From Gaza to Chicago, It's All Connected

The residents of an apartment complex in Chicago woke up to the sights and sounds of black hawk helicopters yesterday morning as 300 federal agents laid siege to their homes. They rappelled onto rooftops. They cut through fences with circular saws. They blew doors off their hinges and busted holes in walls. They tore apart families. They marched moms and dads into vans. They ziptied children together. When residents begged them to show a shred of humanity, the agents said, "Efff them kids."

Why is this happening?

It's part of the Trump administration's alleged "crackdown" on immigration across the country, focused on major cities like Chicago, Portland, and Memphis. Let's call it what it is, the fascist takeover of American cities. They've designated gangs and drug trafficking rings as terrorist organizations. They've also applied that label to Antifa, a group that doesn't even exist because Antifa refers to an ideology. They don't care. They're using these terms to conjure threats into being, in order to roll out what amounts to martial law against their enemies. It's a textbook history pattern, a regime using a high-profile assassination as the catalyst for military action.

These aren't just ICE raids, not anymore. They're being assisted by the FBI and other agencies. They're using military tactics and gear. Trump and his regime are increasingly using the language of war to justify their moves, describing cities as "wartorn" and their opponents as "terrorists." It should surprise nobody when Donald Trump blurts the quiet part out loud, describing cities like Chicago as a "training ground" for their military, the same week he convenes an unprecedented gathering of generals.

Trump's exact words:

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump said. He noted at another point: “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms... It seems that the [cities] that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out one by one, and this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room...”

That's the core of what the media has been dismissing as a rather pointless, bumbling spectacle where Trump and Hegseth rambled on about grooming standards. That wasn't the point. This is serious stuff. The President and The Secretary of War, as he's called now, just told every American general (hundreds total) that they're going to send the military to major cities, one by one, and they're going to use terrorism as an excuse to round up anyone they don't like and throw them in prison.

This time, they're focusing on immigrants and gangs. They'll label anyone else who gets in their way Antifa, and throw them in prison, too. They'll send them to camps here, and they'll send them to prisons overseas.

This won't be the last time.

If you're wondering why, consider how many of our own politicians, including Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker, have said that Trump likely plans to use the military to thwart the 2026 and 2028 elections.

From USA Today:

"I fear that we will not have an election in 2028. I really mean that in the core of my soul − unless we wake up to the code red, what's happening in this country, and we wake up soberly to how serious this moment is," Newsom said during a Sept. 23 appearance on “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert. 

This should sound familiar.

I'm not talking about Putin, although that's the only comparison we see drawn in the mainstream media right now.

I'm talking about Gaza.

This scene from Chicago doesn't just echo the atrocities in Gaza. It mirrors them. It replicates them. It re-imports violence from a place halfway around the world, where a military force has committed countless war crimes against an unarmed civilian population, simply because they happen to live among a group designated as terrorists, simply because they don't share the religion or ethnicity of their executioners, simply because they're in the way of a far right regime's ambitions to develop the land and exploit the natural resources beneath their feet. Sure enough, over the last year, entities around the world have finally admitted that Israel is committing genocide in plain sight, and that regime's reasons include a bald desire to annex Gaza.

Many of us have spent the last two years trying to inform our fellow Americans about what's really been going on in Gaza. We've tried to make it clear that if the ethical and moral reasons weren't enough, they should be deeply disturbed by the other developments going on, and how Gaza predicts our own future.

It's finally becoming real.

In Gaza, military intelligence and cybertech companies have been cooperating in the development of new warfare strategies and technologies. They're starting to deploy those tactics here on American soil, and Trump has pressed the go button on it all. As one article explains, these entities have always found the Middle East a useful laboratory for warfare, given its "high degree of urbanization," with wars often reaching "their decisive climax in cities and suburbs, such as Aleppo, Raqqa, Mosul, and Sirte." As any military expert knows, cities are hard places to fight.

Here's more from the article:

Combat in three-dimension battlespaces of such densely built settings imposes acute hardships on belligerents, offsetting advantages in mass, mobility, and firepower, and degrading command-and-control.

Working alongside software giants and military tech firms, Israel has been using Gaza to battle test and develop new weapons and systems that harness artificial intelligence. As the article goes on to explain, "artificial intelligence presents the promise of easing, if not erasing, some of these challenges" of urban and suburban warfare.

We're talking about small drones and robots "fitted with sensors and munitions" that can "move over mounds of rubble, through the interior rooms of buildings, and inside sewers and tunnels." We're talking about systems that can allegedly use biometric data and facial recognition software to "predict" terrorist attacks in "densely populated areas." Israel, along with other regimes like Saudi Arabia, have been investing heavily in these systems. In Gaza, they've been using these weapons "against terrorists," but the civilian casualty rate clearly tells a very different story. They've been using them to coordinate and support conventional missile and bomb strikes. They've been using them in hospitals and schools. They've been using them in apartment buildings. Saudi Arabia has also been doing this in Yemen, with U.S. funding and support.

