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Growing up in New Mexico as I did, you hear about them. The kids, almost always boys, very often disruptive in some obvious and exhausting way, almost always trouble, who get disappeared to “Nimi” for “straightening out,” as in: If you don’t stop setting frogs on fire/fondling the neighborhood girls/failing all your classes/breaking into school and overturning all the desks, Billy/Johnny/Kevin, your dad/mom/grandpa is going to send you to Nimi to straighten yer happy ass out.
One day, they’re there, throwing rocks at you for having an immigrant parent, say, or commenting on your bra size (you’re thirteen) as they follow you home from school, a little ragtag group of similar cruel-eyed degenerates sniveling along behind them in their wake. The kinds of boys that make you lock the door behind you once you make it safely home. The next day, their carved-up desk sits empty and no one talks about them much anymore, except to say, eyes wide in warning, I heard his folks shipped him off to Nimi.
Decades later, you see his name in the news. He’s a spy. He’s overthrown a government. He’s assassinated a foreign leader.
He’s the Attorney General of the United States of America.
What Is The New Mexico Military Institute?
While most of us have heard of the fancy private boarding schools and prestigious Ivy League and military colleges that produce the polished J. Crew shoppers who go on to lead the nation from podiums with their gleaming smiles — places like Andover, Exeter, Yale, West Point — there is one boarding school that is just as influential but far less well-known, forgotten in dusty Roswell, New Mexico, a school that functions as an early pipeline into the more secretive forms of power that intelligence recruiters say requires, if not outright sociopathy, sociopathic tendencies. That school is the New Mexico Military Institute.
New Mexico Military Institute is a blonde-brick fortress, a large citadel located a block from Jazzercise Roswell, two blocks from the Cattle Baron steakhouse, and a mere pebble’s toss from the Dairy Queen Grill & Chill.
Founded in 1891 — back when New Mexico was merely a United States territory, 21 years before it was ordered to become a state — it’s a national oddity across several markers.
One: It’s the nation’s only publicly-funded co-ed militarized boarding high school.
Two: It’s the only boarding high school in the United States that also houses a boarding junior college on the same campus. Until 2022, students grades 9 through college sophomore shared dorm buildings.
Three: A weirdly high proportion of its graduates go into government and military intelligence operations.
And four: It produced Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and yes-man who this week was narrowly confirmed as the new dead-eyed, pedophile-protecting, almost-robot Attorney General of the United States of America.
The New Mexico Military Institute writes the highest honor of American espionage into its own rulebook. Its Hall of Fame criteria for “eminence” formally list the Distinguished Intelligence Cross and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal of the CIA among the achievements that qualify a graduate for enshrinement. The school does not merely produce men who drift toward the covert world. It defines that world’s darkest medals as the summit of what a life can amount to.
Its own pantheon proves the point. Consider Nestor Daniel Sanchez, class of 1950, who spent three decades in the CIA's covert operations and rose to chief of its Latin America Division. He was part of the 1954 coup that toppled Guatemala's elected government and installed a military dictatorship — the opening act of a civil war that would kill some 200,000 people, culminating in genocide against the Maya. He was the case officer who, on the day John Kennedy was shot in Dallas, ran the Paris operation that handed a Cuban asset a CIA pen rebuilt into a poison syringe, meant to inject Fidel Castro. He was closely tied to the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. And after retiring from the agency, he moved to the Pentagon as a Reagan Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, steering U.S. military aid to the Central American forces of the 1980s dirty wars — later linked by federal investigators to the illegal Contra arms pipeline that became Iran-Contra — an operation with documented links to Jeffrey Epstein. The school inducted Sanchez in 1993, the year Epstein bought Zorro Ranch from the then sitting governor of New Mexico, as a man of eminence. The honors it treasures are the honors he earned.
This is the institution’s revealed character, stated in its own documents: the place where the difficult kid is sent to be hardened even more, and where the hardest thing a graduate can become is an instrument of the state’s most violent and secret work.
New Mexico Military Institute enrolls roughly 870 to 980 cadets each year — the school markets the figure as "nearly 1,000" — across a combined public high school (grades 9–12) and a two-year junior college, though the federal IPEDS count of about 460 reflects only the postsecondary junior-college side. The corps is roughly 80 percent male and 20 percent female, a ratio of about four to one, with women having been admitted since the school became fully coeducational in 1977. Cadets come from around 45 states, two U.S. territories, and about 35 foreign nations; international students make up a substantial share, reported between roughly 14 percent on the college side and about a quarter of the full corps, with the largest contingents historically drawn from Mexico, China, and Vietnam. The student body is majority out-of-state or foreign — roughly 60 to 67 percent — and financially mixed: about a third of students receive federal Pell grants, and a large majority receive some form of grant or scholarship aid, against a tiered tuition structure in which New Mexico residents pay about $2,000, out-of-state North American residents about $8,880, and international students from outside North America the highest rate, for a total cost of attendance above $31,000.
