As George Floyd calls out for his mother, we see a crisis of overproduction. This brutal murder by the state can tell us something, not about Floyd himself, who every political actor co-opts for their own agenda, and thus murders an innocent man all over again, but rather about capitalism.

For the right, Floyd is a criminal and deserves to be killed. Candace Owens, herself a victim of a hate crime, led the charge. And yet, where was the principled response? Did Floyd have to follow bourgeois moral law to live? For the liberals, Floyd became a symbol of anti-racism, to be manifested in boardrooms, and ignored in the millions of homeless, prisoners, cancer allies, ghettoes, where populations are deemed surplus places for experiments of capital, flooded with guns, drugs, toxins, and agents of the state. For the left, Floyd becomes a radical, and we read into him potential victory rather than do the honorable thing and admit his murder was another reminder of our defeat and an invitation not to gain hope, but rather discipline ourselves to productive despair and clarify our purpose.

On the streets of Minneapolis, the same Mayor reigns. Elected by a coalition of the rich in the Southwest and the poor in the Northwest, while the base for socialism, the discontented hippies in the Northeast, and the optimistic students in the Southeast, oppose Mayor Jacob Frey. Frey represents a break, from the left, and the right, a defender of the police, a dissident against ICE.

The call for defunding the police has never seemed more obvious in the face of the surge. In a real crisis, any effort by the police to intervene against the federal government produces a crisis, a potential for civil war. Meanwhile, the alternatives to policing, called for by activists, become all the more urgent. These services are done, remarkably, for free, by strangers, many of whom, without a pot to piss in themselves. Communities of care, offering services of all kinds, keep afloat terrified ordinary people, while the city runs bankrupt on overtime for the police, who can either collaborate with Mr. Trump, or wisely sit on their hands, hoping for better days ahead.

Furthermore, to our horror, we find hope: the situation is not wholly tragic. We have the duty to the families torn apart, to bury this hope, and even to condemn it. Human beings meeting each other’s needs is not a happy story and should not be viewed in even a dialectical way. In fact, this is exactly how we allowed Mr. Trump to wield absolute power in the first place.

The entire theory, which should be acknowledged as a catastrophic misreading that has killed millions across the globe, that through the crisis of Trump, people would bond together to form a socialized means of production. Rather, the opposite has happened. Predictably, the fulfillment of human needs has, if not gone underground, organized itself away from the reproduction of capital, and the profit motive has become more concentrated in the hands of financial speculation and polluting technologies.

Much of the sentiment has been racist in nature. For the most part the question of food and medicine to the third world, slashed by Project 2025, has been ignored, for these lives cannot be co-opted for Marxist ends, but rather for liberal American capitalism. Thus we are more likely to have a celebration of famine in Africa than a condemnation. We say that actually existing communism in China, or the superior spirit of the African, will do our work for us and these millions of dead Africans are a path to liberation.

The racial nature of capital expresses itself too in Minneapolis. We must keep the receipts of the argument that all seemed to accept, namely that woke had gone too far. The key to this argument was the paranoia that the state’s intervention into capitalist markets did not only choose elimination of the racial Other, but also, at times, kept her afloat.

Of course the state is always intervening and the battle must be into not if, but how. Much is said about the class nature of the MAGA movement, but one only has to follow the long standing voter suppression to know that America’s politics are not about class, in which the poor are more likely to favor the Democrats in self-defense. But class is not how people vote, more determining is race, gender, geography, education.

For capital moves in these areas, and the poor recognize the negotiation is not over the means of production at this point in time, but rather where the sledgehammer will land next. Thus, the underestimation of Mr. Trump was, of course, racial in nature as well. Underneath all of this was a belief that the Constitution of the United States would save us. We should have listened to the people of color telling us differently.

For the constitution is being expressed more honestly now, in its original form. Of course, revisions were welcome, and must be welcomed again. But at its core we are dealing with a document that is anti-Marxist in nature. One that cements private property rights, away from the state and into the hands of those that can use it for their own ends. Over time these private interests gain more power than the state and ultimately direct the state even if the state outlasts all individual actors.

