This dispatch by Bill Shaner, an independent journalist who writes the Worcester Sucks and I Love It newsletter, was first published by Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World.

I’m driving five miles across the city to check out a tip that there’s an ICE rendition ongoing. I’ve got the scanner on the car stereo as I’m about to pull onto the street in question. It’s a quiet neighborhood, small houses on small lots, people walking dogs, the mailman waving, the lawnmowers running, and I hear the dispatcher: “We have an ICE officer over there who’s allegedly being surrounded.”

“On our way,” the officer responds.

As a local reporter for a decade now, I’ve learned that you can hear the cops at their most honest on the scanner. And as I’m hearing that “surrounded” comment I remember what the city’s police chief told the city council in January:

“We do not do civil detention arrests,” Police Chief Paul Saucier said at the time, reassuring them that they wouldn’t be party to the ICE assault Trump was about to unleash. The police, he said, “do not have the authority to affect a civil arrest.”

What he didn’t say is that if you try to stop the civil arrest, the police will stop you from stopping it.

This morning a few dozen of us here in Worcester, Massachusetts, got to see that unstated fine print in action firsthand. A woman was led by federal agents in cuffs away from her family, through a throng of community organizers trying to stop it, and into an unmarked car. The local police arrived to prevent the community from protecting their neighbor from an unlawful kidnapping. They succeeded, and in the process arrested two of the people who tried to stop it.

I park my car on the edge of the scene and all I can hear are the screams—the deafening desperate screams, from a mother, from her daughter, from the woman holding the daughter’s baby. Wordless screams.

And then I see the mother, a young woman in a green shirt, wailing, crying, held on either side by menacing white men in tactical vests, black neck warmers pulled over their noses in the style du jour for our secret police forces.

Surrounding them are a few dozen community members who were tipped off about the ICE raid and got to it before the police did. Before I arrived, they demanded to see a warrant. The ICE agents refused to provide one, so they created a human chain, which the ICE officers eventually broke through.

I still don’t know her name or where they’ve taken her. The federal officials provided no information to anyone at the scene. But apparently they called the local police for backup. They felt that they were surrounded. Black Hawk Down.

New video shows close-up view of ICE agents slamming the young woman's face into the ground during arrest in neighborhood raid."I don't have anyone at home. They arrested my mom, my sister, and a 2-month-old baby," a family member cries out. pic.twitter.com/9vcxEICW5Y

— (@LongTimeHistory) May 9, 2025

As they’re marching this woman to the back door of the tan unmarked Ford SUV representing her nebulous fate, the community is swarming, surrounding, yelling at the ICE officers. City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, a dear friend and a relentless advocate for her community, is following closest behind them. She’s screaming. “You are cowards.” She’s jogging to keep pace as they march their jackbooted march to the SUV with New York plates. “This is an innocent woman.”

An ICE agent opens the door and the woman’s daughter shrieks—an unforgettable noise of agony. Her mother is about to disappear, into the purposefully vague bureaucratic world of forced removal. The opening of that door, to this shrieking girl…it must look like a life torn apart. Her family fractured. And for what? No one bothers to explain that to her. Perhaps they’re not allowed to.

The Worcester Police Department steps in at this crucial juncture, among us residents surrounding the car about to take one of our neighbors away. And they do so on behalf of the ICE agents, not us. A Worcester cop comes over, stepping between the open car door and the community, past the ICE agents stuffing the mother into the back seat, and he looks at a woman holding the shrieking daughter’s baby. She’s also wailing in desperate anger and he says—to her—“Stop, stop, stop. They’ll explain. They’ll explain.”

Of course they don’t explain.

The woman’s daughter then jumps on the hood of the car. A Worcester cop pulls her off.

The crowd chants, “Don’t take the mother!” over and over again as the daughter keeps trying to get back on the hood of the car. More Worcester cops arrive, all helping the ICE agents carry out their rotten senseless work.

The deportee’s daughter, a 16-year-old whose name has not been disclosed, held to the ground and cuffed by Worcester police officers. (Bill Shaner)

When I say ICE, it’s a catchall. These federal agents were wearing a myriad of badges and few of them had name tags. Most of them had “POLICE” written somewhere on their tactical vests. There were ICE insignias, but also Customs and Border Patrol, and one ATF.

A CBP agent, his face cover falling down slightly below his nose, pushes a woman away from the car in the manner of an offensive tackle—elbows out, knees bent, forearms thrusting. Others take the woman’s place.

The crowd of community members, who these officers ostensibly protect and serve, continues to cheer, “Don’t take the mother, don’t take the mother.” The daughter is still shrieking.

