I am a former police officer and a private investigator with over fifty years experience specializing in use of force cases. This is not ideology. This is experience. I had planned to wait for the official reports. They will have more video footage and more witness statements. But the essential facts already seem clear. This analysis is based on incomplete information, and it does not need to be perfect to be accurate. Alex Pretti opposed ICE and deportation policy. Fine. He had every right to protest. What he did not have was the right to riot. He attended a protest that devolved into violence. Pretti armed himself with a legally carried 9mm SIG Sauer pistol and spare magazines. Most people who carries semi automatic pistols also carry an extra magazine or two.  There is nothing unusual about that .  Carrying a gun was not the problem. Deciding to physically intervene in an arrest was. ICE agents were lawfully arresting a woman who had become physically aggressive. Prett...

When shootings like those involving Renee Good and Alex Pretti occur, the reaction is immediate and unforgiving. Within seconds, judgment hardens. Two opposing narratives form, each fueled by politics, emotion, and incomplete information. These incidents did not occur in a vacuum. Both individuals placed themselves directly in harm’s way by feloniously obstructing federal ICE agents engaged in official duties. They were not present as passive or peaceful protesters. Each was killed during the commission of a violent felony. The central question is not whether force was used, but whether the force applied was necessary and legally justified under rapidly unfolding circumstances. Multiple videos exist of both encounters. None clearly establish what actually happened. The footage is fragmented, obscured, and inconclusive. As investigations continue, additional video may surface. Only careful, frame-by-frame analysis may eventually clarify the sequence of events. Use-of-force encounters...

Vigilante hero Kyle Rittenhouse is still waiting for the final legal chapter to close in Kenosha, a city whose leaders chose cowardice over duty and chaos over law. When government refuses to protect its citizens, often the vacuum does not stay empty. Order does not politely wait its turn. Someone always steps in. In Kenosha, that someone was a 17 year old kid who showed more spine than the entire political class running the city. Kyle Rittenhouse was cleared of every criminal charge by a jury that actually watched the evidence instead of swallowing slogans. Yet six years later, civil lawsuits still crawl through the courts against him and against government officials who deliberately stood down while their city burned. No urgency. No accountability. Just the slow bureaucratic grind designed to punish by exhaustion. August 2020 was the moment Kenosha exposed itself. Leadership refused to act. Law enforcement was ordered to stand down. Arsonists roamed freely. Property was destroyed...

If the goal is to reduce injuries, then we need to stop pretending that chemical agents and kinetic projectiles are “gentler” options. Tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and impact munitions put people in emergency rooms. Sometimes they put them in hospitals. Always they create lawsuits, especially in blue states where juries reward bad behavior with lottery-sized verdicts. There is a better tool, and it works. Properly used water cannon trucks drastically reduce injuries. No chemicals. No burns. No broken bones. No permanent damage. Just water. A lot of it. Water cannons are safe, effective, and humane when used correctly. Not to blast people off their feet. Not to injure. Simply to subject disruptive crowds to sustained, miserable conditions. Soaked clothing. Cold exposure. Total discomfort. The fastest cure is simple. Go home. Dry off. Get warm. That is why the political left hates them. They work too well. American law enforcement keeps deploying so-called less-lethal wea...

  The Democrat Party has burned through every shred of credibility it ever had with the American public. Whatever trust once existed is gone, buried, and not coming back. What remains looks like a political ghost ship. No rudder. No compass. Just drifting in circles while the crew argues on deck. Call it the Flying Dutchman of American politics, cursed to wander forever while pretending it knows where it is going. And spare the theatrics. Its real heading is obvious. Straight toward collectivism, dependency, and state control. The sales pitch never changes. Promise riches to people who have none. Promise security to people who feel afraid. Promise fairness to people who do not want to compete. What they actually deliver is dependency, stagnation, and permanent poverty. Everywhere communism or its close cousin socialism has taken root, the result is the same. A tiny elite of party insiders living like royalty, and a massive underclass reduced to economic serfdom. The masses surviv...

