Laura Rethmann CounterPunch

Last Wednesday, Border Patrol detained me for nearly twenty hours.

I have never felt my citizenship more acutely than I did in detention. Not when I first held my passport, not when I cast my first ballot, not in any of the moments when citizenship is ceremonially affirmed. I felt it there, where my freedom was uncertain but my privilege was not.

I won’t go into what happened before I was placed in handcuffs, but I do want to talk about the hours that followed.

A comrade and I arrived at the Border Patrol station after an hour and a half of being jolted around in the back of a hot, bumpy truck. After cuffing us, officers had driven us to three different locations, each time attempting to transfer us to a transport vehicle, only to find no one available, or willing, to take responsibility for us. Eventually, they drove us themselves, lurching over uneven dirt roads as the heat and motion left us increasingly carsick. Plastic water bottles rolled just out of reach at our feet. When we protested the reckless driving and told the officers we were feeling sick, one officer assured us, “I am actually one of the chill guys.” He offered this as reassurance, as though he was doing us a favor, as though we should feel fortunate to be in his custody rather than that of officers who might treat us worse. We were relieved when the truck finally stopped and we were led through the station’s metal gates where our cuffs would finally come off before the first search and the seizure of our possessions.

With four other officers looking on, an officer instructed us to stand, one by one, as they patted down our bodies, made us shake out our bras, and ordered us to remove the laces from our shoes. They took any extra layers of clothing we had on and packaged up our belongings, placing them on a shelf along the wall. That was when I noticed the baby seats lined up among the confiscated possessions. To my right, strollers jammed beneath the stairs.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. These were the remnants of children’s lives, ordinary objects that had somehow been absorbed into the machinery of detention. The children themselves were nowhere in sight. I did not encounter the human bodies that filled those car seats, but their absence was made tangible by the items left behind. I imagined the chain of events that was required to bring each object here. The journeys, the apprehensions, the separations, the moment a stroller and car seat ceased to be an ordinary necessity of caring for a child and became another instrument entangled in the machinery of separation. I could not know where those children were now, whether they were nearby or far away, whether they were still with their parents or had been taken somewhere else.

Everything in that room had been reduced to almost nothing: bodies to be searched, clothing to be removed, possessions to be packaged and put away. And yet, among that nothingness, these objects insisted on the fullness of the lives they belonged to. A pink car seat. A toddler’s purple polka dotted booster seat. Ordinary things made unbearable by the people they silently testified to, and by the uncertainty of where those people had gone. I stood there in the strange in-between of presence and absence, surrounded by evidence of lives that had passed through this place, traces of people who were no longer visible. Humanity, reduced to its traces. I stood among the ghosts of children whose stories I would never know, left to wonder how many lives had passed through this room and where, beyond these walls, they had gone.

The devastation came in pieces, each detail making the last harder to stomach. “Avelino,” “Mercado,” “Checo”- names scratched into the cell benches as proof of people who sat there long enough to need to leave some evidence that they had existed. Outside the interrogation room sat a child’s bead maze, the kind found in doctors’ offices. Outside a cell labeled “unaccompanied juveniles” hung children’s artwork of superheroes and flowers. Across the detention center, large cartoon posters announced “You have a right not to be assaulted.”

What kind of place needs to remind people that they have a right not to be assaulted?

The first holding station was as uncomfortable as one might imagine. Everything was concrete. The cold benches were too narrow to lie down on, too hard to rest against, offering no position in which the body could settle. A short concrete dividing wall provided the slight suggestion of privacy around a communal combination metal toilet-sink. Above it, signs read NO AGUA POTABLE. A posted warning explained that the station violated water testing requirements and that the water contained dangerously high levels of nitrates, associated with “blue baby syndrome,” a condition where infants’ blood cannot carry enough oxygen, turning their skin blue.

The fluorescent lights blazed overhead, day and night. Eventually, we were given mattress pads and emergency blankets made of thin, reflective foil. Every movement made them crackle. We tried to lie as still as possible, minimizing even the small sounds of shifting bodies, listening to the blankets rustle whenever someone moved. Even rest required a kind of collective stillness.

And yet, despite the handcuffs, the concrete, and the hours of confinement, my comrades and I were treated relatively well. The officers seemed unsure how to behave around us. They had detained us, but we were citizens, and that appeared to complicate their understanding of how they were supposed to act. “We aren’t used to dealing with people like you,” “this is all new for us,” they would say while struggling to fill out our paperwork or attempting to guess what would happen to us next. We seemed to present a contradiction they couldn’t resolve. We were people they had detained, but people they understood they were supposed to treat differently.

Occasionally, an officer would barge into the cell shouting orders and threatening us if we did not comply. My comrades and I would joke that they’d briefly forgotten we were the kind of people they recognized as human. Soon enough, the aggression would recede, and the officer would return to a more accommodating demeanor.

When time had lost all meaning and the next morning’s sun finally rose, my comrades and I were transferred to the Tucson Sector Station. This time, we were marched onto a large prison bus. Inside, rows of detained migrants sat waiting.

I slid into the first row, in front of a woman whose face was swollen and black-and-blue, her wrists still cuffed. Yet as I stepped on the bus, I caught her wide, beautiful smile and the cheeky, playful spark in her eyes. Throughout the drive, she would say something amusing in Spanish to the person beside her, then erupt into a deep, full-bodied laugh. Otherwise, the bus was heavy with exhaustion, fear, and anguish. In the row beside the beat up woman radiating joy, a mother sat silently holding her daughter, the child’s head resting against her shoulder. Toward the back of the bus, beyond the metal gate separating the men from the women, men sat with tears in their eyes, looking terrified.

The relief I’d been holding onto all night that I’d soon return home curdled as I took them in.

The woman behind me, the mother beside her, the men in the back – their futures were in the hands of a state that had already reduced them to fingerprints, paperwork, cells, bus routes, and decisions made by people they would probably never know. I could imagine my life resuming but, at that moment, it just made me feel sick.

I leaned my head against the metal bars covering the bus window and watched the sun rise over the Sonoran Desert. The mountains glowed in the early light, their exposed ridgelines cutting into the vast, open sky. Still green from the rains, the desert bloomed among the saguaros and creosote. It is one of the most beautiful ecosystems I have ever seen. I turned to the comrade beside me and asked about their ecological restoration work in the region and about the watersheds they worked to restore. I wondered what the people sitting behind us thought as they looked out over the same landscape.

For people crossing this same desert on foot, it could mean something entirely different. Thirst. Exposure. Death. I could sit behind bars and marvel at its beauty. Others had to cross it at the risk of their lives. We shared the same landscape, but not our relationship to it.

In that moment, and in every moment since the confused, ambivalent agents threw us against their trucks, citizenship revealed itself not as an abstract legal status, but as a mark inscribed on our bodies. A mark that set us apart from the others. It moved us to the front of the intake line while others waited behind another chain link fence. It sent us to a different holding block, earned us an extra Suncup, and granted officers the absurd privilege of looking us in the eyes. Nothing about our bodies had changed. Yet a line had been drawn between us and the people standing just beyond it. A line that reorganized the world around us. Citizenship was not simply something we possessed. It was something that acted upon us, sorting our bodies, redistributing dignity. It was a border that traveled with us, a border reproduced inside the trucks, the holding cells, and intake lines- wherever the state decided who counted, who waited, and who could be seen. Citizenship was a line drawn through a bus full of people.