Rights expanded to others for the purpose of war economy, and capital’s use of the already captured state for its own accumulation. And then taken away again once their labor was no longer needed. Thus, we should understand rights not as a product of superior civilization but rather as something granted to people to order production.

That is to say, none of us owed any rights. Any means of subsistence we have are thanks to the exploitation of labor and nature. Any means to purchase is based on the exploitation of ourselves, or our exploitation of others, both of whom valorize nature. But any rights we have are a different question entirely. For those who own slaves earn rights not in and for themselves but rather so they can valorize the slave. Therefore, the slaveholder must be protected not because capital wants him to suppress his fellow man, but rather because, in order to gain value from this suppression, there must be organization of the slave’s labor.

The question of ICE, the chaos, is likewise a question of organization and of predictability. On the one han,d liberals and conservatives alike get the word out that racial profiling is being done. In a sense getting the word out does reduce the need to actually commit atrocities for the racial Other voluntarily retreats from labor out of fear. Likewise, the humanitarian seeks to fill the needs of those in retreat through activity outside of the market.

And yet this only cements the original crisis of slave labor, migrant labor, prison labor, globalization, deindustrialization, the supposed discontents. For the monopoly on good jobs can be restored to snowflake whitey, but he will find himself without a consumer base. Furthermore, his gain makes him less desirable as a producer for capital, who will look more desirably upon the slave for work than it will the free man.

We should not be afraid to look at the real point of the Minneapolis surge. Much like the investor class, the White House can play with house money. Specifically, the post-financial crisis of 2008 has been one where the very rich can engage in wildly speculative bets, knowing that if they fail, they will be deemed too big to fail and will be bailed out. Therefore, why not be as aggressive as possible in pursuing high-risk, high-reward?

This explains the oddity of the AI bubble, the U.S. bubble, the bubble of Mr. Trump, who has proven again and again to understand the system better than any of us chasing him. How long have commentators claimed that A.I. will crash, the United States will crash, Trump will crash? Romantic thinking in the age of serious crisis.

A.I., of course, has provided very little, if any, benefit to ordinary people while sucking up an unimaginable amount of rapidly dwindling water supply. Even to the capitalist class the use for this technology seems very small. However the investment remains massive. Why? Because there is no competitive advantage in labor. People are more or less the same. While new technology, however useless, can provide a marginal advantage.

The fear of massive job loss from A.I. is utopian. The real crisis is that labor, compared with capital, has been so devalued that there is little incentive to eliminate it. If anything, we have a displacement of first-world labor to third-world labor, prison labor, migrant labor, unprotected and dangerous labor, as the means of production can travel digitally.

Similarly, the United States is propped up by this investment in A.I., the Trump economy, and its strength in the stock market, tied up as well. Meanwhile, China’s state directs investment into the real economy and benefits the rest of the world. And yet there is no crash, only steady decay of the dollar. The gains by China are far more gradual and they remain disciplined.

Back to playing with house money. What has made Mr. Trump successful throughout his life in business and in politics is his willingness to fail upwards. Push to the brink, take the biggest risk, and land the biggest gain, or end up in the same place. The rolling threats of tariffs and invasions to friends and foes alike have resulted in compliance at best, or the status quo at worst.

The goal of the Minneapolis surge was not only to provoke protestors into violence but also to provoke the state of Minnesota into pushing back with the National Guard, sparking a constitutional crisis and the Insurrection Act. In this way, Mr. Trump “failed”, at least so far. And yet in failure, no price was paid, much like his bankruptcies in business, the retreat from Mr. Trump leaves him in a secure position to strike again when the time is right.

Now, one could argue that if Mr. Trump thought the Democratic Party would go to civil war for its base, then he really has lost his mind. However the crisis was/is, and really we should say is, so severe it remains unclear how anyone should rationally respond.

