The Price of Words Under Occupation

The federal occupation of the Twin Cities makes it clear that the liberal constitutional order is being dissolved by the raw application of state violence.

The public execution of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis was not a malfunction of policing but a successful operation of the state in its purest, most unmasked form. When Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander overseeing the federal occupation, stood before the cameras to address the killing, he did not offer the usual bureaucratic apologies or promises of investigation. Instead, he delivered a message of crystalline clarity that shattered the liberal illusion of a social contract. Bovino explicitly linked the use of lethal force to the political speech of the citizenry, warning that describing federal agents as a “Gestapo” or accusing them of “kidnapping” invites fatal consequences. This was not a warning about public safety; it was a declaration of sovereignty by an occupying army. Bovino established a direct causal link between the exercise of the First Amendment and the summary execution of a citizen, effectively deputizing every federal agent as a judge, jury, and executioner on the streets of America. We have arrived at the “what are you going to do about it” stage of the fascist trajectory, where the regime no longer hides its crimes but flaunts them as a dare to the population.

This rhetorical maneuver transforms the relationship between the state and the subject, stripping away the veneer of consent to reveal the naked force beneath. By framing the act of witnessing and criticizing as an escalation that justifies death, the state has nullified the Bill of Rights in practice, even if it remains on paper to comfort the naive. The right to free speech creates a material vulnerability rather than a protective shield. When Bovino suggests that Pretti died because he chose to listen to “politicians” and “so-called journalists” who criticize law enforcement, he is articulating a doctrine of collective punishment. The state views the population of Minneapolis not as citizens with rights to be protected, but as a hostile insurgency to be pacified. In this paradigm, holding a phone to record state violence is reclassified as an act of aggression, and speaking truth to power is treated as a capital offense. The chilling effect is immediate and intentional. The objective is to produce a docile population that is too terrified to look up, let alone speak out against the armed men patrolling their neighborhoods.

In a sick way, it is satisfying that twenty-three years later, all of the screaming we did in the streets was correct. I remember protesting the Afghanistan war and being called a terrorist by passersby who bought the lie of national unity. I remember opposing the invasion of Iraq and being told by neighbors and pundits alike that I should be hanged for treason. I remember holding signs in 2001 in the public square, warning that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security would literally lead to the institutionalization of Nazi-style death squads within our lifetimes, and being called overly dramatic for it by my peers. We were dismissed as hysterics, as the “crazy” left who didn’t understand the necessity of safety. And now, the “crazy” left turned out to be one-hundred percent correct, and all of the liberal gaslighting was woefully and likely willfully wrong. The infrastructure of terror we warned about has been turned inward, exactly as we predicted, and the very people who called us paranoid are now asking how this could have happened.

This nightmare is the bastard child of a bipartisan consensus, forged by post-9/11 authoritarians who craved an imperial presidency and the liberals who eagerly cemented it. We must confront the uncomfortable material reality that the Obama administration did not dismantle the Bush-era machinery of war; they streamlined it, normalizing the state of exception and annually inflating the National Defense Authorization Act to monstrous proportions. For two decades, every legislative session offered a choice between decency and the prison state, and the liberal establishment consistently chose to fortify the walls. Even after the attempted self-coup of January 6th, the Democrats spent four years refusing to dismantle the executive powers that had been weaponized against them. Instead of neutralizing the threat, they polished the weapons and kept the engine running, ultimately handing Donald Trump the keys to the prison state when they should have been locking him in one.

The validation of those early warnings is cold comfort as we watch the predictions materialize in blood on the sidewalk. The Department of Homeland Security, nurtured by that very bipartisan consensus, was never built to protect the people; it was constructed to protect the state from the people. The agents currently roaming Minneapolis represent the logical endpoint of a system designed to operate with absolute impunity, shielded by the layers of secrecy and authorized violence that consecutive administrations labored to perfect. The “death squads” are no longer a dystopian warning but a present reality, embodied by men like Jonathan Ross and the executioners of Alex Pretti. The liberal establishment, which once mocked our fears while dutifully voting to fund these agencies year after year, is now paralyzed by the monster they helped feed. They believed that the institutions they fortified would save them, failing to realize that those institutions were designed to be the specific weapons of their own oppression. The trajectory was always leading here, to a moment where federal agents could murder citizens in broad daylight and their commanders would defend it as a necessary consequence of disobedience.

The murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti serve as a violent refutation of the First and Second Amendments, exposing the fraudulence of the claim that constitutional rights act as a check on tyranny. The Trump administration is sending a clear message: do not record ICE, do not carry a gun around ICE, and do not ask ICE for a warrant. Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a valid permit, yet this legal status offered him no protection; instead, the mere presence of a weapon served as the retroactive justification for his murder. The state claims a monopoly on violence that supersedes any constitutional provision. The right to bear arms exists only for those who align themselves with the state’s agenda. For anyone else, the mere possession of a weapon, or even the suspicion of one, is a death warrant. The federal apparatus has demonstrated that it will interpret the presence of an armed citizen not as a right to be respected, but as a threat to be neutralized immediately.

