White women get in the way of Trump’s war on civil rights

The right-wing propaganda machine works hard to instill fear in white women. It’s replete with images of crime everywhere and warnings that immigrants are threats. The tragic killing of Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 and the Trump administration’s response to it have ripped away any remaining pretense: We are witnessing the implementation of a white nationalist agenda, sanctioned at the highest levels of power. Nearly one year since Trump’s second inauguration and Elon Musk’s infamous Nazi salute, white women, in particular, are refusing to play their assigned role as silent shock absorbers for state violence. The victim-blaming looks to have backfired on MAGA. 

Within hours of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shooting Good, an unarmed mother in Minneapolis, the official narrative had already been decided at the highest levels of the Trump administration: She was a “domestic terrorist” who “willfully and viciously” tried to run over a federal agent, and thus her shooting death was justified. The refusal to even investigate her killing has reportedly led to a raft of resignations at the Department of Justice. Now, MAGA’s entire political project is in question. 

The administration’s crackdown on Minnesota was designed to be popular — Donald Trump ran in 2024 on immigration enforcement, and a viral right-wing video targeting immigrants in the area showed it was a top issue for his supporters. But masked agents swarming a Target and abducting employees in broad daylight, and killing a wife and mother in her car, is not what most voters had in mind. The images of Good’s blood-soaked SUV, her grieving widow sitting in the snow crying and armed federal agents standing over the scene have shocked the conscience of millions who might have otherwise supported tougher border enforcement, if not the overall darker MAGA agenda.

After Good’s killing, the president sat for a lengthy interview with The New York Times, which curiously decided to publish the conversation in bits over the course of several days. So we learned late Sunday that, when asked whether protections that began in the 1960s, spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had resulted in discrimination against white men, Trump said he believed “a lot of people were very badly treated.” 

This has been the central, animating principle of American conservatism for decades: redefining who belongs in the United States and undermining our pluralistic democracy. Vice President JD Vance has been the most explicit member of the administration about this. In a speech last summer, he declared: “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” He praised so-called “Heritage Americans” for taming “a wild continent.” At a White House briefing after Good’s killing, Vance alleged without evidence that she was part of a “broader left-wing network” plotting to attack federal agents. 

It didn’t land the way he expected. Vance has been repeatedly ratioed on X ever since, a small but telling sign that the usual outrage machine is misfiring. Even some MAGA influencers, conditioned to defend ICE reflexively, hesitated. On Tuesday’s episode of his popular podcast, Joe Rogan questioned whether Americans want “militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people” and creating a “Gestapo” demanding papers. Disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has urged ICE to de-escalate. 

Since Good’s killing, the right has also amplified its rhetoric that frames liberal white women as traitors and the reason the country is in chaos. Fox News’ Jesse Watters suggested that “a lot of these women are single so you have this instinctive motherhood that’s really not been able to be expressed, so they are trying to wrap their arms around the immigrant community.” 

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White women like Good are not just dissenters within the racial in-group, however, they are proof that the entire white nationalist story about inheritance and destiny is unstable. Still, MAGA plows on. Elon Musk went on a racist tirade on his X platform the same week Good was killed, retweeting a post that declared: “If white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.” Musk added a “100” emoji, signaling complete agreement. 

These actions are textbook Great Replacement Theory. The Department of Homeland Security then posted memes on its official account, sharing an image of a lone cowboy beneath a stealth bomber with the words “We’ll have our home again,” a lyric from a far-right nationalist song about reclaiming a country by blood or sweat. James Rodden, an assistant chief counsel who acts as an immigration court prosecutor for ICE in Dallas, whom the Observer identified last year as the operator of an X account that posted “America is a White nation” along with apparent praise of Adolf Hitler, appeared to be back at work this week.

But the American people are rejecting this narrative. Poll after poll shows the public turning against ICE’s brutal tactics. A Quinnipiac survey found that 53% of voters believe Good’s shooting was not justified, including 59% of independents. An extraordinary 82% of Americans have seen video of the shooting, confirmation that this story has broken through in ways most do not. A YouGov poll conducted the same day as the killing found that 52% disapprove of how ICE is doing its job, with 51% calling the agency’s tactics “too forceful.” Most remarkably, a YouGov/Economist poll found that support for abolishing ICE had surged to 46%, with only 43% opposed — a dramatic shift from June 2025, when just 27% supported abolition. Even right-wing provocateur Chris Rufo is now disavowing the anti-intellectual rot at the core of the MAGA project: “The dissident Right simultaneously won — staid government bureaucracies are now posting like Biden-era edgelords — and, in winning, lost its function, which is why that movement is now splintering.”

Good is one of four people killed by ICE since the administration’s crackdown began in June, amid more than thirty incidents in which agents opened fire or held people at gunpoint, according to data compiled by the Trace. ProPublica has documented more than 170 instances of U.S. citizens detained by immigration officials. 

The culture war on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and trans students trained millions of people to believe that civil rights protections are scams and that empathy is weakness. But Renee Good’s killing, and the administration’s gleeful defense of it, has revealed the truth. The right can terrorize and propagandize, but it cannot easily make liberal white women unsee what they have seen.

 

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correctly state the name of the ICE officer who shot Renee Nicole Good. His name is Jonathan Ross, not Brian Ross.

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