The Friday Brief, June 20, 2025

Inside:
The Secret Police.
Two Weeks Is The New 90 Days.
Loathsome Mike Lee.
Tucker Humiliates Cruz.
Asbestos? In. Public Lands? Out.
RFK, Jr. Gets Roasted
Tulsi, Meet #ETTD

The Big Picture

The Secret Police

This week, I sat in a dim hotel room after a series of fundraisers, staring into the bleak glow of a camera, trying to find the words for a visual symbol that increasingly feels like a punch to the gut.

The mask.

Not the N95s or the COVID-era face shields MAGA once treated as signs of satanic globalist oppression. I mean the real masks. The blackout balaclavas. The ones worn by anonymous men wielding state power in the name of law, but cloaked in secrecy and devoid of accountability. You see them at every ICE raid. Every demonstration. Every exercise of Stephen Miller’s vast power over the tools of Federal Law enforcement.

Masked men tackled New York City comptroller Brad Lander this week. Masked men also arrested Democratic leaders in New Jersey. They’ve become a constant, common sight.

I spent a few days in Chicago, and they’ve taken it a step further. Masks. Civilian clothes. No badge. No name tag. No warrant. No ID. Just unmarked cars and faces hidden behind tactical fabric. A vision straight out of every authoritarian playbook ever written.

The question I asked - "Who is that masked man?" - isn’t a joke. It’s a warning.

Every dictatorship in human history has depended on one constant: unaccountable police power. Saddam had the Mukhabarat. The Nazis had the SS. The Soviets had the NKVD and KGB. Their defining trait wasn’t just brutality. It was anonymity. The ability to drag you from your home in the dead of night without leaving fingerprints. The masked man is not a myth. He is the warning sign of the police state.