The outpouring of grief for leftist activist Renee Good makes sense: no one likes to see a mother killed, children left motherless, no matter how preventable the circumstances that led to her death. But along with grief has been an absurd amount of pretending, pretension, and larping and it's larping that got Good out onto that frigid Minneapolis street in the middle of a school day in the first place.
Nowhere perhaps is that more clear than in the comments made by Becca Good, Renee's partner, immediately following the shooting. "Why did you have real bullets?" She shouted at agents before saying "It's my fault, I made her come down here, it's my fault."
The activists who have been coordinating with each other anonymously on Signal chats, calling themselves ICE Watch, believed that ICE agents would not have real bullets while carrying out immigration enforcement in Minneapolis. The reason ICE has to carry out immigration enforcement door-to-door is because local law enforcement has been forbidden from turning over illegal immigrant criminals for deportation. Minnesota is larping that they don't have to obey federal law and activists are larping that they are on some kind of righteous mission and agents are playacting at law enforcement.
Activists share intel across chats to identify license plates and alert groups of activists as to where ICE is engaging in enforcement so they can go stop them. White women falsely believe that their "white privilege" gives them leave to confront ICE. They have been indoctrinated to believe that officers operate from a place of racism, not law enforcement and that they are protected by their white skin.
Joy Reid stated her belief that Good should was "supposed to be safe" because she was a white woman using her white privilege to obstruct ICE agents. She said that white protesters and their activist backers believed white agitators could "step to ICE" because officers wouldn't take aim at white women. This, of course, is absurd. White people are killed by police, too. According to Washington Post data, out of 1,176 people killed in the US by officers in 2024, 254 of them were black, 400 of them were white, and 303 were of a race unknown.
The activists were playing that they could interfere with law enforcement and not face any consequences. They thought they were protected by their whiteness, that they could claim to be "observing" while taking direction from behind-the-scenes dispatchers on Signal chats, and that the officers would not be playing for keeps.
The Golden Globes saw actors don "Be Good" pins, with notables like Mark Ruffalo saying that it was hard for him to attend the star-studded celebrity bash because "we got literally Storm Troopers running around, terrorizing" and that makes it "hard to pretend anymore." Actress Jean Smart encouraged Americans to "do the right thing" in this "moment of reckoning," going on to say that "I think almost everybody knows in their hearts what's the right thing."
These actors encourage others to man the proverbial barricades while they feel bad about themselves and the state of the nation behind their velvet ropes and secured gates. Ruffalo, Wanda Sykes, Natasha Leone, and the rest of them can all wear their buttons and tell people to "do the right thing" but they don't feel that they're under any obligation to do it themselves.
Celebs will make movies like "One Battle After Another," which attempt to say that the United States is so evil and racist it needs to be brought to its knees by gun-toting murdering lunatics drunk on their own edginess. They will give each other awards for it. But they won't be there to do anything other than give money to the ACLU when regular normie Americans are shot for dressing up like revolutionaries and ramming their cars into ICE agents.
It's the regular Americans in their minivans who will take to the streets while their kids are in school that will pay the price for the celeb virtue signaling and Democrat moralizing. When the next activist is killed after taking things too far, it will be those same celebs wearing another button and lamenting about the state of the nation while Democrats use it to fundraise.
A column out from Slate shows this exactly. Jenee Desmond-Harris writes that Renee Good "Was the kind of person I should be." Desmond-Harris writes that she knows she's "falling short" of what she should be doing as a "person who lives in the Unite States in 2026 and cares about others."
She writes about "sobbing" about ICE raids and says that she feels inadequate just donating money and "sharing Instagram stories." Desmond-Harris is a mom with children at home who says she wants to be more like Good. "When I say she was the kind of person I want to be, I'm talking specifically about her presence at the scene of the immigration raid." She praises Good for "wanting to help."
Ruffalo, Sykes, Smart and Leone all want to help, too, but where Desmond-Harris and Good believe that putting their life on the line is how one should "help," the celebs know, and the ACLU tells them so, that wearing buttons and giving money is the best way to engage in helping. But Desmond-Harris has a fantasy about activism that is almost religious.
Good, she writes, "didn’t have the power to change the outcome of the election, or change the minds of all the people who voted for this horrifying reality, or even to stop ICE from chasing down the people in her community, or to reunite kids with their parents. But she still showed up, to be the kind of person we all hope will be there if we’re having the worst day of our life. I imagine that, before she was killed, her presence was a comfort that showed that someone was watching and that someone cared."
For Desmond-Harris, perhaps for Good and her partner Becca, but definitely not for the button-wearing celebs, others finding comfort in you giving your life makes your death worth it. I think I speak for all of us when I say that this is an insane perspective. There is no glory for the greater good in a life lost for refusing to comply with law enforcement.
But for Desmond-Harris, Good "was killed because she was a good person. Because she decided to be there," and seems to fantasize about being killed for a cause, too. There is no extant reality where sacrificing your own life for a political cause is anything other than dying for nothing and no amount of pretending about a righteous cause is going to help.
