🔒 But At Least Woke is Dead, Right?

On Wednesday they shot a poet.

 37 year old writer and mother of three Renee Nicole Good was sitting in her car observing an ICE raid in a Minneapolis neighborhood when a number of the goons rushed at her car, yelling at her to leave the area. Paradoxically, while issuing this command, they attempted to yank the door open. Panicked, she tried to leave as instructed, at which point, one of the officers pulled out a gun and shot her three times point blank in the face.

 According to the President and the Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, the officer who executed Good, Jonathan Ross, was fighting for his life in hospital after being fully run over by Good’s car.

 Here is footage of Ross immediately after the incident. As you can see, his crushed and mangled body is barely still recognizable as human.

I’m not going to post any of the half dozen videos of every conceivable angle of this incident because you can find them easily and even posting them for consideration gives undue credibility to the idea that there might be two sides to this. It is some of the cleanest video that you could possibly want of something like this. There’s no shaky cam or deceptive angles. Very, very clearly, at no point were any of the ICE officers directly in the path of where the vehicle was moving as it was moving. Certainly nobody got “run over,” even injured, even hurt.

 What happened was an ICE goon became infuriated that he wasn’t going to get to pull a woman out of a car and slam her face into the concrete and, let’s face it, probably molest her that day, so he decided to unload three rounds of substitute masculinity into her head instead.

 Once again, I assure you, this is not in any good faith way controversial. Nobody who saw the video disagrees that this is what happened, no matter what they say. I don’t know what kind of hallucinatory drug would even make that possible. And yet, in the most astonishing example of large scale gaslighting I think I’ve ever seen, pretty much every Trump voter I’ve been able to find has closed ranks, gallingly insisting to people with working eyes that this is an image of a man shooting in self defense as he is actively being run over by a car that is speeding directly toward him:

What chills me to the bone in fear for Good’s family is that, in the space of a few days, this innocent woman has become one of the most despised human beings among the American and international far right. The myth that she tried to run down an ICE agent isn’t even on the top of the list of the reasons she deserved to die. Consider, for instance, the fact that she listed pronouns in her social media profiles.

She was a poet, she was in a same sex marriage, and she had a kid with no male role model (they like to imply she abandoned her child’s father when in fact he died). Did I mention the pronouns?

They are projecting that she looks like a Karen, like their HR nightmare.

Every right-wing influencer from the gutter trash like Tim Pool right up to the Vice President of the United States is celebrating her death, not because she attacked a cop, which they know isn’t true, but because she represents something they have been champing at the bit about for a while now: Permission to expand scope. To move beyond immigrants and black people and start disposing of other undesirables.

 I know that we already crossed this Rubicon with George Floyd and probably earlier than that, but this is just another terrifying example of how the American right, and indeed Trump supporters in other countries around the world, have coalesced into something closer to a cult than a political movement.

 But hey, you know what?

 At least Woke is dead!

That’s right, boys and girls, rejoice! We did it!!

 No more interracial couples on TV, we did it!! Woke is dead!! You can say faggot again!! Woke is dead!!

Gigantic asses in videogames!! We’re bringing back plastic straws!! Woke is dead!! Blackface is back and we’re putting the radium back in cough medicine!!

At least, that’s the concern of a certain breed of enlightened centrist, people who don’t like fascism but also don’t like that they cast some black people in the Lord of the Rings TV series, and think that the latter explains and maybe even partially justifies the former.

 Ben Cohen of The Banter is certainly no fan of Donald Trump. He calls him fascistic and rails against the billionaire oligarchs and the dismantling of democracy. But as the New Year rolled in and Cohen reflected upon the eve of Trump’s second year as America’s first monarch, he chose to open it like this:

 I have a confession to make. A part of me has enjoyed watching the left’s radical identity politics movement crumble under assault from the Trump administration. DEI is gone. Gender pronouns are out. Biological men taking part in women’s sport is becoming a thing of the past.

 This kind of instinctual “I’m nervous about calling out brutal ethnic cleansing because it might make people think I respect queers” caveat is the kind of centrist technique I’ve decided to call a Silverism after this classic from the “black people can’t restrain their jungle instinct to eat cats” era of the 2024 campaign:

But only the brain of the kneejerk-anti-wokeist can come up with a mental Korbut flip like Cohen’s assertion that America willingly electing a white supremacist is a “cathartic reckoning” because it somehow debunks the idea that America has a white supremacy problem:

 More than that, the Democrats appear to finally understand that the vast majority of Americans think they are out of touch elitists. Outside of liberal enclaves, people don’t use terms like “Latinx”, “BIPOC”, and “intersectionality”. They don’t believe America is a white supremacist country and would desperately love to move beyond the stultifying tenets of Wokeism. The party refused to listen until it was too late, and the reckoning has felt cathartic.

 Now, I am of course also a white guy but I am nevertheless more hesitant to posit that the utility of the suffering of minorities is to teach other white guys a lesson. Certainly not about a complaint as insipid as “woke.” Like, there’s a paramilitary force rounding up anyone on the street who looks vaguely Latin and disappearing them to a swamp fortress where many of them just die of exposure or exotic disease and that’s the first news their family will hear about them after their disappearance and it feels good knowing that Anita Sarkeesian will learn her lesson from this and stop criticizing our video games. Native Americans might lose all rights to their own ancestral land and that’ll serve Barbara from HR right for making me sit through that fucking land acknowledgment, I hope she’s suffering.

 No, “cathartic” is not the word I would use for this. I don’t use the pain of fascism’s victims as a tasty snack to make me feel better thinking that someone might be sorry that they made me hear the word “BIPOC” all those times.

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