Intel Update — Jan — 17 — Slow Burn Insurgency

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for January 11th through the 17th, 2026. It would seem that this year has gotten off to a rather crazy start. I had originally planned to talk about many things today, but since I have a lot of stuff to cover, I'm afraid I don't have enough time to cover everything I'd like because I've obviously been focused on Minneapolis, but we'll see how it goes. And this week, the unrest continues to escalate all around. So, let's get right to it. Despite the heavy focus on domestic issues this week, it has in fact been a busy week around the world. Way up north, where the air gets cold, the White House has been steadily moving towards the acquisition of Greenland. And on the diplomatic front, things have been busy regarding the expansion of the United States to the Arctic. It's still too early to know how that's going to work out, but the talks and negotiations continue between Greenland, Denmark, and the United States. So, deals are being made, or at least being worked on at the moment. The other point of contention around the world this week has obviously been in the Middle East. The Persians are a little ornery at the moment and varying factions within Iran are continuing to battle it out as best they can. As always, this topic is very much filled with propaganda from all sides. But as of right now, it doesn't seem to be purely a revolutionary or uprising movement. There is that element to it, but there are also a lot of crowds that are certainly pro- regime. So, it's not as simple as the entire Iranian population trying to rise up against the Ayatollah and the current system of governance that they have. It's complicated, as you might expect. And in a larger sense, none of that really matters because the United States is going to do what the United States is going to do. And this is demonstrated by the strategic movement for this week. So there have been a few updates to the general state of strategic forces around the world. This week, many eyes have been on the Middle East as several mainstream media sources have claimed that the United States is surging forces into the region. So far, this doesn't appear to be that big of a deal, at least not yet. There has been an observable increase in cargo flights going to American bases scattered around the Middle East, but it's nowhere near the level that would be indicative of an imminent war. Again, at least not yet. This may change over the next few days. Right now, there is no aircraft carrier in Sentcom and the Abraham Lincoln CSG is moving into the area as we speak. As I mentioned earlier this week, there was a bit of concern at Aluded Air Base as the New York Times claimed that the United States was evacuating personnel from this base. This could be true. It's hard to say. it would make sense, but they're also citing unnamed sources, so there's really no way to verify it. And there have been a few movements from this base, but nothing super major just yet. For anyone so inclined, you can just check the daily Sentinel 2 satellite pass over the base, which usually happens a few times a week, just to see if everything has been evacuated yet. I've been keeping an eye on this. Same with the ADSB traffic, which is in this case a little bit less reliable because they can always just secretly leave the base with their transponders off. But so far, I haven't seen a mass exodus that we should be seeing if strikes are going to happen in a few days. Remember, the reason that we're watching this base is because this is the base that the Iranians struck with a ballistic missile the last time we uh bombed their nuclear sites. So, if there is to be retaliation, this is probably one of the ones that's going to get hit along with a few others, which I'm also watching. But I have no doubt that if the United States were to strike Thran, we should expect to see much larger strategic movement of aviation, including at this base. So, in short, yes, the United States is probably maneuvering to conduct strikes in Iran. However, it might be a couple more weeks before this comes to fruition. So, it's on the back burner right now, but it could move to the front burner rather quickly. Now, in the homeland this week, for everyone's favorite topic, Minneapolis. I know for many, this horse is deceased, and this topic has been milked by many people already, but I think this is important. Of course, the main question that most of you probably have is how serious is this? Hopefully, we can get out the answer to that question today because it's complicated. In terms of the actual unrest itself, it's comparatively minimal. Minneapolis has seen much worse during the George Floyd years, but there are still other factors which are bubbling beneath the surface which are vastly more serious than at first glance. Right up front, I want to be very clear that there are very specific reasons as to why I'm focusing on Minneapolis so heavily. Most of these reasons are that it's incredibly easy to find malign activity throughout the city, but also because it's very very easy to observe the levels of organization that are being stood up in Minneapolis which are becoming straight up insurgent groups. So all of this is going to be helpful for us to understand because the same funding sources that are causing a lot of the problems in Minneapolis are also going to shift to other cities and they've also been going on in other cities for a very long time. So, please do not think that Minneapolis