Sunday, February 8, 2026

Authoritarianism-- American Style (and on fast forward)




In December 2025, three of the most careful scholars of democratic backsliding—Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt—finally said out loud, in Foreign Affairs, what many of us had been saying for months, and thinking about for years: the United States no longer qualifies as a functioning democracy. We live in what they call a “competitive authoritarian” regime: elections still happen, but the party in power is systematically bending the machinery of the state to punish opponents and tilt the playing field.

The venue matters. This is not a Substack screed. Foreign Affairs is where the Cold War foreign‑policy consensus was hammered out, where Kennan published the “X” article, where Kissinger and Brzezinski argued about détente. When that journal publishes “The Price of American Authoritarianism,” the conversation has shifted. The establishment is talking to itself about regime change.

On the core diagnosis, I think Levitsky and his co‑authors have it essentially right. Where I am less sanguine is their sense of how much time and how many guardrails we still have. Their piece leans on courts, elections, and a still‑resilient media landscape as remaining lines of defense. The past year—and especially the Minnesota crisis and election‑related moves of late January and early February—suggests those lines are thinner, and the timetable shorter, than their article allows.


1. The Silent Judicial Coup

For generations, the basic emergency brake in the U.S. system worked like this: if a president rolled out an obviously unlawful policy, any federal judge could issue a nationwide injunction—temporarily freezing that policy for everyone while the case wound its way up on appeal. One lawsuit, one order, and the deportation program or travel ban stopped while the courts did their work.

In June 2025, in Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court removed that brake. Lower courts, the majority held, had overstepped by issuing “universal” relief. From now on, they could still decide whether a policy was unconstitutional, but their orders would ordinarily protect only the named plaintiffs or a carefully certified class. Everyone else remains exposed while dozens of fragmented cases proceed at different speeds in different districts.

We’ve already seen what that abstraction means in human terms. When lawyers discovered that at least 327 unaccompanied Guatemalan children were about to be placed on planes over Labor Day weekend and dumped in Guatemala without the hearings Congress requires, they filed suit in the middle of the night. A federal judge in D.C. stopped the deportations—for ten named children, and then for a narrowly defined class of others in the same procedural posture. Some kids were literally pulled off planes because of that order. But nothing in the post‑Casa framework allowed the judge to simply say: “This kind of secret weekend airlift is unlawful for any unaccompanied child, so you must stop doing it, full stop.”

Minnesota, this January, brought the point home even more starkly. By then, ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge” had already produced two citizen killings in three weeks on Minneapolis streets, both captured on video and then carefully reconstructed by CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Renee Good’s SUV is turning away as the agent shoots her. Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, is killed days later under the same banner.

The state went to court. On January 31, Judge Katherine Menendez issued her ruling. She acknowledged that the operation “has had, and will likely continue to have, profound and even heartbreaking consequences.” She summarized evidence of racial profiling, excessive force, and other serious harms, noted that the federal defendants “do nothing to refute” much of it—and then denied the request to halt the operation. The surge stayed in place.

This is what I mean by a silent judicial coup. The forms are intact: opinions are written, constitutional violations are recognized, phrases like “profound and heartbreaking” appear in the Federal Reporter. But the function has been hollowed out. The Supreme Court has quietly stripped lower courts of their main tool for stopping unlawful programs in real time, and then used unsigned “emergency” orders on its shadow docket to keep the most contested Trump policies in effect while appeals grind on. In Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, executives spent years packing and purging courts in public view. In the United States, the Court largely did the work to itself, in doctrinal language most non‑lawyers never see.

A judiciary that can describe lawlessness and “heartbreaking” harm but structurally cannot stop it is not the bulwark Levitsky’s comparative story presupposes. It looks like a court. It does not act like a brake.


2. Media Capture, Fragmentation, and the “Deal” That Wasn’t

Levitsky and his co‑authors rightly highlight media capture as central to competitive authoritarianism. What the past year demonstrates is how efficiently that capture can proceed through ownership, lawsuits, and access worries, without a single censorship law on the books.

In just over a year, we have seen:

  • The Ellison family take control of CBS through the Skydance–Paramount merger, put Bari Weiss in charge of the news division, and position themselves to run TikTok’s U.S. algorithm while bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery (and with it, CNN).

  • Jeff Bezos fire roughly a third of the Washington Post’s newsroom, shut down desks, and push out internal critics, even as Amazon spends upward of $75 million on a Melania Trump biopic that functions as a glossy tribute.

  • Elon Musk retool X as a Trump‑aligned platform, while the administration batters legacy outlets with multi‑billion‑dollar defamation suits and regulatory threats.

These ownership changes and legal pressures are not background noise. They help explain how the Minnesota week was narrated.

Between January 23 and February 1, the country witnessed something we have not seen in decades: a nationwide strike, coordinated across cities and sectors, explicitly framed as resistance to federal killings of citizens. Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, gave an interview to The Atlantic warning that this felt like a “Fort Sumter moment”—an armed federal force testing whether it could act with impunity against his constituents. He set a deadline for ICE to withdraw, or at least share evidence with state investigators. Then he announced that he would never run for office again.

If you followed only the main headlines, you saw a different story. On January 29, national outlets ran pieces like “Democratic Governors Promise Accountability After Minneapolis,” featuring governors from New York, Illinois, and California—but not Walz. Two days later, the New York Times framed a phone call between Trump and Chuck Schumer as a “deal”: a two‑week pause in DHS spending and vague talk of “Phase 2” reforms. The impression was reassuring: protests had shifted the dynamics, Democrats had gained “leverage,” the system was working.

What didn’t make it into that “compromise” frame? Menendez’s ruling, on the very same day, denying relief and leaving the surge in place. The earlier Bondi letter conditioning any discussion of ICE withdrawal on Minnesota turning over its voter rolls and Medicaid/SNAP data. The Lyons memo, quietly circulated months before, authorizing warrantless home entry based on internal ICE paperwork. Trump’s own same‑day post calling protesters “insurrectionists” and promising that federal forces would continue to guard federal buildings “very powerfully.”

Each audience got a slice: lawyers read the ruling, Hill obsessives read about the Schumer call, the base saw Trump’s “insurrectionists” post, the general public saw clips of marches and the word “deal.” No one was forced, by coverage, to confront the integrated picture: two citizens killed on camera; zero operational change; expanded home‑entry authority; coercive demands for voter and welfare data; and a president explicitly signaling no retreat.

