There are moments when the facts are still being assembled, the investigations are ongoing, and restraint is warranted.
And then there are moments when the lie is immediate, reflexive, and revealing.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent belongs to the latter.
Within hours of the footage emerging, before the public had time to absorb what it was seeing, the machinery of the American state snapped into gear. President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not express caution. They did not promise transparency. They did not acknowledge uncertainty.
They declared self-defence.
They invoked terrorism.
They told the public what it was supposed to believe – even as the video told a very different story.
That instinctive rush to control the narrative is not incidental. It is the story.
When a civilian is killed by an agent of the state, the question is not merely what happened, but what follows. And what followed here was depressingly familiar: the victim was transformed from a human being into a threat, from a person into a category, from a woman into a justification.
This is how power protects itself.
Words like “terrorist” are not descriptive in this context; they are strategic. They short-circuit empathy. They tell the public that whatever you think you saw, you did not see an unjust killing – you saw danger neutralised. They convert a moral question into a security talking point.
And once that framing is established, everything else becomes easier. Accountability can be delayed. Doubt can be cast on witnesses. Grief can be dismissed as political theatre. The agent becomes the presumed victim; the dead woman becomes a footnote.
What makes this case especially grotesque is how little time elapsed between the shooting and the spin. There was no pause for facts, no space for humility. The lie – or at best the reckless distortion – arrived fully formed, as if pre-written.
That alone should disturb anyone who still believes the state tells the truth when it kills.
This is not about immigration policy in the abstract. Reasonable people can disagree fiercely about borders, visas, enforcement, and law. It is about something more fundamental: whether the government can be trusted to tell the truth when its agents take a life.
History suggests the answer is no – not without pressure.
From police shootings to military “mistakes,” from body cameras that mysteriously fail to narratives that collapse under scrutiny, the pattern repeats: deny first, reframe second, admit narrowly – if at all – much later, when attention has moved on.
Trump and Noem did not invent this reflex. But they have perfected its brazenness.
Under this administration, truth is not something to be discovered; it is something to be imposed. Video is inconvenient. Eyewitnesses are unreliable. Only the official statement matters – until it doesn’t, and then it quietly changes.
And in the meantime, a family is left to grieve while being told their loved one deserved it.
That is the cruelty at the heart of this episode.
The real obscenity is not just that a woman was shot and killed by an ICE agent. It is that the state responded not with sorrow or seriousness, but with propaganda. It is that those at the very top of government chose narrative defence over human dignity.
If the footage had supported their claims, they would not need to shout them so loudly.
Democracies depend on a simple moral bargain: the state is granted the monopoly on legitimate force, and in return it owes the public honesty, restraint, and accountability. When that bargain is broken – when lies are used to excuse lethal power – something fundamental rots.
Renee Nicole Good should not have to be canonised to deserve the truth. She does not need to be perfect. She does not need to fit a script. She was a person, and she is dead.
And the least a government can do, when it kills, is stop lying about why.
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And so far as l can see no mention that she was a mother of one from those in authority? Yet every misanthrope on the extreme right, every person to be used as an prop is always listed as “father of…. Mother of…..” as though parenthood makes their lives worth more.
It is far too humanising for a dead woman they want to use as an excuse.
‘And once that framing is established, everything else becomes easier. Accountability can be delayed. Doubt can be cast on witnesses. Grief can be dismissed as political theatre. The agent becomes the presumed victim; the dead woman becomes a footnote.’
So here it is once more:
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.” (George Orwell, 1984).
Orwell was not so much prescient back in the day as staring clear-eyed into the power of propaganda to transmute and transcend perceived reality, to manipulate, to exploit, convince, to hypnotise…
But he rendered in his own pared-back language its brazen paradoxes, its slippery contradictions, its blatant lies, its feathered violence and insidious effectiveness.
In his essay “Why I Write” (1946) he states: “Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”
Art must be a lot of things, but it does not have to be pretty.
Dread Scott (real name Scott W. Tyler), a US visual artist, reflects on his protest portfolio, its Orwellian spirit going back almost forty years:
‘IN 2025, fascism is rapidly being consolidated in America. Along with gutting the rule of law, the military occupation of cities, unbridled violence and cruelty, the support of Palestinian genocide, overt racism, the suppression of dissent, and the shameless substitution of propaganda for truth, this US fascism relies on nationalism (including the division of society into those who belong as Americans and those who do not) and unquestioning patriotism.’
‘I started making work that directly addressed political issues and American patriotism as a young art student in 1987. The US had recently invaded Grenada and had supported military intervention in El Salvador. Greed and selfishness were considered virtues. America was waging a war on drugs, which was really a war on poor Black and brown communities that ended up warehousing a generation of young people in prison. Through it all, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush packaged their policies in the American flag. I was radicalized by Reagan’s America.’