is any worse than, say, Brooklyn or Los Angeles. No, the same concerns exist there. It's just that right now there's a little bit of civil unrest sprinkled over top of this. But the civil unrest part itself is not as much a concern as the organization that is going on underneath the surface, if that makes any sense. So, let's jump over to ATAC and we'll dig into what's been happening on the ground this week. All right, so here we are in Minneapolis and as we can see, it has been a bit of a busy week. So, a lot of red on the screen, I know. Um, but just for additional context here, the map layers that you're seeing, a lot of these points are really just uh historic map layers from my ArcGIS maps. So, for those of you who use and find some some utility in my ArcGIS map layers, you can export a lot of that stuff or I've actually exported for you and I provided separately KMZs that you can then throw into ATAC, which I'm doing here right now. So, uh, let me go ahead and turn off these layers. I find it a little bit helpful to understand the general context of the city and it's really helpful to know where some of these more kinetic places might be, especially when you've got a lot of businesses, right, which are just, you know, they've got stacked on top of each other a lot of these more uh unfriendly sites, I'll call them that. So, uh let's go in here to overlays and I'll go ahead and turn off the border crisis map to kind of clean up the map a little bit because we don't need all that historical context to know what's been going on in the city this week. So moving down south to the Whipple Federal Building. This is where most of the connect kinetic activity has taken place this week. For the most part, this building is the main site of civil unrest when it comes to the persistent protest. So this is the main line of effort uh when protesters are not going around and conducting roving operations. If they want to participate in a static protest, this is where they're at. Most of the people who show up at this location are the same people over and over and over again. And so if you're watching the live streams of these kinds of protests and stuff like that, you'll see the same faces over and over again. They're repeat offenders, right? So for the most part, a lot of the more kinetic stuff that happens happens here at this uh injury control point or ECP. Numbers-wise, we're talking 1 to 200 people per day, every single day without fail. Even in the freezing cold and in a blizzard, they're they're going to be there. Also, not a single night has gone past uh since this whole thing kicked off where there has not been some kind of deployment of pepper balls, pepper spray, tear gas, all that kind of stuff. So, every single night without fail so far, every single night has been hosted to civil unrest and rioting at this location in the form of things like trying to tear the fences down, attacking vehicles, attacking police. You know the drill. Same story as always, right? This area has been host to most of the persistent civil unrest, but more the the more interesting stuff that has taken place and the more concerning things that have taken place have taken place in the downtown region. So in terms of persistent protests in the downtown area, we have three main sites. The Renaissance Hotel, the Canopy Hotel, and also the Hilton Graduate Hotel. These are again the hotel protests by which demonstrators, riers, agitators, whatever you want to call them, have set up more of a persistent effort to keep people awake at night. So, it's an over usually these are overnight protests uh to cause noise for the ICE agents staying inside the hotels. At this point, I don't even know if there are any ICE agents in these hotels because a lot of these uh intelligence networks that these demonstrators are relying on are flawed in many many ways. So, a lot of times they end up protesting at places that have no affiliation whatsoever with ICE. So, that's something to be aware of if you are uh planning to travel to Minneapolis in the near future. There are also demonstrations pretty much everywhere else. at city hall. It's a pretty good place for demonstrators to kind of rally. Also at the initial shooting site of Renee Good, the East 34th Street location really from Portland Avenue all the way to Park Avenue is kind of like a persistent think like Portlandesque demonstration zone, but not really that kinetic. Just kind of more annoying than anything else. And of course, we see the same thing at random places throughout the city. The same uh spot they had riots the other day on North Lindell Avenue where they had those ICE vehicles broken into and and taken. But for the most part, that's kind of the general uh gist of the unrest in this city right now. The more concerning things that are happening in the city are not something that I can put on the map very easily because they're moving. So, a lot of these demonstrators, agitators, insurgents if you want to go that far, for some of them at least. Most of these people are just straight up annoying, but some of them are straight up insurgents, which we'll get to in a moment, the the choice of vocabulary here. But just know that in the Minneapolis area, specifically in the downtown area, you've got a lot of activists which are engaging in more direct confrontations. They're following around random people now, right? And they're starting to harass random citizens uh to make them prove that they are not ICE. So once again, these are a little bit isolated at the moment, but