Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“More than 2,200 National Guard soldiers and airmen, a majority from out of state, have been deployed to D.C. to support what Trump has framed as a concerted effort to tackle crime and homelessness in the nation’s capital.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/national-guard-troops-d-c-225235010.html
“The initial images of bored Drug Enforcement Administration agents strolling past perplexed joggers on the National Mall were more clownish than carceral. Local street resistance to the occupation was limited to a drunk guy throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
But inevitably, as this operation has dragged on, things have taken a darker turn. The sandwich-thrower was overcharged and rearrested in a needless, publicized show of force.
Masked federal agents have set up an unconstitutional checkpoint, violently arrested at least one delivery driver, and filmed themselves tearing down a banner protesting their presence in the city. Each day, more and more National Guard members pour into the capital.
The conversation about Trump’s declared crime emergency has understandably, albeit unhelpfully, provoked a lot of discourse about how safe D.C. is, whether a federalized local police department will make it safer, whether federal agents are being deployed in the right places and going after the right crimes, and on and on.
This incessant crime conversation has distracted from just how un-American Trump’s show of force in the nation’s capital is.
Uniformed troops and masked federal agents doing routine law enforcement at the command of the president is just not how we do things in the United States.
The entire point of the U.S. Constitution is to prevent the federal government from becoming a despotism, and one of the primary ways it does this is by limiting how many men with guns it has at its disposal.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/20/trumps-d-c-goon-squads-are-un-american/
“Sex offenders are supposed to be ineligible for minimum-security federal prison camps, but the rule was waived for Maxwell.
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“Maxwell’s transfer raised eyebrows not only because it appeared to be part of an obvious quid pro quo between a rather infamous public figure and a president trying to downplay his connections to Epstein, but because it’s practically unheard of for a federal inmate with Maxwell’s record to get transferred to a minimum-security camp after serving only a fraction of their sentence.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/06/why-ghislaine-maxwells-transfer-to-a-minimum-security-prison-camp-stinks/
“Throughout the early 2020s, there was a wave of disturbing crimes related to the shadowy Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Harp demonstrates that government officials turned a blind eye as JSOC operators stole, killed, raped, and smuggled, shielding them from both military and civilian justice.
At first, it may be hard to understand where the word cartel in Fort Bragg Cartel comes from. The first half of the book is a history of JSOC—an organization that includes Delta Force and SEAL Team Six—and a collection of seemingly unconnected stories about JSOC veterans behaving badly. But the conspiracy comes into focus in part four. Former U.S. Army quartermaster Timothy Dumas and former policeman Freddie Wayne Huff were leading a criminal enterprise that brought together JSOC operators, the local redneck mafia, Puerto Rican smugglers, Los Zetas of Mexico, and even a former Islamic State fighter.
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From late 2020 through early 2023, 12 Fort Bragg soldiers were murdered or accused of murder, and some of these cases remain unsolved. Violent crime in the area is so bad that the nearby town of Fayetteville is nicknamed “Fatalville.” The most infamous case might be the murder of Spc. Enrique Roman-Martinez. Suspected of selling LSD, he disappeared in May 2020 during a camping trip. A few days later, Roman-Martinez’s decapitated head washed up on a beach. The case is still completely cold.
In a 2021 interview with military police, obtained by Harp, the commander of Delta Force’s administrative headquarters complained that JSOC was sending problem soldiers and accused criminals to serve desk duty in his unit rather than discharging them from the military. “Having some of the most tactically skilled, physically fit, and intelligent operators in the military coming in on bad terms is dangerous,” the commander said. “We intentionally limit their physical presence as it is a hindrance to the good order and discipline of the company.”
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“They were buying dope from the cartel,” local pawnbroker Sharon Shivley told Harp. “Somebody that’s associated with Mexicans. Who will kill you if you don’t pay for your shit.” As it turns out, Huff’s supplier was Los Zetas, a gang founded by a renegade Mexican special forces unit—trained, ironically, at Fort Bragg.
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Lavigne and Huff escaped so many close brushes with the law that other gangsters wondered whether they might be police informants. But the Fort Bragg cartel appears to have been protected instead by North Carolina’s good old boys’ culture. Veterans can “show up in their Class A uniforms looking great” to court and expect to have any charges thrown out with a “thank you for your service,” said Det. Diane Ballard, a former tenant of Dumas’. Although Huff was a civilian, he had his own network of law enforcement friends to lean on. According to Harp, court documents also imply that Huff had gay sexual blackmail material on at least one law enforcement officer.
The murder of Dumas and Lavigne finally forced the government’s hand, bringing the full force of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security down on Huff’s network. Still, Harp suggests that the authorities haven’t really followed up on every possible lead.
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It’s common now, almost to the point of cliche, to speak of “the war coming home.” And to a large degree, the Fort Bragg cartel was a case of war-on-terror blowback. But exposure to combat doesn’t automatically turn soldiers into criminals. Nor do hard drugs. What all the characters involved in this bizarre saga had in common was a total lack of accountability. As long as America treats JSOC as a warrior caste above the law, some of these warriors will abuse their privileges.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/12/how-elite-special-operations-troops-created-a-drug-cartel/
“Trump’s comments came in response to questions about the assault of Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old man known as “big balls” who played a prominent role in the administration’s efforts to slash government under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Coristine, who now works for the Social Security Administration though Musk has left the government and DOGE has been scaled back, told police he was attacked by a group of juveniles as part of an apparent attempted carjacking about 3 a.m Sunday in Northwest D.C.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/06/trump-weighing-sending-the-national-guard-to-dc-00496882
“Texas already has several mechanisms to use in coaxing the Democrats back. Each day they’re gone, the fleeing Democrats incur a $500-per-day fine. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott also released an order for their arrest by the Texas Department of Public Safety, describing the Democrats’ conduct as “abandonment or forfeiture.” Republicans in the Texas House, meanwhile, have issued arrest warrants for the absent Democrats, and Attorney General Ken Paxton—who is challenging Cornyn in his re-election bid—has called for their removal from office.
