Wendy, you’re right, and what makes it so hard to look at is how familiar it feels once you let yourself see it.

I know what lawful authority is supposed to look like, and I know what it looks like when power stops caring whether it’s recognized. Masks and missing badges aren’t about safety. They’re about severing responsibility. They’re about making force portable and blame optional.

This was never immigration policy. It’s posture. It’s rehearsal. It’s teaching the public to accept armed men who can’t be named, questioned, or held. Once that’s normalized, the target almost doesn’t matter anymore.

What chills me most is how quickly people are told to look away, to treat this as necessary, temporary, justified. That’s how legitimacy erodes, not all at once, but through repeated exceptions until nothing is left but raw power and habit.

Renee Nicole Good didn’t just die. Something else did with her. The assumption that authority still needs to show its face. The belief that force must answer to the public it claims to protect.

I’m grateful you’re naming this plainly. Silence is what these systems feed on, and clarity is one of the few things that still slows them down.