The sky is empty, the earth delivered into the hands of power without principles.
~ Albert Camus, The Rebel
These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam
Last week on Judging Freedom, I asserted that events in Minnesota were establishing a line between the best of us and the worst of us. Renee Good, murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, represented the best of us. Good was someone willing to put herself between the powerful and the vulnerable. Ross, undoubtedly someone who would murder again for those in power, and to satiate his own petty, hateful and venal needs, is the unmasked face of the worst among us.
That’s the sordid and terrible reality of human nature – that many of us will do as we are asked to do, as we’re ordered to do, as we’re told to do for a multitude of reasons: because we’re stupid, because we’re greedy, because we’re fearful.
I take heart in those who are standing up though, because that’s not everyone. ICE represents the very worst of us. ICE represents the thugs, the brutes, the hooligans in our society. They are the worst of us. And then you have those like Renee Good, and her widow, who represent the best of us.
And this is a defining time in American history. This is a time for all of us as Americans to determine which side of that line do we stand upon.
This articulation in Minneapolis of the line dividing the best of us from the worst of us was solidified on Saturday with the murder of Alex Pretti. Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration, i.e., someone who helps someone like me, was executed because he put himself between a woman and the ICE officer attacking her. This screen capture of Pretti’s killing may be this century’s Saigon Execution moment.
A beaten, pepper sprayed Alex Pretti shot by an unknown federal law enforcement officer on January 24, 2026 in Minneapolis, MN. Screen grab of video from X.
Saigon Execution. Eddie Adams, Associated Press, February 1, 1968, Saigon, South Vietnam.
For those unsure of the circumstances of Pretti’s murder, Dropsite News details the video here, just as the New York Times did for Renee Good’s murder. If, after watching these analyses, you still believe the government, against your own (lying) eyes, I know which side of the line you are on.
There are metaphysical aspects occurring that we must acknowledge if we have any hope of understanding and defeating, not solely these modern-day black and tans who are terrorizing our communities and seeking subjugation, but, more importantly, the people in power that they serve.
And the aspect of these men and women who populate ICE and these other federal law enforcement agencies—the most dangerous thing about them is not that they’re thugs, not that they’re brutes, not that they are nothing more than common criminals themselves, but the fact that they have no principles, they have no ethics. These men and women don’t even have the decency, the ethics, the morals to conduct themselves in any type of manner that we would describe as decent. And they’re, of course, led by sadists and nihilists at the top level.
And I’m reminded of a quote from Albert Camus who described this type of danger: when the sky is empty, power resides in the hands of those without principle. This idea that when we don’t have principles, when we have no ethics, when there is no religion—this is where we go to. This is where we as a people, as a human race, go to. Tyranny, brutality, oppression comes hand in hand without principles.
And that’s what we’re seeing in Minnesota. That’s what we’re seeing throughout the Muslim world that we’ve been bombing for decades. That’s what the Europeans are now dealing with, with the United States about to take Greenland from them, and so on and so forth.
I’ve spoken about this danger before. Last spring, after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem couldn’t define habeas corpus, I had this to say:
I went to law school for five days back in 1995, and I’m pretty certain we covered that within those five days. This is basic stuff.
But I was reminded the other day of an amazing Fyodor Dostoevsky quote that covers a lot of this. It’s from The House of the Dead, if people want to look it up. He talks about if anyone has ever enjoyed humiliating someone, the hypnotizing power of that, how tyranny is something that can be indulged in. And he concludes by saying blood and power are intoxicating. And that’s what you have here.
You have people who are intoxicated by their power, intoxicated by the ability to carry forward not just tyrannically, but sadistically. Kristi Noem, who has gone to that prison in El Salvador and taken TikTok videos there in the midst of that crime against humanity, she is not simply an ignoramus, but she is a sadist. She is someone who, as Dostoevsky would describe, is intoxicated by blood and power.
Here’s the Dostoevsky quote, thanks to Mark Taylor, who reminded me of it. Still, reading it again, I get cold as I understand who we are up against, both on our streets and in Washington, DC’s offices, and, as time goes on, and history tells us, our options for dealing with these people will become more and more limited.
“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate … the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead
To characterize the entire administration as sadists is too simple, as the President’s people have multiple motivations and characters, although not so varied as to allow me to name any of them who are seemingly possessed of any virtues.