“This is ICE. This is federal,” one of the WPD officers explains, as if a suitable explanation. Case closed.

A woman says, “They don’t have a warrant.” Another says, “They’re trying to kidnap someone.”

As the local cops are clearing the road for ICE’s unmarked SUV, community organizer Maydee Morales confronts them. “Worcester police are not supposed to be involved in this.”

In the background, a Worcester police officer looks at the desperate woman holding her baby trying to stop the agents from taking her mother and says “Do you want to stay with your baby?” The tacit threat of separation for her protestation of another separation. Later he would complain “She’s putting the baby in harm’s way.” A classic move: “harm” goes undefined because the harm is him.

Maydee, still confronting the officers, says, “Where is the warrant?” Officer Lugo, according to his nameplate, says, “Ma’am we are trying our best but they are federal.”

Morales again asks for the warrant.

“They’re federal.”

“They still need a warrant.”

Another officer, frustrated, says, “They don’t need a warrant.” Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they’re concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing. At this point an ICE agent starts pushing me away, but not very hard. Lazy jabs, his mind elsewhere. Too many people, too much pushing to be done. I return to my pre-push position. I keep filming. I don’t know what else to do.

A Worcester police officer stands between the ICE agents and a crowd of community members. (Bill Shaner)

A cop pulls his cruiser behind us—we’re boxed in now—and from the intercom says “This is the Worcester Police Department. This is an unlawful assembly, I’m warning you to disperse right now or you will be subject to arrest.”

On the other side of me, a crackle of the scanner from an officer’s vest-mounted radio: “Do I have a car to escort the marshals out of here?”

They don’t need a warrant but they do need an escort.

As the car pulls away, nudging into the thick crowd, the daughter shrieks another horrible horrible horrible shriek, communicating the non-communicable as the disappearers take another step toward disappearing her mother. As the car breaks from the crowd she runs after it. A Worcester police officer, his voice frothing with anger, shouts, “Arrest her right now. You are under arrest.” And then four cops swarm her, grab her, throw her to the ground. All the while she’s crying crying crying. Her hair’s caught in her mouth and matted to her face, wet with spit and tears. Four cops hold her pinned to the ground.

Then they march her away. Her and another member of the community who had tried to intervene. They take the pair away from the crowd. I follow. They have the daughter by both arms, same as the ICE agents had her mother. I still don’t know either of their names. Next to me is a TV reporter from a Spanish language station and her cameraman. She yells out, “What’s your name?” and the woman responds in Portuguese. I can’t make it out. She asks her age and this one I catch: “dezesseis.”

Not a woman—a girl. A 16-year-old girl. Now in custody for the crime of reacting in an unruly way to the sudden forceful disappearance of her mother.

I keep asking about the charges. The only cop who doesn’t ignore me explains “I’m not the arresting officer.” The arresting officers go on ignoring me.

We get to the spot where the wagon is set to arrive. I ask again. Eventually I get an answer, and it’s the usual package job: disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, unlawful assembly. The charges they throw on anyone they want to arrest for the sake of arresting them, knowing they’re unlikely to stick. But sticking isn’t the goal. The officer who tells me this has a tactical K9 Unit vest on. He tells me the 16-year-old girl was interfering with police business. “Worcester police business?” I ask. What was the police business here exactly? He looks at me like I’m a smart ass. He doesn’t say anything. I press him again: “Kind of a grey area, huh?”

“Not really,” he says.

Update: In a statement posted to the Worcester Police Department’s Facebook page Thursday night, the WPD said they responded to “a report of a federal agent who was surrounded by a large group of about twenty-five people.” The daughter was charged with reckless endangerment of a child, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. The other community organizer faces charges of assault and battery on a police officer, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (unknown liquid), disorderly conduct, and interfering with a police officer. Both were out on bail by Thursday night, according to local organizers. The name and whereabouts of the woman taken by ICE remain unknown.

!debatebro@ponder.cat

Honestly, I think the idea pretty much explains itself lol.

Also, I don't have time today for an in depth back and forth as I usually would. I threw a little bomb in there about the Ohio shooting if anyone wants to get it going but I may not be able to be too much of a part of it.

