The Sufferable Evil

Chicago and the End of American Liberty.

Around 10 PM on Monday, September 30th, 2025, federal agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF—a multi-agency operation targeting suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

What happened next should be the biggest story in America.

Pertissue Fisher came out to the hallway of her apartment in her nightgown to find armed agents yelling “police.” She had a gun pointed in her face. She was handcuffed. She was held until 3 AM before being released. Fisher isn’t suspected of any crime. She lives in the building.

Alicia Brooks stuck her key in her door to enter her own apartment. An officer grabbed her. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He never told her. She was detained.

Every resident in the building was detained. Not just suspected gang members. Everyone. Adults. Children. Witnesses report children zip-tied together, crying, terrified. One federal officer, when asked about the children, reportedly said: “Fuck them kids.”

Marlee Sanders watched as agents separated detainees by race. “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”

Thirty-seven people were arrested. How many innocent residents were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, detained for hours without probable cause? Federal authorities won’t say. Residents estimate 30-40 additional people were held and released.

Blackhawk helicopters. Flash bangs. A chainsaw to cut through fencing. Doors blown off hinges. Holes in walls. An entire building’s worth of American citizens treated as enemy combatants in a war zone.

This happened. In Chicago. In America. This week.

And we’ve already moved on to the next story.

Thomas Jefferson understood something about human nature that we’re watching play out in real time. In the Declaration of Independence, just paragraphs after declaring certain truths self-evident, he observed: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Jefferson wasn’t making an abstract philosophical claim. He was describing what he had witnessed throughout history: humans endure tyranny. They accommodate. They find reasons why this particular violation isn’t quite bad enough to justify the terrifying work of resistance.

They suffer while evils are sufferable.

And what happened in Chicago this week? It’s sufferable. Barely. Just barely. But sufferable enough that most Americans will shrug and scroll past.

The bitter irony is that what occurred in that South Shore apartment building represents precisely the kind of tyranny that provoked the American Revolution itself.

The Founders didn’t rebel over abstract principles. They rebelled over specific violations that made daily life under British rule intolerable. And high on that list of grievances was the British use of general warrants—legal instruments that allowed authorities to search anyone, anywhere, without specifying particular suspects or probable cause.

General warrants gave British soldiers the power to enter colonists’ homes, demand papers, detain occupants, and search property based on nothing more than broad authorization to look for contraband or fugitives. You didn’t need to be suspected of a crime. You just needed to be in the wrong place when authorities decided to exercise their power.

The colonists considered this an abomination. It violated what they understood as the fundamental right to be secure in one’s home against arbitrary government intrusion. The rage against general warrants fueled revolutionary fervor and shaped the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t just prohibit searches without warrants. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—including searches conducted under the kind of sweeping authority that allows agents to detain everyone in a building because the building itself is “known to be frequented by” suspected criminals.

What happened in Chicago wasn’t a targeted operation against specific individuals for whom probable cause had been established. It was a general sweep. Everyone detained. Everyone held. Everyone’s liberty suspended until federal agents decided whether you were interesting enough to arrest.

This is exactly—exactly—what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.

And America yawned.

Let me say this clearly: nobody in this country is safe.

The justification for what happened in Chicago? The building was “known to be frequented by” suspected gang members. Not “we have warrants for specific individuals.” Not “we have probable cause to believe these particular residents committed crimes.” But proximity to suspected criminals now means everyone loses their Fourth Amendment rights.

This is collective punishment—the logic of occupation, not policing in a constitutional republic.

And it gets worse.

This is part of a pattern we’re watching unfold in real time. The government is selecting targets—cities, communities, people it doesn’t like—and then deploying federal agents to find crimes. Not investigating crimes and following evidence to perpetrators. Choosing perpetrators and then searching for crimes to justify their detention.

This is the inversion of everything a constitutional system of justice is supposed to prevent.

In a legitimate legal order, suspicion of specific criminal activity creates the authority to investigate. You don’t get to pick your enemies and then rifle through their lives looking for something to charge them with. You don’t get to declare entire buildings or neighborhoods presumptively criminal and suspend constitutional protections for everyone within them.

But that’s exactly what’s happening. Chicago isn’t an outlier—it’s a demonstration project. A proof of concept. A test of how far the administration can go before Americans say “no further.”

And so far? We’re accommodating.

Federal agents are conducting warrantless mass detentions of American citizens, and the response from most of the country is a shrug. Some actively celebrate it—finally, someone willing to get tough on crime, to do what needs to be done, to stop worrying so much about rights and procedures and just deal with the problem.

