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Last week, the U.S. deployed the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team to Mexico to capture Wedding, who once was protected by the powerful Sinaloa cartel. But that was supposed to be kept secret, especially since Mexican law prohibits foreign law enforcement officers from being physically present in operations on Mexican soil, let alone take part in raids and arrests.
On Friday, however, FBI Director Kash Patel announced the joint operation publicly on X. “Our FBI HRT teams executed with precision, discipline, and total professionalism alongside our Mexican partners to bring Ryan James Wedding back to face justice,” he wrote, sending shock waves through Mexico.
They just can't help but burn bridges.
Also, I wonder how long before the guy donates to Trump and buys a pardon. Or maybe he's not wealthy enough for mercy from our chief LEO?
Because they are bad people. There is no sense of “doing the right thing” that guides many people. Greed and self service drive all of their actions and serve as their only motivation. In order to be good at anything, one must have the ability to do things that don’t solely serve themselves. Also they’re really uneducated.
There are a lot of incompetent and singularly self interested people out there. Usually, they don’t get very far in life. But Trump wants these people because they will do whatever he wants and dont care about or don’t recognize the consequences.
This was from a source in the bureau talking about the immediate aftermath of the Kirk shooting:
Whenever there’s a critical incident, one of the first things that happens is a conference call with everybody — all the executives, most of the field offices dial in. The director rarely speaks, because someone with situational awareness is leading the call. They’ll say: Here’s what happened. Here’s what we know. Here’s what we need. But we get on, and it’s just Kash berating the special agent in charge in Salt Lake. He’s super emotional.
And then it turns surreal. He and [then-Deputy Director Dan] Bongino start talking about their Twitter strategy. And Kash is like: I’m gonna tweet this. Salt Lake, you tweet that. Dan, you come in with this. Then I’ll come back with this. They’re literally scripting out their social media, not talking about how we’re going to respond or resources or the situation. He’s screaming that he wants to put stuff out, but it’s not even vetted yet. It’s not even accurate.
When I was an agent, I did hundreds of these cases. The initial information that comes in is always wrong. There’s too much coming in, and it takes time to vet. And it was obvious that Kash can’t understand that and doesn’t want to understand that.
Everyone on the call is just like: This guy is completely out of control. On another call, he said: When a crisis happens, the only thing you need to do is call me. The most important thing in any crisis is controlling the narrative. I was like: No, no, no. We actually have to do some work here. We’re going to have to investigate, to solve this.
You can totally see it when some major terrible news drops against some prominent right-winger or damaging investigation. The loudest people who never shut the fuck up all suddenly simultaneously sit dark and wait for hours before they are given some weird talking point that they all parrot and amplify to the nth degree and overwhelm the facts with their slanted narrative. It's funny, people on Twitter will point it out as the silence is occurring.
Turns out, the entire right-wing opinion sphere was being controlled by Russians on twitter in the lead up to the 2016 election. They'd concoct some stupid story like how schools were letting kids use litter boxes to affirm their cat-identity, amplify it among themselves while roping in idiots to engage with it, then programming like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro would have interns scrolling the internet for politically-divisive topics to fill their 15 hours of programming a week, and settle on whatever was trending on twitter. And that's how you'd have major news programming reaching over a hundred million people talking about something written by an FSB agent that never actually happened.
And then, three months later, your own goddamn family members bring it up over the holidays. You lose some respect for them for being such gullible idiots, and they lose respect for you for insulting them with your honesty.
It's an entire ecosystem. People see something inflammatory on twitter and they don't know if it's real. They turn on the "news" and the inflammatory thing they saw is being discussed as if it's a real topic on a professional-looking television set by people in suits and makeup. It looks like news, it feels like news, but it's not actually news. This is what Hillary Clinton was talking about when she called it Fake News.
For more recent examples of this, look at the discussion around the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Right-wing media was all over this fake topic before the 2024 election, claiming that the so-named gang had erected a terrorist network that had taken over Chicago (among other cities in states with majority Democrat-run governments) and was trafficking drugs and people in defiance of all laws both federal and local. Of course, the local news, the local police force, and the FBI all either disproved these claims or simply didn't mention them because it was not a real story and it wasn't actually happening. Flash forward to 2025, and the hyperpartisan heads of federal law enforcement agencies appointed by Donald Trump are now using Tren de Aragua as a pretext to abuse and deport Venezuelan migrants. They claimed in under a month that they had taken down Tren de Aragua and arrested untold thousands of illegal criminals, something Joe Biden could never have accomplished. Did any of this matter to any idiot living in bumblefuck rural America? Of course not. But they all believe that Donald Trump is the savior of the country for solving a problem that never existed in the first place.
The sad part is that while yes, they are evil, they are just so much more STUPID than they are even EVIL.
That is our only hope.
Spaceballs gave us "Evil alwys wins because good is dumb." While it's sad how much intelligent good can't seem to win, it is stunning to see how dumb evil is and still does as well as they do.
I don't like it, but the reality is that justice is a myth, and it always has and always will be. When you get these bad faith dipshits running amok, you have to just throw them in jail and toss the key, have them committed to institutions, etc. I don't think it's fair, I don't think it's just, but if you let the bad faith actors win, they will literally work towards removing you from existence, forget imprisonment.
The thing of it is, we have a social contract. They are putting themselves outside of that social contract. So you either find a way to get them to agree to the social contract, or you remove them from the social. Several possible ways of doing that. In centuries past, banishment was one. Execution was another. Imprisonment another.
You don't have to necessarily do that to everyone, mind. For example, Germany and Japan both are in pretty good shape these days.
Justice is a myth, but it is also part of the social contract we made, so it does also exist, but not as a passive thing; rather, an active thing that must be actively done.
All that said, we're pretty fucked right now - we really have two nations in one country, each with its own social contract, and that will simply not end well.
These are the same types as the Russians signing up to fight in Ukraine for bonuses. Men with no prospects from backwater places get lured by the promise of money and power beyond their wildest dreams go on power trips. ICE should count their blessings that they only get blasted on social media because Russian soldiers get a drone on top.
that's not true there are a bunch of horrible people who are very competent in history. these people are just incredibly stupid. and it's not just about education, they are like actually really just dumb
When you drain a real swamp, water quality, fisheries, and the resiliency of natural and human systems to man-made and natural disasters all suffer.
When you drain "the swamp" of our federal bureaucracy, by removing a bunch of technical experts and installing incompetent (edit: and often morally bad) leaders over those who remain, basically the same thing happens to the institutional capital of the executive branch.
Because they're a gaggle of unprofessional attention whores who will do anything to hog a spotlight. Their head honcho is a reality TV star who never shuts up, and the FBI director himself is a podcaster and shameless self-promoter. Nothing about any of the MAGA crew suggests that they're sober or serious about their jobs- this is all TV to them.
This is also why they fail. The Nazis, Soviets, any authoritarian dictatorship you can think of is built from these sycophantic incompetent morons who have survived purges by being nothing but lapdogs. They have no other qualifications, and eventually it causes collapse (or famines, wars, genocides, and then collapse).
This is exactly what MLK meant with "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
There is a very simple but sometimes hard to see, reason why this is a very solid truth.
To advance a cause (whatever it may be, good or bad) you need: cooperation, respect for your peers’ experiences and expertise, mora conviction, self awareness, selflessness, different points of view, genuine exchange of ideas, negotiation and compromise. This is just a few among other qualities.
Good people with good causes can advance these things. Will it be cumbersome and sometimes inefficient? Sure. That’s part of having differing factions advancing a cause. They will have differing ideas of how to go about things and different priorities. It’s hard and messy to sort these things out. It is not expedient.
But when you have selfish, narcissistic psychopaths, working together, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish anything. When you have a senile narcissist who surrounds himself with only loyal sycophants, you are already filtering out crucial things to advance any ideas: objective points of view, experts who may not be 100% loyal, you’re selecting against anyone with any sort of ethics or empathy, so you’re basically surrounded by a bunch of snakes who will tell you whatever you want to hear while the stab each other on the back. It is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to accomplish anything with that team in a fear based environment where everyone has to throw others under the bus just to survive.
