The right-wing dehumanization machine is speeding up
They're skipping right past thoughts and prayers.
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For the first time in the era of high-profile police killings caught on film, a federal agent under the direction of Donald Trump’s authoritarian immigration crackdown is at the center of an egregious killing.
Renee Good is not the first person shot by Trump’s armed goons since they began rampaging through American communities nearly a year ago. But none of the previous shootings (and there have been nine of them since September) have provided as clear a picture of agents’ brutality, inhumanity, and unnecessary violence as the fatal shooting that took place Wednesday in Minneapolis.
By now, you probably have seen videos of Good’s killing. What they show is the inevitable result of an unaccountable law enforcement apparatus staffed by inexperienced agents whose primary qualification is a willingness to brutalize immigrants and Americans who stand in solidarity with them. Over the course of the year, ICE has lowered its standards for hiring, partly resulting in an unending parade of violence that is captured on video virtually every single day.
While Good’s killing is just the latest act of brutality carried out by Trump’s unaccountable masked thugs — what increasingly looks like the president’s personal secret police — it marks a new chapter in the decade-long tragedy of police brutality caught on film for the entire nation to witness. But what makes this police killing distinct from others in the past decade that have roiled the nation and sparked mass protests — George Floyd, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and many more — is that this one has the tacit approval of the White House.
Exacerbating matters are the Trump administration’s justifications of the incident, which in more normal times would be universally condemned as an obviously unnecessary killing of an unarmed civilian. But before Good had even been identified, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem started smear her and lying about what happened.
Noem’s claims about Good engaging in an act of “domestic terrorism” and attempting to “ram” an agent who feared for his life with her SUV are in direct conflict with what is clearly viewable in footage of the incident. If those lies weren’t enough, Trump himself spread a bogus narrative yesterday on Truth Social.
Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over” the agent, Trump claimed. “It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recording in the hospital.”
Remarkably, Trump, having seen the video that clearly shows the officer was never even knocked to the ground, continued to lie to reporters from the New York Times on Wednesday as they pressed him on the incident.
“She behaved horribly,” Mr. Trump said. “And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”
An aide then played a slow motion clip of the shooting as Times reporters pointed out to Trump that the video “did not appear to show that an ICE officer had been run over.”
“Well,” Trump said. “I — the way I look at it … ”
Vice President JD Vance upped the ante yesterday, effectively blaming Good for her own death and alluding to a vast and shadowy network of left-wing activists who are trying to harm immigration agents.
"Ramming an ICE officer with your car — that's what justifies being shot,” Vance said. “The reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car and that guy acted in self defense."
Good’s killing is now among the pantheon of events that — despite the objective evidence of video footage and reputable reporting — are judged along culture war lines. When Trump says “the way I look at it,” what he means is that he sees what he wants to see, and so do many of his supporters.
What the video clearly shows is there was no reason for an officer to use deadly force against Good. The situation escalated when an agent suddenly approached her SUV and tried to forcibly open the driver side door. Another agent, who had positioned himself in front of the SUV, can be seen filming with his phone. The agent attempting to open Good’s door then reached inside her open window as she put the vehicle in drive.
As the SUV moved forward, the agent filming Good with his phone unholstered his sidearm. A second angle of this portion of the incident shows that agent sliding from the front of the car around to its front quarter panel. The initial incident video shows that at the time the agent fired the first shot, his feet were clear from the path of the SUV.
The agent fires a second time as the SUV pulls away, and a third time as the vehicle is several feet away.
At no point during the incident are any of the agents knocked down. The shooting agent ultimately holstered his weapon and calmly walked toward the SUV as it crashed into a parked vehicle.
Given the footage, Trump’s claim that the agent is “lucky to be alive” is mind-bogglingly absurd. No video that has been posted so far even remotely backs up that claim.
Further proof that the agent was not injured — in addition to the video evidence — came from Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. O’Hara said Wednesday that federal law enforcement informed him “only the woman” was injured at the scene of Good’s killing. DHS did not respond to questions from Public Notice about the specificity of the agent’s injuries or his treatment at the hospital
Now, the investigation may be entirely in the hands of Trump’s government. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), which has jurisdiction over virtually all fatal uses of force by law enforcement in the state, has been pushed out by the feds. In a statement, the BCA said the investigation into Good’s killing “would now be led solely by the FBI.”
On Thursday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said that there may still be a local investigation into whether Good’s killer — identified by the Minnesota Star Tribune as Jonathan Ross — violated state law.
