Renee Good was murdered in cold blood, and there's no plausible argument to the contrary

I guess we have to do this. I really don't want to.

The intentional murder of an American videotaping ICE actions in Minneapolis is, in a word, unforgivable, and in more words it was an act of belligerent thuggish incompetence of the sort that all authoritarianism begins and ends as.

There's simply no plausible defense of it. That doesn't mean the fascists who itch for Americans they don't like to be murdered aren't trying to defend it, but "Homeland Security" apparatchik Kristi Noem and other administration figures had to immediately spiral up a fictional version of events in which a Minneapolis mom was supposedly doing "terrorism" and that is how you know that even they know the actual murder, recorded on at least four different nearby cameras, has no non-lying non-propaganda-laced defense.

It is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes, and we are very much in one.

There's enough video of the encounter to immediately disprove Gestapo Barbie's lies, but the part I want to specifically focus on is the incompetence, from top to bottom, of the involved ICE or Border Patrol officers. (Why don't we know which it was? Because the agents involved continue to hide both their identities and even agencies when conducting public arrests.)

The officers confronting Renee Good in her vehicle at no point acted like actual, trained law enforcement officers would. It's difficult to believe any of them have any f--king training at all, given their buffoonish, f--kwitted assault.

Analysis by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and your own eyes clearly show that the officer was in no danger when he executed Renee Good by firing three times into her moving car. He was not in the car's path. He fired only after he was fully clear of the car.

And at this point I am still too angry to form coherent word-chains so I am going to list off just some of the incompetent thuggery that led up to the murder.

1. Law enforcement officers are trained to never put themselves in the path of a vehicle with a running engine—for obvious reasons.
2. Real law enforcement officers are trained to never shoot at a moving vehicle.
3. Especially a moving vehicle in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
4. Especially a moving vehicle in the middle of a crowd that has gathered in a residential neighborhood.
5. Because only a fucking moron would do that.
   
   Instead, this officer drew his gun and shot once through the windshield, then shot twice more through the open driver side window with no apparent regard for the passenger, the crowd, or whoever might be standing in their own fucking front yard at the time. It's pure luck that nobody else was killed.
   
6. Before the shooting, we see another Absolute Idiot reach into the vehicle—while it was running—in an apparent attempt to open the door from the inside. It takes no great imagination to guess why actual law enforcement officers are trained to not do that: Even if everything goes the way you intend it, flailing around for a hidden door handle while a driver still has the engine running and foot on the brake has a very good chance of ending with you getting dragged along the street on your knees, possibly with a dislocated shoulder to show for your efforts. You idiot. You absolute buffoon. You dime-store pretend-ass armored thug.
7. You can see, in the video, that the officer who fired the shots was previously holding up a damn smartphone to record the encounter as all of this is going on. He circled around the vehicle, holding up that phone, and that is the reason he put himself in front of the car before the shooting. Notably, the driver waited for him to move to the side before driving forward—she clearly did not move her car until Officer Content was out of her path.

None of these "officers" had their guns drawn as they approached or as they shouted (conflicting) instructions. None were keeping their hands free. None were acting like they were in the slightest bit of danger—even though they themselves kept putting themselves in obvious danger from their own incompetent fuck-ups.

As is so often the case, the now-murdered American seems to have taken more steps to safeguard their lives than the officers confronting her did.

We can presume that the federal agents had their body cameras on—unless they intentionally chose to not record their actions—and we know for certain that the shooter was recording events from his own smartphone. The Department of Homeland Security has assuredly now reviewed all of those tapes.

We all know exactly how corrupt this Justice Department is. We know how they operate. If even one of those recordings showed anything that could plausibly be used for the agents' defense, you can bet your ass that Noem and the Department of Justice would already have released them. Instead, Minnesota state investigators report that the Trump administration is now refusing to share evidence with them after originally agreeing to investigate jointly.

We can take that reversal to mean that federal agencies have, between yesterday and this morning, seen evidence that they absolutely do not want state prosecutors to get wind of.

