On Tuesday I mentioned to my First Draft colleagues that the world was really weighing on me. And then on Wednesday an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good.
I was furious. I still am furious. I’ve watched a fair number of videos of people chasing ICE agents out of their neighborhoods with whistles and shame. And now I’ve watched videos of ICE murdering a woman and trying to blame it on her.
If you’re wondering how this sorrow and outrage and despair feels so familiar, we went through it during the first Trump administration when another white supremacist killed Heather Heyer with his car in Charlottesville.
It’s not just that Renee Good was murdered. It’s how ICE agents kept a physician from administering first aid:
HuffPost has obtained a video of a physician trying to give medical care to the woman shot and killed by ICE agents today, and not being allowed to go near her.The ICE agents claim there are medics on site, but witnesses scream that there are no medics present.Full Story: bit.ly/3YwbaQR
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T22:04:55.944Z
It’s how the administration reacted—with lies. It’s how the right wing echo chamber wound itself up to blame Good because…she had pronouns in her profile. Yes, that’s all they had, beyond manipulating the horrible images of the murder. But don’t worry, they’ll soon turn her sexual orientation into a motive soon enough, too. It’s all they have for their pickled-in-MAGA audience.
It’s all they have because this is the confrontation that the Trump administration has been salivating over since January 20, 2025. They are desperate to declare martial law and know they are going to need something at least partially believable to get their lapdogs on SCOTUS to uphold it. And they are failing.
And then mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, told ICE to “get the fuck out” of the city. And we all sat up a little straighter. And then Tim Walz vowed that Minnesota would make sure Good had justice. And then the administration cut Minnesota off from seeing any of the evidence, and then totally refused to cooperate with state investigators:
According to my sources, the FBI was initially open to a concurrent investigation with the MN Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (the state agency that would do this investigation). Trumpy U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen heard about this and intervened, barring the FBI from cooperating with local police.
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) 2026-01-08T16:35:34.175Z
So here we are. And in the middle of my sorrow and anger, I feel the shift in the wind. So far there has been no violent response to the murder. Instead there has been a shared understanding that this really could have been any of us. There is a shared, public, sorrow:
"This was a family that could've been like mine" — Philip Bump breaks down crying on MS NOW when talking about the stuffed animals in Renee Good's car when she was killed
Heather Heyer’s murder was a turning point in the first Trump presidency. Renee Good’s murder is the inflection point of the administration’s march to fascism. There is no ambiguity in the videos of the event. Because Renee Good was white, the easy avenue to impugning her based on her skin color is closed. The FBI’s refusal to cooperate with Minnesota state investigators is all the proof you need to understand that the dog has caught the car and the process of being run over has begun.
Renee Good actually was like the rest of us. She had a family. She was just doing her daily routine of driving her son to school. She was any of us, whether we have kids or not. She was no danger to anyone. And the government murdered her anyway. And now that same government knows that it’s on the ropes.
So far the reaction to Good’s murder is what the GOP craved back in September: an authentic nationwide sorrow and a natural identification with the victim coupled with the determination this will never be allowed to happen again. And now they fear what they craved.
Good.
I’ll leave you with this: