Extreme Risk Protection Orders: On Red Flag Laws and the Monopoly on Violence (01.25.26)
1. Red flags mark the moment when violence is no longer hypothetical but has not yet fully materialized. They function as early indicators: signals that allow institutions, individuals, and states to intervene before force is openly deployed. In contemporary society, the term circulates across legal, psychological, and political registers, revealing how violence is increasingly managed preemptively rather than addressed after the fact.
2. In the legal sphere, “red flag” laws (Extreme Risk Protection Orders) permit courts to temporarily remove firearms from individuals deemed a danger to themselves or others. These laws operate in advance of crime, mobilizing the state’s monopoly on violence as a preventive mechanism. Rather than adjudicating guilt, the state acts on probability, risk assessment, and behavioral indicators. Violence is not punished; it is anticipated. This marks a broader shift in governance toward managing threats before they become events, expanding state authority while compressing the space of individual rights.
3. Recent events in Minneapolis underscore this failure. A federal operation framed as enforcement and risk mitigation escalated into lethal force, resulting in the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Official claims of self-defense have been widely challenged by eyewitness testimony and by video footage captured from multiple angles, which suggest a far more rapid and aggressive escalation than the narrative of necessity allows. What is at stake here is not only the factual dispute over what occurred, but the structural conditions that made such an outcome predictable.
4. This incident exposes a critical contradiction in the logic of red-flag governance. While the state asserts the authority to intervene preemptively—disarming individuals deemed dangerous, monitoring behavior, anticipating threats—it simultaneously reserves for itself the right to escalate force with minimal delay when it perceives risk. The monopoly on violence is justified as a stabilizing function, yet its exercise increasingly bypasses the very caution it demands of others. Emergency powers expand, while accountability lags behind
5. At the interpersonal level, red flags describe patterns of control and escalation that precede abuse: surveillance, isolation, jealousy framed as care, the gradual erosion of autonomy. These behaviors are rarely recognized as violence in themselves, yet they reliably signal its approach. The parallel with legal red-flag mechanisms is instructive. In both cases, violence is understood not as a sudden rupture but as a process—one that announces itself through repetition, atmosphere, and pressure long before it becomes visible or actionable.
6. Historically, states have followed the same logic. The incremental annexations and territorial expansions of the 1930s—most notably the Anschluss—were framed as administrative adjustments, protective measures, or expressions of popular will. Each step tested the limits of tolerance and resistance, advancing power without triggering immediate confrontation. By the time violence was unmistakable, it had already been normalized through legal, bureaucratic, and symbolic means. Emergency did not arrive suddenly; it was prolonged, staged, and managed.
7. This condition defines the present. We are living within a permanent pre-crisis, where emergency is continuous rather than exceptional. Governance increasingly relies on prediction, surveillance, and risk mitigation, while cultural and political systems struggle to distinguish between prevention and control. The monopoly on violence is no longer exercised only through overt force but through anticipatory frameworks that authorize intervention in the name of safety, stability, and order.
8. The visual language surrounding this condition is not incidental. Warning systems depend on color, signal, and spectacle—alerts, banners, coded thresholds of attention. Red flags are meant to be seen quickly and acted upon without deliberation. Yet visibility does not guarantee comprehension. Repeated exposure dulls response; constant alert produces fatigue. What once signaled danger becomes background noise.
9. Within this context, red and blue surfaces—flags, fabrics, screens—function as diagnostic images. They register how authority is staged and how danger is aestheticized. Power must appear controlled, legitimate, and reassuring even as it expands. The emergency is not only political or legal; it is perceptual. Our capacity to recognize escalation has been eroded by its normalization.
10. To diagnose the present state of emergency is to acknowledge that violence is increasingly managed through delay, deferral, and anticipation rather than confrontation. Red flags no longer announce an exception; they describe the condition itself. The question is no longer whether warning signs are visible, but whether visibility still carries the capacity to compel action—or whether we have already learned to live inside the warning.
Whistles, Warnings, and The Whistleblowers (02.05.26)
Warnings are among the oldest social technologies. Long before formal law or institutional oversight, societies relied on signals—shouts, horns, bells, flags, whistles—to mark danger and mobilize collective response. A warning is not neutral information; it is an interruption. It demands attention in moments when harm is imminent or already underway.
The whistle is a condensed form of this logic. As an object, it is small, portable, and designed for amplification. It allows a single body to summon a crowd, to convert vulnerability into signal. In emergencies, a whistle cuts through noise when speech fails. In politics, whistleblowing performs a similar function: it names a violation that institutions are unwilling or unable to address, forcing private knowledge into public space.
What defines both acts is timing. Warnings arrive before consensus, before proof is complete, often before power is prepared to acknowledge them. This is why warnings are frequently dismissed, delayed, or punished. The whistleblower is rarely heard as a protector; more often they are treated as a threat—to stability, to authority, to reputations. History shows this pattern repeatedly: early warnings are ignored until violence or collapse makes them undeniable.
Recent events underscore this dynamic. Escalations by state agents, conducted in the name of order or security, are increasingly contradicted by eyewitness accounts and multi-angle footage. The gap between official narrative and lived reality is now visible in real time. Yet even when evidence circulates widely, accountability lags. Warnings are issued, but response is deferred. The signal is clear; the system hesitates.
This delay is not accidental. Warnings challenge monopolies on legitimacy—who is allowed to define danger, who is authorized to name harm. When citizens issue warnings—through protests, recordings, testimony, or whistleblowing—they contest the idea that authority alone controls truth. This is why warnings are often reframed as noise, hysteria, or disloyalty rather than treated as information requiring action.
The same pattern appears in long-running failures of accountability. Victims of abuse, corruption, or state violence often warn publicly for years. Their signals do not disappear; they are archived, sidelined, legally constrained, or strategically ignored. The failure is not one of hearing but of response. Warnings are withheld from consequence by systems designed to protect those already insulated from risk.
Whistles, then, are not symbols of panic but of asymmetry. They emerge where power is uneven and formal channels are compromised. To blow a whistle is to insist that something is already wrong—that waiting will only deepen the harm. It is a call not just for attention, but for collective responsibility.
In periods of political volatility and institutional distrust, warnings multiply. This is not a sign of chaos but of pressure. When ordinary mechanisms of accountability fail, societies revert to older, louder forms of signaling. The question is no longer whether warnings are being issued—they are everywhere—but whether there remains the capacity, or the will, to act on them before emergency becomes irreversible.