but they're becoming more and more common as time goes on. So that is the general gist of Minneapolis at the moment and uh what the the kind of concerns that are ongoing throughout the city for now. Now, while we're here on the map, I wanted to mention something else that occurred yesterday. I have no information on this whatsoever, but I didn't want to mention it because it did occur about an hour and a half or 2 hours north of Minneapolis last night, or rather yesterday afternoon. Multiple explosions were reported at a pipeline. So, a natural gas pipeline exploded up there in Willow River, just to the north of Minneapolis. Now, once again, everybody's initial knee-jerk reaction is, well, is this these insurgent groups shifting into more of domestic terrorism? Was this a deliberate attack that we would expect to see by now? The answer to that question is I don't know, but I will certainly be looking at this and uh trying to figure out what happened here over the next few days. Hopefully, we'll have some more information from local authorities and the utility themselves to figure out was this something that they caused, was this some kind of issue with the pipeline or was this more malign action? Right now, we just don't know. But in the context of what's going on in Minneapolis and the very sharply rising uh tensions throughout the city, I thought this would be worthy of note. So, that's the general tactical situation on the ground in Minneapolis. There's not a whole lot more uh right now. I'm continuing to plot out these places uh including again some of these more uh active map layers such as the let's see here, the border crisis map and uh things like that. That's just what I'm calling this. This is really just kind of my my own arbitrary criteria for anything that you might want to know about or any kind of uh location or site or facility or installation or whatever that might be affiliated with some nefarious action I wanted to put on the map. That's what all of my mapping projects really are. And uh yeah, I'm continuing to build this out as best I can, but it's slow going and uh there's a lot of points there on in Minneapolis already and there will probably continue to be more as time goes on. But once again, the most concerning stuff are things that are really hard to put on the map, such as roving protests, uh, activists trying to follow around ICE agents, which increases the tension. It increases the chance that another shooting might take place. Again, the Renee Good shooting was due to this. It was an activist following around an ICE convoy uh way too many times and finally just having to constantly oneup themselves uh to put themselves in a tough situation. So my guess is that as long as these activists are doubling down and tripling down and quadrupling down on following ICE agents around and harassing them directly, you're going to see more of this. So that's that's my guess and that's why I'm putting in a lot of this effort into Minneapolis. So that's the general situation on the ground. We can easily see these things. We can map all the points uh that are being used for civil unrest. Although all that's pretty easy, right? But what about the broader question of how serious is this and how is the situation developing? One observation that might help us answer that question is the level of organization that we're seeing, not just in Minneapolis, but nationwide. Concerning the intelligence networks that are operating within Minneapolis alone, significant efforts were made over the past week to improve the organizational capabilities of these groups. One bit of insight that can be gleaned openly is the use of trade craft by these groups. The Defend the 612 organization, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, the Immigrant Defense Network, and many others all encourage their members to fill out salute reports when observing ICE agents to inform immigrants that they are coming. It must be noted that the salute report format is just a standard military reporting format and on its own is fairly benign, as this report format is mostly used by Ford observers to tell higher command when they see the enemy during wartime. However, when it comes to the use of this tradecraftraft in Minneapolis, two things must be noted. For one, it's an example of insurgent networks using doctrine for more malign purposes. But more importantly, this reporting format is of no use unless a hierarchical structure is in place to analyze the data. If you see someone that you deem to be an enemy, right, and you write it down in a salute report format, and then you take that report and stick it in your pocket and don't tell anyone about it, it's of no use. So the fact that they are using the salute report format and have a place to submit salute reports confirms that they are using them and that there is some kind of hierarchical structure here. Intelligence reports that do not have a customer are useless. So clearly these reports have a customer and a command structure exists. Even as primitive as it is, it does exist that organizes the data that is submitted. In this case, there are highly organized intelligence networks working to further the goal of protecting illegal immigrants and violent felons alike. And in most cases, the funding sources of these organizations is substantial. In the case of the Defend the 612 network, otherwise known as Defend 612, tracking down the ownership of this group is quite easy as they don't really care that anyone knows who is pulling the strings