A negligence lawsuit against NMMI alleges that in 2019 a fifteen-year-old girl who reported being raped on campus was told by a staff sergeant to sleep it off, and accuses the school of failing to address a pattern of sexual violence on its premises. Two cadets involved in the assault were criminally charged for rape. Kiarion Freeman and David Johnson were arrested after allegedly entering a dorm room and assaulting an incapacitated female cadet. Freeman pleaded guilty and was sentenced.
Additional criminal cases have involved NMMI cadets, including the 2023 arrest of a former cadet, Marco Varela, on charges of second-degree criminal sexual penetration.
In a separate case, a cadet enrolled there pleaded guilty in federal court to producing and distributing child pornography while a student.
These are the documented facts of an institution that could not, or would not, protect the children and especially not the female children inside it. An institution that produced Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, who is now in charge of the federal department of justice.
Apropos of nothing, it’s interesting to note that among NMMI’s most famous graduates are pornographic actress Jessica Jaymes, and Playboy Clubs executive Victor Lownes. Other famed graduates include actor Owen Wilson, and Conrad Hilton, the hotelier, his son, Conrad Hilton, Jr., and news anchors Sam Donaldson and Chuck Roberts.
I’m bracing for the flood of emails and comments I’ll get for writing this piece, the I went to NMMI and I turned out fine, you deserve to die you fucking c%nt kinds of screeds that lack self reflection to such degree they will not see the ways their attacks simply prove my point.
So let me say this now, and plainly: I’m sure some of you went to NMMI and turned out okay. I’m sure many of you are proud to have gone there, are passionately loyal towards the place, and look back on your time there fondly. Militarized schools tend to breed a fierce sort of loyalty, the kind of loyalty that feels dangerous to question. So, I get it that you might not be able to question yours.
But I am also sure that the school terrifies me, just as I am sure it has produced more than its share of monsters — including several with direct ties to the powerful network of men protecting famed child sex trafficker and likely Mossad agent Jeffrey Epstein.
Bear in mind, too, that one woman’s monster is another man’s hero.
And if you’re the type to think someone like Todd Blanche, the amoral and horrifying new Attorney General of the United States of America, is a hero, then I suggest with all the kindness in my heart that the rest of this article might not be for you.
Do not keep reading.
Do something, anything, else.
Why Todd Blanche Was The Perfect NMMI Student
Todd Wallace Blanche arrived at NMMI as a high schooler. I’m not sure of the year he arrived, and no one will confirm it for me. What I do know for sure is that he graduated in 1992, and that in 1992, the person at the top of NMMI was, as it always is, the Governor of New Mexico, who, at the time, was Bruce King. I also know that in the following year, 1993, Bruce King, still governor and still in charge of NMMI, sold a portion of his own personal family ranch to a guy from New York named Jeffrey Epstein. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll get back to this. First, let’s talk about Todd’s childhood, and why he was typical of the kind of kid who ends up at NMMI.
Todd was born in Denver, Colorado. For those of you unfamiliar with United States geography, Colorado is a U.S. state that borders New Mexico, another U.S. state, in the north. Todd’s dad was a Canadian immigrant to the United States. The man was also a professional athlete, a hockey player, and a basement preacher who formed his own church in Todd’s childhood home. Now, I wasn’t there. So I can’t say I know this for sure. But my limited experience with both hockey players and defiant basement preachers tells me there is a good chance Todd’s dad was narcissistic and authoritarian and possibly a spare-no-rod kinda guy. Psychologically, this would make sense. It would have created a guy who, as a lawyer many years later, would feel comfortable with a person like Donald Trump.
Anyway, when Todd’s dad got in trouble because his home-church pissed off the neighbors because it was loud and disruptive, Todd’s dad fought back and ended up in jail for contempt. The whole ordeal inspired the family to move to Florida. Todd, meanwhile, was not religious. You can imagine how well that went down with a dad like Todd’s dad. We should also mention that Todd appears to have been born with a cleft palate and “hairlip” that was surgically repaired somewhere along the way. Not sure how his dad would have felt about that, either. His mom was a nurse. I can’t tell you much more about her than that. Whatever happened in Todd’s house, someone decided it was better for him to go to NMMI than to be around his parents anymore, and so he went. Stories floating around the internet say he was regarded as a good athlete, like his dad. I guess we have to assume that’s true.
It also appears true that Blanche — let’s switch to his last name now that the version of him we’re talking about is an adult — was a good student, at NMMI as well as in college and law school. He went from NMMI to LSU, then to Brooklyn Law School. After that, he clerked for federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties, and made himself a respected prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. (You know, the same SDNY that asked New Mexico to stand down in its first investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.) I think what I’m circling here is this: NMMI does not turn out dullards. You don’t get into NMMI just because your daddy is rich. You get in because you’re a certain kind of dangerous, a dangerous that can be molded and turned into something harder and more useful to power — the loyal, disciplined operator who has learned, young, that survival becomes thriving only by attaching yourself to power and never letting go.
Blanche eventually attached himself to the most powerful client available. He became Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer, standing beside the sharting tangerine wonder through the hush-money trial that ended in thirty-four felony convictions, through the classified-documents case, through the effort to overturn an election. Then the felon he defended returned to the White House and made him, in stages, Deputy Attorney General, then acting Attorney General, and now — permanently, over the objection of two Republican senators and every Democrat — the head of the Justice Department itself. From that chair he interviewed/coached Ghislaine Maxwell, saw her moved to gentler confinement, and declared the Epstein files closed with millions of pages still withheld.
