Friday Update on the Regime's War on America

Chicago and New York infrastructure hammered, kids arrested in Chicago, Bad Bunny News

New rule: From now on, I refer to the Trump regime as the Axis. Unless I change my mind.

Those who resist are the Allies. We may say goodbye to some of our allies after this is over. But for now, if you are against the regime, you’re an ally.

The worst that political discourse should be is when I go to lunch with a “conservative” friend, and by this I refer to old-style conservative, we argue for a bit over politics, and one of us picks up the tab before we fist-bump and go our separate ways.

But today, the regime is at war with America. All hands on deck. Axis vs. Allies, just like in that bigger war over fascism.

Screenshot for IceBlock, a reporting app designed for reporting and recording ICE appearances in your neighborhood

This week’s Axis Attacks

It’s not possible to cover every attack by the Axis. So I won’t try. I’ll only cover a few that got my attention. First, I’ll cover the attacks, then the responses (if any).

The South Shore attack

Imagine waking up at 1:00 a.m. feeling your building shaking.¹ You know it’s not an earthquake, because you live in Chicago. But you have heard that a fading, angry old pumpkinhead has declared war on Chicago, so you sit straight up.

Guess what? It’s a helicopter landing on your building. You quickly discover that the people jumping out of it in military fatigues are not there to fix your plumbing.

You want to go to sleep, but you can’t, because five masked men bust your door down and tear up your apartment.

The agents snatch every single person in your building, including you, an American citizen.² You don’t even speak Spanish.

All the kids from the building are zip-tied to each other.

This is what happened to an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood early this week.

Some unconfirmed reports claimed that a few kids were naked when they were tied up, because the Axis gets off on that sort of thing (which is why Mike Johnson won’t sit newly elected congressperson Adelita Grijalva in the House of Representatives — he would rather the House not vote on releasing those pesky Epstein files).

Possibly satirical logo

According to Chicago’s Channel 7 Eyewitness News:³

“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’”

Keep in mind that it’s easy to overinterpret reports we see on social media. The “naked kids” reports we see on places like BlueSky could mean one toddler in a diaper. I haven’t been able to verify those reports elsewhere, but damn, it’s bad enough.

According to multiple reports, ICE shoved all the Black folks in one van and all the immigrants in another. They zip-tied everyone and ultimately made 37 arrests.

The Axis attack involved 300 federal agents. Three. Hundred.

At least four children were arrested.⁴

Who arrests children????

Chokeholds R nICE

In another incident, for sport, apparently, ICE agents grabbed a man and put him in a choke hold after the driver of the car he was in crashed her car. He was released shortly after.⁵

By itself? Kind of so-what, right? Guy made it home. But this stuff is happening everywhere ICE has decided to drop a major presence, and they’re hiring thousands of additional goons to do more of this in more cities.

ICE at the Super Bowl?

Almost as soon as the regime’s worst nightmare, Bad Bunny, was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer, ICE announced that they’d be roaming the stadium, presumably to go on a massive Arrest-by-Ethnic-Profile campaign.⁶

Corey Lewandowski, who I thought was long gone after embarrassing himself during Mad Clown 1.0, is an Axis advisor now. According to the Chicago Tribune:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are expected to attend Bad Bunny’s halftime Super Bowl performance to potentially arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, according to Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski.

ICE confirmed the move in a statement to TMZ on Thursday. “There is no safe haven for violent criminal illegal aliens in the United States,” an agency spokesperson told the outlet.

Lewandowski — the fired Trump campaign manager who is now seen as the “muscle” behind the work of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — spoke with right-wing commentator Benny Johnson during his podcast, “The Benny Hill Show,” on Wednesday.

No Infrastructure for Blue States

The Axis has begun the process of withholding funds for previously allocated infrastructure projects in blue states that didn’t vote for this madness. In Chicago, $2.1 billion in project funds have been frozen by the regime.⁷

This puts an immediate halt to the Red Line extension, an important Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) light rail project, much of which serves non-white neighborhoods, because the mad clown says that Chicago is rife with anti-white discrimination.

