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.

A Government of Laws, Not of Men

One of the most dangerous shifts in modern governance isn’t happening loudly. It isn’t announced with sweeping legislation or dramatic court rulings. It’s happening quietly, through omission, selective enforcement, and political posturing by those entrusted to uphold the law—not reinterpret it.

At the center of this shift is a troubling trend: senior law enforcement executives increasingly engaging in political activism rather than enforcement.

The Unique Weight of the Badge at the Top

Unlike many political appointments, the selection of a chief law enforcement officer—police commissioner, chief, sheriff, or attorney general—carries a responsibility that transcends ideology. These roles are not meant to advance political agendas or signal virtue to a partisan base. They exist for one reason: to faithfully and impartially enforce the law as written.

That doesn’t mean leaders can’t hold personal views. It means those views must never eclipse their obligation to the rule of law.

And yet that is exactly what we are seeing happening across the country. In cities like Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, D.C. and New York City, we are watching senior law enforcement executives quietly abandon the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution. Instead of faithfully executing the duties of their office, too many have chosen self-preservation—submitting to the political whims of mayors, governors, and party power brokers in order to keep their positions. In doing so, they trade principle for proximity to power, and the badge for a bargaining chip. The damage isn’t abstract: it erodes trust, confuses subordinates, and signals to the public that the rule of law is negotiable if one’s job depends on it.

When a law enforcement executive begins governing by personal belief, political loyalty, or public pressure instead of statute, the entire system begins to blur. The result is not compassion. It is confusion.

When Enforcement Becomes Optional

Laws are not suggestions. They are not talking points. And they are not meant to be selectively applied based on who agrees with them.

If a law is unjust, outdated, or harmful, there is a mechanism for addressing it: the legislature. Debate it. Amend it. Repeal it. That is how a republic functions.

What a society cannot survive is a system where governors, mayors, or law enforcement executives decide—unilaterally—which laws they feel like enforcing and which they don’t. That isn’t leadership. It’s circumvention.

And it sends a dangerous message to everyone watching:
If you don’t agree with a law, you don’t have to obey it.

The Damage Below the Surface

This ambiguity is corrosive, especially within the ranks of law enforcement.

Officers are hired to enforce laws, not guess political winds. When direction from the top becomes inconsistent—enforce this today, ignore it tomorrow, apologize for it publicly next week—it creates paralysis. Officers hesitate. Enforcement becomes uneven. Decision-making becomes reactive rather than principled.

That uncertainty doesn’t just affect morale. It affects safety.

At the same time, the public absorbs the lesson being taught. When enforcement appears arbitrary or politically motivated, compliance erodes. Boundaries blur. Tensions rise. And in that space—between unclear authority and emboldened defiance—catastrophic incidents are born.

Not because laws were enforced.
But because they weren’t enforced consistently.

Laws Belong in the Legislature, Not the Headlines

A society governed by laws cannot function if those laws are endlessly debated in the street instead of addressed in the chamber where they were created. Enforcement is not the place for policy experimentation. It is the final step in a process that should already be settled.

When enforcement becomes performative—applied or withheld to curry favor—it ceases to be justice. It becomes theater. And theater is a poor substitute for order.

The Principle at Stake

The phrase “a government of laws, not of men” exists for a reason. It is a warning against exactly this moment—against systems where personal ideology replaces institutional obligation, and where authority bends to personality instead of principle.

Once enforcement depends on who is in charge rather than what the law requires, the rule of law is no longer the foundation. It’s just another opinion.

And no society remains stable for long when the law itself becomes optional.

These tensions sit at the heart of my upcoming novel, Exposed King. In the story, NYPD Police Commissioner James Maguire finds himself trapped between a political system that helped create the chaos now gripping the city and a shadowy group that has decided the system is beyond repair—and that justice must be taken into their own hands. As laws are debated, undermined, and selectively enforced, Maguire is left to confront the consequences of leadership by ideology rather than principle. The novel isn’t an argument for vigilantism; it’s a warning about what emerges when the rule of law is weakened from above and abandoned from below.

Exposed King is coming soon.

When Fiction Bleeds Into Reality: A Cautionary Tale

There’s a moment every writer dreads—not writer’s block, not bad reviews—but the quiet realization that the story you’re telling no longer feels speculative.

It feels familiar.

As I prepare to release the latest James Maguire book, Exposed King, I’ve found myself increasingly unsettled by the daily news cycle. Headlines that once would have sounded exaggerated now feel routine. Language that once belonged in dystopian fiction is now spoken casually from podiums, press briefings, and social media feeds.

And that should concern all of us.

Writing a Story I Never Wanted to Be Relevant

Exposed King follows NYPD Police Commissioner James Maguire as he investigates a disturbing pattern: criminals turning up dead, seemingly targeted, seemingly judged, seemingly executed. The city is already fractured—politically, socially, morally—and instead of unifying in the face of fear, its leaders retreat into tribal lines, rhetoric, and blame.

Maguire isn’t just fighting a killer.
He’s fighting paralysis.
He’s fighting politics.
He’s fighting the slow erosion of trust between the public and the system meant to protect them.

I began outlining Exposed King in 2019—long before the social fabric felt this frayed, before institutions were openly questioned at every turn, and before division became a political currency. At the time, much of what I was writing felt speculative, even risky. I remember second-guessing certain plot points, worried that I might be “jumping the shark,” pushing the story too far beyond what readers would find believable. Now, as the book nears release, I find myself unsettled for an entirely different reason: those same elements no longer feel exaggerated. They feel plausible. Worse, they feel familiar—like stories that could comfortably lead the evening news rather than live between the covers of a novel.

That growing sense of recognition is also part of why Exposed King took longer to finish than I ever anticipated. As the world began to resemble the story I was trying to tell, I found myself slowing down—not because I had run out of ideas, but because the line between fiction and reality had blurred. The story demanded more care, more restraint, and a deeper understanding of the consequences it was pointing toward.

Exposed King was intended as a cautionary thriller—a “what if.” What if leaders spent more time posturing than protecting? What if laws were enforced selectively? What if criminals were elevated as symbols while ordinary civilians were reduced to statistics? What if accountability vanished, replaced by ideology?

I never expected to watch those questions unfold in real time.

The Dangerous Game of Anarcho-Tyranny

There’s a concept often discussed in political theory called anarcho-tyranny: the idea that institutions grow increasingly oppressive toward the law-abiding while becoming increasingly permissive toward the lawless.

You see it when:

• Crime rises, but consequences vanish

• Civilians are told to “understand” while victims are told to endure

• Violence is condemned selectively, depending on who commits it

• Entire groups of people are demonized for their beliefs, their votes, or their skin color

When leaders fan these flames—intentionally or not—they gamble with something they cannot control: human breaking points.

History shows us, again and again, that when good people feel abandoned, ignored, or sacrificed for political optics, something snaps. Not in everyone. Not at once. But enough to change the trajectory of a society.

That’s the danger zone.

When the System Loses Moral Authority

One of the central tensions in Exposed King is this:
What happens when the system loses the moral authority to govern?

Not legally.
Morally.

When people no longer believe justice is possible, they don’t stop believing in justice altogether—they start redefining it. And that’s when things turn dark.

This isn’t an endorsement of vigilantism. Quite the opposite. It’s a warning. A society that pushes its citizens into corners—where law feels optional for some and suffocating for others—creates the very monsters it later claims to fear.

And here’s the part that should keep politicians awake at night:

Once violence becomes normalized, once dehumanization becomes routine, once “enemy” replaces “neighbor,” the crosshairs don’t stay fixed on the margins forever.

They move.

A Personal Unease

As a writer, I’m supposed to imagine worst-case scenarios. I’m supposed to explore uncomfortable questions. But I never wanted to feel like I was chronicling the present.

There’s a deep discomfort in watching scenes I labored over—conflict, distrust, political theater—play out not on the page, but in real cities, with real victims, and irreversible consequences.

Stories are meant to provoke thought, not serve as blueprints.

A Caution, Not a Call

Exposed King is not a manifesto. It’s not an argument for one side or another. It’s a warning about trajectories—about what happens when leadership prioritizes ideology over stability, messaging over lives, and division over responsibility.

The path we’re on is a dangerous one.

If leaders continue to sacrifice cohesion for applause, morality for momentum, and people for power, they shouldn’t be shocked when the consequences arrive uninvited.

