An Election Day reflection on Minnesota, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and the price of liberty.
If you’ve already voted, or are planning to vote on November 3, I hope you’ll take a moment to think about the people of Minnesota. Earlier this year, ordinary citizens confronted federal authority, organized demonstrations, documented government actions, and demanded accountability. Some paid a terrible price. Their experiences deserve a place in our reflections on what it means to live in a free country.
In particular, I hope you’ll remember Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two Americans killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis in January 2026. Their deaths sparked protests, investigations, and a national argument about the proper limits of federal law-enforcement power. Those arguments continue, and the full legal accounting remains unfinished.
I find myself thinking about them as Election Day approaches, because voting is only one part of maintaining a free society. Elections give citizens an orderly means of changing their government. But elections alone do not guarantee that government will respect the rights of the people between elections.
Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty
In November 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Stephens Smith about Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts. The young American republic was still struggling to determine what sort of government it would become, and Jefferson was concerned about a political culture that regarded public resistance as an intolerable threat to order.
He asked how any country could preserve its liberties if its rulers were never reminded that the people retained the spirit of resistance.
Then came his famous observation:
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”
Jefferson continued by calling that blood the tree’s natural manure. The language is deliberately unsettling, and it should be. He was discussing rebellion, the deaths that could accompany it, and the relationship between popular resistance and political authority.
The word patriots matters. The quotation is sometimes repeated as though Jefferson were speaking only about the blood of tyrants, as though liberty can always be defended without sacrifice by those who believe in it. But Jefferson included both. His formulation acknowledged that resistance to power could cost the lives of the people resisting it.
That does not make every rebellion just, every protest wise, or every act of resistance legitimate. Indeed, Jefferson himself believed the participants in Shays’ Rebellion were mistaken about important facts. His response, however, was not simply to demand their suppression. He argued that the government should correct their misunderstandings, pardon them, and restore peace.
His larger concern was a government so fearful of dissent that it lost the ability to distinguish public disorder from the warning signs of a population determined to remain free.
Read Jefferson’s November 13, 1787, letter at the Library of Congress.
Remembering Renee Good and Alex Pretti
Renee Good was killed on January 7, 2026. Alex Pretti was killed on January 24. Both died during federal immigration-enforcement operations in Minneapolis. The shootings provoked widespread public demonstrations and demands for independent investigations. Accounts of the encounters, the officers’ actions, and the federal government’s handling of evidence have been the subject of substantial controversy.
I do not believe we need to pretend that every fact has been resolved to recognize the gravity of what happened. Two citizens are dead. Their families have suffered irreversible losses. The public has a legitimate interest in knowing precisely how and why federal officers used deadly force, and whether those actions complied with the law.
Nor should we confuse remembering people who died with celebrating their deaths. There is nothing glorious about a family losing someone it loves. The proper response to such a loss is grief, an insistence on the truth, and a determination that government power remain subject to meaningful accountability.
When I think about Jefferson’s reference to the blood of patriots, I think about the human cost that can accompany confrontations between citizens and their government. I think about the people who take personal risks to exercise their rights, the families who bear the consequences, and the importance of ensuring that those sacrifices are neither forgotten nor casually exploited.
Whatever conclusions the investigations ultimately support, Renee Good and Alex Pretti deserve to be remembered as human beings, not reduced to symbols in a political argument.
Frederick Douglass, a Founding Father in My Book
My definition of America’s Founding Fathers is somewhat unconventional. I include Frederick Douglass.
Douglass was born decades after the Declaration of Independence, and he held no seat at the Constitutional Convention. But founding a nation is not merely a matter of writing its first governing documents. It is also the continuing work of making the nation’s institutions live up to their professed principles.
By that measure, Douglass helped make America what it is.
Born into slavery, Douglass escaped bondage and became one of the nation’s most consequential abolitionists, writers, and orators. He confronted a country that proclaimed liberty while denying it to millions. His work helped force Americans to reckon with the distance between their founding ideals and their actual institutions.
In his 1857 speech on emancipation in the British West Indies, Douglass offered a warning that remains relevant whenever people ask why citizens cannot simply remain quiet and trust those in authority:
“If there is no struggle there is no progress.”
He compared those who desire freedom without agitation to people who expect crops without plowing, rain without thunder, and an ocean without the roar of its waters. His argument was not that violence is always necessary. He explicitly recognized that struggles for liberty can be moral as well as physical.
But he understood that people who hold power rarely surrender it simply because someone has politely explained why they should.
His most enduring formulation was:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
And he warned that the limits of tyranny are shaped by what the oppressed are willing to endure.
Read Douglass’s West India Emancipation speech.
What Voting Means
We are fortunate to possess a means of challenging government that does not require rebellion: the ballot.
An election allows citizens to replace officials, reject policies, and change the direction of their government without violence. That is an extraordinary achievement of constitutional government, and one that should never be treated casually.
But the ballot does not operate in isolation. Its value depends upon freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, due process, and the ability of citizens to criticize public officials without fear of unlawful retaliation. Those rights are not ornaments attached to democracy. They are among the conditions that allow elections to function as meaningful exercises of popular sovereignty.
That is why public demonstrations, independent reporting, legal challenges, and demands for accountability matter even when elections are approaching. They are ways citizens communicate with their government between opportunities to vote.
None of this requires believing that every protester is right or that every government action is wrong. A free society must permit disagreement about both. The test is whether people can exercise their rights, challenge official conduct, and seek redress under laws that apply to citizens and government officers alike.
A Moment of Reflection
So when you cast your ballot this year, I hope you’ll take a moment to remember Minnesota.
Remember the people who marched, the people who documented events, the people who demanded answers, and the families whose lives were changed forever. Remember Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Remember Jefferson’s warning that liberty cannot survive when a government forgets that the people retain the right to resist its abuses. Remember Douglass’s insistence that progress requires struggle, and that the desire for freedom means little if we are unwilling to defend the rights that make freedom possible.
Most of all, remember that our rights are not gifts bestowed upon us by whoever happens to hold office. They belong to the people, and public officials exercise authority subject to constitutional limits.
Voting is one of the most peaceful and powerful ways we have to defend that principle.
May we never take it for granted.
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