What does the surge entail exactly? More or less a complete shutdown of a local economy. The unpredictable and unaccountable nature of the surge essentially makes for a situation where any person of color, seemingly, could disappear, where no one knows where they went, how to get them back, or if their health is deteriorating without their regular medication.

Now this is applied unevenly but with a sense of fear for everyone in a way. White people, likely spared unless they actively engage, then people of color, are they saved by papers, legal residents a level down and those deemed illegal a level down. Maybe forever prison, maybe the country of origin, but maybe somewhere you’ve never been, a war zone. The sheer amount of agents, and the ability of the administration to communicate that any rule may or may not be followed create a situation in which even without totalizing ability to disappear everyone, everyone wonders, and thus everything is shut down.

And yet at the same time we have to acknowledge that the opposition distributes this information, and even exaggerates it, for humanitarian reasons, but also to legitimize their own political existence, which has not figured out how to provide for people much better than the current administration, and while in power may provide more ways for economic stimulus through green technology and investments in underserved communities. However they too largely must answer to capital, and while out of power, concede to the real goal of the Trump administration, which is not actually to be a fascist state, but rather to stimulate the economy through exploitation. Thus the goal of both sides is in fact to get people of color in hiding, and whites taking care of them for free, while directing capital to its more productive places of greater technology and weaker labor.

The thing about distraction is that when the crisis is more severe, the distraction works even better.

Now one has to remember the absurd arguments being made before the election of Mr. Trump. While no one will dare discuss Greg Palast’s reporting, and this remains an utter mystery, in this present world where we ignore the elections, for all appearances, there was a real dismissal of the racial nature of capitalism. There was an obsession, across the political spectrum, with downplaying race.

One can recall the bad faith argument by Hillary Clinton, against Bernie Sanders, that taking on Wall Street will not solve racism. In 2020, Mr. Sanders did make a valiant effort to address this critique. However broadly speaking the elephant in the room has not been addressed and the denial of race remains a consensus.

Amidst the surge the racial nature is obvious. People of color, confined to their homes, which are searched without warrants, while white people can roam about, providing value to the economy. The state has always disciplined this free movement of colored bodies, restricting and criminalizing basic economic activity.

Then we get to the assumption of the paid protestor, the genuine belief that those protesting have no self-interest in doing so, and must be getting paid.

The surge was ultimately weakened by some white people, among others, naively acting in the interest of the community. First, a white woman, murdered. This was met with equal horror and hatred. On the one hand, white women are supposed to be killed and controlled by their husbands, not the state. On the other hand, she was stupid to be there. There was a sense this is wrong, the state should be protecting her role in reproducing strong white men, a mother of three, on the other hand she was a lesbian, she failed. Then the white man is killed. Here the outrage was more clear. Even worse, he was carrying a gun. There was nothing to defend. These ICE agents must be unprofessional police. Professional police know to kill Black men.

Now here we should defend a local Black commentator who said Black people know not to carry arms to a protest. All he was saying was Black people don’t have constitutional rights. Everyone knows this. Amendments were added later, and if we are losing the Fourth, Second, and First Amendments, we have already lost the higher-numbered ones. In fact this line of thought makes the white man who showed up to protest all the more heroic. There was a way out for him and the establishment is genuinely confused why he didn’t take it. Furthermore his act of selflessness upends the system, and forces the powers into retreat.

The reason we should say the surge was a provocation rather than simply the normal targeting of racial enclaves is that they aimed precisely for the communist parts of Minneapolis. Mayor Jacob Frey carried the rich and the ghetto parts of Minneapolis. Mr. Trump largely went for where he thought Marxism would respond, where Minneapolis burned after George Floyd.

However no burning was done and the 2020 crisis has been mischaracterized as well. There was an organized movement for Black lives long before George Floyd and their tactics were never about property damage. Rather the property damage was spontaneous and all “crime” is necessarily labeled as colored when in reality, precisely for this reason, people of color remain more disciplined. This is not to endorse or condemn the riots but merely to say genuine chaos rising from below is just different from organized activism and the Trump administration seems to have conflated the two as has the liberal class who seemingly embraced defund the police, only to retreat to a lament for the ordinary state of affairs of precise racial targeting in the face of Mr. Trump.