The man who shut the drawer on the country’s largest child-trafficking investigation learned this particular brand of misogynistic and predatory discipline at a state-funded military school in Roswell, a school that was, when he was there, overseen by the man who sold Epstein Zorro Ranch.
So who is ultimately in charge of what happens at NMMI? The answer is clear: The governor of New Mexico, whoever that happens to be at the time, because they appoint the board of regents that manages the school.
In 1992, that governor was Bruce King, the man who sold Zorro Ranch to Jeffrey Epstein and whose son Gary King went on, as Attorney General of New Mexico, not only to protect Epstein, but to work with Epstein’s lawyers to create ways that Epstein could finance Gary’s run for governor without the public finding out. The King family also introduced Epstein to John J. Kelly, who served as Epstein’s personal POA for the purchase of the ranch in the same year he was appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico by Bill Clinton.
Today, the governor is Michelle Lujan Grisham, whose own party has created the sham “Truth Commission,” a public relations damage control operation seemingly designed to create a public appearance of concern for Epstein survivors while in fact continuing the King family legacy of protecting Epstein and those in their own party who benefited financially from their associations with him.
The same commission last week released its first report, which reads to me like a textbook case of clumsy narrative control efforts by a political party intent upon protecting its own.
In that report, they said the new owners of Zorro Ranch, Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines, were fully cooperating with the supposed investigation the commission and NM DOJ are conducting. This was only true if you did not want or expect a warrant search. The search in March was a permission-based search. The New Mexico Department of Justice inexplicably did NOT seek a warrant search.
Did I mention where the father of Donald Huffines went to boarding school? Just… you know. Take a guess.
If you guessed that James L. Huffines Jr. attended NMMI, you would be correct. He was later enshrined in its Hall of Fame, honored as a man of eminence. He built an automobile and banking fortune in Dallas and moved through the hardest rooms of Texas conservative money. His son Don Huffines is a former state senator who now controls the treasury of Texas, and whose family secretly purchased Epstein’s Zorro Ranch from Karyna Shuliak, Epstein’s heir, in 2023.
They have been excavating it ever since.
The current president of the NMMI Board of Regents is M. Christina Montoya, a graduate of the school who is now a clinical social worker. She is the Vice President of New Mexico CASA Association, which provides court-appointed special advocates to children in foster care or otherwise at risk. Gary King sits on the board, despite calls for him to be removed due to his documented unethical associations with Jeffrey Epstein. Other members of the board have ties to King and to his wife, weapons scientist Yolanda Jones King.
Roughly a hundred cadets a year move from NMMI to the five United States service academies. Its Hall of Fame holds more than two dozen generals and admirals. And woven through its criteria for honor is that single, extraordinary line — the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Cross and Distinguished Intelligence Medal, named outright as qualifications for eminence.
Understand how rare that is.
Most institutions that feed the intelligence world do so quietly, through a wink and a professor’s recommendation and a quiet lunch in a wood-paneled room. NMMI wrote it into the bylaws. Out loud. The school announced, in its own founding documents of honor, that the highest thing one of its children could grow up to be is a keeper of the state’s most violent secrets, and those secrets know no political party.
As far as I can tell, NMMI is yet another node in the Epstein/Maxwell protection network, and that network crosses all party lines and points directly at military intelligence and defense contractors. My previous reporting has led to inferences that Epstein and Maxwell were working for foreign and possibly domestic military intelligence operations, and that their presence in New Mexico was possibly centered on obtaining nuclear weapons secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories.
The people who continue to protect Epstein, whether it’s a Republican like Todd Blanche or a Democrat like “Truth Commission” head Andrea Romero (a state representative from Santa Fe who took part in NMMI’s activities honoring the school’s princesses for the 2025-2026 school year, and who also, notably, removed gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland’s name from the Truth Commission’s first report), are protecting something much bigger than “just” a child sex trafficking ring, something with roots in the military-industrial complex that no one in power hopes you ever find out about.
I’ll end this with an actual promotional video put out by NMMI’s official account, with the band Portugal. the Man’s “Feel It Still” as the background music. The song includes the following lyrics:
Can’t keep my hands to myself
Think I’ll dust ‘em off, put ‘em back up on the shelf
In case my little baby girl is in need
Am I coming out of left field?
Ooh woo, I’m a rebel just for kicks, now
I been feeling it since 1966, now…
We could fight a war for peace
(Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now)
Give in to that easy living
Goodbye to my hopes and dreams
Stop flipping for my enemies
We could wait until the walls come down
(Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now)
It's time to give a little to the
Kids in the middle, but oh 'til it falls
Won't bother me
Please accept this informal award for best lede in a substack article. *******EPIC***********
Nice, a state-supported incubator for violent attitudes honed with a superiority complex and oiled with narcissism. Mold the child into a tool for retribution…with a soundtrack.