The Best Of Us And The Worst Of Us

And the uncomfortable and dangerous question of the sadists and nihilists in charge.

The sky is empty, the earth delivered into the hands of power without principles.

~ Albert Camus, The Rebel

These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam

Last week on Judging Freedom, I asserted that events in Minnesota were establishing a line between the best of us and the worst of us. Renee Good, murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, represented the best of us. Good was someone willing to put herself between the powerful and the vulnerable. Ross, undoubtedly someone who would murder again for those in power, and to satiate his own petty, hateful and venal needs, is the unmasked face of the worst among us.

As I said to Judge Napolitano:

That’s the sordid and terrible reality of human nature - that many of us will do as we are asked to do, as we’re ordered to do, as we’re told to do for a multitude of reasons: because we’re stupid, because we’re greedy, because we’re fearful.

I take heart in those who are standing up though, because that’s not everyone. ICE represents the very worst of us. ICE represents the thugs, the brutes, the hooligans in our society. They are the worst of us. And then you have those like Renee Good, and her widow, who represent the best of us.

And this is a defining time in American history. This is a time for all of us as Americans to determine which side of that line do we stand upon.

This articulation in Minneapolis of the line dividing the best of us from the worst of us was solidified on Saturday with the murder of Alex Pretti. Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration, i.e., someone who helps someone like me, was executed because he put himself between a woman and the ICE officer attacking her. This screen capture of Pretti’s killing may be this century’s Saigon Execution moment.

A beaten, pepper sprayed and unarmed Alex Pretti shot by an unknown federal law enforcement officer on January 24, 2026 in Minneapolis, MN. Screen grab of video from X.

Saigon Execution. Eddie Adams, Associated Press, February 1, 1968, Saigon, South Vietnam.

For those unsure of the circumstances of Pretti’s murder, Dropsite News details the video here, just as the New York Times did for Renee Good’s murder. If, after watching these analyses, you still believe the government, against your own (lying) eyes, I know which side of the line you are on.

There are metaphysical aspects occurring that we must acknowledge if we have any hope of understanding and defeating, not solely these modern-day black and tans who are terrorizing our communities and seeking subjugation, but, more importantly, the people in power that they serve.

Again, from my interview last week with Judge Napolitano:

And the aspect of these men and women who populate ICE and these other federal law enforcement agencies—the most dangerous thing about them is not that they’re thugs, not that they’re brutes, not that they are nothing more than common criminals themselves, but the fact that they have no principles, they have no ethics…

…These men and women don’t even have the decency, the ethics, the morals to conduct themselves in any type of manner that we would describe as decent. And they’re, of course, led by sadists and nihilists at the top level.

And I’m reminded of a quote from Albert Camus who described this type of danger: when the sky is empty, power resides in the hands of those without principle. This idea that when we don’t have principles, when we have no ethics, when there is no religion—this is where we go to. This is where we as a people, as a human race, go to. Tyranny, brutality, oppression comes hand in hand without principles.

And that’s what we’re seeing in Minnesota. That’s what we’re seeing throughout the Muslim world that we’ve been bombing for decades. That’s what the Europeans are now dealing with, with the United States about to take Greenland from them, and so on and so forth.

I’ve spoken about this danger before. Last spring, after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem couldn’t define habeas corpus, I had this to say:

You know, Judge, I went to law school for five days back in 1995, and I’m pretty certain we covered that within those five days. This is basic stuff.

But I was reminded the other day of an amazing Fyodor Dostoevsky quote that covers a lot of this. It’s from The House of the Dead, if people want to look it up. He talks about if anyone has ever enjoyed humiliating someone, the hypnotizing power of that, how tyranny is something that can be indulged in. And he concludes by saying blood and power are intoxicating. And that’s what you have here.

You have people who are intoxicated by their power, intoxicated by the ability to carry forward not just tyrannically, but sadistically. Kristi Noem, who has gone to that prison in El Salvador and taken TikTok videos there in the midst of that crime against humanity, she is not simply an ignoramus, but she is a sadist. She is someone who, as Dostoevsky would describe, is intoxicated by blood and power.