Notably, the White House isn’t even pretending to have a valid reason for pushing Minnesota officials out of the investigation. Asked about it yesterday, Vance changed the subject to bashing Democrats.
“I wish the state officials would investigate why you have so many people who are using their vehicles to interfere with law enforcement,” he said.
There is no indication that Good’s actions interfered with any law enforcement operation being carried out on Wednesday. In fact, before she was killed, she calmly waived an ICE vehicle past her SUV. The vehicle passed without incident, video shows.
The quiet part gets louder
In a dark sign of the times, Good’s killing was partially the result of the Trump administration’s obsessive fealty to the right-wing outrage content machine. Last month, a 23-year-old right-wing political influencer named Nick Shirley piggybacked on reputable reporting by local press in Minneapolis to create outrage bait about fraud committed by Somali immigrants running childcare centers in the city.
Shirley posted his video — which showed him and a right-wing activist visiting daycare businesses where no children were allegedly present — on X on December 26. The next day, Vance and others, like Elon Musk, shared the video, sending its view count into the hundreds of millions.
In response, Noem announced DHS would “surge” up to 2,000 immigration agents to the city to crack down on Shirley’s overhyped fraud claims. On December 29, Noem posted a video of agents speaking to a Somali man. By Tuesday, Noem was in neighboring St. Paul, where her content crew and a local news station took video of her asking a man being arrested if he was “aware of the crimes you committed.”
In an X post, Noem tied the arrest of the man — who does not appear to be of Somali descent — to right-wing fraud claims that prompted her to surge unprecedented DHS resources to the area.
“If you think you can come to this country and get rich defrauding the American people, think again,” Noem wrote.
In this way, Good’s killing encapsulates the Trump era’s signature blend of unnecessary violence fueled by — and for — the right-wing outrage content mill. In fact, the agent who killed Good was creating some content himself, filming her with his phone before unholstering his gun and shooting her in the face.
In true Trumpian fashion, Noem, Vance, and other administration officials have gone as far as to refuse expressing any remorse or normal human empathy for the death of a mother who leaves behind a toddler. Both have said that, if anything, Good’s killing strengthened their resolve brutalize the Twin Cities, where public schools are closed due to the unrest, with “door to door” operations.
Noem and her agents will surely post video of some of those operations online, since their goal is as much to harass and dehumanize immigrants as it is to get clout on X from the right-wing provocateurs they are beholden to. It’s not as clear we’ll ever see the video that Ross was apparently taking before he killed Good, but based on the footage already available, anyone who hasn’t been hypnotized by the growing fascism on display throughout the country already understands what happened.
A 15-minute walk away from where Good was killed is the street corner where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020. At first, Floyd’s killing was universally condemned as a brutal and unnecessary act of over-the-top police violence. But as protests and riots took hold throughout the summer of 2020, a realignment began to take shape.
What had been seen as a straight-up murder even by many on the American right began to be reframed. Floyd’s criminal history was brought to light. Right-wing titans like Tucker Carlson began to speculate that he actually died of a drug overdose, not the knee on his neck choking the life out of him.
Just months after the nation and world was appalled by Floyd’s murder, it became an event with two different truths. With the killing of Good, the American right has not even deigned to admit the heinousness of the event before deciding she had it coming.
The dehumanization cycle is speeding up.
That’s it for today
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I'd like to believe (in fact I'm pretty sure this would happen) that if such a shooting happened here in Australia politicians from both sides would largely keep their mouths shut. They certainly wouldn't declare the innocence of the shooter before the investigation. The Prime Minister would say nothing beyond expressing deep regret at the death and asking people to withold judgement until an investigation by an imartial, independent and generally respected body was conducted.
The idea that a cabinet Minister would start turning up on police operations in a thinly disguised effort to score favourable media attention would be unthinkable. Politicians that made statements clearly at variance (even to a biased viewer) with widely shown videos would be ridiculed.
Sadly no one can trust the FBI under its present leadership to conduct an independent investigation. As far as I can tell the sort of professional, independent investigator who would be prepared to make an adverse finding on the ICE officer has been encouraged to leave and would be left in no doubt that to make such a finding would be at the very least a career damaging move.
For what it is worth this American friendlly person, looking at things from a distance can only confirm to US citizens who can see clearly, that government services in the USA have sunk very low under this administration with no chance of recovery while the present regime lasts.
With all the bogus justifications and pure out lies, this is the world bully-boys Trump and Miller (and probably Vought) really want—shoot first, don’t bother with questions.