State of Thursday: WHAT KILLED RENEE GOOD?
Of course the shooting was instantly politicized by all the worst people
Greetings, Dear Reader,
It’s a sad day. Regardless of how we feel, we should pray for the six-year-old who lost his mommy yesterday.
What killed her? Literally an ICE agent killed her. That’s not what really killed her though. Not in my view.
WHAT KILLED RENEE GOOD?
Some weeks back I was invited on a radio show to discuss a completely different shooting from the one that occurred yesterday in Minnesota. This one involved a black man, accusations of racism, and a white man who is now in jail, wrongly in my estimation.
If you want to read more about that, here’s a link to the column I wrote on it, titled “Shut Up And Let This Black Dude Pummel You.”
During the radio hit, one of the last comments I made was that we’d never know the true death toll of the Black Lives Matter movement. We know how many people (mostly black) died in the riots. Daily Caller (and others) did a good job tracking that at the time.
More difficult to track, however, is the effect the corresponding propaganda campaign had on black people. Not just from BLM, but also from the media. We know police forces across the nation lost morale and withdrew from economically marginal, colored communities. That’s the Ferguson Effect. We know that resulted in a spike of violent crime, murder, rape and assault.
What we don’t know, however, is how many basic social interactions went sideways because people in those communities were taken with the sudden delusion of the moment.
The delusion at the time was nuanced and had many elements, but if I could boil it down to the bleating of Orwell’s sheep, it would be “Black People Right, Police Wrong, Black People Right, Police Wrong,” over and over and over into oblivion. The delusion was so pervasive and repeated at such a rate that networks were eventually tripping over themselves to get a guy like Jacob Blake in the studio for friendly interviews.
Blake was a violent criminal and literal wife beater. He had violated a restraining order to assault her once more, and was in the process of abducting their kids at knifepoint when police appeared. She had called them frantically.
Blake refused to obey lawful orders from officers seeking to intervene on his rampage, opened the door to his SUV, grabbed a knife, and was shot seven times.
Open and shut case of heroism from law enforcement, but the delusion dictated that the hero was Blake. So there he sat in his wheelchair, on Good Morning America, on CNN.
“I didn’t want to be the next George Floyd,” he said to nodding, sympathetic, highly paid shmucks on the boob tube.
The delusion’s message was clear, and its grip on the nation approached mass hysteria.
Every police interaction became a minefield of uncertainty. There was suddenly social currency in talking back to the police while black and recording it. Activist Twitter would turn you into the superstar of the week.
You can’t give me a ticket; Activist Twitter will have your job. You can’t arrest or pursue me; Activist Twitter will call you racist. You certainly can’t shoot at me; Activist Twitter will make sure you go to jail. I’ll be on CNN tomorrow like objectively vile human being Jacob Blake. The delusion called him a hero, the delusion dictates it!
How many summary traffic stops that would have otherwise resulted in a warning turned into violent felonies, high-speed chases, shootings, hospitalizations, needless incarcerations, death? We know it happened, is still happening in fact, but nobody truly knows the tally.
I ended my appearance on the radio by saying something to the effect of, “The messaging we’ve been beaming to young black men, the black community in general, has been so bad for them. There’s really no telling how much damage it’s caused.”
I don’t know much about Renee Nicole Good. She was first married to a comedian who died unexpectedly. She had at least one son with him. Reports say she had two other children who were with “extended family.” She was artsy, wrote poetry, had face piercings, had become a lesbian and married a woman.
By all appearances, Good was a pedestrian liberal woman. Probably considered fun in her friend group but an absolute bore in mixed company, especially if that mix was politically diverse.
The bumper stickers on the rear window of her SUV are blurry but visible in the video as she appears to gun the gas and an ICE officer shoots her in the head. The aftermath of Good’s interaction with ICE officers is hard to stomach. The fatally injured Good likely seized up, common with traumatic head injuries, and her foot floored the gas. The SUV sped across the street and crashed. Her airbag was covered in blood. So was her wife.
Video from the scene captured her saying, “I have a six-year-old in school right now” and “this is my fault, I made her come down here.”
Truly gut wrenching stuff.
Of course the shooting was instantly politicized by all the worst people. The anti-ICE left went utterly ballistic. An “American citizen” had been “murdered,” they shrieked — the delusion they’re taken with demands this conclusion of anyone with eyes who can watch the video for themselves.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem went full MAGA-brained retard, tweeting that Good was a “domestic terrorist.”
No, she fu***ing wasn’t, lol. Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist. Ted Kaczynski, Nidal Hasan, Tyler Robinson. These are domestic terrorists.
Good was obviously just a confused, mentally unwell woman who had given in to a delusion, a mass hysteria propelled by both social and network media.
It wasn’t an ICE agent who killed Renee Good. It was a long-running propaganda campaign that has produced armies of Karens who believe it’s their duty to use their family vehicles, festooned with cutesy window stickers, to chase, harass and blockade DHS operations.
We’ve all seen it. We’ve seen videos of bystanders and common pedestrians turn into roiling, chaotic masses threatening violence simply because ICE is serving a warrant on a known pedophile. There’s hours of footage online. They think they’re patriots. They think they’re doing the right thing. And the media gluttonously airs this content, affirms, encourages and solidifies this delusion.
I’ve personally watched at least a dozen videos of ICE agents stopping “influencers,” mostly women, to tell them to stop chasing ICE vehicles in the street. Stop broadcasting this on Facebook Live, you idiot, what are you doing? “Go home,” one agent said in a recent video. The terrified woman, fearful she would go to jail and not be able to pick her kids up from school, thankfully complied.
It’s the delusion and its hysteria that’s harming and, in the case of Good, killing these people, not ICE.
I wish, at this point, I could say I have a solution. I don’t. I’m not for policing speech. I’m not for censoring news organizations or social media. And I can’t say any of them will take responsibility. Just like with Jacob Blake, they should know better, but they don’t care. “Give me more footage of police beating up black guys and ICE agents confronting neighborhood Karens — it’s good for ratings!”
What I do know with utter certainty is that if Renee Good wasn’t taken with the delusion, when the officer grabbed her door handle and said get out of the car, she’d have probably gotten out. She’d have probably gotten out, maybe even made a bit of a scene, but she’d almost certainly be with her son right now.
She might be light a few shekels because of fines, she might have to make a court appearance, but she wouldn’t be dead. She’d have a good story to tell. She’d be a hero to her literally gay friend group.
But she wouldn’t be dead; the delusion, however, dictates.
That’s it for the free portion of today’s State of the Day.
The full subscriber edition continues below with expanded analysis and additional context.