Here’s the Dostoevsky quote, thanks to Mark Taylor, who reminded me of it. Still, reading it again, I get cold as I understand who we are up against, both on our streets and in Washington, DC’s offices, and, as time goes on, and history tells us, our options for dealing with these people will become more and more limited.

“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

To characterize the entire administration as sadists is too simple, as the President’s people have multiple motivations and characters, although not so varied as to allow me to name any of them who are seemingly possessed of any virtues. As I discussed with Nima Alkhorshid on Dialogue Works last fall:

You’ve got a narcissist in charge of this country who is unhinged. He is unmoored in the sense that he has no principles other than those a narcissist or a megalomaniac would choose to embrace. In that sense, he’s a posturing nihilist. That’s who’s leading this country.

And then you look at who his advisors are. It is men and women who have made it into power because they’re really good sycophants. They’re incredibly loyal. They are really great spokespeople. They will go to the ends of the earth to trumpet Donald Trump’s name. Or they are men and women who have risen to power because they are con men and criminals, just like their boss. Or they are men and women who have done well for themselves because they’ve known how to climb the ladder in a rigged and corrupt economic, media, and political ecosystem that we have here.

So you look at the people who are directing these policies and put that on top of the inertia that comes from an empire, let alone a declining, failing, dying empire like the U.S. And so we shouldn’t be surprised at the type of decisions and policies we see coming about.

And it’s no better when it comes to those not in suits and ties, but in military costume:

The behavior of the generals was reprehensible—that they all sat there silently. There’s a lot of hoopla, there’s a lot of nonsense, particularly in liberal blogs and podcasts and television shows about how the generals are going to save us. And that’s complete nonsense.

Those men and women have sat silently as Trump fired their peers for no reasons other than politics, race, or sex. They’ve sat silently as Trump has extrajudicially massacred and murdered people. They’ve sat silently as the American military—guardsmen, active duty Marines—have taken part in the detention, the brutalization, the humiliation of American citizens, legal residents, and immigrants all throughout the U.S.

Those men and women have sat silently for that. And they sat silently through his speech when Trump gave them the opportunity to get up and leave, and not one of them did. And so people think their silence was some kind of “F you” to Trump. You just don’t understand the military. Their silence was obedience.

There is a phrase of unknown attribution that I keep coming back to: never argue with someone John Brown would have shot.

In the last two years, first with the genocide in Gaza and now with neo-fascist reactionaries in control of our government, I have been grappling with my belief in non-violence from moral, political and strategic positions. Limitations on non-violence from those perspectives that I previously dismissed as conditional, historical or inconsequential are no longer; if those limitations ever truly did exist and weren’t just excuses for me not to fully engage thoroughly with the concept of non-violence. I should make clear that my belief in non-violence did not include armed resistance as allowed under international and natural law, as well as self-defense. Rather, non-violence for me was a political, strategic and moral choice to defeat an oppressive or abusive authority, particularly against Western governments. Of course, situations and circumstances differ, and one course of action will be necessary, correct and just, while in another time and place, that same course would be counter-productive, ruinous and unjust.

At this point, I still firmly believe non-violence is the correct response, politically, strategically and morally, against this American government. However, I no longer believe a non-violent response to be correct against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I have always held to the right of Palestinians to armed resistance, but felt politically, strategically and morally a non-violent response to occupation was the best path, in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank. I was wrong.

However, the question is before us. Against a government of sadists, narcissists, and nihilists, with a military led by feckless and obsequious generals, and a growing, brown-shirted, paramilitarized federal police force, what will need to be done? The Democrats’ worthlessness, as the opposition political party, has been demonstrated clearly this past year, and we shouldn’t forget that Democratic policies, when in control of the White House and Congress of the last decades, built the infrastructure and hired the personnel the Trump Administration is using to terrorize our communities. As I write this, a news alert tells me that President Trump is sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to take over operations for the federal government in Minnesota - the same Tom Homan who President Obama awarded with the US government’s highest civil service award for his “extraordinary” results in deporting people. It was during Obama’s time in office that Homan intellectually fathered DHS’s family separations policy, aka “kids in cages”. It’s unknown if Homan will travel with Obama’s medal to Minnesota.

