All Gaslighting, No Breaks

When They Lie About What We Can See

A few years ago, I traveled to India to investigate an alleged political murder. A judge was presiding over a case involving one of the most powerful men in the country—the current Home Secretary—and died of a heart attack under suspicious circumstances.

I spent over a year investigating that particular case, not just because it potentially implicated Modi’s right-hand man, but because it was a perfect reflection of what had gone wrong with India. The real story wasn’t whether the judge was murdered. It was how everyone involved reacted to it.

In a healthy and functioning society, when someone dies of a heart attack, we usually presume it was just a heart attack. If that person happens to be powerful, or if there’s any reason to suspect foul play, an investigation ensues, an autopsy is ordered. By and large, the members of such a society trust those processes to bring clarity, truth, and justice.

That’s not what happened in the Loya case. The family of the judge publicly sowed doubt about nearly every step of the process: where the judge stayed, who was with him, which hospital he went to, who treated him, who conducted the autopsy, where his personal belongings went, why his body was cremated, when, and who made that decision. Opponents of the government and many civil society and journalistic leaders picked up on that skepticism and held on—even as the family went suspiciously quiet and eventually flipped, saying they no longer suspected foul play. The case went all the way to the country’s highest court, which broke with its own protocols to shut the door on the case, showing a noticeable lack of interest in interviewing key witnesses.

Public skepticism was earned through decades of corruption and brutality. I experienced just a tiny sliver of the Kafkaesque reality most Indians live through. The director of the hospital where the judge was pronounced dead spent over an hour lecturing me to stay in my lane while stonewalling me on every basic question about the judge’s condition when he arrived. I sprang up on the politically connected doctor who conducted the autopsy and asked him about inconsistencies in his story and the trail of allegations against him for improper conduct—including the alteration of records—and he turned beet red and showed me the door. (In fairness, I had posed as a medical student doing a journalism project. It was my only way to get in.)

This is all to say that India is broken in profound ways that cause everyday citizens to question everything they see. I examined this phenomenon at length during that podcast series, Killing Justice. If you want a clear distillation of what’s gone wrong over the past century, read Ashoka Mody’s book.

Our country is heading in that direction. We may already be there.

My friend Bradley Tusk pointed this out in a moving article this week. I’m not going to offer a detailed take on what happened in Minnesota—if you want my in-the-moment reaction, you can listen to my conversation with Jason Kander on Majority 54, which we recorded just as the video of the incident was released. The most thorough accounts that also capture my feelings are from Isaac Saul in Tangle and Noah Smith in Noahpinion.

But here are a few facts I can’t ignore.

The sitting Vice President of the United States said that shots—plural—were fired from the front of the car, as if the officer were standing in the path of a vehicle barreling toward him. The video tells a different story. Even the most generous reading shows only the first shot was fired from the front-left of the vehicle—and the car was turning away from the officer, not toward him. The next two shots were fired from the side, as the car passed. All three came in under a second. No serious analysis of the footage supports the claim that this officer was in the path of an oncoming vehicle with no option but to fire. Federal officials are stonewalling a local investigation while continuing to spew falsehoods that betray a startling lack of objectivity.

And even if you accept the official story here, that doesn’t absolve them of their conduct before and after the incident. Before the incident, ICE agents were going “door-to-door”—Vance’s words—in search of undocumented immigrants, which seems like intimidation dressed up as enforcement and a potential violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

The agents violated their own agency’s rules and, from what I can tell, best practices shared by law enforcement around the country. Here’s Isaac Saul:

One eyewitness said ICE agents gave Good conflicting instructions, with some telling her to leave while others told her to get out of the car. The video backs this up: You can hear a lot of yelling and barking orders, and the officers aren’t approaching her car with uniform calm, control, and clarity. Also, officers are never supposed to position themselves in front of a vehicle or approach it from the front for precisely this reason. DHS officers are generally prohibited from discharging a firearm at a moving vehicle, unless someone is using their car as a deadly weapon and “no other objectively reasonable means of defense is available.” DHS also has use-of-force rules, which are relatively straightforward and include a baseline “respect for human life” and “the communities we serve,” emphasizing de-escalation tactics as a core component.

Why was this agent holding a cell phone in one hand while discharging his gun with the other? And then there’s the aftermath: video shows a physician trying to help Good as she bled out, only to be blocked by agents who told him, “I don’t care.” Is there going to be a serious investigation of that allegation?

Any strong and healthy law enforcement agency would want its people well-trained and accountable to their rules of engagement. The fact that this administration rushed to offer a slanted and verifiably false account while blocking outside investigations should alarm us.

A woman is dead. That much we know. But the costs of these incidents go well beyond one life. At least in the India case I investigated, there was no video. It was harder to know what happened—and potentially easier for officials to lie, if that’s what they were doing. Here, we can all watch the video. We can see for ourselves what happened. And still, they lie to us.

This is what breaks a society. Not the violence itself, but the official insistence that we didn’t see what we saw. The accumulation of these incidents won’t just leave a trail of dead bodies. It will disintegrate the glue that holds us together—the baseline assumption that we share a common reality, that our institutions will at least try to find the truth, that the people with guns answer to something beyond the whims of their political patrons.

I try to avoid politics on this Substack. That’s not what this space is for (I have two podcasts for that). But this was too much for me to stay quiet.

I grew up around law enforcement. My grandfather was a cop. My brother is a federal corrections officer. I’ve generally been to the right of most Democrats when it comes to how they talk about policing and public safety. But none of that means we stop expecting accountability, good training, and the truth. If anything, it means we should expect more.

You can be of any political party and believe this was wrong. You can support strong borders and believe that the people enforcing them do everything they can to preserve life and keep our society’s trust. You can believe that we owe each other honesty—and that when a mother dies on a residential street in Minneapolis, the least we deserve is a straight answer about what happened.