Dominating the headlines is a conspiratorial theory of capital from above, which once again serves as a scapegoat of the Jewish people, while the targeting of capital’s destruction from below, upon the racial Other, remains unexamined. Can one not take Gaza, the place where experiments with weapons and surveillance systems overwhelm people and the environment with destruction as the most obvious misreading across the political spectrum? Is it not the case that from right to left we mask a consensus of capital, an integrated global trading system, where all our illusions, liberal democracy, actually existing communism, third world nationalism, are willing collaborators in support of this testing ground? And anyone who brings up the obvious is accused of naive liberalism, of identity politics, or sympathy for a people who will always, somehow end up pulling the strings?

Do these reactionaries, always on the back foot, lagging behind capital’s speed, have an answer in their precious Epstein files, happily released by the cunning political genius we continue to underestimate for the explicit racial nature of the ICE surge in the Twin Cities metro area? We should have no doubt they will make up the devil pulling the strings, but by the time they find him it will be long after capital creates him to distract from the crisis and indeed to become collaborators in chaos, disorder and mind control.

Of course, Mr. Trump’s genius is perhaps striking enough where one could become conspiratorial about his role, although that may even be wishful thinking. What has characterized the Trump era has been excuse after excuse. Every time something awful happens it is dismissed as simply capitalism, neoliberalism, etc. as commentators cower behind intellectual posturing. Paradoxically, every time Mr. Trump misdirects the supposed free thinker to a grand theory of history that exonerates Mr. Trump, the President is given no credit for outsmarting his intellectual colleagues.

Many speculate that Mr. Trump reads Hitler, and many claim that they, the opposition, read Marx. It appears the opposite may be the case, that Mr. Trump understands capital, and we only think we are ahead in the race because Mr. Trump has nearly lapped us. The way out, a socialized means of production, was supposedly going to simply appear from the crisis that Mr. Trump created. Laughing to the bank, Mr. Trump has observed a socialized means of care and community, naively fetishized by outside observers as a step towards socialism rather than a means of survival for a community under attack.

While sentiment celebrates defeat and heartbreak, Mr. Trump wins victory every day as he cunningly consolidates power in global capital relations. Back to caring for our loved ones, we go. There is dignity in that, but no victory. All those interested in a socialized means of production should be learning from Mr. Trump. A civil war was avoided in Minneapolis, and of course, this was his goal. We can stand for moral victories when none exist. The only victory is socialism. For every other mode of production will grind down people and planet to a pulp.

Those of us with our eyes on the prize tip our cap to the undefeated Donald John Trump, who perhaps even understates himself. We find ourselves thanking him for not kidnapping our family members. And then we wonder, after these ridiculous words come out of our mouths, how did we get so bad at negotiating? The answer may lie in misunderstanding our own rights, not won through struggle, but given to us only because of our usefulness to the accumulation of capital.

For we are at the mercy of the morality of Mr. Trump now. Complex systems have bowed before him, kissing the ring for crumbs. Many a day some of us have banged the table, demanding our elimination, and yet we are so small our king does not notice or care. Thus we return to the drawing board, with humble and heavy hearts, acknowledging the costs of believing in the system we claimed to condemn.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Federal authorities have denied attempting to expedite an end to asylum claims by the family of a 5-year-old boy who was detained with his father during the immigration crackdown that has shaken the Minneapolis area.

Images of Liam Conejo Ramos wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack surrounded by immigration officers stirred outrage over the crackdown.

Danielle Molliver, a lawyer for the boy and his father, told the New York Times that the government was attempting to speed up the deportation proceedings, calling the actions “extraordinary” and possibly “retaliatory.”

The government denied that.

“These are regular removal proceedings. They are not in expedited removal,” Department of Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, adding “there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.”

Molliver told the Times that an immigration judge, during a closed Friday hearing, gave her additional time to argue the family’s case.

