DW, Leni and Spike: They Got Shame

 In August 1990, Spike Lee penned a defensive op-ed in The New York Times titled "I Am Not an Anti-Semite," responding to accusations that his film Mo' Better Blues peddled antisemitic stereotypes through its portrayal of two Jewish club owners, Moe and Josh Flatbush, as greedy exploiters of Black jazz musicians. Lee insisted he was no bigot, just an artist crafting "honest portraits". He decried a "double standard" in Hollywood, where Black stereotypes abound without uproar, yet his brief depiction of Jews drew fire. He invoked whataboutism, comparing 10 minutes of screen time to 100 years of racist cinema, and accused detractors of hypocrisy for ignoring D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation—a film that glorified the KKK and incited lynchings—while scrutinizing him under a microscope. Ironically, Griffith and Leni Riefenstahl made similar pleas: Griffith denied racism, claiming Birth of a Nation was mere historical art; Riefenstahl swore she wasn't a Nazi propagandist, insisting Triumph of the Will was aesthetic documentary. All three hid behind "honesty" while mainstreaming hate.  Mo’ Better Bigots.

Thirty-six years on, in 2026, Lee no longer seems bothered by the "anti-Semite" label—he wears it like a badge, much like his hero Louis Farrakhan. At the 2026 NBA All-Star Game, Lee strutted courtside in a keffiyeh-patterned hoodie and bag strap with Palestinian flag colors, including the upside-down red triangle—a symbol popularized in Hamas propaganda to mark Israeli targets for destruction. Timed against Deni Avdija's historic debut as the first Israeli All-Star, it wasn't subtle solidarity—it was a targeted provocation. Lee has doubled down on pro-Palestine messaging since Israel's war on Hamas began in 2023, sharing Palestinian flags on Instagram and railing against accusations: "I just find it insane that if you speak about what's happening in Gaza…you’re antisemitic." This echoes Farrakhan's playbook—framing anti-Israel fervor as anti-racism while dismissing antisemitism charges as smears. Lee's history with Farrakhan vibes (like in Malcolm X, which nods to Nation of Islam themes) and his refusal to backpedal suggest he'd embrace the label now, not deny it as in 1990.

So the historical parallels sharpen: Griffith revolutionized cinema with The Birth of a Nation, pioneering narrative techniques like cross-cutting and close-ups -- using them to rehabilitate the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of white purity against caricatured Black villains, fueling a KKK resurgence. Griffith denied bigotry, calling it "history". Riefenstahl elevated documentary form in Triumph of the Will, with innovative camera work and mass spectacle to humanize Hitler and glorify Nazism at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. She claimed it was pure art, not propaganda, denying her complicity till death. Lee, like his forebears, denies bias while indulging it: Mo' Better Blues revives Shylock tropes, and his 2026 All-Star stunt normalizes symbols tied to Hamas, a group whose charter calls for Israel's destruction. 

Lee might consider that history will place him in a ninth circle with Griffith and Riefenstahl—three cultural giants whose genius betrayed their fealty to normalizing eliminationism: Griffith—the KKK; Riefenstahl —the Nazis; Lee—Hamas.  In Inside Man, Lee's heist thriller, Christopher Plummer's character is the hidden enabler of Nazi Judeocide, profiting from collaboration behind a facade. Perhaps that's Lee's subconscious confession: the "inside man" of Hollywood, subtly enabling Judeocidal rhetoric under empowerment's guise, forever damned in the frozen circle of treachery.

Preserved on film.

MAGA Weren't Who You Thought They Were – And YOU Let Them Off the Hook

The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is often romanticized as a crusade to restore America to greatness through equal opportunity, individual rights, traditional family values, and a fight against big corporations and corrupt politicians who exploit ordinary people. This vision stands in stark contrast to the left's emphasis on viewing society solely through lenses of oppressor and oppressed, complete with hierarchies of marginalized identities that reward the accumulation of victimhood points—at this point anyone who chants "Free Palestine" loudly enough.

