Renee Nicole Good Is Now an Object Lesson

 

      In a way, it's surprising that what had happened to Renee Nicole Good yesterday in Minneapolis didn't happen a lot sooner. In a way, it's as if Sensible America has been holding its collective breath and just writing for something like this to happen.

     In a classic illustration of the Butterfly Effect, it all started when some little-noted right wing "influencer", who shall remain nameless, at the margins of the MAGA movement released a podcast about allegations of fraud in Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota. That was all the Trump administration needed to hear. So Trump personally dispatched 2000 ICE agents to Minnesota, even though investigating fraud isn't ICE's remit. But the fraud allegations was all the pretext that Trump and his goons at DHS needed to flood Minnesota with thousands of his Thought Police.

     Renee Nicole Good was driving her SUV down what used to be a peaceful residential street in Minneapolis when she decided to briefly block traffic with her vehicle. ICE agents immediately swarmed her vehicle screaming at her to leave while simultaneously trying to open her door with the intention of pulling her out.

     Good backed up a foot or two and attempted to leave. One ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, pulled out his gun and shot her three times in the face, after which she crashed into another vehicle. At no time did Good's car even brush him, no matter how many different videos from differing angles you see. 

     It takes a lot of hatred, fear, sociopathy or whatever to shoot another human being in the face. If he truly feared for his life, he could have shot out her tires. Instead, he shot her several times in the face.

     According to one witness who saw and videotaped the whole thing, the agent who shot her was then surrounded by other ICE agents and whisked away in a vehicle. They saw to his safety while denying medical care to Renee Good for at least 15 minutes.

     Yes, it's a miracle this hasn't happened already. ICE for the last year has been a drain into which the very worst elements of society find themselves. A recent Daily Mail article detailed the abysmal quality of the recruits that DHS has attracted with the lure of a ridiculous $50,000 signing bonus. They axed the training regimen from 16 to six weeks, got rid of sit ups because many of the recruits couldn't handle them. Many are barely literate, some have criminal court cases pending and several have gang tattoos (So, yes, let's talk about gangs).

      And still the Trump junta is trying to extrude through its recruiting and training mill an additional 10,000 ICE agents, regardless of how woefully under qualified they are. And, when you actively recruit the stupidest and cruelest people in this country, which is exactly the kind of people a thuggish authoritarian government wants to enforce its will, a tragedy is all but inevitable.

     Good was a published poet, a mother of three and was by all accounts outside of the lying psychopaths of our government the kindest person you could ever hope to meet. In the final minutes of her life, she'd just dropped her six year-old daughter off at school.

     Of course, if we were to ask lying scumbags like JD Vance, Kristi Noem or Trump,  they'd tell us, and have, that Good was a domestic terrorist, that Good's wife, who'd witnessed her murder, was "a professional agitator", that Good "weaponized her vehicle" to viciously run over an ICE agent.

     Renee Nicole Good should serve as an object lesson in what inevitably happens when you stand up against an authoritarian regime. She ought to remind us of how monstrously intolerable this criminal regime is and how important it is to continue to stand up to them.