I have a distinct memory of playing one of the Batman Arkham video games back in law school, launching the Dark Knight off a rooftop and cannonballing into a pack of criminals, breaking bones and shattering teeth in a righteous blur. As I grappling-hooked back to the rooftops, a thought arrived unbidden: Batman is a problem.
A man in a mask. Acting in the name of justice. Accountable to no one.
That fantasy of unaccountable violence is fun on a console. It is horrifying on a residential block in Minneapolis: armed federal agents in masks and body armor, faces hidden, badges concealed, piling out of unmarked vehicles. A woman named Renée Good—37 years old, mother of three, poet, American citizen—shot dead in her Honda Pilot, her child’s stuffed animals visible in the glove compartment, her steering wheel turned away from her killer in the final second of her life.1
And then the real obscenity began.
The Anatomy of Fuckery
Within hours of the killing, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement. Renée Good, they announced, was a “violent rioter” who had “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted to murder an ICE agent in an “act of domestic terrorism.”
I need you to understand what kind of lie this is, because it is not the ordinary kind.
An ordinary lie attempts to deceive. The liar says something false and hopes you will believe it. Propaganda operates similarly—it presents a distorted picture and trusts that repetition and restriction of alternatives will make the distortion stick.
This is different. The administration knows we have the video. Multiple videos, in fact—bystander footage, (incredibly) the agent’s own phone footage. ABC News has done a frame-by-frame analysis. The video shows Good’s vehicle stationary on a residential street. It shows agents approaching on foot. It shows an agent unholstering his weapon not two seconds after exiting his car, before any interaction with Good, positioning himself to the front-left of the vehicle. It shows Good turning her steering wheel to the right—away from the agent—one second before the first of three shots was fired.
Secretary Noem knows this. Vice President Vance knows this. President Trump knows this. They have seen what we have seen, or their staff has briefed them on what we have seen.
They issued the statement precisely because you have seen.
This is not lying. This is not gaslighting. Gaslighting tries to make you doubt your own perception. This does not. This is something else, something that requires its own name. Let’s call it fuckery.2
Fuckery is the assertion of a transparent falsehood as an act of dominance. It does not attempt to convince. It dares you to object. It says: We will claim this woman tried to murder a federal agent. We know you know she didn’t. We know you have the video. We do not care. We are saying it anyway. What are you going to do about it?
It is a performance for two audiences: it tells the base they are untouchable, and it tells the opposition they are impotent.
The fuckery is the point. The brazenness is the message. They are demonstrating that truth—observable, verifiable, video-recorded truth—is subordinate to their power. They are making you watch them lie and proving that your knowledge of the lie is irrelevant.
Authoritarians do this when they are confident they will face no consequences: they stop bothering to be plausible and the simple assertion is an act of dominance.
The Mask and the Pardon
The agent who killed Renée Good has been identified by the Minnesota Star Tribune and The Intercept as Jonathan Ross, a 43-year-old ICE deportation officer and Iraq War veteran. The federal government has not named him. In official statements, he is described only as “experienced.”
Ross was masked during the operation. No badge visible. No name tag. This is now standard practice for ICE: agents in face coverings and civilian clothes, operating from unmarked vehicles, refusing to identify themselves even when directly asked. Their official justification is “to prevent doxing.”3
Judge Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, called this rationale “disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable.”4 The court wrote: “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence. We have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”
Judge Young is correct, but let me be more precise about what the masks accomplish.
You cannot file a complaint against an agent you cannot identify. You cannot testify against a face you never saw. You cannot name your assailant in a lawsuit. The mask severs the connection between act and actor. It is the physical implementation of impunity.
But impunity requires more than anonymity. The identity of Renée Good’s killer is now known. Journalists found him in less than 48 hours through court records. So the mask, by itself, is not enough.
What completes the circle is the pardon.
On January 20th, 2025, Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6th defendants. This was not case-by-case clemency. It was categorical absolution. It included people convicted of assaulting police officers—the beating of cops with flagpoles, the crushing of cops in doorways, the spraying of cops with chemical irritants. All forgiven. All welcomed back as heroes.
The pardons were not an act of mercy so much as the proclamation of a principle: violence committed in service of this president is not a crime.
Now consider what this means for Jonathan Ross, or any federal agent operating under this administration.
He knows—with certainty—that no action he takes in the field, up to and including the killing of an unarmed American citizen, will result in lasting consequences. The process might run. There might be an investigation, even charges, a trial, a conviction. And at the end of it, a pardon will be waiting. Trump has demonstrated this. He has proven it. The J6 pardons were not merely retrospective; they were prospective. They were a promise.
