It occurred to me yesterday that what we’re seeing online and in the streets in reaction to the shooting of Renee Good is very familiar. And then it occurred to me why. What we’re seeing is the Black Lives Matter playbook.
Think about it for a moment. Going back years to the start of Black Lives Matter the organization established a particular way of operating. They would identify a shooting, usually involving a white police officer and a black suspect, and they would quickly nationalize the outrage and demand justice for this individual. Activists would rush to television cameras demanding everyone say his name (or her name) and then there would be organized street protests against law enforcement, often making some demands.
Frequently, the specifics of the incidents BLM chose to highlight were false or badly misleading. This was true of the stories that circulated after the shooting of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown. Almost always the story that initially made the news turned out to be skewed in such a way as to make the shooter look worse and make the victim look innocent. Trayvon Martin was just walking home with skittles when a racist neighborhood watch person killed him. Mike Brown was just walking home with a friend when he was murdered by a racist police officer while surrendering (Hands up, don’t shoot).
The stories are outrageous and these serve their purpose by creating nationwide outrage. And then weeks or months later we learn that many of the details weren’t accurate or complete. Trayvon confronted his shooter and was pounding his head into the concrete when he was killed. Mike Brown had committed a robbery when he was confronted. He tried to take a cop’s gun and after briefly running, had turned and charged at the officer when he was shot.
The real story is always one that legitimately puts some or all of the blame on the person who was shot. But because we don’t get that story right away, the outrage has time to build. And once it does, people never let it go. They stick with the narrative they like, even if it wasn’t true. They get angry all over again that someone is questioning that narrative.
So here we are and just a few days ago a protester was shot an killed by a federal law enforcement agent working for ICE. Immediately, people started claiming this was murder or even “cold-blooded murder.” Activists have taken to the streets and Democrats have taken to the airwaves. We’ve seen it all before.
This is the BLM playbook. The only real difference here is that the victim was white. It’s White Lives Matter.
As always the goal is to generate outrage by any means necessary. So we get a story based on claims from her ex-husband that a) she’s not an activist and b) she was just dropping of her daughter at school. There were stuffed animals in her car. She’s just a mom.
It takes another day or two to find out that she was part of an anti-ICE activist group. She wasn’t just a mom coming back from school drop off. She was an activist blocking the road in front of federal agents on purpose. She let her wife out of the car to film her activism. She was acting the way Democrats in her own state had encouraged her to act.
The media continues to fail the American people in their reporting on the events in Minneapolis.
New evidence shows that the anti-ICE agitator was STALKING and IMPEDING a law enforcement operation over the course of the morning.
The evidence speaks for itself. The legacy media… pic.twitter.com/0enstqGkhq
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 10, 2026
And video of the shooting shows it’s not clear cut in the way progressives would like. There’s no reason to think the ICE agent wanted to shoot anyone that day or (as AG Ellison has suggested) that he was trying to send a message. Instead, it looks like he panicked when the driver put her car in gear and stepped on the gas, moving in his direction. He fired as he was being clipped by the car and then fired two more shots as the car passed. I think the latter shots are questionable because he was out of immediate danger at that point. But the first shot seems clearly justified, but you won’t hear any Democrats admitting that. They are sticking with murder even though there’s almost no chance of a murder charge for that first shot.
Part of why BLM worked so well is that it takes months to carefully gather evidence and reach a conclusion about whether charges are even warranted, not to mention the months it takes to put on a trial. BLM’s strategy was always to run out ahead of the facts, convict law enforcement in the public mind before there’s any chance of the system offering a more nuanced take.
That’s what we’re seeing here from many, many people on the left. You have elected officials and far-left partisans insisting there is no nuance here and demanding justice. By the time this case eventually gets a close look from responsible parties, they’ll have set up another moment of outrage if no charges are filed. And if charges are filed and the agent is acquitted, they’ll have yet another moment of outrage.
That’s how this playbook works, whether the person shot is black or white. You pretend the answer is absolutely clear and law enforcement is absolutely wrong and then reality itself becomes a shock to the system.
I don’t predict the future but this case seems to have a lot in common with some of those BLM cases where all the heat was on supposedly racists cops until someone actually looked at the facts and found the victim was sometimes not a victim of racism at all but of their own bad behavior. That’s not true in every case but it was true in many cases that BLM elevated to the national stage. I think it’s going to be true here too.
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