EA-Times Radio VideoCast: Trump, Bondi, and “The Authoritarian is Here”
I joined Germany’s DW News on Wednesday night to describe and evaluate the killing of Renee Nicole Good, 37 (pictured) — a mother of three, a poet, and a “shitty guitar strummer”, in her words — by an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis.
Unsettled both by DW’s identification of Good as “a woman” without a name and by the opening question asking me about “competing narratives” over her killing, I respond:
Watch from 2:45:
Before discussing narratives, it is important to state the facts as we know them.
Renee Nicole Good, 37 years old, the mother of a 6-year-old who lived with her and her partner in Minneapolis — she was there watching as ICE agents were trying to detain people.
I describe how, when she tried to drive away as an ICE agent put his hand on her driver’s side window and challenged her, she was shot in the head 3 to 4 times by another agent. I explain that, contrary to the narrative of Trump officials, she was turning the car away from the agents and driving at slow speed.
There is no evidence that she was a “domestic terrorist”. She was a poet. She described herself as playing the guitar badly. She was well-liked by neighbors. She leaves behind her partner, her children, and her mother.
When the DW host tried to push all this away as facts still to be determined by a formal investigation, I cut in:
It is absolutely right that a formal investigation needs to be established. That is why the statement by Kristi Noem, the Director of Homeland Security, was so out of order. Speaking only minutes after the incident, without any investigation, without any attempt to establish the facts, she prejudged this as an act of domestic terrorism and smeared the victim.
I then consider the motives for the Trump Administration’s authoritarian exercise of power to “flood the area and sweep up immigrants with vast numbers of unidentified masked officers to intimidate communities so there is no resistance”.