So: armed men, masked and anonymous, operating in American cities with the advance knowledge that they are outside the law. Answerable to no one except a president who has already declared he will shield them from accountability.
There is a word for this. We have been avoiding it.
The Bargain We Forgot We Made
Let’s step back and ask a question so basic it sounds naive: what are police for?
In a constitutional republic, the answer is supposed to be straightforward. Citizens grant the state a monopoly on legitimate force. We give up the right to private vengeance, to vigilante justice, to armed self-help against our neighbors. In exchange, the state promises that its force will be exercised only by accountable agents—officers who are identifiable, bound by law, subject to discipline and review, answerable ultimately to us.
This is the bargain. This is why we tolerate armed agents of the state in our communities. Not because they are strong, but because they are constrained. Not because they can hurt us, but because there are consequences if they do.
“Protect and serve” is not a PR slogan. It is the legitimating theory of police power in a democracy. The moment officers serve only the executive and protect only his interests, the moment they become masked enforcers answerable to one man who will shield them from all accountability, they are no longer police in any meaningful sense.
They are a praetorian guard, a paramilitary. They are exactly what the Founders, who had experienced the quartering of British soldiers in colonial homes, designed our system to prevent. The police state had already grown so unrestrained that Radley Balko convincingly argued in The Rise of the Warrior Cop that our police forces might violate the 3rd Amendment. This is something else entirely.
What we are watching in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in cities across this country, is not aggressive policing. It is the replacement of policing with something else —force without legitimacy, power without accountability, violence in service of a strongman rather than an elected leader of a republic.
Let Us Be Precise About the Word
Tyranny describes rule without accountability to law. But tyranny is a condition, not a form. A tyranny might be one man’s enrichment scheme. A theocracy. A junta protecting military prerogatives.
What we have is more specific.
A cult of personality in which loyalty to the leader supersedes all other obligations, including the Constitution. Paramilitary forces deployed against a scapegoated internal population—”animals,” “vermin,” “invaders,” “poisoning the blood of our country.” The subordination of truth to power—not through persuasion, but through the open assertion of dominance.
Fuckery.
Mass rallies. Grievance mythology. National humiliation reversed through the strongman. Restoration of greatness through purification.
And (this is the part people who have lives and obligations, people who don’t have time to keep up with the rapid firehose of insanity keep missing) the merger of state and corporate power into a directed economy where the government picks winners and losers, extracts tribute from disfavored industries, and takes equity stakes in “strategic” companies. The US government now owns a stake in Intel. It takes a cut of NVIDIA’s revenue from China sales. Tariffs are wielded not as trade policy but as reward and punishment, enriching allies and kneecapping rivals. This is not the free market. It is not socialism. It is corporatism—the economic structure of fascist Italy, where private ownership persists in name while the state directs all consequential economic activity.
Then there’s the crypto.5
The Trump family launched meme coins days before the inauguration—$TRUMP, $MELANIA—and watched billions flow in. Foreign governments, oligarchs, and favor-seekers bought in, not because they believed in the tokenomics, but because it was the most frictionless bribery mechanism ever invented. No need for the old rigmarole of shell companies and speaking fees. Just buy the president’s shitcoin. The transaction is public. The corruption is visible. Graft performed in daylight, structured to be legal, or at least unprosecutable, because the same administration controls the SEC, the DOJ, and the pardon pen. It is the financialization of fuckery: Yes, I am openly selling access and influence. Yes, you can see me doing it. What are you going to do about it?
Mussolini had a name for this arrangement. He called it “the corporate state,” and defined fascism as the merger of state and corporate power.6 We’re watching that merger in real time, and we’re pretending it’s just “industrial policy.”
The word is fascism.
I am not using it as an epithet. I am using it as a classification. These are the defining features of fascist movements as identified by historians from Robert Paxton to Umberto Eco to Timothy Snyder: the leader cult, the scapegoated enemies, the paramilitary violence, the performative dominance over truth, and the corporatist economic model.7 This is what it looks like. It is here. It is not coming. It arrived.
The Babbitt Test
If you want to understand the total corruption of the people defending this administration, consider two deaths.8
Ashli Babbitt was shot by a Capitol Police officer on January 6th, 2021. The video is clear: she was climbing through a smashed window, part of a mob that had just violently overrun police lines, while officers with drawn weapons screamed warnings. Members of Congress were being evacuated down the hallway behind the shooter. It was a textbook defensive shooting—the last line of protection for fleeing legislators.