It is long past time for the Federal Communications Commission to stop fainting on the couch over dirty words. Let us drop the fake shock. The F bomb is no longer a linguistic outlier. It is everyday speech. Grocery stores. Job sites. Court hallways. Family dinners when the turkey burns. The language police lost this war decades ago, and the surrender papers were signed in permanent marker. Is it polite? No. That is the point. Profanity exists to add force, volume, and emphasis where ordinary words fail. It is verbal punctuation. An exclamation mark with teeth. These words may have sexual origins, but in modern usage they have about as much to do with sex as a screwdriver has to do with architecture. Most of the time they are insults. Sometimes they are comedy. Often they are pure frustration escaping the mouth at high velocity. What they are not is a threat to civilization. This is, inconveniently for the censors, a free speech issue. The late comedian George Carlin understood t...

Turn on the TV any night and you will see the same rotten story on loop. Americans who did everything right. Worked. Paid premiums. Played by the rules. Then came the moment they actually needed care, and the insurance company slammed the door shut. Claim denied. Coverage “reviewed.” Treatment delayed. People die while corporate lawyers shuffle paper. That is not a glitch in the system. That is the system. And spare me the gaslighting. This is not complicated. Baby boomers like me did not live through this nightmare. We had jobs that came with real insurance. Not marketing brochures. Not fine-print scams. Real coverage that actually paid when someone got sick. So what the hell happened to our kids and grandkids? The legacy media will never tell you the answer because they helped build the mess. When we grew up, borders meant something. If you overstayed a visa, you were apprehended and sent home. Period. By the late 1970s, enforcement got shoved into a drawer, forgotten, and e...

History keeps meticulous records. Humans keep none. What is past is prologue, and once again, nobody bothered to read it. Cue the emotional detonation following the death of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Predictably, grief was immediately repackaged, politicized, and sold at retail outrage prices before the law was even unpacked. Start with the part everyone skipped. The law. The primary federal statute governing interference with federal officers is 18 U.S.C. § 111, titled Assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees. This statute applies broadly to federal law enforcement personnel defined under 18 U.S.C. § 1114, including ICE agents while performing official duties. Under 18 U.S.C. § 111(a), it is a crime to forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with such officers while engaged in their duties. “Forcibly” does not require Hollywood theatrics. Courts have consistently held that physical resistance, threats creating reasonable fear, or...

President Trump is being scolded for not briefing Congress before moving to forcibly arrest Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Apparently, national security now requires a group chat. Let us count. There are 535 members of Congress. Each one drags along a small army of staffers, interns, aides, consultants, and political parasites. That is not oversight. That is a leak factory. A disturbing number of these people have zero loyalty to the citizens they claim to represent. They swear an oath to the Constitution, then spend their careers trying to carve loopholes through it with a dull spoon. If hypocrisy were fuel, Congress could power the grid. The brutal truth is this. Some members of Congress would sell classified information for a headline, a cable news appearance, or a friendly nod from a foreign adversary. They are not worried about protecting America. They are worried about protecting their ideology. You do not brief people who cannot wait to betray you.

Let me be crystal clear right out of the gate. Any law restricting the possession, manufacture, or sale of machine guns violates the Second Amendment. I do not give a flying shit what politicians or judges think about it. The language is not vague. It is not mysterious. It does not require interpretive gymnastics. It is plain English. Now for some honesty. Shooting full auto is mostly a great way to turn expensive ammunition into noise. Accuracy disappears, ammo evaporates, and the novelty wears off fast. Semi automatic firearms combined with solid marksmanship beat spray and pray nonsense every time. The real attraction to full automatic weapons has never been practicality. It is desire. People want what they are told they cannot have. Forbidden fruit with a selector switch. There are likely millions of machine guns sitting quietly in safes right now, hurting exactly no one and bothering nobody. Yes, legally transferable machine guns exist. The problem is that banning newly manufac...

Some films shout. Others whisper. Shepherds and Butchers doesn’t do either. It stares you down and waits for you to flinch. This is one of the finest courtroom and moral injury dramas most people have never heard of. That is not an accident. It is a consequence of a film that refuses to pander, refuses to sermonize, and refuses to dumb itself down for distracted audiences. The acting is uniformly exceptional. Not “good for a foreign film.” Exceptional, period. The performances feel lived-in, not performed. The accents matter because they are real. The silences matter because they are earned. An imported A-list American cast would have turned this into dialect theater. Instead, the filmmakers trusted actors who understood the world they were portraying. That decision carries the entire film. The story is devastating in its restraint. Rather than attacking capital punishment head-on, the film exposes the psychological wreckage left behind. Not just on the condemned, but on the men tas...