Next they'll claim the ICE officer was killed, but he's better now
See, if only American citizens would just close their eyes, hide in their basements, and let the federal government ramp up its national goon squad of masked thugs, rampaging around Democratic-run cities, challenging brown people and randomly plucking them off the street for possible dispatch to Third World hellhole prisons, then this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
But there was do-gooder Renee Nicole Good, 37, in her Honda Pilot, on a residential street in Minneapolis Wednesday, acting as a "legal observer" — a self-appointed concerned citizen who doesn't want to let her neighbors be secretly muscled into SUVs and whisked off to fates unknown.
On the video, you see Good didn't comply with ICE orders to get out of her car, instead trying to roll away, and was shot in the face and killed for it.
Typically, I don't encourage readers to watch such death videos — they can be jarring. But sometimes they're necessary to understand what happened in a situation. You see the split second between when Adam Toledo tossed his gun away and when the officer in that alley fired in 2021, and realize he shouldn't be charged. You see Jason Van Dyke’s bullets slamming into the prone body of Laquan McDonald and know his subsequent stint in prison was deserved.
With Wednesday's fatal encounter, you see, from several angles. the yawning gap between the lies President Donald Trump and his administration instantly spun, and what actually happened. You see she was driving slowly away from the officer who ran up and killed her.
Kristi Noem, aka ICE Barbie, aka Homeland Security Secretary, called Good's attempt to escape “an act of domestic terrorism,” that she “attacked them" and "attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”
Trump somersaulted past that — rare is the lie so bald he can't embellish it — condemning Good because she “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
I thought the Trump administration is sympathetic to citizens assaulting police officers. Or is that only while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? Pity Good wasn't filmed beating a cop with a metal bar on the Capitol steps. The Trump administration might give her a medal.
Don't worry, the ICE officer is recuperating from his imaginary injuries after being notionally run over. Just the way the "serious injuries" suffered by the ICE officer who killed Chicago cook Silverio Villegas Gonzalez in September magically got better upon closer inspection.
This might be a good moment to step back and remind ourselves what is happening, big picture.
Totalitarian states demand that citizens trade freedom for security by positing harms that do not in fact exist, then promising to liberate people from the perceived threat of these imaginary wrongs.
Thus for the past — geez, not even a year — immigrants are being tarred as violent criminals, even though they're more law abiding than American-born citizens. The myth justifies the creation of an ICE army, currently being recruited and trained — perhaps poorly trained.
These ICE men are being sent out to round up all the landscapers, fry cooks and preschool teachers they can get their hands on.
Some Americans love this. Goosestepping fear junkies ready to sign off on whatever they're told. When our leaders talk about purifying the blood of the fatherland, they nod. One side of their mouths whine about the lingering trauma of being asked to wear a cotton mask five years ago, while the other demands to know why the driver didn't comply immediately.
Meanwhile, decent Americans resent the spectacle of their neighbors being hauled away on technicalities, and try to put themselves in the path of ICE — we saw that daily at Broadview. Sometimes ICE gets impatient and kills somebody.
There are two ways this could go. Minnesota can charge the ICE officer who killed Renee Good with a crime — a steep climb in court, but as the skilled, ethical lawyers have quit the Justice Department, the pliant strivers who remain might lack the legal skills to get the case thrown out.
Outrage could cause more people to step up and protest what ICE is doing. Leading to more innocent deaths.
Or people could stop protesting, stop putting themselves in harm's way, and let ICE go about its business of dismantling our social fabric, frog-marching our country back toward Stephen Miller's fever dream of a white Christian 1950s America that — in a delicious irony — both never existed, and did not include people such as himself.
I hope they charge the ICE officer. At the very least, next time the driver in a car starts to roll away, the ICE agent involved might hesitate before shooting that person in the face. Maybe not, but a guy can hope. Hope has not been redefined as domestic terrorism. Yet.