We Are Being Trained to Watch (And Do Nothing)

In 2020, you might have seen videos of George Floyd suffocating to death beneath a police officer’s knee. In 2020, riot police fired tear gas at nonviolent protesters during the Black Lives Matter protests. Yet today, eerily similar, you might see videos of Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, or of ICU nurse Alex Pretti being fatally shot by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. In both situations, footage of the murders were shared and reshared across social media to the point where the violence itself became spectacle and the deaths became content. All have left Americans with the same question: Is this who we are now?

In my article, “Political Violence is the American Tradition,” I argued that political violence is not a deviation from American democracy, but is instead one of its defining traditions. From state repression of civil rights activists to the militarized policing of marginalized communities, violence has functioned as a recurring mechanism for enforcing political order. Though, what has truly shifted — and now demands urgent attention — is who is wielding violence, how brazenly it is being exercised, and how swiftly it is becoming normalized as a tool of governance. 

What we are witnessing today is not simply another chapter in a violent national history — it is an escalation. Today, federal agents operate with expanding impunity as immigration enforcement blurs into paramilitary action. You cannot reduce these to isolated abuses or unfortunate oversteps. They are symptoms of an authoritarian drift.

It is tempting to respond to these moments with moral condemnation alone: To name them as authoritarian, to document them, to circulate the videos, and to move on. To me, however, naming authoritarianism means little if we refuse to confront what it demands of us. If political violence is embedded in our democratic history and is increasingly a feature of our present, then the question is no longer if this is authoritarianism. The question is: What are we willing to do about it? When the state turns its power inward, when violence is deployed to discipline political disagreement, neutrality becomes impossible. Either we accept coercion as the price of stability, or we organize to interrupt it. The future of American democracy will be decided not by whether we correctly label this moment, but by whether we act with the seriousness it demands.

I should be clear: I do not have a ready solution for this. My role in contemporary American political life — as a student at an elite private college, a campus journalist with no formal authority, a single voice operating inside but largely excluded from the machinery of state power — is limited. Unfortunately, I cannot unilaterally stop federal agents from shooting or the president from deploying the military domestically and abroad. But if the only thing we do is name the violence, circulate the clips, and sigh at social media outrage, then have we really done anything at all? Outrage without consequence is exactly the condition that allows political violence to become routine. Acknowledging the problem is necessary, but insufficient; documenting the escalation is morally vital, but it cannot be the end of our effort. To sit and talk while the state treats human life as disposable is to participate — passively, but undeniably — in the cycle we claim to condemn. This is not to dismiss the work of sitting, talking, planning, learning, and processing—those practices are often prerequisites to mobilization—but they become a failure when they substitute for action rather than prepare it.

Under the second Trump presidency, there has been a clear pattern of using state power — military forces, federal law enforcement, and immigration agents — not simply to enforce law, but to project coercive force in ways that many experts and local officials argue exceed traditional democratic norms. Since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, the scope and frequency of state violence against civilians has expanded across multiple arenas of American life. In Aug. 2025, Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., federalized the Metropolitan Police Department, and deployed National Guard troops despite violent crime being at historic lows. Similar threats or deployments followed in cities such as Chicago, Memphis, and Portland, often in response to protests or immigration enforcement operations, triggering lawsuits from states and municipalities challenging the administration’s use of federal power and domestic military force.

Federal immigration enforcement has expanded dramatically in scope, geography, and resources, with ICE and related federal agencies deploying thousands of agents far beyond the border into interior cities, increasing at-large arrests nationwide, and overseeing a rapidly growing detention system funded with far greater appropriations. This growth has coincided with an escalation in deadly confrontations and use-of-force incidents. On Jan. 7, ICE agents fatally shot Renée Nicole Good, a murder federal officials described as self-defense while video footage and local authorities raised serious questions. Days later, ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, during a federal operation in Minneapolis, again citing a perceived threat that witnesses and bystander footage disputed. These killings sparked nationwide protests demanding accountability and the removal of federal agents from local communities. At the same time, detention of immigrants has surged to record levels. As of mid-January, more than 73,000 people were held in ICE custody nationwide — a significant increase since Trump took office — with many detainees lacking any criminal conviction. Deaths in ICE custody also reached their highest level in more than two decades in 2025, with over 30 reported deaths, and additional fatalities recorded in early 2026, further intensifying scrutiny from Americans of federal detention practices.

State violence has also expanded through the criminal legal system, where the state’s authority to punish has increasingly taken lethal form, from capital punishment to deaths produced by incarceration itself. In 2025, the United States carried out its highest number of executions in years, with at least 47 people put to death, primarily by lethal injection. Several states recorded their deadliest years for capital punishment in decades, as executions accelerated alongside broader law-and-order rhetoric. Together, these developments have fueled sustained protests in cities including Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Portland. Taken as a whole, they form a widening record of state power exercised through coercion and force, directed not only at perceived enemies abroad or criminals at the margins, but increasingly at civilians and communities within the United States itself.

What these events share is not merely their brutality, but the speed with which they fade into the background of American political life. A shooting, a deployment, a death in custody — each met with a momentary rupture, a spike of attention, a cycle of statements and justifications, and then a return to normalcy. The extraordinary becomes administratively routine. Violence does not need to be hidden to be effective; it only needs to be normalized. When the state can deploy armed agents into neighborhoods, detain tens of thousands without conviction, execute at accelerating rates, and kill civilians under disputed circumstances without sustained consequence, the question is no longer whether democracy is under strain. It is whether we have quietly adjusted our expectations of what democracy is allowed to look like. 

