When protesters become the Other

Donald Trump speaks the language of autocrats and demagogues fluently. His followers hear it as something beautiful instead of as poison for their hearts and minds. In Minneapolis, Chicago, across the United States and beyond, this authoritarian logic is producing lethal results.

Renee Good was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis. She was serving as a legal observer, volunteering to document and protest ICE enforcement, which is constitutionally-protected behavior. Her killing was tragic, preventable and predictable.

Since June, Trump’s mass deportation campaign has unleashed thousands of heavily armed ICE agents and other federal forces into Democratic-led cities and blue regions of the country. ICE now has a larger budget than the Marine Corps. In Minneapolis alone, several thousand ICE agents and other federal officers are estimated to be deployed as part of Trump’s mass deportation dragnet. In the wake of Good’s killing and the shooting of a Venezuelan man by a federal agent on Wednesday evening, the president is now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act as a means to declare martial law.

“[M]uch of [what] the nation has now seen [in Minneapolis] was not professionalized or situationally appropriate law enforcement,” Michael Feiberg, a former FBI assistant special agent-in-charge, wrote in Lawfare. “It was a series of incredibly bad choices leading to an unnecessary death. At every step which led to the fatal trigger press, ICE could have behaved differently. It could have behaved more tactically. It could have behaved more humanely. The nation — to say nothing of Renee Nicole Good’s family — deserves an honest accounting of why it did not.”

In a Kafkaesque inversion, it is being reported that the Department of Justice is now investigating Good’s wife for alleged connections to supposed activist groups that oppose the Trump administration’s mass deportation raids. “Activist groups” is a vague description by design, constituting an attempt to punish dissent by criminalizing the majority of Americans who oppose the administration’s deportation campaign and other policies, and are exercising their rights to protest and organize. 

But the administration hasn’t stopped there. Almost immediately after Good was killed, Trump, Vice President JD Vance and their messengers began attacking her character, declaring that she was a “paid agitator,” “domestic terrorist” and “deranged leftist” who provoked ICE agents purportedly acting in “self-defense” because “they feared for their lives.” In essence, they were holding Renee Good responsible for her own death and creating a “tragedy of her own making.” ICE agents, they said, were the real victims.

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These claims are false. They distort not only the facts, but reality itself.

Nevertheless, public opinion polls show that a majority of Republicans believe the shooting of Good was justified. The vast majority of Democrats, along with a large majority of independents, believe it was not.

The ICE agent who shot and killed Good is now a cause célèbre on the American right. He has already received more than $500,000 in donations.

This dynamic illustrates how Trump’s MAGA supporters have been emotionally trained and conditioned to believe that what he and his mouthpieces say is true, even when it is directly contradicted by reality and the facts. That type of collective psychology and behavior is a defining feature of authoritarian movements and personality cults.

Once people surrender truth to the will of a leader, party or movement, moral collapse quickly follows, making it much easier for them to do far worse things to resolve the cognitive dissonance between what they know to be true and real, and what they are told by their leader and the movement. As Voltaire warned, “Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.” 

Ultimately, Trump and his MAGA messengers see Good not as fully human but as a prop for their mass deportation campaign and law-and-order crackdown on democracy and the right to protest and free speech.

Many observers have professed confusion over how Good, an unarmed person, can somehow be seen as a mortal threat. This is not a mystery.

Authoritarian leaders and movements — especially racial authoritarians and nativists — target the Other. Their vision of society is us versus them, friends and enemies, zero-sum; it is rooted in social dominance behavior. For Trump, MAGA and today’s broader right-wing, the Other includes immigrants, racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, political opponents and anyone outside their definition of “real America.” These individuals and groups are the “poison” and “vermin” that Trump and his spokespeople have repeatedly said must be purged from “the blood” of the nation.

Pluralistic multiracial democracy and a cosmopolitan society are not compatible with such an authoritarian and fascist worldview. Leaders like Trump function as “conflict entrepreneurs,” as sociologist john a. powell noted in an interview with El País.

“These are people who take our anxiety and curate it into fear, into hate, not because they believe it, but because it gives them power,” powell explained. “People have feelings; we have anxiety. And by definition, anxiety doesn’t have a specific object. It’s just: “I feel anxious.” What the story does is tell you why you’re anxious. It says: “You feel anxious? It’s because of all those damn immigrants…It’s everybody, students, people who criticize America.”

The Other is deemed to be less than fully human, which means that they do not merit empathy and respect. The Other is viewed by the dominant group as inherently dangerous, which means that the resulting violence is defensive, virtuous and even heroic.

“When people are deeply “othered,” the part of the brain that lights up for human recognition shuts down,” powell said. “Instead, the brain reacts with disgust — as if seeing vermin. At that point, people stop being human. You can bomb them, starve them, cage them. Who cares? That’s how genocide and ethnic cleansing begin.”

Renee Good was a white woman who chose to stand in solidarity with non-white people in a struggle against state power. By doing so, she became the Other, tainted by association. That principled stand cost Good her life.

This is a painful lesson for many Americans –– especially the “good white liberals,” centrists and moderates. The status of being the Other is variable and not fixed. This is especially true in a society that is devolving into authoritarianism and fascism, where loyalty to the Great Leader and The Party determines one’s social status, rights and safety.

ICE agents in Minneapolis are now threatening observers and protesters that they had better be careful, or they too could end up like Good.

Her fate is prelude, prediction and warning — it’s not an aberration. As Trump’s mass deportation campaign becomes even more aggressive, as his war on multiracial democracy escalates in the months preceding the midterms, I fear there will be many more Renee Goods.

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