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Transcript:
Last week, I posted a video about anti-trans bias at the British Broadcasting Corporation, who pushed a 16-year veteran presenter to resign due in part to the support he’s shown trans people in his private life. This comment, posted shortly after my video went live, caught my eye:
@BFthoughts wrote, “In this video, it seems obvious why an officer could fear she was going to run into him with her vehicle. Wow! I hadn’t seen this angle. He had a reason to feel threatened. It is done.”
That comment, clearly, is not about the BBC pressuring a radio host to resign over his remarks supporting trans people. If you’re watching this video at a much later date or from another dimension, that comment is quite clearly referencing the recent murder of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year old woman who was gunned down in cold blood by American gestapo agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis as she was legally observing their unconstitutional actions, shortly after she dropped off her child at daycare.
At the time “BFThoughts” wrote his comment, I hadn’t even begun to write the script for a video on Ross murdering Good. It’s clear, then, that the comment was posted as a mistake. A bot mistake. As of this recording, it appears that BFThoughts has realized the mistake and deleted that comment, instead replacing it with a completely unintelligible but fairly standard transphobic comment about how it’s “lesbophobic” to suggest that trans women should be able to compete in sports with cis women. Excuse me, I mean lesbians. The only kind of woman who plays sports. I didn’t mention anything about trans women in sports in that video but hey, at least the little clanker’s new comment was somewhere in the same general universe as the video topic.
I begin this video with that story because I think it’s important that you understand immediately that the discourse you see online about this, and other headline-grabbing topics, is artificial. There are probably by this point in the video, just a minute or so after it goes live, already comments below saying similar inflammatory things as “BFThoughts.” You can reply to them once to debunk them or ignore them, but I’m going to advise you to not waste your time engaging in a back and forth argument with them. It’s not worth your time.
And hey, you know I’m serious when I say that because as the uploader, I get more money the more these bots go back and forth with you and each other. It’s still not worth it.
I’ll back up a bit for people who maybe aren’t in the United States and/or who aren’t getting an accurate picture of what’s going on here, from the mainstream news. “ICE” refers to “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” and they are essentially the gestapo of the Trump administration. They descend on American cities wearing masks and no identifying information, often not even badges signifying their branch of law enforcement, and they violently abuse US citizens in the name of finding and apprehending (and abusing and disappearing) undocumented immigrants.
Last week, a patron from the EU let me know that they had no idea that any of this was happening, despite the fact that I’ve been talking about it for the past year and warning about it for a year or two longer. Because of that, I just really really want you to know that this has been happening for many months now in Los Angeles, Portland, and briefly back in October they were here in the Bay Area but I’m pretty sure our politicians are chummy enough with the technocrats that the gestapo was redirected elsewhere.
I also need you to know that we are not just sitting back and letting it happen. People have been in the streets, not just protesting at big events like No Kings but doing real community organizing to protect one another. They’ve been passing out flyers with information on what our rights are regarding ICE and giving contact information for pro bono local legal advice. They’re 3D printing whistles and spreading codes so neighbors will know if and when ICE is on their streets. Every day people have been putting their bodies on the line to protect each other, with US citizens physically stopping the gestapo from disappearing people off the street, out of workplaces, and away from gas stations. They’ve been comforting the children left behind, finding contact information for the disappeared, and returning their empty cars to their families and letting them know how to begin finding their fathers, mothers, cousins, kids. And they’ve been pulling out their phones and recording what the gestapo would prefer to do in secret.
That’s what Renee Nicole Good was doing: legally observing the actions of ICE in her neighborhood while her partner recorded them. Good was driving her SUV when she stopped in the middle of the road, letting her wife out to record the ICE agents in unmarked SUVs behind them. The agents exited their vehicles and began recording Good, her wife, and their car’s license plate, as Good’s wife Becky assured them that (unlike ICE) they don’t swap their license plates to hide from scrutiny, and Good herself reassured ICE officer Jonathan Ross that it’s “fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
More officers then charged Good’s car, with one reaching his hand through the window and attempting to open the door. With Ross off to her left, Good turns the wheels of the car to the right and attempts to pull away. Unfortunately, Ross had already drawn his weapon. With his gun in one hand and his recording cell phone in the other, he shoots Good three times at point blank range, causing her to accelerate forward and crash into car parked down the street.