Also: If you didn't hate this idea already and want to tell me I'm a pain in the ass, check this out: The whole reason behind this community is that I made a little LLM tool that can take a look at a discussion and call out bad faith in the argumentation. I'm actually pleased with how it is working in testing. But... it's weird to have it inject itself into disagreements without both participants wanting that to happen. It's like calling up your mom to tell someone you're arguing with that you are right and they need to agree with you. So, to put it into action I would like at some point to enable it in some way within this specific debate community. But I'm really not sure what that even should look like. I think probably the way to go about it is to have the community and the human participation come first, and then only after that, consult with the people there about progressing it to some kind of input from it, or moderation that is more "argue in good faith pls" and less "don't use any racism otherwise any horrendous distortion of reality is fine" as in most communities.

Edit: Someone raised I think a pretty valid point about it being offensive to have people's comments fed into an AI thing. I think consider the AI bot on hold until I can address those concerns.

Anyway, feel free to subscribe, go nuts, feel free to tell me why I am literally a sealion. Peace.

Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere' (permalink)

Pyramid schemes are as American as apple pie. If you doubt it, just read Little Bosses Everywhere, Bridget Read's deeply researched, horrifying, amazing investigative book on the subject, which is out today from Crown:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715421/little-bosses-everywhere-by-bridget-read/

Read, an investigative journalist at Curbed, takes us through the history of the "industry," which evolved out of Depression-era snake oil salesmen, Tupperware parties, and magical thinking cults built around books like Think and Grow Rich. This fetid swamp gives rise to a group of self-mythologizing scam artists who found companies like Amway and Mary Kay, claiming outlandish – and easily debunked – origin stories that the credulous press repeats, alongside their equally nonsensical claims about the "opportunities" they are creating for their victims.

In Read's telling, there's only two kinds of MLM participants: suckers (who lose lots of and lots of money) and predators (who rake in that money). MLMs pretend that they're doing "direct sales," cutting out the middleman to peddle vitamins, household cleaners, cosmetics, tights or jewelry. But the actual sales volume of these products rounds to zero. The money in the system – tens of billions of dollars per year in the US alone – is almost entirely being spent by "salespeople" who are required to buy a certain amount of "product" every month, either as a condition of membership, or in order to attain some kind of bonus or status.

The "salespeople" in these systems are effectively in a cult, and the high-pressure techniques that Read describes will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with cultic dynamics, or even just a casual listener to the Conspirituality podcast:

https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes

And, as with other cults, MLM members are tormented endlessly by other cult members into trying to recruit their friends and family-members. Sometimes, they succeed, and the cult grows a little – but usually not for very long. Most people who get recruited into an MLM quickly figure out that it's impossible to make any money – indeed, it's impossible to avoid losing a lot of money – and bail.

The meat-and-potatoes of the MLM industry are the minority who don't see through the scam. They believe that they are deficient, because everyone else is reporting such incredible returns from "the program." They charge more product to their credit cards, insisting to their "uplines" that they are selling machines (and not that they are filling their garages and attics and living rooms and kitchen cupboards with unsold, unsellable junk). What they don't understand is that all the "successes" in the cult are either scammers who are getting rich off people like them, or they are people like them, going deep into debt and desperately trying to pretend that they're selling as well as those uplines.

The US government and various law enforcement agencies have taken various runs at these cults, but the cults have always won. That's down to enforcers buying into the cult leader/scammers' essential lie: that, at the end of the day, MLM is a system for selling things to people. That isn't true, has never been true, and never will be true. But by crafting rules and tests that attempt to sort the "legitimate" MLMs from the "scam" MLMs, enforcers fall into the scammers' trap. The scammers welcome rules that distinguish "good" MLMs from "bad" MLMs, because it's trivial to create the superficial appearance of adherence to these rules while flouting them. For example, if the rule says that "independent sales representatives" must sell to at least ten outside customers, they can simply make up the names of ten people and charge it to their card. This happens routinely, but there's no auditing, and besides, the MLM victims are all "independent business owners," so if there were any penalties for these violations, they would fall to the victims, not the cult.

Meanwhile, the scammers know it's a scam, and the failure of their victims to sell the useless "product" the cult is nominally organized around is a feature, not a bug. The hordes of indebted, cost-sunk, self-castigating failures are suckers for yet another scam: selling victims "training" to improve their sales technique. After all, if everyone around you is selling this crap without breaking a sweat, the failing must be your own. You need coaching, training, seminars, cassettes, books, retreats, all of it piling debt on debt.

The internal operations of these cults are shrouded in mystery, but Read lifts the veil and makes masterful sense of the horrors lurking beneath. In this, she is somewhat aided by MLM cult leaders' propensity for suing one another, as various sub-bosses build up massive followings of their own and seek to usurp the cult leader by founding their own parallel cults or sub-cults. These lawsuits sometimes drag the cults' dirty laundry out in public, and Read sorts through these court filings very carefully. Unfortunately, the cults' propensity for suing also helps suppress a lot of dirty laundry, because MLM leaders love to sue ex-cult members who participate in online forums where they document their expenses, and they use these cult victims' own money to pay for the court cases that silence them.

