The Regime's Demand: Believe Them, Not Your Own Eyes

A mother gunned down by ICE in Minnesota. Rioters attacking the capital. The Trump regime doesn't want you to believe what you just saw.

On Wednesday, ICE agents pulled up to Minnesota mother Renee Good’s car and shouted a series of confusing, contradictory demands. When Good attempted to drive away, one of the agents aimed his gun through her side window and shot her multiple times in the head. ICE agents then refused to let medical professionals through to render aid. They blocked an ambulance; paramedics had to get to Good on foot. She died at the scene.

The Trump administration is calling Good a domestic terrorist. The Department of Homeland Security put out what is, in my view, one of the scariest statements I’ve ever seen from a federal authority. “Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism,” the statement reads in part. DHS secretary Kristi Noem offered a totally different lie, claiming that ICE officers got their car stuck in the snow and “they were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”

You can easily find multiple videos of this incident online. Good was not rioting. She did not block ICE officers. She did not attempt to kill ICE officers. The ICE officers were not trying to push a car out of the snow; they were surrounding Good’s vehicle. The whole thing is just invented, and the story keeps changing.

Think what you will about her actions — and ICE supporters generally argue she didn’t follow the ICE agent’s directives, and that as her car rolled forward he believed he had a right to act in self-defense — but the evidence is front of all of our faces. It’s clear that, whatever you believe about the ICE agent’s self-defense claim, Good was not a violent rioter. She did not attempt to run over ICE agents who were simply trying to push their car out of the snow. This government is demanding that you accept their patently false version of events — that you talk yourself out of what you can actually see, and into whatever they say.

This comes just a day after the Trump administration released its rewritten Jan. 6th history. MAGA loyalists jumped on board: “On this day in history in 2021, thousands of peaceful grandmothers and others gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building,” tweeted Republican Rep. Mike Collins, in a truly stunning series of lies (if I break into your house in the middle of the night and threaten to kill you, am I a peaceful mother taking a self-guided albeit unauthorized tour of your bedroom?).

Many of these “peaceful grandmothers” were actually able-bodied adult men and women who scaled walls, busted through doors and windows, hunted for politicians to murder, plotted to lynch Mike Pence, beat police officers within inches of their lives, and were eventually convicted of many serious crimes. Nearly 140 police officers were injured on Jan. 6th. They were beaten with flag poles and hockey sticks, sprayed with bear spray and hit with pieces of broken furniture. Lawmakers, including Republicans, hid in their offices, fearing for their lives. That reality has simply been whited-out of conservative history. The administration’s rewrite accuses former vice president Mike Pence of “cowardice and sabotage” for certifying the election results; it continues to claim, falsely, that the election was stolen.

Trump and his team are rewriting the truth. They’re insisting that you didn’t see what you know you saw. They are have already created a fake history to make themselves the heroes. They are selling you a fake reality right now. And their followers are going along with it.

That Good’s murder happened in the first place was the entirely predictable outcome of having barely-trained masked and heavily armed thugs trawling American streets looking for people to abuse. But now that it has happened (and was caught on camera), the justifications have begun. ICE supporters say Good was accelerating toward an officer who feared for his life. If you watch the video, it’s hard to see a deadly threat. The most generous interpretation in favor of the officer is that he was scared and he overreacted with deadly results — but even that interpretation is pretty damning, because people who are handed guns and authority by the state should be trained to know how to respond to stressful situations. And the law governing most federal law enforcement agents, as far as I can tell, is fairly clear: Federal law enforcement officers cannot shoot at a moving vehicle unless the person in it is threatening them with deadly force using a non-vehicular weapon (i.e., pointing a gun at them), or unless the person is using the vehicle in a way that imminently threatens their life or safety “and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.” Emphasis mine. It’s possible this standard doesn’t apply to ICE, which is at this point little more than a personal presidential militia. But we should ask: Why not? Why aren’t we expecting ICE officers to comport themselves with basic professionalism?

This is one of those moments when I find myself pushed down to the deepest depths of despair. Not just because an innocent woman was killed, but because my country has fallen to such a profound low that a significant minority of its citizens continue to support a man who lies to their faces, and they hate people who politically disagree with them so much that they’ll justify murdering us in the streets and call it a morally righteous.