We don't know who did the shooting or why the team acted with such rank incompetence, but Border Patrol head Greg Bovino was personally with the agents so we can presume the deployment was one of the typical harassment operations that Bovino and Noem have been using to generate self-flattering "content." Bovino is a pathological liar who a federal judge recently blasted for lying to the court, and he's known both for that lying and for the violence of his content-farming operations.

Notably, Bovino's core "tactical" team (that is, his bodyguards) has repeatedly proven themselves to be incompetent thugs; today a Minneapolis photographer snapped pictures of one underling shooting one Minneapolis observer in the face with a "less-lethal" round from point blank range, yet another training violation that can produce severe injuries or death.

Because they are thugs.

My own speculation is that Bovino, a man who already ought to be in prison for a half-dozen different reasons, has surrounded himself with like-minded racist goons who similarly enjoy violence. Bovino travels with a so-called "tactical" team, which is a fancy way of saying that his inner circle appears to have next to no street-level training and instead is meant to be deployed in SWAT-level operations against heavily armed opponents or random Americans who offend him.

Nobody involved here may even have any training in how to do law enforcement in a not-rural environment, and if they have they sure aren't showing it, and so fucking up with extreme acts of violence may be all Bovino's circle of stormtrooper-premised thugs is capable of.

Some of those linked pictures are from a high school, by the way. After murdering a Minneapolis mother who had inconvenienced them by filming their efforts to get one of their unmarked cars out of some snow, Bovino sauntered off to a local high school where his team assaulted other Americans.

So now Minneapolis schools are closed for the rest of the week—to protect the city's children from being assaulted, injured, or possibly killed by the same team that killed Renee Good.

There is not much else that can be said about this. Renee Good was quite definitely murdered, and it wasn't even a close call. Bovino, Noem, JD Vance, and other administration figures are in a fairly giddy mood about it, and Republican lawmakers are using the murder to warn Americans that if you oppose them you're going to get murdered too.

Absolute piece of shit, that guy. People like that used to be hounded into resigning in disgrace, but after you've made a coup-attempting felon, rapist, and apparent child predator your moral center there's really nothing lower that you might get "disgraced" by. The guy could be caught with six 10-year olds chained and naked in his basement and I don't think he'd feel "disgraced" by it.

At this point, Gov. Tim Walz has some choices to make. Walz announced that he's given to the National Guard advance warning that they may be called up to protect the state, but it's unclear just what metric Walz will use to make such a deployment. It may be only intended to quell growing protests, if those protests turn violent—many Americans are very, very angry right now and are finding it hard to stomach the escalating post-shooting tauntings that Trump's underlings and goons keep engaging in.

A better move at this point would be to station the National Guard around schools and other key state buildings in order to protect students and others from being assaulted by Bovino's personal squad of thugs. It also might be time to have the National Guard follow ICE and Border Patrol operations in order to record every arrest and public confrontation, rather than leaving it to civilian volunteers to gather that evidence; the problem with that, though, is that the public might (with good reason) see the National Guard as protecting the federal thugs, rather than monitoring them.

I can't tell you. But be aware that not only is "heavily armed thugs with no apparent law enforcement training kidnap local residents based on perceived ethnicity, assault protesters, and kill citizen observers" well down the path of fascist governance, but Republicans are still defending it. They fully intend this to be their version of "the law" going forward, just like Stephen Miller's premise that international "law" should be considered invalid in the face of American power. It's why Trump pardoned the insurrectionists who answered his call to try to erase an American election, and why the White House on Tuesday released a new site celebrating those insurrectionists with a new, fictional version of events that painted them as the heroes of the day.

This is what they want. These figures are coup-supporting traitors who are not and have never been shy in announcing that they want this, not the version of America they grew up in. They want to rule America by force, purge their supposed "enemies," and laugh in the face of anyone who is properly disgusted by that.

I don't know what to tell you. If this wasn't who they were, then they'd say so. They're not saying so.