What does it say about a political movement that demands absolute reverence for life in the womb yet shrugs when the government kills, cages, or brutalizes the living?
What does it say about a government—and a political movement—that claims to value the unborn, but once you are born, that concern evaporates?
When life upon birth becomes expendable, subject to force, punishment, neglect, and death so long as it serves “law and order,” “national security,” or political convenience—when you can be shot by the police state, executed by the police state, starved, surveilled, displaced, raided, abused, or discarded by the police state—and this is treated not as a moral failure but as policy and doctrine, then you’re not dealing with a government that is truly pro-life.
If the measure of a society’s morality is how it treats its most vulnerable—the living, breathing, conscious—then a worldview that sanctifies life before birth but abandons it afterward is morally hollow.
Consider that on January 24, 2026—one day after the Trump administration paid lip service to the annual March for Life in Washington, DC—37-year-old Minneapolis resident Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse who worked at a Veterans Affairs hospital, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a federal immigration enforcement operation that exemplified the militarized, unaccountable force that has come to characterize ICE’s tactics.
Pretti’s death has sparked widespread protests, legal challenges, and national outrage, especially as videos and eyewitness accounts appear to contradict official claims about how the encounter unfolded.
The Pretti shooting did not occur in a vacuum.
It was the second federal agent-involved shooting of an American citizen in Minneapolis in January alone, part of the Trump Administration’s Operation Metro Surge that brought more than 3,000 federal agents into the city and ignited protests nationwide.
Yet the problem is not merely who occupies the Oval Office. It is a bipartisan willingness to trade constitutional restraint for raw power—and to accept human casualties as the price of governance.
While President Trump has been particularly vocal about his willingness to act on his lack of respect for the lives of those he perceives as enemies, the erosion of respect for life all along the spectrum has accelerated under presidents of both parties, through expanded executive power, militarized enforcement, surveillance, detention, and lethal force in the name of safety, efficiency, or order.
When the government claims the power to decide whose life has value and whose does not—who may live and who may die in the name of “security,” “order,” or “efficiency”—it is no longer governing. It is playing god.
A government that acts as if freedoms—and life, in turn—are privileges granted by the state has abandoned the foundational principle that rights are inherent and inalienable.
We see it in a system that celebrates the sanctity of life before birth while expanding the machinery of death after birth—through executions carried out in the name of justice, militarized policing carried out in the name of order, indefinite detention carried out in the name of security, shoot-first enforcement regimes that treat civilians as threats rather than human beings, and endless wars driven by greed, profit and ego.
Nor are these executions limited to death chambers.
As the killing of Renée Good makes clear, the modern police state now carries out executions in the streets—without trial, without jury, and without meaningful accountability.
When government agents act as judge, jury, and executioner, the distinction between capital punishment and law enforcement violence collapses.
Both rest on the same premise: that the state has the moral authority to decide, unilaterally and irrevocably, that a human life is no longer worthy of protection.
We see it in a bureaucracy that has armed itself like an occupying force—federal agencies equipped with military-grade weapons, surveillance tools, and near-total immunity—while insisting that this concentration of power is necessary for our safety.
We see it in the normalization of state violence: no-knock raids, warrantless searches, armed enforcement actions carried out in residential neighborhoods, and the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens during domestic enforcement operations that resemble a military deployment more than civilian law enforcement.
Alex Pretti’s death was the foreseeable end result of a system that normalizes state violence, immunizes authority from accountability, and treats human life as collateral damage.
Once government is allowed to decide whose life matters, no life is safe.
The moment government agents are permitted to take life without due process, judicial oversight, and genuine accountability, the Constitution’s promise of equal protection and the rule of law ceases to exist in practice.
When federal agencies become standing armies, when enforcement replaces justice, when force substitutes for law, and when accountability disappears behind claims of immunity and national security, the Constitution is no longer functioning as intended.
This moment cannot be treated as a footnote.
It demands a reckoning with how much power we have surrendered to the state and the even more dangerous idea that government can be trusted to wield absolute power benevolently.
So where do we go from here?
We must start by rejecting any government that defaults to force and asserts it dominance at gunpoint.
A constitutional government exercises restraint. It recognizes limits. It understands that power—especially the power to use violence—must be constrained, questioned, and accountable at every turn.
There is no way around it: we must dismantle the machinery of control that has normalized state violence.
That means ending the routine deployment of armed federal agents into civilian communities as though they were enemy territory. It means demilitarizing domestic enforcement agencies whose weapons, tactics, and mindset increasingly resemble those of standing armies rather than peace officers. It means rejecting enforcement regimes that treat human beings as threats to be neutralized instead of citizens entitled to due process and dignity.
If we are serious about restoring a government of laws rather than force, then we must roll back militarized policing, end warrantless and no-knock raids, restore strict limits on federal enforcement authority, and hold agents accountable when they abuse power—without exception.
Scaling back the massive funding for ICE and the DHS would be a good place to start.
At some point, a line must be drawn between a government that serves life and one that claims the power to take it, one “justified” killing at a time.
As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the choice before us is simple, even if the work is not.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
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