Eyes on the decay
Weekly Roundup
This week was one for the books, with Israeli aggression in Beirut leaving the Middle East on edge, Ukrainian peace talks floundering, more fallout from MTG’s announcement - she’s stepping down at the beginning of 2026; can’t handle the heat of the inner circle anymore - and more of the usual horror stories from the ICE frontlines.
Additionally, Epsteingate continued to dominate the news cycle, with Mark Epstein making claims about of an FBI redaction squad feverishly trying to protect Trump working outside Winchester, Virginia. Venezuelan airspace was cleared, likely in preparation for increasing US military presence in the are- driving tensions in the region sky-high.
On the whole, an unremarkably hectic, middle-of-a-cursed-bell-curve week further circling the drain of global capital.
Heeeeeere’s Benny!
You’re reading Surviving Late-Stage Capitalism - the best spot for cheeky armchair wonkery and thoughtful analysis alike. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the latest edition of my newsletter, which features two carefully crafted pieces on topical concerns - at home and abroad - plus a recurring satirical interlude!
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Let’s dive in.
Eyes on ICE: How Americans Are Keeping Tabs On “Meal Team Six”
If there’s one thing the American security state hates more than accountability, it’s average civilians getting organized to demand it in response to the abuses of power we’re all becoming increasingly desensitized to. ICE, in particular, lacks anywhere near enough supervision: blacked-out, tagless SUVs, no-knock raids that look like Call of Duty LARPing sessions, and mile-long “administrative warrants” printed off like CVS receipts - and which are about as constitutionally relevant - raise some serious questions about the rampant abuse and impropriety that is glaringly apparent.
But while ICE has tried its best to perfect the art of clandestine domestic repression, communities hit hardest by immigration policing have been quietly building something else entirely: a patchwork community of decentralized, DIY resistance networks that do what Congress and the courts routinely refuse to - keep an eye on the enforcers and demand they be held to account for mistreating our neighbors (usually for nothing more than being a person of color).
This is what happens when the global hegemon turns its paunchy, camo-covered domestic arm of imperialism on you and me. We are forced to develop our own tools and methods of resistance. Here are some great examples of how you can organize your “barrio” to resist “la migra”:
The Neighborhood Early-Warning Systems
Some of the most effective anti-ICE monitoring happens at the grassroots level: a WhatsApp thread run by abuelas and aunties, a Signal group pinging alerts in two or more languages, a neighborhood mutual aid squad that can tell the difference between a delivery van and a suspiciously-unmarked ICE truck.
These systems are hyperlocal, built on trust, and brutally efficient. Someone spots suspicious cars circling a minority/immigrant neighborhood? The group chat lights up. ICE starts staging at Dodger’s Stadium again? A dozen phones buzz. These folks then notify…
ICE-Tracking Organizations
Across big cities and border towns alike, people have turned monitoring into a full-time civic hobby. Some follow public scanner traffic; others log sightings of ICE convoys, raid patterns, or detainment hotspots using open-source tools - and then there’s the digital frontlines: activists cross-referencing ICE’s own contracting data, surveillance tech purchases, and vehicle fleet expansions.
It’s the DIY anti-ICE version of tracking foreign troop movements - except the guns are actually being pointed at the dishwashers and farmworkers being zip-tied and thrown unceremoniously into Budget rental vans. These ICE-tracking heroes then call up…
Community Rapid-Response Networks
These are the “show up fast” teams - neighbors, legal observers, clergy, union volunteers - who mobilize the moment a raid rumor surfaces. They’re the early-warning chats taken to the next level: people physically showing up to film, witness, intervene, and support.
Anyone who’s attended a rapid-response action knows the vibe. It’s part neighborhood watch, part civil disobedience, part “we are absolutely not letting you snatch someone without the whole block watching.”
ICE hates attention: witnesses with cameras, guys in frog costumes thrusting lewdly at their LRAD, etc. - and they tend to crash out when they have even a couple pairs of eyes on their operations. Any disruption of their ghost-in-the-machine routine is an affront to their “authority” and a reason to rethink their battle plans for the day. Communities have learned to capitalize on that and show up in force, ready to document, mock the unwanted Federal interlopers, and protect their friends and neighbors from being disappeared by these brown shirts to Alligator Alcatraz… or worse.
