Renee Good's last words

"I'm not mad at you," the 37-year-old mom told the ICE agent who murdered her, per new cell phone footage released Friday. Then he shot her in the face three times and called her a "fuckin' bitch."

A screenshot from cell phone footage released Friday by Alpha News.

The two days since an ICE agent executed a 37-year-old American citizen and mother named Renee Good, point blank, for no apparent reason in Minneapolis after she dropped her 6-year-old child off at school have been some of the most horrifying I’ve ever experienced on the internet. Anyone who saw video footage of the incident from literally any angle—aside from the sped-up or otherwise AI-altered videos circulating via disinformation agents on places like X—would come to the same conclusion about what took place here:

• Good, along with her wife and dog, had stopped at a neighborhood ICE raid to support their neighbors

• ICE agents barked conflicting orders at Good, both to leave the scene and to get out of her car

• Good chose to leave, turning her wheels away from the ICE agent and accelerating at about 2 mph away from the scene (ICE are not police officers; they only have the power to stop, detain and arrest people they suspect of being in the US illegally)

• The agent reached over the hood of her car and shot her once in the face through the front windshield, then twice more in face through the driver’s side window as she tried to get away

An unarmed woman breaking no laws and harming no one was brutally murdered by the state. It shouldn’t matter that she was a loving mother and wife, a poet, and had only a glove box full of stuffed animals and a dog when she was shot to death in her car, though those things are all true: She was a real, human, empathetic woman who died trying to stand up for her immigrant neighbors against government tyranny and torture.

Still, it’s hard to overlook the optics here. ICE has shot at least eight other people since September whose murders hardly registered with most Americans, but now the Trump administration has executed in broad daylight a white, Christian, American woman who was literally named “Good.” I thought, perhaps naively, that this woman’s murder by the state would be one that we could all resoundingly protest, both the left and right, and one that might finally wake people up to the violent authoritarianism of ICE and Trump administration. And to some extent, that is happening: Support for abolishing ICE just hit an all-time high in a poll taken the day of Good’s shooting, and the mainstream media (including the Bezos-owned Washington Post) pretty much accused ICE of cold-blooded murder across the board along with some elected Democrats who managed to locate their spines.

But the administration decided to lie about the incident and blame Good for her own murder, which in turn emboldened all the right-wing internet freaks to really yank back the curtain on the misogyny underpinning their movement. It started with Fox News personalities like Jesse Watters zeroing in on the fact that Good is divorced and a lesbian, which makes her the kind of woman in their eyes who had it coming. (Nevermind that Watters also has children from a previous marriage. He left his wife for a 24-year-old colleague whom he wooed by deflating her tires after work so she’d be forced to accept a ride home from him.)

And then alt-right men with tens of thousands of followers on X started just openly suggesting that they thought Good deserved to die for being the kind of woman they find annoying, or the kind who wouldn’t sleep with them or otherwise socially rejected them. One user prompted Grok to generate an image of Good’s freshly murdered corpse in a bikini, which Grok did.

The narrative slowly shifted from, “This is a tragedy but she should’ve obeyed the officers,” to “Good was a lesbian commie activist who should’ve kept her mouth shut and been at home with her kids.”

And while some in the administration were still trying to pretend that the officer who murdered Good did so in self-defense, that he genuinely feared for his life as she supposedly tried to “ram him” with her vehicle, a right-wing news site released cell phone video footage today that puts that entire narrative to rest and exposes Good’s killer as just another guy who hates women. Here’s the video, which is difficult to watch:

You can clearly see her being “Minnesota nice” to the man who shoots her and even smiling at him, with her dog in the back seat, seconds before he kills her. “That’s fine,” she says in her final words to the ICE agent, using a mom’s high pitch. “I’m not mad at you.”

Good’s wife, filming with a cell phone, taunts him a bit from a distance about the fact that ICE changes their license plates every morning, which must have pissed him off. Then he shoots Good in the face three times as she tries to drive away from him, right in front of her wife, and says, “Fuckin’ bitch.”

I find myself thinking about a piece I read back in 2012 about the Republican war on contraception, called “Big Babies”:

All Big Babies know in their hearts that their own confusion and impotence are someone else’s fault. Usually someone who can be feminized — government employees, teachers, African Americans — but often someone genuinely, biologically female. The Nanny is government reimagined in one way, as a frustrating mother (mother who won’t give baby the breast when baby demands, mother who has a life or will of her own, mother who works outside the home — in short, any mother who isn’t baby’s exclusive possession). But the ultimate target for Big Baby’s rage is the Adult Woman.

There is no possible scenario in which that armed ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, feared for his life while interacting with an unarmed, 37-year-old mom in a van with her dog. He hated that woman—she and her wife were “fuckin’ bitches,” just like all the other women he’s known in his life who’ve rejected him and made him feel small. He murdered her because he wanted to and because he could, despite being a tiny, pathetic little man with a gun.