The boy and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, who originally is from Ecuador, were detained in a Minneapolis suburb on Jan. 20. They were taken to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas.

They were released following a judge’s order and returned to Minnesota on Feb. 1.

Neighbors and school officials have accused federal immigration officers of using the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would come outside. DHS has called that description of events an “abject lie.” It said the father fled on foot and left the boy in a running vehicle in their driveway.

The government said the boy’s father entered the U.S. illegally from Ecuador in December 2024. The family’s lawyer said he has an asylum claim pending that allows him to stay in the U.S.

Copyright
© 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

This essay will appear in the upcoming March 2026 issue of First Things.

It’s tempting, given the pace of our news ­cycle these days, to resist the urge to crown any one event as a watershed moment. But at this moment, that resistance is hard to maintain. The January 24 shooting of a nurse named Alex Pretti in Minnesota may turn out to be just such a cataclysm. 

This one feels different. When Renée Good, another anti-ICE protestor, was shot and killed on ­January 7 ­after she refused to comply with federal agents’ ­instructions and get out of her car, the public debate focused primarily on trying to ascertain whether or not Good was attempting to run an agent over with her Honda Pilot. For days, social media platforms and news outlets shared videos of the incident, taken from several angles, and the argument, heated as it was, revolved around an attempt to declare Good incontrovertibly guilty or ­innocent. 

No such presumption of an ultimately knowable truth accompanied the killing of Pretti. Although some time was spent debating specific questions, such as the point at which the late nurse was disarmed of his handgun, the energy was all feeling and no facts.  

I’ve spent days collecting responses to Pretti’s killing, culled from various sources, ranging from public posts to private communications on WhatsApp groups and text chains. Take this sample with a grain of salt, but ignore it at your peril.

“My kids are old enough,” mused one middle-aged man in a message to his friend group. “They can live without me, but not without democracy and liberty, and I’m willing to die to make sure that they never have to see America descend into autocratic darkness.”

“Ready to be drafted into the civil war,” another suburban mom on Instagram wrote: “Here to fight against federal crimes by any means necessary.”  

“We will remember the perpetrators in perpetuity and bring them to justice just as we did the Nazis,” another dad opined on Facebook. “We don’t just want justice; we want revenge.” 

The commenters cited above, and throngs of others just like them, aren’t wild-eyed radicals. They’re not college kids hopped up on ideological intoxication, carefree and oblivious to consequences. They’re not professional agitators committed to chaos. Like Good and Pretti, they’re responsible adults with steady jobs and loving families, and yet they have taken complete and utter leave of their senses. 

Because this is a great, godly, and free country, we are all at liberty to protest against government policies we find objectionable. But referring to the lawful attempt to capture and deport a criminal who is in this country illegally—the man whose arrest Pretti was trying to subvert, Jose Huerta-Chuma, is an Ecuadorian national with a record of domestic assault and disorderly conduct—as a crime comparable to those of the Gestapo isn’t dissent; it’s lunacy. 

And it’s not reserved for random pundits. Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg took to social media to call on his fellow Americans to band together and stop “masked, militarized government agents” from terrorizing “politically noncompliant areas” with impunity. Remember what happened the last time Democrats considered some states to be entirely within their rights to be politically noncompliant, free to disregard the authority of the federal government?

Which leaves those of us who love this country ­unabashedly and unreservedly with a conundrum: How do we stop this madness?

The first step is to identify the disease for precisely what it is. What we’re facing is neither a political nor a partisan challenge: It’s a full-blown spiritual crisis. 

What compels a normal person, a parent with a steady job and a mortgage and a host of other responsibilities, to decide one fine morning that it is his or her duty to go and actively disrupt federal agents in the course of their duty, ignoring common sense, civic norms, and basic courtesy? It’s not just the result of years of propaganda, during which the media has been calling our president an illegitimate tyrant and deeming his policies—lawful and precedented as they may be—a descent into fascism. The answer is deeper and more painful than that. 

