The Media Are Agents of Propaganda
Last Thursday Vice President JD Vance joined a White House press briefing to discuss initiatives the Trump administration is taking to investigate the pervasive welfare fraud that has been discovered in Minnesota. He was inevitably asked questions about the death of Renee Good after she attempted to drive her SUV over an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Vance described the media coverage of the death as “disgraceful,” and followed up with this question: “You guys are meant to report the truth. How have you let yourselves become agents of propaganda?” The collective response of the “reporters” was to disregard the question, but the answer is vital to the future of the republic.
The ICE officer was not only hit by Good’s SUV, he was briefly hospitalized due his injuries. There is no way an objective viewer can watch this video and draw another conclusion.
In a letter to the British philosopher Richard Price, Thomas Jefferson observed that “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” Jefferson was, of course, an ardent advocate of a free press whose function would be to provide voters with accurate information about the government’s actions in order to assess the competence of their elected leaders. By that standard, it’s unlikely that the Sage of Monticello would dignify the corporate media with the appellation, “free press.” This term implies that, in addition to being free of government coercion, the press must be untrammeled by ideological prejudices which render it impossible to report facts objectively. Today’s corporate media have failed that test spectacularly.
Consequently, it’s impossible to be “well informed” if you are among the millions of people who rely on the corporate media for news. This may be one of the reasons Renee Good was foolish enough to use her SUV to interfere with a law enforcement operation, ignore multiple commands by federal agents to exit the vehicle, and finally try to escape by ramming an ICE officer. That, despite the fictitious reports widely circulated by the corporate “news” media, is precisely what happened. This video, taken by the ICE officer she struck, clearly shows Good accelerating toward him before he fired on the SUV while trying to avoid being hit. This was just the latest example of a rapidly increasing number of vehicular attacks on ICE officers per the DHS:
Today, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released new statistics on assaults against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) law enforcement … During the first year of the Trump administration, from January 20 – December 31, 2025, DHS officials reported 275 assaults as compared to the 19 reported assaults during the same period in 2024. This is a horrific 1,347% increase in assaults against ICE officers … From January 21, 2025 – January 7, 2026, ICE law enforcement officers experienced 66 vehicular attacks against them, compared to only 2 during the same time period the previous year. This is a 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks.
Yet the corporate media continues to canonize Good as an innocent “observer” brutally murdered by ICE storm troopers. NPR, for example, gave Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison a platform to perpetuate this myth: “She was a compassionate neighbor trying to be a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors.” Oddly enough, there has been sparse corporate media coverage of her anti-ICE activism. As the National Review reports, “Renee Nicole Good, the Minnesota woman who was fatally shot by an ICE officer, belonged to a Minneapolis-based “ICE Watch” group that actively tracked immigration enforcement operations and trained activists to interfere with agents, including by blocking law enforcement vehicles.”
Instead of reporting such inconvenient facts, publications like the Washington Post gave us encomiums from her loved ones: “Good’s family and friends describe her as a devoted mother to her three children, an artist with a prizewinning talent for poetry who had weathered personal difficulties, including the death of her second husband, a military veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.” We are also informed that Good’s “wife” was deeply fond of her: “In her statement Friday, Rebecca Good recalled how Renee “sparkled.” When the Post finally gets to its “analysis” of the various videos that show her fatal encounter with the ICE officers, they are remarkably reluctant to concede that Good’s actions put them in danger:
A recording released Friday by Alpha News appears to show the moments immediately before the shooting from the perspective of the ICE officer who shot Good … Other videos from witnesses that day show Good’s maroon Honda Pilot parked in the road as ICE vehicles approach. ICE officers then confront her, demanding that she get out of her car. A frame-by-frame analysis by The Post of the bystander footage, however, raises questions about administration officials’ accounts of the shooting. The SUV did move toward an ICE officer as he stood in front of it. But the officer was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle.
This last claim is preposterous. The ICE officer was not only hit by Good’s SUV, he was briefly hospitalized due his injuries. There is no way an objective viewer can watch this video and draw another conclusion. Nonetheless, the Washington Post is not the only legacy outlet clinging to that fiction. The New York Times also reached the same conclusion: “On Thursday, after our interview with the president, a Times analysis of footage from three camera angles showed the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire.” This is utterly absurd. Even the Post admitted that the SUV “moved toward” the ICE officer. The only mystery here is why President Trump keeps giving the Gray Lady interviews.
This brings us back to the purpose of the free press — to keep the electorate well-informed in order to make intelligent political decisions. Does anyone believe the corporate media are doing their job? Brandon Straka summed up the cause of Renee Good’s death: “This woman lost her life because she was fully gripped by years of media indoctrination that told her that she’s living in 1930s Germany and interfering with ICE is akin to fighting Hitler’s Nazis.” That is the price of corporate media corruption. It is far more dangerous than most Americans know — and the people who are charged with telling us the truth have long since sold their souls.
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