This Is the Land of Wolves Now
Masked agents snatching people off the street. Government officials using caged prisoners for propaganda videos. We are the villains.
1. POWs
Two weeks ago Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a law that grants the president extraordinary powers during times of war. Here’s his proclamation:
Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.
Some of the individuals who have been apprehended under the Alien Enemies Act have been rendered to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. Yesterday, Kristi Noem, America’s secretary of homeland security, toured this facility and then staged a photo-op and interview in front of a cell containing dozens of what we can only assume are prisoners of the supposed “war”1 we are fighting with Tren de Aragua.2
Look at these images. What do you see?
In the background are a few dozen men, crammed into a cell. Their bunks are stacked four-high. Their heads are freshly shaved. They wear identical white shorts. They are all shirtless.
Their poses are similar. Three rows of prisoners stand still in the front as Noem speaks, their hands either at their sides or clasped in front of them. The rest of them are arrayed on the bunks so as to create a visual for Noem’s use. None of these men is speaking. Or moving. Or making any facial expressions. They have clearly been posed by the jailers, forced to hold position so that they can be useful props for the American woman so that she can manufacture propaganda for her regime.
We have seen this kind of thing before. Just not from America.
I want to be deadly serious about this: We are now the bad guys.
Let’s discuss.
The use of prisoners for propaganda purposes is as old as war itself. But there are a few recent examples you may recall. ISIS made extensive use of videos and pictures of imprisonment and execution. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese alternated their approach. Sometimes they used American POWs as props to suggest that all was well in their camps and that prisoners were being treated properly. (They were not.) Other times, they used images of American prisoners as tools to spread fear. They would parade captured American soldiers before mobs and display them at press conferences.
The goal is always the same, though: To use prisoners’ bodies as weapons of political war and to do so against their will.
This is what evil, illiberal regimes do.
Liberal regimes have standards for the treatment of prisoners. These standards are codified under the Geneva Conventions, which the United States has signed and ratified.
Among the standards dictated by the Geneva Conventions is this: Prisoners may not be publicly exploited for purposes of propaganda.3
Another standard of liberal governments is that people who present themselves through legal pathways as refugees fleeing oppression are vetted and provided due process, not disappeared into foreign gulags.
And yet here we are.
A high-ranking American official visits a prison on foreign soil which we are using to warehouse enemies of her regime. She appears in a fitted long-sleeve tee and active-wear slacks. There is a ballcap on her head and a pound of makeup smeared across her plasticized face. A gold Rolex Daytona—worth more than some of these men will make in their entire lives—sits proudly on her dainty wrist. Every piece of this visual is carefully engineered.
She visits the prison armory and shakes her head approvingly while inspecting the rifles. Then she pauses in front of a cage where human beings have been posed to her liking so that she can speak to the cameras in front of a powerful visual. She is sending a message on behalf of her country.
The message is this:
America is no longer a shining city on a hill. It is no longer the leader of the free world. It no longer stands on the side of liberty as a beacon for those who yearn to breathe free.
This is the land of wolves now.
It gets worse, by the way.
We’ll get to “worse” in a minute. But I want to hammer something home: When autocratic regimes take hold, solidarity is the only defense. Everyone on the side of liberalism has to stand as one. We have to defend each other. There is strength in community.
The Bulwark started as a defense of “conservatism.” That battle turned out to be lost before we even entered the fight. We became a pro-democracy media company. And we’re still that. But maybe the most important thing we are right now is a community of people rallying to pass through this crucible. Together.
I know that I couldn’t do it alone. That’s why I have Sarah and the rest of this team. It’s why I have readers I talk to every day. We lift each other up and if it comes to it, we’ll defend each other.
You don’t have to join The Bulwark—if you have other communities around you to rely on, that’s great. But every American who wants to live in freedom and truth is going to need a community in the coming months. If you’re looking for someone to stand with, we’ll have your back here.
2. Tufts
On Tuesday evening a masked group abducted a woman off the streets of Boston. They wore no uniforms. Their faces were covered. You can watch the video here.
According to Zeteo, the woman being abducted is Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University grad student and Turkish national with a valid student visa. She does not appear to have been charged with any crimes. Our government merely says that her student visa has been revoked because she “supported Hamas,” but declined to give further details.
Ask yourself: Why was she handcuffed and pulled off the street? She had not committed a crime; she did not present a danger. She could have been notified of the change in her visa status by mail, given instructions to leave the country promptly, and given a deadline with which to comply.4
But merely pulling Öztürk’s visa wasn’t the point. Even having Öztürk leave the country wasn’t the point. The point was to arrest her.
The point is to create a climate in which agents of the state routinely wear masks to conceal their identities and street abductions are not out of the ordinary.
As a fellow on Bluesky said, “If you’re a police officer in America and you think you need to wear a mask to do your job, you shouldn’t be a police officer in America.”
That was true enough in the old America.
But we don’t live there anymore. We live in a country where the federal government allies itself with Russian and South American dictators while taking sides against democratic allies. A country that threatens its neighbors with annexation. A country that views the Geneva Conventions as namby-pamby suggestions that only apply to suckers and losers. A country that uses secret police.
And perhaps most importantly, a country where the regime no longer abides by rulings from the existing legal system.
