In Renee Good’s killing, ICE’s misogyny isn’t a side note—it’s the point

In the days since ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good, corporate media appears to have decided on the narrative that divisive political partisanship makes it impossible to say what really happened the morning of January 7. Video analyzed by The New York Times and The Washington Post led both outlets to conclude that the Department of Homeland Security’s official story — that Good was a “domestic terrorist” who had intentionally “weaponized” her vehicle against Ross — is deliberately inaccurate.

Footage captured by Ross himself, released on January 9, supports this. Moments before she’s killed, Good is on video speaking directly to Ross: “It’s okay, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Ross’ response comes only after he fires three shots into Good’s face as she attempts to turn her car away; Ross still has the phone in his hand when a man’s voice — presumably his — utters two words: “F*cking b*tch.” Conservative onlookers celebrated the video: To them, the disdain in Ross’ voice wasn’t evidence of guilt, but confirmation that a woman who challenged the authority of a man in uniform got exactly what she deserved.

But even before the recording surfaced, Good had been condemned by conservative onlookers in language that was terrifyingly familiar: She must have done something to provoke him. Why didn’t she just do what she was told? It’s too bad, but she brought it on herself. These are phrases that have been used to explain away men’s assault, rape and domestic violence since time immemorial. They are also, apparently, how the MAGA crowd now identifies women whose desire to help neighbors avoid being deported offends their sensibilities, as talk-show host Erick Erickson established when describing Good with the acronym AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) in a now-deleted post on X.

And when the woman with Good during the incident was identified as her wife, Rebecca Good, the narrative of the couple as murderous man-haters was picked up by The Daily Mail in a headline that was as homophobic as it was convoluted: “Wife who brought ICE shooting victim Renee Nicole Good to Minneapolis protest is named as handywoman, 40 — as depths of couple’s disdain for Trump is revealed.” The narrative had been set: A lesbian with a butch wife made it impossible for an ICE agent standing in front of her car not to shoot her.

Conveniently, this narrative can withstand the gradual crumbling of the White House’s own version of events. Of course he shot her — she’s a domestic terrorist. Okay, maybe she’s not a domestic terrorist, but it was still self-defense. Okay, fine, it wasn’t self-defense, but she must have said or done something to provoke him. Sure, she said she wasn’t mad at him, but did you hear how she said it? Accompanied by revelations of FBI interference with an investigation, these fast-moving goalposts quickly became part of DHS’ permission structure for its agents: Go ahead and shoot; we’ll find a way to justify it. The “F*cking b*tch” of it all, however, is illuminating, because all the details observable in the video — everything that lets us see who Good was — characterize the fury of men unable to get what they want from a woman.

It’s fair to assume, for instance, that Ross was looking to intimidate both Renee Good and her wife (who was outside the car, directing Renee in making a three-point turn). Neither woman gives him that satisfaction: Renee speaks to him calmly and clearly; she’s not gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles but has one hand on it. Rebecca more closely matches Ross’ energy. He has a phone in his hand; she has one in hers. She’s not scared of Ross either, instead poking fun at his obvious desire to intimidate.

“Race and Reasonableness in Police Killings,” a 2020 paper published in Boston University Law Review, notes that a prominent piece of the “baggage” law-enforcement officers bring to their perceptions of danger during traffic stops is “hypermasculinity . . . An exaggeration of masculine qualities such as aggressiveness, endorsement of violence and anxiety over self-presentation as a dominant male.” “Anxiety over self-preservation as a dominant male” is also a tidy summation of a presidential administration characterized by strongman theater (the Secretary of War, the military parade, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning”) and recent statements about living in a world “governed by force,” where the United States will “do something on Greenland whether they like it or not.”

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In the recent history of violence committed by men — mass public shootings, women killed for refusing to talk to men on the street, staggering murder rates of Black transgender women —  the hypermasculinity, homophobia and rage at women turned outward is a bright, broad throughline. In incidents of aggression too numerous to name, the fury of men and boys who have been denied the love, sex, deference or respect of women and girls is not only acknowledged — they are quite often subjects of sympathy.