You’ve got a narcissist in charge of this country who is unhinged. He is unmoored in the sense that he has no principles other than those a narcissist or a megalomaniac would choose to embrace. In that sense, he’s a posturing nihilist. That’s who’s leading this country.
And then you look at who his advisors are. It is men and women who have made it into power because they’re really good sycophants. They’re incredibly loyal. They are really great spokespeople. They will go to the ends of the earth to trumpet Donald Trump’s name. Or they are men and women who have risen to power because they are con men and criminals, just like their boss. Or they are men and women who have done well for themselves because they’ve known how to climb the ladder in a rigged and corrupt economic, media, and political ecosystem that we have here.
So you look at the people who are directing these policies and put that on top of the inertia that comes from an empire, let alone a declining, failing, dying empire like the U.S. And so we shouldn’t be surprised at the type of decisions and policies we see coming about.
And it’s no better when it comes to those not in suits and ties, but in military costume:
The behavior of the generals was reprehensible—that they all sat there silently. There’s a lot of hoopla, there’s a lot of nonsense, particularly in liberal blogs and podcasts and television shows about how the generals are going to save us. And that’s complete nonsense.
Those men and women have sat silently as Trump fired their peers for no reasons other than politics, race, or sex. They’ve sat silently as Trump has extrajudicially massacred and murdered people. They’ve sat silently as the American military—guardsmen, active duty Marines—have taken part in the detention, the brutalization, the humiliation of American citizens, legal residents, and immigrants all throughout the U.S.
Those men and women have sat silently for that. And they sat silently through his speech when Trump gave them the opportunity to get up and leave, and not one of them did. And so people think their silence was some kind of “F you” to Trump. You just don’t understand the military. Their silence was obedience.
There is a phrase of unknown attribution that I keep coming back to: never argue with someone John Brown would have shot.
In the last two years, first with the genocide in Gaza and now with neo-fascist reactionaries in control of our government, I have been grappling with my belief in non-violence from moral, political and strategic positions. Limitations on non-violence from those perspectives that I previously dismissed as conditional, historical or inconsequential are no longer; if those limitations ever truly did exist and weren’t just excuses for me not to fully engage thoroughly with the concept of non-violence. I should make clear that my belief in non-violence did not include armed resistance as allowed under international and natural law, as well as self-defense. Rather, non-violence for me was a political, strategic and moral choice to defeat an oppressive or abusive authority, particularly against Western governments. Of course, situations and circumstances differ, and one course of action will be necessary, correct and just, while in another time and place, that same course would be counter-productive, ruinous and unjust.
At this point, I still firmly believe non-violence is the correct response, politically, strategically and morally, against this American government. However, I no longer believe a non-violent response to be correct against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I have always held to the right of Palestinians to armed resistance, but felt politically, strategically and morally a non-violent response to occupation was the best path, in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank. I was wrong.
However, the question is before us. Against a government of sadists, narcissists, and nihilists, with a military led by feckless and obsequious generals, and a growing, brown-shirted, paramilitarized federal police force, what will need to be done? The Democrats’ worthlessness, as the opposition political party, has been demonstrated clearly this past year, and we shouldn’t forget that Democratic policies, when in control of the White House and Congress of the last decades, built the infrastructure and hired the personnel the Trump Administration is using to terrorize our communities. As I write this, a news alert tells me that President Trump is sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to take over operations for the federal government in Minnesota – the same Tom Homan who President Obama awarded with the US government’s highest civil service award for his “extraordinary” results in deporting people. It was during Obama’s time in office that Homan intellectually fathered DHS’s family separations policy, aka “kids in cages”. It’s unknown if Homan will travel with Obama’s medal to Minnesota.
I don’t romanticize the idea of political violence, let alone armed resistance, organized insurgency and civil war – I have seen two of those first-hand and know their tragedies and barbarities well. I also know that throughout history, rebellions and revolutions, if successful, very often fail to live up to their pronounced noble intentions, and that the victors can deliver tyranny, oppression and corruption as well as those overthrown. Yet this uncomfortable and dangerous question remains: what may have to be done?
May it not have to come to that. As for now, let us reflect and embody Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and those on the streets of Minneapolis today, the best of us, standing against the worst of us, for the most vulnerable among us.