This erasure of rights extends to the Fourth Amendment, which has been rendered a dead letter by the operational realities of the occupation. Federal agents are conducting raids on private homes without judicial warrants, relying on internal administrative paperwork generated within the Department of Homeland Security. This closed loop of authorization removes the judiciary entirely from the equation, allowing the executive branch to authorize its own intrusions into private life. The concept of “unreasonable search and seizure” has been redefined by the aggressors to exclude their own actions from scrutiny. When agents can smash through doors and abduct residents based on internal memos, the home is no longer a sanctuary but merely another zone of operations. The legal protections that were supposed to guard against arbitrary state power have been dismantled, leaving only the raw will of the federal enforcement apparatus and the terror it inspires in the families it targets.

The erosion of the Sixth Amendment is equally stark, as the masked anonymity of the agents and the summary nature of the violence preclude any possibility of due process. There is no trial, no jury, and no defense attorney when a federal agent decides to open fire in a residential neighborhood. The execution of citizens in the street demonstrates that the state has arrogated to itself the power to administer the ultimate punishment without any procedural hurdles. The masking of agents further ensures that this violence remains anonymous and unaccountable. A defendant cannot confront their accuser if the accuser is a faceless stormtrooper who answers to no local authority. This anonymity is a structural feature of the occupation, designed to sever the link between individual actions and legal consequences for the enforcers of state terror, ensuring that they can operate as ghosts within the legal system while inflicting very real casualties on the population.

The liberal establishment’s response to this systematic dismantling of the Bill of Rights has been catastrophically inadequate because it relies on the very institutions that are being liquidated. Democrats and union leaders continue to appeal to the rule of law, filing lawsuits and issuing statements, failing to recognize that the law itself has become a weapon of the enemy. They operate under the delusion that the Constitution is a self-enforcing document rather than a social relation that reflects the balance of power. By appealing to the courts or the administration’s conscience, they validate the very system that is crushing them. Their failure to call for the immediate physical expulsion of federal forces reveals their ultimate allegiance to the state’s stability over the lives of the people. They fear the chaos of resistance more than they fear the order of fascism, and in doing so, they have rendered themselves obsolete in the fight for survival.

We have reached the point of no return where the only question that matters is what you are going to do about it. It is not too late to stop Trump from overthrowing America, but it will require everyone who isn’t a fascist to take a risk and stand in public against this regime. The time for private disapproval and social media commentary is over. The state is betting that the population is too comfortable, too frightened, and too divided to offer meaningful resistance. They are banking on our inaction. Every day that we allow these agents to operate in our cities without confrontation is a day we concede ground that we may never get back. We must step out of the comfort of our homes and into the uncertainty of the streets, knowing that safety is no longer guaranteed by silence. In fact, silence has become the most dangerous position of all, for it invites the encroaching darkness to advance without hindrance.

The resistance in Minneapolis offers a glimpse of the courage required to meet this moment, characterized by autonomous direct action and community defense. Rapid response networks, neighborhood defense committees, and the physical blockade of ICE operations represent a reclamation of power by the people. These actions do not rely on the state’s permission or on the protection of the Constitution; they rely on the material strength of solidarity and the willingness to physically intervene in the machinery of death. It is an anarchist response to an authoritarian crisis, asserting that we keep ourselves safe, not the police, not the courts, and not the politicians. This is the only path forward that acknowledges the reality of the situation: that the government has declared war on its people, and the people must organize their own defense or perish.

The threat issued by Bovino must be understood as a pivotal moment in American history, marking the end of the liberal consensus. It is the moment when the state explicitly conditions the right to life on total submission to its narrative. It is the formalization of a death squad politics where the price of speech is the bullet. To accept this new normal is to accept the status of a subject rather than a free person. It is to accept that the Bill of Rights has been replaced by the rules of engagement of an occupying army. The silence of the grave that the fascists seek to impose must be shattered not by pleas for mercy, but by a roar of defiance that makes the continued occupation materially impossible. We must refuse to let their violence become the background noise of our lives.

Now is the time when we will each think back either in shame of our inaction or with pride that we stood for something greater than ourselves. The history of this era will not be written by the politicians who issued statements of concern, but by the people who put their bodies between the agents of the state and their neighbors. We are being tested, not on our political opinions, but on our moral courage. We had all of the warning signs that this day would come, and now that it is here, the only thing that matters is the actions we take to stop it. We must become ungovernable, for it is the only way to survive a government that has declared war on its own people. The Constitution is a paper shield against lead bullets, riddled with holes. Only our communities, through solidarity and mutual aid, can be our true shields in the streets where the future will be decided.