Defending the Memory of Renee Nicole Good and January 6 (#114)
In this edition: the Trump regime is trying to rewrite the history of Renee Nicole Good’s murder in Minneapolis and the January 6, 2021, insurrection. We must oppose the regime’s authoritarian command that we reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.
Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.
“It might be helpful for you to know that you are not alone. And that in the long, twilight struggle which lies ahead of us, there is the possibility of hope.” “The Long Twilight Struggle.” Babylon 5, created and written by J. Michael Straczynski, Season 2, Episode 20, 1995.
The State-Sanctioned Murder of Renee Nicole Good
Renee Nicole Good was murdered by Jonathan Ross, an agent of the United States government, last week in Minneapolis.
In the daylight. On video. With sound and featuring many angles.
There is no reason, other than the Trump regime’s ruthless racism, for federal officials to be in Minneapolis. The person murdered and the killer should have been doing something else at that moment.
Instead of showing remorse or sympathy for Good and her wife and children, Trump regime officials have been defaming her since the first moments after the shooting.
We should be outraged. And we must not allow the Trump regime to rewrite the history of what we all saw and the humanity of the Good to advance their fascist project.
Renee Nicole Good’s humanity needs to be the first thing that’s said before anything else, because the regime started erasing it from virtually the moment it murdered her.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good was an “agitator” who “weaponized” her vehicle in an act of “domestic terrorism.” The ICE officer, she said, acted in self-defense.
Vice President JD Vance blamed the murder victim.
“Don't illegally interfere in federal law enforcement operations and try to run over our officers with your car,” Vance wrote on Twitter. “It's really that simple."
On his social media site, the president added his own smears.
“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting,” Donald Trump wrote. She “then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer. ... It is hard to believe [the ICE officer] is alive but he is now recovering in the hospital."
Every single word is a lie.
The Trump regime is using the full weight of the United States government to make Good seem like a domestic terrorist.
There were domestic terrorists involved in Good’s murder. There were people unlawfully seeking to further ideological goals through violence in Minneapolis. It was the person with the gun and his ICE colleagues.
Trump, Vance, Hoem, Stephen Miller, and their cell of television and MAGA enablers are trying to justify a murder by making Good a criminal. We must not allow them to rewrite the history of what we all saw. We must not allow them to erase Good’s humanity.
Renee Good was a poet, and a mother, and a wife, and many other things as well. She was a human being, which is to say, a unique and irreplaceable work of art. Then a member of Donald Trump's ethnic cleansing secret police force shot her in the face four times, and called her a "fucking bitch," after he did it, and then all of America's fascists claimed she was not a person, in order to justify her summary execution, and to demonstrate the normalized right of white fascists to murder any of us if they want to, and as a pretext to increase murdering if anyone dare resist the murder. It's the standard play for these sorts of things.
They didn't say those exact words, mind you. On the news they mentioned that Good was in a gay relationship, and that she had her pronouns in her bio, and these days these are things that Republicans say when they want you to understand somebody isn't a person, and doesn't deserve to live.
Since Wednesday, Republican elected officials have publicly stated more or less explicitly that they believe Good deserved to be killed. Florida representative Randy Fine, for instance, went on Newsmax to declare: “The Left believe they can do anything they want and we’re just supposed to sit down and take it. It’s time for Americans to say ‘enough,’ and if you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re gonna end up just like that lady did yesterday.” If you “get in the way,” and you prove to be a nuisance to the regime, you deserve to be killed by the state.
Meanwhile, the regime’s propaganda machine has been hard at work reminding their audience that they are supposed to hate and fear those people: On Fox News, for instance, Jesse Waters told his viewers that Good had “pronouns in her bio” and had a “lesbian partner”; rightwing online extremist Matt Walsh made sure to remind his audience that Good was a “lesbian agitator.” The message is clear: The state committing violence against such obnoxious deviants is good and necessary – they are the “Other” that must be subjugated and punished.
We know the playbook. The Trump regime didn’t create it.
We have every right to make fun of law enforcement officials. We can annoy them. They don’t get a “marked safe from criticism” sticker with their badge and gun.