I remember watching all of this unfold in real time. The violence of it. I will never forget the pit of fury I felt in my chest as the Capitol was overrun by what the current regime calls “patriots” and “sightseers.”
Donald Trump has called Babbitt “an innocent, wonderful, beautiful woman.” He has played memorial videos at his rallies. He invited her family to the White House—hell, he awarded her family $5 million in damages for a bullshit wrongful death claim. Ashli Babbitt, climbing through a window toward members of Congress despite repeated and clear instructions to stop, knife in her possession, during a violent attack on the Capitol: innocent martyr, murdered by the state.
Now: Renée Good.
The video shows her vehicle stationary. It shows her wheel turning away from the agent. It shows her posing no physical threat to anyone. And she is dead, and the administration has labeled her a terrorist who “weaponized her vehicle” in an attempted murder.
Do you see?
The video evidence is irrelevant in both cases—but in perfectly opposite directions, determined entirely by which narrative serves power. Babbitt’s violence is erased. Good’s nonviolence is invented. The truth of what the camera recorded does not matter. What matters is who is useful to the regime.
This is how you know it’s fascism. The law does not apply equally. It is a weapon wielded against enemies and a shield protecting friends. Some are protected by the law but not beholden to it, while others are beholden to the law but not protected by it. The same act—posing a physical threat to federal officers—is martyrdom or terrorism depending on nothing but political alignment.
The Houck Test
For years, a certain kind of American—let’s call him a Fox News Catholic, though the type is not limited to Catholics or Fox News—has raged about the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. The case they cite most often is Mark Houck.
In September 2022, FBI agents arrested Houck at his home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was a pro-life activist who had, by his own admission, twice shoved a 72-year-old Planned Parenthood escort. The escort said Houck attacked him. Houck said he was defending his son from harassment. A dispute of fact.
But that’s not how the story was told.
Within hours, Houck’s wife was on Catholic media describing a terrifying “SWAT raid”—25 to 30 agents, guns pointed at the children, a battering ram at the ready. The story spread like wildfire through conservative media. Here was proof of Biden’s war on Christians: jackbooted thugs terrorizing a Catholic family at dawn over a minor altercation.
The FBI disputed nearly every detail. No SWAT team was involved. Agents knocked on the door, identified themselves, and asked Houck to exit. He did so and was “taken into custody without incident.” The bureau stated that the reported numbers of personnel and vehicles were “an overstatement” and that tactics were “professional” and “in line with standard practices.”
None of that mattered. The myth of the raid was too good to fact-check. It confirmed everything the right wanted to believe, so it became true—or true enough.
And what actually happened to Mark Houck?
He was arrested pursuant to a federal indictment. He was arraigned. He was represented by counsel. He went to trial before a jury of his peers. The jury heard both sides. In about an hour, they acquitted him.
He received due process. Every protection the Constitution affords. He faced his accuser. He presented his defense. The system worked exactly as designed. He walked free.
Now let’s talk about about Renée Good.
She received no indictment. No arraignment. No counsel. No jury. No trial. No opportunity to face her accuser or present a defense. She received three bullets from a masked agent and a posthumous designation as a domestic terrorist.
And this time, there’s no dispute about what happened. We have the video. Multiple videos. We can see the agents—actually masked, actually unidentified, actually pointing weapons. We can see Good’s wheel turning away from the shooter. We can watch her die.
The FBI has revoked state investigators’ access to the evidence. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which had been promised a joint investigation, has been cut out. The state’s Public Safety Commissioner says it will be “extremely difficult, if not impossible” for local investigation to continue.
So: Houck, whose arrest was mythologized into a SWAT raid that never happened, received every constitutional protection and was acquitted. Good, whose killing is documented on video, received none and is dead.
If you were angry about Houck, where is your anger now? Where is the Fox News chyron? Where is the Congressional hearing about this weaponization?
The silence tells you everything. The system working as designed—for a pro-life Catholic who shoved an old man—was tyranny. The system being annihilated entirely—for a woman murdered by the state—is not worth discussing. Or, worse, deserved.
You do not care about the rule of law. You never did. You care about your people and your enemies. When you scream about “Two Tiers of Justice,” you aren’t complaining that it exists. You are complaining that, for a moment, you were subjected to the tier usually reserved for everyone else.
The Collaborators
I want to address the “reasonable” Republicans directly. The ones who furrow their brows. The ones who say they find Trump’s rhetoric “troubling” but vote with him anyway. The ones who would rather talk about inflation, or how Biden’s economy was a living nightmare (ignoring the numbers now), or immigration policy in the abstract than grapple with a dead woman on a Minneapolis street.