The line was not drawn based on who was kind or dangerous, who was a parent, who was afraid, who had suffered, or who deserved to go home. It did not measure our humanity. It sorted us. And I knew which side of that line I was likely to end up on. For the first time, I felt its violence not as an abstraction but as a force acting on the bodies around me, determining what could happen to them.

Hours later, after more “for institutional use only” meals in another cold, cement-walled cell, we were finally processed out. Officers checked paperwork and retrieved our possessions, still sealed in Department of Homeland Security plastic. Then a second-generation Mexican American Border Patrol officer stopped her checklist to ask, again, whether my comrades and I were citizens.

When my Indigenous comrade answered, “Unfortunately,” the officer stopped checking her paperwork. Looking my comrade dead in the eyes, she began screaming at us about how grateful we should be to be United States citizens.

“Look around you,” she said pointing at the two dozen migrants just being marched off of the latest bus. “All these people risked their lives to cross the border. You should be fucking grateful!”

I keep returning to the cruelty of that demand.

Be grateful. Be grateful that you are a citizen of the state that colonizes and murders your people. Be grateful that you are included. Look at their suffering. Look at what could happen to you. Look at how much worse it could be.

Be grateful that the state has given you reason to believe it will let you go.

Yet the officer did not see that the only reason crossing a border is such a risk to people’s lives is because of the very system she helps enforce. The desert is not dangerous by accident. Migration is not inherently deadly. The risk to life is produced by the walls, checkpoints, armed patrols, surveillance, detention, deportation, and policies designed to push people into more remote and deadly terrain.

The state creates the conditions that make people suffer, then points to their suffering as proof that we should be grateful to stand on the safer side of the line. The state creates the danger, then presents surviving it as a gift.

This is why the fight against the border wall is connected to ICE in our towns, to police surveillance, to detention centers, to the destruction of Indigenous land, and to every system that decides which people are disposable. These systems are not identical, but they share a logic. They sort people into categories of worth, distribute safety unequally, and make the resulting violence appear natural, necessary, or deserved.

They also recruit people to enforce that violence.

They offer a uniform, a badge, a paycheck, a measure of authority, and the promise of belonging. They invite people to turn that authority against others who look like them, come from where they come from, or carry histories that overlap with their own. They offer a place inside the machinery in exchange for helping keep it running.

I believe one of the cruelest things empire does is offer belonging on the condition that we accept someone else’s exclusion. It tells us we can be safe by helping make others unsafe, worthy by agreeing that someone else is not. It teaches us to mistake proximity to power for liberation, and survival within a violent system for proof that the system is just.

Perhaps the officer believed she was defending something valuable. Perhaps she thought she was reminding my comrade of a privilege she should appreciate. But what she was defending, in that moment, was a hierarchy in which citizenship became a reason to demand gratitude rather than a reason to question why some people were caged while others were permitted to leave.

I do not need to know what she believed about herself to recognize the function of what she was doing. And I cannot pretend that this machinery only implicates people like her. It implicates me too.

I knew I was likely going home. My citizenship had not kept the state from putting me in handcuffs, but it gave me reason to expect that my detention would end. I could imagine my life continuing beyond those walls because I had reason to believe the state would let me leave. Whatever else I experienced there, I had a relationship to citizenship that many of the people around me did not share. I could be frightened by the machinery without having to fear that it would permanently absorb me.

I do not want to turn this experience into a story about how much I learned, how deeply I felt, or how morally transformed I became. The people on that bus were not there to teach me a lesson. Their suffering was not an instrument for my political awakening. They were people caught in a system that had the power to decide what happened to them, and I was a person who could recognize, in that moment, that the same system was likely to let me go.

Instead, I hope this reflection can be a call to action.

Compassion can coexist quite comfortably with domination. We can feel terrible about detention centers and still accept the premise that some people must be detained. We can donate to mutual aid, volunteer with immigrant organizations, and express outrage over deportations while treating the citizenship that protects us as an unquestioned entitlement. We can become very good at tending to the wounds of a system we have no intention of dismantling. We can care about people and remain loyal to the arrangements that hurt them.

This is not an argument against care. Mutual aid, solidarity, and the work of keeping one another alive matter greatly, especially in a world organized around abandonment. But care is not inherently oppositional. It can relieve suffering without challenging the conditions that produce it. When we care for those harmed by a system without questioning the privileges that system extends to us, our compassion can become a way of reconciling ourselves to the very arrangements we claim to oppose.

The question, then, is not whether we care, but what our care asks of us.

We have to become traitors.

Not because we are morally pure. Not because we have never participated in harm. Not because we have figured out how to live without contradiction. But because the opposite is true. We have participated. We have benefited. We have been taught to call that benefit normal, deserved, or inevitable. To be a traitor is not to claim moral purity from outside the system. There is no clean outside from which to condemn the world and declare ourselves free of its violence. We have to begin by recognizing that we are implicated, that the arrangements we inherit are reproduced through our everyday choices, and that refusing them requires more than good intentions. We will not unlearn it all at once. There will always be another complicity to recognize, another loyalty to question, another way we have mistaken our comfort for justice. We do not have to be good at being traitors. We just have to be willing to become them.

To become a traitor is to betray the person you were yesterday, to betray the loyalties that have taught us to accept violence and call silence solidarity. It is to recognize that the things you failed to question yesterday can be questioned today, and that yesterday’s failure is not today’s absolution. We can be wrong, be confronted, change course, and try again. The point is not to emerge innocent on the other side of our politics. The point is to stop making our innocence the condition of our participation.

We have to betray the values that make borders seem natural, detention necessary, and legality synonymous with morality. We have to betray the comfort that depends on someone else’s confinement. We have to betray the story that our safety is proof of our goodness. We have to betray the institutions that ask us to accept cruelty as the price of order. We have to betray the people we love if loving them requires protecting their participation in harm. We have to betray the version of ourselves that needs to believe we are innocent.

And we have to betray whiteness—not as an identity we can simply disavow, or a stain we can wash away through the right politics, but as a system of power that distributes protection, legitimacy, and belonging through a racial hierarchy. The same is true of citizenship. To refuse its hierarchy is not to pretend that legal status has no material consequences. The people on that bus knew better. It is to reject the idea that those consequences reflect a natural difference in human worth, or that the protection afforded to some of us obligates us to defend the machinery that denies it to others.

I think of the officer who demanded gratitude for our citizenship. Her demand highlighted the bargain at the heart of whiteness, where belonging was offered in exchange for loyalty to the system that withholds it from others. Her proximity to that belonging did not depend on the color of her skin alone, but on her willingness to defend the boundaries of who deserved it. The state offered her a place within its machinery, and in that moment, she used that place to insist that we recognize its hierarchy as a gift. Refusing that bargain means acting against the arrangements from which we benefit, including, and especially, when doing so costs us something.

Betrayal requires being willing to lose something: comfort, approval, access, the easy belonging that comes from knowing the rules and staying on the right side of them. It means accepting that people may call us disloyal when we refuse to protect what they want protected. The cost of defection is real, but so is the cost of remaining faithful.

