Renee Good is Us

Since last January 20, the United States under Trump has issued a procession of decrees and actions that have been anything but normal. Every week, every day, Trump & his gang assaults Americans with violations to rules – to the rule of law, and to rules of decency.

All this crystallized on Wednesday with the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Her tragic killing was unnecessary and unjustified.  There was no conceivable reason for immigration officials to be attacking a citizen in a Minneapolis neighborhood in the first place. What stands out about it, perhaps what has brought it to the forefront of media attention, what has broken our hearts and driven us to despair and rage, is that she was white.

Renee’s death brings home to white America that our whiteness no longer protects us. Black and brown people have been demanding for decades for us to consider them as full-fledged humans when they are arrested, imprisoned, and yes, killed without cause.

Just as profoundly disturbing are the propaganda and absurd lies that the Republicans are spreading with impunity. Now that we’re in full-fledged dictatorship, now that ICE is not even pretending to be anything beside the goons of the regime, the Administration tells us that we haven’t seen what we plainly saw in all the videos. Renee’s car was running over the ICE officer, and in the encounter the ICE guy was injured, he feared for his life, he fired in self-defense.

And when this story is proven false, it doesn’t matter: the ICE officer will suffer no consequences. Vice-President JD Vance has claimed that the ICE shooter has “absolute immunity”.    The other strategy straight from the authoritarian playbook is blaming the victim.  The White House has unleashed a torrent of untruths and innuendo about Renee Good. They’re calling her a “leftist insurrectionist.” Vance has ranted that Good was so brainwashed by leftwing ideology that she was determined to kill a law enforcement officer.  I saw a pro-democracy activist, a lesbian mom, trying to drive away.   

In yet another authoritarian strategy, the feds are preventing Minnesota’s state and local authorities from participating in the so-called investigation of the murder. Since Minnesota has Somalis, whom Trump refers to as “garbage people,” state law enforcement is corrupt and can’t be trusted. This refusal to involve investigation at all levels of law enforcement is unprecedented, and strongly suggests a coverup in the making, just as the Justice Department’s stonewalling on releasing the Epstein files, defying all court orders, is plainly a coverup of Trump’s collusion with or involvement in Epstein’s sex trafficking.

ICE is the new gestapo. ICE has legal immunity, and it trumps local law enforcement.  The Big Ugly Bill signed last summer has enabled massive and speedy hiring for ICE, and the application requirements have been eased, so ICE is getting massively unfit and unqualified recruits. They’ve reduced the training of new ICE officers from five months to a mere 47 days—a specific number of days Trump requested to match his number as president.

ICE is here, in our area. On Wednesday, among other actions in Seattle, they arrested three people in a cemetery. – a cemetery! And ICE vehicles and personnel have been seen in Kitsap. What do we do with this? We do whatever we can. We do what we wished the German people had done when the National Socialists started exerting their power, detaining, bookburning, making Jews wear the star, smashing windows, and then imprisoning and executing. To forestall this fate, we don’t shrug and go about our business as the concentration camps get built, the countries get invaded, the war machine revs up, the alliances get broken, the cronyism and corruption openly operate.

  We don’t retreat into silence. We take to the streets, as many thousands have done since Wednesday in Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, Seattle, here in Kitsap, and all across the nation. We find solidarity in loud, peaceful demonstrating. We watch out for our brown brothers and sisters, we have our whistles at the ready. We wave signs, we march, we dress up in inflatable frog suits. We chant. We talk to our neighbors and urge them to actively resist with us. We call every lawmaker from the local level to the US Congress and tell them what we the people want. We mobilize our economic power and BOYCOTT. We OBSTRUCT the functioning of fascism.  We call for the IMPEACHMENT of Kristi Noem, we call for the IMPEACHMENT of Donald Trump.

We show that we stand with Minneapolis. Justice for Good!

JUSTICE FOR RENEE GOOD!

ICE OUT FOR GOOD!

ICE OUT FOR GOOD!