The players could boycott it. Maybe they should be the ones to show some steel?
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Yep, thatâs the difference. Is there a threat to the visiting fans?
Arguably, in order to present a decent face to a watching world, law enforcement will be on their best behavior and ICE will be nowhere near the World Cup.
But visiting fans will obviously be watching what is going on and I would imagine many will vote with their feet.
If there is no boycott, and I donât expect there to be, ideally it will be poorly attended and the stories around the World Cup will be about empty seats, or how they had to scramble at the last minute to get locals in there in an effort to keep up appearances.
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With the ticket prices they arenât targeting travelling fans. I also think the way the tournament is being structured and the logistics of it doesnt lend itself to the great TV images of large fan groups getting ready for the game. Imagine how silly the great Dutch march to the stadium would look making its way through terrain
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Sure, I knew someone would say that tbh. Weâre seeing developments like that in Germany too. Still, nowhere near as extreme as in the US (yet), at least imo.
And we still have things like the BBC and our German public broadcasters, as flawed and under attack as they are.
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I dunno, the Dutch are quite adept with low lying wetlands!
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Aye, look at CNN as just one example. Today people get wound up about the fucking Scott Jennings fella every day given space to play the role of shameless both siders who is handsomely paid to just be as disagreeable as possible and try to gin up some great viral clipable content. But he is maybe the 5th different person who has been paid by them to play them this role since Trump was first elected. Each of them push the limits until they finally cross a line and then ensuring the streak reamins unbroken CNN replaces them with an identikit new version the following day and the sequence continues.
This isnt new. They do this because this is the model 24/7 tv news has used since the beginning and even if they recognized that Trump was different they didnt have any other way of thinking about how to cover it than this theatre production.
The print media is a bit different, but their commitment to what they think is objectivity makes them incapable of actually calling balls and strikes and instead thinks that the lying liars lies are just as fit to publish as a take on what happened as what we all see with our own eyesâŠand I guess if we present both sides the reader can decide for themselves what is true.
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And also we have a main stream press who love promoting people like thisâŠ
https://x.com/RepMGP/status/2015239064195145808?s=20
The hetrodox thinker willing to speak out against party orthodoxy. âWOuldnt we be a better country with more MGPs?â
Yet once these people (often far less intellectually capable than they are presented as) are presented like that their entire frame of reference becomes âhow do I zig when everyone else is zagging?â to the point they both sides a state sanctioned execution of a US citizen
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âWhat youâre seeing and what youâre reading is not whatâs happening.â - Donald Trump 2018
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Amongst other demands to be met for the removal of ICE from Minnesota , US Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Gov. Tim Walz Saturday urging him to repeal sanctuary policies and share Medicaid, food assistance and voter data with the federal government to âbring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.â
Remember Trump saying his biggest regret was not going in and getting the voter machines from the States he lost ?
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Interest rates are going down but yields continue to rise. Thatâs the inverse of what should happen and it is the market telling the Treasury department it no longer wants to be a part of US debt like before. As you say, this is certainly the case with foreign governments which are emptying their coffers of US treasuries at an alarming rate. China alone has almost halved itâs holdings of US bonds to USD680bn, replacing it with gold. Russia has done the same and most other European nations are too rebalancing their holdings in favour of gold. Why? As Trumpâs latest enemy Jamie Dimon says; âGold is money, everything else is creditâ.
De-dollarisation is ongoing globally as the US debt crisis approaches itâs event horizon. The wealthy and foreign governments are already making their strategic protective measures, dumping USD currency for safer havens like metals, property, stable currencies etc⊠but if you still hold eight trillion of US debt like Europe does or 1.2tn like Japan alone, then when the shit hits the fan nobody is going to escape the consequences. Especially the average family with USD savings, pensions and mortgages.
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I used to have an advisory role with a pension fund, and US Treasuries were a significant part of the portfolio. That fund has completely exited US Treasuries now. Who knows how many entities have done or are in the midst of doing that? The internet fantasies of the whole world âcalling in the loansâ are just that, but the slow and steady unwinding of positions will produce similar pressures over time.
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Exactly. Thereâs no hiding the paper trail and the charts of foreign government holdings of US debt show they have retreated to levels not seen the mid 90âs. Everyone is unloading US treasuries except Japan which is on a suicidal mission if there is even a hint of US default. Within 18 months US debt repayment could be at 1.3tn a year, more than defense, medicare and medicaid. Unsustainable.
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I think it could hit into that range this year. Projections had it reaching there circa 2030, but with somewhere between 24 and 30% of all US government debt now in instruments of less than one year, the aggregate interest rate is a good deal more elastic than it has been historically.
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Letâs face it, somethings got to give. Time to abandon ship and seek safer havens. You donât want to get left behind.
I am long out of the US market. Heck, I changed my toothpaste brand to stop using an American product.
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You leave out possibly the biggest red flag. A lot of their new recruits are vets that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you are giving a gun and instructions to walk around in public to a bunch of ex-soldiers who potentially could have PTSD and send them into situations that would not be surprising to hear have caused flash backs
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Me too. Dumped everything long ago and started buying physical silver three years ago. Cash holdings all transferred to CAD.
Alex Jones started out as someone radicalized by Ruby Ridge and then was on site at Waco reporting about government over reach. Now heâs at âif the cops do it then its obviously justifiedâ
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This is a good substack column in Closer to the Edge about the propaganda machine that goes to work to manufacture lies as soon someone like Alex Pretti is killed.