And we can not do this work alone or only inside ourselves. Our loyalties are sustained in relationships, in the groups that reward our silence, in the habits that make certain people easier to ignore, in the decisions we learn not to question. If complicity is reproduced collectively, defection must also become collective. We have to become capable of interrupting those habits together, of building the trust and collective courage to let that recognition change what we do next.

Defection is a practice that has to shape how we organize, what we build, and how we respond when our own institutions reproduce the violence we oppose. Sometimes, defection looks like naming the harm a strategy may reproduce even when the group is exhausted, the deadline is approaching, and everyone wants to believe we have finally found a way forward. It means being willing to risk your standing by saying that our urgency does not absolve us of the responsibility to ask whom we are acting for, whose knowledge we have ignored, and who will bear the consequences if we get it wrong. It also means building organizations in which that interruption can do more than expose someone’s courage, but also create one where the group is willing to pause, reconsider, and change course.

We need places where we can practice this together. Where we can tell the truth about our mistakes, interrupt one another without abandoning one another, and make different decisions based on what we learn. Collective accountability is neither unconditional affirmation or individual punishment. It is the difficult work of remaining in relation while changing what the group is doing. None of this guarantees that we will get it right. It just gives us a way to notice when we are getting it wrong, and to do something about it together.

There will be days when we retreat into old loyalties, when fear makes us defensive, when the cost of defecting feels too high. On those days, we must begin again. We can not wait until we are free of complicity to challenge the systems that implicate us. We can not mistake the impossibility of perfection for the impossibility of change. The call is not to be good traitors. It is to become traitors, and to keep becoming them. Repeatedly, deliberately, in the choices we make, the harms we confront, and the loyalties we refuse to protect.

As the backdoors of our final transport vehicle opened and we were released behind a McDonald’s parking lot, I understood that the border is not somewhere far away. It is in our towns, our institutions, our relationships, and the choices we make about who deserves protection and who can be sacrificed. The border is the difference between being released and being left to wait, between being allowed to return to your life and having your future held in someone else’s hands. It is the machinery that makes one person’s freedom feel deserved and another’s a privilege to be withheld.

My citizenship did not prevent the state from detaining me. It gave me reason to believe the state would let me go. I cannot make that difference disappear by refusing to acknowledge it. But I can refuse the demand that I be grateful for it. I can refuse to mistake my relative safety for being free.

We have to defect.

Laura Rethmann is a scholar-activist committed to challenging systems of oppression and advancing movements for collective liberation. She can be reached at laura.etc@proton.me. For more on the struggle against the border wall, follow @tierralibre_noborders. 

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Photo: Police arrest immigration reform advocates during a peaceful sit-in outside the White House on May 1, 2010, following Arizona’s passage of SB 1070. Photo by Arasmus Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

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In emails contained within the 3+ million publicly available documents in the Dept. of Justice Epstein files, we see that in 2014, notorious child sex trafficker, child rapist and likely intelligence operative Jeffrey Epstein started asking about upgrading the modest communications network at Zorro Ranch to something far more substantial.

Then he waited.

By 2016, he had stopped waiting.

Over those two years, the project drew in his inner circle: his ranch manager Brice Gordon, his accountant Richard Kahn in New York, his lawyer Darren Indyke, his New York IT consultant and “personal genius” James Ce, and Jermaine Ruan, the man he called “the lsj guy,” his communications contact in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They emailed one another and called others too. Local contractors like Richard Boltz of Advanced Communications an Technology in Albuquerque. The list also included a man described only as “Vito,” the manager of the San Cristobal Ranch next door to Zorro, owned by the family of former OSS officer Henry Singleton, who founded Teledyne, one of the most successful defense contractors in the world.

But why? Why was Epstein suddenly and anxiously demanding a new and extremely robust private network at the ranch? And why did Epstein want a communications network that a local contractor would later describe as military and industrial grade, at a place Epstein treated as a vacation property, and where, by the state’s own recent (and likely wrong) estimate, he supposedly spent only two to five weeks a year? (NM Truth Commission interim report)

The answer is hidden in plain sight.

Epstein commands his team to simply recreate at his New Mexico ranch the same private communications system had at Little St. James, his private island.

Little St. James was the first Epstein property to have a powerful microwave communications setup, far more than a remote vacation compound would need, be it an island or a massive ranch.

People have long speculated that Epstein used that Little St. James system to send secret communications in his various unsavory dealings there and in his other properties. Survivors have repeatedly said their rapes were video recorded and used by Epstein and Maxwell to blackmail powerful people, claims backed up by photo evidence in the DOJ files that show hidden spy cameras in clocks and other items in rooms owned by Epstein.

One can safely assume that if kompromat were being collected by them, Epstein and Maxwell would need a powerful closed private communications network for the transmission of such materials to whomever they worked for who needed powerful men blackmailed for them.

So, who were Epstein and Maxwell working for? That’s still a subject of debate and speculation. While there seems to be a concerted effort by certain “independent” journalists, such as Zev Shalev, to point the finger at Russia as the likely recipient of such blackmail materials from Epstein and Maxwell, this appears to possibly be deliberate misdirection, likely paid for by what The Pugilist considers to be the most likely true power behind the operation: Israel.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was an Israeli spy, as documented in the book Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence operative and the author of the book Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network, has said he was tasked with “running” Epstein, and was the man to introduce him to the Maxwells. Perhaps most damning of all is that the voting, legislative and financial records of those men in Epstein’s potential blackmail orbit always ended up shifting after their association with him, to become strongly supportive, in one way or another, of the goals of the Zionist Israeli government. In New Mexico, those goals appear to have been connected to a task begun by Robert Maxwell in the 1980s, when he infiltrated the state’s nuclear weapons labs with software that had been bugged by Israeli military intelligence.

For many years, Epstein’s operation seemed to run smoothly and without interference out of the U.S. Virgin Islands. But by 2014, something there was making Epstein nervous about keeping the nexus of that massive private communications system at Little St. James.

For a while, he waited it out. Maybe hoping things would not get as bad as they could.

Then something happened, and he, seemingly spooked, stopped waiting. He started demanding. The new system in New Mexico, at Zorro Ranch, had to be built, and quickly.

There’s a reason for that. And the reason is this: As the walls started closing in around Epstein in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Florida and New York City, there was only one place left where he held a vast property, where had complete privacy, and where its leadership had been so easy to blackmail, bribe, or otherwise buy off that Epstein trusted no one in power there would ever betray him.

And that place, dear readers, was New Mexico.

The island, and the people who once covered for him

Little St. James was Epstein’s primary residence and, according to the Virgin Islands’ own attorney general, the center of his child (and adult) sex trafficking operation. She alleged that he lured girls and young women to the island, kept a computerized database to track those he could traffic there, and later bought neighboring Great St. James in part to keep anyone from watching. When sex-offender registry officials came to verify his address, they could go no farther than the dock unless Epstein or his staff invited them.

Epstein had been wiring the island for years. Steve Scully, who owned a telecommunications business on St. Thomas, told ABC News in 2019 that Epstein hired him in 1999 to build a communications network on Little St. James, and that over six years he visited the island more than 100 times. Epstein wanted phone or internet service almost everywhere on the 72-acre island, Scully said, including a secluded cove he called “the grotto.” He “never wanted a call to drop.” Scully said he walked away over what he saw there: groups of girls who appeared to be unsupervised and who “couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16 years old.”