Obstructing a law enforcement officer, even if it reaches that point, is not a capital offense. They had Good’s license plate number. They knew how to find her.
But what I saw in all of the videos was a male law enforcement officer getting upset because a woman was having a laugh at his expense. So the gun came out, and he repeatedly shot Good in the face.
As Margaret Atwood said, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
In times past, a politician might offer thoughts and prayers, encourage those reacting to wait for the full results of the investigation and generally try to lower the temperature. A leader might take the opportunity provided by a fresh day to soothe the broken heart of a nation and appeal to the better angels among us.
JD Vance went in a different direction.
"Every congressional democrat and every democrat who's running for president should be asked a simple question: Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over? These people are going to try to arrest our law enforcement for doing their jobs. The least the media could do is ask them about it," said Vance the morning after the shooting.
...
As a Catholic, Vance knows better than to peddle this brand of gaslighting and agitation. Vance knows that, by virtue of her humanity, Good was endowed with inherent dignity, made in the image and likeness of God. Vance knows that only God can take life. Vance knows that protesting, fleeing or even interfering in an ICE investigation (which there is no evidence that Good did) does not carry a death sentence. Vance knows that lying and killing are sins.
Vance knows. He doesn't care. Vance’s twisted and wrongheaded view of Christianity has been repudiated by two popes. His Catholicism seems to be little more than a political prop, a tool only for his career ambitions and desire for power.
The vice president's comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith. His repeated attempts to blame Good for her own death are fundamentally incompatible with the Gospel. Our only recourse is to pray for his conversion of heart.
I wish more religious leaders would speak so directly when political leaders defile their faith.
The problem, of course, is that Vance already had a recent conversation of the heart (2019). This is what he learned from a group of right-wing religious zealots who care much more about political and social power than the actual words of Jesus.
Vance may be a religious person. But like so many of his right-wing followers, he constantly rejects the red words of the New Testament with his actions.
Finally, to emphasize Renee Nicole Good’s humanity, let’s remember that she was a poet. An award-winning poet.
The bio from a now-private Instagram account belonging to Good describes her as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.” In 2020, when she went by Renée Nicole Macklin, she won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs...”
You can read that poem by clicking here.
Diamond closes his post about Renee Nicole Good in a clear way that puts most of the legacy media coverage of this murder to shame.
This is murder in broad daylight by the Trump administration, obvious and brutal. And though each senseless act of violence committed by the state upon its citizens echoes the thousands that have gone before, we cannot become numb to the particular (and intensifying) depravities of this administration.
So if the violence of the deportations, and the crackdowns, and the cuts, and the raids, and the air strikes, haven’t been enough for you, let something so simple and evil as the daytime execution of a poet move you to action.
Well said.
January 6
President Donald Trump and Republican leadership have been engaged in a five-year cover-up about the January 6, 2021, Insurrection and Trump’s role in instigating it.
We have gone from a clear description of the attack on our nation’s Capitol that day to Trump calling it a “day of love” and many Republicans claiming it was just like a tourist visit and mostly non-violent.
As we saw last week, the Trump regime is pulling out all the stops—including publishing a taxpayer-funded official White House website that seeks to place the blame primarily on House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)—to peddle his lies.
We need to defeat this Trumpian effort to erase and overwrite what happened that day.
On January 7, 2021, the day after Trump’s Capitol Insurrection, there was a consensus about what had happened the day before. A mob attacked the Capitol on Donald Trump’s behalf, seeking to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election. Newspaper headlines, the first draft of history, were clear about these events.
But it wasn’t just the newspapers. Republicans were blunt in their descriptions of the insurrection, starting with former Vice President Mike Pence. He called it “a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol” as he reconvened the Senate following the attack.
Other leading Republicans also issued statements condemning the insurrection. Washington, D.C.’s NBC 4 compiled a list of them to mark the one-year anniversary. Some highlights:
- Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth—because he was angry he’d lost an election.”
- Then House Republican Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA): “Let me be clear: Last week’s violent attack on the Capitol was undemocratic, un-American and criminal...”
- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): “…those engaged in violence are hurting the cause they say they support…”
- Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX): “Today, the people’s House was attacked, which is an attack on the Republic itself.…And the President should never have spun up certain Americans to believe something that simply cannot be.”
- Then Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL): “There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill. This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.”
- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “When it comes to accountability, the President needs to understand that his actions were the problem, not the solution, that the rally yesterday was unseemly, it got out of hand...”
- Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY): “This has been a truly tragic day for America. We all join together in fully condemning the dangerous violence and destruction that occurred today in our Nation's Capitol...”
These are to-the-point statements from people who had just lived through an attack on our government and their workplace. They knew they had been in danger.
But once the Senate failed to convict Trump of the Articles of Impeachment related to his incitement of the insurrection in February 2021, Republicans started covering up what happened that day with a different version of events.
Five years after the deadly attack on the US Capitol, Donald Trump and other Republicans have engaged in a near-complete effort to rewrite the history of the day and erase it from the collective American memory.
On his first day in office, Trump pardoned anyone involved in the attack, a move that affected about 1,500 people. His administration has paid $5m to settle a wrongful death lawsuit with the family of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter killed by a Capitol police officer as she attempted to breach doors near the House floor. Hundreds of other rioters are also seeking millions of dollars in compensation.
“The pardons issued last January sent a clear message to the American people: political allegiance now matters more than criminal conduct. But over the past year, we’ve also seen a sustained effort to rewrite the facts of January 6, as if the historical record could be negotiated away or erased,” said Gregory Rosen, who led the justice department unit that prosecuted January 6 cases.
The Trump regime has been persistent in seeking to rewrite the narrative of January 6. Trump has been revising it since that day as part of his related effort to falsely claim he actually won the 2020 election.
But it isn’t just Trump. The entire Republican Party is also complicit in this effort to rewrite history.
One step Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has taken is to obstruct the installation of a plaque to honor the law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol and Members of Congress and their staff on January 6.
On the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the official plaque honoring the police who defended democracy that day is nowhere to be found.
It’s not on display at the Capitol, as is required by law. Its whereabouts aren’t publicly known, though it’s believed to be in storage.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has yet to formally unveil the plaque. And the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a police officers’ lawsuit asking that it be displayed as intended. The Architect of the Capitol, which was responsible for obtaining and displaying the plaque, said in light of the federal litigation, it cannot comment.
Determined to preserve the nation’s history, some 100 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have taken it upon themselves to memorialize the moment. For months, they’ve mounted poster board-style replicas of the Jan. 6 plaque outside their office doors, resulting in a Capitol complex awash with makeshift remembrances.
If there is one thing Republicans—especially Republicans from the south—understand, it is the importance of memorial plaques and statues to creating a narrative. And once again, many Republicans have chosen to use them to rewrite—to lie—about what happened during an important historical event.
But the Trump regime went even further on the fifth anniversary of the insurrection. They have used taxpayer funds to create a website that pins the blame on Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Democrats.
And, five years after January 6, 2021, from his White House perch, Trump and his minions published an appalling alternative history spouting nonstop lies about the day.
In addition to Trump’s never-give-up “Stolen Election“ lie, the White House’s offensive “J6” website included a continued attack on Trump’s first-term vice president for what the White House calls “an act of cowardice and sabotage“ because Pence carried out his ministerial role to oversee the certification of the electoral votes.
This is all a lie.
In the most Trumpian way, it is a lie that he and his minions tell not even because they believe it — at this point, who knows what Trump himself actually believes about anything — but because they can tell it and their superfans will listen.
We will see this website of lies cited by MAGA and the Trump regime to try to justify the January 6 insurrection. We will likely also see the lie about the 2020 election used by Trump in efforts to rig this year’s midterm elections.
We also need to support efforts to tell the truth about what happened on January 6. NPR has developed one of the best websites that tells the truth about that day.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST: Since President Trump returned to office, his administration has actively tried to erase government information about the January 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. Now on the fifth anniversary of the attack, NPR is preserving the history of that day. We’ve created a public archive, featuring hundreds of videos submitted as evidence, a timeline of events and our own searchable database of those cases, plus a two-part podcast on that day and the aftermath.
