from the the-abuser’s-lament dept
The murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross has certainly created quite the divide between the reality-based majority of the population who doesn’t want masked unaccountable federal law enforcement goons invading cities they have no business being in and shooting people for saying “dude, I’m not mad at you” and trying to drive away… and the fantasy-land MAGA folks who are bending over backwards to justify the murder.
Late last week the video from Ross’s phone was released (why Ross was filming Good is a whole separate issue, but shows how Homeland Security is much more focused on producing memes, not doing actual law enforcement), which MAGA cultists pretended exonerated Ross. It did no such thing. It made him look way, way worse.
He deliberately placed himself in front of the vehicle. He walked around the car filming Good and her partner. As can be clearly seen in the video, Good turned steering wheel of her car all the way to the right such that the car was not heading towards Ross and could not hit him. And he shot her three times anyway, once through the windshield and twice through the open driver-side window. Even if you could (and you can’t) argue the first should was potentially justified if he thought the car was coming towards him, the fact that he easily stepped aside and then continued firing shows that it was not justified at all.
And, of course, his first words after murdering a woman in broad daylight in the middle of the street was: “fucking bitch.”
So her last words: “Dude, I’m not mad at you.” His first words after murdering her: “fucking bitch.”
And then, of course, there’s what was discussed last week: how the MAGA faithful immediately began lying and claiming she was a “domestic terrorist” with multiple people trying to twist the story to claim she somehow “deserved” this.
One of the leaders of the goons, “border czar” Tom Homan, (who appears to have gotten away with taking $50,000 in a paper bag from federal officials pretending to be business owners seeking favors from Donald Trump) went on Meet the Press on Sunday and talked about how Democrats need to stop calling ICE murderers or they’ll have no choice but to murder again:
The transcript is as ridiculous as it is chilling:
We gotta stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It’s just ridiculous. It’s gonna infuriate people more which means there’s gonna be more incidents like this, because the hateful rhetoric is not only continuing, it’s gonna be double down or triple down.
It’s the classic abuser’s lament: if you didn’t want me to hit you, why were you so mean to me.
First of all, the ones ramping up the “hateful rhetoric” have been the MAGA faithful. They’re the ones spreading baseless conspiracy theories, insisting that Good was a “domestic terrorist” or a “paid agitator.” This is the same thing Homan, Gregory Bongino, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump have been doing for months, encouraging ICE to see the public as enemies to be fought, not a public they are supposed to be protecting.
Second, if federal agents are so fragile that people calling them names means they’re going to murder people, they shouldn’t be federal agents at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to handle firearms, frankly.
This is textbook authoritarian blame-shifting: create the conditions for violence through dehumanizing rhetoric, then blame the victims when violence inevitably occurs. And it’s not just Homan. The entire MAGA ecosystem is working overtime to justify this murder and preemptively excuse the next one.
Case in point: Fox News columnist Dave Marcus, who wrote this weekend that “wine moms” protesting ICE’s occupations, invasions, and law breaking is somehow a criminal conspiracy of “wine moms.”
Say what?
Marcus’s piece is transparently absurd—he’s claiming that citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to criticize federal agents constitute a criminal conspiracy—but he gives away the real game a few paragraphs in. Good and these other “wine moms’” actual “crime” wasn’t obstructing justice. It was mocking ICE agents in a manner that hurt their feelings:
The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many.
It’s difficult to think of something more “obnoxiously smug” than a Fox News columnist insisting that after an ICE agent murdered a woman in broad daylight for protesting ICE’s actions… we should blame protesting women.
We see these self-important White women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee.
The inclusion of “journalists” in that list is also telling in multiple ways. First off, the MAGA world is way more famous for “insulting journalists.” Hell, it’s part of Trump’s daily activities to insult and taunt journalists. I can’t find any example of Marcus complaining about that. But it sounds like if wine moms make fun of him for his journalism, well, that just means they deserve to be shot in the face?
But, more to the point: obnoxious smugness, heckling, and even goading federal officers is textbook First Amendment-protected speech. Criticizing government officials, even obnoxiously, is perhaps the core function of the First Amendment. Marcus seems to have confused “speech that annoys federal agents” with “criminal conspiracy.” And he’s using his own confusion to justify murder.
All of this, of course, is coming straight from the top. Late yesterday, Donald Trump told the press gaggle on his plane that murdering Good was acceptable because “the woman and her friend were highly disrespectful to law enforcement” and that “law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.”
Yes, he is literally justifying murder by his personal police force by claiming that being “highly disrespectful” (i.e., engaging in First Amendment-protected speech) makes the use of deadly force “necessary.”
Also note how Trump himself reveals that all the retconning nonsense by his MAGA faithful that the shooting had nothing to do with how Good spoke to Ross was all pretext. This was always about whether or not you kiss the boot in front of you. If you don’t—if you are “highly disrespectful”—Trump and his cronies think they can shoot you. And if you complain about it, they can shoot more people.
The state sponsored murders of wine moms will continue until morale improves.
You can see how fragile and pathetic these men are. They are so desperate to subjugate and suppress people who disagree with them politically. They seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power. Instead, the vast majority of Americans see them for what they are: pathetic, insecure man-babies in way over their heads.
So, now their only recourse is to ramp up the threats. To say that if you actually call out their criminal actions, such as murder, for what they are, they’ll just be forced to murder more critics and protestors.
They will never take responsibility for their own actions. They will never reflect on their own culpability. Because to reflect would require admitting what everyone already knows: they have no argument. They have no legal justification. They have no constitutional authority for what they’re doing.
All they have is the authoritarian’s playbook: dehumanize your critics, commit violence, blame the victims, and threaten more violence if the criticism doesn’t stop. It’s the logic of every tinpot dictator in history, now being deployed by federal law enforcement on American streets.
There is no question that they’ll murder again. Homan has already promised they will. And it’s why we need to keep exercising our First Amendment rights to speak out against this authoritarian nonsense, rather than capitulating and letting them win.
Filed Under: abuse, dave marcus, dhs, donald trump, ice, murder, renee nicole good, tom homan