Good and Pretti’s cohort, born anywhere from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, was reared on a package of ­promises. Study hard, went the storyline, and soon enough you, too, will feast on your slice of the American dream. Then came the great financial crisis of 2008, which hit these young Americans in their peak earning years, and, for the first time in history, Americans experienced downward mobility. Consider the following: Among men born in the 1930s, a whopping 60 percent did better, financially speaking, than their parents; according to a 2019 Stanford survey, among those born in the late 1980s, only 44 percent enjoyed higher socioeconomic status than their moms and dads. 

Try to find solace from this unhappy reality in church, say, and you’ll discover that the pews aren’t as full as they used to be. Turn to traditional sources of comfort like books or TV shows, and you’ll find that they’ve been captured by radicals more concerned with re-education than entertainment. Look around you, and you’ll find your friends hooked on internet porn, legalized marijuana, sports gambling, and other self-destructive behaviors. Marriage rates have plummeted. Birth rates are at an all-time low. Deaths of despair—from overdose or suicide—are claiming tens of thousands each year. Is it any wonder that so many, eager for something that feels pure and just, would turn to politics for meaning, especially when encouraged to do so by so many cynical actors, from politicians to well-endowed NGOs? And not just politics in the ordinary sense of civic-mindedness, but radical politics, which is adorned with pretensions to heroic virtue.

Which leads us to the second—and arguably much harder—step of helping our fellow Americans out of their spiritual rut and rescuing them from the maws of destructive, radical rage. To do that, we must hold two contradictory ideas in our minds at the same time. 

Our initial response must—always, always, always—be love. We must let our compassion and empathy grow as all-consuming as the rage of our friends and neighbors. We must engage them, not with attempts at persuasion, conviction, or reasoning, but with warmth. We must remind them that there’s a larger, more meaningful world of relationships outside the realm of hyper-­engaged politics. We must urge them not to be martyrs for some imaginary future deliverance. We need them to be present right here and now as sisters and brothers, parents and children, friends and members of our community. Sit your radicalized neighbor down. Pour her a cup of coffee. Tell him a funny joke. Discuss a book you’ve read lately. Take a minute to give thanks for all the bounties we have in life. Nothing could be more grounding, or more soothing, or more in accordance with things that matter most in life.

Will that work? Not necessarily, and certainly not always. Which brings us to the second, and more difficult, response: the painful yet unavoidable break with some, perhaps many, of those we hold dear.

I am not, God forbid, advocating, or even prognosticating, a civil war. I believe that the necessary divide, unlike that of 1861, will manifest itself in other, far less bloody ways. Ours is a covenantal nation, and we renew the covenant every century or so. To promote this renewal, we must double down on our commitment to first principles. But it is evident that those we have tried our best to embrace may wish to go a different way. Human freedom being what it is, we can’t prevent them from succumbing to the flashy temptations of righteous rage. And if they choose to do so, they must be rejected firmly and swiftly. We can’t pretend that there’s covenantal unity when it does not exist. And we can’t jeopardize our core national virtues in order to appease our unremitting neighbors. 

In the coming months, we’re likely to hear calls for dialing down the temperature, de-escalating, engaging in dialogue. Some of these exhortations may be fitting. But let’s not be naive. The argument we’re having isn’t about the legality or efficacy of this or that policy. It’s about the very soul of this nation. I count myself among the party of believers—in God, in America, in a rosy future. We must rise to the occasion and do whatever we can to heal our collective afflictions. Pursue the strategy of embrace. Try to refocus the conversation around the joys, hopes, and beliefs we all still share. But, at the same time, let’s make sure we don’t abandon our core virtues for the short-lived comfort of false compromise. Yes, embrace our misguided neighbors, but with adamantine clarity that their radicalism must be defeated.

It’s a mighty task—every moment of covenantal renewal is nothing but. And yet, as we celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, we’re strengthened by the examples of those who came before us. Let’s trust our fellow Americans to have the compassion to try and resolve our differences amicably. And let’s have the courage to defend our country’s core values without faltering. It’s our turn now.