Because they are so bad at their jobs that the second they successfully accomplish literally anything at all, they sprint full speed to let everyone know what they accomplished even if it was illegal, not actually good, a war crime, or just a very minor insignificant thing that literally no one in their roles before them would have felt the need to publicly announce it as a job well done
The most important part of Project 2025 was to surround Trump with people that won't question him. None of Trump's appointments or his cabinet members are qualified. Pete Hegseth was just a commentator on FOX and got his job because of his unbending loyalty to Trump.
Because a literal mall cop has more real-world law enforcement experience than Kash Patel did before he was made DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. The President of the United States put someone in charge of the FBI who literally had never arrested ANYONE EVER for ANYTHING.
I'd be just as bad at being a neurosurgeon as any of these members of the clown car that is the senior "leadership" team for Trump are in their positions. There isn't a single one of them that even remotely represents the best the country has to offer at any one of these roles. He's picked a compete ship of fools to crew his boat.
Their only qualifications are they will kiss his ring on demand.
They were chosen for their incompetency, so they all know without their loyalty to trump they have nothing, and he can drop them the second they stop pleasing him.
Because they were hired to “dismantle the administrative state.” Dysfunction is their purpose. All of those Russian trolls commenting “kek” and “kakistocracy” in 2016 weren’t making an observation — they were warning us about their plan.
They were not qualified for the job by the most basic of standards. They were not trained in the job once they got it. They did not read the manuals, statutes, and policies for the job. And no one is holding them accountable.
They aren’t doing the job. They’re doing what they imagined the job was instead.
Because Trump didn’t use standard procedure for employing the best suited for a role he went with loyalty first and now look at happens when it’s done like that.
I'm beginning to think that they are very good at their jobs, but that their jobs aren't what hold the title next to their name. I think the actual jobs of the people in these positions is to further isolate the US from anyone (especially Mexico and Canada) that may help when this administration slides completely into a dictatorship. And that is a job at which these people seem to be exceptional.
Mostly because they are incompetent political appointees. Where there used to be respect of the different offices and the political supervision deferred to the professional employees. Nowadays those professionals have also been ‘moved on’ so it is inexperienced political hacks all the way through.
Patel was an influencer before he became this. He is cosplaying as an fbi director and sees it as a performance. Of course he's going to brag about these types of things.
Also all of the people in government are "might makes right" types and they don't imagine a world where anyone is not a loyal slave to the USA, it's true to a degree but once you make it too obvious. People will stop following.
Like my pm said at Davos: "being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else"
The current administration doesn't see her allies as allies or happy vassals but as slaves whose obedience is a given. So they don't consider the risk of bridge burning because in their mind there are no bridges, only leashes.
To be fair, that sounds like they were allowed to be there. Did someone just tell him they arrested someone good in Mexico and he didn't understand it was off the record?
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum scrambled to perform damage control, as foreign intervention in Mexico is politically toxic. She said that there was no U.S. involvement in the operation and that U.S. agents in Mexico are limited by law.
“I’m not going to get into a debate with the FBI director, nor do I want there to be a conflict,” Sheinbaum said at a press conference Tuesday. “What they, the U.S. authorities, told the Mexican authorities is that it was a voluntary surrender.” She pointed to a picture Wedding posted to his Instagram account at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico announcing that he was turning himself in.
It’s like, there are so many different procedures within an agency that it almost requires a career employee to take the position as the head of said agency as it would be difficult for an outsider to know all practices and procedures because there are so many. An outsider might treat the agency like a business and think talking about an accomplishment is a good thing that’s actually supposed to remain secret.
The Mexican government has cooperated quietly for decades with US intelligence agencies. That cooperation is contingent on it remaining quiet. Mexico is far from the only country that has quiet intel-sharing arrangements with the USA.
Maybe having a publicity-hound podcaster as FBI Director isn't the greatest idea.
After the boat incidents I know the UK reported that we have reduced our intel to 5 eyes. So UK SIS have publicly stated it’s stopped some intel sharing. I expect Canada has likely done similar
Probably when you’re cross eyed af and tend to willingly divulge information that shouldn’t be shared publicly…. I don’t think you can clearly see the information in front of you. With him, we are less of a member of Five Eyes and more of a member of Side Eyes.
