Hippocratic Oaf

There are certain phrases Americans keep polished and mounted above the fireplace because examining them too closely might ruin dinner.

Public service.
Family values.
The sanctity of life.

And that magnificent old chestnut:  First, do no harm.

A noble idea. Clean. Reassuring. The sort of thing I imagine women want floating around in the mind of a man standing between their knees with a medical degree and several thousand dollars' worth of stainless-steel instruments.

But apparently the warranty expires somewhere between the examination room and accounts receivable.

Because Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall — Republican, physician, longtime OB-GYN and professional defender of the sanctity of human life — has suddenly found himself staring down one hell of a medical chart.

According to a new New York Times investigation, Marshall and his medical practice filed lawsuits against more than 700 former patients over unpaid bills.

Some debts ran into the thousands. One was $101.

The practice routinely charged 18 percent annual interest. That is the kind of number that makes you wonder whether your OB-GYN accepts Blue Cross or whether you should just ask for Tony Soprano. At least Tony would have the professional courtesy not to call it health care.

Wages and bank accounts were garnished. And 81 patients were eventually arrested after failing to appear in court in connection with the collection lawsuits.

Sweet Jesus. You could lock a team of political satirists in a Topeka motel with six cases of Red Bull and a whiteboard and they would not improve those numbers.

700 lawsuits.
18 percent interest.
81 arrests.
$101.

This isn't a scandal. It's a billing statement from the Republic. First, do no harm. Then calculate the APR.

The Miracle of Life, Plus Interest

Marshall spent more than 25 years practicing obstetrics in western Kansas and has made his medical career an essential part of his political identity. He has proudly noted that he delivered more than 5,000 babies.

Five thousand.

That is a lot of first breaths, tiny fingers, exhausted mothers and terrified fathers.

It is also, apparently, a hell of a customer base.

Marshall's spokeswoman says he treated patients regardless of their ability to pay and argues that the lawsuits must be understood in the brutal economics of rural medicine — keeping the doors open, keeping doctors available, keeping the hospital lights burning.

And there is truth buried in that defense. Rural medicine is in crisis. Hospitals do not run on prairie virtue. Doctors deserve to be paid.

But then you hit the 18 percent interest rate and the wagon starts losing wheels.

Eighteen percent. On medical debt. In rural Kansas.

This is where the country doctor story starts growing loan-shark teeth.

According to the Times, roughly half the lawsuits were filed under Marshall's own name and the remainder by Heartland Regional OBGYN, a practice he owned or co-owned. Many defendants lived in Barton County, where poverty and lack of health insurance were more common than nationally.

Some of the debts arose from childbirth.

Which gives us one of those uniquely American transactions that would be dismissed as heavy-handed dystopian fiction if it hadn't actually happened.

You have a baby. You go home bleeding, exhausted and terrified that this seven-pound creature will stop breathing if you look away for thirty seconds.

And somewhere across town, a clock begins ticking.

The miracle of life has been delivered successfully, now please remit payment.

The Times reported that Kellie Clutts was sued in 2015 over a $129 postpartum bill. Her baby was nine months old. Her bank account was eventually garnished.

Over one hundred twenty-nine dollars? Members of the United States Senate can spend more than that on dinner without remembering what they ate. But out on the plains, apparently, $129 can become a legal proceeding.

Easter in Kansas

Then we reach Joe Vasquez and his wife. Mrs. Vasquez underwent an emergency hysterectomy. The couple owed $4,561. Marshall sued.

They missed a court appearance. Then came Easter weekend, 2007. Their grandchildren were preparing for an egg hunt when police arrived.

Grandma and Grandpa went to jail.

They stayed there for two days until their son could borrow enough money to post bond.

Stop there.

No embellishment.

No metaphor.

Just look at the picture.

Plastic Easter eggs scattered around a Kansas yard while two grandparents are hauled away after medical debt became litigation, litigation became a missed court appearance, and the missed appearance became a warrant.

Let's be clear that, according to the law, they were not arrested merely because they owed Marshall money. The warrants resulted from failures to appear in court during the collection proceedings. That distinction matters legally and factually.

Morally, however, it reveals something uglier.

Look at the machine: A patient cannot pay a medical bill. Roger Marshall sues. The legal machinery starts grinding. The patient fails to appear. The court issues a warrant. The police arrive.

