Renée Good’s Death is the Flower of Trump’s Psychopathy
I wonder if anyone else has had the feelings of numbness, of helplessness and despair, of unreality and dissociation, that I have had these past few days.
There is an image, a video clip, really, that I can’t get out of my brain. It loops on my mental movie screen when I stop work for a second; it jolts me awake as I drift into uneasy sleep. As I gaze out my window at the blizzard and the grey unvarying sky it comes to me as a sudden chill, whether of fear or sorrow I can’t decide.
It’s made worse by my cabin fever, my inability to leave the apartment and trudge through city slush to the convenience store, because even a brief walk any other season would lift me out of an anxious state. Right now, early January, when the worst of the snowfall immobilises the city, I’m unable to imagine that there will ever be a spring, or that anything will ever be right again. It’s like trying to imagine being well when you’re aching with the ‘flu.
Two video clips, actually. The first one is of Renée Good looking out of the driver’s seat of her SUV, speaking directly to Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent recording her with his phone.
She says,“It’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.”
She’s dressed for the cold weather, with a tuque and winter coat; she’s not the radiant smiling beauty of the photograph that’s displayed on the makeshift memorials. It’s early, and she’s just a mom who’s dropped off one of her children at school.
(One of the video clips online reveals that her dog, looks like a black Lab, is standing on the back seat, alert and focused on the activity outside the car.)
Renée’s expression and tone of voice are relatively calm. She doesn’t appear frightened, but I wonder if she’s beginning to perceive that she’s in danger (but why would she? She’s not doing anything but preparing to drive away). I wonder if she is a bit taken aback by the aggressive behavior of the agent who has told her to “get out of the fucking car.”
And she clearly is steering the car to the right, away from the ICE agents, the car is not accelerating more than you would expect. She certainly doesn’t appear to be aiming the car as though to run anyone down. If anything, she’s trying to lower the heat, de-escalate the situation, to just quietly get the hell out of there.
Seconds later she’s dead, shot point blank three times by Jonathan Ross.
Hideously, the car glides forward, unmoored, and crashes into another vehicle. Later witnesses describe Renée covered with blood from her wounds.
Just a routine morning, the kind of morning when you drive your kid to school and die.
In the video clip captured by Ross (who apparently has his phone in one hand and his gun in the other) he says, “Fucking bitch” after he’s killed her, watching the unmoored car roll forward and crash.
The other clip is of her spouse, Becca (they were partners, not literally married, but Becca referred to her as “my wife”) running up to the car after the shots, running up and looking at Renée in the driver’s seat, then backing away and collapsing to a seated position on the snow-covered curb, a recoiling that describes her incomprehension. I don’t think she cries out, yet.
I keep rewinding the footage, trying to locate the point from which a different path, a reasonable outcome, might proceed; and always, there she is. “It’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.”
Those were her last words.
And I obviously have no proof of this, but I can’t help believing that he must have made up his mind already that he was going to strike from some dark place of male rage and humiliation; take some kind of incel revenge on her, this smug liberal, this lesbian, this left-winger, this gently smiling terrorist; he surely must have already decided that she was a fucking bitch.
A man rushes toward the scene to offer help, but an ICE agent stops him roughly. I’m a physician, he shouts, and the agent shouts back I don’t care.
What follows is expected: a carefully orchestrated gaslighting. Everyone in the administration has been briefed on the narrative. Karoline Leavitt and Kristi Noem lead the way: What happened in this fantasy was that
a radical left-winger, in an act of domestic terrorism, weaponized her vehicle and attempted to run over the ICE agent, who fired in justified self-defense.
This is laughable, easily disproven by watching any number of eye-witness videos online. By the time Trump decides to comment, with that sinister, instinctive genius he has for chaos: for making anything worse, more ridiculous, more shocking, more confused and contradictory, more infantile, the narrative has morphed into the lie that she actually ran over the agent, causing, we would assume, grievous injury.
But we’ve all seen him—haven’t we?—walking away, completely unharmed, completely unperturbed, from the scene of the crime.
The Federal government says it is investigating Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, asserting that their public comments, which have been forceful, amount to obstruction, though they have both stressed the importance of peaceful protest. And, leaving no doubt that it’s open season on anyone who disagrees with them, and that you are next, they announce that they will launch an investigation of Becca Good, branding her and Renée as inveterate radicals and troublemakers.
