Here’s what I won’t pretend to know.
I don’t know why, on January 7, 2026, Renée Nicole Good was blocking the road. I don’t know what was said between her and the ICE agents before the situation escalated. I don’t know whether the agent who fired three shots believed his life was in danger in that moment.
I won’t speculate about those things. Certainty is tempting in moments like this. It’s also irresponsible. What I can talk about is sequence.
Fear spreads quickly. Panic is contagious. Reaction is immediate—whether it comes from a woman trying to escape a hostile situation or an ICE agent who believes he’s under threat.
Did the agent panic? Possibly. Did he exercise poor judgment? Absolutely. But confusion does not justify violence. And it should not absolve someone who decides that because they hold a badge and a gun that they hold the power to be both judge, jury and executioner.
What followed, however, was not confusion. It was deliberate. President Trump posted on social media: “The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
The statement came quickly. Just hours after the incident, before a full investigation and without acknowledging uncertainty. It did not distinguish between what was known and what was assumed. And although the president gave himself an out by saying “seems to have shot her in self defense,” it told the public how to understand the event immediately.
That was a choice.
This is the same president who once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. The same president impeached and later acquitted for inciting an insurrection in January 2021. The same president who, after a white supremacist committed an act of domestic terrorism in Charlottesville, insisted there were “very fine people on both sides.” And before politics, the man who took out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five—boys who were later exonerated.
These are not rhetorical accidents. They are signals. Presidential language doesn’t just describe reality; it narrows it. It tells supporters what to excuse, what to dismiss, and which questions are no longer worth asking.
“Violently.” “Willfully.” “Viciously.”
Each word assigns intent and character. Each word pushes us closer to a moral conclusion before facts have settled. Once that happens, questions about whether lethal force continued after a perceived threat ended start to feel beside the point.
We saw the language hardened throughout the day. Not just from the president. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stepped forward to frame the killing as something far more than a chaotic encounter, casting Good as the villain, someone who had “stalked” agents and “weaponized” her car, invoking the language of domestic terrorism.
The point of this kind of rhetoric isn’t accuracy; it’s containment. It moves faster than evidence and louder than doubt, closing ranks before facts have time to surface. It doesn’t ask what happened. It tells you what it meant. By the time the video is reviewed or questions are raised, the emotional architecture is already in place. Violence has been explained. Authority has been reassured. And anyone still asking how fear turned into fatal decision-making is made to feel late to the conversation.
This is where media responsibility becomes unavoidable.
On Fox News, coverage quickly pivoted away from the circumstances of Good’s death. Anchor Jesse Watters instead focused on a familiar inventory of identity markers: referring to her as a “self-proclaimed poet,” emphasizing her pronouns, her sexuality, the fact that she had a child from a previous marriage.
None of it was relevant to the use of lethal force. All of this narrative reinforcement serves a purpose. It’s political Mad Lib. Fill in the blanks until the audience knows exactly how to feel.
But accountability doesn’t stop there. Writing for a Black media institution carries its own responsibility. We are not immune to shorthand. We are not exempt from trope. If we aren’t careful, our language can flatten the world in a different way; seeing everything through inherited narratives of harm, suspicion, or inevitability. Seeing ourselves that way, too.
Language doesn’t just describe injustice. It shapes how we imagine it. And how we imagine it shapes what we believe is possible, tolerable, or inevitable.
The fact that Renée Nicole Good was not Black does not lessen the urgency of speaking out. It clarifies it. Compassion is not a finite resource reserved for people who look like us. Critiquing state violence is not an act of racial loyalty; it’s a civic one. When systems created to protect people fail, when those in the highest offices close ranks instead of opening themselves to scrutiny, silence becomes complicity, regardless of who the victim is.
For many “Make America Great Again” has always functioned less as nostalgia, but as promise. As authority. As threat. The phrase might as well read: Make America Great Again—By Any Means Necessary. That logic is embedded in the impatience with process, the hostility toward scrutiny, and the reflexive defense of force.
The media ecosystem makes this easier. Speed is rewarded. Certainty travels. Complexity slows things down. Empathy complicates the story.
There is a quiet irony in writing a careful argument about language in a culture optimized for clips. This piece will not become a viral sound bite. It will likely disappear into search results and AI summaries that flatten intention and never reach the hearts and minds it’s meant for.
That reality feeds exhaustion. We’re tired of turning on the news and seeing chaos framed as strength, cruelty framed as realism, and certainty framed as leadership.
America may not be a failed state in the sense that it’s collapsing, but you can say it’s a malfunctioning democracy. A system where power speaks quickly and is rarely challenged. Where media amplifies instead of interrogates. Where language makes violence easier to accept.
Words matter. From the presidency to the press, and to those of us tasked with telling the story carefully. The alternative is to treat this as normal.
It isn’t.