JD Vance Is 'Not Happy' Renee Good Was Killed, But...

Journalists in the White House press briefing were all but begging the vice president for a shred of humanity, some kind words for the deceased, and he refused to offer any. 

Vance during Thursday’s briefing was resolute in carrying out his mission: Rejecting wholesale the reality we all witnessed on Wednesday when an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross executed a Minnesota poet and mom on camera, positioning Ross as the victim, and the slaughtered Renee Good not as an opponent of the regime, but a terrorist, an enemy of the state. 

Conceding that Renee Good may have been a human being who did not deserve to be shot three times in the face by one of the president’s secret police, Vance knew, would have made it impossible to shoehorn right-wing unreality into the nation’s consciousness and counter actual reality. Vance took the stage on Thursday to lecture anyone in the media who would dare report what they saw on camera – an extrajudicial execution of a U.S. citizen – in the newspaper or on TV. 

He stood there and furiously wagged his pudgy little finger and again and again rejected reality as shown in the video of Good’s execution. With smarminess leaking from his pores, Vance leaned across the podium and vomited a trail of half truths and outright lies designed to offer unreality of the Good murder to anyone who would like to adopt it as their own and to spread it online, in posts on the child sexual abuse platform known as X, on Facebook, on Instagram, and wherever reality is formed in this age of endless fragmentation. 

Jonathan Brooks, Vance said, did nothing wrong. In fact, he said, Brooks deserves our prayers after pointing a gun at the face of a U.S. citizen and pulling the trigger until she was dead and sitting in a pool of her own blood. Pray for the killer, for he may have been bumped by a Honda SUV on a cold Minnesota morning. 

Vance, competing with the vampiric Stephen Miller for the title of Worst Millennial, is perfect for doing this kind of bad-faith unreality creation and enforcement. Like many millennials, Vance has been extremely online since his teenage years. He remains terribly online today, following and communicating with white supremacists and genocide fanboys on Elon Musk’s CSAM platform. Vance understands in his marrow that enough working the refs – belittling and badgering otherwise well-meaning journalists – will eventually create a both-sides approach to coverage of even the most cut-and-dry stories. This is how the right operates – abusing the refs until they cry for mercy – because it works. It worked for the January 6 insurrection and it will work with Good's murder.

A generation ago the murder of Renee Good would have been a one-sided narrative, namely that an innocent American doing nothing wrong was shot multiple times in the face by a rogue federal agent with a long history of violence. Today the social internet allows a powerful man like Vance to offer a version of events that will be picked up by the country’s vast, Kremlin-backed right-wing propaganda machine and allow conservatives online to retreat to their partisan foxholes and say no, Renee Good was not murdered. She was a terrorist trying to kill federal agents. Or maybe she was an activist working for a shady anti-American organization. She had it coming.

They can say this with a straight face because JD Vance said it with a straight face first. 

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Over thirty minutes Vance dismissed Renee Good as a member of a left-wing terrorist network and someone who had been “victimized” by leftist ideology. Renee Good, Vance said, had been "brainwashed" into opposing the fascist assault on her community. When asked about the left-wing terrorist network, Vance hedged and stumbled and said the Trump regime was looking into it powerfully, and that daycare workers in Minnesota allegedly defrauding Medicare – the “largest scale corruption in our country’s history” – were maybe part of this network. 

Several reporters in the briefing room asked as politely as they could for Vance to say something nice about the deceased, like the charity workers in A Christmas Carroll pleading with Scrooge to say something halfway nice about London’s orphans and the city’s poor. Reporters asked Vance how he and the regime could “turn down the temperature” on political discourse that’s starting to sound an awful lot like a civil war.

They pleaded with the vice president to speak to the country, truthfully and forthrightly, in a time of national turmoil. And Vance said no. 

Vance assured the assembled press that he was not “happy” Renee Good was dead. It was not the most convincing part of the presser. One had to ask, Vance said, why someone would put herself in that position, observing an illegal secret police operation designed to antagonize immigrant communities and delight regime supporters who are titillated by such barbarity, such pain experienced by their perceived enemies. 

But Vance said nothing nice about Good, who, according to the vice president, “used domestic terror techniques.” He said that there was “one angle where if you squint, you can tell yourself it’s not clear what happened” when Ross executed Good, but that every other angle of the killing made it clear that she was intent on mowing down ICE agents the way Ron DeSantis and other Republican officials encouraged motorists to mow down racial justice protesters in 2020. Everything with these people is pure projection. The Good murder is no different. 

Vance could not help himself but to inject a touch of sexism into the discourse, for in his heart of hearts the vice president is an internet troll, a hardened nihilist who lives to trigger the libs. What was a mother – a woman – doing out by herself anyway? How, Vance wondered during the briefing, did she even know about the ICE ethnic cleansing operations? Who, Vance asked, is paying people like Good to protest ICE actions in their communities? He knows the answer is no one, and he chooses a bad-faith interpretation of Good’s intent: To observe and protest the terrorizing of her community. For that she was killed. 

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the only elected Democrats who seems to understand the contours of competitive authoritarianism, cut right through Vance's bad faith-fueled unreality on Friday when she said Vance during his press briefing made it clear that a masked agent working for Donald Trump murdering an American citizen is just fine. “I understand that Vice President Vance believes shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not," AOC said, as plainly and forcefully as possible.

Vance has taken on many forms in his public life, from Trump skeptic to never-Trump Republican to outright fascist collaborator. That Vance can so easily shape shift should not come as a surprise considering he has changed his name four times – no one knows his real name – and has a background that has never been fully verified. Vance is someone and no one. He is whoever his handlers want him to be, so pliant and malleable as long as he gets tiny droplets of power every once in a while like a hamster on wheel, making the country more insane with every turn. 

Sometime in the past ten years he was recruited by American tech oligarchs to push their agenda into the mainstream and, they hope, oversee the AI-assisted dissolution of democracy in the United States. As odious and hateful as Trump is, I see Vance as the greatest threat the country has ever known. It doesn’t matter that he has the personality of a wet wipe during a vicious stomach bug. He’s in our lives for good and he knows what makes people tick. He knows how to drive people mad on the computer. He has the full backing of men with more money than God. He should be taken seriously.

Vance's performance in the White House briefing room this week might have been the most disgusting thing I’ve ever watched on TV, so corrosive and abrasive that I could hardly look at his smug face for more than a few seconds. I knew this was the point though. Vance was before the assembled press in the White House briefing room for three reasons: To belligerently shape an alternate reality in which Renee Good was an enemy of the United States, to upset the libs, and to chew bubblegum. And he was all out of gum.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social