No “Good”, Part II

 

I mentioned the Ravens-Steelers finale in Part I of this post and the game’s 2 crucial missed kicks as an analog to how badly people were missing the point of what happened in Minnesota last week. Well – like tonight Packers-Bears playoff, decided in no small part by 2 missed field goals – the misses just keep on coming.

There is a particular genre of moral performance that only appears once violence is already in the room: the insistence on having no opinion about what just happened, paired with an immediate, emphatic insistence on how the aftermath must be handled. It sounds like humility. It advertises itself as restraint. But it does the same thing every time in practice: it tilts the field toward whoever just acted most recklessly while binding the hands of anyone tasked with stopping them.

A Levi Lomasky X post is a perfect specimen. He has “no desire” to watch video, no opinion on guilt or innocence, and no confidence that evidence could even help him form one. But he does have strong views on what justice requires: the ICE officer should be stripped of qualified immunity and put on trial, while Kristi Noem should be fired for calling Renee Good a terrorist. That is not neutrality. That is a distribution of moral and legal risk disguised as epistemic modesty.  A Brianna Wu post is, if nothing else, more honest. Calling Good a “wannabe cop killer” while balking at the word “terrorist” is at least an attempt to name the act while policing the label. Lomasky’s move is more corrosive: he grants Good all benefit of doubt and the officer none, while insisting he has no idea what happened. 

This move is always accompanied by a fetishization of process. Qualified immunity becomes a moral shibboleth rather than a legal doctrine. The fact that a federal agent acting within the scope of federal employment is subject to federal, not state, prosecution is waved away. Meanwhile, every governor and mayor who has already labeled the officer a “murderer” is treated as engaging in righteous outrage rather than potentially actionable defamation. Proceduralism here is not about law; it is about which side gets protection.

And then there’s the libertarian variant of the same moral evasion, helpfully compressed into a single tweet by Being Libertarian: “maybe both the ICE officer and Renee Good made poor decisions in a tense situation.” That’s both-sidesism stripped of even pretense. By refusing to decide anything, it masquerades as nuance while doing something far more radical — it erases agency. Everyone becomes a billiard ball knocked around by “tension,” no one actually chose anything, and therefore no one is responsible for anything. Video evidence becomes irrelevant, the sequence of events dissolves, and all that remains is a vague moral fog where outcomes simply “happen.” This isn’t neutrality; it’s abdication. And it functions exactly like progressive both-sidesism: protecting whoever created the danger by treating deliberate action as if it were weather.

And this is where the “no opinion” posture collapses. If you truly believe the facts are unknowable, the only coherent stance is to wait. What both-siders actually do is launder a prior through agnosticism: they begin from the assumption that the activist deserves maximal sympathy and the state actor maximal suspicion, and then build a rhetoric of restraint around it. That’s how neutrality becomes a weapon.

And then there’s Ruby Ridge and Waco — the holy texts of grievance culture: who else claimed to be morally outraged by Ruby Ridge and Waco? Timothy McVeigh. He cited them. He built a narrative of state tyranny around them. He used them to justify killing civilians and calling it collateral damage. That is not a cheap analogy; it is a structural one. When grievance against the state is sacralized, when “process” becomes a talisman that overrides all other moral reasoning, it creates the intellectual oxygen that lets extremism breathe.

We see the same structure today in Gaza discourse. Those who insist on tying the hands of anyone fighting Hamas and then blame every death on the people whose hands they themselves have tied are not neutral. They are not above the conflict. They are morally embedded in it. Their obsessive proceduralism becomes a practical guarantee that the worst actors get to keep acting.

The people who endlessly litigate Waco and Ruby Ridge as if they were the central moral tragedy, while ignoring how those events have been weaponized by violent extremists, play the same role today’s anti-IDF moralizers play for Hamas. They provide the rhetoric. They launder the grievance. They turn murder into a cause.

The woke right has their “narratives” too. That’s why they’re woke.

And this is why the hand-wringing, the both-sidesism, the refusal to call things by their names is not merely annoying — it is dangerous. It doesn’t reduce violence. It redistributes moral responsibility in a way that always, inevitably, favors those willing to use force and punishes those trying to contain it.