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.
