, the largest local prosecutor's agency in the country is a reverse image when it comes to cases involving violent police misconduct. Ominous tidings especially since local prosecutors are one of the few entities in a position to hold federal agents to account, such as the Border Patrol and ICE agents who ran riot across Southern California last spring.

-It may be easy to forget amidst the firehose of daily horrors, but last October saw the single bloodiest police operation in Brazilian history. A planned ambush of the Commando Vermelho gang's narcotics operations in Rio de Janeiro's TKTK favela led to an hours-long running gun battle, civilians being held hostage, and residents cowering in fear as thousands of heavy-caliber rounds ricocheted around their neighborhood. In the end, four police officers and 118 civilians, many of whom were not CV members, were killed. I've never been able to shake the images of bodies being laid in the favela's main square by mourning residents. The Guardian did a tremendous service by piecing together the course of this catastrophe of militarized policing in a thorough visual investigation.

-Created a little under a quarter century ago, Immigration & Customs Enforcement is a rogue agency without peer. Time and time again, judges have overturned ICE's detentions and deportations of people arrested for criminal and immigration offenses, yet the agency refuses to obey the ruling. More than 4,40 times, in fact, per this Reuters investigation, a state of affairs that prompted the chief judge in the federal circuit of Minneapolis to remark that ICE has violated more judicial orders in the past year than many federal agencies have in their entire existence.

-Remember Nordstream 2? The Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline that was sabotaged by a team of "rogue" Ukrainian special forces in 2022? That the Biden Administration reportedly knew nothing about? Turns out the Central Intelligence Agency knew all about the sabotage plans and spoke with the dive team that ended up blowing the pipeline up with a series of well-placed explosives, a move that pushed Germany onto a war footing with Russia for the first time since World War II. Phenomenal reporting from Der Spiegel, who've been out in front on this story for years.

-The notorious mercenary firm the Wagner Group was once powerful enough to challenge Vladimir Putin's seat of power. Since they were cowed into submission following the killing of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023, the Wagner Group's network used for Russian freelance sabotage campaigns across Europe, per this FT article. As usual, the pink paper found an unexplored angle in a story making the rounds in the European press and American prestige publications.

-Palantir, the Peter Thiel & CIA-funded surveillance and datamining firm that has become so toxic that it moved its headquarters from Denver to Miami this week because of incessant protests over its work for ICE and the Israeli military, has long since shed any modicum of non-partisanship. The company's MAGA turn has also proved lucrative: its federal contracts now run over a billion dollars, per my colleagues at WIRED.

BOOK - Richard Powers' Playground (2025) does for the oceans what his 2018 masterpiece The Overstory did for forests: it's a kaleidoscopic narrative that situates our own place in nature and society with an exhaustively researched depiction of the ecosystems that gave birth to humanity - and that we are currently ripping apart. In one particular subplot powers nails the social fabric of Chicago, which seems very out of place in a book that largely centers on Micronesia and the oceans. But it fits.

FILM - To Live And Die in L.A. (1985) isn't just a (lesser) TuPac Shakur track: almost a decade before that song hit California's airwaves, the patron saint of adrenaline junkie cinephiles worldwide released a film by that name which is widely considered the best neo-noir to come out of the 1980's.

The locations, soundtrack, cinematography, use of contemporary LA's avant-garde art and performance scene, the merciless plot - all of it adds up to the best neo-noir to come out of a very distinguished decade for that particular genre of film. And the chase scenes rival director William Friedkin's legendary sequence from The French Connection a decade earlier.

MUSIC - For the most part, I avoid laying my Turkish heritage on too heavily. But Anadolu Rock, the 1960's Turkish amalgam of folk music and rock & roll, is something that I'll never apologize for. Cem Karacara is my pick of the lot, a phenomenal writer and guitarist from Istanbul whose heavily political music become internationally famous even as he lived in exile from the Turkish junta in the 1980s. I picked this 1973 concert in Ankara as a good example of his peak - Turkey had just gone through the second of its many military coups and attempts. Even if you can't understand Turkish, the suffering is plain to hear in his voice.