The Distortion of Violence

On Wednesday, Renee Good, a mother and poet in Minnesota, was shot and killed by an ICE agent. The latest footage of the incident, posted by Vice President Vance, is below. (Note that this video, shot by the agent, does not show any actual gore.)

There have been more than enough hot takes on the shooting. But I wanted to offer a few distinct thoughts from an animal rights and activist point of view.

ICE, due in part to their puppy-killing leader Secretary Kristi Noem, has been cultivating a culture of cruelty. You can see this in the way the ICE agent, immediately after shooting Renee, mutters “f_____ b____” and walks away calmly, as if his irritation was a just reason for lethal violence. I’ve posted about similar incidents in Noem’s own history on Twitter/X:

It is astonishing and telling that Noem thought this story was a good one to share in her own autobiography. It is a story she is proud of, not a horrible mistake driven by anger. But then there’s this on the next page:

Noem not only kills a defenseless dog. She moves on to kill another defenseless animal, a goat, for the crime of being “too smelly.” Then brags about how it made all of her employees work even harder! This is not a sign of the leadership we need.

JD Vance knows nothing about cell phone cameras at protests. JD Vance claims that the video I shared above proves the officer’s life was in danger, and that Renee was trying to kill him with her car.

As an activist attorney, I’ve reviewed thousands of scenes of cell phone footage at protests. And I can say quite confidently that the footage does not show the officer was endangered or hit by a car.

Cell cameras, when jostled, create incredibly violent-looking scenes. (Try turning on video on your iPhone and throwing it on your bed to test.) That does not mean something violent happened. It just means cameras create dramatic-looking scenes when dropped.

The loud sounds you hear in the footage, moreover, are not the sounds of a car colliding with anything but the sounds of something clanging against the cell’s mic. (You can try this as well; try clanging a spoon or even a paper clip against your cell phone, particularly near the bottom where the mic is.) From other video of the shooting, we know what hit the cell is not a car but the officer’s own gun. Mics will massively amplify even soft sounds when they are close to the source. (Think about tapping a microphone, and the impact it has on a speaker.)

I don’t actually blame the VP for getting this wrong if this is the first footage he saw. However, a good person will admit when they’re wrong and backtrack. Vance has not done that.

The world is becoming dangerously cruel. Regardless of whether she was killed in a legal shooting, the amount of gloating and hatred directed at Renee Good—with the White House calling her a “domestic terrorist” and the VP referring to her as a “deranged leftist”—is a bad sign for the future of our nation.

I will say, however, that I felt similarly when people on the left ignored the killing of Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed January 6 protester who was gunned down by the Capitol police. If we oppose violence, we have to oppose it consistently, regardless of whether the victim is someone we personally like. The cruelty exhibited by those on the left, in the wake of her death, was hard to watch. And it was the result of distorted narratives pushed by politicians and their allies in media.

We need something to fight back against this cruelty soon, and very strongly, or even worse things will come.

But luckily, there is an answer. The fight for animal rights, the most powerful movement for compassion in human history, is perhaps the best antidote to this tide of violence. It’s just one of the many reasons that I hope that all of you will join us when we take a stand against cruelty in Wisconsin in the weeks to come.