This is how political violence succeeds in democratic societies. Every incident is framed as exceptional, legally justified, or unavoidable. And every time, the burden of proof shifts further away from the state and onto the public — onto grieving families, witnesses, journalists, and protesters — to demonstrate that the violence was not deserved. Over time, the threshold for what counts as unacceptable force rises. What once would have provoked a crisis becomes a headline, then a statistic, and finally an archive link.

Future generations will not ask whether we were shocked. They will not ask how many videos we watched or how fluently we named authoritarianism when it appeared. They will ask what we allowed to become ordinary. They will ask when armed force against civilians stopped feeling like an emergency and started feeling like policy. And they will ask whether we recognized that a government which cannot stop shooting is not merely failing at restraint, but is redefining its relationship to the people it claims to protect. 

If that redefinition goes unchallenged, it will not announce itself with a single decisive moment. It will arrive gradually, through acquiescence, fatigue, and the false comfort of thinking that someone else — the courts, the media, the next election — will intervene. We are fond of calling certain episodes “turning points” — as The Washington Post editorial board did in declaring the killing of Alex Pretti a turning point in Trump’s second term — yet too often those labels become another form of consolation, where the promise of change replaces the work of making it. But no institution intervenes on its own. Democratic limits exist only when they are insisted upon. The danger of this moment is not simply that violence is escalating, but that we are learning how to live with it.

It should be noted that what many people are only now being forced to tolerate — the unchecked, unilateral expansion of presidential power — is not actually new for queer people, people of color, women, immigrants, and other communities long subjected to state violence. Generations have already learned to navigate a society in which police and federal agents patrol neighborhoods with disproportionate force, where courts deny justice, and where official indifference is itself a form of punishment. For Black and Indigenous families, for undocumented people, for trans and queer youth, and for countless others, the routine threat of injury, detention, or death is not an abstract escalation but an everyday reality — a politics of survival that precedes and outlives headlines. What feels like a shocking expansion of state power because it can now be wielded against a white man, a nurse with a clean record, is in fact the extension of a system that already claimed countless lives with impunity; the difference now is that more of us are being forced to see what others were never allowed to forget.

And at some point, the phrase “don’t normalize it” ceases to be a warning and becomes a polite excuse that allows us to sit with our outrage while doing nothing to intervene, a way to feel morally alert while remaining politically inert; recognition, in the absence of meaningful consequence, carries no force, and every time we watch videos of state violence, circulate them online, express condemnation, and then return to our routines, we are not resisting, we are rehearsing acceptance, conditioning ourselves to tolerate what should provoke upheaval. 

As students in this generation, we are trained — perhaps more than anyone — to mistake powerlessness for innocence, to believe that witnessing, debating, and writing thoughtfully about injustice constitutes meaningful engagement. We then graduate into the very institutions and systems that produce and legitimize the violence we claim to deplore. This is deliberate, a method by which universities translate complicity into funding, careers, and abstract policy debates, sanitizing systemic harm while ensuring that those most aware of it remain polite, fragmented, and temporary, incapable of imposing real cost.

Refusal, if it is to be genuine, cannot be symbolic or temporary and cannot be a march that disperses on schedule or a statement that arrives too late to matter. It must be organized, sustained, and insistent to the point of being inconvenient and disruptive, forcing institutions to confront the stark choice between the smooth operation of their programs and the moral and political consequences of their complicity. It must transform relationships with law enforcement, military contractors, and detention agencies from — often treated as sources of institutional prestige or legitimacy — into sources of accountability and pressure, so that continued violence cannot proceed without resistance.

It is here that most falter, not in recognizing that meaningful resistance demands sacrifice, but in bearing it. Some might be even unwilling to acknowledge that meaningful resistance will demand sacrifice. 

To combat authoritarianism, we must abandon the illusion that being “reasonable” or “moderate” is equivalent to being ethical. And yet, when measured against the cost borne daily by those policed, detained, incarcerated, or killed in the name of order, these sacrifices are trivial, mere inconveniences. While the insistence that opposition remain polite, moderate, and non-disruptive is not a call for democracy but a demand for silence dressed as civility, a comfortable posture for those who benefit from the violence remaining uninterrupted, from political elites and law enforcement institutions to corporations profiting from the prison-industrial and military complex to many others.

There will never be a “perfect” moment to act. There will be no future moment when this struggle becomes easier, no point at which the moral clarity will be simpler, no opportunity when acting will seem less costly. There is only the unrelenting repetition of deployments, shootings, detentions, and executions, each new instance of state power performed in public, documented and absorbed into routine without consequence. Awareness alone is not enough. Paying attention, analyzing, and witnessing does not equal care and care itself requires action — calling representatives, protesting, boycotting, speaking with friends, organizing, and taking measures to sustain oneself and one’s community. The only question that remains — the only one worth asking — is whether students and young people, trained to observe and analyze, will continue being passive witnesses to a government that increasingly wields force with impunity, or whether, at long last, we will accept the truth history has always demonstrated: Power concedes nothing voluntarily, and those who seek justice must create the conditions under which it becomes impossible for it to continue unchecked.