Epstein could operate that way because the territory’s government let him. From 2007 to January 2015, the Virgin Islands was governed by John de Jongh Jr. For that entire stretch, according to JPMorgan Chase, the governor’s wife, Cecile de Jongh, worked for Epstein as office manager of his St. Thomas companies. JPMorgan alleged she was paid as much as $200,000 a year, that Epstein paid the couple’s children’s tuition, and that in 2009 she certified Epstein was a “bona fide resident” while he was serving his Florida sentence. In 2011, according to the bank, she sent Epstein draft language for the territory’s sex-offender monitoring law and asked whether it would work for him. The de Jonghs have contested the claims against them in court.

In 2014, Epstein was about to lose that protection. De Jongh was finishing his second term and could not run again. Epstein courted his successor, Kenneth Mapp, from the start: Mapp later acknowledged a $10,000 Epstein contribution to his inaugural committee, and he had lunch on the island, probably in 2016. But Mapp was a different kind of governor. In text messages released by the Justice Department, he repeatedly scolded Epstein for building on his islands without permits and told him environmental matters could not be settled informally. By 2018, Epstein’s own lawyer is seen in the DOJ files strategizing about how to unseat Mapp.

The pressure was building outside the islands too. On December 30, 2014, Virginia Roberts asked to join a federal lawsuit in Florida that challenged Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, and her filing named Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz, both of whom denied her allegations. In 2015, now Virginia Giuffre, she sued Ghislaine Maxwell in federal court in New York. These were civil cases brought by victims, not criminal investigations; those would come later. But their discovery reached into Epstein’s and Maxwell’s records, and the Florida case threatened to tear up the deal that had kept him out of federal prison.

The Virgin Islands, long his safe haven, was suddenly not looking so safe. But another of his properties was. Florida had prosecuted him. New York would. The Virgin Islands would sue his estate and collect more than $105 million. New Mexico, where he owned 10,000 acres, never charged him, never made him register as a sex offender, and never searched his ranch until 2026, seven years after his death. More than any other place Epstein kept a home, New Mexico had done the least to hold him accountable, and he could wagered he could count on that continuing. (Spoiler alert: He was right.)

I believe that whatever Epstein was sending and receiving through his network at Little St. James, he began moving to New Mexico in those years. He started planning the twin in 2014 and then hesitated. He pushed it through in 2016, after his protector had left office and his name was back in headlines beside Prince Andrew’s. It was finished in September 2016.

When the reckoning finally came, it proved him right about New Mexico. The Miami Herald’s 2018 series “Perversion of Justice” blew open the Florida case, and the Virgin Islands sued his estate after his death.

Zorro Ranch went unsearched until this year, seven years after his death. It is only now, too, that the state’s attorney general is finally investigating Epstein’s crimes here. Both of these things might never have happened if the release of the DOJ files earlier this year had not been so deeply, pathetically embarrassing for the state and its leaders, and many of them named in the files as taking money from Epstein are still in positions of power today. There is some indication that the state’s sudden creation of a “truth commission” made of four state legislators, one of whom has since resigned from office after a conflict of interest was made public, and another of whom has a similar conflict but is refusing to resign, was created mostly as damage control and public relations.

Without the world finally having known about the New Mexico power structure’s deep ties to Epstein, I rather suspect no one here would have done a goddamned thing at all.

The build, document by document

Until 2014, Zorro ran on two leased T-1 lines and an unlicensed radio hop to Sandia Crest, about a megabit and a half of data. (EFTA01124584) The emails released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act show what happened next.

• June 2014. Epstein approves a bid from Richard Boltz of Advanced Communications for a licensed microwave link, and a $30,000 deposit goes out on a $48,984 job. (EFTA00991033, EFTA01206652) That month, Richard Kahn reports that the ranch’s data lines keep getting hammered with traffic “even when no one is using any computer equipment.” (EFTA00706953)

• 2014. Epstein asks for the Zorro system to duplicate what he has at Little St. James.

• October 6, 2014. The FCC grants Zorro Development Corp. its first two microwave licenses, WQUT488 and WQUT489.

• December 1, 2014. The project stalls; Kahn tells the vendor they will wait for Epstein’s next visit before deciding whether to cancel. (EFTA01206652) The 2014 licenses lapse unbuilt in April 2016.

• March 22, 2016. Ranch manager Brice Gordon forwards Epstein a memo laying out three options. The cheapest is to share a fiber site on the neighboring San Cristobal Ranch; the most expensive is a 27-mile shot to Sandia Crest that the memo says would require industrial or military grade equipment. Epstein picks Sandia Crest. (THE PUGILIST)

• March 23, 2016. Epstein refuses a gigabit link and points to the DragonWave radios he already uses: “we shoot dragon wave further.” (EFTA00830845)

• March 25, 2016. Epstein tells Gordon that if problems come up, they should bring in “the lsj guy.” (THE PUGILIST)

• April 15, 2016. The contractor runs the engineering numbers: 27.53 miles from Sandia Crest straight to the main residence. (EFTA00702637)

• May 2016. A crew confirms line of sight by flashing a signal mirror toward the peak. (EFTA01738251)

• July 12, 2016. The FCC grants WQXY316 and WQXY300, a two-way link between the ranch house and Sandia Crest.

• September 26, 2016. Gordon confirms the link is finished. (EFTA02450493)

• November 2016. Gordon writes that he and his wife are returning to their “new home” on Little St. James. They keep managing Zorro until Epstein’s death.

The people on the emails

The documents name the people Epstein relied on to build and run the network. Each played a documented role. Kahn, as co-executor of Epstein’s estate, has been sued by government plaintiffs over the estate; the others have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The pattern matters more than any one name. The vendor who built the islands’ microwave backbone designed Zorro’s. The island’s communications man was on call for the ranch. And the couple who had managed Little St. James since at least 2011 built the New Mexico link, then went back to the island while still running Zorro. The same small team ran both ends of a twin system.

The documents show what the network was built to do and who built it. They do not show what it carried. That is the question only these people, or a subpoena, can answer.

The case against everything I’ve written about the communications system at Zorro Ranch, answered point by point

The most detailed rebuttal to my reporting on this comes from self-described researcher on Substack, named Rye Howard-Stone. He went through the same emails and concluded that the Zorro network was nothing but a troubled rural broadband project. His argument, published in his own newsletter, deserves a full hearing, and an answer, point by point. But before we get to that, we should also make it clear that Howard-Stone is associated with another group of “journalists” in Zionist Cliff Schechter’s “Blue Amp Media” universe. This cabal, which serves the Zionist wing of the United States Democratic Party (and has a strong interest in hiding the truth about Zorro Ranch and the powerful NM Democrats in Epstein’s orbit) includes people like Ellie Leonard (on Blue Amp’s payroll), mega-grifter Lev Parnas and a few other less significant “influencers” who joined forces in an attempted smear campaign against me in the wake of my having published articles that pointed towards Israel’s possible involvement with Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring.