And suddenly everybody involved can point toward the previous cog and announce that none of this was really their decision.

The doctor didn't make the arrest.

The lawyer didn't issue the warrant.

The judge didn't perform the hysterectomy.

The sheriff didn't set the interest rate.

Everybody's hands are clean.

It's a miracle.

The machinery has somehow produced handcuffs without anybody ever touching the controls.

This is the great genius of institutional cruelty: responsibility disappears one procedural step at a time.

The Eighteen Percent Question

Marshall's former attorney told the Times that Marshall was not personally involved in deciding when attorneys sought warrants, arrests or garnishments. He left collection tactics to the law firm.

That fact belongs here. It matters.

But then comes the other fact: According to the same attorney, Marshall set the 18 percent interest rate.

And there it is. The doctor may not have been driving every vehicle in the convoy, but apparently he helped set the speed limit. 

Eighteen percent is not a clerical error. It is not something that crawled out of QuickBooks at midnight and began reproducing. Someone decided on it.

And medical debt is not ordinary consumer debt. Nobody comparison-shops an emergency hysterectomy.

Nobody says, "Doc, the bleeding is pretty bad, but your financing terms are murder. What can you do if I put twenty percent down?"

Nobody walks into an obstetrics ward because the Labor Day sale looked irresistible.

The transaction begins with vulnerability: You are pregnant. You are bleeding. You are sick.You are frightened.

You need help now.

Then the crisis passes, and the invoice arrives. Then interest. Then lawyers. Then court. Then garnishment.

Then, for some people who fail to appear, warrants.

A lawsuit over $101 is a moral Rorschach test.

You either look at it and see something grotesque or you begin explaining administrative overhead.

And Then the Doctor Went to Washington

Had Roger Marshall retired from medicine and disappeared onto a ranch somewhere, this might be merely an ugly artifact from the subterranean history of American health care.

But Marshall did not retire into obscurity. He went to Washington.

Marshall won a House seat in 2016 and later became a United States senator, carrying his identity as a Kansas country doctor all the way to the Capitol.

The physician-legislator. The man who had seen American health care from the inside. And in 2017, he joined the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Well, that résumé reads somewhat differently now. Because there are several ways to acquire "firsthand experience with America's health-care system."

You can learn what happens when a working family gets crushed by medical expenses. Or you can learn precisely which forms need to be filed to collect them.

Both technically qualify as experience. Only one looks good in a campaign commercial.

Marshall's campaign says this reporting unfairly transforms the financial realities of rural medicine into an election-year scandal. His spokeswoman argues that he treated people regardless of ability to pay and was trying to keep rural medical care alive.

Fine. Put that defense on the table. Let Kansas voters inspect it.

But while we're inspecting things, perhaps somebody can explain exactly how many $101 lawsuits are required to keep the hospital lights on.

And whether the bulbs get noticeably brighter at 18 percent APR.

Make America Glum Again

 Losing 23,000 jobs in July is just part of the grand economic strategy. You don't have to worry about high gas prices or inflation destroying your paycheck if you simply no longer have a paycheck. 4D chess. 📈🧠

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/business/economy/us-economy-gdp-growth.html?smid=url-share

A Tale of Two Balance Sheets

There are two ledgers in America now. 

One belongs to the Republic (that is, you, me and the rest of us non-billionaires). The other belongs to the Ruling Family.

The first bleeds red ink by the trillions of gallons. The other has discovered that foreign sovereign wealth travels first class.

Our country now carries nearly $39 trillion in national debt—a figure so immense that people react to it the way we react when Patrick Mahomes stays on the turf a beat too long. For a split second, everyone feels genuine terror. Then the cameras cut away, the crowd convinces itself he just needs to walk it off, and the game goes on as though panic itself were unpatriotic.

But, just when the federal government has ostensibly embraced austerity as its defining political virtue, billions of dollars in state-linked foreign investment have flowed into business ventures associated with the Trump Crime Family.

Those two stories—if they are reported—typically appear on different pages. They should be in the same sentence.

Trump returned to power promising nothing less than a controlled demolition of the administrative state. Through the Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE, because apparently every Trump initiative must first survive the branding department—it pledged to slash contracts, eliminate waste, and reduce the civilian workforce by roughly ten percent. Trump told Americans that somewhere inside the federal bureaucracy lurked the secret villain responsible for the nation's fiscal crisis.