It’s important to understand why ICE was in Minneapolis specifically, and the answer also comes down to a series of right-wing lies alternately amplified and created by the Trump administration. ICE is of course all over the country. But they have lately focused on Minnesota because the state is home to many Somali immigrants, and Somalis have been in the MAGA crosshairs after allegations of mass fraud. Here’s the truth about the “Somali fraud” allegations: There really was a mass post-Covid fraud in Minnesota related to a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future (run by a white woman), that involved hundreds of millions of dollars being stolen in a scheme involving fake programs for autistic kids. It was a despicable plundering of public resources, and after a big criminal investigation, dozens of people were indicted; convictions have been steadily mounting. Most of the people prosecuted in this fraud scheme are Somali-Americans; the fraud worked because people within a specific community brought in friends and family members, which isn’t particularly unusual in a fraud case (heavily Mormon Utah is America’s fraud capital, seeing more Ponzi schemes than any other state specifically because of this in-group dynamic). What was unusual in Minnesota was the scope and brazenness of the crimes. It was very bad. And justice is being fairly served. The story might have ended there, except conservative johnny-come-latelies jumped on the story and used it as evidence of some inherent Somali criminality. They then started theorizing about other frauds, which culminated in MAGA influencers showing up at daycares with cameras, demanding to be let in to see the children. When they were rightly rebuffed, they accused scores of daycares of being fraudulent. So far, investigators haven’t found any daycares that weren’t operating as expected.

In other words, the original fraud was real, and had already been dealt with by law enforcement. But the great big Somali daycare fraud just… isn’t. Subsequent accusations of fraud worked kinda like the claims that Haitians were eating people’s pets in Ohio: They were mostly just racist, and not based in any reality, but they’re having devastating consequences for people whose only crime is being a member of a currently disfavored ethnic group.

Lack of evidence supporting the fraud allegations hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from reacting. They’ve already cut off childcare funding to Minnesotans until the state proves that their daycares are real. Trump called Somalis “garbage.” And his administration ramped up ICE activity in Minnesota explicitly to hunt down Somalis, who are the current favored target of all manner of MAGA racists.

Now a woman is dead. She is dead because of a MAGA lie. And her death is being used to create more MAGA lies.

I don’t know what to do about people who are happy to be lied to, so long as the lies bolster their sense of righteousness and paint those who disagree with them as mortally dangerous enemies. I don’t know what to do about people who think it’s ok to kill people because their politics differ from yours. I don’t know how to get through to people who believe an armed agent of the state should be free to act with total impunity.

Law enforcement officers do not get to kill you just because you don’t listen to what they say. In most of the world’s democracies, an armed agent of the state killing an unarmed citizen would be an earthshaking scandal. In the US, it’s just Wednesday. What’s different now, though, is that the people in the White House aren’t even pretending they want to find out the truth; they aren’t even pretending that ICE officers are held to high (or any) standards. The president and his lackeys want a loyal personal militia, and they’ve created one in ICE.

It’s increasingly clear that Americans are not being governed; we are being ruled.

Narratives about authoritarianism often suggest that entire populations were browbeaten and intimidated into submission. But that’s not true. It seems to me that, in most societies, there is a critical mass of people who desire authoritarian rule. They want a big strong man to protect them and beat up on their perceived enemies. They don’t want the obligations and hardships that freedom brings — a free and pluralistic society requires owning your own life and decisions; it puts you into contact with people who have different ideas and ways of life; it forces you to think and to sometimes be challenged. If you’re part of the dominant and in-charge group, authoritarianism is an easier route, at least at first. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to be responsible for yourself. You can feel good and valuable by being the kind of person those in power say is good and valuable — you don’t have to work to prove anything. Things might go very badly for you if you are suddenly pushed to the outside (something Indian-American Trump supporters are currently learning the hard way). But for a certain kind of person, affiliation with the powerful — even superficial affiliation, by virtue of race or heritage or religion — can feel pretty meaningful. For a certain kind of (sadistic) person, seeing the powerful crush and abuse others can feel pretty good.

This is where we are. No one is being fooled or forced into accepting authoritarian governance. The people with Don’t Tread On Me flags who have for years stockpiled weapons in anticipation of a rogue federal government infringing on Americans’ rights are quite happy to see the Trump administration’s boot treading on Americans they deem less worthy of basic rights. Millions of Americans voted for this. And while I am heartened that many will see what happened in Minneapolis and feel sickened — that many less-plugged-in Trump voters will see what happened and feel sickened — I am troubled by the reality that millions of my fellow citizens do not want to live in a free and democratic society, but rather desire a totalitarian one that tells them what to do, what to think, and what is real. I don’t know how we salvage a nation of people who want to be lied to.

xx Jill