As Ross calmly walks away, he calls Good, the woman he just shot, “Fucking bitch.” Bystanders rush to render aid, including one person who identified themselves as a physician. The agents prevented anyone from trying to save Good, and she died from the gunshot wounds. Ross climbs into a vehicle and the agents leave the scene.
None of that is debatable. Not only was this all witnessed by a dozen bystanders, but it was also caught on camera from five different angles, including Ross’s own cellphone.
The only way for a fascist state to stop average people from seeing these videos, being horrified, and taking action to stop it from happening again is to lie. To lie loudly, boldly, and often. Lucky for them that they have practice.
On Xitter, aka X, aka Twitter, aka the website that has now become an avalanche of AI-generated pornographic images of unconsenting women and children, the Vice President of the United States posted, “Watch this, as hard as it is. Many of you have been told this law enforcement officer wasn’t hit by a car, wasn’t being harassed, and murdered an innocent woman.
“The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self defense.”
He attaches the video taken from Jonathan Ross’s cell phone, which does not show him being hit by a car (because he clearly wasn’t, as you can see from other angles) and does not show him being ‘harassed,’ though I’m sure both Ross and JD Vance consider it harassment when a woman good naturedly suggests they relax. As Margaret Atwood famously wrote, men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.
Another relevant quote is from Walter Langer, a psychoanalysis who lived in Germany during the rise of Adolph Hitler and produced a thorough analysis of him for the Office of Strategic Services, in which Langer wrote that Hitler’s “primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong;” and, crucially, “people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
Langer also later correctly predicted that Hitler would commit suicide once he knew he was beaten. Fun bonus fact.
Anyway, with video evidence contradicting them at every step, Trump’s lackeys have worked hard to repeat the biggest of lies over and over and over again: that Renee Good was a terrorist; that she was trying to run over Jonathan Ross; that Ross acted in accordance with the laws regulating these agencies; that shooting someone three times in the face as they are attempting to leave is “self defense;” that people who protest what ICE and the Republicans are doing deserve any violence that is visited upon them.
And it’s simply not enough to have these big, obvious lies repeated from the top down: as Hitler knew as well, good propaganda can boost a campaign from the bottom up. And so, the same bot networks that researchers have proven to have been used in the past to destabilize democracies, perpetrate genocides, and even make you hate famous women, are now in the comments here on YouTube, as well as on Xitter, BlueSky, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and hell, probably LinkedIn, agreeing with the Trump administration that the Big Lie is true.
Does that mean that everyone you see online spreading this lie is a bot? Of course not. The point of the bots is to provide the illusion of a support network, a safe space for idiots, bigots, and cult members to ignore their lying eyes and go along with the Trump administration’s propaganda without feeling that pesky cognitive dissonance. They don’t NEED to watch the videos of what happened. They can just upvote and support that guy who says he watched it and it proves that the Lie is Truth.
Helping all this? The grifters, of course. All the guys who called themselves capital L “Libertarians” ten years ago, like Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer, smell the money to be made from spreading the Big Lie in the rightwing grift machine and don’t hesitate to suddenly switch sides and throw personal freedom out the window. In between posts about how scary trans women are, Shermer backs up his new rightwing friends, pretending that a more reasonable interpretation of these videos is at first one that suggests maybe things are more ambiguous than they seem. As he’s confronted with more and more evidence against the Big Lie, like cleaned up audio showing that Good told the agents she was going to pull out, he desperately reaches for more reasons she deserved to die, like how someone (her wife) exited her car. Exiting cars should be punishable by death, that we can agree on.