Ahem. Here we go:

The license. Howard-Stone notes that the license Epstein used, Microwave Industrial/Business Pool, is one of the most common the FCC issues: more than 55,000 are active, about 1,500 of them held by Union Pacific Railroad alone. That’s true, and it’s the wrong comparison. These licenses belong to railroads, electric utilities, pipelines, internet providers and governments. So I downloaded the FCC’s complete license file, dated October 18, 2026, and went through it. Of 55,487 active licenses, about two dozen connect to a private house, cabin, lodge or ranch, roughly one in 2,400. That means only 0.04% of these “common” licenses were issued to private homes. It also means that among private homes in the USA with internet service, the chance that the service is provided by the kind of operation Epstein had at both LSJ and Zorro is 0.000022429906542056075%. In other words: For a private home, this type of license is close to unheard of. Howard-Stone has a fucked-up view of what the word “common” means.

The hardware. He’s right that the DragonWave radios are standard equipment rural internet providers use every day. I’ll grant it. The question this piece asks was never whether the radios were exotic. It’s why a man with a vacation ranch built a private, point-to-point link he owned end to end, with the same brand of radio, designed by the company that built the Virgin Islands’ microwave backbone, with his island’s communications man on call. Ordinary parts can build an extraordinary system.

The speed. Howard-Stone reads Epstein’s refusal of a gigabit connection as proof that this was only about getting decent internet. The March 2016 options memo points the other way. Plan A was to tap fiber at the neighboring San Cristobal Ranch, where gigabit service was available, and talks with the ranch’s manager were already under way. Plan B was the memo writer’s recommended fallback: lease any nearby property with gigabit fiber and build a short microwave hop, as he had done on his own ranch. Plan C, the 27-mile shot to Sandia Crest, was his least favorite: hard to reach, expensive, and expected to carry about 30 percent of the bandwidth. Within 48 hours of receiving the memo, with the neighbor’s fiber still in negotiation and Plan B untried, Epstein chose Plan C. A man shopping for internet takes the fast, cheap option down the road. A man who wants a path that runs through nobody else’s equipment pays more for less. Epstein was never after speed. He was after privacy.

The antenna. Howard-Stone cites Epstein’s objection to seeing the antenna as the fussiness of a rich homeowner. Maybe. It’s also what you would expect from someone who didn’t want the link noticed, and the emails show the contractor flagging for “Jeffrey’s attention” whether the dish would be visible from the back parking area.

The heating and cooling. When the link failed in a March 2017 storm, the ranch manager shut down the main house’s climate system. Howard-Stone ties that to a 2015 Honeywell contract that made the climate controls depend on an internet connection. That may be right, and it proves only that the link carried ordinary traffic too, which this piece never disputes. A thermostat’s data and any other data travel the same path. And as Howard-Stone himself acknowledges, Gordon’s email never says why he shut the system down.

The route. He suggests the completion email, which describes a link “from Sandia to Ranch and MH to Lodge,” may mean the 27-mile path was never built as a single jump. The FCC’s own record settles it: license WQXY316 runs directly from a site labeled “MAIN RESIDENCE” to one labeled “SANDIA CREST TOWER.”

The licenses. He reports that WQXY316 and WQXY300 expired on July 12, 2026. FCC records confirm it. The licenses were active when THE PUGILIST first reported on them in March; they lapsed four months later, at the end of their ten-year term. The more telling fact is how long they lasted: the licenses stayed active in the name of Epstein’s company, Zorro Development Corp., for three years after the ranch was sold in 2023.

The silence in the files. Finally, Howard-Stone notes that the released documents never mention Sandia Labs, Los Alamos or any intelligence agency in connection with this network. No shit. He says this as if all the truth of Epstein is only contained in the files. As if reporting were limited only to things a robot can find on the internet (Howard-Stone’s specialty.)

First off, we do not know what the full Epstein files contain. Most of them have never been released, and the ones that have been are heavily redacted.

Secondly, the only reason a man with associations such as Howard-Stone’s would stand up, point a scrawny finger at my work and say, “That’s not true” without evidence is because someone paid (or merely flattered and misled?) him to do that. I think we all know who that might be.

The questions New Mexico hasn’t asked

I cannot tell you what traveled over that 27-mile path between 2016 and 2019. As far as I can find in the public record, nobody with subpoena power has tried to find out.

New Mexico has two bodies that could. The Department of Justice reopened its criminal investigation in February. The Truth Commission has subpoena power and a list of witnesses. I am putting these questions to both, and will report their answers:

1. Do you plan to subpoena or interview the people who built and ran these networks — Brice and Karen Gordon, Richard Kahn, James Ce, Hector Cintron, Chris Cappiello and Future Technologies, Richard Boltz, and the operator of the Sandia Crest tower — about what the Zorro and Little St. James systems carried?

2. Have you subpoenaed the companies’ records: invoices, network configurations, access logs, and any record of who could reach the system remotely?

3. During the March 2026 search, did investigators examine the ranch’s communications equipment, or ask the current owners for its logs, configurations or storage devices?

4. Have you asked the U.S. Virgin Islands, or Choice Communications, for records of the Little St. James network Zorro was modeled on?

5. The Truth Commission’s counsel said the Gordons are on its list to depose. When?

Epstein spent two years and tens of thousands of dollars making sure his ranch could talk privately with his island and the rest of the world. Seven years after his death, New Mexico still hasn’t asked what it said.

Looking beyond New Mexico

My coverage of the Epstein saga has so far been provincial by design, focused almost exclusively on what happened here in my home state of New Mexico, and on what did not happen but should have. Now I have started looking beyond our borders, at the ways Epstein’s other properties and connections shaped what he did, and did not do, here.

In 2014, as the rest of Epstein’s secretive world was slowly being uncovered at his other estates, he figured that here in New Mexico no one would bother him.

And he was right.

I offer all my news, investigations and analysis for free. But your support is necessary and appreciated. Please like, share, comment and subscribe, paid if you’re able. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day keep me writing full time. Thank you!

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Paris is burning, which is always a good thing, and the revolution that Sinwar started is turning, though they deny him. I'm sure French and Albanians can see their problems, but few see al-Sinwar as their spiritual leader, though he is. Al-Sinwar started a great rebellion across West Asia, which is where Europe really is. 'Europe' is just a racist line on a map which the flood is simply ignoring. As Hemingway said, ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you.

I have gone through one 'grey' revolution myself in Sri Lanka and I know if the people do not have power they will take power. All of us are just a few powercuts away from overthrowing our governments. Energy is the economy and it's the economy, stupid. I also know that revolutions don't just turn themselves, if you don't have revolutionary leadership you'll end up with bloodless bureaucrats still bleeding you to death (see Sri Lanka, Nepal, etc). But none of this is to offer advice or hope to Europe. Europe as a concept should be destroyed. Good riddance.

My enemy is not the European government, it is the European people. Europeans are, by definition, awful. Europe is a just a racist line across Asia, it's not a real continent. Europe is the idea that tribes which have been fighting for centuries should put aside their difference to wage war on everybody that doesn't look like them. It's not racist to point this out, it's racist to do it. Whiteness, which includes their colonies, is these savages putting aside their differences to gang up on the rest of us, and this is very dangerous. So it's not just that the White Empire needs to fall, or that borders in West Asia should be withdrawn. Europe needs to be wiped off the map entirely.

