The killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by ICE agents could be a turning point, according to some.
Then again, maybe it’s just another day in Making America Safe Again.
The video footage has been analysed and poured over by countless people online in the few days since the deadly incident occurred.
So I don’t want to bother with analysing the footage here: but instead to examine the extraordinary level of victim blaming and blatant lying that accompanied this horrible incident.
And the extraordinary message being communicated by those supporting or defending this killing.
But what we see from the initial clips appears to show the woman attempting to leave the scene in her vehicle. The agents yell and swear at her, one of them trying to forcibly open her door. Another of them then shoots into the car three times, killing the young mother of three.
A different angle, it is claimed by ICE defenders, shows the woman attempting to run over the agent.
This is, according to them, proved by the subsequent footage released today – filmed from the ICE officer’s phone.
It doesn’t really show that though. While the clips aren’t entirely clear and the incident unfolds quite quickly, there’s no indication that she’s trying to use her vehicle as a weapon.
Most observers would conclude that she is trying to leave the scene – the fact that the ICE agent is stupidly standing in front of the car is his fault.
At any rate, the initial angle shows that he moves out of the way *before* he proceeds to shoot her in the face – so he probably wasn’t in danger.
But the lies were already being told, the excuses made, virtually before Renee Good was even identified as the victim.
Despite what the initial video evidence – and crucially the eyewitness accounts – seemed to show, police-state apologists continued to engage in the usual mental gymnastics to justify the unnecessary killing of an unarmed citizen.
But they’re only taking their lead from the top: the President himself bizarrely claimed that the thirty-seven year old woman ‘ran over’ the ICE officer – which anyone with eyes could see wasn’t true.
He also went further and said the man was being treated in hospital and that he was lucky to be alive – also seemingly untrue. “She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over…”
Meanwhile, dog killer Kristi Noem told the country that the woman had ‘weaponised’ her car: and she quickly branded Renee Good a ‘domestic terrorist’.
So not merely victim-blaming, but immediately defaming and misrepresenting the deceased woman barely hours after her death.
Renee Nicole Good clearly wasn’t a ‘domestic terrorist’. She was an unarmed citizen in her vehicle on a residential street. Even if – and it’s still an ‘if’ – she was being a minor inconvenience, the idea that this justifies her being shot dead is extraordinary.
So then the apologists say ‘well, she should’ve cooperated with the officers and exited the vehicle’.
Is that really what we’re saying now? A woman who hasn’t committed any known crime should have ‘cooperated’ with armed men, wearing masks and body armour and carrying guns, who were yelling and swearing at her as they approached?
Wouldn’t your instinct actually be to just try to drive away instead?
At any rate, she wasn’t trying to move at speed: but relatively slowly and unthreatening.
The remarkable thing about those apologists is that they’re essentially (1) siding with the police state, and (2) basically justifying an innocent woman being shot three times.
In *any* interpretation of this incident, the ICE officer shooting her three times is entirely unnecessary. In the newer phone footage, a second person outside the car (Renee Good’s partner) also reminds the ICE agents that they can see the license plate clearly, so can easily deal with Renee Good if any crime has been committed.
Apparently that notion didn’t occur to the trigger-happy ICE agent.
What’s baffling is the bald-facedness of the administration’s dishonesty in this case. Why would the President say such an obviously untrue thing – that the offending officer had been run over and had almost lost his life?
Didn’t Trump see the same videos everyone else did? The footage clearly shows the man was on his feet and able to walk away – comfortable in the knowledge that, murderer or not, the regime leadership would have his back.
So then the innocent victim immediately became a ‘domestic terrorist’: and in truly Orwellian speak, the administration told people not to believe what their eyes showed them but only what the party was telling them.
Why couldn’t Noem, Trump and co simply acknowledge the tragedy, say that there would be an investigation and that the agent would be held to account if found guilty of wrongdoing?