This is how it happens. This is how democracies slide into authoritarianism. Not through some dramatic coup or overnight transformation, but through the steady normalization of violations that people are “more disposed to suffer.”

Why are we accommodating this?

The calculus is simple and ancient: it’s not happening to us. The targets are gang members and their unfortunate neighbors—mostly Black and brown people in neighborhoods most Americans will never visit. This violation doesn’t affect me directly, and resisting it would require effort, risk, discomfort. Easier to believe that people detained probably did something to deserve scrutiny, even if we can’t quite articulate what.

Because it’s sufferable.

This is the logic that makes tyranny possible.

Every authoritarian regime in history has relied on this same human tendency to accommodate violations of other people’s rights while trusting that “it won’t happen to me.” Every descent into authoritarianism proceeds through exactly this pattern: define an enemy (gangs, immigrants, terrorists, dissidents), suspend normal legal protections in the name of fighting that enemy, expand the definition of who counts as the enemy, repeat.

The architecture is always the same. Only the specific targets change.

And here’s what people still don’t understand: once you normalize the suspension of constitutional rights for one group, you’ve eliminated the principle that protects everyone. Once you accept that the government can detain entire buildings full of people without individualized probable cause because “bad people might be there,” you’ve conceded the logic that makes your own rights contingent on someone else’s judgment about whether your neighborhood, your building, your home might harbor someone the government wants.

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect gang members. It protects Pertissue Fisher, standing in her nightgown with a gun in her face. It protects Alicia Brooks, grabbed at her own door. It protects those children, zip-tied and terrified.

It protects you.

Or it did. Until we collectively decided that protecting those people was too much trouble.

President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military. Think about what that means. Not that the military should train in Chicago—that Chicago itself, an American city, should serve as practice for what? Urban warfare? Population control? The exercise of federal force against civilian populations?

This isn’t hyperbole. These are his words. And the response from most Americans has been... silence. Accommodation. The sufferable evil.

Jefferson understood that humans will endure almost anything rather than face the terrifying work of resistance. He understood that experience teaches accommodation, that habit makes tyranny bearable, that people will suffer injustice until the moment it becomes absolutely insufferable.

What he couldn’t tell us—what no founder could tell us—is where that line falls for any particular generation. When does the sufferable become insufferable? When do people finally stop accommodating and start resisting? When does the evil grow too large to ignore?

I don’t know. But I know this: we’re not there yet. And that should terrify you more than anything else in this essay.

Because we are falling now.

Not metaphorically. Actually. The constitutional order that prevents arbitrary government power is collapsing in real time, and most Americans are scrolling past the evidence on their way to something more entertaining.

The wire is breaking. The center cannot hold. And the ground approaches.

You can feel it if you’re paying attention—that sickening acceleration, that sense that things are moving faster than our capacity to process them, that each new violation makes the previous one seem almost quaint in retrospect. Warrantless mass detentions. Children zip-tied. American citizens sorted by race. American cities as military training grounds.

Each accommodation makes the next violation easier. Each shrug gives permission for something worse. Each time we decide that this particular evil is sufferable, we lower the threshold for what becomes acceptable.

This is how it happens. Not all at once, but through a series of choices—individual and collective—to look away, to accommodate, to suffer what seems survivable rather than risk the unknown consequences of resistance.

Jefferson knew. The Founders knew. They built constitutional protections precisely because they understood how easily liberty dies—not through conquest, but through accommodation. Not through force alone, but through the steady erosion of principle that occurs when good people decide that defending rights is too much trouble.

History will not wake you from your ignorant slumber gently.

It will not tap you on the shoulder and give you time to prepare. It will not announce itself with clarity and give you the comfort of knowing exactly when to act.

History wakes us with the impact. With the moment when sufferable becomes insufferable and we realize—too late—that we accommodated our way into something we can no longer escape.

The ground approaches. You can choose to notice. You can choose to care. You can choose to say “this far and no further.”

Or you can scroll past. You can shrug. You can decide this particular evil is still sufferable, that someone else will hold the center, that surely it won’t come to your door.

All experience hath shewn which choice most people make.

But you are not most people. You are you—conscious, capable, still free enough to choose what you will accommodate and what you will resist.

Federal agents detained American citizens without individualized probable cause this week. They handcuffed children. They sorted people by race. They treated an American city like occupied territory.

This happened.

The question isn’t whether it happened. The question is whether you’ll decide it’s sufferable.

Because that choice—your choice, made right now, in this moment—is what determines whether we land or crash.

The ground approaches.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the Fourth Amendment means nothing if we collectively decide it’s too much trouble to defend.

Hold the center. Or watch it collapse.

There is no third option.

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“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” – Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington (1788)