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I am cold.

I should be hot with rage. And I am hot with rage.

But I am shivering with cold, and all the covers I’ve piled on top of me make no difference. Nor our new heat pump, warming the room I’m in.

This is an inside cold, the kind of cold I’ve seen in the aged, saw in my mother in the months before she died. The kind of cold I imagine one feels the instant before death, the kind of cold I keep imagining Renee Nicole Good felt as the masked ICE agent’s gun came out, just before his bullet tore through her face. Maybe even as it was tearing through her face, just before it ended her life. 

I am cold now, with a cold rage, a cold fear, a cold sickness. I am afflicted with that weakness of Western civilization known — according to Elon Musk — as empathy. I am cold as a snowflake, cold as ice.

My biggest fear right now is that I will warm up, and that in warming up I will forget, and in forgetting I will move on, turn to my affairs, rejoin the host of Good Americans, staying safe with my head down and hoping someone else will take this war on their shoulders, find a way to repel these invaders and occupiers and restore the America that was struggling its way toward the light.

My biggest fear right now is that I will warm up, and that in warming up I will forget, and in forgetting I will move on, turn to my affairs, rejoin the host of Good Americans, staying safe with my head down and hoping someone else will take this war on their shoulders, find a way to repel these invaders and occupiers and restore the America that was struggling its way toward the light.

I don’t mean forget entirely — I doubt I will ever forget entirely. I mean lose the edge, lose the hard edge of ice, see my rage gradually melt into a useless puddle of sadness and grief.

There will be time for grief. Now is time for action. For me, a writer, action begins with words. These words — describing a horror in a way that moves you to action, fills you with a determination born of cold rage, frozen fury.

Death comes, of course, for all of us. I am reminded of a line from one of my favorite films, Breaker Morant: “Every life ends in a terrible execution, George.” 

Most of us will die naturally, nonviolently. Some will die violently — in war, by accident, natural disaster, domestic murder, random killing, in the line of duty, while committing a crime, or perhaps just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We’ve seen plenty of ugly in our lifetimes — from the firehoses of Bull Connor and the gnashing teeth of his dogs, to the heavy knee of Derek Chauvin on George Floyd’s neck, to the gratuitous violence of Trump’s masked ICE and CBP thugs — but this one feels different. 

Nobody, I submit, has been snuffed out — as Renee Nicole Good was, having spoken as her last recorded words “Dude, I’m not mad at you” — and immediately smeared by their own government as a “domestic terrorist”; falsely accused by their own president of a crime they could not possibly have committed — not by any conceivable interpretation of the visual evidence. 

At least not in America, land of the free, where Renee Good’s killing was promptly exploited by the true terrorists, the Trump regime, as a warning to everyone else of the mortal risk of not instantly bowing to its power.

We’ve seen plenty of ugly in our lifetimes — from the firehoses of Bull Connor and the gnashing teeth of his dogs, to the heavy knee of Derek Chauvin on George Floyd’s neck, to the gratuitous violence of Trump’s masked ICE and CBP thugs — but this one feels different. 

Perhaps, in part, it’s the video, the suddenness of death, the splash. 

Perhaps it’s because this killing seems to usher in a time where armed goons feel free to shoot someone if they simply don’t like what they conclude that person believes or stands for. 

And perhaps, in part, it feels different to me because Renee Good was a woman, a writer, a mother, with a dog and toys in her car. We carry our preferences and prejudices and sympathies, not always lightly, and that needs to be acknowledged.

Some commentators have identified Renee Good’s whiteness as a distinguishing feature. The murder of George Floyd stirred long-smoldering outrage over police brutality and systemic racism, and led, understandably, to a convulsive response. The murder of Renee Good reeks of the even more pervasive stench of a budding dictatorship, a coordinated assault on rights and liberties long taken for granted by the privileged majority.

Renee Good’s killing has much in common with the tragic fate of others. It is hard to put a finger precisely on the difference — perhaps in time I will come to better understand why this one feels different.

Such incidents become visceral and enraging in proportion to the degree to which we identify with the victim. So it was with MAGA and Ashli Babbitt — with the crucial difference that she was part of a violent mob attacking the Capitol and she was actively attempting to break through a door behind which the police officer who shot her (once) was defending hunted and endangered members of Congress.

