Friendly Fire

America tells itself it was born in freedom and perfected through progress. The truth is harder to look at. For more than two hundred years, the government has used its own armies and laws to control the very people it claims to protect, from the soldiers who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion to the police who fired on students at Kent State.

Friendly Fire is a fearless and often darkly funny exploration of how power in America defends itself. Historian and essayist Jordan Blake Carter traces the long arc of domestic repression, connecting forgotten rebellions, labor wars, massacres, and modern protests into a single pattern: fear disguised as virtue.

This is not a story of cynicism but of reckoning. The rifles have gone quiet, yet the reflex that pulled the trigger still hums beneath the surface.