Renee Nicole Good was killed by an ICE agent yesterday. Marked a terrorist protester by the administration (similar to Trump’s blatantly false tweet about Martin Gugino five years ago), she was in fact a Legal Observer. All video angles show her trying to go around agents. Agents are allegedly trained not to open fire in such cases. Now comes the army of parrots and bots saying she would be alive if she just obeyed orders — or stayed home. Even with video, facts don’t matter as much as state-sanctioned reality. Reasons don’t matter unless they serve the pre-ordained interpretation. Like Zimmerman, George Floyd et al., it seems pointless to even argue over it. But there’s a detail in reporting that reveals who we really are as Americans.
If not in the headline, in the first paragraph of much reporting is the fact that she is a WHITE CITIZEN.
If we weren’t a racist, xenophobic country, it wouldn’t matter. It SHOULDN’T matter. But so many of us think ANY consequences or punishment for crossing a border is deserved, including a foreign death camp or losing your unborn child by being takled and dragges in a raid. And anything that happens to anyone who tries to stop or even document it is a fascist-porn version of FAFO. Where images of water cannons and dogs won public opinion in favor of civil rights activists in the 1960s, today’s “patriots” are calling for them. Or maybe they were the same people that gave reason to the marches both then and now.
But saying she was White is a dog whistle of another color.
“First, they came for …” goes the poem. Many of us were ridiculed as alarmists last year for saying it. We saw this coming, but had the conscience (or at least sense) to resist then. Saying a White person was killed by ICE just now is an “I told you so” moment. It’s an appeal to the selfish masses who don’t care unless it affects them. I learned since 2020, that the typical Conservative notion of liberty means little more than protecting their lawn, and the only time they will exercise the Second Amendment is to confront People of Color marching. Law and order is only for keeping undesirables out of their neighborhoods. Ands more and more, immigration policy is a welcome cure to some Great White Replacement — a driving force of Project 2025, Turning Point, and backed by everyone from Tucker Carlson to the Proud Boys.
But it’s even worse. People don’t care that she was White, only that she was an appointed villain in their narrative. We are so far down the poem that even if our own friends and family are taken or killed, one “truth” from the President or official statement by any member of the TrumpReich will convince us it’s justified. It will be a “tragedy” — but they should have stayed home, obeyed orders, or not posted that meme of Charlie Kirk with his own damning words.
If the same people who brag about their patriotism and guns ever saw outside their this-is-what-we-voted-for bubble, those of conscience would make 1776 look like a grade school food fight and this would be over. The rest of us are doing everything we can to keep our civility and not to give reason for martial law. The largest violence-free protests in history took place in 2025, and all they could do was ridicule the pointlessness of it all. And yet the propaganda is being screamed at us that we’re the violent ones. All the political assassins now and of yore were closet liberals according to the now-infallible doctrine, facts and statistics be damned.
There are even neighbors who are gearing up for a fight and taking note of who suspiciously does not have a Trump 2028 bumper sticker. They drool over the imagine glory a Civil War — God on their side and all. The administration is already engaged in one, according to Steve Bannon, adding, “It will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” And the rhetoric reveals that side of the public is ready to blame us for starting it as justification for “whatever happens”. It’s not just the usual scapegoats but anyone who is seen as protecting them. None of us is safe, and even those in the fold of this insanity could be targets. We’ve seen historically how this works. We read the poem.
The questions that remain are two. First, will we be accused of violence as a pretense for an iron-fist response, no matter how pacifistic we are? Second, will we keep our powder dry until it’s too late to use it?