The Op-Ed Narcissist vs the Orange Ghost
Welcome to the circus where the ringmaster is a boyish mayor with a penchant for high-brow vocabulary and a desperate need to be liked by the coastal elites who wouldn’t spend a weekend in his city if you paid their Uber fare. Jacob Frey, a man who looks like he was grown in a lab specifically to manage a high-end yoga studio but instead found himself running a metropolis in the middle of a nervous breakdown, recently decided to take to the pages of the New York Times to tell us that Donald Trump is lying. Shocking. Groundbreaking. We are all deeply moved by this revelation that a politician might be embellishing the truth for personal gain, but the irony is so thick you could carve it with a dull steak knife because Frey is doing the exact same thing while pretending his hands are clean. He paints a picture of a city under siege by rhetoric, ignoring the fact that the actual siege is happening on his street corners where the rule of law has become a suggestion and the federal government is playing cat and mouse with activists who think a Honda Civic is a legitimate barricade against the full weight of the American state. Frey is writing poetry while the house burns. Fraud. It is a classic move from the playbook of the performative progressive who believes that a well-timed paragraph in a legacy newspaper is equivalent to actual governance, but the reality on the ground is far less polished and far more violent than his PR team would ever dare to admit in a press release. He’s obsessed with Trump because Trump is the perfect foil for his own incompetence, a looming shadow he can point to every time something goes wrong under his own watch as if the former president is personally responsible for the potholes and the systemic collapse of civil order in the Twin Cities.
The Concrete Reality of the Fatal Encounter
While the mayor was busy polishing his silver-tongued defense of the status quo, Renee Nicole Good was busy making a much more permanent statement on the asphalt of a Minneapolis road. The video doesn’t lie, though I’m sure a dozen activist groups are currently trying to hire a choreographer to explain how what we see isn’t actually what we see. It’s a tragedy. A woman, described by her wife as a beacon of kindness and a soul dedicated to the service of others, decided that the best way to spend her final moments was parking her car in the middle of a road for several minutes to block a federal officer from doing a job that nobody really wants to do anyway. The footage is haunting. It’s a slow-motion car crash of ideology meeting the cold, hard reality of federal enforcement where there are no points for good intentions and the bullets don’t care about your activist resume. We are living in an era where people believe their bodies are shields against the machinery of the state, and then everyone acts surprised when the machinery just keeps grinding forward like it was programmed to do since the inception of the Republic. Good’s death is being framed as a martyr’s sacrifice by some and a Darwin Award entry by others, but the truth is buried somewhere in the middle of that grainy surveillance tape that shows a woman who believed the narrative that she was untouchable because her cause was righteous. Boom. Just like that, a life is extinguished because the disconnect between the political rhetoric in the mayor’s office and the tactical reality on the street became too wide to bridge with anything other than a body bag.
The Ghost of the Minneapolis Miracle
Minneapolis used to be the ‘Minneapolis Miracle,’ a place where urban planning and economic growth lived in a harmonious marriage, but now it’s just the stage for a never-ending psychodrama starring a mayor who wants to be a martyr and a federal government that has completely lost the thread of its own authority. If you look back at the history of this city, you see a trajectory that was supposed to lead to a Nordic-style utopia, but instead, we got a landscape where federal agents are shooting people in broad daylight because the local police are too demoralized to even get out of their cruisers. The shooting of Renee Nicole Good is not an isolated incident; it is the logical conclusion of a system where the lines of authority have been blurred by years of political grandstanding and a total collapse of mutual respect between the governors and the governed. Trump uses this city as a punchline in his rallies, calling it a hellscape, and while he’s clearly exaggerating for the benefit of his base, Frey’s defense feels like a man standing in a flooded basement claiming that the water is actually a luxury indoor pool. The gaslighting is professional-grade. We are being told to ignore our lying eyes and instead focus on the high-synergy keywords being tossed around in the opinion section of the Times while the actual citizens of Minneapolis are left to navigate a world where a trip to the grocery store might involve a standoff with ICE and a self-appointed traffic controller with a grievance. It’s a mess. A beautiful, tragic, terrifying mess that shows no signs of clearing up because nobody involved has the courage to admit that they are all just playing roles in a script written by people who don’t have to live with the consequences of their actions.
Surveillance and the Death of the Narrative
The surveillance video is the ultimate buzzkill for the activists who wanted to paint this as a simple case of federal overreach and cold-blooded murder. It shows a car parked. It shows deliberation. It shows a woman who had several minutes to move, to reconsider, to choose life over a political statement that most people will forget by the next news cycle, but she stayed. Why? Because the modern activist culture has convinced people that they are the protagonists in a movie that never ends, and the mayor’s rhetoric only fuels this delusion by treating every minor policy disagreement as a battle for the soul of the nation. When you tell people they are fighting literal fascism, don’t be surprised when they start acting like they’re in the French Resistance, even if the ‘fascist’ is just a mid-level bureaucrat trying to serve a warrant on a Tuesday morning. The wife of the deceased talks about her kindness, and I have no doubt she was a lovely person in a vacuum, but the road isn’t a vacuum; it’s a public utility where the laws of physics and the laws of the state intersect with lethal force. The tragedy is that her kindness didn’t save her from the consequences of a system that is currently being pushed to the breaking point by a mayor who would rather fight with a former president on Twitter than figure out how to keep his streets from becoming a firing range. Madness. We are watching the slow-motion collapse of civic cohesion in real-time, documented by 480p security cameras and analyzed by people like me who are cynical enough to see the strings on the puppets. Prediction: nothing changes. Frey will write another op-ed, Trump will send another tweet, and the next person who thinks their car is a fortress will find out the hard way that the state always has bigger guns and less patience. This is the world we built. Enjoy the show.
