UPDATE: 12:53 p.m., Sunday, January 25, 2026
I originally published this piece just before 8:00 p.m. on Friday, January 23, 2026. Barely thirteen hours later—just after 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 24—37-year-old U.S. citizen and ICU nurse, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was shot to death by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent near the intersection of Nicollet Avenue and West 26th Street in south Minneapolis. The yawning delta between the claims of the relevant federal authorities immediately following the shooting and the plainly obvious facts disclosed by multiple unambiguous videos and subsequent reporting1, have shown the first frame I invoked below to be tragically decisive. To anyone for whom principle trumps expedient, any remaining sympathy or benefit of the doubt harbored in good faith for this federal administration, ought now to be utterly spent.
Among the many deranging effects of this fourth turning is its relentless acceleration into a nightmarish montage of revelations—a stochastic sequence of blinding flashes each of which, like lightning in the dark, briefly illuminate some monstrous new truth. Where one anticipated glimpsing the congenial face of a friend, one is hit with a ghoulish, lumbering apparition; where one expected the sound, impenetrable walls of the citadel, one is jarred by the vision of a catastrophic, gaping breach.
Just over two weeks ago, another such flash rent my adopted hometown of Minneapolis2—the City of Lakes, in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Yet again, the world watched a searing scene of state-sponsored violence unfold here in “flyover country” USA. I cannot be alone in wondering how and why Minnesota has become a crucible—arguably the crucible—where moral sentiment, administrative failure, and coercive power repeatedly collide along the fault lines of our age.
For anyone whose humanity has not yet been numbed by tribal overidentification—a shrinking minority, judging by the daily flood of limbic eruptions on public display—there is only one honest place to begin: a heartsick pit in the soul at the suffering of others. Precious lives, made in the image of God, extinguished or brutalized—whether by disproportionate state violence or by the bullet of an assassin. This grief is my first and most unmediated response to each new convulsion, to the steady drumbeat of public deaths and political killings that now pockmark our shattered yet shared reality.
What follows is an attempt to move beyond that visceral register, not to escape it, but to situate it—to articulate a deep and unresolved tension that I have yet to hear clearly synthesized elsewhere. I write, conscious of the fact that I am about to trespass on the partisan sensitivities of both of the dominant political tribes, but in good faith, guided by the clear voice of conscience.
The first frame is one I have already gestured toward: I hold a universal and uncompromising distaste for centralized state power and coercion. This opposition is not selective. It is not contingent on tribal advantage or disadvantage. I am not outraged by pandemic-era incursions on free movement and bodily autonomy, while remaining sanguine about armed agents breaking down doors or dragging people from their cars without clear legal authority. I am not critical of the madness of DEI for imbuing immutable characteristics with social significance and then seeking to discriminate on that basis, while excusing the same logic when deployed in service of immigration enforcement. The principle is singular and consistent.
State coercion must be constrained by the most rigorous checks and balances and reserved as an absolute last resort—employed only in the narrowest, most principled, and precisely defined circumstances. Any use of coercion beyond these bounds, especially when justified by expediency, warrants unequivocal condemnation. History and reason alike testify that once restraints on state power are loosened, abuse becomes not merely possible but probable, as political priorities and justifications inevitably shift. Coercion directed at your adversaries today is, in time, likely to be directed at you.
That same opposition undergirds my rejection of state-imposed fiat currency, whose structural function is the projection of coercive power3; my resistance to legislating constraints on speech; and my broader skepticism toward centralized authority in favor of decentralization and subsidiarity. In my view, there is not one acceptable excuse for the state to err on the side of coercion rather than restraint. Not one.
Here in Minneapolis, our federal government has repeatedly and egregiously violated its obligation to confine itself to a narrow and precisely defined domain of legitimate force. That failure ought to be deeply troubling—even to those compelled by the expedient.