Unfortunately, like most marketing campaigns, DOGE offered more snake oil than substance.

The 21-year-old interns in DOGE focused overwhelmingly on discretionary spending—the comparatively small slice of the federal budget devoted to agency operations and personnel. The principal engines driving long-term debt, including mandatory spending programs and rapidly escalating interest costs, remained largely untouched. Meanwhile, ill-considered mass personnel layoffs generated substantial near-term costs through severance obligations, while reductions in IRS staffing are projected to reduce future tax collections by hundreds of billions of dollars.

The theory seemed to be that enough pink slips could somehow frighten a $39 trillion balance sheet into behaving itself.

Arithmetic, however, has never shown much respect for political messaging.

So, let's try some missiles.

Military operations against Iran introduced tens of billions of dollars in expenditures that were never in what passes these days for a fiscal plan. Those operations, like so much of modern American governance, were financed through additional borrowing. The conflict also contributed to renewed pressure on global energy markets at a moment when inflation remained stubbornly above the Federal Reserve's target, complicating the path toward lower interest rates and increasing the government's cost of financing new debt.

Our leaders are remarkably adept at borrowing money to pay interest on what they borrowed to finance promises made before creepy Ty Masterson had discovered hair gel.

Through the first three quarters of the fiscal year, the Treasury accumulated roughly $1.4 trillion in additional debt. Net interest payments now exceed $20 billion every week, making the cost of servicing yesterday's borrowing one of the largest expenditures in the federal budget.

This is the bleak status of the public ledger. But don't worry, at least the private ledger tells a happier story.

While the public piles up debt to pay for debt, businesses connected to the Trump Family have attracted billions of dollars from foreign sovereign wealth funds and state-linked investors. Public reporting has documented substantial commitments to Trump-branded real estate developments, investment partnerships, and cryptocurrency ponzi schemes ventures involving capital originating from governments or government-affiliated entities in the Gulf region and elsewhere.

Apparently "America First" comes with a caveat that foreign capital remains perfectly acceptable, provided it arrives through the correct Trump-affiliated revolving door.

Whether every transaction is ultimately lawful is one question. Whether every arrangement reflects sound constitutional judgment is another.

The framers of the Constitution understood the difference.

Having watched European courts convert political influence into commercial opportunity, they knew corruption rarely looked like a sack of gold labeled "Bribe". It wore finer tailoring. It arrived bearing partnerships, investment opportunities, and mutually beneficial business deals. Human nature, they understood, has always hired excellent accountants.

They wrote that concern into the Constitution itself. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits federal officeholders from accepting benefits from foreign states without congressional consent. The Domestic Emoluments Clause limits the president's financial compensation from governmental sources beyond the salary established by law.

Whether Trump's shady business deals ultimately violate those constitutional provisions remains unresolved. Previous emoluments litigation largely ended on procedural grounds before courts reached the constitutional merits. The legal questions remain open.

But the ethical questions don't disappear just because the legal ones are unsettled. They become more difficult.

Luxury developments in Qatar, Oman, Dubai, and Vietnam promise licensing income and management fees associated with projects backed by foreign capital. Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners has secured billions of dollars from Gulf sovereign wealth funds, generating substantial management revenue regardless of short-term market performance. None of these arrangements automatically establishes a constitutional violation. They do create the appearance of overlapping financial interests that the framers regarded with profound suspicion.

And it is super suspicious that we have a Trump administration telling us that sacrifice is unavoidable, agencies must shrink, efficiency requires layoffs and your services are going to be drastically reduced...

... And on the other hand is at the center of an expanding constellation of luxury developments, sovereign investment funds, licensing agreements, management fees, and private equity partnerships quietly demonstrating that austerity is apparently a policy preference rather than a lifestyle.

Perhaps the overlap is entirely coincidental. Maybe every foreign policy decision has been made wholly independent of private financial considerations. Maybe Trump doesn't care at all about money. 

Those extremely hypothetic possibilities don't eliminate the conflict. They define it.

The founders understood something the Trump Family wants us to forget:

Influence rarely arrives kicking down the front door. It books a reservation. It attends conferences. It hires prestigious law firms. It invests through sovereign wealth funds.