Russell Vought, an editor for the Axis planning document Project 2025⁸ and now the Axis budget director, said that the withheld funds will also impact the city’s modernization of the CTA’s Purple line, which serves the city’s North Side.

Per the Chicago Tribune:

The pause threatens a plan to build four extra stations along the Red Line, stretching the transit line south by 5.6 miles to 130th Street in what former CTA president Dorval Carter said back in January would “undo nearly 60 years of racial inequity in transit.”

The Axis also pulled funding for $583 million in Illinois energy projects.⁹

Also according to the Chicago Tribune:

Among those set to lose tens of millions of dollars in anticipated funding are power giant Exelon, the University of Illinois, the nonprofit Gas Technology Institute, which is based in Des Plaines, and a handful of other entities in Illinois.

No wonder the mad clown fired his labor statistics data gatherer. The jobs reports are going to take some fearsome hits.

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In New York, the regime is withholding $18 billion in infrastructure funding, which will impact the desperately needed rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River between New York City and New Jersey. New Yorkers and New Jersey residents have been trying to build that thing since before most of us were born.¹⁰ It’s a crushing blow to all the people who’ve worked so hard to plan it, fund it, and get it started.

Russell Vought again blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies by state officials in awarding contracts for the funding freeze, but this was all part of the plan when Project 2025 was developed.

The funding freeze also puts a stop to the Second Avenue subway extension.

Between naps, Charles Schumer issued a strongly worded memo saying, “Obstructing these projects is stupid and counterproductive because they create tens of thousands of great jobs and are essential for a strong regional and national economy.”

Comedy Central

The week’s comedy comes from Pumpkinhead himself, and this bizarre video that certifies his insanity:

h/t to almost everyone on the interwebs at this point for this one, as this has gone viral. I don’t know that it going viral is a good thing. A lot of people seem to dig this kind of crap, especially those under 30, who will all probably die in climate change fires for not paying attention to all this shiz.

The Allied Response

People are fighting back, as I said in a previous post:

An Update on the Resistance Against Trump's Civil War on America [UPDATED]

IceBlock Released

Yay! There’s an iPhone app available for reporting ICE incidents.

I’m probably late on this, based on the version number, but better late than not at all. In the app developers’ words:

ICEBlock is an innovative, completely anonymous crowdsourced platform that allows users to report Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity with just two taps on their phone. In recent years, ICE has faced criticism for alleged civil rights abuses and failures to adhere to constitutional principles and due process, making it crucial for communities to stay informed about its operations.

Modeled after Waze but for ICE sightings, the app ensures user privacy by storing no personal data, making it impossible to trace reports back to individual users. Available exclusively for iOS devices, ICEBlock empowers communities to stay informed about ICE presence within a 5-mile radius while maintaining their anonymity through real-time updates and automatic deletion of sightings after four hours.

This is currently only available for iPhones. IceBlock’s friend and ally, David Fagin, told Slate that they can’t release IceBlock on Google Play because using it would compromise user identities and expose them to harassment by the regime:

“The ID of every user would be stored in a database that would make it possible for any government official to subpoena the developer for information.” ¹¹

There’s an app called Ice Report on Android, but it’s for ice fishing. On lakes. So don’t download that unless you’re planning a trip to Fargo.

Release the Bad Bunny Kraken!

Bad Bunny aficionado

Adrian Carrasquillo

thinks that Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl is going to be a pièce de résistance. Carrasquillo guesses that Bad Bunny, who is from Puerto Rico, which some people (accurately) believe is part of the United States (full of American citizens, and everything!), is likely to bring his protest anthems to the festivities.¹²

Kendrick Lamar’s performance a few years ago was protestish, but not many people understood his underlying messaging. Bad Bunny is likely to not be quite so subtle.

Maga is miffed that he’s been invited at all. Danica Patrick reportedly drove her fast car into a wall in protest. (Sorry, I made that up.)

