The System Isn’t Broken — It’s Working as Designed

Recent events have once again exposed a dangerous game being played by those in power. A familiar pattern repeats itself: politicians pander to a base they know will not question narratives, will not dig into history, and will not examine the mechanics of government. Emotion is rewarded. Outrage is amplified. Nuance is punished.

And the consequences are never borne by the people making the speeches.

Laws, Blame, and Convenient Amnesia

Here’s an uncomfortable truth that rarely gets said plainly enough: Politicians write the laws. Law enforcement enforces them.

The legislative branch creates policy. The executive branch carries it out. That division is foundational to how our system is supposed to function. But when laws become politically inconvenient—when enforcement generates backlash—the same politicians who authored those laws suddenly develop amnesia.

Instead of revisiting bad policy or owning the consequences of their votes, they deflect. They point to “rogue officers.” They vilify the very people tasked with enforcing statutes that lawmakers themselves passed, funded, and defended.

It’s a neat trick: create the problem, then redirect the anger toward the most visible uniform in the room.

Power Preserved, Lives Spent

At the local level, this dynamic becomes even more dangerous. City councils, mayors, and prosecutors gin up public anger, knowing full well they will never stand between that anger and its consequences. They speak recklessly from behind microphones while officers are sent into the streets to absorb the fallout.

Those officers are not policymakers. They are employees—hired to do a job, bound by oath, procedure, and law. Yet they find themselves caught in the crosshairs: politically expendable, publicly condemned, and personally threatened for doing precisely what they were ordered to do.

Power is preserved. Lives are risked. And the gap between rhetoric and reality grows wider.

Selective Memory and Political Shape-Shifting

What makes this moment especially corrosive is the sheer audacity of the flip-flopping.

We are told today that certain policies are “fascist” or “authoritarian,” despite being openly supported—sometimes enthusiastically—by the very same political figures in previous years. Calls for stricter immigration enforcement once framed as pragmatic governance are now recast as moral atrocities. Policies once defended as necessary are retroactively condemned when they become politically inconvenient.

We are asked to believe two contradictory things at once: that enforcement is tyranny, and that the people who enforced it before were heroes.

This isn’t moral growth. It’s political shape-shifting.

When Law Enforcement Becomes the Enemy

There is a line—an old one, and a dangerous one—that societies cross when law enforcement is successfully reframed as “the enemy of the people.” When that happens, anarchy doesn’t arrive all at once. It creeps in slowly, justified as righteous anger, tolerated as political expression, excused as necessary pressure.

But here is the part no one in the crowd is meant to think about:

Once protests outlive their usefulness…
Once the anger reaches critical mass…
Once it threatens the same politicians who encouraged it…

The switch flips.

The same law enforcement once vilified becomes indispensable again. The same laws once condemned are suddenly enforced with urgency. And the same people who were cheered on in the streets find themselves facing the full weight of the system they were told no longer applied.

History is very clear on this point.

Why I Wrote Exposed King

These themes sit at the heart of my upcoming novel, Exposed King. What begins as a crime story quickly becomes something more unsettling: a portrait of a city where politics paralyze justice, where leaders hide behind ideology, and where the consequences of that cowardice begin to surface in blood.

The book isn’t an endorsement of chaos or vigilantism. It’s a warning about trajectories—about what happens when leaders stop governing and start posturing, when enforcement becomes a political liability instead of a civic necessity, and when responsibility is endlessly deferred.

Because when the system teaches people that laws are optional, enforcement is immoral, and accountability is selective, it shouldn’t be surprised when someone decides the rules no longer matter.

And by then, it’s already too late.