Born in 1988, Renee Ganger was, according to her family, “extremely compassionate,” as well as “loving, forgiving and affectionate.” She went on youth missions to Northern Ireland, and then proceeded to attend one of the 3 colleges that I myself attended. By all accounts she made a much larger impression than I did in my single year of attendance; in contrast, Renee won a prize from the Academy of American Poets for one of her poems. She married a man and had two children; after they divorced, she married another man, Tim Macklin, with whom she started a podcast, and also had another child. Macklin died in 2023; Renee’s father said of her “she had a good life, but a hard life.”
Then Renee married Rebecca Good, finally becoming Renee Nicole Macklin Good, which was her full name on the day when, after dropping her now six-year-old son off at school, she and her wife encountered a group of ICE agents in her new home city of Minneapolis. A bit of yelling ensued; the agents were yelling at the couple, and Rebecca was yelling right back. At least one agent yelled at them to get out of the car; at least one other agent yelled at them to just drive away. Renee, however, did not yell: she responded to the aggressive officer outside her window, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” In response, the agent shot her 3 times in the face, both through the windshield and through her open driver side window as her body went slack, her spasming foot hit the accelerator, and her SUV went past the agent, who had ample time to pronounce “fucking bitch” and walk sedately down the road. A nearby doctor tried to give Renee medical aid, but was prevented from doing so by the ICE agents. The murderer stuck around for a while, then was hustled off; later, masked federal agents cleared out his house. He’s now apparently in hiding, along with his wife. She, by the way is a Filipino immigrant. Our vice-president, JD Vanc
This woman was not a brown woman: she was a white, Christian, suburban mom. This puts the poor, beleaguered MAGA crowd in a tough spot: how to paint her as a villain? They tried calling her a domestic terrorist, but that didn’t seem to stick. Jesse Watters, ever the brave one, hit upon pointing out that she was a lesbian, and had “pronouns in her bio!” I’m actually a little surprised that there hasn’t been more coverage of Good’s LGBTQ identity. I mean, I understand why people aren’t talking about it: because it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t. But I have to wonder if it does. The murderer’s father described him as a “conservative Christian”; was he aware that the two women he was harassing were married? And did that influence his decision on whether or not to shoot? Surely it’s hard to believe that it didn’t color his “fucking bitch” pronouncement.
But what’s really weird to me is that all the coverag
Good coverage of the murder from just about all quarters this week: Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s monologue, Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue, Seth Meyers in “A Closer Look”, Christopher Titus’ Armageddon Update, the Even More News crew and guest, Robert Reich and W. Kamau Bell on the Coffee Klatch, Adam Kinzinger’s reaction, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey interviewed by BTC, Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan interviewed on Under the Desk News, Alex Wagner on What a Day, Colbert’s Late Show interview with Chris Hayes, V’s Under the Desk interview with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg reacting on BTC, Jamelle Bouie’s call to abolish ICE, Owen Jones providing the UK perspective. I recommend them all, but I know it’s a lot to watch. The best short summary is probably the Kimmel; if you need something angrier, try Titus; for the best in-depth coverage, I would take Even More News.
Other things you need to know this week:
- Another good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.
- Over on Legal Eagle, Spencer the Scowl Owl covers all the ways that our invasion of Venezuela was illegal.
- This week’s Strict Scrutiny covers the Venezuela thing as well, but I thought the more chilling segment was their interview with Kim Lane Scheppele, who you may recall as being the author of the fish soup metaphor that I quoted Kate Shaw’s quoting of back in week 27. Here she’s comparing our Supreme Court to the “captured courts” of autocratic regimes around the world. She says: ”... when people think it’s a captured court, they think that it will stop looking like a court or acting like a court ... But the thing about captured courts is that they don’t rule in every single case for the government they’re trying to defend, because they want to preserve their appearance of independence. They want to preserve the fiction that they’re still actually operating in law rather than politics.” I found the whole “appearance of independence” thing a bit chilling, and it’s something to remember as the Supreme Court is set to rule “against” Trump on birthright citizenship and maybe even tariffs.
- Mehdi Hasan also breaks down the invasion of Venezuela. He points out that, while it seems like everything has worked out great at the momen
t— Maduro captured, no American lives lost, we appear to be in charge of their oi l— these things don’t last. “I remember watchin g— I was in a BBC newsroom in 2003 when the Saddam statue fell, and a colleague turned to me and said, ‘Haha, you were wrong about Iraq: look, it’s all great.’ How did that work out? You know, give it time.”
- On Runaway Country, Alex Wagner talks to Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes (of Pod Save the World) about Venezuela. At one point they play a clip of Marco Rubio saying, in regard to the money we take from the sale of Venezuelan oil, “we will control how it is disbursed, in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime.” What balls! Apparently we will save the Venezuelans from the Venezuelan corruption, but I wonder who will protect them from the American corruption?
- Adam Kinzinger has some stirring words on the anniversary of January 6th.
Overall, I had hoped to have more time to talk about the Venezuela thing, especially the part where every single person feels a need to point out that Maduro was a bad guy, and that our military did a great job, before then moving on to talking about the illegality. Much as with the ICE shooting, I wonder why we feel the need to focus on that part. Even if Maduro was a horrible dictator (he was), and was guilty of many human rights abuses (he was), and even if the feat that Delta Force accomplished was an insanely intricate and flawlessly performed mission (it was), and even if we end up getting all their oil and it makes our gas prices go down (it won’t), none of that makes what we did okay. “He was a bad guy, so it was okay that I kidnapped him and stole his country’s oil” is no more sensible a statement than “she was a lesbian, so it was okay that I shot her in the face.”
Which feels like a sour note to end on, but honestly I can’t do better right now. As bleak as many of the previous 50 weeks have been, this one has managed to be bleaker. The murder of an innocent woman has made us forget about the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, which in turn made us forget that the Department of Justice still hasn’t released the Epstein files that they are legally mandated to make public. And that’s just the top three debacles: the thing about “flooding the zone with shit” is that, eventually, everyone is drowning in shit. Right now, I’m just trying to keep my head above water. And/or feces.
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