If you live in a rural area like the central Pennsylvania region that I exist in, you will see your share of violent right-wing bumper stickers.
Not talking about Blue Lives Matter stickers, or even Trump ones. But ones that make explicit the idea that the person supports killing political opponents. I’ve seen things like “It’s always liberal season” with a caricature of a liberal person in a gunsight, or Obama or Hillary Clinton in a gunsight. But there’s one that gives me chills, especially now in light of what is currently going on.
“If you don’t want to get behind the troops, then get in front of them,” so says the bumper sticker I am referring to. There are varying versions of this. One shows a kneeling soldier aiming a gun, and another just shows a gun sight. But the message is clear: Political dissent should be punishable by agents of the government.
That leads me to the killing of Renee Good.
If you are even a little bit politically aware these days and are not one of them, you probably know that MAGA is much more about dominating rather than governing, and this attracts a certain type of person. When they announced a massive recruitment drive for ICE, if you are like me and pay attention to the violent bumper stickers, the angry rhetoric, and the gun obsession, it was hard not to envision the types of people they would attract. With policing, you could at least state that a person might become a policeman out of a sense of duty to their community. But that’s a very difficult argument for something like ICE.
So, we see video after video over the last year of ICE officers acting like thugs, like secret police or gang members. Many of the images we’ve been exposed to are things you would see in an authoritarian dictatorship, unfolding not just in cities but in normally quiet suburban neighborhoods. They are not snatching up undocumented immigrants with criminal records; they are terrorizing legal immigrants and detaining U.S. citizens.
If you dig into the verbiage of what the right is saying now, and somehow look past the sheer derangement of it, you can see that what they are really saying is horrifying: People should die for dissent. This, for example, is absurd. It’s also scary:
And yes, that is from a real opinion piece.
As for complying with the ICE agents who were telling her to get out of the car, it is hard not to imagine that Renee Good tried to drive away with her dog in the car because she was terrified to do so. There’s plenty of evidence of ICE agents not following any law enforcement standards and just yanking people of cars, raging behind their masks. Given her pet was in the car, she could have been worried they’d shoot her dog. Why wouldn’t they? Their boss LOVES shooting dogs.
That Good was trying much harder than the agents to de-escalate to no avail, and that an agent was screaming out of her to get out of the car while yanking at her door, was enough for her to attempt to slowly leave. It had to be terrifying for her, and also extremely disorienting. If you watch the video, including the one they put out that was shot by the killer to “exonerate” him, I’d say that if you still believe she deserved to be shot or that we need to “understand” her killer, you are either very stupid or a terrible human, or both. But the video wasn’t about exonerating him.
They didn’t release the video to make the shooter look innocent, but to make Good look like she deserved it. Not guilty of any crime, but guilty of having a female wife. Guilty of being against the Trump regime, guilty of being on the left, and guilty of being the people that the bumper stickers have said should die. No doubt the killer swam in these waters for a very, very long time.
This started even before that video was released, see Greater German Radio Personality Jesse Watters’ response the day after it happened.
Jesse Watters highlights that Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE, had "pronouns in her bio" and "leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage"
My greatest fear is that this will mean we will see more people put into situations where they panic and try to drive off, or worse, end up shooting an ICE officer. That’s the only Reichstag Fire they would need to greatly up the violence, even as they are basically treating Minnesota like a rebellious region in an authoritarian nation.
The feeling that we are moving in slow motion towards something much worse gets stronger by the day, and I am not sure if it is really slow motion anymore.
The last word goes to the late Bob Weir, whose death we learned about over the weekend. Damn, Bobby, that was bad timing.