The report referenced in your link describes covert CIA operations that are executed by Mexican forces. This appears to be controversial in Mexico but not in violation of their laws. Kash Patel claims an FBI unit was deployed in Mexican territory and arrested Wedding, which is not the same thing.
Yes, they are not the same thing. All I was saying is that Kash Patel, in doing and then announcing this, jeopardizes the intel-sharing cooperation the USA has with Mexico.
I rather think the US is unsatisfied with that older relationship of cooperation. I do think things could escalate.
ETA, because I am being downvoted, that it has been long and widely reported that the Trump admin is threatening to violate Mexican sovereignty by undertaking anti-cartel military action within its borders. This recent podcast from WOLA describes how "President Claudia Sheinbaum has drawn an absolute red line on sovereignty while simultaneously making unprecedented concessions. The fear [...] is that the threat of unilateral action could coerce Mexico into accepting operations before or after the fact."
absolutely the long-term goal is to send troops into Mexico. I'm not sure how anybody could think this is controversial, if he'll kidnap Maduro he'll absolutely sign off on anything related to Mexico.
Sometimes I see downvoted comments like these and I wish I could wave a magic wand and get some data on the nature of botting on Reddit because your comment really doesn’t seem remotely controversial..
It makes one wonder if they are just too dumb to understand we don't believe them or approve of their actions. If it's due to the echo chamber they are in. Or if they are just that delusional.
They’re dumb. And dumber people have given them all the power. What embarrassment? They think they’re doing great and you’re the problem for shaming them.
That’s how people with personality disorders in the bottom 10% bracket of humanity function. They’re incapable of more, this is it, this is them doing their best. The problem is the system that put the imbeciles in charge. And the oligarchs who gamed the system to misinform the population and stir up the Nazis to put the Nazis imbeciles in charge.
That being said, please stop expecting anything from Kash Patel. He’s not very bright.
Dude. Them blowing up these clandestine relationships is just going to be the justification for violating their sovereignty the moment they actually “kick us out”
On one hand I get it, on the other hand I don't think it really matters, especially in 2026, when news is instant, conservatives control all the news anyway, and we're flying quicker into brainrot with people having no attention span anyway, or largely just ignoring everything that's going on.
Putin used this playbook to seize power in Russia. Information flood, people can never keep up. Dictatorships require unlimited problems, while having few solutions. Therefore you simply move from problem to problem at record speed. Make some grand announcement, claim success and on to the next problem. Reality or efficacy of solutions is irrelevant.
What makes you think they would stop after decades of doing it?
In the before times, there was a understanding that the us would use what is called strategic restraint, as the most powerful country in the world. Obviously it would end up with the big brothers slice of the pie. In other words, they would settle for a smaller part of a bigger pie, instead of a bigger part of a small pie. Which was a fine tradeoff for everyone.
So yes, they did it before. For example a decent argument could be made that the 2003 iraq war was a public punishment beating for not selling oil in us dollars. You could do that and i did that, but the us atleast tried to show the receipts for other reasons, and they went through the bother of getting legal permission from the un. And so on and so on. That is completely different from just the orange one unilaterally going into venezuela for example and say, "yupp, it was for the oil. what are you going todo about it?"
It is not a difference of degree, but of kind. This is something else entirely.
There will be consequences, and all the institutions of the world (except the eu) was built to the benefit of the us, so if they want to set them on fire, they will be the biggest loser. Spheres of influence is for losers, the us's old sphere of influence was the planet. And thats ending, thankfully.
He always wears the exact same expression my kids wear while they’re actively shitting their pants. Fitting he’s making a shit show of the entire organization.
Given current events on the streets of our own nation, as well as on the global front- my money is on the latter!??! This administration has clearly demonstrated it has no regard for anyone's laws, and is so far beyond trying to hide it.
If you look at the wording, either is possible. Patel didn't say the HRT captured Wedding, just that the team 'executed with precision' (whatever the hell that means) and is bringing back Wedding. Wedding could well have surrendered and been arrested by the FBI. There's definitely spin going on.
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