Renee Good’s death has already become narrative, always more dangerous than facts. Either she is to be remembered as an innocent victim of state violence, or as a righteous resistor crushed by authoritarian power. Both versions are designed to do the same thing: remove agency from what actually happened. Once agency disappears, accountability disappears with it, and all that remains is grievance. That is how a tragedy becomes a recruitment tool.
What is being debated here is not merely whether an ICE officer was legally justified in firing his weapon. That question will be litigated, and the evidence will be weighed by people with subpoena power and expertise. What is being decided in real time, on social media and in activist circles, is something else entirely: whether Renee Good’s actions should be turned into a model. That decision, not the bullet, will determine whether this story ends here or multiplies. Movements do not need weapons when they have examples.
The activist organizations that rallied around this incident have not hidden what they believe they are doing. One widely circulated ICE Watch graphic calls every attempted “de-arrest” a “micro-intifada,” something meant to “spread and inspire others.” That language is not poetic. An intifada is, by definition, a distributed campaign of confrontation, escalation, and symbolic sacrifice designed to overwhelm enforcement through sheer friction. When every arrest becomes a stage, the goal is no longer justice — it is collision.
That framework explains why these confrontations are engineered to be visible, emotional, and risky. Protesters are trained to block vehicles, surround officers, and physically obstruct arrests while cameras roll. They are told that if they are arrested, injured, or even killed, the spectacle itself advances the cause. The individual is no longer a citizen with rights and duties; they become a prop in a larger moral theater. Once you understand that, Renee Good’s death looks less like a freak accident and more like a foreseeable outcome of a strategy.
People only need to believe that their actions are righteous, that the rules no longer apply, and that any consequences will be morally redeemed. That is how ordinary people end up standing in front of armed officers in moving vehicles.
Ideology does the rest.
Stripped of slogans, what Good did was simple and dangerous. She used her car to block federal agents executing warrants, refused lawful commands to exit the vehicle, and then accelerated while an officer was in front of her. Whether she intended to injure him is irrelevant; she created a situation in which lethal force became a reasonable response. This is not conjecture — it is the basic law of self-defense that governs every armed profession. When you drive a two-ton vehicle at a person, you are not engaging in protest; you are creating a deadly threat.
That makes her responsible for the conditions that killed her.
There is a difference between being killed and being martyred. A martyr is someone whose death is morally separable from their actions, whose innocence makes their killing an injustice in itself. Someone who engineers a lethal confrontation forfeits that status, even if their death is heartbreaking. Tragedy does not erase agency.
The insistence on turning Renee Good into a symbol is therefore not about compassion. It is about protecting a script. In that script, every ICE officer is a fascist, every obstruction is heroic, and every death is proof of moral righteousness. Once that story takes hold, the next person who blocks a raid or floors a gas pedal is not acting alone — they are acting inside a myth that promises meaning. That is how movements turn grief into fuel.
We have seen this mechanism before, and not only on the streets. When Iranians rise up against their regime, Western progressive elites like Ben Rhodes suddenly discover the dangers of “chaos” and urge protesters to stand down and negotiate with their oppressors. When activists confront ICE, those same moral managers reverse themselves and celebrate escalation. The principle is not nonviolence; it is control. Resistance is praised when it harms the right enemies and discouraged when it threatens the wrong allies.
This is why the attempt to frame the ICE confrontation as some kind of balanced struggle between two extremist poles is so dishonest. ICE was not there to make a statement or perform a ritual. It was there to execute warrants against criminals, including people accused of child exploitation and large-scale fraud. The activists were there to stop it, by force if necessary, and to film the result. One side was enforcing law; the other was trying to make law unenforceable.
The appeal to “common sense” — no communists, no fascists — collapses under that reality. You do not get moral credit for paralyzing enforcement in the name of moderation. That move has a name in Jewish history: the Rav Zechariah ben Avkulas problem, the paralysis that destroyed Jerusalem by refusing to confront zealotry when it mattered. When law collapses because no one is willing to defend it, the extremists win by default.
None of this requires celebrating anyone’s death, and most people defending the ICE officer are not doing so. But neither does it require pretending that every fatality is morally interchangeable. We do not hold vigils for drunk drivers who wrap themselves around trees or for armed robbers shot in the act. We call those deaths tragic and preventable, but we do not build movements on them. To do so would be to invite repetition.
Good was not executed for her beliefs; she died because she deliberately created a lethal situation. That is not an injustice that can be laid at the feet of the officer who fired or the law he was enforcing. It is a case study in what happens when ideology convinces people that danger is virtue.
The only true innocent in this story is the six-year-old child she left behind. That child did not choose the politics, the confrontation, or the radicalization that led a parent into traffic and gunfire. If there is pity owed here, it belongs to that child, who will grow up without a mother because adults chose spectacle over safety. Everything else is theater.
Turning Renee Good into a martyr does not honor her memory. It recruits her. It tells the next activist that confrontation is holy, that law is illegitimate, and that death is a form of victory.
That is why Renee Good was ultimately No Good.
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