The Obsolescence Economy: What Comes After Subordination
When the Billionaires Don’t Need You Anymore
This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1: “The Week They Stopped Pretending”
If you read Part 1, you saw what happened the week of February 2-7, 2026. Federal agents killing citizens. $500 million buying foreign policy. Racist content from the presidential account. Epstein files revealing hundreds of powerful men who exploited children, many continuing after his 2008 conviction. Plans to “take over elections” with ICE agents stationed at polling locations.
You saw how the elite see you, the infrastructure being built in real time. Now let’s talk about what it’s for.
Here’s what both sides get wrong about the moment we are living in. If you oppose Trump, you think this started with him. It didn’t. The surveillance architecture, the extraction economy, the hollowing out of labor — these were built across administrations, by both parties, serving the same billionaire class, especially after Citizen’s United. Amazon’s monopoly grew under Obama. Wall Street got bailed out under Bush and protected under Biden. Palantir’s government contracts predate Trump by a decade. The system wasn’t built by one party. It was built by money, and money doesn’t vote, it controls as it always has.
If you support Trump, you think he’s fighting this system. He’s not. DOGE isn’t draining the swamp, it’s handing the swamp’s data to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel while those in the circle of the administration grab as much wealth as they can as quickly as possible. Clear corruption, in broad day-light, with little regards to ethics or morals. The tax cuts that don’t help you, they help the billionaire class consolidate. The detention infrastructure that not about immigration, but about building capacity. Trump isn’t the disease nor the cure. He’s the accelerant.
What’s being built isn’t liberal or conservative. It’s a world where the billionaire class — Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Zuckerberg, the men in the Epstein files who never faced charges — no longer need ordinary Americans. Not your labor. Not your votes. Not your consumption. Not your military service.
It’s not hypothetical. It’s a 5-10 year timeline. And the infrastructure being built right now is designed to make you optional.
This is the obsolescence economy.
I. What They’re Building
Four infrastructure projects are running in parallel. Each replaces a reason they currently need you.
Production Without Workers
There’s a benchmark called ARC-AGI-2 that measures something specific: can AI solve problems it’s never seen before? Not retrieve information it memorized. Not pattern-match against training data. Actually reason through novel problems — the kind of abstract thinking that defines cognitive work.
Humans score 60% on average. As of February 5, 2026, Claude Opus 4.6 scored 68.8%. It surpassed average human performance on the test specifically designed to be the thing AI couldn’t do. I covered the earlier stages of this in “Silicon Immigrants.” What’s happened since is the part that should concern you.
To understand what this means for your job, think about what cognitive work actually is. It’s reading a contract and identifying the risk. Writing a marketing strategy for a new product. Diagnosing why a system failed. Analyzing financial data and recommending action. Drafting legal briefs. Designing software architecture. Evaluating medical imaging.
None of that requires genius. It requires the ability to encounter a new problem, understand its structure, and reason toward a solution, what college and experience teaches you, exactly what ARC-AGI-2 measures. And AI just passed the average human threshold on that ability, at a fraction of the cost. Tasks that would cost $17 per human worker, that used to cost closer to $30 for AI, now cost $3.49. That gap will only continue to widen.
The speed of improvement tells the story. In July 2025, the best AI scored 15.9% on ARC-AGI-2. Seven months later: 68.8%. That’s not incremental progress. That’s a capability curve steeper than any in the history of technology. What you see below are the improvements in both ARC-AGI-1, which then was then improved to ARC-AGI-2 to make it harder for the AI’s once they were getting to close to the 85% mark for the first version.
What gets replaced first: legal research, financial analysis, medical diagnosis, software engineering, content creation, customer service management. That’s tens of millions of knowledge workers. Physical labor follows, humanoid robots are in factory testing now, with manufacturing deployment 2-3 years out. Robotics has been here for a while, but the “brains” were too expensive to create, now, a fraction of the cost and getting cheaper and more capable.
The standard rebuttal, “new jobs will be created”, doesn’t apply when the technology replacing you also replaces whatever new work gets invented. When AI reasons better than the average human, learns faster, adapts instantly, and works without pay, the question isn’t which jobs survive. It’s why they’d pay a human to do it.
A simple example is what’s happening in Alabama, they now have robots doing ultrasounds on pregnant women since the state now has no OBGYN’s. Not too few, NONE. So care for pregnant women is being handled by robots already. And for those in power, like Dr Oz, they think this is the right direction.