It purchases penthouses overlooking immaculate skylines while everyone insists that business and politics use separate elevators.

Corruption might change its wardrobe, but it rarely changes its business model.

America has survived wars, depressions, constitutional crises, and financial panics because it has generally insisted upon one stubborn principle: public office exists to serve the Republic, not the balance sheet of those fortunate enough to occupy it. 

The Emoluments Clauses were not drafted because the framers believed every officeholder would become corrupt. They were drafted because they understood that republics do not collapse only through dramatic acts of treason. More often, they erode gradually, one perfectly legal transaction at a time, until no one can remember where public duty ended and private opportunity began.

Noemland insecurity

The Department of Homeland Security is not a campaign ad. It is not a cable-news green room with a bigger budget, or a vanity social media propaganda app.

It is a 260,000-employee nerve center responsible for border enforcement, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, FEMA coordination, and disaster response. It is where managerial errors echo in real time.

And yet, in Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s second term, DHS has become the latest example of a governing philosophy that prizes loyalty over competence.

Kristi Noem’s tenure as secretary started out turbulent and only got worse. Immigration enforcement operations drew national scrutiny. In one widely criticized episode, victims killed in a fatal encounter with ICE agents were characterized as “domestic terrorists” before facts were established — a rhetorical leap that undercut credibility (a vanishing commodity in this administration) at a moment demanding precision.

As Noem flailed, the department entered a partial shutdown amid congressional dissatisfaction with its strategic direction, and its own inspector general accused DHS leadership of obstructing oversight work — an extraordinary charge for an agency entrusted with safeguarding constitutional order. 

At the same time, morale plummeted as enforcement priorities appeared increasingly driven by headline numbers rather than targeted, sustainable strategy.

Noem was removed earlier this week. It should have been a moment for recalibration — a pivot toward technocratic steadiness, toward a leader with deep experience in national security management or emergency coordination.

Instead, the felon-in-chief signaled his intention to nominate Sen. Markwayne Mullin.

Mullin’s résumé includes small-business ownership and a Senate seat. What it does not include is executive leadership in counterterrorism architecture, intelligence coordination, border command structures, cybersecurity infrastructure, or disaster logistics — the core machinery of DHS.

Hell, his résumé doesn't even include a bachelor's degree. 

The through-line is allegiance, not administrative qualifications.

Presidents are entitled to appoint leaders who share their policy views. That is democratic governance. But when blind loyalty becomes the primary credential for overseeing complex security institutions, the cost is self-inflicted vulnerability and avoidable national risk.

DHS is not built for improvisation. It requires fluency in interagency coordination, statutory limits, operational chain-of-command discipline, and crisis logistics. It demands respect for oversight, not friction with it. It demands credibility with career professionals who keep the system running long after political cycles end.

When leadership is selected for loyalty first and fluency second, agencies deform. Career staff learn that posture outweighs performance. Oversight becomes adversarial. Messaging drifts ahead of evidence. Mistakes are defended instead of corrected.

Homeland security can't and shouldn't function on personal devotion.

Noem’s malfeasance exposed the limits of appointing political allies to manage sprawling security institutions. Doubling down with another figure whose principal qualification is proximity to presidential power suggests the lesson absorbed was not “we need deeper expertise,” but “we need tighter loyalty.”

That is a dangerous substitution.

Border security, cyber defense, counterterrorism, disaster response — these are systems that either operate with disciplined competence or fail under pressure. The American public doesn't benefit from theatrical resolve. It benefits from steady, qualified leadership.

Loyalty may be useful in politics, but it's not a homeland security strategy.

The less things change...

"The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War."

– Hunter S. Thompson, 2003
"Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

Free speech lip service

Talk about your absurd contradictions. There's something Onionesque about watching the Kansas GOP supermajority christen a “Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day” while simultaneously tightening the screws on actual speech and free expression in Kansas.

It would be absurdist satire if it weren’t entered into the official legislative journal.

SCR 1615, the resolution designating October 14 as “Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day,” moved through the legislature like crap through Canada goose (but not as pleasant). Republicans advanced it early. It consumed floor time. It generated speeches about liberty, the marketplace of ideas, the sacred American right to speak one’s mind without fear.

