The Anti-Reality Field

Prologue: The Snowbank

The ICE vehicle was stuck in a snowbank. It was a cold Wednesday morning in south Minneapolis, January 7, 2026, and federal agents were conducting what the Department of Homeland Security had announced, just one day earlier, as the "largest immigration enforcement operation ever"—two thousand agents deployed to the Twin Cities, ostensibly to root out fraud in the Somali community.1 A gray pickup truck sat immobilized in the snow at the corner of East 34th Street and Portland Avenue. Nearby, a burgundy SUV idled. At the wheel was Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three.

What happened next took only seconds. At least five federal agents were on scene—three initially, plus two more who arrived in an unmarked Nissan Titan pickup just twenty-two seconds before the shooting. Agent Jonathan Ross, recording on his cell phone, approached Good's vehicle from the passenger side, circled around to the front. Two agents from the Titan approached the driver's side—one placing his hand on the door handle, trying to yank it open. Good, apparently alarmed, reversed her car with wheels pointed left, then shifted to drive and turned her wheels RIGHT—away from where Ross stood. Ross, now positioned to the front-left of the vehicle, drew his firearm. At 9:37:13 A.M., as the SUV began moving past him, he fired the first shot through the windshield. A second shot came 399 milliseconds later. A third, 299 milliseconds after that—these through the side window as the vehicle passed. Ross had to pivot to avoid the SUV, but he was never in its path.2

Renee Nicole Good was shot in the head. She died there, on a residential street less than a mile from where George Floyd had been murdered by police in 2020.

Within hours, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem would call Good's actions "an act of domestic terrorism."3 President Trump would claim on Truth Social that Good had "viciously ran over the ICE officer."4 Vice President Vance would call her death "a tragedy of her own making" and suggest, without evidence, that she had been "brainwashed" by a "far-left network."5

None of this was true. The video evidence showed no officer being run over. Ross was seen walking around the scene afterward, unhurt. There was no hospitalization. Good had not "rammed" anyone. She was driving away.

This is the story of how a woman was killed, and how her killing was immediately rewritten.

Part I: "Garbage"

The death of Renee Nicole Good did not emerge from nowhere. It was summoned—by rhetoric, by policy, by a month-long campaign that treated the Somali community of Minneapolis as an enemy to be subdued.

On December 2, 2025, Trump ended a Cabinet meeting with an outburst. The subject was Minnesota, home to the largest Somali population in the United States—approximately eighty thousand people, the vast majority of them American citizens or legal residents. Trump called them "garbage."6

The next day, he doubled down. Somali immigrants had "destroyed Minnesota," he said. The state was "a hellhole right now." "The Somalians should be out of here."7

The pretext was fraud. A series of scandals—including a massive pandemic-era theft from a child nutrition program—had led to prosecutions in which most defendants were of Somali descent. This was real. But what followed was not a measured law-enforcement response. It was collective punishment, dressed up in the language of public safety.

The Influencer Pipeline

The surge of federal agents to Minneapolis was not, in fact, triggered by Justice Department analysis. According to NBC News, it was triggered by a YouTube video.8

Nick Shirley is a twenty-three-year-old content creator whose viral videos allege fraud at Somali day cares. His December video—coordinated, reportedly, with a Republican officeholder—was amplified by Elon Musk's algorithm and ricocheted through the right-wing media ecosystem. Within days, two thousand federal agents were en route to Minneapolis.

This is the new pipeline of American policy: YouTuber to algorithm to Fox News to presidential decree. Nick Shirley did not conduct an investigation. He made content. And the content was enough.

Tom Homan, the White House "border czar," appeared on television to defend the crackdown. He claimed, without evidence, that Minnesota had a "large illegal Somali community."9 This was false. The overwhelming majority of Somalis in Minnesota are citizens. But Homan did not retract the claim. In the anti-reality field, retraction is disloyalty.

The Terror Begins

By mid-December, the Somali community of Minneapolis had begun to disappear—not because people were being deported, but because they were hiding.

"Many Somali asylum-seekers in Minneapolis are staying in their apartments for the last two weeks, starving," community organizer Abdikarim Farah told the Sahan Journal. "They fear being captured by ICE if they come out for food."10

Restaurants emptied. Mosque attendance plummeted. Parents stopped taking their children to school. Business owners reported ICE agents entering their establishments, demanding papers from patrons.

