On Jan. 7, 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attempted a kidnapping operation in a suburb of Minneapolis. In the ensuing demonstration by peaceful protestors, Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was accosted by federal agents. The agents gave her confusing commands, some ordering her to exit the vehicle while others demanded she drive away. The woman began attempting to drive away, as officers told her to do. Jonathan Ross, an ICE agent, stepped in front of her car, firing a round into her throat. He then stepped to the side, leaned in the window and fired two more rounds, executing her in broad daylight.
In response to this murder, the federal government rushed to Ross’ defense, and so did the Republican Party. Republican legislators across the board support the killing and have continued to call for expanding ICE funding in the weeks since. We are in a historical moment in which we face a mob of legislators and officials who have made supporting a murderous institution a hallmark of their personal and political identities. This has troubled me; I am divided between my desire to punish those responsible and the politics of unity and love that have dominated liberal identity for generations.
For decades, if not centuries, liberals like myself have been obsessed with some vague sense of “love thy enemy” and a seeming need to reject any form of retribution. We have been plagued by the idea that to move on from crisis, we must show our love, find common ground and somehow build anew. Why are these politics—which are without a doubt beautiful and well-meaning—so counter-productive and often dangerous? To answer these questions, we can turn to our past, and the past of Europe.
Following the Civil War, many held the belief that there was a need for a sense of “unity” and reignition of “brotherly love” among Americans. This perception, motivated by exhaustion from four years of war, led to a relaxed policy towards former Confederates. Confederate President Jefferson Davis saw no court, and within 20 years of the war’s end, the South effectively went back to normal, reintroducing systemic white supremacy. This reluctance to punish Confederates who had led a vicious war of secession—motivated by a commitment to slavery and white supremacy—allowed them to regain power, institute brutal Jim Crow laws and restart white supremacist militant power. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate commander who played a direct role in the massacres of hundreds of surrendering Union troops, was set free after the war and founded the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). George Gorden, a Confederate General from Tennessee, would also go on to play a founding role in the KKK, and successfully ran for Congress in 1907. There, he vigorously promoted violent Jim Crow laws and racial violence. One could easily write a book about the number of Confederates who, after being pardoned out of “unity” and “brotherhood,” came to lead the horrific world of post-war Southern politics. For all we may discuss unity in the wake of the Civil War, our forefathers’ focus on it only led to more violence, more destruction and the reinstitution of white supremacy.
A similar story can be seen in the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The vast majority of Nazi war criminals, from low-level Schutztaffel (SS) soldiers who personally committed the massacres to camp leaders and scientists, were never punished. This came out of a sense of strategic necessity, and, more importantly, a widespread desire within Germany to simply move on and rebuild. An estimated 150,000 people, primarily members of the SS, took part in administering extermination camps, slave labor camps, concentration camps, ghettos and mobile death squads. Of this massive number, less than 10,000 were convicted in the post-war period. Men who committed atrocities to an extent unimaginable simply walked away and rejoined society. Heinz Reinefarth, who led the slaughter of 60,000 people over the course of two days, was elected to the state legislature and received a military pension. Franz Six, who was convicted of war crimes but was released within a few years, would go on to take part in a conspiracy to restore Nazism. The list goes on: As amnesty laws went into effect in the decades following the war, untold thousands of people who had knowingly and willingly participated in the Holocaust were allowed to go free. Of the men in charge of West Germany’s ministry of justice, the majority were former Nazis, including a man who had taken part in the planning of the Holocaust. Now, over 70 years later, the Nazis are back in Germany. The Alternative for Deutschland, a party that happily associates itself with Neo-Nazis and whose senior members attended a secret Neo-Nazi conference to plan the return of Nazism, is now predicted to win majorities in two state legislatures and is tied with the ruling Christian Democratic Union in national opinion polls. Germany allowed its Nazi war criminals to go free so they could rebuild, and now they are back.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, we allowed Confederate leaders to go free, so they simply rebuilt the structures of white supremacy. The United States issued pardons for all Confederates, and they attacked our country a second time. Denazification, a joke of a process in and of itself, ended in 1951 with an untold number of Nazis rejoining society. These Nazis became doctors, teachers, judges, politicians and the overwhelming majority of them felt little, if any, sense of guilt. Now, over 75 years later, Nazism has reared its ugly head again in Germany and in America. Yet, we only have ourselves to blame. We have, for too long, let ourselves be dominated by an unwillingness to truly fight fascism. If we are to ever move beyond the crisis of today’s U.S. federal government, we must be willing to punish the ringleaders and foot soldiers of this fascism. They must see a fair trial, the type of trial we never gave Jefferson Davis or Nathan B. Forrest. If we refuse to take these people to trial—whether they be legislators, officials or the agents of injustice themselves—we will be repeating the same mistake we have been making for nearly two centuries.