These regular, working-class people come together to create…
The Cultural Counter-Offensive
People aren’t just tracking raids - they’re dismantling the fear machine that makes those raids possible. Workshops at churches and union halls, teach-ins led by immigration lawyers, zines explaining “How to Spot ICE Vehicles” and “What to Say When They Knock,” kids passing around civil rights Cliff Notes like playground gossip. There’s a whole DIY information ecosystem that rewires power at the neighborhood level.
This is the information war ICE didn’t plan for. The communities they target aren’t passive subjects - The American public is creating: their own resistance strategies; their own media networks; their own protective infrastructure; and their own narratives.
Why This Matters
ICE relies on three things to function: secrecy, surprise, and the assumption that most Americans won’t pay attention. Once you strip away those three pillars, the agency suddenly looks less like a fearsome arm of the state and more like a militia made up of husky LARPers that can’t operate when the anyone has them in their sights for once.
These community-born systems do more than simply protect vulnerable people, though doing that alone would be a feat worth celebrating. They further expose the contradiction at the heart of modern American immigration policy: an agency claiming to defend “public safety” but panicking the moment the public starts actually paying attention to their behavior.
Imperialism doesn’t just happen abroad; When it runs out of skulls to crack overseas, it puts on a balaclava, drives an unmarked SUV through a line of protesters, and tear gasses an elementary school during recess - all in the name of “homeland security.” When those abuses happen, the most radical thing ordinary people can do is what they’ve been doing already - keep their eyes open, keep each other safe, and refuse to let Meal Team Six operate in the shadows with impugnity.
Dear Chairman Mao,
I am writing to share with you a tale of true sorrow, a let-down I can hardly bear to speak of, much less with anyone less elightened and class-conscious as you are. My latest paramour - with whom I have been quite enamoured until recently - just came out to me and I don’t think we can keep seeing each other; I’m not one to kink-shame, but I’m just not into lobbying for the military-industrial complex, and that’s their biggest turn-on.
It sickens me, knowing this person I’d been intimate with had not only kept this from me but let me make room in my heart for someone so fundamentally broken. Funnelling arms into war torn regions shouldn’t be what get’s your engine going - call me old-fashioned, but that’s just immoral.
I’ve broken it off with them, but a part of me misses them still. How can I move on when every foreign policy story reminds me of them now? I’m so pent up I can’t even read a chiron without having to leave the room.
Please Help,
“Field Full Of Unexploded Ordinance”
Dear “Field Full Of Unexploded Ordinance,”
You’ve done the right thing by breaking things off immediately - there can be no comfort given to class traitors like your former partner. No salary - or knee-rattling explosion - is worth selling your soul to Raytheon. I know it’s hard to see yourself with someone else so soon, so picture yourself free of attachments as a start along the uphill path that is the life of a goodhearted comrade like yourself.
Personal sacrifices in the name of the movement such as yours must be celebrated; this is the perfect use-case for my nationalization of the escort industry. Let your fellow workers care for your needs, and depend not on arms industry lobbyists.
Faithfully Yours,
Chairman Mao
… and who benefits when both conflicts are perpetuated…
Two Wars, One Pattern: What Imperialism Looks Like When The Cameras Are Rolling And Everybody’s Doomscrolling
Part I - Russia and Ukraine: A Colonial War Wearing a 21st-Century Name Tag
When Russia rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin didn’t bother with the usual international diplomacy niceties. This wasn’t some tragic, yet good-faith misunderstanding between neighbors or a “security dilemma gone wrong.” It was the same old imperial script dusted off and broadcast on state TV: Ukraine isn’t a real country, Ukrainians aren’t a real people, and Moscow has the right to redraw the map by force because it wants to.
That’s the whole argument. Everything else is ornamentation.
And when a state decides an entire nation is basically a bureaucratic misprint, the violence follows with grim predictability. Independent investigators and human-rights monitors - people who actually sift through rubble and testimony instead of performing geopolitical improv - keep documenting the same patterns: mass abductions, filtration camps, torture sites, systematic strikes on housing blocks, power stations, water systems, and the forced transfer of children into Russia’s custody.