behind the scenes. However, a donation link can be found which points to an affiliated parent group. In this case, the Cooperation Canyon River 501c3. As surprising as it may be to some, most domestic terror cells are actually registered as taxexempt organizations such as charities. They all have very pleasant and wholesome names and colorful websites. But under the hood, they openly provide how-to guides, doctrinal publications, and organizational efforts, all with the common goal of aiding illegals evade ICE detection, as well as the targeting of ICE agents themselves. But because it's a 501c3, most of the documents are public. And just last year, this charity had a 54% increase in revenue, nearly all of which came from grants. So, they had a really big boost of funding. Again, the tap gets turned on. And it happened last year, so this has been in the works for a while now. These grants came from mostly other charities, which is a common way to launder money uh throughout the whole charity game. And in this case, the origin point of the funding is the Infamous Tides Foundation, otherwise known as George Soros's personal pass through charity, which is used to launder money to varying causes. Rest assured, though, the usual suspect, boogeyman, George Soros, isn't the only one throwing money on the pile. The state of Minnesota itself is also funding these protests via grants that have been given to dozens of groups scattered throughout the community. This is how the rent a riot scheme works out. A mysterious check gets deposited in an account. Far-left insurgents get activated and billionaire donors get to claim terrorism as a deduction on their taxes. This has been the playbook since long before 2016. And over the years, far-left groups have industrialized the process of using civil unrest as a dial, turning up the heat when benefactors so desire, and dialing back the unrest when needed as well. Of course, there are exceptions, and it would be a grave error to assume that every protester is paid. Many do indeed believe in their own cause and work for free. However, in the case of Minneapolis, the dial has been turned up and the funding has flowed once again, but right now it's just a warning, right? Things are not as bad as it could be. It could go further if required. The unrest is seen in Minneapolis is not nearly as severe as the George Floyd years. However, due to the many insurgent networks that are openly allowed to operate within the city, the infrastructure for chaos is already well established. This is why it's worth focusing on Minneapolis. They've given us their playbook. Every single protest event becomes violent when nightfalls without exception. Last night it was -4° with the windchill and about a 100 protesters were doing their job and causing a ruckus at several sites around the city. Citizens moving around the city are now being harassed by militants who threaten them and give them orders and restrict their freedom of movement. Right now, this is an amateur-ish effort, but the longer this behavior goes unchecked, the more substantial it will become. You may not like cracking down on this kind of behavior, right, to start with because it gets into this um a civil rights, you know, kind of era, but the longer you let this go unchecked, the more dangerous it's going to be. Many people may chuckle at the irony of anti-ISE activists themselves starting to establish checkpoints, profiling random citizens, and conducting warrantless searches, but this behavior is very serious, even if it's being carried out by absolute insane people. Doctrinally speaking, this type of harassment is often a prelude to much more serious behavior later on. One group of people restricting the rights of another group of people, neither of which are explicitly acting on behalf of a government system, usually gets ugly really fast. As such, the harassment of citizens is very likely to expand in scope to include more direct confrontations in the very near future. Now, all of this being said, what we're trying to do is figure out how serious the situation is and how serious it's likely to be over the next few weeks, not just in Minneapolis, but elsewhere. And right now, it should be quite clear that the situation is very serious. But in the grand scheme of things, how serious is it, right? There is a massive tendency for media groups to sensationalize civil unrest and over dramatize the general situation. After all, much of what we've seen at protests around Minneapolis has fallen squarely into the realm of goofy instead of insurgency. As unfortunate as it is, we can't throw people in Gitmo simply for being annoying. Or so I'm told. And many of the protests so far have not earned that precious terrorism label. They're just annoying. They're breaking things. It's a criminal issue for local law enforcement to handle. Of course, when they're not handling it, the feds have to step in, thus the fray throughout Minneapolis. But you get the idea. When it comes to the more active stuff, right now there are a lot of conservatives on social media screaming for the Insurrection Act to be enacted. And it may be necessary at some point, but not right now. Personally, my guess is that the feds are trying to keep this in the realm of law enforcement and not counterterrorism. Remember, we have got bigger fish to fry, and we've already had multiple sniper attacks, ambushes, vehicle ramming attacks, and other terrorist attacks targeting ICE and ICE facilities. So, my guess is that the feds want to keep them in the