Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter Jan 19, 2026

EDITOR’S NOTE: This will be one of the more controversial articles I’ve posted, given the current political atmosphere, and some of you won’t like it. It will require you to think outside of the box set up for us by the gatekeepers who control the official narratives on the left and the right. It will pose difficult questions and point out inconsistencies in the official narrative.

In a previous article I posted on January 8, I implored my readers to keep an eye on Minnesota, that there is likely more than meets the eye going on there.

Sure enough, the situation has continued to dominate the news cycle. Standoffs between anti-ICE protesters and federal officers continue to fester and now the president has placed hundreds of U.S. Army troops on standby, ordering them to get ready to enter the fray. Those on the left respond by storming churches and other predictably irresponsible behaviors.

If the troops do swoop in, it will mark another escalation and play right into the hands of those hoping to ignite a spark that will set off America’s second civil war.

I suggested that we keep an eye on Minnesota because it’s a microcosm of the nation. Tense. Emotionally charged. Highly divided. Each side looking for a seminal moment they can use to score points with their base and parlay into a wider crisis, creating more chaos in a world desperately yearning for stability.

I am not at all sure that the optics coming out of Minnesota are as black and white as they appear to most Americans who inform themselves through the left-right paradigm, as transmitted through the lenses of Fox News, CNN, MSNBC or even most of the alternative media.

These outlets all report on events in isolation, refusing to connect dots and ask “who benefits?” from escalating the situation.

In the end, we’ll all learn the hard way that Minnesota had more to do with expanding federal power than it ever had to do with some innocent little deportation program.

When you’re dealing with these types of powers in high places, the real issue is always masked behind some other issue.

In this case the mask is immigration and Somali daycare fraud.

In the case of Iran, it’s “liberating” an oppressed people group in a distant land (if this were the case we would be invading Saudi Arabia tomorrow but we call that country our friend).

And yet, some of the very same folks who have warned us that “the issue is never the issue” are now taking the bait in Minnesota. They are taking the Trump administration’s word at face value and cheerleading what’s going on in Minnesota, all in the name of border security and public safety. And if this operation veers off in the direction I anticipate, it will forever change our country in ways my fellow conservatives will look back and say, how could we have been so blind?

It’s extremely concerning to see the level of naivety on display right now within the conservative community.

It was on display in their coverage of the situation in Iran, when they thought Trump’s intention, again taking his comments at face value, were to liberate the Iranian people and bring freedom and democracy to the Persian people.

But no matter how many times they get burned by Trump, they line up for another dose of deception. Because many of the same Trumpsters are now falling all over themselves to run cover for the questionable tactics being used by ICE.

Whether it’s Iran, Venezuela, Greenland or Minnesota, these narratives are playing into the hands of globalist power elites seeking to destroy America, grind it down through endless foreign wars and internal strife, while growing the size and power of the federal government with each new crisis, whether real or manufactured.

Yes, I understand that we have an illegal immigration problem in this country and I have been outspoken about that over the years.

But what we’re seeing is a textbook Hegelian psychological operation being waged against Americans, and some of the voices on the right who I know are familiar with this playbook still can’t see it at work in the current situation involving an increasingly aggressive federal police force.

You’ve seen the videos. Federal ICE agents, heavily armed with both lethal and non-lethal weapons, going door to door, asking people to show proof of citizenship, pulling people out of cars who are obviously unarmed and presenting no immediate physical threat.

I’m not saying the targets of these raids are always totally innocent and on their best behavior, but in proper law enforcement, the use of force must always match the immediate physical threat. Properly trained cops take opportunities to deescalate situations. That’s not what’s going on in Minneapolis.

If you look carefully in some of these videos, there is often an agent holding a cellphone, not talking like in a live conversation but getting a reading of some sort. What are they doing?

I believe there is enough evidence sitting in the wide open that indicates they are getting information on which houses to approach, which cars to stop, which doors to knock down. Where is this information coming from?

We know that ICE has contracts with a company called Palantir Technologies, the government’s massive Orwellian police-state partner that helps it spy on and collect data on citizens and noncitizens alike. Palantir also has contracts with the U.S. Department of War, IRS, FBI, CIA and a plethora of local law enforcement agencies. In 2025 under the Trump administration, Palantir’s federal contracts nearly doubled, rising to $970.5 million. It should also be noted that Peter Thiel is a member of the steering committee of the shadowy globalist Bilderberg group and was a major financial backer of the Trump-Vance ticket.

Palantir, by its own admission, specializes in warfare technology. They help take out “adversaries” on the battlefield. The company’s software, which uses facial-recognition connected to artificial intelligence, has been widely used by the Israeli Defense Forces to select kill targets in Gaza. It can spot an alleged enemy combatant and pull up a full dossier on that person in seconds, something that used to take hours or even days to accomplish.

Palantir’s technology comes with an admitted 10 percent error rate, and we’ve seen that on full display in the ICE raids, where they brutalized some poor sap who is an American citizen, not an illegal. This behavior is on full display in the below video as agents invaded a legal American citizen’s private property, demanded to see his papers, and then hauled him away in front of his 5-year-old daughter.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warned in a January 15 press conference that she believes its perfectly legal and constitutional for her agents to stop Americans and demand they show proof of citizenship.

Wired magazine reported April 18, 2025, that “ICE Is Paying Palantir $30 Million to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’ Surveillance Platform.”

The contract calls for Palantir, whose chairman and co-founder is billionaire technocrat and high-ranking globalist Peter Thiel, to track in real time those illegals who self-deport while at the same time “help ICE choose who to deport.”