Because once society decides the rules no longer apply evenly… everyone becomes vulnerable.

Including those who thought they were untouchable.

September 11th, Charlie Kirk, and Exposed King

I am sitting here this morning feeling a sense of numbness as I deal with the normal emotions of September 11th coupled with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I say ‘normal’ because as an NYPD first responder on that day I have grudgingly accepted that the emotions are part of who I am now. I stopped trying to make sense of it long ago, and now I just accept that there is an ebb and flow that I must ride out annually. I don’t fight it; I just let the memories come in and go out, because you cannot make ‘sense’ of what happened twenty-four years ago.

On September 11th, 2001, we came together as a country. At first we felt rage and anger about the terrorist attack. Then we felt the collective pain as we came to terms with the fact that we’d lost thousands of our fellow citizens; men, women and children who would never see another sunrise; people who woke up and died because of someone else’s hatred. Then there was a brief moment of solidarity: United We Stand, Never Forget, Remember the Heroes… but like most altruistic slogans, it had no depth.

Yesterday, September 10th, 2025, a 31-year-old husband and father of two small children was assassinated in Utah. His crime? Having a dissenting opinion.

Charlie Kirk was on a university campus, a world where dissenting opinions have traditionally been fostered and embraced, but yesterday we were told, in no uncertain terms, that this world no longer exists.

A man was murdered in cold-blood and many cheered at his demise.

A bullet became the ultimate form of censorship.

It reminded me of the line spoken by Tyrion Lannister in George R.R. Martin’s book: Clash of Kings – “When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

This is America now. This is who we have become. Not United, but divided to the point that murder has become an acceptable course of action against those whom we disagree with.

I released my last James Maguire book, Glass Castle, in 2019. As most good authors, I had the working plot for the next book, Exposed King, in my head. I remember that I struggled a bit with it, because it had what I felt was a radical leap, or, to use the old Happy Days trope, I felt like I was ‘jumping the shark’ with this story-line, but I told myself that I could polish it and make it plausible. I’d moved on to the next Alex Taylor book, The Killing Game, as I compiled notes and ideas and fleshed-out the outline.

Then Covid-19 happened.

I thought it was my time to shine, to get the downtime I needed to write my little heart out.

I finished The Killing Game, I wrote Awakening, a genre bending police procedural meets vampires, got in another Cold Case novella, and even managed to write: Shadow Strike, a Maguire origin story, but Exposed King languished in a file on my computer.

I wrote some chapters, which were more like snippets or frustrated paragraphs, in fits and starts, struggling as I went, as if some unseen force was trying to block me. As a writer, I knew I had to walk away. Forcing it would never work. I kept asking myself why I was having so much of a problem.

It’s fiction. I’m a writer. This is what I do.

The truth is I fear that Exposed King won’t be fiction. The premise is less of a ‘who done it’ and more of a ‘what if.’

As I said earlier, the plot came to me during Glass Castle, pre-dating Covid, but also George Floyd and before the Defund the Police movement and all the other radical events since. With each passing day, I saw my fictional plot growing potentially more real, and it scared me.

America is changing, and not for the better.

For nearly a hundred years, Superman’s iconic motto was: “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” and yet today we find ourselves facing an America where truth is subjective, justice is no longer impartial, and the American way is abhorrent to a large swath of society.

I know I have to finish Exposed King; I just hope it remains within the realm of fictional work and does not become a prescient warning.

A part of me wonders if George Orwell felt the same way when he published 1984.

May God have mercy on us.

9/11 World Trade Center Cross taken by anne bybee

Interview with Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith (National Police Association)

I had the absolute pleasure of being interviewed by retired sergeant, Betsy Brantner Smith, for the podcast she does for the National Police Association.

Some of you might be familiar with Betsy, as she has appeared on a number of news shows, including Newsmax, and Fox.

Despite some minor technical glitches (rural internet being what it is), we managed to have a great time. Betsy is an awesome interviewer and we touched on a number of topics, including my career with the NYPD, my transition to author, and the state of policing.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Click on the photo below or the link provided at the botom.

or CLICK HERE: https://www.thefirsttv.com/watch/npa-report-andrew-g-nelson