Why can’t the right say Renee Good’s death is a tragedy?

One of the ugliest features of the woke left is its infantile revelling in the death of people it dislikes. ‘Good’, they said, when dad-of-two Charlie Kirk was mercilessly slain. They made a pin-up boy of Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the cruel killing of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’, mobs wailed. Some of us, sickened by such death-gloating, looked to the other side in the culture war for at least a flickering flame of humanity. But it seems to have gone out there, too.

The response of the digital right to the ICE shooting in Minnesota this week has been depraved. No sooner had Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mum of three, been shot dead by an agent from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) than swarms of right-wingers were justifying her death and even celebrating it. ‘An aggressive communist carpet-muncher who FAFO’ (fucked around and found out), wrote alt-right ‘internet personality’ Laura Loomer. Imagine how far you need to have drifted from the shores of moral decorum to homophobically mock a freshly dead mother.

It wasn’t just scum like Loomer – more respectable voices ridiculed Ms Good, too. ‘This lesbian agitator gave her life to protect 68 IQ Somali scammers who couldn’t give less of a shit about her’, thundered Matt Walsh. This is the same Matt Walsh who in the wake of the woke left’s gross cheering of Charlie Kirk’s death said leftists would cheer his death, too. ‘They would spit on my grave’, he said. Like you did with Ms Good, you mean?

Social-media sites are awash with Good-bashing. She was a ‘commie’, a ‘lesbian whacko’, a ‘domestic terrorist’. The right lost its shit – justifiably – when activists and luvvies responded to the killing of Kirk by calling him ‘hateful’ and ‘a bigot’. And yet here they are not only rushing to judgement on the shooting of Ms Good but also rushing to condemn her entire life. She was a crazy leftist and now she’s dead – The End. Really? There’s no room to mourn three children’s loss of their mother?

From the very top, the commentary about Good has felt untethered from the old norms of morality. US vice-president JD Vance said the media should ask ‘every Democrat who’s running for president’ whether they believe the ICE agent ‘was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over’. Deranged? Sir, that is not how you speak about a young-ish mother who just lost her life. It feels mad to have to say this.

At least Vance said the killing of Ms Good was a ‘tragedy’, which is something. But this whole episode has been chillingly revealing. It confirms beyond a shadow of doubt the existence of a ‘woke right’. The digital dancers on Good’s grave are a mirror image of the left they love to hate. Like them, they have dispensed with the rules of humanity and have come to see death as a just infliction on people they disagree with. ‘He was a disgusting transphobe’, said some when Kirk was killed. ‘She was a lesbian nutter’, said others when Good was killed. The rage between these two camps really is the narcissism of small differences, for stripped down they are two cheeks of the same arse of inhumanity.

As if to confirm it, woke radicals are protesting against the killing of Good by calling on people to kill ICE agents. In New York City last night, the cry went up: ‘Save a life, kill an ICE!’ They also chanted ‘Kristi Noem will hang!’, referencing Trump’s secretary of homeland security who defended the ICE agents’ actions in Minnesota. The digital right shrugs over a woman’s death, the phoney left dreams of more death. We need to ask how the hell we got here.

Indeed, we should not overlook the role of faux-progressives in dangerously upping the ante on the ICE question and paving the way for the kind of tetchy, tragic clash we saw in Minnesota. American leftists call ICE a ‘terrorist organisation’. They compare it with the Gestapo. They agitate for anti-ICE violence. In November, I saw with my own eyes graffiti in Boston that said, ‘Kill your local ICE agent’. Having conspired in the hyperbolic depiction of ICE agents as a Nazi-like threat to the republic who possibly deserve death, leftists and liberals cannot feign innocence when ICE agents get jittery and protesters get hurt.

There is nothing democratic about the bourgeois agitation against ICE. These people fantasise that they are facing down a fascist menace, but in truth they’re blocking something millions of Americans voted for: the refortification of America’s borders. Late last year, a Harvard / Harris poll found that 78 per cent of registered voters support deporting illegal migrants who’ve committed crimes, and 56 per cent support deporting all illegal aliens. The anti-ICE rage of the graduate left is a cry of imperious contempt for the political desires of working-class America.

And yet, no one should be shot for being a wrongheaded wokeist. Can we agree on that? I have watched all the videos of the killing of Ms Good and my opinion is that it was unjustified. But I will await the official investigation before casting judgement. Too many people seem to be suffering from ‘internet brain’, feeling the need to spout a definitive view instantaneously. As the Free Press put it, from Kristi Noem, who instantly defended the killing, to Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who got the digital left hot under the collar by telling ICE to ‘get the fuck out of Minneapolis’, everyone has reacted to the killing with ‘the speed and logic of the internet’. But that digital frenzy for instant posturing and tribal point-scoring is ill-suited to a political realm where calm and truth should rule.

It feels like the moral guardrails of political discourse have been dismantled. I know very well that the woke elites are primarily responsible for this, with their brutish culture of cancellation and their branding of their opponents not just as people who are ‘wrong’ but people who are evil, disgusting, excrement on the bottom of society’s shoe. I know there is staggering hypocrisy in their reaching for the smelling salts now that lowlife right-wingers are saying in response to the death of Ms Good: ‘I don’t care about dead communists.’ And yet to ape the woke left’s excesses in order to get one over on them is nuts. It drags all of a society into a death spiral of loathing and recrimination where politics should be.

No doubt some will think me ‘gay and retarded’ – to use internet-speak – for lamenting the death of a woman whose views were likely the opposite of my own. I’m sure it’s true Ms Good would have considered me a transphobe and a populist irritant. So what? I can still be concerned about state overreach, a possibly unjust killing and the fact that there are three children in the United States without a mother today. If that’s ‘gay and retarded’, so be it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.