Authoritarian media capture in the United States does not look like a single state broadcaster marching in lockstep. It looks like lawsuits hanging over every major outlet, owners with business before the administration, Pentagon access denied to reporters who refuse to sign prior‑review pledges, and a professional culture that prefers “breakthrough” and “de‑escalation” narratives to admitting that a line has been crossed and not crossed back. The facts are often reported. They are rarely allowed to cohere.


3. Elections Under Pressure: Data, ICE, and “Nationalizing” the Vote

Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt are correct that elections remain the main arena where this regime can still be challenged. The question, nine months before the 2026 midterms, is what kind of contest that will be.

Three developments since late January are especially telling.

1. The Bondi “ransom note.” On January 24—one day after Alex Pretti was killed—Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Governor Walz that ought to be taught in every future course on competitive authoritarianism. Before the administration would even consider altering ICE operations in Minnesota, she demanded three things:

  • Complete, unredacted voter registration rolls, including partial Social Security and driver’s license data.

  • All Medicaid and SNAP recipient records.

  • An end to sanctuary policies and full cooperation with ICE detainers.

None of those first two demands has anything to do with whether armed federal agents should stop shooting people on Minneapolis streets. They have everything to do with building a centralized, federally held file linking names, addresses, citizenship and immigration status, welfare usage, and voting records — exactly the raw material needed for algorithmic purges and targeted intimidation in a close election.

Minnesota’s Secretary of State called it what it was: a ransom note. Other states, however, have already complied in whole or in part, and DOJ is suing many of the rest. Minnesota was not an outlier; it was a pilot.

2. “Nationalizing” elections. Against that backdrop, Trump’s early‑February comments are not free‑floating rhetoric. On friendly platforms he has argued that Republicans should “take over” elections in at least 15 states and that the federal government should “nationalize” voting. He has said, explicitly, that states are “merely an agent” of federal power when it comes to counting ballots, and he has joked—only half joking—about canceling the 2026 midterms altogether because “when you think about it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

In 2020, this would have been dismissed as bluster. In 2026, when the same administration is already seizing 2020 ballots in Fulton County, demanding full voter files from dozens of states, and threatening to pull ICE back only if Minnesota hands over its data, the words and the deeds line up.

3. The ICE‑at‑the‑polls threat. Finally, there is the exchange that should have been front‑page news for days. Asked about Steve Bannon’s proposal that ICE “surround the polls” in November to prevent the election being “stolen,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was not something she had heard Trump consider—and then added, “I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November.”

Given what we have just watched ICE do, that sentence is not neutral. In the last year alone, ICE and CBP agents have shot at least 25 people, killing six, including two citizens in Minneapolis whose deaths were captured on video and then forensically reconstructed by mainstream outlets. No agent has been criminally charged. In case after case, body‑camera footage is suppressed or turned on only after the shots are fired. Prosecutors quietly drop charges against survivors once it becomes clear they cannot win at trial. Text messages show agents joking about “another round of **** around and find out” and their “15 minutes of fame.”

Against that record, a White House statement that it “can’t guarantee” ICE will not be at or near polling locations is not an abstract observation. It is the state signaling that the same masked, heavily armed agents we have just seen maim and kill people may be present, in some fashion, on Election Day.

I felt the effect myself. I am a citizen, an academic, and someone who has spent years studying authoritarianism. After watching the Good and Pretti footage on loop, reading the court transcripts, and then hearing Leavitt’s line from the podium, I caught myself thinking: maybe I will vote by mail. Why risk running into those men just to stand in a line?

If that is my reflex, it is not hard to imagine the calculation in mixed‑status families or recently naturalized households. The law does not require ICE to literally stand inside polling places for intimidation to occur. The threat broadcast from the White House, in the shadow of a year of unpunished shootings, is itself a form of intimidation. People hear it. They adjust.

Taken together, Bondi’s ransom letter, Trump’s “nationalize elections” talk, and Leavitt’s refusal to rule out an ICE presence are not disconnected incidents. They are three faces of the same strategy: use immigration enforcement as a data‑gathering arm, a symbol of fear, and a lever to pry open state‑held voter files. Elections will still be held. The pool of people who feel safe participating, and the integrity of the infrastructure they rely on, are what is being quietly altered now, months before anyone casts a ballot.


4. What Follows From Naming the Regime

Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt urge Americans to avoid two opposite mistakes: pretending that Trump’s second term is just unusually sharp‑elbowed democracy, and throwing up our hands in fatalism. They are right on both counts. We live under a competitive authoritarian regime. At the same time, 2025’s off‑year elections showed that opposition victories are still possible under those conditions.

Where I part company is on the question of which tools we still actually have, and how much time they buy. In 2020, federal courts could still issue nationwide injunctions against unlawful executive orders. In 2020, video evidence of George Floyd’s killing sparked a national uprising and led to a murder conviction. In 2020, it was still at least plausible to think that if something unconstitutional happened, the courts and the press would force a correction.

In 2026, we have a Supreme Court that has disabled the lower courts’ main emergency brake, a shadow docket that routinely green‑lights Trump policies without explanation, a media system under concentrated ownership and legal pressure, and a president openly promising to “nationalize” elections while his press secretary declines to rule out ICE near the polls. Under those conditions, waiting passively for “the courts” or “the midterms” to save us is not realism. It is misrecognition.

That does not mean there is nothing to be done. It does mean we have to act as if we are already inside the kind of regime Levitsky describes, not the one some of his readers still imagine. That means:

  • Protecting local election infrastructure and officials from both legal and physical intimidation.

  • Building networks that document abuses in real time, even if they do not trigger accountability immediately.

  • Supporting what remains of independent media, and pushing back hard against feel‑good “deal” narratives that obscure the underlying continuity.

  • Speaking plainly—in classrooms, churches, union halls, professional associations—about the fact that the regime has already changed type, rather than treating each outrage as an isolated “controversy.”

Levitsky and his co‑authors have used their position to move the establishment conversation to where it needed to be: willing to say the word “authoritarian.” The task now is to update the prognosis with what the last year has shown about courts, media, and elections, and to adjust our strategies to a reality in which the old guardrails are weaker and the timeline is shorter than most people still want to admit.

Bibliography/References:  

Regime diagnosis and democratic backsliding

  • Levitsky, Steven, Lucan A. Way, and Daniel Ziblatt. “The Price of American Authoritarianism.” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2026 (published December 11, 2025). [Anchors the “competitive authoritarianism” diagnosis and discussion of weaponized state, media pressure, attacks on civil society.]

