To defend the indefensible, the right is going after white women as race traitors.
Vice President JD Vance speaks during a news briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on January 8, 2026.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
The killing of 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last Wednesday has shocked the world and become a political nightmare for the Trump administration.
The proper response to this horrific killing would be an independent and transparent investigation. Instead, the Trump administration has chosen the path of stonewalling, cover-up, and demonizing the victim—including by making sexist and homophobic attacks against Good.
The Trump administration immediately went on the offensive. Vice President JD Vance denounced Good as a “deranged leftist” who created “a tragedy of her own making.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted that Good was a “domestic terrorist.” A New York Post headline described Good as a “Warrior of the Left.”
It will surprise nobody that the government and its allies are blatantly lying about both Good and the circumstances of her death.
Analysis by The New York Times and others of the many videos taken of the shooting demonstrates that the White House’s account is wholly at odds with the evidence. Apart from the fact that shooting at a moving vehicle goes against standard guidelines for police conduct, the videos show that ICE agents were belligerent and unprofessional, and that Good herself was clearly trying to de-escalate the situation. Her last words were a comment to the officer who would soon kill her: “I’m not mad at you.” After Good was shot, one ICE agent seems to have yelled out, “Fucking bitch.”
None of these facts matter to the White House and its MAGA outriders, though. The comments by Noem and Vance were bad enough, but they were echoed by even more extreme language by pundits who fleshed out the idea that Good was dangerous (and therefore guilty of her death and perhaps deserving of it). The demonization of Good had a strong gender element and focused on her personal sexual identity as a lesbian. These attacks also highlighted the fact that she was a white woman who sacrificed her life for non-white immigrants, with the implication that she was a race traitor.
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The attacks on Good are remarkable for their ugliness and derangement. A few major ones should be highlighted.
Erick Erickson, a radio host who has in the past been a commentator on CNN and Fox News, tweeted, “An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her. Progressive whites are turning violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.”
Naomi Wolf, a onetime liberal who has become increasingly supportive of the far right since her promotion of anti-vaxxing ideas in 2021, posted:
I’ve seen enough videos of the faces of liberal white women in conflict with @ICE, to know what is up. Liberal men at this point (sorry) are disproportionately estrogenized, physically passive, submissive due to woke gender hectoring, or porn-addicted. White liberal women are disproportionately sexually frustrated. Policing others as in the pandemic was an outlet for them, but it was not nearly enough. The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE – who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men – because the conflict is a form of physical release for them. They long for actual kinetic battle and it will get even uglier.
It’s hard to know how to respond to Wolf’s screed. The idea that women are made insane by a lack of heterosexual satisfaction is the type of pseudo-science that was common in the mid-20th century but which has been refuted by generations of feminist scholarship. Further, the fact that Good was a lesbian makes Wolf’s analysis absurd. To be sure, Wolf is notorious for her complete disregard for scholarly standards, so much so that her 2019 book Outrages was canceled by the publisher after it was shown that its core arguments rested on a deep misunderstanding of archival records.
Lauren Chen, a right-wing media entrepreneur who allegedly has been funded by a Russian media influence campaign, posted, “This liberal woman was willing to take on federal agents, to disrupt ICE operations, in order to protect criminal Somalis.” According to Chen, “this type of thinking is almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.” Matt Walsh, host of a podcast and regular writer for The Daily Wire, made the same point in even more repugnant terms: “This lesbian agitator gave her life to protect 68 IQ Somali scammers who couldn’t give less of a shit about her.”
Some have been puzzled by the fact that MAGA, a movement of white nationalism, is so quick to demonize white women. But there is no paradox here. White nationalism depends on a certain type of white woman: someone who is “loyal” to the white race and compliant with patriarchy. The ideal white woman follows the classic model of barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen as well as being obedient to a male husband.
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Renee Good didn’t follow the MAGA ideal on a number of fronts, both as a lesbian and as an activist for immigrant rights. On their own terms, MAGA is right to hate Good; she lived in defiance of their ideals. But for the majority of people who aren’t MAGA, Good’s defiance of reactionary norms was admirable.
The fact that MAGA is so intent on demonizing Good shows that the defense of her killing rests on thin ice. After all, if it were clear-cut that Ross was acting in self-defense, any discussion of Good’s character would be unnecessary. But precisely because the evidence doesn’t support the self-defense narrative, MAGA is trying to shore up support by portraying Good as someone who deserved to die. This defamation of a murdered woman is itself proof of the moral depravity of MAGA.
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