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By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News
The murder-in-broad-daylight of Renee Nicole Good on a Minneapolis street last Wednesday shapes up as a watershed moment in national politics. Let us hope this proves so, in any case. Our crumbling republic is greatly in need of a watershed or three.
Via all the video of the incident that has since circulated, the nation watched as a goon from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fired point-blank into the windshield of Good’s car as she tried to avoid a confrontation with two more of these jumped-up punks. Jonathan Ross, the murderer, then fired twice more at Good, the last of these shots from behind.
I could not take my eyes off the videos before rerunning them several times, and I’ve watched them several more times since. The scene, start-to-finish, is grotesque in 10 different ways.
Look at the body language at the start of the incident — aggressive, predatory — as one of these ICE primitives approaches Good’s vehicle. “Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car,” he commands. This is not someone who is enforcing the law in a sound, disinterested manner.
No, this guy, seething with animosity, has nothing to do with law enforcement or legitimate authority. He is a straight-out expression of the ressentiment abroad among the rightist constituencies now running riot in our no-longer-fair land.
Ressentiment is a French term the Germans borrowed in the 19th century to describe the poisonous mix of hatred and envy shared by any group that feels itself spurned or scorned or disdained — socially, economically, politically. This is the defining feature of the MAGA crowd. Most ICE “officers” are MAGA people who nurse their feelings of inferiority — another feature of the ressentiment complex — behind badges. What we see in the videos of Good’s murder is not the enforcement of anything. It is a hate crime.
Follow the videos of the immediate scene to their end. You see the stunning indifference of Ross and his colleagues while Good slumps over in her car, which is at this point smashed into another vehicle on the side of the street. Ross approaches Good’s car but walks away without checking whether she is alive or dead. In one of these video clips, two ICE people share a moment of self- congratulatory glee, Good’s car behind them.
The Trump regime has since described Good as “a deranged leftist” (J.D. Vance) and “domestic terrorist” (Kristi Noem, President Trump’s shockingly primitive Homeland Security secretary). Vance, Trump’s v.p., describes Good’s murder as “a tragedy of her own making” and promises Ross “total immunity” from prosecution.
On the Streets
What happened last Wednesday in Minneapolis and what has happened since has got a lot of Americans out in the streets. They are demonstrating against ICE, yes, but a lot of other things, too —Trump’s lawless presidency, the collapse of American democracy, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s laundering of the Epstein files such that what is disclosed discloses nothing.
All good. Ordinary people are beginning to connect the dots and get off the sofa, having at last seen the oneness of the full-dress crisis in which the reigning regime has so swiftly plunged America. “Everything is a part of everything”: Remember that idiotic phrase from the 1960s? It does not seem so dreamy when you consider the American condition at the start of 2026.
I went to one of these demonstrations here on Sunday morning. It was a good turnout on the village green. I am pleased to be a member now of a statewide group called “ICE Out for Good” — a brilliant and compassionate pun that opens the mind as the meaning of the phrase takes hold.
Torrington is an old factory town in northwest Connecticut that once thrived on water power and the manufacture of brass products but now searches for a new way forward — a familiar story across the country. The remnants of the old, white working class now live side-by-side with a considerable population of Hispanics.
Torrington, population plus-or-minus 35,000, is vulnerable to the predations of ICE, to put the point simply. Nobody seems to know when the agency’s goons will come, but it seems a given that at a certain point they will.
The crowd at Coe Memorial Park Sunday came to several hundred and was properly spirited. And the placards held aloft were of infinite variety:
“ICE — Trump’s Gestapo.”
“Say her name.”
“Once you know, they all have to go.”
“Impeach Kristi Noem.”
“Protect neighbors, not Nazis.”
“Fuck ICE. No goons allowed.”
“America is anti-fascist. Fascism is anti–American.”
Etc. Now you know what a little speck of America sounded like this past weekend.
On the way home I thought about what I had seen, read on placards, and heard in conversations. I am leery of hyperbole, as it does nothing to clarify one’s moment, but is “fascism” at last our word? So I wondered. We are certainly closer to it than I imagined even a few months ago.
In this connection, I was bitterly amused to see Kristi Noem, as she declared she would urge the Justice Department to prosecute those of Renee Good’s kind as domestic terrorists, wearing a brown shirt (along with an outsized cowboy hat that made her look like a high school cheerleader somewhere in Texas).
Memo to Secretary Noem: Anything but brown next time.
I count this a new moment as of last week. How to define it, how to name it deserves careful consideration, and I will give it some in a future column — accurate nomenclature being the key to clarity of mind.
But there was one placard that I will address right away. It was a piece of brown cardboard held by a kindly lady dressed in pajamas and slippers and holding her dog beneath her overcoat. It read:
“Look up. Imperial boomerang.”
How exceptionally astute is this? It seems to me this is what Americans must most urgently think about now if they are to understand their new moment.
The policy cliques in Washington and the pols that front for them have managed an imperium for nearly 80 years now, and no imperium is ever managed without violence. Was it anything other than a matter of time before what the American empire has long done abroad would eventually turn out to be what the empire would have to do at home to preserve itself?
A lot of the placards I read this past weekend in Torrington had to do with the defense of American democracy:
“Save our Constitution.”
“Criminalizing dissent is un–American.”
These sentiments go straight to the point. Since the United States began to cultivate its imperial aspirations 128 years ago — taking my date from the Spanish–American War — it has all along been a choice between democracy at home or empire abroad.
It is not an original thought. Twain and others in the Anti–Imperialist League got this right as the 19th century turned into the 20th .
ICE is at bottom a paramilitary force — precisely of the kind the United States has supported abroad in numerous cases over the past 80 years. Now the managers of the imperium impose one on Americans. Any understanding of this new moment must begin with this reality.
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Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.