You know who you are. You know what you are enabling. You have chosen not to know the particulars because the particulars are intolerable, and knowing them would require you to act or to admit what you are.
So let me give you the particulars.
Renée Good was a 37-year-old American citizen. A poet. A mother of three, including a six-year-old. Her previous husband died in 2023. She was not an “illegal alien.” She was not a criminal. She was observing a federal operation in her own neighborhood because she was worried about her neighbors.
She was shot three times by a masked federal agent who has not been charged, will not be charged, and will face no consequences. The video shows she posed no threat. The administration says she was a terrorist. The investigation has been blocked.
You will not talk about this. You will change the subject to the border, or the economy, or Hunter Biden’s laptop, or any of the other topics that allow you to avoid the specific, concrete, documented reality of what your coalition has produced.
You are collaborators, you Vichy bastards. Not because you pulled the trigger. Because you looked away. Because you decided your tax rate or your judicial appointments or your cultural grievances mattered more than whether the state can murder citizens without consequence.
History will remember this. More importantly, you will remember it. You will know what you did. You will know what you permitted. You will live with that knowledge, and it will not be pleasant.
The rest of us will remember it, too.
The Rebel Says No
Albert Camus wrote that the rebel is not one who simply refuses. The rebel says: there is a limit, and you have crossed it. The no of rebellion is also a yes—an affirmation that some things are not permitted, that dignity exists, that the human being is not infinitely malleable by power.
Here’s the truth of the matter: the mechanisms designed to enforce limits have been disabled. The pardon power nullifies criminal accountability for regime loyalists. The Supreme Court has immunized presidential acts. The Senate will not convict. The House is controlled by collaborators. The courts are being packed and defied. And our fellow citizens, many of them, have decided that they do not want to know.
What remains is the act of naming. Of stating, clearly and without hedging, what is happening. Of refusing the anesthetic of euphemism. Of insisting that fascism is fascism, that murder is murder, that the video shows what it shows, that their lies are lies and their fuckery is fuckery.
This will not stop them. They are beyond shame. They have made a bet that power is its own justification, and so far the bet is paying off.
But naming is not nothing. It is the preservation of a standard against which reality can be measured. It is the refusal to let them define what is normal. It is the maintenance of a record, so that when the historians come—if they are permitted to come—there will be a clear account of what happened and who said what.
I know the feeling. Wouldn’t it be safer to just say nothing? That nagging in the back of your head that they might come for you if you leave some record of wrongthink. I have a wife and a child. I am dependent on a live-preserving medication. I am at the edge of precarity. Maybe I should just pack it in.
But that’s the deep irony of this moment: the fear of what may come enables, ordains, the authoritarian state we fear. Silence is a bet, and it’s a bet on the world you fear most.
A woman named Renée Good was killed by the state four days ago. Her killers are masked and will face no justice. The administration has called her a terrorist based on video evidence that proves the opposite. They are daring us to do something about it.
I cannot stop them. I do not have that power.
But I will not look away. I will not be quiet. I will not pretend this is normal, or complicated, or a matter of perspective.
Join me. Say no.
While the act of naming may not stop the bullet, it ensures that when the history of this moment is written, it will be written in the language of crime, not the language of the state.
I do not want to embed any of the videos here. They are revolting. I am guessing you have seen them. If not, here is a detailed reconstruction with multiple video perspectives.
The “doxing” justification is rich for two reasons.
First, it is an implicit admission. If ICE agents require anonymity to protect themselves from public accountability, they are conceding that their conduct might provoke public outrage. Legitimate law enforcement in a democratic society does not hide from the communities it serves. The fear of identification presupposes that identification would be damaging—which presupposes that what’s being done cannot withstand scrutiny. They are telling on themselves.
Second, doxing is the currency of right-wing terror. This is the ecosystem that targeted election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, that publishes the home addresses of school board members and librarians, that sent bomb threats to children’s hospitals over gender-affirming care. Libs of TikTok built an entire brand on identifying targets for harassment. And the president himself regularly posts the names, photographs, and locations of judges, prosecutors, and political enemies, knowing exactly what his followers will do with that information.
The same administration that claims its agents need masks for protection operates the most sophisticated doxing apparatus in American history. They don’t oppose doxing. They oppose being subject to the tactic they deploy against everyone else.
Doe v. Wolf, Civil Action No. 20-10350-WGY (D. Mass. Mar. 23, 2020)
For those who don’t follow this world (and there’s no reason you should) let me explain what’s happening, because it’s the most brazen grift in the history of the American presidency. I almost admire the imagination required for a grift at this scale.
