ICE murdered her. Now the news media is helping assassinate her character.

If you give a gun, a badge, and impunity to the kind of people who want a gun, a badge, and impunity, some of them will do very bad things.

Renee Good is dead because the Trump regime gave a gun, a badge, and a sense of impunity to the kind of people who want a gun, a badge, and impunity. Her murder^[1] was the obvious and intended outcome of a reign of fascist terror Donald Trump and his henchmen are imposing on the American people.

It really is that simple, and if the Trump regime was as confident as they want us to think they are, they'd say so.

The Trump regime’s actual position is that they killed Renee Good because they wanted to, that they will continue to do similar things to people they dislike, and fuck you for questioning it. This is the central truth of the situation: They killed her as a means of imposing terror and control on the American people, and they will continue to behave similarly as long as they can get away with it.

We know this in part because Donald Trump has spent more than ten years telling us — and, more importantly, his loyalists — that he favors violence against those Americans with whom he disagrees, as a means of imposing control. His words have made this clear, the actions of those under his influence have made this clear, and his response to violence has made this clear. We do not have to pretend otherwise. We have a responsibility — to his victims, to our communities, and to our own survival — to recognize it.

Trump and his henchmen aren’t yet comfortable saying they killed Renee Good because they wanted to. They know the American people oppose lawless, masked government death squads roaming the streets, snatching children from schools, mothers from cars, and fathers from streets. They know their grip on America is not secure. So while they act as if they are immune from prosecution and free from accountability, their words betray their fear: Instead of telling the truth about why they killed Renee Good, they defensively peddle what they hope are more palatable justifications.

That brings us to the central lie of this story: that Renee Good’s murder was her own fault, that she brought it on herself. That she was asking for it.

That desperate lie has taken two primary forms: That the ICE agent who killed Renee Good was acting in self defense (the video we have all by now seen, if we are willing to see it,^[2] clearly demonstrates otherwise) and that Good's actions and associations prior to the day of her murder justify it (a self-evidently monstrous stance.)

Those lies are so transparent that few outside the Trump regime and the most overt of its propagandists are peddling them. But many more news companies are privileging those lies. "Privileging the lie" is a concept I introduced nearly 20 years ago. In short:

When a news report treats the truthfulness of a lie as an open question, it privileges the lie. When a news report devotes more and more prominent space to recounting the lie and the liar’s defense of it than it does making clear that it’s a lie, the article privileges the lie. When a news report focuses on the target of a lie’s struggle to deal with the impact of the lie, the article privileges the lie. And when a news report focuses on the topic of the lie — even if it does a good job of making clear the lie is a lie — it privileges the lie, because it allows the liar to set the topic of conversation, and thus increases the electoral salience of a topic the liar believes is to his benefit.

It is easier to get people to think about something than it is to get them to think what you want them to think about it. Privileging the lie does the liar’s work by getting your audience to think about the thing the liar wants them to think about, while doing comparatively little to ensure your audience does not believe the lie.

Take, for example, this CNN article:

The "ties" in question turn out to be that Good "served on the board of her son’s school, which linked to documents encouraging parents to monitor ICE," and the article noted that "four legal experts who reviewed the documents for CNN said they largely describe nonviolent civil disobedience tactics practiced at American protests for generations – far from the sinister depiction of extremism and domestic terrorism portrayed by Trump administration officials like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Vice President JD Vance." Few who read the CNN article are likely to conclude that serving on the board of her child's school justified Good's murder. But a 30-paragraph "investigation" into Good's "ties to ICE monitoring efforts" privileges the lie that anything Good did prior to her encounter with the ICE agent who killed her could possibly justify her death. It pulls us away from what we should be thinking about – how do we stop the government’s campaign of intimidation, violence, and murder – and focuses attention instead on whether that might all be somehow justified.

Next, consider this lengthy New York Times article about the Trump regime investigating Good in the wake of her murder (emphasis added):

Mr. Trump and many in his administration — particularly Vice President JD Vance — have already made clear that they believe Ms. Good, who was shot at three times at close range, was unambiguously responsible for her own death.
...
It is unclear how deeply Ms. Good was involved in activism in Minneapolis beyond participating with her wife in the protest against immigration officers on the day she was killed. In a group chat used by local residents to monitor ICE movements, her wife was described as a “helper” in that action.
...
But even though investigators have not made public a specific allegation that anyone aside from Ms. Good and her wife were involved in an encounter with federal agents that day, the Justice Department is still planning to examine a wide group of activists who took part in the neighborhood watch activities, believing they were “instigators” of the shooting, the people familiar with the inquiry said.

This article demonstrates the same flaw we saw with the CNN article, planting in readers the idea that Good's "activism ... beyond participating with her wife in the protest against immigration officials on the day she was killed* could possibly provide any justification for killing her.^[3]

Note, also, the repeated assertion that the Trump regime believes the bullshit it is peddling that Good was "unambiguously responsible for her own death" and that a "wide group of activists" were "instigators" of the shooting. For as long as I can remember, journalists have responded to the criticism that they fail to call lies lies by saying they cannot read minds; that they cannot know what the people they are covering think and believe, but only what they say and do. But here the New York Times engages in exactly that kind of mind reading in order to portray the Trump regime as acting in good faith on sincere beliefs. And it does so despite a decade of evidence to the contrary. JD Vance has publicly bragged about telling lies in order to get the news media to cover things -- and here the New York Times vouches for the sincerity of his professed belief that Good was responsible for her own death!

We'll probably soon hear that these kids might have had it coming, too.

Two songs have been running through my head all week.

First, the Drive-By Truckers' Ramon Casiano, in which Mike Cooley sings about the killing of a 15-year-old by Harlon Carter, who went on to lead the U.S. Border Patrol and the National Rifle Association. Cooley's description of Carter sounds a lot like Donald Trump and his followers:

He had the makings of a leader
Of a certain kind of men
Who need to feel the world’s against them
Out to get them if it can
Men whose triggers pull their fingers
men who would rather fight than win
United in a revolution
Like in mind and like in skin

"Someone killed Ramon Casiano," Cooley concludes, "and Ramon still ain't dead enough." The Trump administration killed Renee Good, and now they're trying to justify it by assassinating her character.

The other song is Woody Guthrie's All You Fascists Bound to Lose, which speaks for itself: