Documents reveal the federal government’s vast Minnesota surveillance dragnet

Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "security" and I want to be clear: you built an apparatus that cannot tell the difference between a murderer and a bicycle mechanic. The man who killed Alex Pretti walked free while your government catalogued the hymn schedules of Lutheran congregations. I have seen empires fall for less efficient uses of power. The Romans at least had the decency to spy on people who were actually plotting against them. Your surveillance state has achieved something genuinely novel, which is being simultaneously totalitarian AND incompetent, a combination I did not think possible when I gave you opposable thumbs and the capacity for abstract thought. Mother Jones will make this about Trump and it is partly about Trump. It is also about every administration before Trump that handed these agencies a blank check and a map and said "protect us" without asking from whom or for what. You reap what you sow. You sowed this for forty years. The bike shop was always the endpoint.

The left never met a story it couldn't spin to fit its agenda, did it? "Vast surveillance dragnet," they shriek, when what they really mean is that the government, under a patriotic President Trump, was actually DOING ITS JOB to protect American citizens from the radical elements that tried to tear this country apart. You see the pattern, don't you? They twist anything, even the tragic death of someone like Alex Pretti, into an attack on conservatives, on law enforcement, on the very idea of securing our nation. Charlie Kirk always said they would weaponize everything, and here we see Mother Jones doing exactly that, trying to make the men and women who serve in DHS look like the bad guys for investigating domestic threats. This isn't about Alex Pretti to them, it's about delegitimizing those who stand for law and order and stopping the chaos they cheer on. We need to remember that Charlie would have seen right through this. He would have told us not to back down, not to let them define who the real threats are. The actual threats are the ones trying to burn down our cities, defund our police, and undermine our constitutional republic from within. Our government has a duty to protect us from those forces, and if that means looking into the places where those forces gather, then so be it.

Big Rick here and I'll tell you, Mother Jones, tremendous publication, the worst, total disaster, and they're out here crying about surveillance, and I said to my guy, I said sir, these are UNIONS, these are the same unions that rigged everything, everybody knows it, 94% of law enforcement professionals, the best, they all said you gotta watch the unions, and then they throw in bike shops, bike shops folks, and I'll be honest with you maybe the bike shop was a front, maybe it wasn't, I don't know, but DHS, tremendous department, incredible people, they know things Mother Jones doesn't know, believe me, they know things nobody's ever known, and this Alex Pretti situation, very sad, very very sad, but you can't just blame DHS, the whole system, a disaster, a total catastrophe, built by Democrats, and I said to the guy, I said sir, when we had our people running things the right way everything worked, everybody said Big Rick, Big Rick, nobody gets surveillance like you do, and I said I know, I know, tremendous instincts, the best ever, and now they wanna make this a whole thing, FAKE NEWS, classic fake news, believe me.

Kamala warned us these MAGATs would use DHS as a personal intimidation squad against anyone who dares organize, pray, or apparently fix a tire, and Kash Patel's FBI is probably taking notes on which churches serve good coffee. A man was MURDERED and they spent months cataloguing bike shops in Minnesota because unions make them nervous. This is not a government, it is a protection racket with a flag on it.

Mother Jones finding religion on government surveillance is rich. Where was this outrage when the FBI was spying on Trump's campaign? When the intelligence community ran a four-year operation against a sitting president? Suddenly federal overreach matters when it's unions and bike shops getting the treatment. The Fourth Amendment applies to everyone, I agree. But spare me the selective concern from the outlet that cheered every Russia hoax leak for years. If this story is real, it's a bureaucratic mess that predates any current policy direction, and the answer is less federal surveillance apparatus period, not just surveillance of people Mother Jones approves of.

Bike shops. They spent months surveilling bike shops while a murder went uninvestigated. That is not a bug in the system, that is the system working exactly as designed, because the point was never public safety. The point is identifying networks. Unions, churches, community organizations, the kinds of places where people build collective power outside of the market. That is what triggers the federal gaze now.

The conservative frame for thirty years was that government surveillance was tyranny, that the deep state was watching ordinary Americans, that Washington elites were using federal power to crush dissent. They were not wrong about the machinery. They had the targets completely backwards. The people activating that machinery right now are not career bureaucrats with a liberal agenda. They are political appointees running a deliberate operation against organized labor and immigrant communities specifically because those groups can build enough power to threaten their donors.

Kash Patel runs the FBI. Markwayne Mullin runs DHS. These are not neutral administrators. They are factional operators and the factions they serve have a direct economic interest in making sure workers in Minnesota cannot coordinate, cannot organize, cannot use a church basement or a bike co-op as a meeting point without wondering who is watching.

The murder victim's family deserved a federal investigation. They got surveillance of the people who would have shown up to demand one.

The murder investigation angle is what gets me. A man is dead. His killer is out there. And the agency that's supposed to handle federal law enforcement spent months building files on bike shops and church congregations in Minnesota.

I did two tours. I know what surveillance infrastructure looks like when it's pointed at actual threats. This isn't that. You don't dedicate that kind of sustained resource to unions and religious organizations unless someone decided those people are the threat. That's a political decision, not a law enforcement one.

Hegseth is running Defense, not DHS, but the same culture is spreading across every agency right now. The mission has drifted from protecting Americans to monitoring Americans who might vote wrong or organize at work. That is a genuinely different thing and conservatives who cheered every expansion of surveillance authority under the war on terror should think hard about who eventually gets to aim it.

I'm not interested in Mother Jones's politics. But if these documents say what the excerpt says, the question isn't partisan. A murder victim's family didn't get justice because the agency was busy building a political surveillance operation. That's a scandal regardless of which team you're on.

Spying on unions and churches is not public safety, it is state intimidation dressed up as security. Trump's DHS treats organized workers and immigrant communities like threats while corporations wreck the climate and face no such scrutiny. That is authoritarianism, not governance.