If I Were Jonathan Ross, I’d Be Shitting My Pants and Looking to Move to a Non-Extradition Country
- john raymond
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
When agents of the state begin to rely on anonymity, silence, and institutional shielding rather than law and legitimacy, something fundamental has already broken. That is the context in which Jonathan Ross now finds himself. Not as a rogue. Not as an aberration. But as a man standing at the fault line between collapsing impunity and reasserted accountability.
To be clear at the outset: this is not a claim about what Ross will do. It is an analytical claim about what someone in his position would rationally fear. And fear, in moments like this, is diagnostic.
The Moment When the Ground Shifts
Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Good during a federal immigration operation. That fact is not in dispute. What is now in dispute—violently, publicly, and irreversibly—is whether the old assumptions still hold: that federal authority automatically insulates lethal force from meaningful scrutiny; that time, silence, and abstraction will dissolve moral outrage; that the system will always protect its own.
Those assumptions are no longer safe.
When their future is linear, an agent trusts the system. When the future bifurcates, a known murderer starts thinking about exits.
Why This Case Is Different
Most state killings disappear into procedural fog. This one did not.
It happened in public. It happened on video. It happened in Minneapolis—a city that has become synonymous with the American public’s refusal to accept “just trust us” as an answer. And it involved a civilian whose humanity is legible, whose family is visible, and whose death cannot be dismissed as abstract collateral.
That combination is lethal to impunity.
Ross is now exposed not because of social media outrage, but because narrative control failed immediately. The administration’s reflexive defensiveness—its insistence on anonymity, its framing of naming as “doxxing,” its refusal to permit a full independent reckoning—has only intensified suspicion.
In asymmetric terms, the regime tipped its hand.
Why Silence Is a Red Flag, Not a Shield
When Kristi Noem publicly admonished journalists for saying Ross’s name, she revealed the administration’s real concern: not safety, but precedent.
Names create cases. Cases create records. Records create chains of responsibility.
Once Ross is treated as a person rather than a function, the inquiry cannot stop with him. It climbs—through supervisors, through doctrine, through U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and into the political leadership that authorized aggressive interior enforcement as a performance of power.
This is why the administration is trying to freeze the moment. But moments do not freeze. They compound.
Why an Agent Starts Thinking About Escape
Historically, when state violence loses legitimacy, two things happen simultaneously:
Institutions attempt to preserve themselves by narrowing accountability.
Individuals begin to realize they may become expendable.
This is not conjecture; it is pattern recognition.
When a system can no longer credibly defend an action, it looks for insulation. When insulation fails, it looks for scapegoats. And when scapegoats appear, proximity to the act becomes a liability.
Ross’s problem is not that he broke the rules. His problem is that he appears to have followed them—and the rules themselves are now under moral indictment.
That is the point at which a rational actor stops assuming the system will hold.
The End of the Badge’s Magic
Badges feel permanent until they aren’t. History is replete with men who believed institutional loyalty would save them, only to discover—too late—that loyalty flows upward, not downward.
When political winds shift, regimes sacrifice the visible to protect the powerful. They do not do this out of malice. They do it out of survival instinct.
If accountability arrives, it will not arrive gently. It will arrive because the public insists on moral symmetry:
If an ordinary citizen did this, there would be no anonymity, no silence, no patience.
Once that symmetry takes hold, the question is no longer whether Ross is protected—but whether he is useful to those currently in power.
Why the Thought Even Arises
So when one says, “If I were Jonathan Ross, I’d be shitting my pants and looking to move to a non-extradition country,” that is not advice. It is a diagnosis.
It is a recognition that the old guarantees are failing; that anonymity is being fought for because it is no longer assured; that the administration’s panic signals vulnerability, not confidence.
Ross may never flee. He may never be charged. But the fact that such a thought is now imaginable at all tells us everything we need to know about where legitimacy stands.
When agents of the state begin to look over their shoulders—not for protesters, but for history—justice is no longer unthinkable.
And once justice becomes thinkable, impunity is already disappearing.