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Regardless of how involved the FBI will become, the bureau’s involvement at all degrades the principle of federalism by infringing upon Texas’s authority to discipline its lawmakers. It is also the most recent example of the Trump Justice Department being weaponized for political gain and tasked with duties outside its standard wheelhouse.
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Though Patel dismissed concerns during his confirmation hearing that he would weaponize the FBI, he seems to have set his sights on the Texas Democrats, despite Trump’s Day One executive order to end the “weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”
While the Democrats’ plan is an attempt to circumvent a vote, they’ve broken no federal laws or statutes. There is simply no need for the FBI’s involvement.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/08/the-fbi-has-no-business-tracking-down-texas-democrats/
“I’m hugely in favor of stopping violent crime, but using federal agents to get the job done—and perhaps more worryingly, having the president direct how minors are charged—is likely to get into sticky territory rather quickly. “Because D.C. is not a state, the federal government has unique authority to exert control over city affairs—even amid objections from the residents and locally elected government,” notes The Washington Post. “The Home Rule Act of 1973 gave D.C. residents the ability to elect their own mayor and council members. A federal takeover of the D.C. police force would be an extraordinary assertion of power in a place where local leaders have few avenues to resist federal encroachment.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/11/big-balls-attacked/
“Trump does have the power to oversee what happens in D.C. because of its unique role as home to the nation’s seat of government. The law gives the president the power to temporarily take over the city’s law enforcement operations.
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The president’s description of crime in Washington, D.C., is not reflected in official statistics, which show that the city had its lowest violent crime rate in over 30 years in 2024.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/article/trump-says-dc-has-been-overtaken-by-crime-the-data-tells-a-different-story-220200486.html
“”What’s interesting about crime in DC is that there’s three very distinct problems,” writes Reason’s Robby Soave, who lives there. “One is semi-professional gang crime, mostly confined to sketchy neighborhoods, that usually targets other gang members. This is the kind of crime every large city has, and is counteracted by spending more money on homicide detectives and then aggressively prosecuting illegal firearms violators.”
“Then there’s mentally ill and drug addicted homeless people setting up tent cities,” he continues, noting that the most egregiously large and disorderly encampments were cleaned up. “Lastly, there are large groups of teenagers rampaging through otherwise fairly nice and affluent areas, assaulting people and stealing cars, and also getting into fights with each other. Seems to be driven by a mix of post-pandemic societal collapse, trends in youth behavior, and insufficient action by authorities. It’s here where a more robust police presence might do the most good.” It’s this third group that news reports are mostly fixating on, the group responsible for the Big Balls assault and that has caught Trump’s attention.”
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Crime is down, and, “though the decrease is laudable, this is in part because crime and disorder were rampant during the pandemic. It has taken years for it to come down to seminormal rates, and those “normal rates” aren’t even that good: “The murder rate at the end of 2024 was, per Asher’s data, lower than 2023, but still about 70 percent higher than that of a decade prior. And although carjackings are down, they’re still elevated over pre-2020.” But lots of crime data is unfortunately easy to manipulate, and novel approaches by new entrants—young people engaged in serious property crime and assaults in previously safe areas—are surely worth stamping out as they emerge.
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a ton of D.C.’s criminal justice system is already under the federal government’s control, and the feds are doing a rather poor job managing it. “That starts with the US attorney’s office, which, unlike a normal federal prosecutor’s office, also does the job of a district attorney and prosecutes local crimes. More significantly, the basic local trial court—the DC Superior Court—is technically a federal court whose members need to be confirmed by the Senate. Senate majority leaders, understandably, are normally not that fired up about local trial courts in DC, and they don’t like to spend floor time on these confirmations.” A high vacancy rate (roughly 20 percent) is the result, which means people in need of punishment don’t receive it so swiftly.
The federal government also handles pretrial supervision for people who’ve been arrested and are awaiting full court proceedings, adds Yglesias, but the agencies handling this can’t seem to figure out how to do their damn jobs: The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, in 2023, “had 2,120 offenders on ‘maximum supervision level’ but only 490 outfitted with GPS monitors,” for example, per Politico. And when a pretrial release of a man accused of shooting 26 rounds from an AR-15 at a car made the rounds on the news, the Pretrial Services Agency came under intense scrutiny, with prosecutors writing in a legal filing that “while GPS monitoring by the vendor may be in real time, PSA’s monitoring of defendants is not. PSA only works during normal business hours. Therefore, PSA only finds out about violations that occur at night or on weekends after the fact.” (When would you guess that the majority of violations occur?)
Trump, of course, is not focused on the unsexy work detailed above, which could meaningfully impact which criminals get locked up and how quickly, who gets leniency and who gets surveilled and confined.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/12/whats-really-happening-to-d-c/
Trump officials say Epstein killed himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZmKlWTIrT0