For a few seconds, I had thought that the most clear and compelling assessment of what happened during the January 7 ICE shooting on a suburban street in Minneapolis had come not from eyewitnesses or Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz or Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey or any other anti-ICE partisan, but rather from the lips of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. I would have taken him for a solidly pro-ICE partisan, but—surprise, surprise—it looked as though he had come down early and clearly on the side of the victim, 37-year-old Renee Good.
To recap for the record, the only indisputable facts about the Minneapolis ICE shooting are that Good was on the scene protesting their presence and, it appears, attempting to impede their progress with her car. A believable description of the following events will depend on whose side the reader is on, but Good was obviously approached by three ICE agents, one of whom reached into her car as if to pull her out, at which point she put the car in reverse and then into drive, turned her car away from the agents as if to flee, and another agent shot her in the face.
In the 27-second, out-of-context clip I watched on Twitter (posted by BlueGeorgia), DeSantis got my attention because he did not take the expected MAGA, “own the libs,” or anti-Antifa stance. He took, or so I was made momentarily to believe, the victim’s side. “If a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you,” he stated matter-of-factly to the camera, “you have a right to flee for your safety. If you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault… You have a right to defend yourself in Florida.”
Hear, hear. Yes.
But hold up. That’s not right. There’s no surprise here.
It took less than 30 seconds, or much scrolling of comments, to discover that that 27-second, out-of-context clip did not refer to what happened to Renee Good. As Twitter user ThatFellow pointed out, DeSantis was not responding to Minnesota in January 2026 but to Florida in June 2025. He was, in fact, making the opposite point to the one BlueGeorgia was using the clip to make. He was referring not to the rights of protestors to flee from ICE but to the rights of drivers to escape protestors by running them over.
I am a pretty savvy media consumer. Except in the case of a natural disaster in which the facts are not at all in dispute, I don’t believe anything I read or see at first or second glance. I will wait for confirmation from an unbiased source, and if that is not available, as it often isn’t, I will seek out confirmation from sources representing opposing biases. But I learned about this tragedy for the first time when I was absentmindedly scrolling Twitter, which is a propaganda factory in the best of times. The afternoon of January 7 was a lesser time, and the app devolved into a surreal ideological tug of war set at warp speed. The top post in my feed was the zoomed-in, slow-motion video of the moments when ICE officers approached Good’s window. So was the next. And the next. The same clip was repeated tweet after tweet, but half of the tweeters were using it to call Good out as a domestic terrorist, and the other half were using it to call her a murder victim.
The tug-of-war messages:
“If you hate ICE, this video proves they are guilty of cold-blooded murder.”
“If you support ICE, this video proves the agent acted in self-defense.”
“If you hate ICE, this video proves they are guilty of cold-blooded murder.”
“If you support ICE, this video proves the agent acted in self-defense.”
And on and on and on and on.
This is why I was primed to hear a voice of non-partisan reason in Ron DeSantis, stating what seemed to me to be the obvious truth: that Renee Good, while provocative, was not trying to run over anyone, was justified in trying to get away from an armed man trying to pull her out of her car, and was, therefore, wrongfully killed.
Our messy real world does not comport with the superficial demands of an insatiable, tribal algorithm. The pundits who weighed into the algorithm with takes so fast they seemed simultaneous to the event itself should have lost all credibility for their irresponsible rashness. But it seems the pundits who instantly decried that Renee Good was using her Honda Pilot—its glove compartment stuffed with kids’ toys—as a deadly weapon still have their jobs punditting. Credibility is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholders are mostly political partisans who seek out information curated to confirm their priors.
I was, I now realize, distraught by the indecency of what I was seeing and looking for decency to reassert itself. Decency is a thing we all know when we see it. It is not interested in a competition for attention or prestige. Decency is offering condolences to the mourners, even when you did not like the person they are mourning. It is waiting your turn in line when you are in a rush, holding the door open for a slow-moving person, helping to pick up a mess of groceries spilt on the sidewalk, getting to a meeting late because you stopped to help pull someone’s car out of a ditch.
Our sense-making figures in the media have a still higher bar for decency. They are called on to have the courage to tell the people the truth even when the truth contradicts the beliefs of their tribe. They are called on to at least acknowledge that posses of trigger-happy men do not belong in American neighborhoods.
Very few of them are meeting this bar. (One notable exception was Geraldo Rivera, who spoke out forcefully and clearly on NewsNation against anyone who would “spin” the facts of what happened to Renee Good into an act of domestic terrorism.)
We hear a lot these days about George Orwell. Ironically, he enjoys evergreen relevancy not because he was not concerned with promoting anti-fascism or socialism, per se, but because he was concerned with promoting the best in human nature against the partisan instinct that is poisoning our democracy. Five years before the publication of “1984,” he wrote this: “Either power politics must yield to common decency, or the world must go spiralling down into a nightmare into which we can already catch some dim glimpses.”