The second frame rests on a principle I regard as nearly thermodynamic in its inevitability: Your freedom is equal to the degree to which you govern and take responsibility for yourself and your obligations; Where you do not, someone else will—at the cost of your freedom. This is the axis along which human maturation and individuation, even sapience, occur. The child, incapable of self-governance, necessarily cedes its freedom to its parents. The mature adult earns freedom through the hard, unglamorous work of self-governance: making wise choices and prudent trade-offs, meeting obligations, solving problems, and bearing the consequences of failure.
The relationship between these two frames should now be coming into focus. A society of free people—lightly governed, locally rooted, decentralized, and minimally coercive—is viable only if its leaders and a critical mass of its citizens possess the capacity for self-governance and responsibility. Where that capacity erodes, freedom from coercion becomes unsustainable.
In Minnesota and the Twin Cities, a toxic combination of expansive social welfare provisions, weak oversight, non-enforcement, administrative opacity, and a hands-off posture toward the legal status4 and conduct of residents has produced a perverse incentive landscape. It has functioned as a magnet for opportunists, criminals, organized fraudsters, and other unscrupulous actors adept at extracting value from poorly designed systems and naive, well-intentioned rules. This was not merely a policy failure but a failure of civic responsibility—an abdication by state and city governments, and by a critical mass of voters, of their duty to govern their jurisdictions competently and honestly.
Such failures are never contained. Wherever self-governance collapses—at the personal, local, or institutional level—intervention from a higher, more centralized authority, even from nature itself, inevitably follows. Local autonomy is lost. Freedom contracts. And tragedy accrues to those caught in the collapse.
Thus my heartsickness is inseparable from a deep frustration at the simultaneous inadequacy of our federal, state, and local governments and institutions. Between these two forces—government by federal Scylla and state and local Charybdis—we, the people, now find ourselves trapped, battered by each lurch of the narrowing passage, struggling to remember that neither monster absolves us of responsibility for righting the ship.
- In place of a comprehensive review of the publicly available record, I submit this excellent synthesis by civil libertarian, constitutional lawyer, and investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. Though I have frequently disagreed with him on matters of policy, his consistent, principled and costly commitment to civil liberties—evidenced by his alternating embrace and rejection by the dominant political tribes—has earned my highest respect.
↩︎ - At 9:37 a.m. on January 7, 2026, 37-year-old Renée Nicole Good was in her SUV, partially obstructing Portland Avenue South near East 34th Street in South Minneapolis, in protest of a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in the city, when she was fatally shot through her windshield by ICE agent, Jonathan E. Ross, when she declined to step out of her vehicle and instead started driving. Despite numerous eye witnesses, and video evidence recorded from multiple angles, interpretations of what happened vary sharply and predictably along contemporary partisan political lines. While I note the visceral horror and heartache I felt at seeing this awful event, I determined that there is nothing more that I could add here that would shed any additional light on the matter.
↩︎ - From its inception, the defining political utility of fiat money has been to extend the state’s capacity for force projection beyond the natural limits of its treasury, by covertly converting the private wealth of citizens into instruments of state power through monetary debasement. As the term fiat itself suggests, such a currency does not arise organically from voluntary exchange. Instead, it reallocates the benefits and control of the shared monetary ledger away from its distributed users and toward a centralized authority. For this reason, fiat currency must be decreed, imposed and maintained through coercive state power, and plausibly sits upstream of a wide range—perhaps the majority—of modern abuses of state authority.
↩︎ - This hands-off posture is vividly illustrated by Minneapolis’ status as a “sanctuary city” by way of the Minneapolis Separation Ordinance, which promises that immigration laws will not be enforced by the city, and effectively guarantees access to taxpayer funded city services for residents without a legal basis for residing in the United States. At the time of this writing, the Minneapolis city website literally reads: “We do not enforce immigration laws. The City of Minneapolis is committed to serving all residents – no matter their immigration status. We follow the Minneapolis Separation Ordinance. This means that City employees, including police and firefighters: Do not enforce federal civil immigration laws; Cannot ask about your immigration status or documentation. It ensures everyone can feel safe: Using City services; Reporting crimes; Being part of our community. The City of Minneapolis is a Welcoming City. This means everyone is protected and respected when they interact with our employees and services.” ↩︎
Deliberative Dad 