  • Levitsky, Steven, Daniel Ziblatt, et al. “How Bad Is It?: Three Political Scientists Say America Is No Longer a Democracy.” New Yorker Political Scene podcast, December 11, 2025. [Reiterates that the U.S. no longer qualifies as a democracy.]

  • Walter, Barbara F. “Stop Waiting for the Midterms to Save Us.” Here Be Dragons: Warning Signs from the Edges of Democracy (Substack), January 14, 2026. [Warns that the most dangerous period is the 6–12 months before a potentially threatening election, when autocrats move most aggressively to rig the system.]

  • Human Rights Watch. World Report 2026 – United States. February 2, 2026. [Documents broad assault on press freedom, judicial independence, and use of state power against opponents.]

Courts, Trump v. CASA, and the “silent judicial coup”

  • Trump v. CASA, Inc., No. 24A884 (June 27, 2025). U.S. Supreme Court slip opinion. [Ends universal/nationwide injunctions by lower courts.]

  • Congressional Research Service. “Trump v. CASA, Inc. and Nationwide Injunctions During the Second Trump Administration.” CRS Legal Sidebar, July 15, 2025. [Explains how Casa limits lower courts to plaintiff‑specific or class‑specific relief.]

  • “CASA’s Complete Relief Paradox.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 139, December 9, 2025. [Analyzes how Casa turns emergency relief into narrow triage rather than broad brakes.]

  • “Reining in Relief: Trump v. CASA and the Judicial Retreat from Nationwide Injunctions.” Columbia Law Review Online, January 2, 2026. [Discusses practical consequences for constitutional litigation.]

  • Sohoni, Mila. “What Trump v. CASA Means for the Future of Universal Relief in Administrative Law.” Yale Journal on Regulation (Notice & Comment), July 14, 2025. [Explains shift in remedial power and tempo.]

  • Brennan Center for Justice. “Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker — Challenges to Trump Administration Actions,” 2025–26. [Catalogues unsigned emergency orders allowing contested Trump policies to continue.]

  • L.G.M.L. et al. v. Kristi Noem et al. (Guatemalan children litigation). Case documents via National Center for Youth Law, National Immigration Law Center, Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, and Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. [Illustrates post‑Casa limits: children protected as named/class plaintiffs while policy can be replicated for others.]

  • Trump v. Illinois, No. 25A443 (December 23, 2025). U.S. Supreme Court emergency order. [Finds likely Posse Comitatus violations in National Guard deployments, followed by redeployments under new labels.]

  • Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, No. 25A169 (September 8, 2025). U.S. Supreme Court opinion. [Allows broader immigration stops, effectively licensing profiling in immigration enforcement.]

ICE shootings, Minnesota, and state‑sanctioned violence

  • “List of shootings by U.S. immigration agents in the second Trump administration.” Wikipedia (continuously updated). [Baseline numbers for 25 shootings and 6 deaths since January 2025.]

  • Wang, Philip. “‘I’m Embarrassed’: ICE Agents Speak About the Shooting in Minneapolis.” TIME, January 14, 2026. [Agent reactions to Renee Good killing, internal concerns.]

  • CNN. “How the ICE Shooting Unfolded, Step by Step” / “New Video Reveals ICE Agent’s POV on MN Shooting.” January 10, 2026. [Multi‑angle forensic reconstruction of the Good shooting.]

  • New York Times. “Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis.” Video analysis, January 7, 2026. [Shows agent not being run over; shots fired as Good turned away.]

  • New York Times. “Video Analysis of ICE Shooting Sheds Light on Contested Moments.” January 15, 2026. [Further forensic detail on Good case.]

  • Washington Post. “Video Shows ICE Agent in Minneapolis Fired at Driver as Vehicle Moved Away.” January 8, 2026. [Corroborates that the vehicle was turning away.]

  • ABC News. “‘A Beautiful Light’: Renee Good’s Family Mourns Her Death Amid Push for Answers.” January 14, 2026. [Family context, public response.]

  • New York Times. “Six Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s Widow.” January 13, 2026. [Documents retaliatory investigation into Good’s widow, resignations in protest.]

  • Democracy Docket. “After Minneapolis, Trump Ushers in Death of Independent Federal Law Enforcement.” January 15, 2026. [Analyzes federal interference with local investigations.]

  • Fox 32 Chicago. “Marimar Martinez Update: Bodycam Video Ordered Withheld in Border Patrol Agent Shooting Case.” December 19, 2025. [Chicago case where charges against victim are dropped, footage suppressed.]

  • Court testimony re Agent Charles Exum’s text messages (“Cool, I’m up for another round…”, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”). November 2025 hearing transcripts. [Shows agent gloating after shooting Martinez.]

  • Los Angeles Times. “Second Man Says Homeland Security Blinded Him at Anti‑ICE Rally.” January 16, 2026. [Santa Ana protest blinding.]

  • Fox LA. “Anti‑ICE Protester Claims He’s Blind in One Eye After Federal Officer Shot Him With Non‑Lethal Weapon in Santa Ana.” January 12, 2026. [Same incident; details on injuries.]

  • The American Prospect. “ICE Agents Can Be Charged With Murder.” January 6, 2026. [Legal framework; confirms agents can be prosecuted under state law.]

  • The Trace. “Immigration Agents Are Shooting People. Is It Legal?” January 11, 2026. [Overview of prosecution failures.]

  • Connecticut Public Radio. “What If an ICE Shooting Happened in Connecticut? A Legal Expert Explains.” January 15, 2026. [State authority to prosecute.]

Minnesota crisis (January 23 – February 1, 2026) and voter‑roll demands

  • “How the Trump Administration Survived the Backlash Against Citizen Shootings—And Advanced Authoritarian Consolidation: January 23–February 1, 2026: Nine Days of Peak Resistance That Ended With the Administration Stronger.” Books & Ideas blog (PD), February 3, 2026. [Full reconstruction of the 9‑day sequence, including Bondi letter, Menendez ruling, media framing.]

  • PBS NewsHour. “Federal Judge Says She Won’t Halt the Immigration Enforcement Surge in Minnesota as a Lawsuit Proceeds.” January 31, 2026. [Summarizes Menendez’s denial of injunction.]

  • New York Times. “Federal Judge Denies Request to Temporarily Block ICE Surge in Minnesota.” January 31, 2026. [Details of ruling; quotes about “profound and heartbreaking” consequences.]