Why immediately lie about the incident, defame the victim, and then block local authorities from being part of the investigation?
But they’ve doubled down. J.D Vance continued the extraordinary strategy the next day, telling reporters that the woman’s death was ‘of her own making‘ and reiterating the domestic terrorism angle.
In Kristi Noem and J.D Vance’s world, most American citizens are now potential domestic terrorists: because, as Noem says, a car is a weapon. Therefore, anyone in a car should be considered armed and dangerous.
Implicit in this is also the green-lighting of any further murders by federal agents in similar circumstances: so long as they can claim to have felt threatened, they can execute anyone they like in broad daylight and the administration will have their back.
No one in the Trump administration even seemed sorry or regretful that this had happened. Noem in particular seemed almost smug about it.
It also imparts even more irony to Trump, this very week, threatening the Iranian government with US retaliation if Iranian protesters continue to be harmed. Could this killing even bear some parallel to the Iranian regime’s killing of Mahsa Amini a few years ago, in terms of the level of backlash? It probably won’t.
But regardless of whether you fall into the ‘well, she had it coming to her’ camp or the ‘why are masked government agents executing civilians in the street?’ camp, what’s absolutely obvious was that something like this was destined to happen.
And will happen again.
In fact, another shooting incident had already happened in Portland since the Renee Good killing. Note that they only send the ICE agents into liberal cities that didn’t vote for Trump.
When you ramp up the rhetoric and the ill feeling to this extent and when you send in masked thugs with guns in to residential areas, bad things are going to happen.
You almost have to wonder if this was made to happen by design: to provoke further outrage and resistance, and thus in turn to provide the pretext for further crackdown.
You know, there are people who do actually desire a civil war type scenario in America and are always looking for these inciting incidents.
If there’s any cause for suspicion in this story, it would maybe be that this incident coincidentally happened very close to where the George Floyd thing happened. And that Minneapolis and Minnesota seem to be a recurring location for high profile incidents like this.
The fact that this is Tim Walz’s state doesn’t help, in terms of wondering about some degree of manufactured unrest.
But then it’s prince of darkness Stephen Miller and the Trump administration sending in the enforcers to these communities in the first place that’s causing the unrest. The entire way these ICE operations have been carried out have been designed for maximum agitation. The fact that people generally don’t even know who these people are or why they have to be masked also remains an obvious point of conflict.
I examined this here recently: trying to understand who these men are exactly and what the game is that’s being played.
A further excuse has been forwarded by J.D Vance, claiming that Renee Good’s killer was traumatised by previously having been hit by a car while performing ICE duties.
If that’s even true, why was someone with PTSD given a firearm and sent to deal with members of the public in high-stress situations? Is there *any* vetting going on at all?
But regardless of such concerns, the central reality is that an unarmed and innocent woman was needlessly shot dead by masked government thugs acting like regime henchmen in some banana republic.
And that said government then lied about what happened instead of apologising or promising to review its practices.
The fact that they refuse to even treat Renee Nicole Good as a victim, but instead as some kind of vanquished enemy target (from the “radical left”), is a new low that is almost incomprehensible.
The most extraordinary thing to me is, again, the extent some people go to to defend or justify this killing.
Because what they’re advocating for essentially is total cooperation with police state conditions, and total surrender to masked goons marching into residential areas and engaging in intimidation tactics.
What they’re saying is that Renee Good should have nicely ‘cooperated’ with the unidentified men swearing at her and trying to break into her vehicle. And that these thuggish intimidation tactics should be welcomed by law-abiding citizens.
And ultimately that it’s okay that they shot her dead: because she didn’t meekly do as commanded in those tense circumstances.
This is the society they apparently want to live in.
As noted before, the supreme irony is that it used to be right-wing people who talked about the threat of federal overreach and government tyranny intruding into peoples’ lives and communities. You could even say it was a classic trope of the right.
Now half of them are basically cheerleading for it. That’s how perverse it’s all become.