But those speeches — delivered with solemn cadence and patriotic flourish — carried the unmistakable stench of performance. Lawmakers spoke of courage and constitutional virtue, invoking free expression as if it were under siege. But for all the rhetorical bluster, the measure itself was nonbinding, symbolic, and materially inconsequential to the daily lives of Kansans.

It was a pageant of principle without policy — a moment of grandstanding that cost nothing politically and delivered nothing substantively.

The vote was decisive. The majority flexed. The calendar gained a commemorative square.

At the same time, debate inside that chamber was being managed with the precision of a soundboard operator hitting the mute button mid-sentence.

Amendments ruled not germane. Motions curtailed. Floor discussion was suppressed under procedural authority that only a supermajority can wield with such disregard for decency. Perfectly legal. Entirely within the rules.

And profoundly ironic (or should I say moronic? I guess both can be true).

Because free speech — if it means anything beyond a slogan — requires tolerance for dissent, not merely celebration of allies.

What unfolded was a kind of civic ventriloquism: a Legislature praising free expression in theory while suppressing it in practice.

The contradiction doesn’t stop at Statehouse chamber doors.

In recent years, this same Kansas GOP supermajority has advanced and enacted measures that critics argue narrow participation in the democratic process itself:

• HB 2332 (2021) restricted who may return advance ballots and created criminal penalties for certain ballot collection practices.
  
• SB 209 (2023) shortened the advance voting period and imposed new limits on ballot drop boxes.
• In 2022, a new congressional map was foisted on Kansans by the supermajority. The heavily gerrymandered map was a transparent attempt at suppressing Democratic voter voices in the 3rd District. 
• Not satisfied, Republican leaders recently went back to the gerrymandering well to try to dredge up even more voter suppression with a mid-decade redistricting effort. While they ultimately declined a special session last November, it won't be a surprise when they try to force this measure through in the current session. 

Supporters frame these laws and redistricting efforts as "election security" and "legitimate political strategy." Critics — including voting rights advocates and many Democratic lawmakers — describe them as structural barriers that reshape who participates and how much their vote weighs.

The dissonance is sharp enough to cut through the rotunda’s marble echo.

A Legislature celebrates “Free Speech” with a named holiday while curtailing debate on the floor through stifling procedural control and suppressing opposing voices with aggressive partisan maneuvering. 

Speech is applauded when it aligns. Participation is managed when it threatens.

Meanwhile, Kansans are told all of this is in defense of liberty? If liberty is the banner, then it is being flown at half-mast.

Free speech isn't merely the right to praise one’s champions. It's the willingness to endure dissent — on the floor, in committee, and at the ballot box. It's messy. It's inconvenient. It lengthens debate instead of trimming it.

What we continue to see instead is far more curated: a ceremonial embrace of “Free Speech” alongside a governing style that prefers efficiency over friction, control over contest.

When you declare a holiday for free speech while cutting off debate, narrowing voter access, and redrawing districts to consolidate power, you invite scrutiny and should expect criticism.

Free speech deserves more than a resolution number.

It deserves a microphone that stays on — and a map that doesn’t mute voters before they ever speak.

Racist is as racist does

There is a particular kind of cowardice that wears a necktie and speaks in complete sentences. It smells like caution, sounds like reason, and survives by never quite touching the thing it claims to condemn. Senator Jerry Moran’s response to Donald Trump’s racist AI video sits squarely in that tradition—clean, polite, and morally insufficient.

Yes, he called it racist. Yes, he said it shouldn’t have been posted. And yes, by modern Republican standards, this apparently qualifies as bravery. But let’s not confuse naming the fire with putting it out.

Moran’s statement reads like a man scolding a broken office printer. The video “should not have been posted.” An unfortunate error. A lapse in judgment. As if the President of the United States accidentally leaned on the wrong button and out popped a piece of digital minstrel propaganda depicting the first black presidential family as animals.

Oops. These things happen. Let’s all move along.

This is nonsense.

What Trump (a convicted felon, let's not forget) posted was not a gaffe. It was not clumsy humor. It was not a meme gone awry. It was a deliberate deployment of one of the oldest racist tropes in Western political history, now turbocharged by AI and blasted out from the most powerful bully pulpit on Earth. That matters. History matters. Power matters.

And when a sitting U.S. senator responds to that act with a gentle verbal wrist-tap while continuing to support the man who did it, we are no longer talking about intentions. We are talking about effects.