Below is a chart from Anthropic about Opus 4.6 and its abilities in testing. What you are seeing is that the longer it takes a human to be competent at cognitive work, the faster AI replaces that work. Where the work is more manual, still behind, but starting to have the “brain” to put in the robot to do the tasks.
Wealth Without Consumers
You think you matter to the economy because you spend money. That’s the assumption behind every labor negotiation, every consumer boycott, every “vote with your wallet” campaign. The entire social contract rests on the idea that the wealthy need your consumption to stay wealthy.
That assumption is now dying.
The top 1% own 30.8% of all wealth in America — $49.2 trillion. Within that, the top 0.1% alone hold roughly 14%. The bottom 50% — 165 million people — share 2.5%. But it's not the numbers that matter, it's where the money circulates. Increasingly, the ultra-wealthy buy from each other. Real estate, art, private equity, luxury services, venture capital — money moving in a closed loop that never touches your grocery store, your landlord, your employer. Their economy and your economy are already separating. And when you can’t afford your home, they buy that too.
The K-economy is real and you can see it clearly on graphs now.
Your economy — Walmart, Amazon, fast food, streaming services — still exists, but its function is changing. It’s not designed to build your wealth or sustain a middle class. It’s designed to extract your remaining purchasing power as efficiently as possible while the transition to full automation completes. Subscription services that nickel-and-dime you monthly. Algorithms that calculate exactly how much you’ll pay before switching. Shrinkflation, junk fees, dynamic pricing, tariffs. You’re not a customer being served. You’re a resource being mined.
And here’s what happens when the mining is done: once production is fully automated, the economy runs on AI labor and the billionaire class’s capital. It doesn’t need 330 million consumers. It needs a few million high-value participants and the machines that serve them. Your spending becomes irrelevant. Your debt becomes irrelevant. You become irrelevant — not because you’re poor, but because the economy has been redesigned to function without you.
Governance Without Voters
DOGE was never about finding waste and abuse. It was about building this.
Federal databases were deliberately kept separate. Your tax records at the IRS, your medical history at Health and Human Services, your employment data at the Department of Labor, your Social Security information, your immigration status at DHS — these systems were siloed on purpose. Accessing data across agencies required judicial review, legal process, probable cause. That separation wasn’t inefficiency. It was a constitutional firewall protecting citizens from their own government.
DOGE dismantled it. Under the cover of “eliminating information silos,” a March 2025 executive order opened every agency’s data to cross-referencing. Palantir — the surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel — is now building what Congressional Democrats have called “the most expansive civilian surveillance infrastructure in U.S. history.” A unified platform connecting IRS records, Social Security data, health information, employment history, immigration status, and law enforcement databases into a single searchable system. Rep. Lloyd Doggett called it “a federal master file on every American.” The ACLU warned it was “a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person in this country.”
Courts have pushed back — a federal judge in Maryland blocked DOGE from accessing Social Security data, writing “the Privacy Act is not toothless.” But the architecture is being built faster than the courts can intervene.
Once operational, algorithms decide who gets audited, who gets benefits, who gets investigated, who gets deported, who gets healthcare. No human discretion. No appeals. Risk score calculated, decision executed.
Democracy becomes decorative. You can still vote, but algorithms make policy. Elections become performance art for decisions already made by code you can’t see, written by companies you didn’t elect, optimizing for metrics you don’t control. Many would say this is what’s already been happening, and they would be right, now think about a system that works at 10x efficiency. Do you think you will get your representation back?
Security Without Soldiers
For the entirety of American history, or just history for that matter, the powerful have needed ordinary people to fight their wars. That need created leverage. It’s why the GI Bill exists, why veteran benefits exist, why the government has historically invested in keeping the population healthy and educated enough to serve. You don’t send your sons and daughters to die for a country that treats you like garbage — so the country had to treat you well enough to keep you willing.
That calculation is ending.
Ukraine: 80% of casualties are now inflicted by drones. It’s why the Russian army is stuck at Pokrovsk and their soldiers are deserting in high numbers. In Gaza: AI target selection generated over 37,000 targets, with the system called “Lavender” recommending strikes faster than any human analyst could review them. Laying Gaza to rubble so the billionaire class can build a high-tech, and industrial metropolis, being led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
The U.S. military is watching both conflicts as live testing grounds for what comes next — drone swarms numbering in the thousands, coordinated without pilots. AI targeting systems that cross-reference facial recognition against databases in real time. Autonomous logistics that don’t need supply lines staffed by human beings.
