Politics and law Every citizen fatality in the custody of a government official—like George Floyd’s excruciating death in Minneapolis—deserves a solemn response and ultimate accounting, including both criminal investigation and broader assessment. The fear and fury flowing from recent law-enforcement casualties, however, have been inflamed and manipulated by opportunists to produce something much more sweeping. Hard facts and data about our systems of law and policing are being ignored. Emotional hysteria is increasingly substituted for reasoned problem-solving. There is enormous pressure to conform to approved ideological assertions, and people expressing alternate views are often railroaded. Broad attacks on social order, widespread destruction of public and private property, and new waves of street crime have unfolded. There is open hostility toward the fundamentals of American justice and governance. It is now routinely claimed that “the United States government was founded on racist intellectual premises and economic practices that institutionalized oppression of people of color that continues to the present day” (to quote the Seattle Public Schools). U.S. society as a whole is characterized as a “system of oppression.”