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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:

  1. This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

  2. The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.

  3. It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.

  4. it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

  5. Shooting her would have had no effect on his safety, even if she had gotten traction. They were at “point blank” range.

All in all I think everybody here is a victim of the current evil in our society. A woman in a gay relationship with a recently deceased husband, in a new city, is being fed a constant stream of propaganda. I can imagine the state of mind if this person, and it isn’t pleasant.

She decided to try and help, which is good, but was essentially a pawn, or unknowing martyr for political power struggles I doubt she understood. A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber.

The iceman: I expect better than this. Unlike the woman, acting on pure propaganda fueled adrenaline, he is supposed to train for this. He also interacts with these people daily. He should be thinking rationally here, and the rational move is to just get out of the way, not walk in front of the car of a neurotic woman screaming at you. He is legally, technically in the clear, but this was immoral. Hes basically exploiting a series of laws and norms to allow him to “innocently” kill a woman as a form of retribution. This is akin in my mind to entrapment of some form. The iceman sets up a series of traps, and just waits for an untrained, trigger, fight or flight woman to fall into one of them. He shouldn’t be setting traps, he should by building golden off-ramps to de-escalate.

Unfortunately the same which gripped both the woman and the shooter is gripping everybody forming an opinion online around this. nyTimes put out am [absurd] “forensic analysis” and determined she was trying to escape, which will never be questioned by the blue tribe ever. We will forever live in the reality where an iceman killed a woman in cold blood on Jan 7th 2026 in Minneapolis.

I don’t think this will metastasize into Floyd 2.0, mostly because the woman was white, but also because of the weather. We’ll see how this weekend plays out though.

A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?

Is there any evidence she was at a protest or in the act of protesting? There's some evidence she wasn't.

We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.

I have an unverified video being shared around twitter that shows a supposed interview of a neighbour near the scene talking about seeing Renee actively engage in blocking ICE vehicles.

I traced it back to this GAB post, but can't find the wider interview that it was clipped from.

Edit: Got it; I traced it back to its source. There was an interview by local MPR photojournalist Ben Hovland with locals up on TikTok.

The full interview is here.

2nd Edit: Seems from the full clip that she was repeating information she received from 'another guy that was driving behind her'.

You should probably archive footage like that.

Do you know of any good tools to archive video? I know catbox is a good hosting site.

My first choice is to throw yt-dlp at it, if it fails I look at the network tab in the dev tools and pick either the largest media element or m3u files if any.

Thank you.

I have read that her wife was outside the car when this all happened. Presumably the wife was there for the protests.

I suppose it’s possible that Renee was coming to pick her wife up, which would explain why she might stop in a weird spot in the middle of the action.

Except all the commentary from the pro-protest side is that she was there as a Legal Observer, or otherwise intentionally. The ex-husband quoted in news articles says she and her wife were both in the car after dropping off her kid to school. So it doesn't seem like "Wifey was at protest, Good just turned up to collect her".

Except all the commentary from the pro-protest side is that she was there as a Legal Observer,

Reminds of the situation in Gaza with all kinds of Hamas operatives claiming to be "journalists."

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/08/renee-good-woman-killed-by-ice-agent-in-minneapolis-was-a-mother-poet-and-new-to-the-city

Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Macklin Good had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school Wednesday and was driving home with her current partner when they encountered a group of ICE agents on a snowy street in Minneapolis, where they had moved last year from Kansas City, Missouri.

I'm not sure how much credibility to give this semi-sourced story, but it seems to me like if she was involved in an organized protest the government probably knows what group it was by now, and there's going to be video all over the internet of her at this or other protests. It's not really the kind of thing that would be a mystery.

To say nothing of the footage that ICE definitely has that has not been released for some reason.

The more statements issued, the more confused I am.

If she was just trying to drive home with her new spouse after dropping off the kid at school, and she's new to the city, I could buy that "oops, turned down the wrong street and drove into the middle of a protest".

In that case, though, why was New Wifey outside the car? If this is "two women driving the wrong way by mistake", then both women should have been in the car when Good tried to park/turn/drive back.

From other places, I'm seeing them identify her as deliberately being there for the protest:

...Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison told NPR she was acting as “a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors.”

ELLISON: You know, these are some important legal questions that need to be determined. And I can tell you that there are a number of parallel prosecutorial authorities that could be employed here, including the county and the state and even the federal government if - but, you know, we're looking at the reality of - the Homeland Security secretary has already said, we did nothing wrong, even though there's been no investigation, which is really disturbing. You know, you would think that the Homeland Security secretary would be the first to say, let's suspend judgment and look into it. That's not what we saw. We saw the Homeland Security secretary defame, you know, Miss Good by calling her a domestic terrorist. She was anything but that. She was a compassionate neighbor trying to be a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors. That's what she was doing at the moment of her death. And she was a poet. She was a mom. She was a daughter. And I'm deeply saddened by what happened to her and her family. And so I think that it is important for us to investigate this matter thoroughly. We need to keep our legal options open, and we must have transparency and accountability from the government.

I don't know what exactly a legal observer is or what they do, but both stories can't be true. She can't be just someone who got caught up in an event she had no idea about and there to observe ICE for the sake of immigrants.

