the Shoot First, Rationalize Later edition

Nine FACTS, One LIE
Issue #35
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1. The woman's name is Renee Nicole Good. The woman is dead. And that is where factuality ends and religion begins.

2. Sounds like she'd been following ICE around all day, filming, yelling things with her partner as a sort of Citizen's Protest against both the actions and overall legitimacy of ICE. There are many reasons to question the legitimacy of ICE, and many ways to protest their actions, none of which are particularly effective, and most of which involve social media.

3. The wisdom inherent in both ICE as a political tool, and verbally confronting ICE as a political response, is equally dubious. Since deportation numbers under Obama and Biden are about the same as those under Donald J. Trump, ICE is really a performative tool of control pretending to be a legal method of enforcement.

4. As a species, we respond to images, not math. It SEEMS like something has changed through the deployment of ICE, but it's more that giddily depicted brutalism has entered, and been widely embraced, by a percentage of culture that gets high on fear experienced by people in a position they will almost certainly never themselves be.

5. Hey, you can open-field tackle an endless row of laborers in endless Home Depot parking lots, but we will still have the same understaffed courts, non-existent immigration policies, broken and feckless congress, transpiration of political courage, and a convenient racial toolbox with which to ignore the same set of problems and the same lack of solutions.

6. The Brutal Truth: America will never deport its way back to a perceived National Whiteness that will make poorly educated and perpetually angry whites more comfortable.

7. Although pretending to do so will make them vote.

8. But at some point the emotional and fiscal costs will overwhelm the fake benefits, and even those votes will shift to a better quality brand of hamburger.

9. Which is to say, Mr. JD Vance in 2028.

10. By the way, is there a more disingenuous, calculating, insufferable prick on the face of the planet than JD Vance? If so, please forward this mythical person's specs.

11. ICE just is, and almost certainly will be, until Donald J. Trump just isn't. But barring an emergency McNugget angioplasty, ICE will continue to behave as such, or worse, unless something happens that is so awful/embarrassing to the administration that it is forced to quietly back away.

12. Turns out in 2026 that incorrectly sending people to supermax in El Salvador and Uganda to be raped and tortured for crossing the border, branding them all Tren de Aragua cornerboys, and denying them Due Process, the ONE THING that we ALL have to be patriotic about, has yet to have that effect.

13. Spend five minutes online, and it's clear that shooting an obviously harmless woman in the face as payback for making your crap job a little crappier, and then calling her a "domestic terrorist" is totally cool with a percentage of Americans who are prepared to concede absolutely nothing, ever.

14. ICE is not moral or judicial or effectual. They are not police or military. They are a private army, and probably illegal themselves, but we won't know for sure until another decade of endless lawsuits scrape to an end. "FAFO" and "Why was she there in the first place?" and "If you obeyed the lawful commands of an officer, this wouldn't have happened" are party-line arguments that contrive to engage in rational discussion and event impartiality, but are really expressions of a transcendent personal anger to which facts, or even crisp video footage, does not apply.

15. Yes, Renee Nicole Good was probably being annoying as fuck, and other more subdued protesters, who watched her earlier behavior and even though sided with her politically wished she'd just shut up and go home already, did not think it a wise idea to plant their SUV between tired and illegally armed ICE goons on a freezing Minneapolis afternoon confident that shit would remain in control simply because they happen to live in White America.

16. All of that can be true, and all things can be stripped of politics, and Kristy Noem can be head of Homeland Security while also the most surgically altered aging stripper to ever be forcibly removed from the golden pole, and Donald J. Trump can be a sociopath and Baron Trump could have sold 150 million dollars worth of World Liberty Financial memecoins in the last year alone, even though his father is both President of the United States and owns World Liberty Financial, not to mention pardoned the guy from Binance who in exchange agreed to feature WLF tokens on his exchange, which, even for a world glutted with useless tech, is about as slick as method of gorging on bribes ever devised, and NONE of that changes the one elemental truth:

17. Renee Nicole Good was murdered. Your particular politics, religion, or political religion does not factor into that sentence.

18. America, in the end, is just another burgundy SUV half up on a bank of dirty snow, surrounded by police tape, inside of which evidence will be collected and bagged and stored and juries marshaled to be RIttenhoused, and names will be forgotten and lawyers paid extravagantly, but citizens of both parties will still know that their ride needs to be topped off, eventually, with fresh Venezuelan gas.