ROUNDUP: Deportation, Authoritarian Drift, and Collapse at the Frontiers
Failed State Update for September 4, 2025
This week’s stories capture the many faces of American decline: hidden deportation flights and Everglades gulags, Trump’s criminalization of dissent and meddling abroad, and the dysfunction that follows us from polar research stations to space programs.
IN THE NEWSLETTER
The latest from Failed State Update
Failed State New Orleans: Visiting New Orleans and hanging out with mutual aid activists, one year after Katrina (September 2)
Can John Lennon use the N-Word? What the quiet suppression of a 40-year old song teaches us about corporate censorship (August 30)
FORTRESS AMERICA
From mass deportations to deep-swamp detention camps, the U.S. is transforming immigration enforcement into a theater of cruelty. Deportation flights are being hidden from the public, detention centers are thrown up in violation of laws, and even when they collapse under lawsuits, the impulse behind them only grows stronger. This is the logic of decline: a government that can’t solve problems, only exile them.
US deportation flights hit record highs as carriers try to hide the planes (AP)
Why 'Alligator Alcatraz' is winding down (MSNBC)
Immigration Detainees Revolt at Notorious Florida Detention Camp (Unicorn Riot)
AUTHORITARIAN DRIFT AND STATE VIOLENCE
The decline is political as much as it is social. Trump’s deportation machine doesn’t just target immigrants — it criminalizes protest, militarizes cities, and redefines dissent as conspiracy. Overseas, the U.S. stirs geopolitical trouble even in remote Greenland. At home and abroad, the signs point to an empire fraying and turning inward on its own citizens.
Army Vet Charged with “Conspiracy” for ICE Protest as Trump Expands War on Dissent (Democracy Now)
DC residents rebel against Trump’s ‘gestapo takeover’ of US capital (The Real News Network)
Denmark summons US envoy over claims of interference in Greenland (AP)
SCIENCE, SPACE, AND THE MYTH OF PROGRESS
Even in humanity’s most “forward-looking” frontiers — Antarctica, outer space, advanced technology — the same old patterns of abuse, neglect, and collapse emerge. Harassment in polar outposts mirrors workplace rot at home, space exploration strains under political cuts, and cyberattacks cripple state infrastructure. Instead of building a future, America and its peers seem to be importing decline into the cosmos.
Harassment at Antarctic research bases could spell problems for moon, Mars outposts (Space.com)
Silver State Goes Dark as Cyberattack Knocks Nevada Websites Offline (Slashdot)
Russian space official: “We need to stop lying to ourselves” about health of industry (Ars Technica)
SUBSCRIBE TO FAILED STATE UPDATE
Failed State Update has been publishing podcasts and original reporting since 2020. I couldn’t do this without your support. If you are already a subscriber, thank you. If not, please sign up below:
This is one of the most ridiculously juvenile analyses of what the Trump Administration is doing I have ever read. It reads like the radical left-wing nut presstitutes Rachel Madow, and Keith Olbermann co-wrote it in five minutes after scouring the web for ten minutes to find trivial incidents of much ado about nothing, then cobbled them together in a boomer doomer dumb diatribe with pretence of profundity about the decline of the U.S. As far as douchebag, dimwitted, dilettante "journalism" goes, perhaps it's par for the course since anyone can shit post on Substack.
After the senile pervert, Biden (his coliege roommate said he liked youngsters, and he liked to grope them in official photos) or whoever was really running the country for the demented clown, allowed several millions of criminal aliens to flood into the U.S., including members of the violent Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua, which took over some apartment complexes in Colorado, in addition to the large numbers of criminal aliens already here scamming Medicaid, and other government programs, Trump kept his campaign promise to deport them. Tren de Aragua, and Mexican narco traffickers have destabilized Venezuela, Mexico, and cities in the U.S. including Chicago in addition to other countries to which they have spread operations. Even the presstitute bordellos have reported on this. Trump will now also be exposing big city police departments cooking their crime statistics. The Chicago Police Deoartment has done it for years. They've already caught the scum in D.C. doing it. My youngest brother is a cop in Chicago. It's a cesspool of idiocy, although it's getting better over time.
All people who enter the U.S. in violation of our immigration laws are criminal aliens. It's great that an elected official is getting rid of them as promised. No other politician has done so. Americans elected Trump to do so which is partly why he has received record numbers of votes for a Republican from black, and Latino Americans.
Trump has ruffled some feathers of the professional political clown class overseas, and domestically because he has vociferously gone after the domestic permanent war uniparty, and its associated compulsive liars in the "intelligence community" which he literally caught illegally spying on him when he was a private citizen running for elected office his first go around, then caught them again weaponizing FISA, the DOJ, including the FBI, the CIA, the courts, the Oval Office where closeted homosexual CIA goon, Barack Obama, was stinking it up, and more against him in the Russia hoax. The FBI's raid on Bolton is likely related to that inbred nonSemitic Ashenazim Zionist terrorist POS running assets through Iran that were connected to the assassination attempt in Butler, PA. George Webb has done incredible, real investigative journalism, not shit posting assinity like a ninny. The exposure of the CIA front USAID which has long laundered government money for numerous black ops, pay offs, NGO idiocy and much more was brilliant, and is nowhere nearly done.
Trump has used trade policy to take on the thugs at Big Pharma since Americans have been subsidizing drug development for the rest of the world for many decades. I recall a GSK exec telling me when I worked for that scam company that the con artists in Congress let the PhRMA write the Medicare Modernization Act as a give away to the drug industry. It was the largest expansion of the federal government into the health care sector since FDR created Medicare. Closeted homosexual pedophile, Denny Hastert, was Speaker of the House, GW Bush, the dumbest man to ever be POTUS was president, and sleazy political party flip flopper, Louisiana swamp rat Billy Tauzin, rammed the MMA through Congress. Tauzin then retired to take his pay off as the $1 million a year CEO of the PhRMA.
Trump has also used trade policy to stem the bleeding of the U.S. ability to design, and manufacture silicon chips which the permanent war uniparty had been gutting by off shoring it all to Taiwan, and some to the Zionist terrorist state of Israel. The 10% stake in Intel is brilliant, and the announcement of a total of a $600 billion investment by Apple are just the beginnings of what Trump's genius trade policies will do for the U.S.
No wonder people who work for a living like the members of the Teamsters Union voted for Trump at 60% of their membership.