We need to take Europe apart until we figure out what's going wrong. Europe should be run by a Dictatorship of the Immigrant for 100 years at least, to reeducate Whites until they don't exist as a category, and learn basic hygiene. So Mr. Macron, tear down the wall. Make Europe Asia again. Macron is, of course, no more material than a macaron. The White Empire is run by America and they have used Fortress Europe to attack both Russia and Iran, have lost both battles, and now there's havoc inside the White camp. This is not historically unusual. You lose some, you lose some more.

This unrest in European capitals is like the unrest in any empire when they lose a major war. An Empire is like a shark, it dies if it doesn't move forward. Just because the Empire doesn't acknowledge its losses in the news doesn't make them any less historically untrue. I repeat what goes unrepeated. The strongest European Army has lost (as they always do) to Russia. The White Navy lost a major naval battle to Yemen, major aerial battles to both Iran and Yemen, and a ground war to Palestine. Palestine is now a more viable proposition than Europe, or the White Empire itself. One is on the way up and the other is on the way down. That's the nature of revolution. The revolution will not be televised, as Gil Scott Heron said, but yet it happens.

The spark that the Al-Aqsa Flood is what is burning Paris and Albania and Italy now. There is no European unrest, the natives are restless across West Asia. The same flood of fire than engulfed the Gulf Apostates has enveloped Europe, and it will reach the 'Gulf of America' by December. Les Jews sont faits, to modify a French saying. This dice was cast long ago, the iceberg has been hit, and it's last call on the White Star Line as they lay more steam on the Titanic.

Europeans think they're immune because they've drawn the world's deadliest border around themselves to keep the Slavs and colored out as Hitler, the last honest European, intended. But oil does not care about these borders and the oil is burning. Why wouldn't Europe burn too? Indeed, why shouldn't they? Unlike Billy Joel they did start the fire, and they're not trying to fight it at all.

Europe is in Asia and this idea that you can burn people alive all over the world and not have it touch your lives is over. And Americans are not immune either. My condolences to our people trapped inside, but 'Israeli', European, American, and White identities are all cooked. Any revolution trying to save these cursed people and nations will get turned over in the world revolution that contains them, inshallah. I don't care what Europeans want. As long as they're Europeans, it's not enough.

White people have to understand that it's a wide world and they don't get to suck the energy out of it. That's what the Empire is fighting for, across West Asia, blowing up diesel in Russia and crude in West Asia. It's not trying to restore energy flows, they could do that by just leaving. No, if they can't have the energy they'll burn it on the way out. They would rather rule over a ruin that deal with non-Whites equally. But, thankfully, the non-Whites are dealing with them.

The only thing that unites Russia and Iran and China is sovereignity. They're not authoritarian, they just claim their own authority, which is the only sin against an Empire. Not bending the knee. All these countries are asking for is reciprocity, and Iran more than anyone is enforcing this demand. Iran has said it's all one ocean it's one oil supply it's one internet it's one life. And either all can sail or none can sail, all can trade or none can trade. As Yemen has said, a siege for a siege, a blockade for a blockade. The Axis of Resistance has said this clearly and that is the axis this revolution turns on, not the petty grievances of the petty bourgeoise. The protests in Europe are well and good, but they're fundamentally downstream of the flood. And as long as Paris isn't Hamas, they've lost the plot. Europeans are no longer driving history. They are, in fact, being driven out of it.

There are two kinds of people in Santa Barbara: the people who think we have a housing crisis, and the people who own homes.

The first group talks about it constantly. The second group talks about it, too, but only to mention what the place down the street just sold for.

I love both groups. Some of my best friends are homeowners.

After a second glass of Santa Ynez pinot, a few will confess they couldn’t afford their own house today. Then they get in the Volvo and drive home to it.

This isn’t really a disagreement about facts. It’s about which side of the deed you’re standing on.

For renters, rising prices are a crisis. For owners, they’re a 401(k) with a lemon tree.

Math Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings

Let’s do the numbers, since feelings are free and housing is not.

Santa Barbara home prices have hovered around $1.8 million. In May, WalletHub ranked Santa Barbara last among 300 American cities for home-buying affordability.

Not near the bottom. Last.

Somewhere in Ohio, a real estate agent just spilled his reasonably priced coffee laughing.

Put 20% down on a $1.8 million home — that’s $360,000, which most of us keep in our other jacket — and finance the rest at an illustrative 6.4% interest rate.

You’re paying roughly $9,000 monthly in principal and interest. Add estimated property taxes and you’re above $10,000, before insurance and maintenance.

To keep those costs near 30% of income, a household would need to earn more than $425,000 annually.

The area’s 2026 median family income benchmark for four people is $118,600.

That’s not an affordability gap. That’s a canyon with an ocean view, and the canyon is also for sale.

Renting is the consolation prize. Average asking rents in the Santa Barbara multifamily market were about $2,900 in the first half of 2026, and roughly 59% of occupied city housing units are renter-occupied.

The people experiencing this crisis aren’t a marginal constituency. They just can’t make the afternoon planning meeting.

Why the Other Half Sleeps Soundly

Homeowners aren’t villains. They’re ordinary people responding rationally to incentives California created decades ago.

Consider Proposition 13, passed in 1978, when the Bee Gees were singing “Stayin’ Alive” and Californians were making long-term financial arrangements to do precisely that.

Under Prop. 13, a property’s assessed value generally cannot increase more than 2% annually, except when reassessment rules apply.

The couple who bought on the Riviera in 1991 may pay substantially less in property taxes than the family purchasing an equivalent house next door.

Their house is worth millions of dollars. Their tax assessment still remembers the first Bush administration.

One person’s housing crisis is another person’s appreciating asset.

The interesting question isn’t why homeowners protect their interests. It’s how a community can organize itself around those interests while proclaiming its commitment to affordable housing.

Everyone supports affordable housing in principle. The difficulties begin when somebody proposes building it.

Suddenly, neighborhood character, architectural compatibility, traffic, parking and historic preservation become matters of existential importance.

Nobody needs to announce an intention to exclude working families. Exclusion emerges from the accumulated consequences of individually reasonable objections.

No conspiracy is necessary. The machinery works perfectly well on its own.

Somebody Pays the Bill

The housing crisis doesn’t disappear because some residents can’t see it from their patios. It just gets on Highway 101.

Thousands of workers commute into Santa Barbara from Ventura County and elsewhere. They clean hotel rooms, prepare restaurant meals, teach children, care for older residents, and perform countless tasks that make paradise possible.

We welcome their labor with open arms. Their housing is another matter.

Apparently, our commitment to reducing carbon emissions ends somewhere near the property line.

And at the bottom of the housing ladder, the joke stops being funny.

During my years working with people experiencing homelessness, I encountered individuals whose lives had unraveled through unaffordable rents, illness, lost employment, addiction and family conflict.

Their circumstances differed, but affordable routes back into housing were scarce.

Santa Barbara County figures show people living in vehicles increasing from 675 in 2022 to 962 in 2025.

In a small county-commissioned survey of 90 vehicle residents not engaged with services, more than half reported working.

The survey cannot represent everyone living in vehicles, but it punctures the assumption that employment guarantees housing.

Behold the new Santa Barbara dream: a job and a Corolla with a view.

