I forward two articles from today’s mailbox with the heaviest of hearts. Both concern the Nameless One and his lickspittles attempting to gag the press. You know the plotline – these outrages occur daily; but that the crime against the First Amendment has become commonplace does not make it less ominous.

If reminder were still needed, this gang, sensing their opportunity brief, is driving as recklessly and ruthlessly as they can toward a fascist state; and anyone who supports them in any way is a traitor to our American idea. Ineptitude, avarice, stupidity, cruelty, ignorance, truthlessness, and the horrified disgust of the governed will cause them to fail, but we need to keep our fury fierce and focused until that day. Aroused, enraged, and determined, we the people are not helpless victims but a mighty force. BETTER TOGETHER!

According to MS NOW, the FBI has launched an investigation into an Atlantic reporter.

By David A. Graham

Courtesy of Washington Week With The Atlantic

MAY 6, 2026,

The Trump administration’s war against freedom of the press has reached a startling new low.

According to a report this morning from MS NOW, the FBI has opened a criminal investigation focusing on my Atlantic colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick, related to an article she published last month about Director Kash Patel. Drawing on some two dozen sources, Fitzpatrick reported that people inside the administration and the bureau are deeply concerned about what they described as Patel’s unexplained absences and excessive drinking.

Patel filed a lawsuit against Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic following the story’s publication, alleging defamation and demanding $250 million. The Atlantic says that it stands by Fitzpatrick’s reporting, and legal commentatorsfrom across the political spectrum have concluded that the case is weak and likely to fail. Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg responded to the MS NOW report with this statement: “If confirmed to be true, this would represent an outrageous attack on the free press and the First Amendment itself. We will defend The Atlantic and its staff vigorously; we will not be intimidated by illegitimate investigations or other acts of politically motivated retaliation; we will continue to cover the FBI professionally, fairly, and thoroughly; and we will continue to practice journalism in the public interest.”

Filing a flimsy civil lawsuit as a private citizen is Patel’s right, though it is also plainly an inappropriate attempt to smother unflattering reporting. But if Patel’s bureau has launched a criminal investigation into a reporter, employing the power of the federal government, that would be a significant escalation. An FBI spokesperson denied that a probe exists, telling MS NOW, “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all.”

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The Department of Homeland Security is using a 1930 customs law to try to unmask Canadian critics. the case could decide whether the U.S. government can surveil dissenters anywhere on Earth.

DEAN BLUNDELL

MAY 6

By the standards DHS is apparently working from, I should already have three subpoenas, a black bag over my head, and a one-way ticket to a Salvadoran prison.

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A Canadian man who lives in Canada, has not crossed the U.S. border since 2015, and posts pseudonymously on X about American politics learned in February that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had served Google with an administrative subpoena demanding nearly everything Google knows about him — his name, address, location history, the websites he visits, who he talks to online, his sign-in times, his IP addresses. The trigger, according to the lawsuit he filed Monday in the Northern District of California, was a series of posts criticizing federal immigration agents after they killed two American citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, during the ICE surge in Minneapolis. The legal authority DHS cited? A 1930 customs statute meant to verify that importers paid the right duty on shipped merchandise.

Yes, really.

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On January 30 of this year, the Canadian — proceeding as John Doe in court — posted something on X disparaging ICE. The post got roughly 96,000 views, per the complaint. It was one in a long-running series; collectively, his pseudonymous posts had cleared 100,000 views and frequently tagged U.S. government accounts directly.

On February 9, 2026, Google notified him that it had received an administrative subpoena from DHS demanding all records tied to the Gmail account linked to his X account, covering September 1, 2025 through February 4, 2026.

On February 14, DHS formalized the demand. According to the ACLU, the summons sought “all records and other information” Google had on him — name, physical address, full session history, IP logs, the websites he visited, the people he communicated with, account suspension records, the works.

There was no judge involved. There was no warrant. There was no grand jury. DHS issued the subpoena to itself, signed it, and sent it.

On May 4, 2026, the ACLU of D.C. and the ACLU of Northern California filed Doe v. Mullin in the Northern District of California, naming Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin as a defendant.

DHS cited Section 1509 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 U.S.C. § 1509) as the basis for the subpoena. If you have never heard of this statute, that is because, until recently, it lived a quiet life in the shadows of customs enforcement. It empowers federal officials to “examine records, statements and declarations” relating to imported merchandise — to verify that the right duties were paid, that the right goods crossed the border, that nobody was lying on a customs form about a shipment of widgets.

The statute is, on its face, about widgets.

It is not about Twitter posts. It is not about Gmail accounts. It is not about Canadians who haven’t been in the United States since the Obama administration.

