Policy / January 9, 2026
The Trump administration is once again invoking backwards state alibis to evoke the false specter of an imminent threat.
A sign in Minneapolis commemorates the murder of Renee Good.
(Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images) There was Ferguson. The one in Minnesota where the licensed gun owner wasn’t looking for his gun. The one shot in the back for the brake light. The one with the knee on his neck. The one with the “loosies”. We informally title every killing of a citizen by law enforcement as if it were a Friends episode. Even in this regard, with the murder of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis this Wednesday, ICE is setting a new, lower standard.
“The one where ICE shot the white mom” stands out. Maybe it’s his glove box filled with stuffed animals next to his driver’s seat, now empty except for a fresh layer of blood. Perhaps it’s the way her killer hid her face, even though we don’t know if she still has one. Perhaps it’s the fact that his killers and their handlers spent the day of his death trying to make him look like a terrorist.
Maybe Renee Nicole Good is what it takes to make the evidence itself.
Most of us will be lucky enough to never witness a murder committed by law enforcement; only the Internet actually makes these murders real or proximal. As such, it is difficult not to react from the same context: running towards memes, Internet reminders, gags that pass into preconceived ideas, like drills. All this seems desperately immature at the moment, but we might as well use the same tools as those in charge, at the top of a government rightly described as a memeocracy.
After Good’s assassination, the Trump administration rallied behind them. The Department of Homeland Security’s current RICO-style deployment in Minnesota is itself delivered as a nascent meme, orchestrated by the highly publicized leader of the raidsBorder Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino. It was duly organized in response to a memorized understanding of a fraudulent scheme and daycare fraud meme applied to the people depicted in the annoying and immortal racism memes.
Although the video from Good’s shooting was clear as day from the start, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin later applied the meme template the agency adopted in two shootings (one fatalA not) by agents of the Operation Midway Blitz campaign in Chicago. As in these cases, federal officials have adopted the DARVO manual developed by sexual offenders: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim, and Offender. Thus, the victim was presented as the aggressor, and the killer’s optional responses were transformed into obligatory responses. This was and is, of course, bad and obviously wrong, which Noem actually acknowledged by striking out the good of the thought-ending “terrorist” cliché. When it is finally admitted that the victims did nothing to justify their murder, the job of federally appointed murder apologists will be to ensure that they are already wielding the most dangerous weapon of all: ideology. On Wednesday evening, Fox News agitprop chief Jesse Watters made sure Good’s “pronouns were in the bio.” There it was, clearly in plain sight: the “she was going to get her gun” of the mind.
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Pointing out hypocrisy too often proves an end in itself, but Noem’s criteria for terrorism involved running someone over with a car and nebulous claims of coordination. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been less than two weeks since Florida Man Rep. (derogatory, Republican) Randy Fine tweeted”In Florida, we take down terrorists. Under my Thump Thump Act, the rest of America can do it too.” Or maybe you remember 2020, when the conservative response to the George Floyd protests was a coordinated effort to morally justify and legalize what people already continued to see on social media: police running over protesters with their cars. Their crusade then was to democratize vehicular assaults and provide a defense against civil liability for any smart-ass conspirator, conspirator, racist or in general who was afraid and decided he needed to make a citizen pancake. All they are left to do is attribute their own obvious motivations to unlucky bystanders in order to justify an otherwise completely unprovoked use of deadly force.
A number of concomitant pathologies and memes cut through this hypocrisy. (Any talk of authorities justifying the killing of an outgroup instantly suggests that James Franco is smirking. a noose around the neck“First time? “) There is of course the paradoxical tension of fascism between being master of the world and simultaneously terrified at all times. On a daily basis, this manifests itself primarily in DHS tweets of images of AI defending the homeland with “Nazi propaganda aesthetics” pushed to jaw-dropping dog-whistle levels by people bragging about how many cities they’re afraid to visit. From a macro perspective, we see the shift in duty from protecting and serving citizens to “protecting law enforcement at the expense of everything nearby.” Under this perverse mandate, cops owe the public nothing, while the public is at all times mortally responsible for maintaining the cops’ sense of safety around them, lest their anxiety be triggered.
While all of this is true, it is also just a refinement of what Noem, Trump, and the underlying message of the American right have distilled: that good people have the right to destroy anything that threatens them, frightens them, embarrasses them, or even annoys them, and that this right is so sovereign and so free that any misapplication of it amounts only to the level of collateral damage. There are undoubtedly people in the Trump administration who sincerely regret and abhor the murder of Renee Good, but for them, her murder will never be so horrific as to take away their right to kill her again under the same conditions, even if you bring her back to life.
Trump, Noem, and the GOP know what DHS is, and they like it that way. They know that post-9/11 paranoia has recreated bureaucratic functions as poisonous extensions of law enforcement and the persistently aggrieved police mentality. They know that a rush of hiring has largely paid off, unleashing a new cohort of criminals into their ranks. They know that ICE, Customs, and Border Patrol are full of racists — they can see their memes, too — and they pander to them on the campaign trail. They are now embarking on a new hiring campaign to create more of the same, with near-flat physical standards, ridiculously threadbare behavioral qualifications, and advertisements clearly appealing to nativist sympathies and police worship. All this adds to the historic attraction of the immigration state for existing law enforcement, who feel that their aggressiveness is hampered. It’s a low-risk proposition when only people who look like cops should feel safe.