I don’t romanticize the idea of political violence, let alone armed resistance, organized insurgency and civil war - I have seen two of those first-hand and know their tragedies and barbarities well. I also know that throughout history, rebellions and revolutions, if successful, very often fail to live up to their pronounced noble intentions, and that the victors can deliver tyranny, oppression and corruption as well as those overthrown. Yet this uncomfortable and dangerous question remains: what may have to be done?

May it not have to come to that. As for now, let us reflect and embody Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and those on the streets of Minneapolis today, the best of us, standing against the worst of us, for the most vulnerable among us.

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If you are interested in my further comments to Judge Napolitano on ICE, our civil liberties and who we are as a people, as well as my thoughts on Iran and why the CIA should be abolished, here is my full interview and transcript from last week. As a reminder, I am on Judging Freedom with Judge Napolitano every Tuesday at 2pm Eastern.

[Transcript edited for clarity]

**Judge Napolitano:**

Before we get to the Pentagon and the person who calls himself the Secretary of War, I have been intrigued with the collapse of the MI6-CIA-Mossad plans to cause chaos in Iran. Do these plans call for the killings of innocent civilians? And would Trump have authorized, when he signed some finding for the CIA, them to do this?

**Matthew Hoh:**

Thanks for having me on, Judge. Whether or not Donald Trump knows the particulars of what these types of regime change operations entail is a matter of speculation. We don’t even know. This is a man who doesn’t have a firm grasp of reality as everyone else sees it. Whether he understands what’s put in front of him is a whole other story.

But certainly this plan by, as you correctly pointed out, the CIA, MI6, and Mossad sought to utilize legitimate grievances and legitimate unrest in Iran—many of which are the result of other American, Israeli, and British actions, chiefly the sanctions that have impoverished, hollowed out, and weakened the country, immiserating the population. The CIA, MI6, and Mossad tried in recent weeks to utilize that unrest, that instability, that impoverishment to their advantage. In particular, it seems as if they tried to do so utilizing Kurdish minorities.

It appears that much of the violence came out of the Kurdish regions, that a lot of the pitched battles that occurred between security forces and protesters, rioters, insurgents, or foreign agents—however they can be described—seemed to have been in the Kurdish areas. And this is something that, when we look back on it, is not surprising.

The relationship between the Kurds and the Americans, the Kurds and the Israelis, the Kurds and the British is long. As far as I know, the first time the United States started sending weapons to the Kurds was back in 1973, under Kissinger and Nixon.

When I was in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, I’d go up to the Kurdish areas. You go to Sulaymaniyah, which is a city in northeastern Iraq in the Kurdish region, and there’s a brand new airport there. And you say to them, how did you build this airport? You’re under all this pressure, under siege from the Iraqi government. You’ve been waged war against by the Iraqi government. You had some protection from the Americans and internationals, but how did you actually build this brand new airport? And they said the Israelis built it for us.

That’s twenty-some years ago, and this idea of utilizing the Kurds for American and Israeli purposes has played out in these last few weeks in Iran, where it seems to me the main effort here was through the Kurds—to try and provoke some type of Syria-like civil war, to get these factions fighting.

**Judge Napolitano:**

If there is a CIA or MI6 or Mossad agent on the street—I understand that these are mainly assets on the street, not agents—however, we have that full screen from Pompeo. Chris, do you have it? He is, of course, the former director of the CIA and the former Secretary of State. We only need to read the bottom line: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets, also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

Now does he mean that literally, that there were Mossad agents and therefore MI6 and CIA on the street? And if they were, and they see an innocent old man being beaten to death by a mob, wouldn’t they have the legal and moral obligation to stop it?

**Matthew Hoh:**

No, Judge, they wouldn’t. These are men and women who are beholden to nothing but their own masters at their intelligence headquarters, their own sense of righteousness, their own belief in their own James Bond-esque invulnerabilities—including to [morality], to law, to ethics.

The idea of these agents on the ground there—it’s not going to be the men and women who work at CIA headquarters, MI6 headquarters, Mossad headquarters, people who are Israeli, British, or American. These are Iranians, whether they are Kurds or Baluchs or Persians or Turks or Sunni Arab Iranians. It’ll be a blend. But these are agents that are utilized by the intelligence services to carry out their bidding.