This is not a new criticism. In 2017, during the first Trump term, Customs and Border Protection used the same statute to try to unmask the operator of @ALT_USCIS, a “rogue” anti-Trump Twitter account run by current and former federal employees. Twitter sued. CBP folded the next day and withdrew the summons. The DHS Inspector General then opened a probe and, in November 2017, issued a report finding that roughly one in five Section 1509 summonses CBP issued exceeded the agency’s legal authority — including summonses used to investigate drug smuggling, employees abusing sick leave, and a Border Patrol agent allegedly selling government-issued night vision goggles on Craigslist. None of these have anything to do with imported merchandise.

CBP promised to retrain staff and tighten approvals. Eight years later, here we are again, except now the targets aren’t rogue federal employees with classified access. They’re random people on the internet with strong opinions about immigration policy.

The ACLU has fought three previous Section 1509 subpoenas this year, all targeting Americans:

In every one of those cases, DHS withdrew the subpoena before a federal judge could rule on whether what they were doing was legal. That is not a coincidence. It is a litigation strategy: keep the practice alive in the shadows by retreating any time someone with a lawyer pushes back, while continuing to issue them en masse against people who can’t afford to fight.

Doe v. Mullin is designed to break that pattern. Because the plaintiff is Canadian and lives in Canada, the ACLU is asking the court not just to invalidate this one summons but to declare that DHS cannot use its customs enforcement authority to identify and intimidate critics anywhere in the world. As Michael Perloff, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of D.C., put it: “Not satisfied with trying to suppress speech at home, the Trump administration is now targeting dissenters abroad.”

If the court reaches the merits and rules against DHS, the agency loses its quietest, cheapest tool for unmasking dissent. If DHS withdraws this subpoena too — its standard maneuver — the question simply gets pushed down the road until someone else gets one.

This is not three or four cases. It is hundreds.

In February, The New York Times reported that since Trump’s second term began, DHS has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord seeking identifying information about anonymous accounts that criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. Tech industry sources told the Times this enforcement tool was previously reserved for things like child trafficking investigations. Now it is being aimed at neighborhood Facebook groups posting ICE sightings.

According to follow-up reporting, Google, Meta, and Reddit have complied with at least some of these requests. Google’s stated policy is to notify users so they have 14 days to challenge the subpoena in court before the company turns over their data. That sounds reasonable until you realize what it means in practice: ordinary people receive a terrifying form letter from a tech giant and are given two weeks to find a federal lawyer, draft a motion, and stop the U.S. government from learning their identity. Most of them, of course, do not.

Worse: the EFF has reported a case in which Google did not notify a user — a graduate student on a visa who briefly attended a pro-Palestine protest in 2024 — before handing his data over to ICE in May 2025. Google has named a handful of exceptions to its notification policy (like court-ordered gag orders), but according to EFF, none applied to that case. ICE simply “requested” no notification, and Google complied.

Between 2016 and mid-2022, DHS issued more than 170,000 administrative subpoenas. The 2017 inspector general report found problems in roughly 20% of them. Nobody knows the failure rate now, because nobody is required to count.

Look, I have to laugh. Because here’s what the Canadian John Doe is alleged to have done that warranted a federal subpoena to Google for his entire digital life:

He posted on X that ICE sucks. He tagged some U.S. government accounts. His tweets cleared 100,000 views. His January 30 post — the one DHS specifically pointed to — got 96,000 views and “disparaged” ICE.

Disparaged.

Reader, I have to be honest with you. I have, in the last twelve months alone, on this very Substack:

And I can’t count the number of times I’ve called him a pedophile/felon/rapist/child trafficker and a co-conspirator of Epstein in hundreds of Substack stories.

I am Canadian. I live in Canada. I write five newsletters a week from a desk in Canada. The last time I was in DC was last weekend for the Anti-WHCD dinner, and I was treated to my first lockdown. A real American experience at last.So by the standard DHS is apparently using — foreign citizen, lives abroad, has not entered the U.S. in years, posts critical content about ICE and the Trump administration that gets meaningful traction online, tags U.S. government accounts — I am, point-for-point, a more aggressive version of John Doe. He “disparaged ICE.” I have, on multiple occasions, suggested that ICE agents who shoot unarmed American citizens through windshields should be tried for murder in a Minnesota courtroom. He tagged government accounts. I tag them, mock them, and then mock them again in the comments under my own post.