In many cases, these countries have started their wars using the same border patrol, customs, and immigration agents that Trump is using.

That's where he got the idea...

It just so happens that the U.S. has also started ordering spy and kill drones from Controp and Extend, both Israeli companies that claim to have "battle-tested" them in Gaza, a highly dense urban space that looks a lot like Chicago, Portland, L.A., and D.C. In other words, our government wants robots and drones that can move through urban and suburban settings, spy on citizens, and take them out, even if they're in a tunnel, even if they're in a library, even if they're in a hospital.

Substacker Nate Bear spent quite a few hours studying obscure military tech companies and expos like IDEX. He reached the conclusion that "governments are as much planning to fight internal enemies as they are external ones."

"They are planning to fight us."

Now, it's happening.

As Bear explains, military tech firms collaborated with the Israeli military to develop new ways of automating "mass target acquisition" and elimination. They "proved what could be done," and it's the "first large-scale effort of the 21st century." They fed data on 2 million innocent people into killing machines and then studied the outcome. The result was "military systems to automate mass killing on a scale unlike anything we've ever seen," something straight out of the most dystopian science fiction.

Antony Loewenstein wrote an entire book detailing how Israel helps develop and test these technologies in The Palestine Laboratory.

Look at companies like Anduril, a U.S. weapons maker working in the same vein as Controp and Extend, and you find Peter Thiel. You find CEOs like Palmer Luckey, an ex-Meta developer. There's heavy overlap between the companies that make our apps and the ones that design weapons to kill us. They're funneling all their data into Palantir, another Thiel company, and they're building a giant database on American citizens. Yes, the same companies that are pooling all their data on every American are also designing the killbots and drones that can wage urban warfare.

It gets worse.

This past summer, the U.S. government created a "technical innovation unit" for CEOs from companies that include Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir. The executives dressed in fatigues and swore an oath of allegiance. Going forward, they'll advise the government on the latest spying and killing tech to invest in. Another investment firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is investing hundreds of millions in defense technology now while actively recruiting software engineers from Israel. The same startup investors who helped launch Airbnb and Doordash are also launching their first defense tech startups. A report by McKinsey shows that venture capitalists from Silicon Valley are turning their attention to military technology, with an investment surge of 33 percent.

This bit from The New York Times explains the shift:

The militarization of the nation’s technology capital has been driven by a changing political climate, competition with China for tech leadership and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, where drones and A.I.-backed weapons systems have become crucial in battles. Those wars pushed the Pentagon to begin modernizing America’s weapons arsenal, a move that Mr. Trump has supported.

They say they want to protect democracy.

This article explains how several major tech companies, from Google to Amazon, are dropping any previous promises or pledges about AI weapons and government collusion. They're signing massive government contracts and granting the Trump administration full access to their systems.

The same names keep coming up. Google. Meta. Amazon. OpenAI. Anthropic. Palantir. Oracle. Andreessen Horowitz.

These companies and their executives are buying up all of our media. They're buying up all of our social media. When they see an app or a platform they don't control, they designate it a threat to national security and snatch it up. All this started in 2023, when politicians from both parties began fearmongering about TikTok, which now belongs to Oracle's Larry Ellison, his friends, and UAE royals. Ellison's son now owns Paramount and CBS, and they're using it to silence free speech.

Many of these same companies are spending hundreds of billions to make weapons systems with artificial intelligence. They've been testing out their new weapons in Gaza, a highly dense urban environment that serves as their ideal training ground and warfare laboratory, and they're doing it so they can learn how to control their own populations.

Trump is now talking about cities like Chicago as the same kind of training ground. It's hard to believe, but it's happening.

Unfortunately, it's not just the U.S. government. It's China. It's Saudi Arabia. It's Iran. It's Turkey. It's Greece. It's Britain. It's everyone.

While this post might focus on military takeovers, I've written entire essays about the same logics underpinning the sad lack of pandemic response and preparedness by the exact same governments. To sum things up, the governments that lied to us about airborne viruses and chronic illness are colluding with the same big tech companies that are designing the apps we use, building the spyware that tracks us, constructing the data centers that pool our data, and designing the weapons to kill us. They turned Gaza into rubble, and they're ready to do the same thing in cities all over the world.

Our own president just said it out loud.

They're not even trying to hide it.

We were supposed to stand up for Gaza for basic ethical and moral reasons. We were supposed to put pressure on our elected officials to end it. We were at least not supposed to berate, silence, and attack those who were trying. So many of our fellow citizens didn't step up, but now they want to fight fascism, when the very tools and weapons of the fascism we're fighting were forged in a place most Americans paid absolutely no attention to until the last few months. If we stand the slightest chance of resisting fascism now, we have to recognize where our side went wrong.

What's happening in Gaza isn't staying in Gaza.

It was never meant to.

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