Cassandra HemenwayThe first few weeks of 2026 have cemented the political reality we are living under. Do an internet search for “Minneapolis” and you’ll be overwhelmed with videos and photos of heavily armed federal agents swarming neighborhoods and going face to face with outraged civilians attempting to protect their neighbors from being detained.
Lesson number six from Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny” is on my mind as I see the videos and reports of ICE observer Renee Nicole Good’s killing in Minneapolis this month. Good’s death was preceded by the New Year’s Day death of Keith Porter in Los Angeles, Calif., shot and killed by an off-duty ICE officer.
Snyder’s “Twenty lessons from the twentieth century” range from “Beware the one-party state” to “Establish a private life” (as in scrub your computer and have personal exchanges in person). In the light of the explosive opening to 2026, I am looking to these lessons.
The lesson that came to mind after viewing multiple videos from multiple angles showing ICE officer Jonathan Ross shooting Good in the face three times: “Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”
Others have been shot by federal agents since Jan. 7, including 21-year-old protester Kaden Rummler and 31-year-old Brittain Rodriguez in Santa Ana, California, both shot in the face by federal agents with “less-lethal” rounds, according to CBS News and the Guardian. These deaths and injuries are only a partial list: The Project on Government Oversight reports that 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, three times more than in 2024.
I think of lesson 11 from “On Tyranny” when I read about the trampling of press freedom. Snyder writes: “Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.”
About a week after Good’s death, the FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, a move The New York Times calls “exceedingly rare,” and the Post called “highly unusual and aggressive.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed Natanson was “obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor” and subpoenaed material from the Post as part of her investigation.
“It is rare and extreme for the government to take the extraordinary step of searching and seizing a reporter’s property,” noted the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press on Jan. 16. “Reporters Committee President Bruce D. Brown called the search ‘a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press,’ highlighting the danger that such searches can pose to confidential sources and to public interest reporting broadly.”
These are only a few of the horrific events in these first few weeks of 2026, but they are enough to convince me that if we haven’t yet prepared for what may come to our own backyard, the time is now.
In a Substack post written in 2024, on the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol building, Snyder wrote: “For those who want democracy and the rule of law in the United States after 2024, I would only add: now is the time to organize, to prepare to win locally and nationally, and to talk not only about what is to be lost but what can be gained.”
—Cassandra Hemenway, Editor in Chief