The best way to resist a fascist authoritarian regime is to reject the propaganda and tell each other truth. That will make the militarization of America much more difficult to sustain.
By Brook T Winchester
Closer to the Edge substack
Jan 25, 2026
THE FIRST LIE
When a federal agent kills someone, the first press release is the most important document in the case. It sets the emotional coordinates for the public. It decides whether the victim is mourned or dismissed. It determines whether outrage metastasizes or dies quietly. So DHS did not say, âWe shot a nurse who was holding a phone and got too close to a chaotic operation.â They said, âWe neutralized a violent threat.â That framing was not an accident. It was damage control in uniform.
Because if Alex Pretti threatened federal agents, then everything that followed was justified. The pepper spray. The dogpile. The gunfire. The closed ranks. The blocked investigators. The silence. If Alex Pretti was just a civilian with a phone, then the entire operation becomes what it actually was: a grotesque, militarized overreaction that ended in an unnecessary death. So they chose fiction.
THE SCENE LOCKDOWN
After the shooting, Minneapolis police and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension tried to do what normally happens when someone is shot dead on a city street: secure the scene, preserve evidence, interview witnesses. Federal agents told them to get lost. They threw up a federal perimeter. They claimed exclusive jurisdiction. They blocked state investigators even after a judge signed a warrant. They treated a public homicide scene like proprietary real estate.
This was not about jurisdictional confusion. This was about evidence control. Whoever controls the scene controls the story. Whoever touches the shell casings first controls the chain of custody. Whoever decides when bodycam footage gets released controls the public memory of the event. And ICE and CBP do not like independent witnesses. They do not like outside investigators. They do not like timelines they donât get to edit. So they stalled. They stonewalled. They ran out the clock. That is not law enforcement. That is crisis public relations with guns.
THE SELF-INVESTIGATION FARCE
CBP has a long, documented history of investigating its own killings and declaring itself innocent. For years it even ran so-called âCritical Incident Teamsâ that showed up to scenes involving agent violence and managed evidence before outside authorities could touch it. This is not an oversight failure. It is an architecture of impunity.
The same agency that fires the bullets decides what counts as a fact. The same supervisors who approved the operation decide whether it went wrong. The same political leadership that needs a clean narrative decides when the story is âsettled.â That is not accountability. That is a closed circuit. So when DHS tells you it is conducting a thorough investigation, what it actually means is that it is deciding which version of reality you are allowed to see.
WHY THEY KEEP LYING
This isnât about one bad commander or one bad press secretary. It is about incentives. Structural, political, and bureaucratic incentives that reward lying and punish honesty. ICE and CBP are operating inside an aggressive immigration crackdown that the administration has staked its identity on. Admitting that agents killed a harmless civilian undermines the entire moral justification for the operation. So leadership lies to protect the policy. Not metaphorically. Directly.
Every fatal shooting creates exposure. Criminal liability. Civil lawsuits. Congressional hearings. Budget fights. The fastest way to shrink that risk is to label the victim a violent threat. If the dead person is a gunman, every bullet becomes self-defense. If the dead person is a nurse with a phone, every bullet becomes a potential felony. So they choose the story that lowers their legal bill.
It can often take days or weeks for evidence to surface. It takes minutes for a lie to spread. By the time video contradicts the official story, half the country has already emotionally committed to the first version. Corrections never travel as far as falsehoods. Retractions donât trend. This is not incompetence. It is strategic asymmetry.
THE MILITARIZATION DEATH SPIRAL
ICE and CBP have transformed into paramilitary forces. Masks. Long guns. Armored vehicles. Citywide raids. Surge deployments. This kind of posture creates fear and chaos. Chaos makes mistakes more likely. Mistakes make deadly force more likely. Deadly force makes cover stories necessary. The more they militarize, the more they lie. The more they lie, the more they militarize to suppress backlash.
THE PATTERN
Alex Prettiâs killing did not happen in isolation. It happened weeks after another federal agent killed RenĂ©e Good in Minneapolis. It happened amid a DHS surge that local officials say was reckless, opaque, and destabilizing. It happened in a system where detainee deaths get misreported as suicides, restraint homicides get framed as medical emergencies, bodycams mysteriously arenât turned on, footage gets slow-walked or buried, whistleblowers get sidelined, and families get fed official nonsense while their loved ones are still warm in the morgue. This is not a glitch. This is a design choice.
WHAT THIS ACTUALLY IS
This is a federal law enforcement apparatus that has quietly crossed the line from unaccountable to structurally lawless. The system rewards violence, protects lies, and punishes transparency. Alex Pretti did not die because he was dangerous. He died because he was in the wrong place when a federal crackdown collided with bureaucratic arrogance and political cowardice. And the lie machine turned on immediately because the truth would have blown a hole straight through DHSâs legitimacy.
THE REAL QUESTION
The real question is not whether Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino lied. They did. The real question is why anyone still pretends this is accidental. How many people have to die before âcontradictory initial statementsâ stops being treated like a communications hiccup and starts being recognized as what it is: a federal habit of lying to protect lethal misconduct. How many nurses. How many civilians. How many misunderstandings. How many videos that âdonât tell the whole story.â How many blocked investigators. How many delayed bodycam releases. At some point the pattern stops being deniable.
THE VERDICT
Alex Prettiâs death wasnât just a killing. It was a stress test of federal power in public. And DHS failed it in every possible way: morally, legally, and narratively.
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