Also, it's probably ironic that "domestic terrorism" became a standard definition in 2020 when Biden was president.

Also, it's probably ironic that "domestic terrorism" became a standard definition in 2020 when Biden was president.

It's not ironic; it was Ron Klain and Merrick Garland seeking legal cover to use the US domestic spying apparatus against political dissidents. Sulla never accomplishes his goals, he lays the groundwork for the populares to return with a vengeance.

Okay, but if this really was "innocent bystander got caught in the protest", why didn't she stop the car? Why be "fleeing the officer trying to arrest her"? Maybe she panicked, but that's a really bad decision as it turned out.

It's not that surprising she would panic though, the ICE officer strides towards her car and tries repeatedly to open her car door.

Thats only a reasonable response if she thought the ICE officer was an impersonator though...

I don't think it's reasonable, I think it's predictable.

We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.

My High School driving instructor would like to respectfully disagree with you.

Yesterday the narrative for Democrats was that she was a "Legal Observer", what that is I don't know.

Libs of TikTok

Direct to Rep. Ilhan Omar's Tweet.

The term "legal observer" was trademarked in the U.S. by the National Lawyers Guild, a longstanding radical activist group. I mostly remember them from Days of Rage, regarding them funding and otherwise supporting the Weather Underground. Searching around I can't find confirmation of whether she was actually a certified NLG Legal Observer or if it's other activists using the same terminology, as another comment pointed out even the ACLU uses the term. (And it looks like the trademark is lapsed.)

I got the impression “legal observer” wasn’t a job title, but a claim that she was observing the protest legally.

It's definitely not a job title, but I'm reminded of ACLU Legal Observers, where the point is to observe and document the legal interactions at a protest, either between protesters and police, or protesters and counter-protesters. In theory, they're supposed to specifically be separate from the protest even if they're associated with the protestors, though sometimes they get very hands-on.

That said, I can't find good or trustworthy information on the status here.

Apparently it can be kind of like a job title: https://www.nlg.org/massdefenseprogram/los/

Doesn't sound like a paying job, but the words do have meaning I guess...

That was my first thought too, but I think now that it means “person observing the legality (or lack thereof) of the officers.”

Yeah everyone seems to have made that assumption from all sides, but her family members have come forward and said she wasn't involved in any protests.

With all the cameras around, I'd think we'd have pretty concrete evidence if she was involved in any organized protest group. So far it's just politician statements.

It's a pretty dark scene here if she wasn't, @WhiningCoil might be right about this country.

I'm still hoping someone will put out a longer video that shows the lead up. All the footage I've seen so far is the same couple of videos that all begin seconds before the shooting (granted, it's entirely possible that's just when people started recording).

People here seem to be taking it as a given that she was trying to block ICE vehicles, but the footage we have doesn't actually support that. There are ICE vehicles on either side of her, and we see another vehicle pull past her before the confrontation. It is inference, but it looks more to me like ICE boxed her in rather than vice versa.

Depends on the layout of the street, right?

Man, don't ping me on this. There is nothing I can say that won't get me banned!

I kid, I kid.

Kind of.

It does bring me comfort though that I no longer need to say the things that will get me banned. You know.

I'm not trying to get you into trouble. Quite the opposite, this is strong bayesian evidence that you might be right. Initially I assumed that ICE was going after an immigrant, and the escaping immigrant was indifferent to driving at a cop and got shot in the process, and that seemed unfortunate but basically orderly to me. Then it came out that this was a middle aged white woman, but there were the allegations this was a protestor, which seems more like "bad situation all around."

But if it really is the case that this was an American citizen, driving down the street, trying to turn around, and got shot; and the response is as it has been. Then this is a pretty deep black pill for me. I hope it isn't the case.

Sorry, do you mind elaborating what you're talking about for the peanut gallery?

What is WhiningCoil right about? Are they pro or anti ICE?

I'm not angling for anyone to be banned (why would anyone be banned is another question I have) but this interaction has flown right over my head

What is WhiningCoil right about?

My learned friend in Kettlebells Mr. Coil has frequently expressed distress that his ideological enemies want him dead, and would celebrate his and his family's deaths simple because of who he was. Particularly around the Jay Jones controversy.

If this woman turns out not to have been involved in any protest actions, then the broad reaction from the right wing internet is pretty black pilling to me, in that people are celebrating the killing of a white American citizen because she looks like an ideological enemy.

But in this case it would be the "other side" celebrating her death no?

Jay Jones is a Dem, and anyone who's happy this lady was iced (hah) is presumably republican.

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Defenders of Good seem to think she was part of the protest. That would be wild if not.

Not particularly. The information has been spotty from the beginning.

And anyway, protestors have a vested interest in it being bad for protestors to get shot, for obvious reasons. Protestors don't think it is better if she was an "innocent bystander" as they think protestors are definitionally innocent.

The only people interested in the distinction would be those, like me, whose opinions would change if she weren't protesting.

After big terrorist attacks, many groups claim credit to display impact and efficacy. Similarly, one can easily imagine relevant groups here claiming a martyr or presuming her involvement - it strengthens the besieged narrative too.

Actually, the fact she was being recorded by her partner surely blows that idea out of the water

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