MLMs aren't just cults, they're religious cults. Since the very earliest days, pyramid scheme runners have declared themselves to be engaged in an extension of their Christian (mostly Calvinist) faith. The engine of a pyramid scheme needs social capital for fuel: to bring in new recruits, a cult member has to draw on the bonds of trust, fellowship and solidarity in order to convince their targets that this is a bona fide enterprise (and not a cult). Faith groups – especially fringe faith groups – have this kind of capital in spades. This goes double for faiths that demand large families (which is why we see such deep penetration of MLMs into Mormonism and orthodox Judiasm). If your faith demands that you produce a "quiverfull" of mouths to feed, then the chances are that you will not be able to survive without being enmeshed in a mutual support network with your co-religionists. MLMs convert this trust, generosity and mutual dependency into cash (at a ruinous exchange rate) and then funnel it "upline" to the cult leaders, who reap billions.

Of course, those kinds of bonds are not solely forged on the basis of faith: racialized people, women, and other groups who face systemic discrimination depend on one another for mutual aid, which makes them vulnerable to another MLM pitch: "predatory inclusion":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

Predatory inclusion is when scam artists adopt the language of social justice to pitch their cons – think of all the crypto bros who sold their ripoff schemes as a way to "achieve independence for women" or "build Black wealth" (thanks, Spike Lee):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/spike-lee-made-an-ad-for-cryptocurrency-atms-and-its-bizarre/

Predatory inclusion is parasitic upon the bonds of solidarity forged in adversity, and this goes double for the MLM variety. As MLMs cut away the strands of the web of mutual support, the cult leaders replace them with rabid anti-Communism, the kind of far-right rhetoric that brought Christian conservatives into the Reagan coalition and ultimately led to Trump's fascist takeover.

Here's how that move works: "You are a small, independent businessperson, the backbone of America. You will realize the American dream through your own backbone and work ethic (and therefore your current failure is due to your own lack of both). People who want to shut down pyramid schemes say they want to protect you, but really they want the government to decide who can and can't own a business. They're Communists, and in coming for MLMs, they're coming for America itself."

Some of America's richest family dynasties owe their wealth to pyramid schemes. They are dynasties of fraud, and they funneled their criminal gains into far right political projects. The Heritage Foundation – the authors of Project 2025 and Trump's master strategists – got their start with money from Rich DeVos (father in law of Betsy DeVos, who served as Secretary of Education in the first Trump cabinet). The far-right dark money machine runs on MLM money.

In fact, there's a good case to be made that everything rotten in today's world is built on the tactics of MLMs. Take the "gig economy." Companies like Uber promise drivers a high hourly wage. A small number of drivers are randomly allocated extremely large payouts by the system, in order to convert them into Judas goats, who fill gig-work message boards with tales of their good fortune. As Veena Dubal documents in her seminal work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," this tactic is devastatingly effective, convincing other Uber drivers to put in extremely long hours for sub-starvation wages, and then blame themselves for "being bad at Uber" – just like the downlines at Mary Kay and Amway who think the problem is with them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Trump, of course, is the ultimate expression of the MLM grift – and not only because he licensed his name to two different pyramid schemes. Trump embodies the MLM ethic of lying about how rich you are so that marks send you their money to get in on the "opportunity" and then blame themselves when the promised riches never materialize.

Erik Baker once described MLMs as a kind of bizarro-world version of unions. In the world of labor organizing, success lies in finding the people with the most social capital, the ones who are trusted by their coworkers, and teaching them to have a structured organizing conversation. This is exactly what MLMs do – but the difference lies in the goal of that structured organizing conversation. For union organizers, the goal is build solidarity as a means to improving the lives of everyone in the community. For MLM organizers, the goal is to destroy solidarity, atomizing the community, shattering its bonds, leaving its members defenseless as they are fleeced by the cult's leaders and their henchmen:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

Neoliberalism's war-cry is Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society." The past 40 years have been a long process of tearing us away from one another, teaching us to see one another as marks, to mistrust systems of mutual aid as Communism. Read's Little Bosses Everywhere is a brilliantly told, deeply researched history of the past and present of the ultimate business model for late-stage capitalism: destroying the lives of everyone around you while pretending to be a small businessperson.