Here is the column:
“It was an outright murder.” Those words from Rep. Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) were echoed by Democratic leaders from coast to coast almost immediately after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, 37, as she sped toward him in a vehicle. Goldman is the Madame Defarge of American politics, the character from Tale of Two Cities who knitted as she gleefully called for the heads of aristocrats and counterrevolutionaries in the French Revolution.
Goldman has made a career of dismissing due process for his political opponents while engaging in willful blindness of the conduct of his allies. He has denied the existence of Antifa as an organization as well as claiming that he has seen no evidence of an increase in attacks on ICE officers.
He apparently needed no further proof to declare this officer a murderer: “It was an outright murder. This officer needs to not only be fired and suspended, but—based on the video—charged.”
The video does not support such a claim. Under the governing case law, the officer is allowed to use lethal force when he is facing an imminent threat to his life or the lives of fellow officers or third parties.
In this case, the officer had a fraction of a second to decide whether to fire his weapon after Good sped toward him. Good appears to have been attempting to flee the officers and flight alone is not a justification for the use of lethal force. However, when you speed toward an officer, he may treat the vehicle as a weapon and discharge his weapon in self-defense.
Goldman is fully aware that past case law supports the officer in this case. However, he is also aware that he is facing a Mamdani-supported socialist, Brad Lander, a popular local politician. Goldman is ramping up his rhetoric to appeal to the radical left from promising impeachments to calling for the prosecution of this officer. This officer is no longer a human being, he is a prop to be used for political gain. If he has to go to jail to secure a third term for Goldman, he is viewed as a small price to pay.
Others have joined the murder mantra, including Mamdani, who declared, “This morning, an ICE agent murdered a woman in Minneapolis—only the latest horror in a year full of cruelty.”
Mamdani insisted that he was going to focus on retaining existing NYPD officers rather than adding more officers. That seems unlikely as he shows that officers cannot expect him to support them if they are involved in such shootings. The mayor immediately joined the mob, dismissed the need for an investigation, and declared the officer a murderer.
In an age of rage, the loudest and angriest is king.
That was evident in the profane, unhinged diatribe of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey who immediately not only declared the officer a murderer but called claims of self-defense “bllsh*t” and told ICE “get the f–k out” of the city.
When many of us denounced his conduct, he mocked his critics by apologizing if his profanity “offended their Disney princess ears.”
Gov. Tim Walz followed suit. As his head of Public Safety insisted that they would not speculate on the outcome of the investigation, Walz stood next to him in declaring that Good was killed for no reason and portrayed ICE as terrorizing the state. Walz previously denounced ICE as “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets … being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons.” Ironically, he then added that these people have “no chance to mount a defense.” That concern apparently does not extend for Walz to members of law enforcement.
Goldman, Mamdani, Frey, and others are traffickers in rage, feeding an addiction in the hope that these mobs will propel them further in power. Law enforcement officers are simply expendable when political advantage is at stake.
Democrats showed the same cynical calculation in condemning border agents falsely accused of whipping migrants at the Texas border. Even though videotape refuted the claims, leading Democrats and the media pushed the false claim. The agents were then subject to over a year of abusive treatment before being cleared of the charge.
There is a method to his madness. As Madame Defarge assured her husband, they must ignore the cost to others because “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see triumph.”
Democrats may indeed “see triumph” in rage politics. However, history has shown that today’s revolutionaries often become tomorrow’s reactionaries. Goldman is already facing a challenge from the left that he is not radical enough. Feeding a nation of rage addicts can prove a dangerous business when someone offers purer, cheaper highs.
For now, however, no one will out rage Goldman or others. They remain on a political hair-trigger to find triumph in the tragedies of our times.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the author of the forthcoming “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”