Here’s the part too many people want to dodge: supporting a racist and supporting racist actions is functionally indistinguishable from being racist. Not in the abstract. Not in the philosophical sense. In the real world—the only one that counts.

You can condemn the act in a press release and still enable the actor. You can say “this is not who we are” while voting, fundraising, caucusing, and aligning yourself with the very machinery that keeps producing this behavior. At that point, the condemnation is decorative. It exists to soothe consciences, not to change outcomes.

And spare me the moral-equivalence defense. The “both sides mock presidents” routine is the last refuge of people who know the line has been crossed but can’t bring themselves to say so plainly. Yes, presidents have been mocked. Cruelly. Stupidly. Sometimes viciously. That is not the same thing as the President himself distributing racist imagery rooted in centuries of dehumanization. Anyone pretending otherwise is not confused—they are protecting something.

Moran’s response tries to occupy a safe middle space that no longer exists. The ground has collapsed. You are either willing to impose consequences on racist behavior (and let's face it, other tyranical and anti-democracy behavior) from the presidency, or you are willing to live with it. There is no third option labeled “respectable disapproval.”

The old saying holds because it’s brutally accurate: racist is as racist does. And in politics, enabler is as enabler enables. When leaders draw lines and then refuse to defend them, those lines become decorations—useful for press coverage, meaningless for justice.

Senator Moran wants credit for saying the right words. History will measure something else entirely: whether he was willing to act as if those words meant anything at all.

Recent headlines as a Venn diagram

A Venn diagram illustrating the overlap between MAGA, Second Amendment Fetishists, and cowards as revealed by recent events in Minnesota...

Local power still matters

I live here. You (presumably) live here.  We stand in line at the grocery store with city workers, teachers, dishwashers, kids in hoodies and retirees counting coupons. Kansas City isn’t a slogan or a headline to us—it’s a functioning organism.

And lately, that organism has shown a pulse. A spine. A refusal.

That matters, because the federal machinery has been circling again—quiet walkthroughs, coded language about “capacity,” the familiar smell of logistics masquerading as policy. We’ve seen what that prelude leads to. Minneapolis heard the same music before the volume got turned up and the neighborhood soundscape changed forever.

Here’s the difference—and it’s not small: Kansas City area leaders didn’t sit on their hands.

They moved.

KCMO’s city council didn’t wait for a ribbon-cutting or a press release. They slammed the permitting door and passed a ban on non-municipal detention facilities—five years of legal friction where ICE expected a smooth glide path. That’s not symbolism. That’s municipal muscle. Zoning, permits, land use—the boring tools that actually stop things from happening.

You cannot build or operate a detention center in this city without local approvals. City leaders used that leverage immediately. That’s what resistance looks like when you understand how power actually flows.

And it didn’t stop at city hall.

County officials across the metro—burned before by federal overreach and private prison shell games—have been louder, sharper, and more precise than they were a decade ago. They’ve demanded clarity. They’ve asked who pays, who oversees, who answers when something goes wrong. They’ve refused to treat “federal” as synonymous with “untouchable.”

This is the lesson Minneapolis paid for in advance: If you don’t force the questions early, you live with the consequences late.

Leavenworth learned it the hard way and then did something rare—it adapted. City officials there dragged a private detention operator into the daylight and into court, insisting on permits, hearings, public accountability. The result wasn’t a dramatic moral victory. It was better than that: a delay, a slowdown, a requirement that detention justify itself under local law instead of swaggering in under federal cover.

That fight matters. It sets precedent. It tells ICE and its contractors that the Midwest is no longer an open floor plan for human warehousing. Local governments can’t abolish ICE. But they can make expansion expensive, slow, and politically radioactive.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now.

Let’s not romanticize this. Some sycophantic state-level actors are still feeding the beast—deploying resources, signing cooperation agreements, lending legitimacy to an enforcement regime that thrives on proximity to local power. That tension is real. But it makes the city and county pushback even more important, not less.

Because when ICE expands, it does so through cracks: bureaucratic indifference, jurisdictional confusion, leaders afraid of looking “soft.” Kansas City’s leaders—at least for now—have chosen a different posture. They’ve chosen friction.

And friction can be the enemy of mass detention.

