Sunday, June 14, 2026. UFC Freedom 250 on the White House lawn. Five men, coordinating over Signal, planned to send explosives-rigged drones over the arena, force a panicked evacuation, and then use sniper positions to cut down fleeing “high-value targets.” One plotter typed the plan out like a game plan: “Position your teams in the purple dots, counter sniper and drones.” A mother in Ohio noticed her son’s behavior had turned dark and made the call authorities wish every parent would make. The FBI got there first, and the indictments later expanded to eight.
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That plot makes a good headline. It is not, on its own, the story. The story is what that arrest represents: one save, pulled from a haystack that grows bigger and messier every week. My thesis is simple. The real danger to this country right now is not any single plot. It is that we no longer reliably know who is inside our borders, and the men and women tasked with finding out are stretched thin, doxxed, and increasingly obstructed by their own countrymen while they try.
Start with the scale of the job. According to DHS’s own tally, assaults on ICE officers rose 1,300 percent and vehicular attacks on agents rose 3,200 percent over the past year, with more than 180 vehicle attacks recorded since January 2025 alone. In Minneapolis this January, a woman used her car to wedge federal agents between two vehicles while a crowd threw rocks and pulled agents from their cars. Protesters in New York City barricaded streets with garbage to keep agents from making an arrest. None of that is civil disobedience in the Thoreau sense. It is a bet, made by ordinary Americans who should know better, that following an ICE agent’s car carries no real cost, placed against people doing a legally authorized job under conditions most of us would not last a week inside.
None of that fog assembles itself for free. Following the money is a due diligence habit from thirty years of vetting where capital comes from, not a conspiracy theory. A federal grand jury is examining Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman tied to Chinese state media, for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The House Ways and Means Committee says Singham and his wife, CODEPINK co-founder Jodie Evans, ran more than $20 million through shell companies and donor-advised funds to a single activist hub, The People’s Forum, from 2017 to 2022, and says the money reaches allied causes overseas as well as at home. CodePink is one of hundreds of organizations that turned out for this year’s “No Kings” demonstrations alongside Indivisible, a group that has drawn long-running grants from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. None of that proves a dollar of foreign or billionaire money bought a single blockade outside an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis, and a fair-minded columnist has to say so plainly.
Cartels do not need to fund a protest movement to profit from the fog. Their financing model already runs on it. Drug and human trafficking pay for the cartel’s guns, boats, and sicarios, and every hour an ICE agent spends negotiating a mob instead of working a smuggling lead is an hour that revenue stream stays open. That is a domestic financial interest as real as any foreign one, and an unresolved financing trail running through the picture, foreign and criminal alike, is exactly the kind of ambiguity a subversion campaign is built to exploit. You do not need proof of a tidy conspiracy for the fog to work. You only need enough real, unanswered questions that nobody can say with confidence who benefits.
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ICE agents are not a separate category from the intelligence and law enforcement community. They are the street-level end of the same chain that produced the UFC arrests, the officers who verify the name and make the call on who gets detained. That job has gotten harder because the population they are screening got much larger before anyone finished sorting it. Homeland Security’s own counterterrorism guide has tracked cells operating in at least nineteen states, running armed home invasions, kidnapping, extortion, and human trafficking, with one member of Congress calling it “MS-13 on steroids.” Cartel sicarios move through the same smuggling corridors as the men, women, and children being trafficked for labor and sex. None of that requires a foreign spy service. It only requires a country that has lost the capacity to tell friend from enemy inside its own borders, because it stopped bothering to check.
If you want to see that fog dramatized, watch Season 3 of Lioness. The show buries a Russian intelligence operation under Ukrainian double agents, Belarusian contractors, an Iran-aligned militia, and finally a private revenge plot, until nobody, not the CIA, not the audience, can say with confidence who is actually running things. That confusion is the point. Yuri Bezmenov, the Soviet defector who spent the 1980s warning American audiences about ideological subversion, argued that an adversary rarely needs an army when it can flood a country with enough contradictory information that its own institutions cannot agree on what is happening or who is responsible. Analysts call the Lioness version of this the attribution trap: enough true fragments, pointing in enough directions, to make a wrong conclusion look reasonable. Trade the show’s Moscow handlers for a Tren de Aragua cell, a trafficking network, and a mother’s 911 call, and you have the exact same trap playing out in Minneapolis, Ohio, and every city where a crowd calls an ICE team the enemy.
I want to be fair to the other side of this, because a fiduciary who only argues one direction is not doing his job. Most people who crossed the border illegally came for work, not to join a cartel cell, and treating every landscaper or line cook as a suspected sicario is both wrong and beneath us. But risk management has never worked by assuming the best case. My thirty years advising clients on risk exposure taught me the same lesson: you do not get to ignore a tail risk because it is a small allocation of your portfolio. When millions of people entered the country without so much as a name check, the honest answer to “who is here” became “we do not fully know,” and that uncertainty is the actual product Bezmenov’s model sells to an adversary, whether the adversary is a foreign state, a cartel, or a gang.
So here is the uncomfortable ask. Praise the FBI agents who stopped a massacre at the White House, absolutely. Then extend that respect down the chain to the ICE officers doing the dangerous work of finding out who is here, and stop pretending that following their vehicles, publishing their names, or surrounding them is a form of protest rather than an assist to the fog Bezmenov described. A country that cannot agree that its own law enforcement deserves to do its job without being ambushed has already done half of an adversary’s work for it. The rest gets finished by every sicario, trafficker, and sleeper cell that slips through while we argue about who the real threat is.
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