These aren’t random wartime tragedies. They match multiple criteria scholars use when assessing whether a government is trying to destroy a national group “in whole or in part.” You don’t need a magnifying glass to see the through-line: Russia’s war is an imperial land grab premised on the idea that Ukrainians shouldn’t exist as a sovereign people. Once you grant yourself that premise, you give yourself permission for atrocities on an industrial scale.
And the global response? Near-unanimous condemnation, sanctions, diplomatic freeze-outs, cultural isolation - the full package. The West has presented it as a moral awakening, a principled defense of international law.
Hold that thought.
Part II - Israel and Gaza: Siege, Displacement, and the Politics of Erasure
Shift scenes to Gaza, and suddenly the moral clarity softens into a polite haze of “complexities” and “both sides” and “tragic necessity.” The world’s most technologically surveilled strip of land becomes the stage for one of the most devastating military campaigns of the century, a genocidal slaughter waged by the IDF - AKA the “most moral army in the world,” and half the political class can’t decide whether to look directly at it or use those eclipse viewing glasses you thought you forgot about. Try not to think about the ethnic cleansing before our eyes, in real time- reminisce about that time you blinded yourself staring at an eclipse or something because you must be blind if you still buy that..
Israel’s treatment of Gaza long predates the current war: blockade, enclosure, periodic bombardments, entire generations living under the architecture of deprivation. After October 7th, that system escalated into something far more sweeping. Whole neighborhoods erased overnight. Displacement orders that shoved more than a million people from one shrinking corner of rubble to another. Attacks on hospitals, aid convoys, refugee camps, and what little infrastructure remained that make survival itself a moving target punctuate most days.
Genocide scholars and legal experts - yes, the same analytical frameworks invoked regarding Ukraine - have pointed out that Israel’s conduct checks multiple boxes: mass killing of civilians; deliberate infliction of conditions of life that no population can withstand; open declarations from senior officials describing a people, not an armed group, as the enemy. You don’t need to wait for some future court ruling to recognize the shape of what’s happening. The pattern is not subtle. It is systematic.
And for Palestinians, the consequences are particularly acute: whole lineages erased; cities cratered; water contaminated; disease exploding; and half the population pushed into starvation conditions. The scale of loss is so vast that the usual euphemisms collapse under their own weight, yet Netanyahu still does his weekly song-and-dance before funneling money to Tim Pool and Dave Rubin (speculation, though plausible speculation). There is one way this ends if Israel does not change course - or is not compelled to by the international community - very, very soon.
Conclusion - Same Crimes, Different Punishments
Put the two conflicts side by side and you get a very unflattering portrait of the world order under which we live.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza are not identical, but they are driven by the same engine: the belief that a stronger power can decide, unilaterally, that the people living on a piece of land are expendable or removable. In both cases, the aggressor has carried out acts that match internationally recognized genocide indicators. In both cases, civilians are treated as the raw material of someone else’s geopolitical project. In both conflicts, the military-industrial complex transmogrifies the dead into dividends for their C-suites.
Here’s the difference:
Russia wages its war without U.S. blessing, and is punished accordingly; Israel wages its war with U.S. backing - financial, military, and diplomatic - and is more-or-less shielded from scrutiny.
Same logic. Same patterns of destruction. Same human cost.
Different verdicts, because the judge’s chair is already occupied.
If international law means anything at all, both wars belong in the same category: illegal, imperial, and morally indefensible. Two sides of the same coin - one condemned, one excused - not because the crimes differ, but who stands to gain from watching as the bodies keep piling up.
Final Thoughts For The Week
We did it everybody, we lived through Thanksgiving. Despite skyrocketing costs for food and essentials we (most of us at least) scraped through. Just like always. And it’s that scraping by, the constant state of low-grade anxiety that sits on your chest, a weighted blanket of precarity. This year, one of the things I’m thankful for is having this opportunity to contribute to public discourse in some small way; and for you, dear reader- you are highly appreciated, especially when you subscribe and follow me on Bluesky.
;)