The connection between mass shootings and pre-existing misogynist acts or beliefs is amply documented, often by the killers themselves. Yet corporate media has been reluctant to connect the dots when a male mass shooter’s previous rhetoric, harassment, domestic violence or stalking inevitably emerges in the aftermath of his crime. The shooter who took the lives of 58 people in Las Vegas in 2017 had a history of gendered violence, as did the man who shot up a Colorado abortion clinic in 2015, killing 3 people and injuring 9. In 2018, a man who hated women shot and killed two of them at a Tallahassee yoga studio in a putrid copy of a similar, and similarly motivated, shooting of 12 women, three fatally occurred at a Pennsylvania gym nearly a decade earlier.

These attitudes echo through past decades. From the murders of 14 women engineering students at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 and the 2006 incident in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania when a man tied up 10 girls in the classroom of an Amish school and shot them, killing 5, to the 2021 slaughter of Korean workers at a Florida massage parlor, misogyny kills repeatedly without directly being acknowledged as such. In its sprawling 2019 accounting of the misogyny behind mass shootings, Mother Jones found that “in at least 22 mass shootings since 2011—more than a third of the public attacks over the past eight years—the perpetrators had a history of domestic violence, specifically targeted women, or had stalked and harassed women.” (In the wake of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, meanwhile, Howard Stern joked that the shooters had wasted their bullets on the “really good-looking girls,” commenting, “I’d take them out with sex.”)

Another thing these incidents have in common is that the media reporting on them inevitably categorizes them as “lone-wolf” attacks. Even in cases where murderers leave behind manifestos and statements of affinity with online incel forums, the unwillingness to connect the dots between the murder of women and the broader social problem of misogyny is strategic: Not only does it preserve the lone-wolf profile, it all but ensures that attempts to identify it as pattern behavior are dismissed as hysterical overdramatics.

And this, too, is a pattern — one in which women are cast as simultaneously deserving of misogyny but histrionic when they point it out. In the burgeoning feminist blogosphere of the 2000s, the comments sections of blogs were rancid stews of stunningly angry misogyny, and the statement “the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism” became as reliable an internet law as Poe’s and Godwin’s. Feminist blogs were proving grounds for misogynists, whose trolling and memes escalated with the advent of social media like Twitter into campaigns of targeted racist and sexist harassment that included rape and death threats, DDOS attacks on feminist websites, and bomb threats called in to venues hosting feminist speakers. This was the coalition that Breitbart News and Steve Bannon would leverage in service of Trump: Edgelord Nation.

The ramp-up in ICE confrontations, however, shows the misogyny moving past culture-war rhetoric into real-world brute force. These aren’t men who want to show off their ability to destroy feminist talking points; they are men who want to hurt women and have been given carte blanche to do exactly that, and then frame themselves as innocent victims. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Tom Homan called descriptions of Jonathan Ross as a murderer “ridiculous,” suggesting that the word would “infuriate people more, which means there’s gonna be more incidents like this” — an anticipatory charge of look what you made me do. Footage posted Saturday of an agent knocking the cell phone out of the hand of a woman filming him shows his face (unlike Ross’, uncovered), seeming to savor the moment just before he reaches for her, asking “Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?”

Hypermasculinity and violence appear to be part of DHS’ criteria for new ICE personnel. The speed at which the agency has expanded since 2024 has already raised doubts about the vigor of its vetting and training process. And its January 3 announcement of a new “wartime recruitment” strategy to further beef up ICE appears to be going all in on menace and white grievance, from recruiting UFC enthusiasts to social-media posts that entreat would-be applicants to “Defend your culture!” An “interest in guns and tactical gear” is also a stated plus; meanwhile, the 20 weeks of training previously required of ICE agents has been compressed into a reported 8 days. In this context, Homan’s statement feels like it might be more of a promise than a warning.

The only upside to a hypermasculine goon squad is, of course, the lack of both impulse control and common sense that has already characterized its acts of violence. Last October in Chicago, a woman who was in the process of warning people that ICE was in the area was accused of “ramming” a Border Patrol vehicle, whose driver, Charles Exum, then shot her 4 times. Marimar Martinez survived and would likely have been charged with assaulting a federal officer if not for Exum’s self-congratulatory texts about the incident. (“I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”)

Now, as Fox News whips up fear about “organized gangs of wine moms” and the White House casts around for new ways to devalue Good and what she stood for, it’s hard not to feel the words spoken by Ross still hanging in the air, heavy with the true burden of MAGA’s warrior ethos: a desire for respect that will never be earned, that can only be taken by force.