Blood, Fire, and Federal Power: On the Present Condition of Authority, Violence, and Prophetic Memory
What is unfolding in the United States cannot be adequately described as a constitutional crisis, nor even as a revolution. Those terms imply disruption within an otherwise stable order. What we are witnessing instead is the natural maturation of a system whose architecture already permitted suspension of accountability under the language of emergency. This is not a breakdown. It is continuity.
Isaiah’s language in 1 Nephi 22 —blood, fire, vapor of smoke—was never merely poetic. It names a pattern in history where political authority detaches from moral restraint and begins to justify itself through force, spectacle, and abstraction. Nephi’s reading of Isaiah in 1 Nephi 22 is precise: these signs appear whenever nations turn against Zion, whenever power rises against covenant memory, whenever institutions replace justice with procedure. The righteous are not spared by exemption; they are preserved as by fire. Survival itself becomes trial.
The present moment mirrors this structure with unsettling clarity.
Federal enforcement and intelligence agencies, more particularly Ice and BP and the newly sequestered FBI now operate under a legal framework that places them functionally outside the same constitutional limits governing state and local police. Supreme Court jurisprudence has erected procedural barriers so dense that victims of federal violence are often denied standing before evidence is even examined. Border Patrol and ICE exist inside a carve-out of sovereignty—authorized by national security doctrine, insulated by jurisdictional ambiguity, and reinforced by legislative inaction. This is not accidental. It is intentionally engineered.
Emergency powers, once justified by exceptional threat, have become permanent governance. When danger is fabricated or exaggerated, authority no longer needs restraint. It only needs narrative.
This is why viral footage matters less than structural immunity. Whether a particular video is sensationalized or authentic becomes secondary to the underlying reality: federal agents can deploy force with minimal civilian oversight, minimal judicial consequence, and minimal political risk. Local officers lose qualified immunity. Federal agents largely do not. That distinction alone redraws the moral geometry of the state.
And so violence becomes administrative.
What appears on screens as chaos in streets is, upstream, the quiet certainty of agencies that know they cannot be meaningfully sued.
Against this backdrop, symbolic gestures begin to matter. Promotional imagery adopting militarized aesthetics. Commanders styled in authoritarian visual language. Crowds confronting armored personnel. These are not coincidences of fashion. They reflect the psychological shift of institutions that no longer see themselves as servants of civil order but as guardians of a besieged realm. Power begins to perform itself.
This is where historical memory becomes unavoidable.
Empires always adopt sacred language when coercion expands. They speak of security. They invoke destiny. They redefine dissent as threat. They manufacture urgency. They blur the boundary between policing and occupation. They cultivate loyalty through fear and spectacle. The Roman prefects did it. The European empires did it. Every technocratic state eventually does it.
Isaiah called it Babylon and many books have been written, this is no mystery.
Not as geography. As a repeating pattern.
Babylon is the system that governs by seduction first, then by force. It replaces obedience with access. It rewards compliance with comfort. And when resistance emerges, it answers with fire, blood and vapor 0f smoke.
What we are seeing now is not merely political polarization. It is a theological condition and an awful situation. Authority has detached from legitimacy and accountability. Law has been hollowed into procedure. Justice has been deferred to temporal regime jurisdiction. Violence is outsourced to agencies who hire criminals whose legal insulation makes them untouchable.
The widow in Christ’s parable understands this instinctively. She does not appeal to fairness. She importunes. She persists. She knows the judge is unjust. She petitions anyway, not because the judge is righteous, but because pressure itself becomes testimony.
That is the only remaining mechanism available to ordinary people under such systems: relentless witness before God, angels and these witnesses.
Call or write the governors. Call or write the senators. Call or write the courts. Call or write the president and implore as Patrick Henry before Congress before their feet or importune. Not because they will care, but because record accumulates. Voice accumulates. Memory accumulates. And eventually blood cries out from the ground, whether institutions acknowledge it or not.
This is not conspiracy theory. It is constitutional fact, produced by Supreme Court doctrine and sustained by congressional cowardice. Federal agents now operate under protections denied to every other law-enforcement officer in America. Legislators have refused to close this gap. Courts routinely decline to intervene. Executive branches exploit the vacuum. The structure is deliberate.
It echoes an older moment in American history. When Joseph Smith petitioned President Martin Van Buren for redress following Governor Boggs’ extermination order, the response was telling: your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you. Not because justice was unclear—but because political cost outweighed moral obligation. Today’s victims of federal violence hear the same answer in procedural form. Their claims are dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, immunity doctrines, and standing technicalities. The verdict arrives before the evidence.
The pattern is unchanged: acknowledgment without action, sympathy without remedy. Power concedes injustice while preserving itself. Votes matter more than blood. And so authority shelters behind legality while abandoning justice.
And so we arrive at war language.
Not war between nations.
War between unaccountable power and embodied human life.
War between administrative sovereignty and covenant memory.
War between systems and corroded institution that preserve themselves and people who still believe justice should exist.
Hell and death are not metaphors here. They describe governance structures that normalize harm while insulating perpetrators. They describe bureaucracies that metabolize suffering. They describe empires that no longer recognize the image of God in the bodies they police.
Isaiah saw this.
Nephi saw this.
Every conquered people has seen this.
The fire is not coming.
The fire is already here.
Miguel Tinoco