Shermer was clearly struggling as even the poor Nazis who still comment on Xitter were pointing out that this is a clear case of murder. He was rescued when the Trump administration sent out the memo to the bots and grifters that the latest video released, the one shot from Ross’s cell phone, was in fact the one that actually proved Ross was innocent and Good, the woman he shot to death, was a criminal: “New footage makes this tragedy less ambiguous:
“1. Renee Good was not an innocent bystander who accidentally wandered into ICE actions,” which is wrong in that no one has ever stated Good was just a “bystander”: she was a legal observer who was legally documenting ICE’s actions.
“2. She & the other activists were not peacefully protesting from the sidewalk but taunting ICE agents (“show your face”) & standing in the road”
Again, wrong. We knew she wasn’t on the sidewalk because we knew she was gunned down in her car. And we also know that taunting ICE and standing in a road (neither of which are shown in the video he’s referring to) are, in fact, peaceful actions. If you’re interested in learning about the history of bigots and fascists pretending ever protest they don’t like isn’t peaceful, check out this video I made back in 2020, the last time law enforcement officers murdered someone in that same Minneapolis neighborhood for no reason.
“3. She was not in distress (smiling)”
Which is an INSANE thing to write. INSANE. The only way to parse this is to suggest that the gestapo can murder you as long as you aren’t crying. What the actual fuck? Yeah, she was being really nice to the guy who was about to murder her. Checkmate. Jesus fuck.
“4. Her partner got out of the car to further taunt agents in the road: “you want to come at us?””
Yeah, she got out to film them, which is what legal observers do. When they approached her in a threatening manner, she made a joke about license plates. Checkmate again.
“5. Her partner stated they intended to harass ICE agents “later””
She did not. This is yet another obvious and big lie that anyone can debunk by watching the video. She literally says that their license plate will be the same when the ICE agents come to harass THEM later. Because that’s what ICE does.
“6. When commanded to get out of the car, Good’s partner yells “drive, drive””
It does sound like she says that, probably because previous agents told them to drive away and now men with assault weapons were attempting to illegally gain access to their car by reaching through the window and pulling the handle. And for that, an innocent woman is dead, and Michael Shermer wants you to think that this is simply the “consequences” of her own (and her partner’s) actions.
Fuck Michael Shermer and the rest of his rightwing pro-murder pro-fascism sniveling grifters, who spread this lie even as we see ICE now enabled to literally go door to door, breaking into people’s homes, and dragging them away with zero accountability. They are filling their pockets with no concern that they are personally supporting Nazis. Tim Pool and Dave Rubin at least got paid millions of dollars by the Russians as a reward for spreading obvious lies…I wonder if Shermer is getting anything other than a handful of views on his shitty YouTube channel? I’m not sure which would be more pathetic, to be honest: if he was doing it for Russian disinformation money or for free in the desperate hope that he lands another spot on Joe Rogan.
So yeah, besides the Trump administration, the grifters, and the bots, you’ll find a few people here and there who go along with whatever lazy lie those pieces of shit are handing them, but don’t you fall for it. There are more of us than there are of them. Keep fighting, and keep spreading the truth. If you want to support the people ICE is brutalizing in Minneapolis, a friend on the ground pointed me to this great thread on Bluesky, which links to mutual aid funds for families in the communities hit the worst.
Apologies for those who read the transcript rather than watch the video, but at this point in post-production I had to stop and talk about something I saw after I’d finished filming. I watched the full video of the people who had ICE show up at their door demanding they turn over their Doordash driver. I really, truly want you to watch it in full, because you can see in real time how a person can transform from scared and unsure, and ready to (reluctantly) hand over an innocent person to the gestapo in order to protect her own family, to an angry, powerful voice who literally drives away the fascists from her doorstep. She doesn’t just find that power within herself–she finds it after opening her door and seeing her neighbors surrounding ICE, blowing their whistles and honking their horns to gather more people. She finds it in the thousands of people watching her on social media. She realizes she is right to stand up, and that she has support. THAT is the power that the fascists are hoping to emulate through grifters and bots. They do not have that power and they never will. WE have that power and we must continue to wield it to protect one another.
As always, links are in the transcript. Stay safe, and don’t let the bastards grind you down.
