- Today’s posts are about the Minnesota ICE killing and the responses, from Trump and Vance to Jesse Bering, Jonathan V. Last, and others.
- An essay by Elay Shech about why we should trust science even though it keeps changing. (Because there is no alternative.)
So yesterday an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in her SUV in Minneapolis, and the usual suspects were quick to say the shooting was justified because the woman was obviously a left-wing radical terrorist, or something, without of course having any evidence to support that charge. Fortunately there were people there who took videos of the event — in fact there are volunteer groups who attend ICE raids specifically to capture evidence of what they’re doing — which undercut the knee-jerk accusations of Tramp and Vance and others. Here’s a current status:
CNN, analysis by Aaron Blake, 8 Jan 2026: JD Vance just sharply undercut the Trump team’s ICE shooting narrative
Mere hours after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent killed a woman Wednesday in Minneapolis, the Trump administration staked out a maximalist position.
It wasn’t just that the agent was justified in shooting 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good because he legitimately feared her running him over. It was that the woman “willfully and viciously ran over” the agent, President Donald Trump said. It was an act of “domestic terrorism,” according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
The videos didn’t show that at all; the woman in the SUV attempted to drive off, turning her wheels to the right to pass by, not run over, the ICE agent who nevertheless shot her dead. Faced with the video evidence, Vance, at least, sorta tried to backtrack.
In a press briefing Thursday at the White House, Vance mostly toed the administration’s line in standing strongly behind the ICE agent and even suggesting the woman was part of some kind of left-wing “network.”
But when a reporter challenged Vance on how he knew this was deliberate, Vance conceded that it wasn’t 100% clear, allowing that maybe she was indeed just scared and perhaps wasn’t actually targeting the agent.
“Look, I don’t know what’s in a person’s heart or in a person’s head,” Vance said. “And obviously, we’re not going to get a chance to ask this woman what was going on. What I’m certain of is that she violated the law. What I am certain of is that that officer had every reason to think that he was under very serious threat for injury or, in fact, his life.”
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Here again I think this is evidence that ICE agents, hired with virtually no qualifications and with an obvious enthusiasm to go out onto the streets and rough-up perceive enemies, automatically perceive *everyone* as enemies, especially those who will not immediately comply with their illegal orders. More broadly, conservatives tend to be suspicious of everyone, as potential threats, people who can’t be trusted, if not automatically assumed to be evil. They live in a black and white world, in which only their side is white.
Jesse Bering on Facebook, this afternoon:
Murder or self-defence? Whatever your ‘perception’ of the MN ICE shooting video, the fact that the same footage — remember, we are all looking at exactly the same thing — is so instantly polarising is a sad psychology experiment playing out in real time. At best, it’s an emotionally fuelled, nuclear version of the blue dress/gold dress (where “objective truth” is muddled by genuine perceptual biases). At worst, it’s Asch’s famous social conformity line tests (where there really is a clear objective truth, but powerful social forces make people refuse to see it for what it is).
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An analysis from earlier today:
CNN, Holmes Lybrand: DHS said a woman attempted to run over ICE officers before being shot in Minneapolis. Here’s what videos show
Trump claimed she ran over the ICE agent. She didn’t. She was turning to drive away. At worst, she disobeyed the officer’s demand to exit her car. Is that worth being shot to death? Do these ICE agents have even the training of an ordinary police officer? No, I suspect; they are thugs.
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A comparison between yesterday’s victim, Renee Good, whom conservatives automatically think is a violent insurrectionist, and Ashli Babbitt, part of the mob on January 6, 2021, who was killed and has been made into a conservative martyr.
The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, 8 Jan 2026: The Distance Between Renee Good and Ashli Babbitt Is Fascism, subtitled “It’s not a hypocrisy. It’s a coherent worldview.”
The killing of Renee Good is, as the saying goes, senseless. There was no need for ICE officers to be on that street in Minneapolis yesterday. There was no need for them to escalate their encounter with Good, screaming obscenities at her, attempting to force open the door of her SUV and assault her. There was no need for them to unholster their weapons. There was no need for them to shoot her three times.
There was no need for the entire apparatus of the federal government, from the DHS press flack, to the secretary of that department, to the president and vice president of the United States, to lie about the events and slander Renee Good as a “domestic terrorist.”
There was no need for Renee Good’s 6-year-old son to wake up an orphan this morning.