The design of the system, from ideology to purpose to personnel, will make this happen again because it will be defined until nothing happens. You could lay a line of coffins from the first tee to the 18th green at Trump’s golf resort in Bedminster, and the body count would remain at zero. The Renee Good that deserved this is already under construction, and every future victim will have a doppelganger who needed to be killed. Nothing happens in the detention centers either, because nothing happens if no one can see it. Any witness will just be an inmate anyway – assuming you can track them down. They say they are tortured and things taken from them, but of course they would.
Above all, immigration vigilante lords know that a right-wing Supreme Court has worked to immunize them from virtually all accountability and give their victims access to nothing more than a suggestion box. Where the court is not already protecting them, they know that they are Donald Trump’s chosen national army, his most beloved henchmen, and that Trump, the Republican Party and very often both sides of the aisle and the mainstream media will by default portray them as America’s vital last line of defense against an existential threat.
They know that there will be no constraint, because we almost couldn’t blame them for not recognizing one. If lack of qualifications is not an obstacle to obtaining a job, and if breaking the law is not an obstacle to exercising it, what is murder after adding a few adjectives or nouns? They are already beating people in broad daylight, kidnapping people without legal justification on camera, and then deliberately targeting people with the cameras. They destroy things that irritate them, attack people who annoy them, and threaten them to show them that being told no won’t stop them. And anyone who has been mistreated long enough can see the look of snarling satisfaction on the face of some random ICE or CBP moron when they decided they were going to punch someone because it would make them feel better. How long they are allowed to continue doing this depends on how long it takes others to see the same pleasure in their expressions. At the rate they’re creating memes themselves, constantly issuing watch out for me challenge coins, it might not take much time.
It might be impossible for people of a certain age to talk about memes and the Internet without invoking The Simpsonsbut something interesting happened about a decade ago, when the series’ sudden availability on streaming platforms introduced it to new audiences, just as events like the Ferguson protests were about to appear on the timeline. Gags that had lost some pizzazz through memorization and repetition reached new audiences again, like when Police Chief Wiggum shoots down the starting center of the high school basketball team, then makes an excuse afterward: “He was turning into a monster.”
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It was also interesting to see people who grew up with the show looking at it through these new eyes. The Simpsons paints law enforcement as deadly stupid, corrupt, lazy, and downright hostile with the expectation that they will solve anything or visibly work, and it has. always does that. The main threat to law enforcement was citizens. Sure, a 22-year-old joke seemed pretty old, but the oldest and ugliest acknowledgment was that 22 years earlier the topic was already folk wisdom, common knowledge, and universal enough to be recognized by a large television audience.
Idea Most people have a deeper relationship with reality when they have their revelations, but no one should worry about how people get there. Like Grant Brisbee’s since-deleted tweet about the teenage Rage Against the Machine fan who now attends parties in his 30s and said, “No, really, some of those who work are the same ones who burn crosses”, your discovery is no less profound for sounding cheesy, and the people who are already on the other side are happy to have you.
The only downside to wondering how many decades of life have been spent internalizing one series of human rights atrocities as some kind of wise joke that everyone gets in on is finding out how many more there are. (There’s always just one joke about showering in prison.) DHS is only too happy to guide us through the deep end. If this is how our immigration officers behave in the open, how much torture is already being reported and how seriously should we already be taking it? When inmates say their belongings were confiscated, do you reflexively view this as a lament of bad actors playing the role of the victim? Or do the ethics you see on the streets make you wonder if, off camera, the United States is currently experiencing the largest transfer of jewelry in history, from non-white people to the wives of ICE agents and the girlfriends they met before they were asked to leave their old jobs as high school resource officers?
If it can mean nothing else to the people watching, we hope that the death of Renée Nicole Good will be the moment when the meme or cliché revolves around past mixed feelings and self-exonerating refrains that these cases are much more complicated than they seem, and simply becomes true again. Like the student who grew up learning that the Civil War was about slavery, went to high school and learned that it was about many complex factors like tariffs and states’ rights, then went to college and learned, no, it was about slaveryit is hoped that people can now see that the system kills Good, takes away and harms others by terrorizing others because that is what those who built it want it to do, and that is what many people like to do.
They’ll memorize a new shame and brag about another idiot and maybe pick a distracting fight with a female pop star so their fans can spend three days calling her a lesbian. They hope that everything about Renée Good’s murder dies with her. This is the case for them.
After the shootout, Bovino – lord of nominative determinism and source of 100% crude bullshit – and his henchmen scurried around like groomsmen waiting for the wedding photographer to start setting them up. Of course, all faces were covered for those special moments when you want to say “I was there” without a court being able to say it as well. Nothing had gone wrong.
Jeb Lund Jeb Lund is a former American political correspondent for rolling stoneAnd The guardian. His work appeared in Squire, The New Republic And The Washington Post. He talks with Defector’s David Roth about Hallmark movies on the podcast It’s Christmastown.
