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RENEE GOOD AND THE RAGE THAT FUELS STATE VIOLENCE  
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Ruth Fowler
January 12, 2026
CounterPunch
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_ Renee Good’s death is part of a decades-long continuum in which
state violence has come to resemble the dynamics survivors recognize
from private life: domination framed as protection, punishment framed
as necessity, rage framed as fear. _

, Youtube screenshot.

 

We are at JFK, waiting for the ground staff to retrieve our stroller.
The baby is crying. He holds his arms out and looks at me, wailing and
hot.

Please give him to me, I say quietly.

He’s fine, my husband snaps, and refuses to meet my eye. The baby
cries harder.

He’s not fine. He wants me. He wants his mum.

He’s fine.

He’s not. Please, just give him to me. Give him to me?

I’ve started crying now too. Hot milk prickles at my breasts.

No.

Just give him to me! My voice is high and panicked. My baby cries
harder. Husband looks at me now, his eyes cold, blue and furious. His
voice is low, controlled, a malevolent, vicious undertone. He speaks
slow as if there’s a period after every word. _Will you stop you
psychotic – fucking – bitch_.

There are many of us who recognize this word, “bitch,” and the
hot, scorching punch of it in this kind of context. After the shots
are fired in the footage of Renee Good’s death, a voice can be heard
calling her warm, dead body leaking hot blood over children’s
stuffies, a “fucking bitch.”

The agonizing moment-by-moment breakdowns, the analysis of angles, the
legal justifications, the endless videos which will continue to
surface as neighbors trawl through their RING cameras – none of this
mattered in that moment. That “fucking bitch,” to those of us who
have been victimized by coercive control, was a conviction.

In Civil Protection Orders, the most common gender insult was
‘bitch.’ There are so many studies that track the way verbal
dehumanization starts to pave the way for eventual violence, from
studies with women surviving near-fatal attacks, to social worker
reports, to beyond. It’s a detail defenders want us to ignore — a
slip of the tongue in a stressful moment. But language matters. Slurs
emerge when professionalism collapses and something more primal takes
over. They reveal how the speaker understands the person in front of
them: not as a citizen, not as a human being, but as an object of
contempt. The “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis” matters, because
it is a sign that common decency will not suffice at a time, at a
moment like this, when the breakdown is so acute.

“Fucking bitch” is not a phrase uttered in desperation, in pain,
or in terror, but in anger. In retaliation. It is a sign of verbal
dehumanization that signals contempt, not panic. Fury, not fear. How
dare you refuse to acknowledge my power. You are worthless.

That contempt is the emotional precondition for violence.

Even before the personal footage believed to belong to Jonathan Ross,
the ICE agent who shot Renee, surfaced this morning, the rage of that
‘fucking bitch’ slapped me in the face and took me back to a time
when the person I trusted most in the world was subjecting both myself
and my baby to unrestrained rage on a daily basis. America as an
abused spouse is a trope that has been oft repeated throughout
Trump’s centuries-long regime of terror, which has apparently only
been about a year long. Domestic violence is not a shorthand for
politics, but rather that the current regime incorporates coercive
control as a political technology.

Renee sounds and looks calm in the footage we have. She’s in her
car. I imagine the heat blasting, probably a thermos of joe in the
cupholder next to the stuffies crammed into the glove compartment. Her
hot breath frosts in the frigid Minneapolis morning. Her wife walking
outside the car, throwing smart comments out, is pissed. But she’s
not out of control. She’s not threatening.  Being annoying and
annoyed is not grounds for murder. Throwing smart ass comments out to
law enforcement is a First Amendment Right. Renee herself is not
threatening. She’s de-escalating.

But then that furious hot spat of anger, the anger which rises out of
nowhere, the anger which erupts and destroys in seconds, the anger
which pops out three bullets because those queer bitches are pissing
you off and getting in your way at 9:30am on a Tuesday morning, the
anger which leaves the victims reeling and screaming on the side of
the road saying it’s my fault it was my fault I made her do it while
the perpetrator of that rage puts their gun back in their holster and
calmly walks around for several minutes showing no visible signs of
either injury, distress, fear or sorrow. Just satisfaction.

He looks satisfied.

Rage is not incidental to state violence. Rage is the fuel for state
violence. And as every person in a coercive controlling relationship
knows, the victim will be blamed and the “fucking bitch” will be
manipulated, until that was never rage at being disobeyed and
disrespected, but always fear and desperation and pity. Fear can be
perfectly retrofitted onto rage. Panic can be rehearsed after violent
consequences have been meted. And they will be accepted by the system
because violence is an acceptable corrective when the victim has
committed the crime of being black, being queer, being a woman, being
an other, or being obviously opposed to the regime.

Domestic violence is always about control. It is about one person’s
impossible need to control every single aspect of another person’s
life, and the rage emerges from the futility of this exercise. It’s
often triggered by something inconsequential: a refusal, a delay, a
tone of voice, a choice of words. Looking happy, looking sad, looking
queer, looking straight. Control perceives this inconsequential slight
as vast humiliation and responds with excessive punishment.

What we see in the Good footage follows this script with chilling
precision. Orders are barked. Compliance is demanded instantly. There
is no meaningful attempt to de-escalate, no pause, no retreat. When
the situation slips even slightly out of the officer’s control, the
response is lethal.

Authoritarian power borrows the same emotional logic as domestic
violence.

The tools are familiar: intimidation, humiliation, unpredictability,
and the promise of consequences if you don’t comply fast enough,
perfectly enough, gratefully enough.

Trump did not invent this logic — but he has normalized it. For
Trump and his cronies, violence is not a last resort. It is a
corrective, and it is the first instinct.

ICE, in particular, has become a perfect vessel for this ideology with
its masked agents, minimal oversight and constant posture of threat.
It has instilled an institutional culture that treats civilians as
potential enemies and disagreement as provocation. In this context,
Ross’s rage is not an aberration. It is how Trump’s America will
continue to enforce itself.

What chills me is not whether a jury will find Ross legally justified.
It’s that the system seems uninterested in whether rage itself
should disqualify someone from holding lethal authority. The state has
taught its agents that they should defend reflexively. They have
taught law enforcement for years that civilian death, particularly of
young black civilian lives, will be litigated as a PR problem rather
than a moral one. Over a decade ago, I quoted Malcolm X in an article
I wrote about Christopher Dorner, the LAPD cop who went rogue and
started killing his colleagues. I was not scared of Dorner, I said. Or
no more scared of him than any other cop with a gun in the United
States of America. “The chickens come home to roost”. 
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The foundation for Trump’s America has been laid in the fabric of
American society decades before Tuesday’s horrors. It is no surprise
that all it took was one vile idiot to build a Trump Tower on top of
it and transform the tragedy of American policing into the
humanitarian hell that it has become. Renee Good’s death is being
processed by the right as an isolated incident, and by the left as a
symbol of the horrors of Trump’s America. It isn’t. It’s part of
a decades-long continuum in which state violence has increasingly come
to resemble the dynamics survivors recognize from private life:
domination framed as protection, punishment framed as necessity, rage
framed as fear. Trump could only achieve this because America was
already rotten before he arrived.

 

_RUTH FOWLER was born in Wales and lives between Los Angeles and
London. You can find out more about her __RuthIorio.com_
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_CounterPunch is reader supported! __Please help keep us alive_
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* Rene Good
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* male violence
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* state violence
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* domestic violence
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* Authoritarianism
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