And so it is with Renee Good. I am hardly the first to say that if Renee Good is a “domestic terrorist” then I am a domestic terrorist. And all of us who see Donald Trump as the mad dictator that he is are domestic terrorists. 

Nor am I the first to say that this murder was inevitable and, in a very chilling sense, strategic. That reality, if there was any doubt, was made clear by the way Team Trump and MAGA instantly swung into action in its immediate aftermath.

Behold the speed and shamelessness with which DHS Secretary Kristi Noem et al. aggressively politicized the incident with lies so brazen as to be a parody of lying. Imagine if, as in the other shooting by Border Patrol agents in Portland, the videos didn’t exist and hadn’t come immediately to light. And even with the videos, that despicably false narrative — the opposite of truth on nearly every point — seems to have gaslighted millions of MAGAs. 

Frankly, as gut-wrenching as I found it to watch the videos, I felt just as sick, if not more so, listening to Noem premeditatedly bullshit her way through this morning’s interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union.

It took Tucker Carlson, of all people, to suggest that something very sick was going on, from Trump on down through the ranks. Noting first that he likely didn’t share Renee Good’s views on immigration, Carlson added: “But that shouldn’t matter. Her death is a tragedy, regardless of her partisan affiliations, ideological beliefs, or who pulled the trigger. A woman got shot in the face.”

Carlson had it almost right. I say “almost” because there is every reason to “politicize” the killing of Renee Good based on the revolting facts of that sickening moment (a woman got shot in the face, through her face, three times — twice after no argument could possibly be made that she posed any conceivable threat — and instantly killed, liquidated, and then called a “fucking bitch” for good measure) and the context in which it all happened.

There is every reason to ask just what the hell ICE was doing in Minneapolis (fighting fraud in body armor?) and on that street. 

To ask why they’re (still) all wearing masks — which just scare the shit out of innocent people and can make them make what an ICE agent, two days after Good was killed, told another Minneapolis motorist would be a “bad decision.” Or, as Clint Eastwood once put it, “Do [you] feel lucky?” 

To ask what the overall plan is behind pumping $75 billion into this Gestapo-adjacent paramilitary if it is not to provoke more resistance and escalate conflict to the point of full martial law and the end of democracy.

We win, democracy wins, sanity wins only if we find the narrow way between — the kinds of action, the kinds of resistance that don’t play straight into their hands. By now we should know better than to expect this to be easy, or fondly hope that some deus ex machina will do it for us.

And hence the paradox: The Trumps, Noems, Vances, Millers — they want us enraged, they need us enraged. They need our hot rage to boil over into violence, so they can turn the game from popularity to power, from democracy to deadly force. They’re fishing for a pretext to terrify us, cow us, subjugate us indefinitely.

Or if not enraged, they want us numb, hopeless — they want their depravity, their cruelty, their terrorism normalized, accepted. Yawn, shrug — as the water temperature rises to 212 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Rioting, forgetting: Either way, they win. 

We win, democracy wins, sanity wins only if we find the narrow way between — the kinds of action, the kinds of resistance that don’t play straight into their hands. By now we should know better than to expect this to be easy, or fondly hope that some deus ex machina will do it for us.

I have written at length about what I’ve called the “Dictator’s Doom Loop,” the dynamic of seemingly inexorable escalation of conflict launched by one driven by an insatiable lust for power. America is on that path and the murder of Renee Good (among other killings, abuses, and deliberate provocations) is a significant step along the way.

There is a great danger that it too — like so much of the evil and destruction Trump and his entourage have perpetrated — will become normalized, drowned in the shit in which the zone continues to be strategically flooded. Pushed off the page, forgotten, as we move on to the next depravity, the next threat — Greenland, Iran, Mexico, the next targeted city, the latest ICE atrocity.

It’s on us to make sure that doesn’t happen. 

https://saveamericamovement.substack.com/p/recording-steve-schmidt-and-ken-harbaugh

The good, angry people of the Twin Cities are off to a good start. They’re not rioting; rather, they are assembling peacefully in the cold in massive numbers. If we listen, we can hear their voices — and the echoes all across the country.

All I can do is add my own voice in my own way and hope that you add yours in your way. If there is any warmth to be had, it is in the knowledge and the company of each other.