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson plan on filing lawsuits over the infrastructure freezes

They’ve announced their intent, so that’s a start, but these things take time. Unlike the White House and its Chief of Staff, Susan Wiles, Illinois state government officials don’t use AI to do these sorts of things.

Hasan Piker talks to Ross Douthat!

Yes, this really happened.

Check it out with this gift 🎁 link:

Don’t know who Hasan Piker is? His words:

I’m basically like Rush Limbaugh, but for Zoomers.

He’s a Twitch star who spends seven hours a day talking about all kinds of things, including a lot of politics. He’s very much left of center, and young people are quietly paying a lot more attention to him than they ever did to Charlie Kirk.

The Allies will need more people like him in the face of massive Axis propaganda, but it’s a start.

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Notes

There’s more, but these are the conflicts that I’ve noticed most lately. Since I’m publishing this before the close of business Friday, and the Axis loves to drop bombs after business hours on Fridays, this probably means I missed today’s biggest news.

I’ll close by, again, borrowing loosely from the famous poem by Martin Niemöller, with some wording appropriate to today’s post:¹³

First they came for the undocumented Venezuelan
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Venezuelan.

Then they came for the drug addicts
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a drug addict

Then they came for the children
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a child.

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

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Notes

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Programming note: I use the terms “ICE” and “border agents” synonymously, as the two agencies often operate in tandem, and often bring ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) and other federal agents goons along to participate in their crime sprees.

Footnotes

1. Some reports said 10 pm. Others much later.

2. Cate Cauguiran, Craig Wall, Tre Ward, and Lissette Nuñez. 2025. “ICE Agents Raid South Shore Apartments; Trump Says Chicago Could Become Military Training Ground.” ABC7 Chicago. October 2025. https://abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chicago-federal-agents-surround-south-shore-apartment-building-dhs-requests-military-deployment-illinois/17908911/

3. ABC7 Chicago, ibid

4. Liederman, Mack, Colin Boyle, and Kelly Bauer. 2025. “Feds Detained 4 Children Who Are US Citizens during Controversial ICE Raid.” Block Club Chicago. October 3, 2025. https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/10/03/feds-detained-4-children-who-are-us-citizens-during-controversial-ice-raid/.

5. Liptrot, Michael. 2025. “Border Patrol Agent Put Man in ‘Chokehold’ after West Side Car Crash, Leaders Say.” Block Club Chicago. October 3, 2025. https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/10/03/border-patrol-agent-put-man-in-chokehold-after-west-side-car-crash-leaders-say/.

6. Assuncao, Muri. 2025. “ICE Confirms It Will Patrol Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Show in February.” Chicago Tribune. October 2, 2025. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/02/ice-bad-bunny-super-bowl-perfomance/.

7. Quig, A.D, Talia Soglin, and Alice Yin. 2025. “CTA Red Line Extension Funding Frozen as Trump Administration Withholds $2.1 Billion from Chicago.” Chicago Tribune. October 3, 2025. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/03/trump-pauses-chicago-infrastructure-projects-shutdown/.

8. A Comprehensive List of Project 2025 Authors’ Past and Current Relationships with Trump

9. Olander, Olivia. 2025. “President Donald Trump Cancels $583 Million in Energy Projects for Illinois, One of Many Blue States Affected.” Chicago Tribune. October 3, 2025. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/02/president-trump-cancels-583-million-in-illinois-energy-projects/.

10. Boak, Josh. 2025. “Trump Holds up $18 Billion for NYC Rail Projects.” AP News. October 2025. https://apnews.com/article/shutdown-new-york-rail-projects-money-withheld-ada494e08ae9ae5269c6ce554ecdbd43.

11. https://www.iceblock.app/media/slate-05-16-2025.pdf (PDF)

12. Carrasquillo, Adrian. 2025. “Get Ready for Bad Bunny’s Explosive Super Bowl Trump Protest.” Thebulwark.com. The Bulwark. October 3, 2025. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/get-ready-for-bad-bunnys-explosive-super-bowl-trump-protest

13. “Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | First They Came – by Pastor Martin Niemöller.” 2020. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. April 30, 2020. https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/.