On December 10, agents chased, tackled, and arrested a twenty-year-old American citizen named Mubashir in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. His crime was walking down the street while looking Somali. He was driven to immigration court, fingerprinted, and held for two hours before officers finally looked at his ID and let him go.11

On December 29, nine days before the shooting, ICE agents pepper-sprayed State Representative Aisha Gomez—a DFL lawmaker whose district includes the targeted neighborhoods—along with community members and a television news crew. "This is what we are facing in the streets of Minneapolis right now," Gomez said. "A full-on federal invasion."12

Governor Tim Walz had been warning for weeks that someone would get hurt. On January 6—one day before the shooting—he called the operation "a war being waged against Minnesota."

The next morning, Renee Nicole Good drove to her neighborhood to see what was happening. She never came home.

Part II: The Killing

Renee Nicole Good was not an activist in any conventional sense. She was a mother. She wrote poetry. She had moved to Minneapolis from the Kansas City area after her husband—a military veteran—died in 2023. She had three children: a fifteen-year-old, a twelve-year-old, and a six-year-old whose father was now gone. "There's nobody else in his life," Good's father told the Washington Post.13

On the morning of January 7, Good dropped her youngest child at school and then drove toward Portland Avenue, where ICE agents were conducting operations. She was, according to city officials, acting as a "legal observer"—a civilian who documents law-enforcement activity. She was not the target of any investigation. She was not breaking any law.

At approximately 9:35 A.M., she encountered the stuck ICE vehicle. What followed was captured on multiple cell-phone videos—including one recorded by Ross himself, which would be released two days later, providing a minute-by-minute timeline of the killing.

In the videos, Ross can be seen walking around after the shooting. He does not appear injured. There is no ambulance for him. There is no hospitalization. He is fine.

Renee Nicole Good is dead.

Part III: The Cascade

Within hours, the rewriting began. This is the most important part of the story—not the killing itself, but what came after. The anti-reality field does not simply permit lies; it requires them. Each official who amplified the false narrative was demonstrating fealty. Each right-wing influencer who repeated the claim was proving membership in the tribe.

Watch the cascade:

Trump's first Truth Social post came in the early afternoon, while Good's body was still at the scene. He claimed she had "violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense." He added, implausibly: "It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital."4

There was no hospitalization. There was no injury. The claim was fabricated from whole cloth.

Secretary Noem held a press conference that evening. She called Good's actions "domestic terrorism"—a term with specific legal meaning, now applied to a mother who was driving away. Noem claimed Good had been "stalking and impeding" agents "all throughout the day." She said the officer "followed his training."3

The next morning, Vice President Vance took the podium at a White House briefing. His contribution was to add conspiracy: Good was not simply a dangerous driver but part of "a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country." She had been "brainwashed." Her death was not a tragedy inflicted upon her but "a tragedy of her own making."5

When asked whether the state of Minnesota could investigate the shooting, Vance invoked a remarkable doctrine. "That guy is protected by absolute immunity," he said. "He was doing his job."

Part IV: The Chorus

If the administration created the lie, the right-wing media ecosystem amplified it. The distinction between official statement and influencer content has collapsed; they are now a single system, mutually reinforcing, impervious to correction.

The Professionals

On Fox News, the network's legal experts lined up to validate the shooting. Amy Swearer of Advancing American Freedom called the agent's actions "absolutely reasonable."14 The network framed Good not as a victim but as a threat, emphasizing her membership in "ICE Watch"—a group of civilians who monitor immigration enforcement—as though observing federal agents were itself a crime.

Megyn Kelly, on her SiriusXM show, declared: "This cop almost got run over by this woman, who accelerated into him."15 When Governor Walz issued a statement mourning Good's death, Kelly raged: "How dare you."

Matt Walsh, the Daily Wire podcaster, was more direct. "She was trying to stage an illegal blockade of the road to interfere with ICE agents and then rammed her car into one of them when they attempted to apprehend her," he wrote on X, in a post viewed nearly seven hundred thousand times. "This isn't even a close call. Entirely justified. She is 100 percent to blame for her own death."16

None of this was supported by the video. Walsh did not address the footage showing Good's wheels pointed away from the agent. He did not explain how a car driving away constitutes "ramming." He did not need to. His audience did not require evidence. They required permission.

The Platform

Elon Musk, whose ownership of X has transformed it into what critics call "the social media propaganda wing of the Trump administration," weighed in: "Attempting to murder them with a car obviously requires self-defense."17

There was no "attempted murder." There was a woman driving away. But Musk's post received millions of views, and his algorithm ensured that the administration's narrative—not the video evidence—dominated the platform.