Once again a patently false narrative originating from the President and his enablers has succeeded. Yesterday I read an article in People magazine online which was reporting on the tragedy. The comments section had only two responses sympathetic to the victim and calling out ICE for its unhinged response to what could have been a relatively minor interaction. All of the other comments were variations on “it’s unfortunate, but she brought it on herself / that’s what you get when you obstruct law enforcement going about their duties.”
More than a few, confirmed in their hatred of “liberals”, expressed the belief that Renée Good’s assumed history of willful troublemaking fully justified her murder by ICE.
I was dismayed to understand once again how quickly an egregiously false narrative is validated without question by people who obviously haven’t examined the evidence and are grateful to accept the official spin; to realize that accepting then riffing publicly on the official spin is a ritual call to identify other members of their group and affirm their fellowship.
Any symptoms you might have of uncertainty can be innoculated with a pre-determined moral judgement.
With everyone playing their assigned roles—righteous authority and unruly subversives—it’s not necessary to engage in unpalatable meditations about right and wrong, and anyway, your mental circuits would fry from the cognitive dissonance. The work’s been done for you, and as a consumer, a connoisseur of realities, you choose comfort over quality, convenience over drudgery. I’m only surprised you don’t head over to Yelp to give it a five-star review.
I understand once again how close to the surface in the US is an assumption, especially by conservatives, that any kind of protest is a questionable and borderline criminal activity. There’s no longer any saving grace in keeping it low-key and respectful and following the approved route. Whether your protest is boisterous and carnivalesque (No Kings), or just noisy chants and pussy hats, the act of rejecting authority is, in itself, automatically interpreted as violence.
Attorneys from the firm Romanucci & Blandin, engaged by Good’s family, spoke up with simplicity and clarity.
Seeking to refute “persistent false reports,” and stressing that Good had no criminal or felony record, they stated,
“Renée and Becca Good were responsible community members who lived peacefully and did not engage in harmful conduct toward others, including the federal agents involved on January 7, 2026.”
The line’s been crossed. That collective Orwellian moment has finally arrived, bringing with it phantasms in place of truth, the terror of midnight knocks on the door, the othering of white queer women, arbitrary violence not as response but as strategy, arrests without charges for unexplained crimes that haven’t even happened.
That, too, is what I can’t get out of my mind.
It didn’t take long:
the deployment of two thousand more agents to Minneapolis, three thousand masked troops in a city whose police force numbers about six hundred. The intent is provocation rather than the de-escalation that would show good faith leadership.
It didn’t take long:
the citizens of Minneapolis erupting in more violent protests, defiantly holding their ground, refusing to show ID or answer questions. ICE continues kidnapping people, dragging them from cars, throwing them to the ground, handcuffing them, spraying chemicals in their faces, kneeling on necks. There are no warrants in evidence, there’s no probable cause for any detentions that I can see.
It didn’t take long:
Trump (but ultimately Stephen Miller, the shadow President), is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, which he’s been jonesing to do since his first term. Trump’s threatening, but, just like Jonathan Ross had already decided to shoot, Trump has already decided to invoke. This is the first step towards cancelling the mid-terms, which is the first step towards a third term, which Trump will assert as his right now that his ultimate authority has been granted.
What would be the point of allowing even the possibility that radicalized left-wingers might, illegitimately, seize control? And, for that matter:
How long will Maduro’s trial be? What will they do with the oil? How will they run Venezuela?
How will the prosecution go of Jerome Powell? Becca Good? Is she a terrorist because she’s queer? Did Renée die because she was queer?
When is the invasion of Greeland scheduled? How many troops will be deployed? How many deaths will it take? When will NATO disintegrate? What’s Greenland worth as a piece of real estate? When will Trump wear “his” new Nobel Prize medal?
When will Putin seriously deploy his nuclear weapons? When will the luxury hotels get built in Gaza? When will China absorb Taiwan? When will they annex Canada?
When will they send troops to protect the protestors in Iran, the noble protestors who suffer under an incompetent, bankrupt theocracy and hunger for, risk their lives for, democracy?
How violently, and for how long, for how many deaths, will they continue to hold back the so-called radical left-wingers of Minneapolis, the ordinary people, family and neighbours, maligned as terrorists and paid agitators whose violent protests, orchestrated by “antifa”, regrettably, necessitate restrictions on democracy, restrictions that quietly become permanent?
When will they release the Epstein files?
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