After she was detained on Tuesday, Ozturk’s attorney filed a petition in federal district court in Boston challenging the legality of her detention and asking she not be moved out of Massachusetts.
“(Ozturk) shall not be moved outside the District of Massachusetts without first providing advance notice of the intended move,” District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, wrote Tuesday in an order. Talwani ordered the government to respond to Ozturk’s petition by Friday.
But she already had been transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Wednesday.
It is not clear whether Ozturk had already been transferred out of Boston to Louisiana by the time judge Talwani issued her order.
It’s only been eight weeks.
I cannot imagine what this country will look like in a year.
3. Losing to Win
I have never heard of Vegas Matt before, but this is the story of a guy who makes money on YouTube by losing money in Vegas. There should be a special name for this sort of arbitrage.
At a private baccarat table near the back of the El Cortez Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on a chilly January afternoon, a crowd of fans gathered to watch one of the world’s most famous gamblers at work. Some had come all the way here just to watch him play. They savored every detail—how he cut chips, ruffled his cash, bantered with the dealer. He was dressed for the job. His gray hair was molded into a tight crew cut, and he wore a knitted gold necklace low across his collarbone and a Super Bowl–sized ring with a Ruby 777 jackpot dangling from his hand.
The scene was impressive, except in one way: This man absolutely sucked at gambling. I’d been with Vegas Matt—the YouTube tycoon whose millions of followers salivate over his every bet—for only a few hours. He’d already lost close to $30,000. His four-figure slot machine deposits had gone bust, an unyielding blackjack jet had hoovered up his teetering stacks of chips, and his rare victories had been reinvested into more audacious, ill-fated propositions. There was no way he’d end the night with dignity, yet here he was, perched at the baccarat table, trying to get even.
Usually, the dealer wordlessly organized Matt’s money into thick columns of $100 bills, pleating their edges at a slight diagonal so she could slash through them all at once with counterfeit-detecting iodine ink. But Vegas Matt was making this bet with a ticket he had just extracted from a slot machine. It was worth $6,627. Baccarat is as close as a gambler can get to flipping a coin: Two pairs of cards are dealt, players add up the numbers printed on them, and the combination that comes closest to nine is declared the winner. The dealer revealed an eight. Vegas Matt turned over a zero.
“Oh my God!” he cried, slinging the cards across the felt while his 30-year-old son, EJ, filmed the disaster on his iPhone. “We cannot win a hand!”
That, of course, is his schtick. Vegas Matt’s legion of fans follow him for exactly one reason, and that’s to watch him lose—and, on seldom occasions, win—unconscionable amounts of money. That $30,000 wasn’t even close to the worst drubbing he’s taken: In 2023 he and a few friends lost $147,000 on a high-stakes slot machine in about three hours. (The description on the video read, “Nobody should gamble like this, my friends got a little carried away.”) A year later, he managed to blow through about $43,000 in a single afternoon. All told, in 2024 he reportedly suffered $404,000 in gambling losses. Yet, somehow, he has managed to turn losing money into an enviable living—and is one of the only people on Earth to do so.
“People give estimates of what they think we’re making, and it’s always way low,” he told me from the plush interior of his Rolls-Royce, which was still scented with a synthetic new-purchase aroma. “Our watch hours on YouTube [in December] were, like, 5.7 million hours. And there’s a commercial every 10 minutes.”
The people pictured in San Salvador Ghraib don’t particularly resemble the Venezuelans from the snuff film the White House put out; perhaps she is posing in front of local Salvadoran prisoners.
Important to get the terminology right here so the Trump administration doesn’t admonish us. The Venezuelan refugees are enemy combatants in a war. The people we bombed in Yemen are merely victims of an “attack” plan.
Some other requirements of the Geneva Conventions, as explained by the secretary of the Navy in 1971:
“[D]etaining power [must] quickly provide the names, serial numbers and addresses of all prisoners so that the next of kin can be promptly advised.”
“[N]ot more than a week after capture every prisoner shall be allowed to write directly to his family telling them about his situation, his health and giving them his address, and that thereafter they shall be allowed to send and receive not less than two letters and four cards each month.”
It is unclear whether these mandates are being followed for the prisoners at CECOT.
If we care about government “efficiency,” then it is much more cost effective to use the bureaucracy to inform people of the need to leave the country than to pay half a dozen agents to spend hours staking out, arresting, and processing a single immigrant.
Hearing JVL say that The Bulwark has our backs, especially after I have been helped to be able to be part of this community as of late based on the kindness of this community, it makes me deeply emotional. When I emailed, Jim Swift was unbelievably kind to me. I am so touched by this community in so many ways. I am so lucky to get to be here. I truly am very emotional about it. Here there is love and those that love you to be in community with. Here we are never alone. Because we have this, we have this community, we will never walk alone again. And that tears my soul open to let the light in.
Here's a legit question I have to ask myself nowadays:
If I am in my local neighborhood (Aurora, CO) with my Venezuelan wife who has legal permanent residency, and I'm legally concealed carrying a pistol (which I do), and a group of six men in masks approach us and put my wife in cuffs and start taking her to a van while saying they're police but refusing to show badges or give names, should I be drawing down on this group as they physically abduct my wife like they're one of the gangs from a "Taken" movie?
This is America now?