The right-wing influencer ecosystem activated in unison. Nick Sortor, a far-right podcast favorite, excused Good's killing and accused Minneapolis protesters of "INCITEMENT." He encouraged Kyle Rittenhouse to come to the city. Andy Ngo posted that "Antifa-linked anarchist & far-left extremists" had "set up blockades." Chaya Raichik of LibsOfTikTok amplified the "domestic terrorism" framing.18

ZeroHedge, the anonymous financial blog that has become a clearinghouse for right-wing conspiracy theories, ran a headline about the "left-wing protest industrial complex."

The message was consistent across all channels: Good deserved to die. Anyone who questioned this deserved what was coming to them.

Part V: The Reality

Not everyone capitulated. In Minneapolis, the local officials who had actually seen the video refused to participate in the lie.

Mayor Jacob Frey held a furious press conference. "They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense," he said. "Having seen the video myself, I wanna tell everybody directly, that is bullshit."19

He was more specific about the narrative: "The narrative that this was just done in self-defense is a garbage narrative. That is not true. It has no truth."

He told ICE to "get the fuck out of Minneapolis."

Governor Walz was equally blunt. "We have someone dead in their car for no reason whatsoever," he said. The shooting was "totally predictable, and totally avoidable." He called the administration's response "governance by reality TV."20

Walz activated the Emergency Operations Center and put the National Guard on alert. He told Minnesotans who had seen the video: "Don't believe this propaganda machine."

But the propaganda machine did not need Minnesota to believe it. It had the rest of the country.

The Investigation That Wasn't

On January 8, the FBI announced it was taking exclusive control of the investigation—and cutting out the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The state agency, which had been conducting a joint investigation, was informed it would "no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews."21

Governor Walz expressed what everyone understood: "It feels very, very difficult that we will get a fair outcome."

The seizure of the investigation was the final act. The video existed. The witnesses existed. The evidence existed. But the federal government would control who saw it and what conclusions would be drawn. In the anti-reality field, inconvenient evidence can be made to disappear.

Part VI: The Streets

That evening, thousands gathered at Portland Avenue—the site of the killing. They came with candles and flowers. They chanted "MPD, KKK, ICE, they're all the same." They held moments of silence.

The protests spread. By Thursday, demonstrations had erupted in more than twenty cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Washington. In Rochester, hundreds lined up outside a Border Patrol station.22

In Minneapolis, the backlash was immediate. Hours after the shooting, ICE agents descended on Roosevelt High School. They pepper-sprayed students. They handcuffed staff members. A Border Patrol commander was photographed at the scene.23

Minneapolis Public Schools announced it was canceling classes for the rest of the week.

On Friday, Governor Walz proclaimed a "Day of Unity" in Good's honor. He invited Minnesotans to observe a moment of silence at 10 A.M. "Renee Nicole Good was a loving mother, partner, daughter, and neighbor," he said, "whose life was defined by compassion, creativity, and care for others."24

The Vice President's office did not respond to the proclamation. The White House did not acknowledge it. In the anti-reality field, mourning is sedition.

Epilogue: The Test

Why do they lie so obviously? Why claim a woman "ran over" an officer when the video shows her driving away? Why call a mother a "domestic terrorist"? Why insist on hospitalization that never happened?

The answer is that the absurdity is the point.

In authoritarian systems, loyalty is demonstrated through the repetition of obvious falsehoods. The more absurd the claim, the more meaningful the submission. Anyone can agree with a reasonable statement. It takes commitment to repeat a lie that everyone knows is a lie.

Kristi Noem did not need to call Renee Nicole Good a "domestic terrorist." She did so because it was required—because the President had already established the narrative, and her job was to amplify it. JD Vance did not need to call Good "brainwashed." He did so because escalation is how you prove you belong.

Matt Walsh and Megyn Kelly and Elon Musk did not need to blame the victim. They did so because the right-wing media ecosystem rewards those who most enthusiastically adopt the party line. The algorithm favors the committed. The audience demands purity.

This is the anti-reality field: a zone where truth is not merely contested but irrelevant. What matters is not what happened but what the leader says happened. What matters is not evidence but allegiance.

We know what happened. The video exists. The witnesses exist. The evidence exists.

In the anti-reality field, none of that matters. What matters is whether you repeat the lie.

Most of them did.