Winners & Losers: Atrocity & Profanity

Last week’s news cycle began with American-inflicted violence in Venezuela and ended with American-inflicted violence in Minneapolis.

Around the world, people are leaving the comfort of their homes and hitting the streets — from Minneapolis, where thousands have marched to honor the memory of Renee Good and protest ICE in their community, to the streets of Iran, where runaway inflation and decades of violent oppression have taken their toll.

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Someday, I’ll load all of these columns into an AI and ask how many of them claimed the week in which they were published represented a sea change.

It’s true, when something big happens and we’re all outraged, we often say that it feels like something has changed. But I would argue it’s almost always true, at least over the last year.

Our world — our country, our communities, our neighbors, our economy — it’s all simply changing. We are in the middle of it. So, in fact, this week, we changed. Again. The big question we need to ask is how the left — or the pro-democracy side, anyway — will respond to the change.

Hearing the roar of protestors literally risking their lives to be in the streets of Tehran is heartening, but it’s also frustrating to turn on social media and see that our own streets aren’t quite as full. They should be. We should be shutting this country down.

This week, my Winner comes out of Minneapolis, and my Loser is a familiar face who will undoubtedly be featured here again in the future.

Kristi Noem, Loser

I could have picked the agent who killed Good to be the Loser this week. But I have a policy against picking on middle management. That is to say, the people who are taking orders are off-limits to me.

There’s a case to be made that the agent is a murderer. I know. And he filmed himself calling Good a fucking bitch AFTER he killed her. He is clearly not a good person. Or, to be as generous as possible, he’s a hurt person with incapacitating fear and anxiety that he spills out into the world around him. He’s damaged, perhaps beyond repair.

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But. BUT. You have to imagine the monster who sees a man like this and says, Yes. He is just the right kind of broken. We can use his pain to punish blue cities and terrorize Americans we don’t like.

That’s Kristi Noem. She’s been in this column before, as you know. She has become a cartoon character version of herself that will say or do anything it takes to sound tough, mean, and Mar-a-Lago-y.

Last week, after the shooting in Minneapolis, she called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. Noem’s rhetoric was so appalling that it even turned off some inside the administration, who thought going so hard at a woman killed by a federal agent would turn public opinion against ICE.

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