If “disparaging ICE” from Canada is enough to merit a Section 1509 customs subpoena to Google for my full digital footprint, then somewhere in a cubicle at DHS, a junior analyst should be drowning in a stack of subpoenas with my name on them. By Trump-victim standards — the standard where saying mean things about the President online is a federal threat to the homeland — I am a one-man sleeper cell. I am a clear and present danger. I am, allegedly, more dangerous than the entire fentanyl trade, because the entire fentanyl trade does not, to my knowledge, regularly call the Vice President a couch humping cuck.

And yet — and I want to be very clear about this — none of what I do is illegal. None of what John Doe did is illegal either. Criticizing the U.S. government from a foreign country is, in fact, the entire reason the United States exists. It was founded by a bunch of guys who were extremely online for the 1770s and who specifically wrote anonymous essays under fake Roman names trashing the British government. Publius, Cato, Brutus — those guys were the @ALT_USCIS of their day. The First Amendment was written by people who would have been in DHS’s database before lunch.

So if you’re reading this, DHS — and statistically, given how many subpoenas you’ve been firing off, somebody on your team probably is — please find me on Google. I’ll save you the trouble. My name is Dean Blundell. My Gmail is the same one I’ve had since the second Bush administration. I live in Toronto. I’m 6 foot 3 on a good day. My Substack is right here: DeanBlundell.Substack.com. I publish at 7 a.m. Eastern, five days a week. I’m easy to find. My location data is mostly “kitchen,” “couch,” and “the same coffee shop on Queen Street” or at Botham’s in The Junction. I’m not hard to find.

You don’t need a customs statute. You need a subscription button. It’s free.

Step back from the legal weeds and look at what DHS is actually trying to do here.

A Canadian, posting from Canada, criticizes American policy. He never enters the United States. He is, in every meaningful sense, beyond the jurisdiction of American law enforcement. And yet the U.S. government attempts to use a customs statute — designed to verify duty payments on shipped goods — to compel an American corporation to hand over a comprehensive surveillance dossier on him: where he lives, where he goes, whom he emails, what he reads.

If the government can do this to a Canadian, it can do it to a Briton, an Australian, a Mexican, a German. There is no principled stopping point. The First Amendment is supposed to be a strong shield even for foreign citizens speaking from abroad on matters of American public concern, but a shield is only as strong as the courts willing to enforce it — and DHS has spent the year carefully avoiding any court that might.

There is also something darker going on, which the Minneapolis context makes explicit. Renée Good was a 37-year-old American mother of three who was shot through her windshield by an ICE agent on January 7. Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old American ICU nurse who was filming agents and helping a woman they had just shoved to the ground when six agents tackled and shot him on January 24. Bystander video, eyewitness testimony, and reporting by the Minnesota Star Tribune, ProPublica, NPR, and others have directly contradicted the government’s initial accounts of both killings. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division declined to open a constitutional investigation into Good’s shooting; more than a dozen federal prosecutors resigned in protest. Minnesota and Hennepin County have sued DHS and DOJ for withholding evidence and refusing to identify the agents involved.

In other words: federal agents shot two American citizens dead, the government is stonewalling state investigators, and meanwhile, that same government is using a 1930 customs law to try to identify a Canadian who said something rude about it on the internet.

Pick a side here.

The U.S. government, citing a Depression-era law about widget shipments, tried to compile a surveillance dossier on a Canadian whose only crime was criticizing the President of the United States from a country that is not the United States. He found a lawyer. He sued. We will find out, possibly, whether the First Amendment still means what it says — or whether it has been quietly amended to read: Congress shall make no law… unless DHS issues an administrative subpoena, in which case, knock yourselves out.

If you’ve ever posted anything strongly worded about ICE under a pseudonym, the answer to that question is no longer abstract.

And if you, like me, post strongly worded things about ICE under your own name five days a week from a Canadian apartment — congratulations. We’re in the same fight. The line they’re testing isn’t “what counts as a threat.” The line they’re testing is “how far past the U.S. border can we reach to silence somebody who annoyed us.”

The Canadian John Doe is the test case. I am, statistically, the next one. You might be the one after that.

So keep posting. Keep tagging. Keep naming names. Keep calling Markwayne Mullin the second-dumbest senator in America, because he is, and because saying so is — for now — still legal in a country I don’t live in, which apparently doesn’t matter.

The First Amendment was written by anonymous Canadians of their era. Don’t let DHS amend it with a customs subpoena signed by America’s rapist/felon/pedohile in Chief responsible for sending ICE Gestapo into America’s cities to execute and beat Americans who dissent.

Us Canadians? We’re JUST fine, and that greasy diaper-wearing stain can’t do a goddamned thing about it. We’re here for Better America, and our duty to warn is a privilege. We Love America. It’s why we do what we do, and we will not stop. Well, at least I won’t.

It’s my thing. I. Am. Canadian.

— Dean