And to your point that I didn’t get to about whether or not they would directly kill innocent civilians: absolutely. That’s all to stoke the outrage, to provide the context, to give the casus belli for an American intervention in Iran.

This has been long planned for. This is obviously the culmination of efforts that began months and months ago, maybe even a year ago with Netanyahu’s first visit to Iran. But certainly the cast of characters in this is broad. If you saw, Judge, that text message that President Trump leaked, that Emmanuel Macron, the French president, sent him—Macron says to Trump just yesterday or today: we could do great things in Iran.

The reality of the Iranian economy crashing like it did at the end of December has very much to do with the British, the French, and the Germans putting those snapback sanctions onto the Iranians back in the fall. These were draconian sanctions that did exactly what everyone expected those sanctions to do: crush the Iranian economy, devalue the Iranian currency to nothing, to Weimar Republic levels—meaningless. And that, of course, then engendered the public unrest that enabled the CIA, MI6, and Mossad to put into operation their regime change.

I think what was supposed to happen this past week, part of that regime change operation, was to have been American strikes to decapitate Iranian leadership—military, security, political, religious. But what occurred was that the Iranian government was resilient enough, the Iranian people resilient enough to realize what was occurring. Still unhappy about the reality of their lives, still unhappy about the immiseration, the poverty, the violence and suffering that they’re enduring under these sanctions as well as—let’s not forget that the Iranian government, Judge, is a government that classifies people as enemies of God. So I think most of us would agree that such a government doesn’t need to exist.

**Judge Napolitano:**

I’m not surprised at Mossad killing people. We know the mentality. We know what the IDF does. But if the CIA kills an innocent civilian without a presidential finding or authorization, that person could be prosecuted for murder ten or twenty years from now by a federal prosecutor who doesn’t approve of what the CIA does, right?

The government is prosecuting Maduro for possessing a weapon in Caracas that was legal in Caracas, but illegal if he possessed it in Manhattan, even though he never possessed it in Manhattan. You can certainly prosecute a CIA agent for murdering somebody in Tehran.

**Matthew Hoh:**

Right, but they know that will never happen. They know that will never happen. Bloody Gina Haspel became director of the CIA after she ran torture sites for the CIA. The CIA operates under an impunity that would make J.D. Vance, with all his declarations of impunity for federal agents that murder American citizens, blush.

The impunity the CIA has is not just one based upon its own power, the fact that it is its own kingdom within the United States and does as it wishes. There’s also a cultural impunity, a belief in the United States that the CIA is this James Bond-like apparatus, this Tom Clancy-like affair. And kudos to the CIA for building that reputation, for creating that cultural imprint on Americans to allow them to have that impunity.

So they operate on their own, again, as a kingdom unto itself within the United States. It has this cultural impunity because the American people believe the lies about the CIA, the propaganda about the CIA that Hollywood produces. And then if anyone wants to get out of line, the CIA has ways to punish them.

Look, they brought down David Petraeus when he tried to bring his own version of leadership, to put it politely, into the CIA. The CIA brought him down. They exposed that he was trading top secret information with his lover. So there is this ability of the CIA to also, when it needs to, carry out punitive or vengeful or retaliatory actions to keep the federal government, to keep elected leaders, to keep overseers in line.

Let’s not forget the CIA broke into—hacked into—the Senate’s computers and nothing ever happened. It’s what Chuck Schumer said about Donald Trump in Trump’s first administration where Schumer said something along the lines of, why is Trump taking on the CIA? They can get you six ways from Sunday. This is how the CIA operates.

**Judge Napolitano:**

Schumer’s right.

**Matthew Hoh:**

Right, and this is why the CIA should be abolished.

**Judge Napolitano:**

So I was listening to a recently retired FBI agent basically saying the FBI in Minneapolis are furious. They know they should be investigating Jonathan Ross for killing Rachel Good. They have been stopped. They know they should not be investigating the governor and the mayor for their public speeches. They’re being forced to do that.

Does anybody have qualms? Does anybody say, no, I won’t do this? Do troops say, I’m not going to kill two guys floating on the remains of a boat hanging on for dear life? I’m just not going to deliver this missile to them? Or do people just do what they’re told, morality and law notwithstanding?

