Reaping The Whirlwind, or… What’s In Your Loot Box?

Rule number one when getting kidnapped is really quite simple — never get in the car.

Of course, resisting lawful arrest by a duly appointed agent of a legitimate government may sit near top-of-list for dumb ways to die, too — try not to do that either.

Deconflicting these two constraints under the present regime — left as an exercise to the everyman (and woman; and child, apparently).

What ought a reasonable person to do when a squad of masked goons rolls up and contrives to stuff them into an unmarked vehicle without showing ID?

Let me Google that for you! Ah, here we are — Google’s AI Summary helpfully suggests that you “scream, kick, bite, and use any objects nearby as weapons [while] aim[ing] for vulnerable areas like the eyes, throat, and groin”.

These all sound like excellent suggestions to me if you seem to be getting got by an unlawful gang, but oh, man, is David Sacks ever going to get worked up over such a “Woke AI” answer.

Luckily for me I inhabit a fairly privileged demographic. I am a large male who doesn’t exactly scream “target of opportunity” to would-be perpetrators of street crime. My ancestors hailed predominantly from latitudes sufficiently northern that racial profiling doesn’t flag me for suspicion in the USA. And I earn my daily bread by pushing buttons on a keyboard while safely ensconced in my climate controlled home instead of hustling for today’s gig in a Home Depot parking lot or schlepping take-out to the pampered class, jobs that for many citizens sit below taking a welfare check in the preference stack.

How easy it would be to say “not my dumpster; not my fire” and swim in the gravy of my privileged and sheltered existence while the world burns and people struggling on the margins find themselves subject to careless and callous treatment — like how the geniuses at Robinhood have decided to play the game.

I couldn’t actually believe the WSJ article I found on the front page this morning — Robinhood Offers to Bring Cash to Your Doorstep, for a Fee.

Let’s set aside for the moment the inherent absurdity of this during any given year. I mean, seriously, when do you really need such a service in the current era? Are you re-buying into your local high stakes illegal poker game? Or maybe you need to pay your drug dealer for that unplanned 2am cocaine binge and that dude’s OPSEC posture doesn’t square with Venmo?

Instead let’s focus on the absurdities with a uniquely 2025 flavor — a world wherein about a week ago the FBI issued a memo to ICE (long overdue!) urging them to take field identification seriously in the wake of a crime spree wherein impersonators have carried out robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assault across multiple states; and a world where delivery drivers are disproportionately likely to get peremptorily grabbed by ICE because hard-charging recent immigrants are over-represented in that labor demographic.

And now Robinhood be like — “let’s have those delivery drivers carry giant wads of cash!”

But fear not — as a “security mechanism” the cash will be in a sealed brown paper bag that looks just like every other delivery while the driver remains oblivious to its contents.

Hrm. That “security” doesn’t sound like it’s for the driver’s benefit. And something tells me it won’t actually redound to anyone’s benefit, except maybe enterprising thieves cosplaying as federales. I would hazard a guess that “ICE agents” will be “arresting” hapless delivery drivers in ever greater numbers until someone stops the stupid. How disappointing is it, really, when the “loot box” you crack open has burritos instead of Benjamins? Have you been to Chipotle lately? Maybe if the delivery agents got hazard pay in line with gun-toting armor-clad Wells Fargo employees, then they, too, could afford a quesadilla with a side of guac now and again.

Let’s be clear and let’s be fair. The good ol’ USA has royally screwed up immigration policy over the span of many administrations — we didn’t take border enforcement seriously, we winked at the illegals who got to work doing the jobs most Americans wouldn’t take, we allowed the immigration case backlog to rise into the millions, and now we’re all reaping the whirlwind in the form of an incredibly cruel and capricious backlash with totalitarian overtones.

I empathize with the people who came here to do honest work, fleeing poverty and terror in their homelands while hoping that the paperwork would catch up. As a former government employee, I myself learned that it was often better to ask forgiveness than permission from an unwieldy, overwhelmed, and disinterested bureaucracy of a kind that Kafka would find all too recognizable, hoping that the merit of my work would motivate retroactive compliance.

And I empathize, too, with the cities and towns overwhelmed by the influx. Even the most staunchly pro-immigrant people must recognize that without flow control and curated admission any system will find its infrastructure overrun and culture disrupted.

If Team Red did their version of “Flood The Zone With Shit” by overwhelming the info-sphere with disinformation then Team Blue did similar by overwhelming the courts with an immigration caseload so enormous that our relevant laws began losing meaning. If you love due process, rule of law, and professionalism then you really ought not execute a denial of service attack against a key component of your country’s legal system. As David Frum has been tirelessly cautioning us for years: if liberals won’t enforce borders then fascists will.

But let’s not bog down in an unhelpful debate over the semantics of fascism as the relevant details ought to speak for themselves. I myself come from a 9/11 Defense Department vintage that followed a decade-long hiring freeze during which we foolishly squandered our peace dividend after the Berlin Wall fell only to have to Leeroy Jenkins our way back to a reasonable operating capacity after the Two Towers fell. Where were all the people ten years my senior, I wondered, until I put two-and-two together, realizing that they had never been hired. And here we are doing similar with ICE staffing plans that go long on signing bonuses and short on culture and protocol, wondering why it’s so chaotic and cruel, and scratching our heads over struggling construction and farming sectors as we fly blind through a fog wrought by politicized BLS firings and government shutdowns alike.

If all this isn’t enough to turn your stomach then the larger developing precedent ought to do the job. I have come to think of Trump, to borrow from my cyber-security lexicon, as Pentester In Chief — a cynical strategist who seeks at every turn to overwhelm our capacity for attention, to inure us to erosions of liberty once held dear, to grab power at every opportunity, and in general foster the kind of cynicism and hopelessness that yields disengagement and acceptance, doing so in a manner both piecemeal and inexorable.

By the time the 2026 elections arrive we are meant to be numbed to the encroachments — to think that National Guard deployments to cities against the wishes of local government are normal, that politicization of the armed forces is de rigueur, that the Emoluments Clause and Hatch Act have no meaning, that judges can be threatened with impeachment for doing their jobs, that government executives who share inconvenient truths or make difficult stands will face legal persecution by a weaponized Justice Department or just find themselves summarily fired by the President, that elections will be delegitimized before they are even held, and that free speech will only be protected if it pleases Trump — to say nothing of non-whites just having to live in chronic fear of harassment and arrest by ICE (and their doppelgängers) whether they are citizens or not.

We are navigating a precarious moment with razor thin margins as those in power do everything they can to maneuver pieces on the board, positioning them to strike at a crucial moment against a disaffected population.

Stay frosty, stay loud, stay principled, and stay resolute. History tells us that “Ordinary Men” are capable of complicity in extraordinary atrocities once the energy and momentum in a system go critical. The flywheel is spinning up and future generations will demand to know what you did in the meanwhile.