When the military no longer needs your sons or daughters to enlist, it no longer needs to offer them college tuition or the promise of healthcare. The entire social contract around military service — the benefits, the patriotic investment in communities, the reason the government kept you fed and housed and educated enough to be useful — dissolves.
And you need to make the leap to understanding this: the autonomous systems being built for foreign battlefields work just as well domestically. The drone that surveils a village overseas can surveil your neighborhood. The AI that assigns targets in a war zone can assign risk scores in your city. The technology doesn’t distinguish between foreign enemies and domestic inconveniences. It just needs someone to point it in a direction.
It’s what makes the idea of “Are we living under authoritarian rule right now?” hard to fathom in this moment, we were trained to think that only happens once we see tanks in the streets, not small autonomous drones flying overhead. But ask the Russian soldiers that now are handcuffed together until they are dropped at the frontlines to prevent them from running. Running from what they are referring to as “Baba Yaga.” A multifaceted witch in Slavic folklore that inhabits the boundary between life and death, Ukrainian drone swarms. And if they still don’t want to fight, they are tied to trees and left as sacrifices to the drones.
Now read that list again, but this time put yourself in it:
You work — but AI does your job better, faster, and for $3.49 per task vs your salary.
You spend money — but you’re being mined, not served, and when the extraction is done the economy won’t notice you’re gone.
You vote — but the algorithm already decided the policy before the ballot was counted.
Your children could serve their country — but a drone swarm is cheaper and doesn’t need a GI Bill or veteran support.
Every reason the powerful have ever needed ordinary people is being engineered away. All four, simultaneously, on a timeline measured in years, not decades.
II. What Happens When You’re Unnecessary
Here’s the question nobody in power will answer: What happens to 300 million Americans when the billionaire class doesn’t need them to vote, work, consume, or fight?
History offers three options.
Option 1: They Share
Universal basic income. Post-scarcity socialism. Billionaires redistribute abundance. Humans live meaningful lives without employment.
Likelihood: Near zero, though I wish it was the path we were on.
This requires the billionaire class to voluntarily share wealth. Everything happening right now tells you how they view you. Bezo’s fires workers while adding billions to his net worth. Trump pockets $4 billion while cutting veteran benefits. The UAE deal prioritizes profit over national security. The Attorney General, just testified in front of congress, that the stock market being up is more important than prosecuting wealthy child molesters. Basically saying her job is to protect those at the top, not all Americans. These aren’t people who will choose redistribution when they no longer need you.
Option 2: They Let You Die
Obsolete populations “self-correct” through systemic withdrawal. No healthcare, no food assistance, no infrastructure. Population decline through starvation, disease, despair. Quiet elimination through policy, not camps.
The Irish Famine: British policy led to 1 million deaths — called “natural causes.”
The Bengal Famine: British policy led to 3 million deaths — called “natural causes.”
Native displacement: policy led to population collapse — called “natural causes.”
The pattern repeats: powerful groups decide a population is expendable, withdraw support, call resulting deaths inevitable. Never extermination camps. Just allocation decisions. Resource priorities. The expendable population dies quietly over a generation, now re-read the Big Beautiful Bill with this in mind.
Likelihood: Moderate and rising.
Option 3: They Warehouse You
Billionaire enclaves separated from everyone else. Minimal services, algorithmic control, surveillance state. The rich live in paradise. Everyone else survives in managed decline, and those who object, get contained.
Likelihood: High. This is what they appear to be building.
Look at where the money is going.
For the billionaire class: Peter Thiel’s Praxis Nation, a “sovereign network” outside democratic control. The Seasteading Institute building floating cities beyond jurisdiction. Billionaire retreats in New Zealand. Militarized compounds with autonomous defense. They’re building separation infrastructure — not for catastrophe, but for ordinary operations. Planning a world where they don’t live among you, don’t rely on your systems, don’t need your society.
For everyone else: warehouses.
Not metaphorical warehouses. Actual warehouses. Buildings designed to store cargo, being converted to hold human beings.