  • Lawfare. “Minnesota v. Noem: A Hearing Diary for Jan. 26.” January 26, 2026. [Describes Menendez’s questions about coercion and voter‑data demands.]

  • The Atlantic. “Tim Walz Fears a Fort Sumter Moment in Minneapolis.” January 28, 2026. [Governor Walz’s warning and “Fort Sumter” comparison.]

  • Reuters. “Minnesota Governor Walz Rules Out Running for Elective Office, Saying ‘Never Again.’” January 29, 2026. [Walz’s exit from electoral politics.]

  • Fox News (PDF). Pam Bondi letter to Governor Walz demanding voter rolls and welfare data as precondition for considering ICE changes. January 24, 2026. [Original “ransom note.”]

  • Democracy Docket. “Democratic Senators Accuse Trump DOJ of ‘Apparent Ransom’ in Push to Seize State Voter Rolls.” January 2026. [Broader context around voter‑roll demands.]

Voter‑roll lawsuits, “nationalizing” elections, ICE at polls

  • New York Times. “Why Trump’s Calls to ‘Nationalize’ Voting Have Raised Midterm Fears.” February 7, 2026. [Explains Trump’s “nationalize elections” rhetoric and related moves.]

  • Politico. “Trump Says Republicans Should ‘Nationalize’ Elections.” February 2, 2026. [Initial coverage of Trump’s call to “take over” voting in 15 states.]

  • New York Times. “Judge Rules US Justice Department Filed a Lawsuit Over Georgia Voter Data in the Wrong Court.” January 22, 2026. [Example of DOJ suits to compel voter‑roll access.]

  • Democracy Docket. “Georgia DOJ Voter Data Access Challenge.” January 29, 2026. [Litigation over DOJ demands for full voter files.]

  • Minnesota Secretary of State. “Statement from Secretary Simon.” January 24, 2026. [Rejects Bondi’s demands; calls them a “ransom note.”]

  • Padilla, Alex et al. Follow‑up letter to DOJ regarding voter‑roll requests. January 28, 2026 (PDF). [Questions linkage between ICE operations and voter‑data demands.]

  • Rahman, Khaleda. “Karoline Leavitt Refuses To Rule Out Using ICE Agents in Midterm Elections.” Newsweek, February 6, 2026. [Leavitt quote that she “can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November”; Bannon’s “surround the polls” comments.]

  • Brennan Center for Justice. “Voter Intimidation: Federal Law.” [Explains 18 U.S.C. § 594 and federal prohibitions on voter intimidation.]

Media capture, ownership, and self‑censorship

  • New York Times. “Bari Weiss Urges CBS News to Think Like a ‘Start‑Up’.” January 27, 2026. [Weiss’s approach at Ellison‑controlled CBS.]

  • CBS News. “Bari Weiss Named Editor‑in‑Chief of CBS News as Paramount Restructures News Division.” October 5, 2025. [Official announcement of her appointment and Skydance/Paramount context.]

  • Business Insider. “Leaked Audio: Bari Weiss Tells Staff CBS News Is….” January 27, 2026. [Weiss’s internal vision for CBS News.]

  • Reuters. “What Mystery Company Offered To Buy CNN From Warner Bros.?” December 17, 2025. [Reports on large takeover bid widely attributed to Ellison interests.]

  • New York Times. “Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Guts Staff, Shrinks News Coverage.” February 4, 2026. [Layoffs and section closures at the Post.]

  • NPR. “Bezos Orders Deep Job Cuts at ‘Washington Post’.” February 4, 2026. [Additional detail on scale and scope of layoffs.]

  • New Yorker. “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post.” February 4, 2026. [Describes ideological constraints and Bezos‑era shifts.]

  • New Yorker Daily Newsletter. “Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight.” February 8, 2026. [David Remnick’s essay on WaPo’s destruction.]

Gaza, NAS, and Title VI/IHRA machinery

  • International Association of Genocide Scholars. “Resolution on the Situation in Gaza.” August 31, 2025. [States that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.]

  • International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on Provisional Measures, January 26, 2024. [Finds genocide claims “plausible.”]

  • Schabas, William. Interviews with European Center for Populism Studies and Middle East Eye, 2025. [Warns third‑party states, including the U.S., risk complicity in genocide.]

  • Bartov, Omer. “Gaza and the Threat of Genocide.” The New York Review of Books, November 2024.

  • Goldberg, Amos. “A Genocide in Gaza.” Haaretz, December 2024.

  • U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. Letter from Secretary Miguel Cardona on antisemitism and Title VI. May 3, 2024. [Encourages universities to treat certain pro‑Palestine speech as potential Title VI violations.]

  • American Association of University Professors. “Discriminating Against Dissent: Restrictions on Campus Protest in the Gaza War Era.” November 2025. [Documents campus crackdowns tied to Gaza protests.]

  • House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Staff report and hearings on “campus antisemitism,” 2024–25. [Interrogations of Harvard, Penn, MIT presidents.]

  • International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “Working Definition of Antisemitism.” 2016. [Widely cited NAS framework later used as enforcement template.]

 

Report: From Minnesota to Nationwide: How a Proof-of-Concept Operation Became Infrastructure for Competitive Authoritarian Control

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

From Minnesota to Nationwide: How a Proof-of-Concept Operation Became Integrated Infrastructure for Competitive Authoritarian Control

Between January 23 and February 1, 2026, the Trump administration killed two U.S. citizens during immigration operations, faced nationwide strikes and protests, and received a governor's warning of civil war—yet emerged stronger, securing judicial validation, extracting voter data, and neutralizing elite opposition. This was not policy failure but operational success: Minnesota functioned as a proof-of-concept demonstrating that federal forces could kill citizens, absorb massive backlash, and bank structural wins for regime consolidation. This report documents how that local crisis connects to nationwide infrastructure for competitive authoritarian control being built across six integrated dimensions.

Technical infrastructure: Palantir's ELITE system, originally contracted for immigration enforcement, now integrates Department of Health and Human Services data (Medicaid, SNAP), facial recognition (Mobile Fortify scanning protesters), social media monitoring (Zignal Labs processing 8 billion posts daily), and license plate readers to generate comprehensive dossiers on entire populations. The system does not distinguish citizens from immigrants once individuals are flagged.