The Meme Coin: Three days before his inauguration, Trump launched $TRUMP, a “meme coin”—a cryptocurrency with no underlying value or utility, essentially a digital collectible. It peaked at $75 per token, briefly valuing Trump’s stake at over $50 billion. Within weeks, it crashed. According to a forensic analysis commissioned by the New York Times, 813,000 wallets lost a combined $2 billion while the Trump Organization and its partners collected over $100 million in trading fees. For every dollar in fees the Trump family made, investors lost $20. The coin is now worth around $5, down 93% from its peak. Melania launched her own coin the next day; it fell 99% by November.
This is a textbook pump-and-dump scheme. The Trumps pumped it with presidential hype, collected fees on every transaction, and ordinary people—many of them Trump supporters—lost their savings. (https://fortune.com/2025/02/11/trump-memecoin-traders-2-billion-dollar-loss-family-100-million-fees/)
World Liberty Financial: But the meme coin is the sideshow. The main event is World Liberty Financial, a “decentralized finance” platform launched by Eric and Don Jr., which issues its own token (WLFI) and its own stablecoin (USD1). The Trump family receives 75% of net revenue from token sales. By December 2025, the Trumps had netted over $1 billion in proceeds while holding $3 billion in unsold tokens. The company’s CEO is Zach Witkoff—son of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. (https://www.dlnews.com/articles/people-culture/how-donald-trump-crypto-empire-fared-in-2025/)
The Abu Dhabi-Binance Deal: In May 2025, MGX—a firm backed by the Abu Dhabi government—invested $2 billion in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. They made the payment using World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin. This single transaction transformed USD1 from a nobody into one of the largest stablecoins in the world overnight. That $2 billion remains deposited in World Liberty Financial, potentially generating $80 million per year in interest for the Trumps. (https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/05/07/world-liberty-financial-wlfi-trump-binance-mgx-stablecoin-deal/)
The Pardon: Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao (”CZ”), had pleaded guilty in 2023 to allowing money laundering through his exchange—transactions that, per the Treasury Department, allowed “money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers.” He was fined $50 million and served four months in prison. After his release, Zhao began lobbying for a pardon. Binance donated software to World Liberty Financial. Binance spent $800,000 on lobbying for clemency. A lobbyist hired by Zhao met with Trump after being introduced by Don Jr. In October 2025, Trump pardoned him. (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/23/trump-pardons-binance-founder-cz-zhao.html, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-pardon-of-crypto-billionaire-sparks-concerns-over-use-of-pardon-power-60-minutes-transcript/)
Asked why, Trump said: “I don’t know who he is.” (https://www.factcheck.org/2025/11/addressing-trumps-claims-about-the-pardon-of-binance-founder/)
The Structure: Let’s be clear about what this is. Foreign governments, oligarchs, and favor-seekers can purchase World Liberty tokens or USD1 stablecoins, enriching the president’s family, with the transaction recorded on a public blockchain but the purchaser’s identity effectively anonymous. It is bribery with extra steps. A former CFTC commissioner told CNBC: “This was plainly a bad thing, a wrong thing. Countries and companies could try to curry favor with the Trump administration by purchasing shares of his memecoin.” (https://fortune.com/2025/02/11/trump-memecoin-traders-2-billion-dollar-loss-family-100-million-fees/)
The same administration controls the SEC (which has dropped investigations into crypto allies), the DOJ (which issues the pardons), and Congress (which is passing stablecoin legislation that will directly benefit World Liberty). World Liberty Financial just applied for a federal banking charter—a request that will be decided by regulators appointed by the man whose family owns it. (https://thehill.com/business/5677908-wlf-applies-national-trust-bank/)
It is the financialization of fuckery: open, documented corruption structured to be technically legal because the people who would enforce the law are the people committing it.
See Mussolini, Benito, and Giovanni Gentile. "The Doctrine of Fascism." 1932; Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. Vintage, 2005.
See Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. Vintage, 2005; Eco, Umberto. "Ur-Fascism." The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995; Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books, 2017.
“But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.”
What is your process when you write something like this? Do you craft an outline and then fill in the text? Do you just write whatever pops into your mind, then go back in and edit?
I know that everyone has a different way they go about their writing, but I'm trying to find some new ways that might work for me. I have been feeling this urge lately to write and get things out of my head. But then when I put fingers to keyboard everything gets kerfluffled (that is a technical term). The trash can is filled with half-baked thoughts that never got to see the light of day. I've come to realize that my brain likes to spin really fast and then throw a chain when I attempt to articulate in prose.