Yet this idealized portrait of MAGA's origins is flawed from the start. MAGA, much like its predecessor the Tea Party, was never truly about articulating or pursuing those precise lofty restorations. It served primarily as a necessary, if painful, corrective to the accelerating socialization of American society—a process that gained momentum with the 2008 election but had deeper roots, perhaps traceable to post-Iraq War Democratic realignments or even cultural blueprints evident in media like The West Wing. With "woke" ideology far from defeated, that corrective effort continues today.

Consider the supposed core principles. Equal opportunity, individual rights, and old-fashioned family values proved too nuanced and complicated for MAGA's broader appeal. The movement excelled at opposition—boycotting brands like Bud Light, reshaping debates around gender-affirming care, and potentially achieving breakthroughs in legal challenges against entities like Planned Parenthood (as seen in Missouri cases highlighting controversial medical claims about infant pain). These represent real cultural shifts, even if imperfect or incomplete. No political force wins every battle.

The notion that MAGA once aggressively confronted big corporations and politicians preying on the little guy also requires scrutiny. Corporate profits and size rarely troubled the movement until the COVID vaccine mandates, where objections centered on government coercion rather than capitalism itself. Big government drew ire primarily through taxation, while a strong military—or even the military-industrial complex—faced little inherent opposition when aligned with national priorities.

Recent criticisms highlight supposed betrayals. Complaints about Latino performers at the Super Bowl, for instance, were not mere linguistic or ethnic whining. They targeted figures like Bad Bunny, whose anti-ICE positions, pro-open-borders messaging during performances, and high-profile sponsorships struck directly at immigration concerns central to MAGA. The backlash reflected substantive policy disagreements, not blanket prejudice.

On the Epstein files, accusations of MAGA-led cover-ups miss the mark. Government bureaucracy—redactions and delays—drives the opacity, operating independently of any specific administration. Recent revelations from FBI interviews and documents show Trump contacted Palm Beach police in 2006 during early Epstein probes, reportedly expressing relief that authorities were intervening and noting that "everyone has known" about the behavior—undermining persistent smears linking him personally to the scandal.

Foreign policy charges fare similarly poorly under examination. Claims of "selling out" to Iran overlook that U.S. foreign policy has never hinged on body counts alone—a pattern stretching back over a century, not a MAGA innovation. Complex realities, as analyzed by non-partisan observers, defy simplistic moral outrage over casualty figures. Issues with Qatar trace to 2002 decisions predating the movement, with current handling arguably more assertive than prior approaches. Turkey's NATO tensions persist until fundamental changes like expulsion or U.S. withdrawal—challenges transcending any single political wave.

Fears of MAGA demanding unchecked governmental authority or craving dictatorship clash with constitutional limits and the movement's anti-abusive-state instincts. Libertarian purists may recoil, but this reflects pragmatism, not authoritarianism.

Even the observation that segments of the right—especially Gen Z—are echoing "Free Palestine" alongside the left positions those voices as left-adjacent and marginal within broader MAGA and GOP circles. This fringe, however vocal on influential platforms, remains a minority—dangerous in historical parallels to small groups seizing power (Bolsheviks, Iranian revolutionaries), yet containable, as seen in past neutralizations of figures like Charles Coughlin in the 1940s or earlier fringe elements through institutional pushback.  Figures like Steve Bannon played key roles in MAGA's rise—expelling birthers to make Trump electable in 2016—though sidelined later. Others, like Tucker Carlson (a Democrat until recently), align more with heterodox critics than core MAGA. These elements do not define the majority.

The greater peril lies with Democrats, who have fully embraced woke frameworks and appear to pursue power through strategies reminiscent of electoral consolidation in cities like New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles—mirroring historical authoritarian ascents.