Legal infrastructure: Executive orders issued September 22-25, 2025 redefined "domestic terrorism" to include ideological opposition to capitalism, border control, and "anti-Americanism," while expanding material support statutes (18 U.S.C. § 2339A) to target donors funding organizations deemed "terror-adjacent." This enabled DOJ investigations of Democratic megadonors and chilled opposition funding.

Operational validation: Minnesota proved the system functions under maximum resistance—two citizens killed, forensic evidence contradicting official claims, nationwide protests—producing zero prosecutions, zero policy changes, and instead yielding data extraction, judicial deference, and media retreat from confrontation.

Electoral infrastructure: DOJ sued 24 states for complete voter rolls; 14 states have reportedly complied. DHS modified the SAVE system to access 500+ million Social Security records, enabling cross-referencing of voter registration with protest attendance, social media activity, benefits enrollment, and "domestic terrorism" flags. This creates technical capacity for algorithmic voter purges targeting opposition voters in swing districts before November 2026 midterms.

Institutional consolidation: The White House excluded Democratic governors from the traditionally bipartisan National Governors Association meeting (February 2026), converting federalism disputes into partisan loyalty tests and preventing cross-partisan state coalitions from forming around data sovereignty and election administration autonomy.

Personalist governance: The administration has renamed federal institutions (U.S. Institute of Peace became Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace), placed Trump's image on national park passes, and tied federal infrastructure subsidies to renaming demands—officials told Sen. Schumer that Gateway tunnel funding required supporting renaming of Penn Station and Dulles Airport after Trump. This represents transactional personalism: federal resources conditioned on leader-centered commemorative rituals.

The system operates as a Complex Adaptive System satisficing for power, prestige, and property advantages by treating backlash as feedback to be measured and converted into consolidation. Industry projections indicate agentic AI deployment will reach 10-100x current levels by late 2026, enabling autonomous processing of millions of cases monthly and real-time updating of "domestic terrorism" scores as individuals post online, attend protests, or move through monitored spaces. The question is whether resistance can disrupt this infrastructure before it becomes operationally irreversible—before voter purges, before AI scaling, before donor class chilling, and before Insurrection Act invocation activates pre-compiled target lists.

I. Introduction: Minnesota as Proof-of-Concept

Between January 23 and February 1, 2026, the Trump administration faced what should have been a breaking point: a second U.S. citizen killed by immigration agents in three weeks, mass protests in dozens of cities, a nationwide economic strike, and a sitting governor warning of civil war. Yet by the week's end, the administration had not retreated. Instead, it secured critical institutional validation—a federal court ruling that acknowledged "profound and heartbreaking harm" and "deeply troubling evidence of constitutional violations" but declined to halt warrantless searches and arrests. The administration also extracted voter registration data from Minnesota as a condition for discussing any operational changes, secured a governor's complete exit from politics after his "Fort Sumter" warning, and watched as media coverage retreated from confrontation to narratives of compromise that misrepresented on-the-ground reality.

The question is not whether backlash occurred—it was massive and genuine. The question is why that backlash produced zero operational changes, zero accountability, and instead resulted in structural wins that create infrastructure for controlling the 2026 midterms. To understand this paradox requires moving beyond conventional political analysis to systems thinking. The Trump administration operates as what can be termed a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) optimizing for maximum perceived power, prestige, and property advantages under bounded rationality.[†] It treats public outrage as feedback to be measured and converted into further consolidation, not as a constraint. The system learns from each iteration: it escalates violations to test boundaries, measures the response cost versus benefit, and adjusts. When negative feedback—backlash, legal challenges, polling drops—remains low-cost, meaning it doesn't halt operations, doesn't produce prosecutions, and doesn't trigger sustained institutional confrontation, the system reads that as positive feedback and permission to continue and escalate.

This framework, applied to the nine-day Minnesota battle, reveals a deliberate pattern: Trump Invites Retaliatory Feedback (TIRF). The administration deployed provocations—citizen killings, data demands, doctrine expansions—that predictably generated backlash, then measured the response. The louder the backlash, the more cover the system had to bank structural wins while everyone watched the protests. Minnesota wasn't chaos or overreach. It was a proof-of-concept operation testing whether federal forces could kill citizens in blue cities, extract electoral infrastructure data, and absorb backlash without consequences—while preparing ground for nationwide replication. What follows explains how that local crisis connects to a broader architecture of mass political surveillance, built through legal innovation in September 2025, operationalized in Minnesota in January 2026, and now being scaled nationwide through voter roll extraction, integrated databases, and autonomous AI targeting systems.

II. The Dual Targeting Architecture: From Immigrants to "Domestic Terrorists"

The technological centerpiece of this infrastructure is Palantir Technologies' ELITE system—Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. Originally contracted in spring 2025 for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ELITE provides a map-based interface displaying potential deportation targets with names, photos, and "confidence scores" on address accuracy. The tool integrates data from multiple government agencies, notably the Department of Health and Human Services, including Medicaid enrollment records that provide addresses and household composition. ICE agents can zoom into specific neighborhoods or draw perimeters on a map to generate dossiers for every individual within that area, facilitating what one analysis termed "maximum quantity detainment, not precision targeting."

But by late 2025, evidence emerged that this immigration enforcement tool had been repurposed for political surveillance. Amnesty International warned that Palantir technology posed "significant surveillance threats" specifically to pro-Palestine student protesters and migrants. The Brennan Center for Justice documented in November 2025 that Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons publicly stated his agency intended to "probe anti-fascist and anti-ICE protesters and those that support them," promising to "track the money" and "track these ringleaders." This represented an explicit expansion from immigration targets to political dissidents, enabled by the same technological infrastructure.

The Minnesota operations in January 2026 operationalized this dual targeting in lethal fashion. On January 6, Renee Good was killed by federal agents, with authorities immediately claiming she had "weaponized her vehicle" against officers—a claim forensic video analysis by CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post later contradicted. On January 25, during peak protest visibility, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse with a concealed carry permit he never brandished, was killed after federal agents pummeled him. Trump, Vice President Vance, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately stated he was armed and had tried to "massacre" federal agents, labeling him a "domestic terrorist." By January 31, after brief rhetorical softening for Track 1 audiences (institutional media, Democratic leadership), Trump confirmed "no backing down" and explicitly called Pretti an "insurrectionist"—constitutional language with specific implications for emergency powers.

