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I’ve heard from so many people asking the same question since federal agents in Minnesota shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti: How can the government do this — lie about it, justify it, block accountability — and face no consequences?
This weekend, federal authorities claimed the law protects the agents who shot Pretti while vilifying the victim as a “domestic terrorist” and freezing local officials out of the investigation. Violence on one side. Legal immunity on the other. That’s not a contradiction. It’s a pattern.
Earlier this week, I spoke with Aziz Huq, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, about how undemocratic governments use the law as a weapon — protecting their own while stripping protections from those they target. What Huq describes has a name, and it comes from Nazi Germany: the dual state.
The concept originated with Ernst Frankel, a Jewish labor lawyer who worked defending dissidents in Germany between 1933 and 1938. Reflecting on his experience, Frankel identified how authoritarian regimes don’t abolish law, they divide it. Huq wrote about the dual state in The Atlantic last May, and it’s what prompted our first conversation.
The concept is straightforward. In authoritarian systems, most people continue living under ordinary rules while the state reserves the power to “flip a switch,” stripping legal protections from anyone it wants to punish or silence.
“Authoritarianism doesn’t require anarchy,” Huq told me. “It requires the ability to turn the law on and off.”
That switch is what we’re watching now. In the Pretti case, the law was switched off for the 37-year-old ICU nurse and switched on to shield the border patrol agents who shot him, ie the state.
“That pattern of allocating enforcement resources based upon who is a friend and who is an enemy of those in power is a signature move of the dual state.”
I conducted this interview days before Alex Pretti was killed, so Huq doesn’t reference Pretti — but the pattern he describes fits precisely.
Huq is currently writing a book about the dual state for Knopf
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