Courting death to own the Nazis

Three days ago, a 37 year-old mother of three named Renée Good was killed by Jonathan Ross, a U.S. Immigrations and Custom Enforcement agent, after she accelerated towards him with her car. In this screen grab, Good speaks to Ross seconds before he shoots her in the head:

Renée and her lesbian partner, Becca Good, were activists in the “ICE Watch” protest movement. Among other things, ICE watchers obstruct ICE officers and film their activities for social media clout. Alas, it seems that the unscathed Becca was the primary enthusiast and that her dead partner was merely along for the ride. In this screen grab, Becca taunts Ross …

… seconds before urging Renée to “drive, baby drive” when agents order Renée to get out of her car – a command to flee that precipitated Renée’s death.

At the time of the shooting, both Goods were taking part in one of the most popular and widely advertised ICE watcher activities, namely blocking ICE vehicles on public roadways. This is a trend all across the United States right now. Hundreds if not thousands of freaked out suburbanites, by the looks of it mostly plump middle-aged women, now spend their afternoons stalking ICE convoys in their cars and filming the resulting encounters on their mobile phones. They believe that doing this is necessary to stop National Socialism. Some of them literally claim this, I’m not making it up.

The fruit of this strange recreation is naturally a rash of videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. You’ve probably seen many of these yourself, but if you haven’t, it’s worth watching just one:

The most instructive moment in this clip (again, one of dozens) comes right at the beginning, when our heroine tells the ICE agents whose car she is blocking that “We can play” because “my car’s bigger than yours.” This random woman who probably has kids in school and a mortgage and a miserable ex-husband on the hook for god knows how much in child support thus openly contemplates weaponising her vehicle against multiple armed law enforcement officers. That level of middle-class political radicalisation is pretty amazing if you ask me.

My unstudied impression, is that the years since the Summer of Floyd protests in 2020 have seen the normalisation of traffic protest on the middle-class left. I’ve written extensively about the climate activists of Letzte Generation, a cultic ensemble of university-age girls whose signature tactic was gluing themselves to the street. In the United States right now, you have the ICE Watchers, whose ranks are filled with legions of bored soccermoms eager to defend illegal migrants and stop hate with their sport utility vehicles.

The road is a curious place for the permanent protest. It’s a familiar and quotidian setting, and so everyone underestimates its possibilities. The Letzte Generation protestors time and again delayed emergency responders and caused traffic accidents, and when I wrote about their stupidity some of my own commenters complained that I was being hyperbolic. Many people just have a hard time understanding that the roads they use every day to go to work and the store can be quite perilous, and this allows the activists to play a double game: They’re just innocent concerned citizens trying to save the climate or protect poor oppressed brown people, and anybody who uses force against their incredible provocations is a violent deranged right-wing fascist thug.

Objectively speaking, these ICE-watching women engage federal law enforcement officers in repeated rounds of chicken. Their aim is to edge beyond being a mere nuisance and cause meaningful disruptions, while hoping always to stop short of becoming a serious, actionable threat. This is a very hard balance to maintain because of course threats are perceived subjectively. Where exactly the line falls will vary from officer to officer and from situation to situation, according to a multitude of imponderables. Anyone who plays like this is trying to get shot, whether she realises it or not.

What makes this balance even harder to maintain, is the fact that none of the politically hysterical imbeciles involved shows any evidence of understanding what it is she’s doing. Most of these women give the strong impression of being really naive and stupid, and like all lefty activists in the age of social media, they have only the registers of shallow mockery and victimised outrage. You can see this in the Good shooting video; before the bullets fly it’s all fun and games. As the officer films Renée’s car, presumably for invesetigative purposes, she says “That’s fine dude” and in feigned innocence adds “I’m not mad,” while her partner Becca tells him to “go get yourself some lunch.” After the shooting, the activists discover their victim register and begin their outraged screaming about how the ICE agents are “criminals” who “did a murder.” It’s nothing but clownery from start to finish.

While the ICE Watchers appear to be clueless, they’re pursuing strategies devised by cleverer people. Dangerous and highly illegal protests like these invariably proceed from a shadowy world of diffuse organisations that float like pond scum atop the deeper waters of the left-leaning NGO milieu. The funding relationships are opaque, it’s hard to draw clear connections, but the specific leftist politics that are incubated within the NGO complex and party apron organisations again and again find their way to the street by a range of decentralised mediating activist groups. The goal here is pretty clearly to enlist dumb women to obstruct the police in dangerous ways, with the hope of provoking a violent response that party organisations can exploit for further activism and propaganda.

People on the internet have wasted a lot of energy on armchair forensic analysis of the Renée Good shooting. The truth is that the precise angle of the tires and exact positioning of the ICE agent’s body with respect to the left headlight of the Honda Pilot don’t matter very much. A shooting like this was inevitable given the protest tactics at hand, and more shootings will follow. Each one will be decried by the activist left, and should a protestor ever kill an ICE agent instead, the protesters won’t miss a beat in celebrating his death.