‘“American Newspeak . . . Please Feel Free,” 1988, was a series of installations that featured photomontages and encouraged the audience to write their responses in books that were part of the artwork. Some of the montages included phrases from George Orwell’s 1984, such as WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Throughout, I deployed the American flag as a recurring image to tie the oppression that was the subject of the work to the soul of the country. War, police brutality, racism, the targeting of immigrants, and the use of surveillance and propaganda to support this oppression were not aberrations; they were intrinsic to America. In addition to depicting oppression, this series highlights people fighting back—via images of Palestinians in the First Intifada, people in the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, South Koreans burning US flags, and uprisings in South Africa, as well as in quotations from Malcolm X, the Clash, and Public Enemy.’
https://www.artforum.com/features/dread-scott-artist-portfolio-1234738071/ (paywalled)
Due to his and others’ persistence and determination, the Supreme Court, in United States v. Eichman (1990), eventually ruled in favour of Scott and his fellow protesters, declaring federal laws regulating flag desecration unconstitutional – a great and timely achievement considering the unlikelihood of such a ruling under current Trump appointees to the Supreme Court. (Wiki).
Now in his sixties, Dread concludes:
‘If I have learned anything throughout my career, it is that art matters and courage is contagious.’
And so I stand not only with Greenland but with Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, dumped from the Adelaide Writers’ Week line-up by the Adelaide Festival Board.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-08/randa-abdel-fattah-adelaide-writers-week-axed-festival-board/106210464
Dear Michael, thank you for writing this powerful universal piece. It is murder most foul. Like some of our Deaths in Custody.
Our own government expects us to unsee/forget/ignore/not believe our eyes/forgive a genocide. We are subjected to comments like “Israel has the right to defend itself.” They are intent on making us believe the perpetrator is the victim.
Renee Nicole Good was a US citizen who believed in the rights of the individual and was prepared to stand up for her beliefs and tragically she was killed for those beliefs.
I wonder will she receive the memorial send off that was afforded to right wing rabble rouser Charlie Kirk; a rhetorical question!
PS: Kristi Noem looks like an extra from Yellowstone
I never thought it would come to this, that I would pen the words, ‘poor America, I feel sad for you’… given my generally low opinion of much of what occurs in that country; but the callous and inhumane blaming of Renee Good in terms of her being responsible for her own murder, lies, lies and more lies from the thugs and excusers at the helm of federal politics, along with the likelihood of zero consequences for the murdering ICE agent, along with the implicit message that it’s okay as a government agent to go out and shoot the citizens of that country and bear no costs for such actions… the mounting burden on people who have no choice but to try to live their lives in the face of this madness, the brutality, the government-endorsed violence, the fear and anxiety that is no doubt spreading like the plague across that country while those in power gloat at the mayhem they’ve so successfully seeded. Poor America, that it’s come to this.
Basically Kanga, the US has declared war on its own citizens.
That’s not sustainable.
Somethings gotta give.
”The killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent” conveniently does not tell the whole story. Renee was the mother of three kids who had just dropped off her youngest at school and was driving carefully in the snow to avoid the ICE agents obstructing the roadway.
I have viewed the reels on the Internet and believe that there was no attempt to injure any ICE agent because the wheels of the vehicle were turning away from the masked ICE shooter who intentionally shot and recklessly killed Renee. This was deliberate first degree murder!!!
Funny how this Noem person conducts herself like a Hollywood cowgirl. Was she previously one of TACO’s paramours to be gifted such an important position in government?? Certainly any responsibility, common sense and decency appear to be absent in this event.
… wilfully and viciously, ran over the ICE officer …
Who somehow managed, through this “wilful and vicious” act, to remain on his feet and fire his gun at least three times.
Good was trying to comply with orders to leave the scene. She was in the process of turning her car, and had already waved at least three other vehicles past her. The shooter circled her vehicle on the blind side – I have doubts she was even aware of him because she was interacting with the two other officers who approached her car and were apparently trying to drag her out. She had reversed a bit to get more room and had turned the vehicle as far as possible away from the positions of the officers.
It was murder, pure and simple. Compounded by the refusal of the ICE agents to permit a civilian doctor to attend her, and then further refusal to shift their vehicles to permit the ambulance to reach her. The excuses and lies and justifications are sickening.
You should’ve waited and been more cautious with your words.
https://standingbeforegodblog.wordpress.com/2026/01/09/i-saw-the-video-the-insanity-of-leftist-mod-mentality-in-the-case-of-renee-good/
I don’t think so.
Well batted Michael.
Thanks Michael for the article recognizing the explicit truth.
I’m with you, Herbert, amongst the eternal spray of govt political BS, it’s the artists that best present us with reality.
I’m reminded of Jimi Hendrix brilliant 1969 ‘Woodstock’ rendition of The Star Spangled Banner that sent shockwaves of controversy through the festival and the rest of the country for years to come.
Despite that the brutality of political and corporate America has persisted, and with Trump has blown the US apart, and now strikes fear and brings merciless danger into the world.