As of February 2026, ICE has identified 23 warehouse sites across the country for conversion to detention facilities. Seven mega facilities will hold 5,000 to 10,000 people each — in renovated industrial warehouses near logistics hubs. Fifteen smaller processing centers will hold 500 to 1,500 people each, functioning as feeders into the larger facilities. ICE has already purchased a 418,000-square-foot warehouse in Arizona for $70 million, a warehouse in Maryland for $102 million, one in Pennsylvania for $84 million, and a three-building logistics center in El Paso for $123 million that will hold 8,500 people. In Social Circle, Georgia, a 10,000-person warehouse facility is set to open in April.
The total target: over 80,000 beds, more than triple the system’s capacity when Trump took office. Funded by $45 billion allocated through the Big Beautiful Bill, running through 2029. This is not emergency spending. This is long-term infrastructure.
Picture what a 10,000-person warehouse detention facility actually looks like. A concrete box the size of seven football fields. No windows. Fluorescent lighting twenty-four hours a day. Rows of cots stretching to the far wall, which you can barely see, subdivided by chainlink fence. The hum of industrial ventilation. Ten thousand people breathing the same recycled air in a building that, six months ago, stored auto parts or consumer electronics. The loading docks where trucks backed in with merchandise now process human beings. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the architectural reality of converting a logistics warehouse into a detention facility. The buildings weren’t designed for people. They were designed for inventory.
For context: the largest federal prison in the United States holds roughly 4,000 people. These individual warehouse facilities will hold double that. Some will hold more than double.
And look who’s being detained. In 2025, arrests of people with no criminal record surged 2,450%. By December, 74% of people in ICE detention had no criminal convictions. For every one person released, 14.3 were deported directly from custody. Discretionary releases fell 87%. Deaths in ICE detention hit the highest level of any non-COVID year.
Read those numbers again. Seventy-four percent had NO criminal record. The system isn’t selecting for danger. It’s selecting for vulnerability. It’s testing how many people it can process, how fast, with how little resistance.
Right now, the people in those warehouses are immigrants. That’s politically viable — half the country has been conditioned to accept it. But emergency infrastructure built for one group has never stayed limited to that group. The Patriot Act was sold as a tool to catch terrorists. Within five years it was used for drug cases, tax fraud, and domestic surveillance of American citizens who had nothing to do with terrorism. The NSA’s mass data collection — revealed by Edward Snowden — began as foreign intelligence and expanded to monitoring every American’s phone records. The pattern is always the same: build the infrastructure under emergency authority, normalize it, then expand the target.
The detention infrastructure doesn’t care about nationality. It cares about capacity. The databases Palantir is building don’t distinguish between an undocumented worker and an unemployed citizen. The algorithms assign risk scores based on data, not on where you were born.
So ask yourself: when AI has replaced 50 million jobs and the unemployment crisis hits — when desperate people start demanding resources the system has decided they’re no longer entitled to — what do you think those warehouses will be used for? Who do you think the algorithms will flag next?
The infrastructure being tested on immigrants today is the infrastructure that will be applied to you tomorrow. It just needs a reason. Mass unemployment provides one.
Now look at who protects this system — and for whom.
The same government building warehouse detention for 10,000 people at a time passed $4.5 trillion in tax cuts weighted toward corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The same budget that funds $45 billion in detention infrastructure cut veteran benefits, gutted healthcare funding, and froze education spending. The same administration that gave Palantir contracts to build a surveillance database on every American citizen gave billionaires direct access to federal policy through DOGE.
This is not incoherence. It’s a blueprint.
For the billionaire class, a “sovereign network” outside democratic control. Tax structures that let them pay less than their employees. Deregulation that lets them operate without oversight. A justice system that investigates their critics and ignores their crimes.
For you and your family: warehouses.
They’re building paradise for themselves and a management system for everyone else. Not in secret. With public funds. The money flows in both directions simultaneously — up to the enclaves, down to the detention centers — and both flows are accelerating. The K-economy in plain sight.
Connect the infrastructure: Palantir builds the database that profiles every citizen. The algorithm assigns risk scores based on employment, financial activity, location, associations. ICE — or whatever enforcement apparatus inherits its tools — makes the arrest. The warehouse holds the body. And the legal system, restructured to serve executive power, provides cover.
That’s not a border enforcement system. That’s a population management system with a clear design: protect the people who matter, contain the people who don’t. The only question left is which side of that line you’re on — and what happens when the line moves.
III. The Timeline
This is not distant future. It’s a 5-10 year build.
2026 (now): AI has already surpassed average human performance on abstract reasoning. Database unification across federal agencies is underway. Warehouse detention network is being built, targeting 80,000+ capacity. Cognitive labor displacement has begun — legal research, financial analysis, content creation, and software engineering are being automated at a fraction of human cost. This is not a future phase. It is the current one.
2027-2029: AI performance continues accelerating — the 15.9% to 68.8% curve in seven months shows no sign of flattening. First wave of mass layoffs in knowledge work sectors as companies discover they can replace departments, not just tasks. “Reskilling” programs launch and fail because AI learns faster than the programs can teach. Algorithmic governance operational at scale — human discretion in federal decisions functionally eliminated under the banner of “efficiency.”
2029-2032: Robotic labor deployed at manufacturing scale. Combined unemployment from AI and robotics reaches crisis levels. Social unrest meets an automated surveillance and enforcement apparatus already built and tested. Detention infrastructure, originally framed as immigration enforcement, repurposed for broader population management.
2032-2035: Billionaire enclaves fully separated. Healthcare, education, and infrastructure withdrawn from “non-productive” populations. Life expectancy drops. The Big Beautiful Bill already started this process. Population “self-corrects” through despair, addiction, lack of care — and those who resist find the detention infrastructure waiting.
These aren’t predictions. The first phase is already measurable. The rest are infrastructure timelines published by the companies building the systems, funded by legislation already passed, and visible in contracts already signed.
IV. The Choice
The infrastructure isn’t fully operational yet. That’s the window.
What the billionaire class needs that they can’t yet automate: your compliance.
Algorithms govern if you accept algorithmic governance. Robots enforce if you don’t resist. Warehouses hold people if nobody objects to warehouses holding people. The entire system assumes you’ll comply — that you’ll accept your own obsolescence quietly.
Every act of non-compliance challenges that assumption. The Minneapolis protesters in sub-zero weather. The arrested journalists who came back the next day. Governor Walz activating the National Guard against federal agents. Engineers leaking how the systems work. Communities blocking warehouse detention sites in their towns — Kansas City passed a moratorium, states from New York to New Mexico have introduced legislation banning ICE detention centers.
None of this stops the infrastructure alone. But it proves that subordination is a choice. And the infrastructure only works if enough people choose it.
Scott Galloway put it plainly in January 2026: hit their wallets now, while you can. Cancel subscriptions to platforms owned by the billionaire class. Stop buying from companies funding this infrastructure. Move money to credit unions and local banks. Support worker-owned co-ops. They’re building a world that doesn’t need your consumption — but they’re not there yet. Right now, coordinated withdrawal of economic participation still hurts them. In five years, it won’t matter.
The window is now.
You can go back to sleep. Focus on your immediate life. Hope someone else handles it. Accept whatever comes.
Or you can look at the warehouses being built to hold 10,000 human beings each, and decide that you refuse to live in a country that stores people like cargo.
The billionaire class bet they could build this fast enough that by the time you understood, it would be too late.
They might be right.
But I think they revealed their hand too early. The week of February 2-7 showed exactly what they think of you, what they’re building, and where this goes. They stopped pretending because they thought they were far enough along. You now see this in plain and simple terms.
So now you know, not just from these words but from the actions by those in the inner circle. And what you do with that knowledge — in the next day, week, year, not the next decade — determines whether your children inherit a democracy or a warehouse.
The time is now.