A Third Kind of Person

Santa Barbara’s state-assigned housing-planning target is 8,001 units for 2023-2031. Through 2025, the city had permitted 863, approximately 11% of that target.

Permits aren’t completed homes, and the target isn’t a construction quota. Still, much of the permitted housing remains beyond lower-income households’ reach.

The solutions require more than slogans: infill near jobs and transit, tenant protections, preservation of existing affordable units, and public investment in homes for people the private market fails to serve.

So I propose a third kind of Santa Barbaran: the homeowner who remembers what it took to get in the door and is willing to hold it open.

Perhaps you bought in 1991. Your house has appreciated beyond anything you imagined. Your children now live in Ventura, or in your guest room, because they cannot afford a place of their own.

Come to the next planning meeting. Support a well-designed apartment building in your neighborhood. Welcome more neighbors.

Bring a renter. Offer to split the parking.

Santa Barbara has spent generations preserving its exceptional beauty. Now we face a different challenge: preserving the possibility of belonging here.

A beautiful city that increasingly excludes the people who make it function may remain beautiful for a very long time.

But we should be careful about calling it a community.

The post Wayne Mellinger: There Are 2 Kinds of People in Santa Barbara appeared first on Noozhawk.

Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.

But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank.

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I sat down with Akbar Shahid Ahmed to discuss his new book, Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, an extraordinary feat of reporting based on interviews with more than 150 people inside the Biden administration. Even as someone who follows nearly every story from the region, I was genuinely shocked by several of the revelations Akbar shared.

As usual, we went longer—and more in-depth—than the typical podcast interview. But I think you’ll find our discussion engaging and illuminating all the way through. The conversation transformed my understanding of the Biden administration’s role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and I suspect you’ll have a similar experience.

Among the subjects we cover:

• The suppression of damning reports and legal findings about Israel’s conduct in Gaza within the Biden administration

• What a much-diminished Biden actually knew about the suffering in Gaza, and how his closest advisors controlled the information reaching him

• Biden misleading Senator Bernie Sanders into holding back a Senate vote challenging weapons sales to Israel

• Kamala Harris listening to a recording of Hind Rajab’s murder—and choosing not to act on what she heard

• Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s refusal to sanction an Israeli military unit implicated in torture and sexual assault, despite concrete evidence and a recommendation from his own officials

• Gaza as a testing ground for the tactics and legal justifications of future American wars

• Hamas leaders’ surprise at just how much humiliation Biden was willing to tolerate from Israel

• The Biden administration’s private acknowledgment of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank—and its decision to let it continue virtually unchecked

• The key officials who facilitated Israel’s war in Gaza, their concerns about potential personal liability for aiding and abetting war crimes, and the prestigious new jobs many have since landed

• The continuity between Biden and Trump, and how the former’s decisions laid the groundwork for the latter’s policies in Gaza and beyond

Akbar’s book is an invaluable contribution to the historical record of the Biden administration’s active role in the destruction of Gaza. Please consider picking up a copy here.

Lastly, to my Jewish subscribers, G’mar chatima tovah. May this Yom Kippur be an occasion not only for reflection and atonement, but for reckoning with what’s being done in our name.

Download audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/216744617/8d2d6c64a353295ee4cbd1e0743b57b3.mp3

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
– Samuel P. Huntington

The White Empire took Asia by taking and remaking its forts, using superior cannon and siege weaponry. The Portuguese took the Strait of Hormuz in 1515 and the British took Perim in Bab el Mandeb in 1799 and they are only now being wrested free. How? The same way they were tooken. With superior forts, cannon, and siege weaponry.

Iran and the Axis of Resistance have redefined forts as being underground. Under entire mountains, as in Iran and Yemen, or even under a concentration camp as in Palestine, these have proven to be superior. We had forts before, but the colonizer always wrested them. Now the modern underground fort has been tested in war, and bested them.

The Axis of Resistance has also redefined cannon. While the Empire drifted away from land-based cannon, because they were always bombing people far from home, the people of the land innovated on them. Now Iran and Yemen have 'cannon' that can be fired from its mountain fortresses and quickly withdrawn, and the 'cannonball' can find their targets from across continents. It's a brave new day and the cowardly colonizers have little or nothing to do with it.

As Samuel P. Huntington said, the White Empire won the world by its superiority in applying organized violence and it loses it the same way. To superior, well-organized violence. A 21st century shift in weapons and tactics that they're on the wrong side of. The Empire occupied and monopolized trade around the world using fortresses and cannon and they lose their occupation bases and monopolies to superior cannon and fortress. As the Axis of Resistance has proven.

Historical Background

I will speak somewhat from memory here because Sri Lanka is dotted with forts (Galle, Matara, Jaffna, Mannar, Colombo), still with their cannon. I have a lived memory of them, and know how they changed hands over and over. First the Portugeuse, the Dutch, then the British. The cannon always pointed outwards, because they fought amongst each other, but the fortress was always there for our plundering. Now the Americans do it from a giant embassy, but it's the same thing. These forts have been here so long that it's easy to think that this is the only way to trade. Like that new Jewish saying, 'if I don't steal it, someone else will.' But this tyrannical sort of trade is, in fact, profoundly unnatural.

People traded fine around the Indian Ocean before the White Empire fortressified everything. We had Tamil sailors manning Chinese boats, coins from the Roman Empire, goods from the Muslim World. I'm not saying that people didn't fight, but there wasn't a monopoly of violence across the entire ocean. It's not some natural law that you need to trade this way, it is, in fact, a historical anomaly.

Speaking from Sri Lanka, the entire Indian Ocean has a longer history of trade that was just, trade. Zheng He (a Chinese Muslim) came here in the 1420s and gave us stuff. Ibn Battuta came even earlier in the 1300s, marking our connection to the Muslim World. We have had trade with India since time immemorial. None of these traders set up forts to violently extort us because they were traders. They had stuff and exchanged it, quite often more stuff than us. Zheng He really just left gifts and bounced. Unlike broke-ass Europeans (not coincidentally turned white because they had so little solar energy), people in what's now called the Global South had plentiful energy (recorded on our coincidentally colored skin) and could trade amongs ourselves without depending on coercion. Always remember this, we didn't come looking for them, they came looking for us.

When the energy poor Europeans came here they actually didn't have much to trade with. All the violent tribes of Europe had to offer us was superior violence, so they took. Beginning with the Portugeuse they locked down trade using violence, such extraordinary violence that it required extraordinary cannon and forts. Then they monopolized our trade amongst each other (White people don't even use spices) and started sucking the profits (ie, energy) north. The Whites fought amongst each other for this monopoly trade so long that we think this it the only way to trade, but it's not. Such unnatural trade was only held in place by artificial violence. But nature is healing, inshallah.

What Iran is establishing is trade outside of this monopoly of violence. All Yemen wants is the same, the right to move around and exist on their own terms. Same for China, same for Russia, North Korea, Cuba, et cetera. This is what unites all of the White Empire's enemies, not their political systems, not their religion, not freedom or human rights or any other such marketing phrases used by inveterate slavers and inhuman corporations. The White Empire is run by Corporate AI, not humans, and it's never been personal, it's strictly business. They want a monopoly on trade and they attack any independent nation that threatens this.

