Crowds in New York City responded to a deadly confrontation between a motorist and federal immigration agents not with calls for calm or accountability, but with open chants fantasizing about killing their political enemies.
The demonstrations erupted just one day after 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and killed in Minneapolis during an encounter with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, as reported by Western Journal. In Manhattans Foley Square, activists framed the incident as an example of unnecessary violence by federal authorities, even as they themselves indulged in rhetoric that openly glorified violence against law enforcement and conservative officials.
Goods death followed a tense confrontation in which she was ordered to move her SUV while ICE agents were conducting operations in Minnesota. Instead, she shifted from reverse into drive and appeared to accelerate with a federal agent directly in front of her vehicle, an act captured in graphic video that authorities say shows her turning her car into a weapon.
Whether one believes she acted deliberately or recklessly, the reality is that using a vehicle in that manner against law enforcement is a near-certain way to invite lethal force. Yet establishment media outlets rushed to frame Good primarily as a victim, with WABC-TV, for instance, emphasizing that she was a 37-year-old mother while downplaying the immediate threat she posed to officers on the scene.
For many on the activist left, the facts of the case seemed almost incidental; what mattered was the narrative. In Foley Square, justice was not defined as a fair investigation or a sober review of use-of-force protocols, but as rage channeled into fantasies of mass violence against those tasked with enforcing federal immigration law.
WABCs coverage of the New York protest offered a sanitized version of events that omitted some of the most disturbing elements of the demonstration. The outlet reported that protesters chanted Renee Nicole Good, the name of the American citizen Minneapolis City Council says was killed by an ICE agent, and highlighted emotional speeches from progressive organizers.
Are we outraged enough? No! Were not. We must be must more outraged than we already are. We havent begun to scratch the surface of how outraged we must be, said Angelo Pinto of Until Freedom. What happened today was a tragedy and I think one of the most tragic parts was that I was not shocked to see the headline, said Hannah Strauss of Hands Off NYC. That they have normalized this. It is just a continuation in the escalation of the force that they are using against the communities that they claim to protect.
What WABC did not mention were the bloodthirsty chants that echoed through the crowd, including Kristi Noem will hang and Save a life / Kill an ICE! Footage circulating on social media clearly captured demonstrators calling for the death of the secretary of Homeland Security and for the killing of federal immigration agents, yet these explicit threats somehow failed to make the cut in the local television report.
The omission was reminiscent of the infamous fiery but mostly peaceful chyron that ran on CNN during the 2020 riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as buildings burned in the background. Once again, a left-leaning media outlet appeared more interested in preserving a preferred narrative than in confronting the radicalism and violent rhetoric emerging from its own ideological allies.
To be sure, a few voices in the Foley Square crowd reportedly objected to the calls for violence. But they were drowned out by those who treated fantasies of lynching a Cabinet official and murdering ICE agents as acceptable protest slogans, a spectacle more evocative of revolutionary mobs in early 20th-century Russia than of a serious civic movement in a constitutional republic.
This climate of escalating hostility is not without real-world consequences. Even as New York activists were chanting about killing immigration officers, federal agents on the West Coast were involved in another violent confrontation in Portland, Oregon, where two individuals were shot after allegedly using their vehicle as a weapon against ICE personnel.
Details were still emerging late Thursday, but the Department of Homeland Security stated that the incident involved a Venezuelan illegal alien affiliated with the transnational Tren de Aragua prostitution ring. For the activists in Foley Square, who routinely cast illegal immigrants as a monolithic class of victims, such a suspect might well be dismissed as our sorta people, regardless of alleged criminal ties.
The moral confusion on display reflects a broader cultural decay in which violent rhetoric is excused or ignored when it comes from the left, yet relentlessly condemned when it appears on the right. As one timeless warning from Shakespeare puts it, These violent delights have violent ends, a line that has grown only more relevant as political passions increasingly spill over into threats and bloodshed.
Those violent delights have claimed far more lives than the doomed lovers of Romeo and Juliet, and they may have shaped the mindset that led Good to challenge armed federal agents with her vehicle. She apparently died while attempting to harm officers, yet she did so in a political environment where her own governor had, on that very day, reportedly declared war on ICE, sending a dangerous signal that federal law enforcement is an enemy to be resisted rather than a lawful authority to be respected.
Now, once again, DHS agents find themselves targeted as radical activists in New York gleefully chant Save a life / Kill an ICE! and fantasize about the hanging of Kristi Noem. This is unfolding less than a year after Charlie Kirk was murdered and less than two years since Donald Trump was shot, grim reminders that political violence in America is not an abstraction but a deadly reality.
Some of the people shouting these slogans surely remember those events, which makes their rhetoric all the more chilling. When a movement that claims to stand for justice and human rights embraces language that openly calls for killing its opponents, it forfeits any moral high ground it pretends to occupy.
If New Yorks progressive establishment will not police its own extremists, then public exposure becomes the only remaining tool. Name-and-shame tactics are far from ideal, but experience suggests that confronting these hateful, incitement-drunk fools with the consequences of their words is the only way to force a reckoning with the violent fantasies they are so eager to normalize.
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