Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter Jan 29, 2026

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Jacob Thompson at The Winepress posted a Jan. 27 article and video that should chill every American to the bone regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

Watch as a heavily armed federal agent, his face masked, warns a U.S. citizen that by simply filming him, she is considered by her own government to be a “domestic terrorist.”

Who is assembling this government database on American citizens? It’s Palantir Technologies, co-founded by globalist technocrat Peter Thiel. Mr. Thiel, a multi-billionaire and major Trump donor, heads the steering committee of the elitist Bilderberg group and has talked openly of his desire to turn America into a techno-monarchy run by unelected oligarchs like himself.

Thompson reports:

DHS and ICE have increasingly deployed facial recognition and predictive algorithms to stake out an arrest, and underneath it all is a covert social credit score system. Last week, Biometric Update published a startling report on ICE’s AI predictive tool called ELITE, powered by Palantir. “Backed by $160 million in contracts, ICE’s dystopian tech enforcement architecture is straining long-standing legal boundaries,” said author Anthony Kimery.

So you don’t have to have actually committed a crime to get on Palantir’s watchlist and be designated as a person potentially dangerous to the government. Someone they need to watch more closely than the average joe.

Palantir contracts with governments in Israel, Ukraine, and the U.S. to create dossiers on people and form enemy lists. In the U.S., those enemy lists include dissidents who disagree with government policy like the woman in the above video but who are doing nothing illegal. In fact, she’s wholly within her constitutional rights to video a law enforcement officer.

Please don’t take this article as me saying I’m in favor of illegal immigration. My writings over the last 10 years show I am anything but pro-illegal alien. I do believe, however, that the only thing worse than illegal immigration is the advent of a federalized and militarized police state where American citizens are being harassed, having their homes and cars entered without judicial warrants, and being ordered to “show their papers.” Nothing could be more un-American.

There has to be a better way to remove illegals and I’ve offered a few ideas in past articles, one of which would be cutting off all government assistance, including access to public schools for children of illegals. This would cause the overwhelming majority to self-deport. Next, I would focus on illegals with violent criminal records or who are capable of carrying out terrorist activities.

But sending federal agents geared out like stormtroopers into people’s homes and demanding to see their papers sets a dangerous precedent.

A few years from now, under a President Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom, the woman in the above video could just as easily be a true-blue conservative American filming FBI agents performing an “operation” in your area. Maybe you see them pulling home-schooled children out of Christian homes and placing them in black SUVs bound for re-education camps. These types of police raids on Christian homes are already taking place in Britain and Germany, and their are Democrats who are itching to do the same thing here. I would submit that President Trump’s use of federal police to raid homes on the left will make it easier for the next president to do the same thing to us on the right. They could be looking for home-schooled kids. They could be looking for firearms, or any number of other contraband that fits their political narrative.

It’s sad to me that conservatives can’t understand the concept of precedent. Why are they OK with the normalization of military-looking federal cops in the streets? Why can’t they see how dangerous it is to be watching liberal Americans being pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed, even shot and killed as if they are sub-humans?

Law enforcement, for the most part, is going to follow orders. They are only as good as the politician that signs their paychecks. Right now, they are going after leftists who “get in the way” of them “doing their job.” Some might not even be leftists, they just don’t like what they’ve seen with their own eyes.

The Minneapolis man in the video below may fall into that category. He was angry at what he witnessed. You may or may not share his politics. You may or may not think he’s virtuous. But does he sound like a communist agitator?

Most of what ICE calls “harassment,” “agitating” or “impeding” them from “doing their job” is simply American citizens filming them in action. This is a perfectly legal and valuable service, unless you come from a starting point that cops can do no wrong and citizens have no right to hold them accountable.

Most of our local cops in this country are very professional, but I can tell you that from covering law enforcement at the local level for 30-plus years as a newspaper journalist, there are dirty cops and even dirty police chiefs who need to be held accountable. If they are professional, they typically don’t mind being videoed or showing their faces.

And when you’re talking about a federal police force, which is of dubious constitutionality to begin with, the need for close citizen scrutiny is even more important. I personally think our Founding Fathers would be horrified if they knew the republic they founded now has, not one, but multiple federal police forces armed with military-grade weapons and claiming to be “absolute immunity” from all laws.

If the federal government sent hundreds of agents decked out in military gear to our cities and towns to “just enforce the law” under Joe Biden, we conservatives would have been livid.

Joe Biden terrified us just by implying that he might start rounding some of us up for refusing to take the Covid shots. Remember his famous “red speech?”

That was bad enough. But Biden never actually sent any federal agents to enter our homes without a warrant and haul us away. When a capital police officer shot Ashley Babbitt on January 6, 2021, we were rightly outraged.

Now, with two Americans shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis, we are mostly silent.

Because the Americans shot hold different political opinions, they are considered expendable collateral damage. They are all dismissed as “paid protesters” or “insurrectionists” or worse. Sure there are some who fit into that description, but those are not the majority of people who have been out protesting in Minneapolis.

But because it’s a Republican targeting Americans we label as “leftist,” we’re OK with it? I would posit that this is hypocritical and, because of the precedent it sets, dangerous and self-defeating.

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