streets, keep them screaming and wearing their stupid little costumes, and thus keeping them occupied. As annoying and infuriating as it is to see that people like this are allowed to have any agency in society whatsoever, this is the mission. Keep deportations flowing, reduce the criminal population within the city, but most importantly do so without kicking off a hot war. This is why it's worth dedicating so much time to Minneapolis. This is the framework for most other cities as well. Yes, the situation in Minneapolis has crossed the line in nearly every way. The politicians have committed rebellion at the state level and not the kind that we romanticize so much. The sort of rebellion where they form battle lines against the government to protect very very violent criminals and help them hurt innocent people. That's the kind of rebellion that's going on in Minneapolis right now. Throughout society, an insurgency is building as cartoonish as it is and the money is flowing without any restrictions whatsoever. Shutting off the public benefits to fraudulent businesses is pretty easy. That's an easy box to check. But what's a lot harder is to go after the 501c3s. And those charities, in heavy air quotes, these insurgent groups masquerading as a charity. These groups are the cause of most of the problems. Or at least they're the vector by which a lot of this funding gets transferred around. Right. The good news is that as far as insurgencies goes, a limpisted man zipping around town in a Honda fit isn't exactly the same as a terrorist walking into a daycare with a vest on. However, it would be unwise to chalk all of this up to just silliness, right? because the threats are real. Remember the Dallas sniper attack last year? Even the average overweight and unwashed Reddit moderator is capable of popping off a few rounds from their mausin. And make no mistake, plenty of these people are willing to die for their cause, as odd as that may seem to most of us. So hopefully we can balance out all of this information to have as accurate of a picture as possible regarding what's going on in Minneapolis, but also what will probably happen in other cities as well. No, the riots and unrest are not nearly as bad as the media wants it to be, but the organization of these groups is far better than you might think, and their intelligence networks are somewhat effective. Despite being run by goofballs for the most part, effective leadership is present at every level, from the state down to the mayor down to the local group of four to five protesters. And nearly all of this is coordinated, not necessarily from a strict top-down leadership structure, but just amongst different groups themselves. They are coordinating. They are working together. They are learning how to do all of this stuff. The American insurgency might be pretty lame, but it's still an insurgency. And we have to be mindful of the tendency to underestimate the situation. So, we can do our best to estimate the situation exactly the right amount, not over or under. And we'll do the best we can because at the end of the day, that's all we can do. We can complain. We can have strong opinions on things, but you know, there's a lot of personal accountability here, too. It is true that there is a deficit of ways that the American people can help. Not everyone can or should have a hand in some of this stuff, but everybody can do something. You guys are smart, and I know that you can use your skills for good stuff. We don't all have to agree on everything for good work to be done. There are a lot of bad things in the world, but after the initial recognition of that fact, we don't have to dwell on it so much. And honestly, it helps to just get to work, whatever that might be. For some, it won't be much, but for others, it'll be a lot more. And to segue nicely into the conclusion for today, one of the skills you can always work on is radio stuff, right? Communications, such as the ghost net. It's not the best thing since sliced bread, but the ghost net is one of the many side projects I manage that brings a component of organization and coordination to the world of shortwave radio. So for those of you so inclined, you can get involved and have a decently wellthoughtout communications infrastructure that will work both for large-scale disasters, but also for a more everyday use. As we can see from the weekly nets, people are always exchanging information throughout the week, not just on the the weekly uh radio night, but considering that cellular outages are happening nearly weekly nowadays, and social media is going down all the time as well, having some sort of robust backup plan is helpful, I think. And this is just one way to get at that. And hey, if nothing else, we can always send each other memes after the nukes are launched, which is quite reassuring. So, that's all I have for today. Take it easy, everybody. Don't get complacent. Recognize the risks that are out there, but don't let that really dark stuff weigh you down. It seems heavy right now for everybody, but I promise you it'll all work out in the end. For everybody going through a tough time out there, just know that I'm praying for you, and the tough times are temporary anyway. You'll make it through it just fine. And when you do, you'll look back and see that it wasn't nearly as bad as you thought it was at the time. Whether it's in Minneapolis or whatever town is next. So, keep at it. Do good stuff. Work on bettering yourself. And I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.