Renee Nicole Good & Charlie Kirk…

Lori Lancaster | January 16, 2026
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | January 17, 2026
My heart breaks over this situation and the countless others like it happening every day. The death of Good won't change anything, partly because it's too messy in its specifics to be a clear-cut abuse of power, but mostly because the national appetite for "punishing" "illegals" and liberal "agitators" who "want to destroy us" is nowhere near satisfied yet. It won't stop until a lot more of us want it to stop, if it's not too late by then.

I have little to add to your well-considered and well-written comment, Lori, except to repeat my conviction that lack of accountability for officials is a key part of our democracy's active failing (the last paragraph on that page in particular). Of course allowing law enforcement to act without any bindings on their behavior would lead to abuse of power. Of course an agency engineered to be loyal only to a corrupt official would turn into a secret police who enforce his will with zero regard for society. For anyone who supports this lawlessness—indeed, for any of the people who I've heard claim that ICE isn't going far enough yet—I want to ask them how they would feel about a Democrat being elected president in 2028 and having his own secret police who are loyal only to him, who on his orders go door to door shooting his conservative critics dead and burning their houses down to destroy the evidence and arresting (or just plain shooting) any surviving relatives and witnesses, because "absolute immunity" allows them to do all of that and worse. I'm betting they'd be horrified, as should we all be, and yet I fear that for many of them, the preferred solution would be to prevent a Democrat from ever getting elected again rather than to impose any goddamned limit, at all, ever, on law enforcement.

I'm done seeing this as left-right issue. I'm tired of hearing "even though one side's worse." That doesn't matter. The blaming and name-calling and side-taking don't matter. Opposition to runaway abuses of power and unlimited corruption should be something that every American agrees upon. The fact that we can't, that we have become so polarized that some of us will support "our president" even as he unleashes upon us the most un-American hell we can imagine, is very difficult for me to accept.

I don't know how this nation can survive more years like the one we've just had. But if we somehow do, if there comes a cooler-headed moment when we collectively realize that we narrowly survived being dragged to the brink and could go over it next time, I hope that Congress finally does its job and imposes some long-overdue limitations on the executive branch. Many other limits on power are needed elsewhere, but there, they are most urgent and most directly the result of Congressional inaction for decades. The unitary executive theory is anti-democratic excrement.