This visual archive is a vital effort to preserve a record of what actually happened on January 6. It is an example of what a media company can do with its creative people and reporters to bring a historical event to life. As the archive’s introduction states:
NPR has tracked every Jan. 6 prosecution in a public database, and, drawing on thousands of hours of footage and years of reporting, created a front-line account of the riot. The evidence vividly shows the planning for “revolution” and the brutality of violence on a day that continues to shape American politics.
Explore the database and coverage, or scroll to read the full narrative.
The archive starts with Trump’s callout to the Proud Boys during the 2020 presidential debate with Joe Biden and his repeated claims that he could lose that election only by cheating.
That context matters. The insurrection didn’t just manifest itself on January 6. Trump was pushing it for weeks by repeating his claim about a rigged election. It was not a spontaneous event.
It’s worth remembering today just how much crime there was on January 6th and how dangerous it is that Donald Trump’s first act as president was to pardon everyone involved. It wasn’t a bunch of tourists run amok. There was unbelievable violence and multiple seditious conspiracies that day by far-right militia groups, who came prepared for even greater violence. People died. Many more were injured, including more than 140 police officers who defended our Capitol and the most basic process of democracy.
As Mark Follman wrote last year, “The January 6 attackers—many of whom had gone to the Capitol prepared for violence—used weapons including chemical sprays, Tasers, baseball bats, hockey sticks, pipes, metal flagpoles, and allegedly even explosive devices.” I had the chance to interview MPD Officer Michael Fanone in 2024 about the terror he felt that day — read his memoir HOLD THE LINE for more — and it’s something we should never forget. We have been too quick to downplay it and memory hole it.
One of the telling moments of January 6 was Trump’s demand, as Cassidy Hutchinson testified, that the Secret Service stop requiring people arriving for his rally that morning to go through the magnetometers. It’s almost like he knew something was about to happen.
Graff also promoted two new oral histories of the January 6 insurrection in his recent newsletter. I love oral histories (Graff has written several outstanding ones, including his latest about the Manhattan Project). They can help remind us of what we may have forgotten and put events in a broader context.
- 24 Hours at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6 (Nora Neus, Penguin Random House, Link to Publisher’s Website)
- Storm at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6 (Mary Clare Jalonick, Public Affairs Books, Link to Publisher’s Website)
Talking Points Memo published an excerpt of Jalonick’s book. The excerpt focuses on 12 Senators beginning at 2 p.m., just after the first insurrectionists had broken into the Capitol building one floor below the Senate Chamber.
I have placed holds for these books on Libby, and I look forward to reading them soon.
Epilogue
The Senate has agreed to display a plaque honoring the police who defended the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, rebuffing House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has said the commemorative memorial does not comply with the law.
The action happened swiftly, with brief debate, in floor action Thursday. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina had announced during this week's fifth anniversary of the Capitol siege that he would seek to ensure the plaque is installed, partnering with Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who was also working on the situation, and Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California. No senators objected.
I don’t often have reason to give Senators credit, but at least we have this result—even if it is likely more about how annoyed they are with the House leadership than a desire to correct the record.
It may be a small victory. But all progress towards preserving the history of what actually happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is worth celebrating.
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“Beside the helicopter exhibit was a sign. “Pardon our noise. It’s the sound of freedom.”
Uh, no. The sound of freedom is elected officials debating and voting on laws, judges handing down decisions free from partisan taint, ordinary citizens speaking at local meetings and turning out to vote, and the media reporting without fear or favor. Depending on who is ordering copters to do what, they can embody the sound of freedom, or of despotism.”—Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, The Smaller Trump Outrages
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On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump instigated a violent insurrection against the United States government. Here’s a video from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol that one can review if their memory fades.
People were hurt and police officers died protecting the Capitol. Vice President Pence and other elected officials just barely escaped danger. Our national streak of peaceful transfers of power ended.
It was not, as Trump claims, a “day of love.” And we must resist his efforts to rewrite the history of that dark day.
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