**Matthew Hoh:**

I think many do, Judge. That’s the sordid and terrible reality of human nature—that many of us will do as we are asked to do, as we’re ordered to do, as we’re told to do for a multitude of reasons: because we’re stupid, because we’re greedy, because we’re fearful.

I take heart in those who are standing up though, because that’s not everyone. ICE represents the very worst of us. ICE represents the thugs, the brutes, the hooligans in our society. They are the worst of us. And then you have those like Renee Good and her widow who represent the best of us.

And this is a defining time in American history. This is a time for all of us as Americans to determine which side of that line do we stand upon.

If I could just give two quotes, Judge, because yesterday was MLK Day, Martin Luther King Day. In his Beyond Vietnam speech, which I would encourage people to go and listen to again—because as the title says, it goes beyond Vietnam, it’s not just his denunciation of the Vietnam War; everything he is talking about that expands beyond that war, we are living today.

But as Dr. King said:

These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

And then yesterday we had a bishop from the Episcopal Church up in New Hampshire, Bishop Robert Hirschfield, who said this, Judge:

Now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.

And I don’t think any of this is hyperbole. I don’t think there is exaggeration. When we have masked federal agents murdering American citizens in cold blood with at least six videos of the murder happening, of the execution happening, and our government doing nothing—actually doing worse than nothing. Rather than investigating the murderer, they are investigating the woman who was murdered. If this is not the time, as we can see in terms of a historical lens, then I don’t know what is. As a fifty-two-year-old American, I know that we’ve never been in this position before in my lifetime.

**Judge Napolitano:**

I did not plan on discussing ICE with you, but we’ve gotten there. Chris just sent me a statement. Chris, do we have this? Hold on, I won’t read it. We’ll listen to him. So this is the police chief of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Watch what he has to say about these thugs. This is a cop. Watch what he has to say about these thugs in the streets.

**Brooklyn Park, MN Police Chief:**

We as a law enforcement community have been receiving endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from U.S. citizens. What we’re hearing is they’re being stopped in traffic stops or on the street with no cause and being forced to demand paperwork to determine if they are here legally. As this went on over the past two weeks, we started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off-duty.

Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them. In Brooklyn Park, one particular officer who shared her story with me was stopped as she passed ICE going down the roadway. When they boxed her in, they demanded her paperwork, of which she’s a U.S. citizen and clearly would not have any paperwork. When she became concerned about the rhetoric and the way she was being treated, she pulled out her phone, and in an attempt to record the incident, the phone was knocked out of her hands, preventing her from recording it. The officers had their guns drawn during this interaction.

And after the officer became so concerned, she was forced to identify herself as a Brooklyn Park police officer in hopes of slowing the incident and deescalating it. The agents then immediately left after hearing this, making no other comments, no other apologies—just got in their vehicles and left.

I wish I could tell you that this was an isolated incident. This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers, but what it did do is we know that our officers know what the Constitution is, they know what right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted, and that’s what they were. If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day.

**Judge Napolitano:**

It has to stop. Chris, I want you to see if you can find that chief and invite him onto the show.

Matt, this is a terrible, terrible state of affairs. I know we started talking about Hegseth and the Pentagon, and then we got into the streets of Tehran, but this is a terrible, terrible state of affairs. I don’t remember anything like this in my lifetime. This is worse than the Vietnam War era, where most of the demonstrations were over the unjust nature of the war and the unjust nature of the draft.

Hegseth gave that talk to all the generals and he had a George C. Scott/George Patton-like mammoth American flag behind him and he was carrying on and on and on. Do you think they sort of smirked and whispered to each other, this guy’s an asshole if he really thinks we’re going to put up with this?

**Matthew Hoh:**

I think there’s a lot of that, Judge. I think there was a lot of looking at how much time they had left in their service, realizing if they stay another two years in service and make it to twenty-eight years or thirty years or thirty-two years, that’s another five hundred dollars in retirement pay for them. That’s a calculation that occurs very much at senior levels of the U.S. military. That’s how they keep these guys in, in many ways.

The cowardice that was on display following before, during, and following that Trump-Hegseth performance in Quantico, back in the fall, should tell us everything we need to know about the U.S. military—that any people who are holding on to this fantasy that the generals and the admirals are going to save us, that the commanding general of the 11th Airborne Division in Alaska is not going to deploy his soldiers to Minnesota against American citizens, I don’t know what to tell you.