It’s amazing to me to see some of the same conservative pundits who decried Joe Biden’s use of federal agents with the ATF and FBI, cheering on the ICE tactics that are just as bad or worse under Trump. They’re cheering because those on the receiving end of the raids are people they don’t like. They don’t even know these people but they assume they’re all illegal criminal aliens or less-than-human “leftists” getting in the way.

Please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. I am all for using whatever strong-arm tactics are necessary to round up known bad actors, such as gang members, violent felons or Chinese men of military age who snuck across the border in droves under the Biden regime. One Venezuelan migrant attacked ICE agents with a shovel and was shot in the leg. He clearly deserved what he got.

But other cases are less clear cut and you can find endless examples of them online if you just take the time to look. Take, for example, the video below and tell me if you see a violent felon, gang member, or Chinese spy on the receiving end of questionable tactics.

I would submit that what you saw in the above video is an overreaction. A reaction that does not match the threat level. It’s either poor training, or the wrong training purposely given.

Here’s another video showing similar tactics against another unarmed and helpless woman.

Here’s another incident, involving ICE breaking down a man’s door without a warrant.

ICE truly believes it is above the law and they don’t need to get warrants, read people their rights, etc., like regular cops do. They operate with “absolute immunity,” according to Vice President J.D. Vance, meaning they’re not subject to the laws and Constitution of this country.

Not to mention, these tactics aren’t necessary if the goal is to deport illegals. Previous presidents deported as many or more illegals as Trump has and we did not see these kinds of ultra-aggressive tactics.

In fact, the easiest method would be to encourage self-deportation. How do you do that? By cutting off all, and I mean all, government assistance and services to illegal aliens. That includes shutting off not just the obvious things like food stamps and aid to mothers with dependent children, but also closing off access to a free public education for their kids. If this gravy train were ended, millions would quietly leave this country of their own volition.

But getting rid of illegals is not the real purpose. That’s just the cover. If it were the real purpose, how do you explain the government’s own numbers?

The Trump administration in 2025 deported about 230,000 people who were arrested inside the country and another 270,000 at the border, a New York Times analysis of federal data shows.

That brings the total number of deportations since Trump took office to 540,000 — fewer than in each of the previous two years of the Biden administration. There were 590,000 total deportations in 2023 and 650,000 in 2024.

That should make us skeptical of the official narrative being fed to MAGA supporters that this is all about ridding the country of illegals and violent criminals.

If that were the case, why aren’t we seeing videos of ICE rounding up the 100,000 male Chinese nationals who entered the country on Biden’s watch?

This has little to nothing to do with making America safe.

It’s about building an authoritarian police state based on expanded federal power. But Trump has proved that as long as you have a good cover story, few on the right will question the growth and power of a centralized and very aggressive power emanating from Washington.

Power plays of this nature were very successful under Biden because he was targeting the right, whereas now the expansion of federal power is supported by the right because it’s targeting the left. What’s the net effect? Power is successfully and seamlessly centralized in the very place our Constitution never intended it to be.

If there is anything we should have learned from 9/11 and from Covid, it was that once the government claims a new power over us, it never rescinds it. It holds onto that power, keeping it in reserve and ready to whip out again at the first opportunity.

And it begs the question: Are these law enforcers we see in Minneapolis or are they paramilitary shock troops meant to escalate the situation on the streets?

Who benefits from escalation?

The left benefits because they now have an emotionally charged issue, around which they can rally their troops heading into an election year. The man in the White House benefits because he can invoke the Insurrection Act and replace his paramilitary shock troops with actual military personnel, which is something he’s been wanting to do since he took office, but he keeps running up against a hurdle called the Posse Comitatus Act. This Act prohibits the government from using the military to conduct domestic law enforcement.

The one way around the Posse Comitatus Act is to invoke the Insurrection Act. He’s threatened repeatedly to invoke this heightened level of emergency rule and I believe he will do it. But the more these protests escalate, the better he will look within his base for taking such draconian action.

Those cheering for the Insurrection Act and troops in the streets refuse to look beyond the emotions of the moment. They focus on this one isolated situation and all they can see is putrid leftists who need to be put in their place. Revenge feels so good.

There is an old saying that I believe is true and applies in this case: “Never give yourself power you wouldn’t want your enemy to have.”

In other words, the precedent has been set. Expect blowback when the Democrats regain power and turn this expanded federal apparatus against people on the right.

When you rely on pure power politics and ends-justify-the-means tactics, it usually doesn’t end well because you’ve lost the moral high ground. You’ve lost the information war. You’ve lost the “hearts and minds,” as the military likes to say. And this plays right into the hands of the leftist revolutionaries that the right is so focused on defeating.

I find it concerning that some of the very conservatives who were telling us during the Biden years that we need to support our sheriffs and local law enforcement while resisting federalized police units, have now flipped and argue on the side of using more federal power to achieve their political goals.

BOTTOM LINE: A totalitarian-inspired show-your-papers society is the goal. And the physical papers being demanded today will be the digital ID demanded tomorrow. If we are going to resist this beast system, it will be critical that we recognize how globalist power-elites use both Democrats and Republicans, left and right, to steer the ship in a nightmarish direction. If you only recognize totalitarian tactics when they come from one side of the false left-right paradigm, you will never fully understand what is going on and where things are heading.

Police-state tactics should always be evaluated with a critical and skeptical eye, regardless of whether they come from the right or the left.

 

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