"We have yet to understand: that if I'm starving, you are in danger." James Baldwin
Sources
Palantir government contracts predate Trump: Wired, “Palantir’s $800 Million Army Deal Shows How Its Business Has Changed” (Dec 2019) — https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-800-million-army-deal/
Wall Street bailout (TARP): U.S. Treasury — https://home.treasury.gov/data/troubled-assets-relief-program
Amazon monopoly growth under Obama: The Atlantic, “How Amazon Got Big” (various)
ARC-AGI benchmark & human average (60%): ARC Prize Foundation — https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
Claude Opus 4.6 scores 68.8% on ARC-AGI-2 (Feb 5, 2026): ARC Prize Leaderboard — https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
Grok 4 scored 15.9% (July 2025): ARC Prize Leaderboard — https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
AI task cost $3.49 vs. human $17: METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research), AI task benchmarking studies
Humanoid robots in factory testing: Tesla Optimus, Figure AI — various press coverage
Top 0.1% own 17% of U.S. wealth: Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts — https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/
K-shaped economy: Brookings Institution, various analyses of post-pandemic recovery divergence
Shrinkflation/junk fees: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reports on junk fees — https://www.consumerfinance.gov
March 2025 executive order “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos”: White House executive order
Palantir building unified federal database: Wired, “DOGE Is Building a Master Database” (2025); Democracy Now coverage
Rep. Lloyd Doggett “federal master file on every American”: Congressional statements, Democracy Now — https://www.democracynow.org
ACLU “panopticon” warning: ACLU statement on DOGE data unification —https://www.aclu.org
Federal judge blocks DOGE SSA access (”Privacy Act is not toothless”): Maryland federal court ruling, CNN — https://www.cnn.com
Palantir co-founded by Peter Thiel: Public record
Ukraine 80% drone casualties: Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) reports on drone warfare in Ukraine
Pokrovsk frontline / Russian desertions: CNN (Sept 2024) — https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/08/europe/ukraine-military-morale-desertion-intl-cmd/
Lavender AI targeting system / 37,000+ targets in Gaza: +972 Magazine / Local Call investigation (April 2024) — https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
Baba Yaga drone nickname: Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Yaga_(aircraft); Ukrainska Pravda (June 2024) — https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/06/03/7458837/
Russian soldiers tied to trees as “sacrifice to Baba Yaga”: CNN (July 2025) — https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/28/europe/russia-deserters-ukraine-war-intl
Russian desertions (18,000+ from Southern Military District): Newsweek (April 2024) — https://www.newsweek.com/russian-soldiers-deserting-army-ukraine-war-1895196; The Insider (Nov 2025) — https://theins.ru/en/confession/286662
Bondi cites Dow over Epstein prosecution: CNBC (Feb 11, 2026) — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/11/trump-pam-bondi-hearing-stock-epstein-judiciary-dow.html
UPI (Feb 11, 2026) — https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/02/11/house-judiciary-hearing-bondi-epstein-massie-raskin/
CBS News (Feb 11, 2026) — https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/pam-bondi-hearing-epstein-files-justice-department-congress/
NOTUS (Feb 11, 2026) — https://www.notus.org/congress/pam-bondi-house-judiciary-hearing-jeffrey-epstein-files-release-documents
23 warehouse sites identified: Washington Post, verified by NBC News (2025-2026)
ICE warehouse purchases ($70M AZ, $102M MD, $84M PA, $123M El Paso): NBC News; Bloomberg Government
Social Circle, Georgia 10,000-person facility: NBC News; local Georgia reporting
80,000+ bed target / $45 billion through Big Beautiful Bill: Congressional Budget Office analysis; Bloomberg
74% of detainees have no criminal convictions: American Immigration Council —
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org
Arrests of people with no criminal record surged 2,450%: TRAC Immigration, Syracuse University — https://trac.syr.edu
For every 1 released, 14.3 deported from custody: TRAC Immigration data
Discretionary releases fell 87%: TRAC Immigration data
Deaths in ICE detention highest non-COVID year: American Immigration Lawyers Association; ICE reporting
Largest federal prison holds ~4,000: Federal Bureau of Prisons data https://www.bop.gov
Patriot Act expansion beyond terrorism: ACLU, “Surveillance Under the USA/PATRIOT Act” — https://www.aclu.org/other/surveillance-under-usapatriot-act
NSA mass data collection / Snowden: The Guardian (June 2013); various
Peter Thiel’s Praxis Nation: Bloomberg; Praxis public statements
Seasteading Institute: Public website — https://www.seasteading.org
Billionaire retreats in New Zealand: The Guardian; Bloomberg (various)
$4.5 trillion tax cuts: Congressional Budget Office scoring of Big Beautiful Bill
Minneapolis protesters in sub-zero weather: Local reporting (Jan-Feb 2026)
Governor Walz activating National Guard: CNN; AP (2026)
Kansas City ICE detention moratorium: Kansas City Star; local reporting
States introducing legislation banning ICE detention: New York, New Mexico legislative records
Scott Galloway economic withdrawal call: Galloway podcast/Substack (Jan 2026)