The compact between a government and its people is written not in statutes, but in daily, fragile moments of trust. It is the unspoken agreement that a trip to drop a child at school, a drive home, a protest, or simply existing in one’s own community will not end in a sudden burst of state-sponsored violence.
That compact is now shattered, lying in pieces on a snow-dusted Minneapolis street and in the graveyard silence of Washington’s corridors of power.
The killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother shot three times through her car window by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, is not an anomaly.
It is the latest, most visceral line in a growing ledger of death and fear authored by a federal enforcement apparatus operating with unprecedented impunity.
Her death, captured on video that shows her vehicle turning away from the officer, was immediately branded an “act of domestic terrorism” by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
This reflexive narrative, constructed before any investigation and contradicted by visual evidence, reveals an administration more committed to controlling the story than confronting the truth.
As late-night host Stephen Colbert noted with grim irony, “They’re telling you to believe them and not your eyes.”
This pattern of lethal force, from Minneapolis to Portland, where Border Patrol agents wounded two people in a car, unfolds against a backdrop of performative politics and profound institutional failure.
In a striking breach of partisan decorum, Republican US Senator Rand Paul accused his own party of a profound moral indifference, suggesting they “don’t give a shit about these people” in boats off the coast of Venezuela being killed by U.S. strikes—a rare moment where the fog of geopolitical posturing parted to reveal what looked uncomfortably like summary execution.
On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the White House published a fictionalized account, recasting a violent attempt to overturn an election as a gathering of “peaceful patriotic protesters” victimized by the state.
This was not mere revisionism; it was the formalization of a doctrine where power defines reality, and the lives of anyone outside the president’s circle of sychophants are cheap.
If a mob storming the seat of government can be whitewashed, then a mother in a Honda Pilot can be recast as a terrorist, and a fisherman can be killed without warning. The mechanism is the same: sever public perception from observable fact and replace it with official fiat.
The Democratic response to this escalating crisis has been a study in insufficiency.
While organizations like the ACLU, Indivisible, and a coalition of grassroots groups mobilized a national “ICE Out For Good” weekend of over 1,000 vigils and protests, the official party apparatus has offered little more than strongly worded statements and fundraising emails.
There has been no sustained, unified legislative offensive to rein in agency powers, cut the unprecedented funding fueling these operations, or establish genuine accountability.
This failure is a form of complicity, creating a vacuum where outrage is exploited by money-grubbing politicians but decisive action is absent.
Conversely, Republican officials have moved beyond complicity to active compliance, placing allegiance to—or fear of—former President Donald Trump ahead of their constitutional duty.
They have acquiesced to a world where federal agents pepper-spray students, conduct raids at schools and hardware stores, and now, kill citizens with little immediate consequence.
By refusing to check this expansion of executive power, they have endorsed a vision where the state’s enforcement arm operates in a shadow world, shielded from local oversight and answerable only to its own leadership.
In his 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith, Thomas Jefferson asked, “…what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”
“Let them take arms,” said the author of the Declaration of Independence. “The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Today, that sentiment is like horseshit. We exist in a time when the government is armed with nuclear weapons, and the ranks of our military and law enforcement are being purged of those brave enough to resist orders to do the unthinkable. Tyrant Donald Trump will not suffer a moment as the world witnessed at Tiananmen Square.
The result is a national corrosion of trust.
As Seth Meyers pointed out, the administration that lied about the scope of its deportation campaign—promising to target violent criminals while sweeping up ordinary people—is now lying about a shooting the public can watch for itself.
When institutions fail to provide a credible account of events or impose meaningful restraint, citizens are left to question everything.
Parents wonder if a routine encounter could turn fatal. Communities see enforcement not as a tool for security, but for intimidation.
The foundational idea that the government exists to protect its people is inverted.
A nation cannot claim to value life if ordinary moments can end in irreversible harm at the hands of unchecked power.
The late-night hosts, bizarrely cast as the most consistent truth-tellers, have grasped this. Jimmy Kimmel appealed directly to the public’s discernment: “How stupid do you think we are?” Colbert warned that unaccountable agents acting with impunity could arrive in any town, regardless of how it votes.
The wound from Minneapolis does not remain local.
It spreads as doubt, as fear, and as a chilling precedent.
The tree of liberty, as the saying goes, must be refreshed from time to time. But today, it is parched, not deprived of the blood of patriots, but starved by the silence of politicians and the relentless, sanctioned violence of a government turning its force against the very compact that grants it legitimacy.
The bodies are piling up, and with each one, the nation’s claim to justice grows fainter.