The Lie Comes First
How power moves faster than truth — and why verification terrifies it
There is a move that authoritarian systems make almost instinctively.
It happens fast. Faster than investigation. Faster than reflection. Faster than truth.
Someone is harmed by the state, and before the body is cold, the story is already set.
They were dangerous.
They were threatening.
They forced our hand.
That story doesn’t emerge after evidence is reviewed. It arrives before evidence has a chance to exist.
That isn’t a mistake. It’s the point.
What happened to Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis followed that pattern perfectly. Within hours, senior officials told the public she had “weaponized” her vehicle. She tried to run over federal agents. That lethal force was defensive. Necessary. Inevitable.
Those words weren’t chosen casually. They were chosen to do a job.
They were meant to settle the matter before anyone could look too closely.
This is not a failure. It’s a tactic.
Authoritarian systems don’t rely on persuasion. They rely on narrative dominance.
The sequence is always the same:
First, define the victim as a threat.
Then, declare the violence justified.
Then, flood the zone with authority.
Then, dare the public to contradict you.
This isn’t about one officer or one incident. It’s about how power protects itself.
If authority must be believed immediately and examined later, accountability becomes optional. Over time, it disappears entirely.
History is full of examples where this logic becomes routine. Not dramatic. Not theatrical. Just procedural.
The lie comes first.
The paperwork follows.
I had already seen this logic at work
Weeks before Minneapolis, I had already watched this mentality play out closer to home.
In my community, armed men showed up to remove people from rooftops who were working. Not violent. Not threatening. Just laborers. Guns drawn anyway. Not because there was danger, but because force had become the default language.
That was the moment it stopped being abstract.
This wasn’t about safety. It was about dominance. About making the presence of humanity itself feel criminal. This was about teaching people, through intimidation, where they stood.
So when officials later told the public that a mother in Minneapolis had “forced their hand,” my body didn’t buy it. I had already seen how quickly authority escalates when it no longer feels constrained.
You don’t need ideology to recognize that pattern.
You just need eyes.
This is what AI is actually for
There is a lot of noise right now about artificial intelligence — most of it sloppy, overheated, and unserious. AI as oracle. AI as threat. AI as replacement for thinking.
That isn’t what happened here.
What happened here is something much simpler — and much more important.
This is one of the interesting cases where I used AI to enhance my understanding of truth: as a tool to test power’s claims against reality.
I didn’t ask ChatGPT what to think. I didn’t ask it for the conclusions. I asked it to slow the video down. To go frame by frame. To describe positions, distances, timing. To tell me what was visible and what wasn’t.
Not judgment. Measurement.
That distinction matters.
Because once you do that, the official story stops feeling authoritative and starts feeling strained. Movements described as aggressive resolve as controlled when time is stretched instead of compressed. Positions described as imminent threats don’t hold up when distance and sequencing are examined instead of implied.
AI didn’t tell me the story was wrong.
It made it possible to check whether it was true.
That is exactly what tools are supposed to do in a democracy.
You still needed common sense
Even then, the technology wasn’t doing the thinking.
You still had to watch.
You still had to notice.
You still had to ask whether what you were being told matched what you could see.
If you watched the footage and felt something was off before anyone analyzed a single frame, that wasn’t politics.
That was judgment.
AI didn’t replace that. It reinforced it.
It took what authority expected to pass in a blur — urgency, chaos, confusion — and slowed it down enough for people to reason again.
That is dangerous to systems that depend on speed, fear, and deference.
This is why the response hardened
This is also why the official reaction didn’t soften when questions emerged. It hardened.
Because once ordinary people can independently test claims — cheaply, quickly, without credentials — narrative control weakens.
Authoritarian systems don’t fear disagreement.
They fear verification.
They fear tools that allow people to say, calmly and precisely: wait — that’s not what happened.
This is one of the few moments where technology actually did what it should: reduce the distance between authority and accountability.
Not by replacing human judgment.
By giving it leverage.
Louisiana is choosing this
This is where leadership matters. And this is where it is failing — nationally, and here in Louisiana.
In this state, the mentality has been openly sanctioned. An initiative to reopen Angola’s old death row to house immigrants would be absurd if it weren’t real. Setting up private prisons to house and work immigrants as slave labor must be questioned by all decent humans.
At the same time, our cities can’t afford basic services. People are being laid off. Infrastructure is failing. Budgets are collapsing — not because money doesn’t exist, but because priorities have shifted.
We can apparently afford enforcement theater. Armed presence. Federal coordination that is designed to unsettle people in their own neighborhoods is a waste of time and money.
That isn’t governance.
It’s intimidation dressed up as policy.
When leaders tolerate harassment by the state, excuse disorder by authority, and treat accountability as disloyalty, they aren’t preserving order.
They’re hollowing it out.
Law enforcement cannot function without public trust. And trust cannot survive open dishonesty.
You don’t get stability by telling people to ignore what they can plainly see.
You get fragility.
This is how free societies come apart
Authoritarian systems always believe they can outrun reality.
They believe fear will substitute for consent.
That repetition will substitute for truth.
That authority will substitute for judgment.
It never works.
Eventually, the distance between what people are told and what they experience becomes impossible to manage.
The danger isn’t chaos from below.
It’s chaos introduced by institutions that lie and expect obedience.
That’s how trust dies.
That’s how order collapses.
Quietly. Predictably. And with everyone insisting nothing is wrong until it is.
And everyone knows it.
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