The pattern across at least 13 documented cases reveals systematic narrative construction: federal agents shoot, claim the target "weaponized a vehicle" or posed imminent threat, charge survivors with assaulting federal officers, then quietly drop charges when cases approach trial and evidence review becomes unavoidable. Marimar Martinez, shot five times by ICE agents, had all charges dropped after she survived to testify before Congress—though only Democratic members attended her testimony. The fabrication is provable: if even one shooting were justified, the administration would use footage as a centerpiece for midterm campaigns. Instead, bodycam recordings are systematically withheld, evidence is suppressed, and families of victims are investigated for questioning the official narrative.

What makes this dual targeting systemically significant is that ELITE and associated Palantir systems do not distinguish between immigrants and citizens once an individual is flagged. The software generates "confidence scores" and "bulk dossiers" based on data patterns, not legal status. Mobile Fortify, a smartphone application developed by NEC for real-time facial recognition, allows agents to scan faces of protesters, bystanders, and observers, instantly matching them against federal databases and automatically entering them into Department of Homeland Security data stores. Observers at Minneapolis protests reported being catalogued as "domestic terrorists" simply for recording ICE operations with their phones—an activity Secretary Noem has explicitly characterized as "violence" against federal agents. This creates a legal and operational framework where immigration enforcement tools—warrantless entry under the Lyons memo of May 12, 2025, racial profiling authorized by the Supreme Court's Perdomo decision of September 2025, and dragnet detention enabled by ELITE—can be applied to any population the administration labels as threats, regardless of citizenship.

The transformation of immigration enforcement tools into instruments of political control required legal infrastructure, constructed in a 72-hour period in September 2025 that has received insufficient analysis in mainstream coverage. On September 22, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order officially designating "Antifa" as a Domestic Terrorist Organization, directing all federal agencies to "investigate and dismantle operations conducted by anyone claiming to act on behalf of Antifa," and critically, ordering "investigation and prosecution of those who fund such operations." This applied material support concepts—previously reserved for foreign terrorist organizations under statutes like 18 U.S.C. § 2339A—to domestic political donors for the first time in modern American history.

Three days later, on September 25, the administration issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), establishing a comprehensive strategy to "investigate, prosecute, and disrupt" individuals and entities linked to "political violence." The memorandum redefined material support for terrorism by prioritizing prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 2339A, which criminalizes providing resources while knowing they will be used for specific offenses, and explicitly expanded focus to include "individual funders" of organizations deemed engaged in domestic terrorism. Operationally, NSPM-7 directed the IRS Commissioner to ensure no tax-exempt entities are "directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism," exposing mainstream Democratic nonprofits—including immigrant rights organizations, bail funds, and protest coordination groups—to aggressive audits designed to identify donor networks.

The ideological sweep of these directives is totalizing. Trump's September memorandum ordered federal law enforcement to focus on ideologies supposedly motivating "domestic terrorism," including "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender," as well as opposition to "foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control)." Under this framework, opposing ICE operations constitutes "extremism on migration" and opposition to "border control"—both explicitly listed as domestic terrorism indicators. Attending a protest against ICE killing citizens becomes evidence of domestic terrorism. Donating to an immigrant rights organization becomes material support for terrorism. Posting criticism of federal agents on social media becomes potential grounds for HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) investigation under the expanded mandate to target "those who fund" or support anti-government operations.

By December 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a sweeping Department of Justice memorandum providing the operational blueprint for executing these executive orders. It instructed the FBI to compile lists of entities "possibly related to domestic terrorism" and offered cash rewards for tips on "suspected acts of domestic terrorism"—a mechanism widely recognized as designed to chill opposition funding through crowdsourced surveillance. The temporal sequence is critical: these legal frameworks were constructed in September 2025, four months before the Minnesota operations in January 2026. Minnesota was not a reactive escalation. It was the planned operational deployment of legal authorities deliberately architected in advance.

The material support expansion has already produced targeting of Democratic Party donors at the highest levels. Following rhetoric labeling the Democratic Party "terror-adjacent" after the Kirk murder in 2025, the DOJ opened "inquiry task forces" investigating foundation grants from George Soros and Reid Hoffman to activist organizations. These investigations employ Palantir's Gotham and Foundry platforms to ingest bank records, offshore filings, and foundation grants, creating "link analysis" charts that visualize connections between billionaire donors, intermediary foundations, grantee organizations, and grassroots groups whose members have been arrested at protests. The legal theory being tested is that donations to organizations with any members later arrested for "domestic terrorism" (defined elastically to include protest-related charges) constitute prosecutable material support under 18 U.S.C. § 2339A, even when the donor had no knowledge of and no connection to any alleged illegal activity.

The chilling effect is the point. Preliminary inquiries require minimal evidence but allow the DOJ to freeze assets pending investigation, tie up foundations in litigation for years, and threaten placement on derivatives of the Terrorist Screening Database, including No Fly List designations. High-profile donors facing these investigations don't need to be convicted—the process itself is the punishment, and the message to the broader donor class is clear: fund opposition movements and face terrorism financing investigations. This represents a structural attack on the financial infrastructure of political opposition that operates parallel to, and integrated with, the physical targeting of protesters and the data extraction targeting voters.

IV. The Bondi Letter Decoded: Voter Rolls and the Nationwide Database

On January 24, 2026, in the midst of nationwide strike actions protesting the Good killing, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that initially appeared to be negotiation over ICE operations but now must be understood as infrastructure-building for a comprehensive political database. The letter demanded three categories of information as preconditions for any discussion of ICE drawdown: first, all of Minnesota's records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service programs, including SNAP data; second, Civil Rights Division access to voter registration rolls, purportedly authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960; and third, state cooperation and compliance, with the clear implication that federal operations would continue until these data demands were met.

This bundling is not administrative confusion. It is operational design. The Medicaid and SNAP data feed directly into Palantir's ELITE system, which already uses Department of Health and Human Services information to map addresses and generate targeting dossiers for "areas where lots of people ICE might detain could be based." The voter registration data serve a different but complementary function: cross-referencing political affiliation and voting history with protest attendance (captured via facial recognition), social media activity (monitored through contracts like the $millions spent on Zignal Labs, which processes 8 billion social media posts daily), and benefits enrollment. The result is a comprehensive profile: this individual is a registered Democrat, attended two protests in January 2026, posted criticism of ICE on social media, receives Medicaid, and lives at this specific address with a confidence score of 94%.

