Indiscipline
I repeat myself when under stress...
The shortened training period for more than ten thousand new ICE agents has come under scrutiny, blamed by some for the on-camera homicides and assaults on residents of Minneapolis, in the new year.
Homeland security expert talks about ICE’s truncated training after hiring blitz
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hired over 12,000 officers and reduced training time to aid with deportation efforts. Steve Inskeep speaks with a homeland security expert about that training.
Democrats at first did their best to quell public outrage, promising that when the people finally get their chance and vote the right way, the party would prioritize reforming ICE. Just gotta wait until 2027 to make it happen—inaugurations, you see. In the meantime, seven House Democrats voted to pass the portion of the 2026 DHS budget that was postponed by the last government shutdown.
It turned out that was the exact minimum of Democratic votes needed to pass the bill on to the Senate. Funny how these bills and cabinet nominations keep getting just the right number of Democrats, to allow them to pass.
Democrats’ promises of future reform lasted a week, until ICE conducted a more egregious public execution. This time with at least two (possibly three, or four) goons taking turns putting bullets into the victim’s prone body. That spurred a too-late recognition of his own failureship, by Tom Suozzi.
Rep Tom Suozzi
I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis. I hear the anger from my constituents, and I take responsibility for that. I have long been critical of ICE’s unlawful behavior and I must do a better job of demonstrating that.
The senseless and tragic murder of Alex Pretti underscores what happens when untrained federal agents operate without accountability. President Trump must immediate end “Operation Metro Surge” and ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis that has sown chaos, led to tragedy, and undermined experience law enforcement.
As some of these demonstrators noted, Renee Good was shot to death before Suozzi failed to demonstrate that he opposed the unlawfulness, by voting to further fund the goon squad. Regardless of the Senate vote (and given this week’s high-profile wrist-slap by the Administration, they have given Democrats the cover they need to vote YES to funding) ICE is over-funded already. And should they spend it all, as they did with 2025’s budget, by the end of June, more money will be found, or it will be used as the justification for bringing the National Guard back onto city streets.
But the point of this piece is not to go through the details of the Occupation of Minneapolis and the obvious signs the Democrats are incapable of and unwilling to “preserve, protect, and defend.” Instead, it is to illustrate the importance of discipline in keeping social order.
I have written at length about the means by which the ruling class has utilized the state as a tool to discipline the populous. Taxation, enforcing regulations, framing civil rights, policing and imprisonment; these are the everyday means through which the liberal nation-state makes itself real, upon the bodies of its citizenry. People are disciplined into social relationships and patterns of behavior, through the state. Perhaps the most direct form of this discipline is the police encounter, whereby a state agent holds a claim to legitimate violence they may enact at their will.
While the officer, their superiors, and elected officials consider training for police-citizen encounters to be of foremost concern, they are missing the larger rubric. Training is within a discipline, itself. Only those properly disciplined to the framework can be considered “trained.”
Military Basic Training illustrates this priority quite clearly. Recruits stepping off the bus are expected to know nothing. They are forced into resocialization, where they have no authority, no social support, and are punished (or at least yelled at) for not knowing what they are expected not to know. While this may seem counter to behaviorist psychology, where the possible reward is revealed for proper behavior, the resocialization is not directed toward particular behaviors, at that time. Instead, it is to teach the recruit to follow orders without hesitation. They will learn the proper way in which to do what they are ordered as training progresses, but at first the most important lesson is do as you are told.
This discipline, once practiced and internalized, will carry a soldier through their career, no matter the mission, location, or unit to which they are assigned. To paraphrase the USMC Rifleman’s Creed: “Without this discipline, their training is useless.”
And that’s the problem we are suffering—no amount of teaching ICE recruits how to properly run a domestic military occupation can cover for a lack of discipline. And that lack of discipline is by design, from the very top of the command chain.
Donald Trump despises physical exertion so much he concocted a ridiculous theory that humans only have so much life force and that expending it on running or roofing, shortens life-expectancy. His body is evidence of his physical indiscipline.
He is, however, extremely disciplined in social manipulation. His “Stop the Steal” branding of the coup attempt rested on assertions the 2020 election results were falsified. He did not give up on that stance, faced criminal accusations for the lie, ran for president in 2024 with it constantly in the background, and just yesterday had his DOJ flunkies raid Georgia election authorities, solely for the sake of perpetuating the lie.