He then goes on to describe what would have happened in a sane world. Beginning with officers asking the driver “What seems to be the problem, ma’am?” or somesuch.
And then to the right’s reaction to the killing of Ashli Babbitt. What she a domestic terrorist?
She was part of an armed mob that beat and assaulted police officers as it broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.1 She was then part of a breakaway mob that attempted to force its way into the Speaker’s Lobby. Inside the Speaker’s Lobby at the time was a group of elected officials and their staffs who were barricaded in to hide from the people who were rampaging through the complex calling for the hanging of the sitting vice president of the United States. Babbitt’s section of the mob broke through a window to breach the room. It is unclear what her intentions were. Perhaps she wanted to hug the people inside and thank them for their service.
Nevertheless, a police officer inside the room gave Babbitt specific instructions to stop her attempt to breach the window. One of them said “Get back! Get down! Get out of the way!” Babbitt did not comply with this instruction. An officer shot her once, in the shoulder; she later died from the wound.
Later, it was discovered that Babbitt was carrying a “Para Force” knife—a “tactical” folding knife—though the officer who shot her did not know this fact at the time.
And then comparing reactions to the two killings. Trump, on both. Then the writer goes on about In-Group/Out-Group:
The purpose of this discussion isn’t to play gotcha or to expose hypocrisy. It’s to understand a worldview: The people who run this regime do not understand law enforcement as an institution to be stewarded. The view it as a tool for the domination of their enemies. And their “enemies” include about half of America.
Again: This is not hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is when someone holds to a set of values but applies them selectively. You can work with hypocrites because they share your values, even if they do not always adhere to them. Hypocrisy is, famously, the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
No, what we are seeing is a worldview for which the only value is the domination of enemies. There is a name for that. It is fascism.
And
In this worldview, Ashli Babbitt was committing violence on behalf of the regime; so she was justified, even if that violence was directed toward government agents. And because Renee Good was opposing the regime, violence against her—this time carried out by government agents—was likewise justified.
I’m sorry to keep repeating myself, but this is not hypocrisy. It’s illiberalism.
The liberal view is that violence is not acceptable unless it is carried out by the state under strict sanction of the law. The illiberal view—the fascist view—is that violence is a tool for domination of the out-group.
That’s why Renee Good was killed.
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This event has absorbed most of my attention today. There are always other, better, things to pay attention to. Here’s one for today.
It’s a golden example of simplex, black and white thinking, and how the world is not black and white or simplex. This is about a limitation of human cognition, among a portion of the population.
NY Times, guest essay by Elay Shech (a professor of philosophy who specializes in the philosophy of science), 5 Jan 2026: Science Keeps Changing. So Why Should We Trust It?
Beginning:
As popular mistrust of expert opinion grows, we increasingly encounter the following skeptical argument about science: Historically, even well-established theories and findings have been overturned; therefore, science can’t be trusted because it will eventually change again.
Of course, the obvious rejoinder here is, what is the alternative? Deference to religious faith, whose metaphysical claims have been debunked for centuries? Science is like learning throughout one’s life. You never know everything, but if you keep learning, you always know more than you did before.
The skeptics are right that science does not progress uniformly and steadily toward truth. Once, scientists believed in the four humors as the key to health, in phlogiston as the essence of fire and in the ether as the carrier of light. Eggs were bad for you, then fine, then maybe bad again. Even Newtonian physics, once considered unshakable, was revised by Einstein. If so many widely accepted theories have been discarded, why should we trust the ones we have now?
It’s a sobering question but also a misleading one. It implies that the only possible attitudes toward science are naïve faith and wholesale pessimism. It assumes that science is a single global entity that rises or falls all at once, when in reality, science is an array of local domains of inquiry, each with its own standards of evidence and degrees of reliability.
Then,
Fortunately, there is another attitude to adopt toward science — one you might call disciplined trust — that would serve us much better. It just happens to require some actual knowledge of science and some intellectual humility.
A standard response here is that science is not about “faith,” as religions are, it’s about confidence based on previous results. The essay concludes,
What I’m proposing is neither global pessimism nor naïve faith. It’s local skepticism, or disciplined trust, which is precisely what science needs to improve itself. The history of science is indeed a graveyard of theories, but the fact that science keeps changing is a mark of its strength. It keeps changing because the world is complex and full of wonder. That isn’t a problem; it’s the engine that drives scientific progress.