I think we’re all holding our hopes up that Admiral Holsey, who resigned from Southern Command back in the fall, seemingly in disagreement with Trump and Hegseth and the national security establishment over the murder of people on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific—his retirement came and went. And where is he?

And that’s the best we’ve had so far. The reason why we know the names of whistleblowers, why we celebrate them, is because they’re so infrequent. The fact that you have men like Larry Wilkerson or Doug McGregor, former Army colonels, and we all know them, is because they’re not drowned out by others, because they are unique, because they’re generally specific. The same reason why we have lieutenant colonels like Karen Kwiatkowski or Bill Astore who speak out, or former retired FBI agents like Coleen Rowley, is because they are so unique.

And so I think this is, again, this point in history that we’re at right now, this very historical moment. Again, it’s not hyperbole or exaggeration to say we’ve not seen anything like it. And we know that maybe there will be a few Americans that will stand up who are in uniform. There will be a few police chiefs like that gentleman from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. God bless him.

There will be a few military officers who say, I’m not taking part in this. There will be those like the head of the Catholic diocese for the U.S. military who just spoke out and said that American soldiers should not follow illegal orders, making sure that is understood.

But they’re going to be few and far between. I think that’s what we have to realize here. You, I, our colleagues on these programs, all the good people listening, I think we have to realize the place that we’re at right now, this historical moment, and realize that no one else is going to stand up unless we do so first.

**Judge Napolitano:**

Thank you, Matt. And thank you for letting me take you with my comments and questions all across the board here. I didn’t know about this Brooklyn Park police chief.

There’s a phenomenon in law now called the Kavanaugh stop. Now, if you’re not a law student or a judge or a person who really gets into the granular parts of the law, you might not know what the hell that is, and I wouldn’t blame you.

When the Supreme Court refused to get involved in one of the cases stopping ICE, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion. The Supreme Court just didn’t give an opinion. It just said, we’re not interfering. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion. And in that concurring opinion, he said, oh, come on. If you get stopped, big deal. Just show your papers. You’ll be gone in a couple of minutes.

That’s not the law of the land even though a Supreme Court justice wrote it, and this is not East Germany in the 1970s where the police can stop you for no reason and demand your papers and, oh, don’t worry about it, you’ll be gone in a few minutes.

We know what is happening in Minneapolis, and if we don’t stop it, it’s going to spread everywhere. Just a stupid, dumb, unconstitutional, thoughtless, lawless comment has been picked up by these thugs, and they have run with that ball.

**Matthew Hoh:**

Right, Judge. And the aspect of these men and women who populate ICE and these other federal law enforcement agencies—the most dangerous thing about them is not that they’re thugs, not that they’re brutes, not that they are nothing more than common criminals themselves, but the fact that they have no principles, they have no ethics.

You heard that police chief state how after his police officer had been stopped and identified himself, the ICE agents didn’t even apologize. And you hear that over and over again. I just read the story this morning about an American citizen who was detained, taken from his home in his underwear out into the freezing weather in Minnesota, taken for hours, and then when they finally listened to him and realized that he was an American citizen, they did bring him home, but they didn’t apologize. They didn’t say anything.

These men and women don’t even have the decency, the ethics, the morals to conduct themselves in any type of manner that we would describe as decent. And they’re, of course, led by sadists and nihilists at the top level.

And I’m reminded of a quote from Albert Camus who described this type of danger: when the sky is empty, power resides in the hands of those without principle. This idea that when we don’t have principles, when we have no ethics, when there is no religion—this is where we go to. This is where we as a people, as a human race, go to. Tyranny, brutality, oppression comes hand in hand without principles.

And that’s what we’re seeing in Minnesota. That’s what we’re seeing throughout the Muslim world that we’ve been bombing for decades. That’s what the Europeans are now dealing with, with the United States about to take Greenland from them, and so on and so forth.

**Judge Napolitano:**

Thank you, Matt. As articulate and personally courageous as always, all the best to you, my dear friend.

**Matthew Hoh:**

Thanks, Judge.