OPINION:
You just knew when anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement protester Renee Good tragically died in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 that the media would turn her into the next George Floyd.
Floyd, whose asphyxiation death under the knee of a police officer triggered the 2020 anti-police riots that took at least 25 lives and caused $2 billion in damage, has since been virtually deified. Minneapolis has named a square after him and erected a “living memorial” featuring art installations, including a raised-fist sculpture, in his honor. At least a dozen colleges have created scholarships in his name, and two charitable foundations dedicated to “social justice” now bear his name.
Fast forward to Jan. 7, 2026. Videos, including one from the chest cam of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who reportedly shot Ms. Good three times as her SUV apparently hit him, have been viewed on social media millions of times. Good and her partner, Becca Good, along with others, were protesting ICE enforcement in a Minneapolis neighborhood.
President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi have said the footage shows the agent fearing for his life against what amounted to domestic terrorism. Others have said the agent overreacted and should not have fired his weapon. The public seems sharply divided over who was at fault.
Not the media. They are all in on the beatification of Ms. Good and the vilification of Mr. Ross.
A case in point: a front-page piece in The Washington Post on Jan. 10, headlined, “We had whistles. They had guns.”
Written by four Post reporters, the article has a close-up color picture of Good with the caption: “Good was ‘pure love,’ her wife said in a statement.”
In a later article, The Post reported that the two women had never officially married. Renee Good, a mother of three, had been married twice. Her second husband died in 2023.
The Jan. 10 article ran to a full page inside, with the headline, “Family, friends remember kindness of woman shot by ICE.” Similar accounts appeared in the networks and other major newspapers.
Over the past few weeks, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have been surging into Minnesota to enforce immigration laws and root out social services fraud. In response, prominent Democrats and media have turned up the rhetoric.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called ICE a “modern-day Gestapo,” and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said it’s turning America into “Nazi Germany.”
On Wednesday, The New York Times jacked up more anti-ICE sentiment with this headline: “Federal Agent Shoots Man in Minneapolis, Prompting Tense Protests.”
The man was an illegal Venezuelan immigrant resisting arrest. The agent was attacked by two other people wielding a shovel and a broomstick handle. The agent, who was injured, shot the man in the leg. None of that context was in the lead paragraph, as noted by Newsbusters.org, which quoted the Homeland Security Department release that called the headline “despicably misleading.”
Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin compared ICE enforcement in Minnesota to the Iranian mullahs’ killing of thousands of protesters last week.
“From Tehran to my birthplace of Minneapolis, people are rising up against systems that wield violence without accountability,” he wrote on social media on Jan. 11. He followed this with more damning comparisons.
And Democrats wonder why many Americans think they are not exactly patriotic.
It doesn’t help that socialist-run Democratic teachers unions are educating children in government schools to hate their own country. As The Wall Street Journal opined of Mr. Martin, “Yoking a false image of U.S. authoritarianism to the freedom struggle in Iran is morally obtuse. It’s a slur against his own country.” The paper also noted that Mr. Martin’s post “undermines the Iranian people, who count on the U.S. and call desperately for its help, to say that America is yet another murderous tyranny, comparable to their own.”
Congressional Democrats are in the uncomfortable position of defending Mr. Walz, who presided over billions of dollars in social services fraud. They are also lamenting President Trump’s liberation of Venezuela from the grip of communist dictator Nicolas Maduro. They tried and failed to pass a measure barring Mr. Trump from using any more military forces in Venezuela.
Doing its part, The Washington Post ran a front-page story on Jan. 12 about a Venezuelan man whose soldier son was killed in the Maduro raid. The headline was: “A father mourns his ‘hero’ son.”
I’m not questioning a father’s grief, but whose side are you on, anyway? Just asking.
Meanwhile, Ms. Good’s relatives have hired the law firm that represented Floyd, so expect the same kind of media campaign that elevated Floyd, a drug addict and criminal, to hero status. Although both deaths are heartrending, the left’s exploitation is disgusting.
Never forget its concoction of the false “Hands up, don’t shoot” narrative about Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, which spawned riots and the “defund the police” movement.
Ms. Good’s family members “do not want her used as a political pawn, but rather as an agent of peace for all,” the law firm said in a statement.
Good luck with that.
Antonio Romanucci, a founding partner of the firm, told reporters, “We will honor her memory by seeking accountability and change in her name.”
Yes, we have seen how that goes.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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