Minnesota refused to comply with the voter roll demand, but the state is not alone in facing this pressure. By late 2025, the Department of Justice had filed lawsuits against at least 24 states—including Colorado, Georgia, and 22 others—demanding complete voter registration rolls, ostensibly to "scrub" them for noncitizens using the modified SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) system. In late 2025, DHS secretly expanded SAVE to include data on more than 500 million people who have applied for Social Security numbers, enabling for the first time bulk searches of Social Security Administration records to verify citizenship status and cross-reference voter rolls. As of February 2026, credible reporting indicates that 14 states have complied with federal demands and provided their complete voter registration databases.

The administration's response to this emerging state-federal tension over data sovereignty has been to prevent it from developing along federalism lines by reinforcing partisan frameworks. On February 7, 2026, governors' offices learned that the annual White House meeting tied to the National Governors Association weekend—a bipartisan tradition dating to the Lyndon Johnson administration—would include only Republican governors. The National Governors Association's acting executive director criticized the decision as undermining "an important opportunity for federal-state collaboration" and announced the association would no longer treat the White House session as an NGA event. While the White House defended the move as discretionary and claimed Democrats had separate meetings scheduled, the symbolic effect is clear: access, coordination, and influence are now distributed along partisan lines rather than through federalism's traditional structure of state-federal negotiation among coequal elected executives.

This partisanization serves a strategic purpose in the context of voter roll and database demands. If the conflict over federal data extraction were allowed to develop as "states defending election administration autonomy and resident privacy," it could create a coalition including both blue-state officials protecting constituents and red-state officials protecting their own administrative control and political discretion. Vermont's Republican Governor Phil Scott exemplifies this tension: his administration complied with federal demands for SNAP recipient data (including Social Security numbers) while Vermont's Secretary of State publicly refused to share sensitive voter information, citing state privacy laws and constitutional concerns. By converting federalism disputes into partisan loyalty tests—where cooperation with Washington becomes a party obligation and resistance reads as defection—the administration reduces the likelihood of cross-partisan state coalitions that could mount effective legal or political resistance to database integration and surveillance infrastructure buildout.

This is not speculative infrastructure—it is operational. The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented in January 2026 that ICE's ELITE tool, powered by Palantir, "populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a 'confidence score' on the person's current address," and confirmed that it "receives peoples' addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes Medicaid) and other sources." Al Jazeera's December 31, 2025 investigation revealed that the Trump administration's March 20, 2025 executive order demanding dissolution of "data silos" across federal agencies has enabled unprecedented database integration, with ICE-IRS data sharing agreements (signed in April 2025) allowing immigration enforcement access to taxpayer information, and the Supreme Court ruling in June 2025 giving the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to sensitive Social Security data.

What makes this mass surveillance rather than enhanced law enforcement is the scope, integration, and explicitly political targeting. The September 2025 executive orders define "domestic terrorism" to include ideological opposition to border control and anti-capitalism, among other categories. Individuals attending protests against ICE operations are, by definition under this framework, exhibiting "extremism on migration" and opposition to "foundational American principles" of supporting law enforcement. When their faces are scanned via Mobile Fortify or CBP surveillance drones and entered into federal databases, when their social media posts are ingested by Zignal Labs' monitoring platform processing 8 billion posts daily, when their locations are tracked via license plate readers (Thomson Reuters $4.9 million contract) and cellphone tower simulators, and when all of this data is cross-referenced with voter registration information from compliant states showing Democratic Party affiliation, the resulting "fusion dossiers" are not immigration enforcement files. They are political targeting lists.

The operational goal, following the timeline identified by multiple analysts as the "Barbara Walters danger period," is algorithmic voter purges executed in spring or summer 2026, before the midterm elections in November. With voter rolls from 14 states integrated into Palantir systems that cross-reference protest attendance, social media activity, donation history (via IRS data sharing), and "domestic terrorism" flags generated by the September 2025 framework, the technical capacity exists to identify voters in swing districts who meet algorithmically defined criteria for "terror-adjacent" activity and remove them from rolls under pretexts of address verification, citizenship questions, or eligibility reviews. The precision of such targeting—enabled by AI-driven analysis operating at computational speed—allows for surgical purges: removing just enough opposition voters in just enough swing districts to alter electoral outcomes, while maintaining plausible deniability through bureaucratic language about fraud prevention and list maintenance.

V. Why This Constitutes Mass Surveillance Infrastructure

Some will argue that characterizing this as mass surveillance overstates the case, suggesting it remains targeted law enforcement against genuine threats. The evidence contradicts this in six dimensions: totalization, continuity, political intent, integration, operational validation, and personalization.

First, totalization: the infrastructure is designed to surveil entire populations, not individuals suspected of specific crimes. Palantir's ELITE system generates dossiers for "every individual within" areas agents select on a map. The Brennan Center documented that ICE can "trawl the internet for people holding anti-ICE views," "track the locations where protesters and activists gather and identify their networks of friends and family," and "identify protesters using facial recognition," with the explicit purpose of targeting "domestic terrorists"—a category the September 2025 directives define to include political opposition to administration policies. When 500 million Social Security records are accessible for bulk searches, when voter rolls from 14 states are integrated into federal databases, and when social media monitoring systems ingest 8 billion posts daily, the operational reality is population-level surveillance, not individualized investigation of criminal suspects.

Second, continuity: the surveillance is real-time and persistent, not episodic. Mobile Fortify enables agents to scan and catalog faces at protests as they occur. Penlink's social media monitoring software creates "day-in-the-life" profiles based on location data, social media activity, and online information, while cellphone tower simulators identify devices in proximity and intercept communications. License plate readers create searchable databases showing where vehicles have been, accessible via ICE's app under development through the Thomson Reuters contract. This is continuous monitoring that updates automatically as individuals move through physical and digital spaces, not surveillance triggered by specific investigative needs.

Third, political intent: the administration has explicitly stated its intention to target political opposition. Trump's September 25, 2025 memorandum lists "anti-capitalism," "opposition to border control," and "anti-Americanism" as domestic terrorism indicators. Acting ICE Director Lyons announced publicly that his agency would investigate anti-ICE protesters and "track the money" and "track these ringleaders." Secretary Noem declared that videotaping ICE agents constitutes "violence." Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino stated that all protesters are "violent rioters" and instructed officers to arrest those making "hyperbolic comments." These are not isolated statements by rogue officials—they reflect operational doctrine formalized in executive orders, implemented through DOJ directives, and deployed through ICE operations that killed two citizens in three weeks while labeling them domestic terrorists.

