(Column by Matt K. Lewis, June 25)
“Who was that masked man?”
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember that line from “The Lone Ranger” — a weekly morality play, first broadcast on the radio in the 1930s, in which the hero wore a mask to hide not from accountability, but from accolades (and from the outlaw gang that ambushed him and left him for dead).
In that depiction, justice rode in on a white horse and rode off into the sunset. It was dispensed honorably — if anonymously — and always in defense of the vulnerable.
Fast-forward to 2025, and we’re contending with a different kind of masked man. These cowboys don’t ride stallions or fire warning shots into the air. They roll up in unmarked SUVs, dressed in tactical vests and with their faces covered. In one viral video, such men appear to pummel a landscaper outside an IHOP in Santa Ana, Calif., where he worked. The man’s three sons, as it happens, are all U.S. Marines.
This isn’t just excessive force or profiling. It’s the perversion of the very idea of public safety — one that creates deeper, more insidious problems.
The first is psychological and moral. The old proverb warns: The mask becomes the face. Anyone who’s spent time online knows that anonymity often brings out the worst in us. But this isn’t just about a loss of civility.
The hyper-militarized look of these Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents isn’t merely a “mask” in the Lone Ranger sense. His was a modest black domino mask — the kind that concealed just enough to hide his identity, but not enough to make him look menacing. The masks being worn by ICE agents are, by contrast, a posture. A weapon.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Nietzsche put it more bluntly: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”
The moral? When men begin to dress like soldiers and vigilantes, we shouldn’t be surprised when they start acting like both.
The second problem is more straightforward and potentially more dangerous: When real law enforcement abandons clearly identifiable uniforms and professional procedures, it becomes easier for imposters to step in.
This isn’t hypothetical. In South Carolina, a man named Sean-Michael Johnson was “charged with kidnapping and impersonating a police officer after allegedly detaining a group of Latino men,” according to a CNN report in February. He flashed a fake badge. That was enough….. [The full column is at this link.]