When they first arrived, we hadn't evolved the organized violence to fight them because for centuries we hadn't needed it. Why would China need to violently impose trade with Sri Lanka when they had more stuff than us? They could just come here and trade stuff normally, which they mostly didn't because they simply weren't interested. Why would the Muslim World pepper us with forts? We were happy to trade pepper for their fancy system. It's only when broke-ass Europeans came that they broke the system, and quite effectively played us against each other. There was a huge amount of energy released by them networking the continents (in their desparation) and for a brief period (500 years) they were able to profit from being middlemen with superior violence. Other people had, of course, evolved mostly land-based violence, but no one else was this aggressively amphibious (and later, avariciously avian).

At the beginning Whites (their energy poverty reflected on their skin) had little to trade but organized violence and weapons, which is to say they didn't trade they're terrorized and took shit. Remember, they came looking for us, we didn't come looking for them! Much of the trade that enriched Europe wasn't between us and them, but between ourselves, with them monopolizing the profits. For example, the Whites grew opium in India to violently force on China. Warmer peoples never resorted to such lows as inter-continental drug dealing because we were not that broke. We were really not prepared for the violence that came out of the Asian ghetto called Europe.

I can still see that violence dotted around my island as forts, and the historical lesson I learned over and over was that they fought over these forts, and whoever held the fort won. That's how Sri Lanka passed from the Portugeuse to the Dutch to the British to now the Americans (their Embassy is horrifyingly large). They violently controlled trade not just with them (which was negligible at first) but with each other (which was a lot, literally the world). The controlled trade with sieges then, now with sanctions, but it's the same phenomenon. Coming to its natural denounement. After many millions dead and the climate burning, unfortunately. Shout-out the whales, also, they got it the worst.

That's why what Iran, Yemen and the Axis of Resistance is doing is so important, led by the heroes of Palestine of course. They are taking the Empire's forts, one by one. They very physical occupation they girded us with. And they are outshooting the Empire's cannon, silencing the guns they used to extort the world. What Russia and China are doing is also important, one in hot war and the other trade war, a revenge best served cold. They are showing us that trade and development is possible with or without the Empire, and even against its worst intentions. It's taken long centuries but the natives are relentless and nature is healing, inshallah.

Present Foreground

That's the historical background, I guess, did I digress? Let's connect it back to the present, the rise of Bab el Mandeb to the Yemeni and the Strait of Hormuz to the Iranians, long centuries since losing them. Previously, I've spoken about how the Axis of Resistance is winning the missile and tunnel wars, ushering in a new paradigm of warfare. But is it really so new? What is a missile but a cannonball and what is a tunnel but a deeper fort? Yes, it's still just cannon and forts, the age-old battle betwixt shield and sword. The Persian Gulf is lost the same way the Portugeuse took it, through cannon and fort. This was how they held power and how they lose it. This is the only language colonizers understand, superior violence.

The great innovation of 21st century warfare has been tunnel forts and smart missiles (and drones). Palestine first showed it, in their daring escape from and resistance from under the concentration camp the Whites made of Gaza. Then Yemen showed the same model when they defeated the US Navy in the Red Sea. And Iran demonstrated the same thing when they not only held Iran but destroyed all the US bases surrounding them. The Portuguese conquered Hormuz in 1515 and it's taken over 500 years to get it back! But we got it, homies, we got it. And these guys have changed history.

Can you believe it? I see the same damned Portugeuse Fort in my own country, built by slave labor, passed among Whites so they can rape us, and I have to pinch myself. It's really happening. We're finally beating them. In West Asia, sure, but I'll take it as an Asian.

The White Empire today is still dependent on 20th century weapons which are, in many cases, worse than 15th century ones. Modern American forts are exposed containers and just regular buildings out in the sun. Their old forts were stone while the new ones are basically cardboard. And they do not have much modern cannon at all, they got so used to strafing the poor from air cavalry that their missile technology has barely evolved.

For many years the Empire has ruled by fiat, not forts, sanctions, not sieges. I usually say it's the same thing because it has the same effects, but these are not the same causes. The White Empire has ruled for decades not by the consent of the government but by the lack of concerted opposition. Iran accepted American bases across the Persian Gulf and other countries accepted American sanctions. People, more than we should have, forgave and were content to live under the White Empire. Iran wanted to lift sanctions through negotiation, Russia broached joining NATO, China preaches win-win at ever occassion. Despite them being degenerate thieves and rapists, we gave the White Empire every chance to preside as elder statesman, but they can't do it. White supremacy is the only content to White Empire and they have to go out the way they came in, violently. They know no other language.

Since the White Empire monopolized global trade it was held by force, literally by forts. And if you didn't like it you didn't get missives, you got missiles down the throat. This was the deal and they held it even after they lost the power to enforce it, by sheer inertia. I think there remained that foolish idea that Whites could become human and just trade like normal people if we gave them long enough but they can't and they won't and they forced the point themselves, by starting multiple land wars in Asia. The force was implied, but the minute they made it explicit, everyone could see that they were a spent farce.

Now they're losing fortress Ukraine in North West Asia and every base in South West Asia and can't even start in East Asia, though I don't put anything past them, who knows. They monopolized global trade using superior violence, made real through unassailable forts and assault weapons, and they lose their monopoly the same way, to superior tunnel forts and missiles and drones. But lose to what?

What Comes Next

The common thinking among even avowed anti-imperialists is still basically imperialist. They think some empire has to replace this one, like the succession of Portugeuse, Dutch, British, inscribed in Sri Lanka's historical forts and collective trauma. If I don't steal it, someone else will, as the new Jewish saying goes, or 'the dark forest theory' of Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem books. But this thinking is a historical anomaly we need to think beyond now. You can't be an anti-imperialist imperialist, but you can try and be yourself, in your own land, without hegemony imposed by air and sea.

Land-based empires, forts, trade wars, fine, that sort of fighting goes on all the time. But networks of naval bases to monopolize global trade? That's an anomaly that's seen its time. No one monopolized trade in the Indian Ocean the way the Whites did. Violent trade monopolies are not a necessary evil, they're just evil. I'm not saying there weren't trade disputes and that there wasn't violence and conquest, I'm saying that there wasn't a monopoly of violence sold as peace and a monopoly of conquest sold as freedom. There wasn't one energy flow with most surplus going north (the unipolar world), there was lots of trade going across, in a multipolar world. And that is what we can and inshallah are returning to.

Iran is not replacing the Persian Gulf bases (though I think those borders certainly need to be redrawn, make UAE Oman again and, hell, make Saudi Yemeni). If you look at the way the Axis of Resistance is structured, it's not proxies and buffer states like the Empire does (and accuses everybody else of). Iran is not trying to dominate Yemen, on the other side of the horn. And if you look at the way China operates, they're not monopolistic with its Belt and Road. And Russia isn't owning the new Arctic route. Everyone is trying to just do their own thing, and what the vanguard in Yemen is saying is either everyone can trade or no one can trade. This is kinda the way it was before. And this is possible.

This is what is at stake in World War III. The White Empire is fighting to hold on to the world by force, and the world is struggling to be free many different ways at once. There is no particular alliance between everyone fighting America, but they are all fighting for the same thing. Freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from a monopoly of trade, that says everything has to go through them. And how is that freedom won? The same way it was lost, through cannon and fort.