MAGA was always more Trumpian marketing slogan than libertarian manifesto. Projecting grand ideological restorations onto it invited inevitable disappointment. As ancient wisdom counsels—echoing biblical and rabbinic teachings—expect little, and disillusionment follows less readily. The movement's fringes draw cues from the hard left, rendering them expendable, but its core endures as resistance against socialization, capable of tangible cultural and political impacts.

In the end, MAGA never fell from lofty heights, because those heights were never its terrain. It remains an imperfect, vital counterforce for everyday Americans in a landscape where woke persists and identity-driven tactics consolidate elsewhere.  But if you built them up in your head as some pure, principled army of small-government libertarians ready to restore equal opportunity and smash the corrupt elite—and then got shocked when they turned out to be a blunt, populist hammer swinging against whatever felt like the latest overreach, with no interest in your - or any, really - carefully curated ideology - they were off the hook the moment you made that assumption.

They weren't who YOU thought they were.

No "Good", Part III: She's Even Worse Than You Thought

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.

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.

No “Good”

This past Sunday night NFL fans were treated to one of the wildest fourth quarters possible in a winner take all contest to end the regular season.  And it ended with not one, but two, wildly missed kicks within 55 seconds of playing time.
 A few days later, the death of a woman named “Good” driving a car at a Federal agent in what has been torturously branded an act of “protest” has elicited a flood of memery that, were they kicks, would only wildly miss, but likely would have been kicked in the wrong direction with the kicking team still insisting on being awarded three points.


For starters:  “When protesters get shot, that’s bad, actually.”


Sure. If there were protesters. “Good” wasn’t a protester. She was a domestic terrorist.


“We’re not Iran / We’re not Venezuela.”


This is a category error so basic it barely deserves a response. Protesters in Iran and Venezuela are opposing regimes that criminalize speech itself. What happened here involved federal officers enforcing duly enacted law while being physically attacked. Lumping those together is not moral seriousness; it’s aesthetic moral cosplay.


“She didn’t need to be shot if she was retreating.”


By definition she could not have been “retreating” as long as she was inside the vehicle and it was still running.  Once she hit the officer she presented a clear and present danger to anyone no matter where she was going until she stopped or was neutralized.  This isn’t vibes, it’s video. She drove her car straight at an ICE agent. That’s why there is a bullet hole in her windshield.  Police officers — ICE included — have no duty to be run over by people who think ideological certainty functions as diplomatic immunity.


“ICE is heavy-handed and brutal.”


This isn’t an evidentiary claim; it’s a belief system. It only works if your baseline assumption is that immigration should be treated like a constitutional right and enforcement itself is immoral. But that’s not the law. Crossing the border illegally is a federal crime. Remaining here unlawfully requires additional violations. A system built on mass illegality plus selective enforcement is not “compassionate”; it’s corrosive.

Also missing from the viral narrative: “Good” and her comrades chased and harassed ICE agents beforehand, screaming, surrounding them, intentionally escalating. At one point an agent’s hands were still inside her vehicle when she moved it, injuring him. She then aimed the car at another agent.

This was not confusion. This was escalation.


“Protesters” don’t weaponize cars.


“Protesters” don’t engage in violent obstruction.


“Protesters” don’t then get posthumously rebranded because the outcome makes people uncomfortable.


It is, of course, possible — though at this point increasingly improbable — that some meaningful subset of anti-ICE “protesters” are one-issue: that this administration is driven by nativist impulses, hostile to all non-Eurocentric immigration; that immigration is on balance a net benefit to the country; and that ICE has become the flag under which government overreach now marches.   More likely: the same people screaming about ICE would likely recently have been proetsting about “Freeing Maduro” - what was that about us being Venezuela again?


The call isn’t controversial.  Arguing about proportionality after weaponizing a vehicle, escalating a confrontation, and aiming lethal force at an officer is like debating the wind after the kick went backwards.


No “Good”.

 

Elias Roofriguez

 

A Red-Green Valentine: ICRC + Hamas