The phone call where Trump asked the Georgia Secretary of State to find one more vote than Joe Biden got is not to be found in those records (instead, it is readily available on the internet). Trump’s discipline also carries over to the nomenclature he uses, when he is manipulating scenarios. He described the Georgia phone call as “perfect,” which was precisely the adjective he used to describe the phone call to Ukraine that resulted in his first impeachment. “Hoax” indicates something truthful and discrediting has been alleged about him. “I didn’t know [him]” means Trump knew the person, but no longer wishes to be associated with them.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was accosted while addressing her constituents on January 27, 2026, Trump’s initial response was to accuse her of “staging” the assault attempt. One of Trump’s most consistent exhibits of discipline he learned from Roy Cohn—accuse your opponent of what you, yourself, are doing. Every accusation may thus be understood as a confession.
Training is within a disciplinary rubric, but training without discipline is inadequate. Graduate schools’ rolls are stocked with “ABD” graduate students—All But Dissertation. They have Masters degrees, no coursework remaining, and their dissertation proposal has been accepted. They are likely teaching at a university or working in private industry, fully utilizing their specialized training. They “know” everything they need to, to hold a Ph.D. in their field, but they have not exhibited the discipline required to finish the document.
Academic disciplines are their own frameworks, but unlike military discipline, the doctor of philosophy is required to have self-motivated. While their work will be evaluated by their peers, by definition a Ph.D. has demonstrated original work in which no one else (not even the advisors who confer the degree) holds the same measure of expertise.
Also unlike the military, where hierarchy rules information paths and actions, the discipline developed by the doctoral student through writing the dissertation may or may not be applicable for future work in their field. Other than producing material justification for conferring a Ph.D., the doctoral dissertation serves no other purpose. Publications and future work may grow from this foundational document, but the exercise itself is never repeated within the same discipline. Once you finish your dissertation, your peers in the discipline see no value in you doing another.
A terminal degree is like a terminal illness. One can learn other things but one will never shed the original condition.
Encouraging ICE to wear masks contributes to the indiscipline by anonymizing individuals and thus deflecting accountability. Had JD Vance and Kristi Noem not outed the goon who murdered Renee Good by providing details of an injury he suffered due to his earlier aggressions, we would still have no idea who it was. Just like we do not know the names of the two (or three, or four) goons who murdered Alex Pretti, as he lay face-down and motionless in the street.
Screen caps immediately prior to both homicides show ICE goons with firearms drawn and fingers on triggers; before Good’s car moved, and as Pretti was jumped by five or six men. Firearms instructors speak of “trigger discipline” or keeping one’s finger outside the trigger guard, until the time comes to shoot.
The DOJ issued its conclusions on the Good murder—exonerating the shooter—without an autopsy report. A private autopsy showed Good to have been shot through the left side of her head, when the killer fired through the open driver’s side window. There has not been a rush to exoneration in the Pretti homicide, yet, but we can expect there to be no consequences.
Clearly, ICE is an undisciplined goon squad that has been given assurances they will not be held accountable. That is why the masks are allowed, that’s why the first killer in Minneapolis was exonerated before an autopsy could be performed, that is why with both on-camera murders the Administration pushed blatantly false narratives. The goons have been trained to expect to be protected, and the immediate responses by the Administration show this is the operating procedure.
The ostensible reason for more than 3,000 goons occupying an American city is to “fight fraud.” You may recall that was one of DOGE’s charges as well, along with finding “waste and abuse.” Just as with DOGE, there is not a single forensic accountant assigned to the case in Minnesota. There is no attempt being made to find fraud because there is nothing left to find on a case adjudicated years ago. Greg Bovino was shipped out of state and replaced by Tom Homan, who is on tape from 2024, accepting a $50,000 bribe from the FBI (and who seems not to have returned the money). Putting the guy who takes bribes in charge of a fraud investigation makes sense, when the investigation itself is fraudulent.
ICE practices have been redesigned to shield the street thugs from accountability. Without accountability, there can be no discipline. And without discipline, expect the killings to continue, regardless of training.
An oncologist would laugh at the suggestion we could reform a cancer. There is only one “cure.” Kill it, and if you cannot kill it, excise it from the body.
ICE will never be disciplined again. It must be destroyed, for our freedom and safety.