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Hello Reader,
From a midnight helicopter raid in Chicago to the socialist leading New York's mayoral race, this week's Dispatches reveal how comfortable Americans have become with government overreach—as long as it targets the right people.
Note: This week's edition is abbreviated as I catch up from a brief vacation.
And stay tuned for Saturday's essay, which examines the "No Kings" rallies spreading across America—and the uncomfortable history behind them. Many protesting executive overreach today come from a tradition that spent decades expanding presidential power, believing benevolent leaders would wield it wisely.
- Black Hawks Down - in Chicago
- New Yorkers Take the Socialist Plunge
- The Shutdown Consequences Arrive
- American Renegade of the Week
Color Key: 🟢 Advances liberty 🔴 Restricts liberty
At around 1am, she woke to the thumping of rotor blades outside her fifth-floor window. But Alicia Brooks wasn’t holed up in an Islamabad compound planning her next terror attack—military helicopters were descending on her Chicago apartment building.
A week after the puck dropped in the Chicago Blackhawks’ season opener, Black Hawk helicopters dropped 300 federal agents onto the roof of Brooks’ apartment on Chicago’s South Shore earlier this month, throwing flashbang grenades and smashing through doors with breaching ladders.
Brooks—an American citizen—was grabbed before she could reach her keys, zip-tied, and marched outside in her pajamas with her neighbors, including children. When she protested, she was knocked down, cuffed, and held until sunrise. No one asked her a single question. 130 people were evacuated from the building, and 37 were arrested—Brooks not among them.
The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches and seizures, requiring individualized suspicion before detaining anyone. In INS v. Lopez-Mendoza (1984), the Supreme Court ruled that while immigration agents can sometimes use evidence gathered from routine violations, that tolerance vanishes when their actions are egregious—like warrantless home entries or detentions without suspicion.
DHS insists its tactics are lawful “under the Fourth Amendment,” invoking “reasonable suspicion”—a phrase that never appears in the amendment. It was created by the Supreme Court in 1968 to justify brief, individualized stops—not midnight raids on apartment buildings. DHS also claims the Supreme Court “recently vindicated” its approach, citing a September decision that lifted limits on ICE patrols. But that ruling merely paused a lower-court injunction; it didn’t authorize mass detentions. Even the justices reaffirmed that race or location alone cannot justify a stop.
“Reasonable suspicion” may allow a brief pat-down of one person, but it doesn’t justify zip-tying dozens of Americans in their pajamas—based solely on their address.
In January, Zohran Mamdani stood on Coney Island's frozen beach in a full suit, shouting "I'm freezing…your rent!" before plunging into the icy waters. The stunt captured his campaign perfectly: theatrical populism masking terrible ideas.
The 33-year-old Democratic Socialist leads New York's mayoral race by double digits, promising to freeze rents for two million residents. He ignores when government caps rents below market rates, landlords struggle to cover costs, disincentivizing improvements and driving owners to abandon properties.
The capitalist system Mamdani openly disdains is remarkably good at controlling rats, fixing leaks, and heating homes. In New York's rent-controlled apartments, rodent infestation rates are double market-rate apartments, leaks are twice as common, and heating breakdowns triple.
Mamdani's platform reads like a socialist wish list: free childcare for every family, free buses for all, and a small-business-crushing $30 minimum wage. Add his proposal to invest an eye-popping $100 billion over the next decade building 200,000 public housing units. Funding this requires nearly $9 billion in new annual revenue. His solution: a 2% income-tax hike on million-dollar earners and higher corporate rates.
But top-earning New Yorkers already shoulder the nation's highest income-tax rate—about 14.8 percent when state and city taxes combine—and Mamdani's plan would push it to nearly 17 percent. He hasn't explained how he'd stop wealthy taxpayers from fleeing a city that's already seen its share of the nation's millionaires drop 31%, draining tens of billions in revenue.
Yet New Yorkers appear determined to learn Thatcher's timeless lesson on socialism the hard way: eventually, you run out of other people's money.
It’s day 23 of the government shutdown—now the second longest in American history—and the consequences have finally arrived.
Millions of low-income families who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program face benefit cuts or stoppage. FAA staffing shortages are now delaying flights. Tomorrow, many federal employees will miss their first full paycheck.
Yet neither party will tell Americans the truth.
Democrats are fighting to extend enhanced ACA subsidies before year's end, when premiums could surge by an average of 114 percent for the 24 million Americans enrolled. Yet few Democrats acknowledge that extending these subsidies would heap hundreds of billions onto the federal deficit over the next decade.
They also fight to reverse nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts included in the Big Beautiful Bill. Medicaid spending exploded from $582 billion in 2017 to $909 billion in 2024—driven largely by Biden administration policies that forced CBO to revise its ten-year projections upward by $817 billion. Some seniors will pay higher premiums and rural health systems will suffer unnecessarily, but with federal Medicaid costs approaching $1 trillion annually and interest payments on our debt already exceeding that threshold, the trajectory cannot continue. Work requirements were a necessary reform.
And Democrats are holding the government hostage over a law they already lost. The BBB passed both chambers through the constitutional process. When you lose elections, you don't get to shut down the government for a do-over.
Republicans counter with their own boogeyman: Democrats funding healthcare for illegal immigrants. The BBB stripped Medicaid and ACA access from 1.4 million lawfully present immigrants—refugees, asylum seekers, trafficking victims. The merits of the expansion of asylum priviledges under Biden are debatable, but these immigrants entered with government permission. Democrats seek to restore their eligibility at a cost of $131 billion over ten years—barely one-quarter of their actual ACA and Medicaid demands. Republicans are deliberately transforming a debate over legal refugee healthcare into one about illegal immigration.
Democrats evade the debt crisis. Republicans obscure the cuts. Neither will level with the American people.
American Renegade of the Week:
Erez Reuveni had made it. 15 years grinding through the Justice Department, defending policies he believed in—including Trump's Muslim travel ban—had earned him three awards and two promotions. By March, he reached the American dream for a public servant—he was appointed as Acting Deputy Director, overseeing 100 attorneys.
That same day, Emil Bove—Trump's former criminal defense lawyer, freshly installed as DOJ's #3—summoned him to a meeting that would end his career. Bove told the attorneys Trump planned to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans without judicial hearings. The planes would take off "no matter what," Bove emphasized. Then came the kicker: if some court tried to stop them, they might have to tell that judge "f*ck you."
Reuveni “felt like a bomb had gone off.”
The next morning, when Judge James Boasberg asked government attorney Drew Ensign whether planes were leaving that weekend, Ensign claimed ignorance—despite sitting in the same meeting 24 hours earlier where departure was confirmed. Reuveni called it "the highest, most egregious violation of a lawyer's code of ethics." Hours after Boasberg ordered the government not to remove anyone, the planes departed anyway.
When deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia turned out to have been sent by mistake, Reuveni's superior ordered him to tell a judge Garcia was an MS-13 gang member and a terrorist.
"That is a lie," Reuveni shot back. "I cannot sign my name to that brief."
He was fired.
In April, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the prisoners deserved their day in court. Garcia was never charged with terrorism. Bove got a federal judgeship.
Now Reuveni is blowing the whistle, with an ominous warning: "What's to stop them if they decide they don't like you anymore?”
Primary Source: This 60 Minutes Interview
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