This isn’t hysteria. It’s memory. Minneapolis didn’t fall because people didn’t care; it fell because too many officials waited for certainty while the machinery was still warming up. Kansas City’s leaders appear to have learned that lesson. They’re acting while the doors are still unlocked, while the blueprints are still proposals, while the language is still evasive enough to challenge.

That deserves acknowledgment—and public backing.

Because resistance doesn’t always look like protest signs and megaphones. Sometimes it looks like a denied permit, a zoning code, a judge insisting on process, a council vote taken before dawn. Sometimes it looks like adults in public office deciding that this city will not quietly become a node in someone else’s detention network.

We should be proud of that. Cautiously. Vigilantly.

And we should keep watching—because the only thing ICE respects more than authority is persistence.

Fear and Loathing in Minneapolis

Minneapolis is watching the machine do what it always does after it kills: it tightens its tie, straightens the paperwork, and tries to make the blood look like “process.” And in the last five days the pattern has become unmistakable.

First, they pushed new video into the bloodstream of the news cycle—an administration-approved angle, conveniently framed as the great exonerator. 

But when grown-ups with stopwatches and professional skepticism got their hands on the visuals, the story didn’t magically become clean. Reuters’ reconstruction points to a grim, almost clinical detail: the officer’s first shots came as the vehicle was moving past him. 

That’s not a verdict. It’s something worse for the people selling “obvious self-defense” as gospel: it’s doubt you can measure.

Then came the institutional tell—the part where the state’s credibility is dragged behind a truck because it’s inconvenient.

Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the outfit locals expect to investigate deadly force with at least some baseline public legitimacy, says it was cut off from evidence and interviews—effectively pushed out—when the federal apparatus decided the FBI would run the whole show. PBS and CBS local reporting, along with official statements, describe a reversal that left the BCA unable to meet its standards or the public’s expectations. 

Translation: the people who fired the shots get to manage the room where the facts are sorted.

And when career lawyers inside the Justice Department’s civil-rights machinery reportedly offered to dig in—do the hard work, run down the facts, test the claim of justification—they were told, in essence, No, thank you. CBS reports the Civil Rights Division prosecutors were told they would not play a role. Then the resignations started stacking up like a flare gun going off in the fog.

That’s not “normal.” That’s a system coughing smoke.

Renee Good’s family—left to stand in the crater—has now hired Romanucci & Blandin, the same firm known for representing George Floyd’s family, to investigate and publish findings because the official channels have not inspired confidence. When a family has to rent its own truth because the government won’t reliably provide it, the legitimacy meter is already pinned in the red.

Meanwhile, the city is trapped in the cruel logic of escalation. A second incident: a federal officer shoots another person in Minneapolis, this time reported as a man wounded in the leg amid a disputed encounter. And the response from the top isn’t humility, transparency, restraint—it’s the old authoritarian jukebox selection: threaten the Insurrection Act, hint at troops, dare the city to flinch. AP and Reuters both report the President floating that option as unrest spreads.

At the state and city level, Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul have gone to federal court trying to halt the DHS/ICE surge, arguing the deployment is unlawful and dangerous. Even the existence of that lawsuit is an indictment: it says local government has concluded the federal presence is not merely controversial but structurally destabilizing.

And in Washington, Democrats have responded with an impeachment salvo against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem—symbolic in a divided Congress, perhaps, but politically diagnostic: people in power are now publicly treating DHS not as a normal agency managing a hard problem, but as a machine that has slipped its restraints.

So here is the updated reality, stripped of euphemism:

• We have a killing still argued as “self-defense,” but increasingly litigated in public through video analysis and contested investigative control. 

• We have state investigators sidelined, civil-rights prosecutors reportedly shut out, and resignations that read like a warning flare from inside the hull. 

• We have another shooting, more street tension, and a White House response that leans toward force and threats, not accountability. 

• And we have a community and state leadership trying—through courts, through counsel, through public pressure—to keep Minneapolis from becoming a live-fire demonstration of federal impunity. 

If the federal government wants trust, it knows the price: independent access, full disclosure, and an investigation that doesn’t look like the suspect running the lab. What it’s offering instead—more secrecy, more spin, more muscle—is not reassurance.

It’s a posture.

And Minneapolis, painfully experienced, recognizes it on sight.