Guest Opinion: From Failing Hands the Torch

Guest Opinion by Sean Dunning

McMinnville, OR – December 1, 2025

My father was a math teacher. From the many student reviews posted online over the years, it is clear he had a profoundly positive influence on generations of kids. I have been fortunate to have more than my share of outstanding teachers myself, but none helped shaped my thinking more than my Grade 12 English teacher, Mr. Lines. In that final year of high school he had us read 1984, Animal Farm, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Trial, and Fahrenheit 451. With the Berlin Wall having fallen only a few years earlier, and with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” still in the air in 1992–93, my eighteen-year-old self assumed those books were historical artifacts—warnings about a world that no longer existed. I never imagined I would live to see the map of totalitarianism unroll again in my own country.

Yet here we are: drowning in propaganda, suffocating under censorship, and have spent the Biden years watching the bureaucracy and justice system weaponized to hunt down and destroy the politically disfavored. Every few months a new Emmanuel Goldstein is selected, and the algorithmically amplified Two Minutes Hate begins anew.

Today, almost on cue, Oregon’s Attorney General, the district attorneys of the state’s three metro counties, and Yamhill County Commissioner David “Bubba” King launched the latest salvo in the anarcho-tyranny wars.

Anarcho-tyranny is the selective, uneven enforcement of the law:

– Protective laws against crime and disorder are ignored or deliberately left unenforced (anarchy for the law-abiding).

– Oppressive regulations, surveillance, and punishments are enthusiastically deployed against law-abiding citizens for the slightest infraction, no matter the context (tyranny against the law-abiding).

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn captured the dynamic perfectly:

“Your punishment for having a knife when they searched you would be very different from the thief’s. For him to have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn’t know any better. But for you to have one was ‘terrorism.’”

We have been living in this distorted reality since roughly March 2020. Snitch hotlines for Thanksgiving dinners that were one guest too large. Police chasing lone paddle-boarders and surfers off empty beaches. Liquor stores and strip clubs declared “essential” while churches and gyms were padlocked. Zealots in uniform hunted maskless joggers and small-business owners who dared stay open, all while entire city blocks burned for months with official indifference—or outright encouragement.

The same pattern repeats with this week’s announcement from Attorney General Rayfield, the district attorneys of Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties (enthusiastically supported by Commissioner King). They issued a joint public threat to prosecute federal officers who participate in immigration enforcement inside Oregon—knowing full well that federal supremacy doctrine will almost certainly nullify any such indictment the moment it is removed to federal court.

Legally, the gesture is theater. Politically, however, it is something far more dangerous: a coordinated declaration by the state’s top law-enforcement officials that one category of federal agents is criminal and may be hunted with the full apparatus of local prosecution. When senior prosecutors brandish the machinery of criminal law against officers carrying out congressionally authorized duties, they are not merely posturing; they are painting a target on those officers’ backs.

We have seen this movie before. When elected officials and media figures spend years describing police, ICE agents, Border Patrol, or now ICE again as “gestapo,” “storm troopers,” or “terrorists,” a predictable fraction of the most unstable listeners concludes that violence against the named targets is morally justified. The shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C. –in which 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom lost her life and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe clings to his– did not occur in a vacuum. They occurred in an environment that has been systematically primed by exactly this kind of rhetoric: the relentless dehumanization of law-enforcement officers combined with official winks at “resistance.”

Rayfield, the three metro DAs, and Commissioner King should all know better. They are aware of this dynamic; it has been studied and documented for years. They therefore cannot credibly claim ignorance of the risk that their highly publicized threat will be taken by some deranged person as a license to kill. Proceeding in the face of that obvious, well-understood risk is not courage or principle. It is reckless disregard for the lives and safety of federal law enforcement officers.

I am grateful that our local district attorney, Kate Lynch, has chosen not to lend her name or office to this dangerous charade.

Photo Credit: Yamhill County News File