I have been reading, here and elsewhere, that many, maybe most, maybe all of the unidentified "federal agents" terrorizing American citizens in their own streets are not CBP, riot police from BOP, or other "regular" employees of federal security arms. No, they are "private military contractors" from Blackwater-descended private security firms like Academi, Triple Canopy, G4S, MVM and others, leased from these security firms under hefty and ongoing contracts to provide "security" wherever the feds send them. If the history of Blackwater is any guide, these men are almost exclusively former military, highly trained special forces in fact, former SEALS, Army Delta, Marine Recon troops who, cashing in their training and oaths of service in exchange for salaries up to a quarter million dollars a year, have for decades been shooting up various parts of the world with impunity and without military discipline or any accountability other than to their employer, like Erik Prince. Highly trained, highly intelligent, and highly aggressive men to begin with, many are steroid-shooting bodybuilder types with severe cases of androgen intoxication and the toxic kind of hypermasculinity that breeds. Utterly lacking in compassion and empathy, arrogant and aggressive with brutal tempers set on a hair-trigger, to call these mercenaries "law enforcement" is like calling the Gestapo an investigative bureau, or calling the Waffen SS a protective detail.
Now we know how these troops can act as callously and unconstitutionally as they have: Because they are not oath-abiding public servants, or even Border Patrol officers brutalized by years in the southwestern deserts. No, they are mercenary soldiers who are used to acting a whole lot worse for the majority of their young lives and making a shit-ton of money doing it.
This is beyond dangerous. In one of the most ominous developments in our national history, the President* has finally acquired his very own Liebstandarte.
As Charles Pierce likes to say: This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.