Fourth, integration: the databases being merged—IRS tax records, Social Security Administration files, HHS Medicaid enrollment, state voter rolls, commercial license plate reader data, scraped social media content, facial recognition matches, and donation histories—create comprehensive profiles that no single database could provide. This integration was enabled by DOGE's mandate to eliminate "data silos," implemented through the March 20, 2025 executive order and operationalized through agency agreements like the April 2025 ICE-IRS data sharing arrangement. The legal framework for this integration bypassed the Privacy Act of 1974, which was enacted after Nixon's Watergate-era abuses to prevent exactly this kind of cross-agency data fusion for political purposes. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union have documented, the Trump administration's 2025 actions represent "the demolition of Watergate-era safeguards that were intended to keep databases separated."

Fifth, operational validation: the Minnesota proof-of-concept demonstrated that the system functions under peak resistance. Despite killing two citizens, facing nationwide strikes and protests, receiving a "Fort Sumter" warning from the state's governor, and confronting forensic video evidence that contradicted official narratives, the administration experienced zero prosecutions of agents, zero operational changes, and instead secured judicial validation (Judge Menendez's January 31 ruling acknowledging harm while denying relief), extracted voter data demands, neutralized elite opposition (Governor Walz's political exit), and watched media retreat from confrontation to compromise narratives. This was not failure that would prompt system correction. It was success that validated further deployment.

Sixth, personalization: the administration has systematically attempted to rebrand federal institutions, programs, and infrastructure with Trump's name and likeness, in some cases tying federal subsidies to such renamings. In December 2025, the U.S. Institute of Peace—a congressionally established entity—was rebranded as the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. The 2026 America the Beautiful National Park pass was redesigned to feature Trump's image alongside George Washington, prompting a lawsuit arguing this violates the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act's requirement that passes feature winners of an annual photo competition. The administration has proposed $1,000 "Trump accounts" for children, a "Trump Gold Card" for expedited immigration processing (requiring a $15,000 fee plus $1 million contribution), Treasury plans for a coin bearing Trump's likeness, and announced "Trump-class" battleships and an F-47 fighter jet designation.

Most significantly, in February 2026, administration officials told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that President Trump would release federal funds for the Gateway rail tunnel project if Schumer supported renaming Penn Station and Dulles Airport after Trump. This represents transactional personalism: federal infrastructure subsidies conditioned on adopting the president's name. CNN reported that experts characterized this as having "simply no precedent" for a sitting president. While American infrastructure is often named after presidents posthumously or after leaving office, current reporting describes Trump's second-term efforts as unprecedented in scope, method (funding leverage, board appointments, executive orders), and objective (inscribing personal identity onto governance while still in office).

This personalization functions not as mere vanity but as a governance technique: by merging presidential authority with personal brand across disparate policy domains—cultural institutions, national parks, cash benefit programs, immigration processing, military procurement, transportation infrastructure—the administration creates symbolic and material incentives for loyalty that operate independently of institutional norms or constitutional constraints. Opposition to "Trump" programs becomes symbolically equivalent to opposing the president personally, while access to federal resources increasingly depends on willingness to participate in leader-centered commemorative rituals.

VI. Conclusion: Irreversibility and Acceleration

The infrastructure documented here—technical (Palantir/ELITE), legal (September 2025 executive orders), operational (Minnesota proof-of-concept), political (donor investigations, voter roll extraction), and institutional (partisan governance frameworks, personalized authority)—is not being built in case it might be needed. It is being built because regime consolidation is the objective, and comprehensive surveillance of immigrants, protesters, voters, and donors is the operational requirement for achieving competitive authoritarian control before the 2026 midterms threaten unified Republican governance.

By late 2025, this infrastructure had three components in place: Palantir's ELITE and associated systems operational since spring 2025; legal authorities established through the September 2025 executive orders redefining material support and expanding domestic terrorism categories; and data integration across IRS, SSA, HHS, and DHS enabled by DOGE mandates and the modified SAVE system providing access to 500 million records. Minnesota in January 2026 added the fourth component: operational validation under maximum resistance, proving the system could absorb peak backlash—two citizens killed, a governor's civil war warning, nationwide strikes, forensic evidence contradicting official claims—and emerge stronger with structural wins banked.

What remains is scaling, and that is where the temporal dimension becomes critical. Industry projections indicate that by late 2026, agentic AI—artificial intelligence capable of autonomous planning and execution—will be deployed at 10 to 100 times current levels in federal applications, with agents predicted to outnumber human operators 82 to 1. These are not passive tools requiring human queries but autonomous systems that continuously test hypotheses across databases, correlate patterns across domains, and generate targeting recommendations without human initiation. Applied to the integrated surveillance infrastructure described here, agentic AI transforms the threat from concerning to existential: where human analysts might process thousands of cases monthly, AI agents can process millions, updating "domestic terrorism" scores in real-time as individuals post on social media, attend protests, make donations, or move through physical space monitored by license plate readers and facial recognition systems.

The Brennan Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and international outlets like Al Jazeera have documented these developments independently, each confirming different components of the same architecture. What civil liberties organizations describe as the "demolition of Watergate-era safeguards," what technology researchers document as the "ELITE app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid," and what this analysis identifies as a Complex Adaptive System optimizing for power consolidation through systematic boundary-testing are different perspectives on the same infrastructure. The question is no longer whether this system exists. The evidence, from court filings to leaked memos to agency contracts to executive orders, is comprehensive and public.

The question is whether resistance can disrupt this infrastructure before it becomes operationally irreversible—before voter rolls are purged, before agentic AI deployment reaches predicted scale, before the donor class is sufficiently chilled, and before an Insurrection Act invocation activates pre-compiled target lists for mass arrests. Minnesota demonstrated that peak backlash, when fragmented across institutions and absorbed without operational consequence, strengthens rather than constrains the system. The machinery did not stop in response to the largest protests. It hardened. And it is now being replicated nationwide, with every state that complies with voter roll demands, every protester catalogued via facial recognition, every donor investigated for material support, and every database integrated into the Palantir spine feeding what is rapidly becoming the most sophisticated infrastructure for political control in American history.

[†] More precisely, the system "satisfices" (Herbert Simon's term from decision theory): it seeks "good enough" solutions that satisfy constraints rather than optimal outcomes. The system doesn't need perfect control—just sufficient power to prevent effective opposition

 


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