Eric Schwalm
@Schwalm5132
As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.
What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.
This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.
The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.
I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.
Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.
We either recognize what we’re actually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.
Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore.
It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.
https://x.com/Schwalm5132/status/2015470661490057540
Great minds, and all that... :)
Trump can just wait them out by turning Alinksy’s 7th rule on them:
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
circle back
The Department of Me: Senators Earmark $636M for Universities They Attended
https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/the-department-of-me-senators-earmark
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Most universities dream of wealthy alumni who will send massive donations to their alma maters. The kind who contribute millions of dollars year after year, funding libraries, laboratories and more.
A select few universities have found such a wealthy, if unwitting, donor for 2026: the U.S. taxpayer, by way of pork-hungry senators.
Twenty-four senators requested $636 million of earmarks for the universities they attended as students. That’s more than 20% of the $3.7 billion of earmarks requested for universities in the 2026 federal budget, according to Open the Books’ review of congressional disclosures.
The list includes 13 Democrats and 11 Republicans. However, it was Republicans who requested $470 million (74%) of the cash.
The average alma mater earmark request is worth $4.9 million this year. Earmark requests for universities that are not affiliated with a senator were worth only $3 million on average.
Not every earmark request will be signed into law. Congress has been discreetly adding and removing earmarks from the proposed budget for weeks, presumably in an effort to appease members who were hesitant to advance the budget out of committee.
Regardless, senators on both sides of the aisle are trying their best to gift federal funds to their old schools.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville
7 earmark requests worth $164.9 million
Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV)
Marshall University
9 earmark requests worth $57.5 million
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
Washington State University
2 earmark requests worth $50.9 million
Sen. John Boozman (R-AR)
University of Arkansas-Fayetteville
2 earmark requests worth $4.3 million
Conclusion
The government will shut down on Jan. 31 if Congress cannot agree on a 2026 federal budget. Unfortunately for taxpayers, alma mater earmarks appear to be one of the few items that lawmakers from both parties support.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) introduced an amendment on Jan. 22 to strike all earmarks from the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies bill, calling them “partisan pet projects” that are “outside the core mission” of the bill.
He was unsuccessful. Seventy-six House Republicans joined 215 Democrats in voting to keep the earmarks intact. Another eight Republicans and one Democrat abstained. The results were unsurprising, given that 31 House members secured $131 million for their own alma maters last year.
Each one gets an “F” for fiscal sanity.