Did you know they want you dead?

Forget the person you thought you knew more than a decade ago, when Donald Trump formally entered the world of politics and made unfiltered bigotry popular again. Regrettably, your loved ones who turned MAGA and stayed aboard through COVID, January 6 and the 2024 terror campaign against Haitian immigrants are not the decent human beings you once imagined them to be.

That your mother or father or brother or uncle actually might want you dead — or would at least forgive if not praise your killer — cannot be so easily denied in the wake of the state-sanctioned killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old from Minnesota whose child was orphaned because she made one of Trump's ICE agents feel temporarily emasculated. Insta-smeared as a "domestic terrorist" by the Department of Homeland Security, videos show that Good did not, in fact, run over her killer with her car. Video, in fact, shows that this mother and active member of her community posed no threat to anyone but that man's fragile masculinity; it also shows that armed agents of the state denied her medical care while she bled to death from the bullets lodged in her head, chest and forearm.

Here, again, was an opportunity: even self-styled conservative supporters of the police and Trump's all-out assault on immigration, legal or otherwise, were under no obligation to defend a reckless agent's daylight murder of an unarmed white woman. The victim's race ought to be irrelevant, of course, but the lesson is that we are now at a point where white racists will justify the killing of white people, which portends even worse for anyone of color. If they can shoot her dead in the streets with no pushback, they can shoot anyone.

And there was no pushback. What there was instead was justification, based less on Good's actions than her identity: She was a lesbian "with pronouns in her bio," Fox News' Jesse Watters pointed out, and indeed a race traitor, per the right-wing influencer Matt Walsh, who asserted that giving one's life to protect one's Black neighbors (Somalis in Minnesota this year's version of Haitians in Ohio, i.e., people the president told you to hate) is the "most disgraceful and humiliating end a person could possibly meet."

Right-wing media didn't even leave the deceased's kid alone, the New York Post publishing an exclusive investigation — while Good's body was still undergoing an autopsy — regarding "her 6-year-old son's woke charter school." That school has since been forced to suspend in-person classes following a wave of harassment from Trump supporters.

Good's ex-father-in-law, a self-described Trump supporter, then used his 15 minutes of fame to appear on television, lie about the incident and absolve ICE of any responsibility for killing the woman who gave birth to his grandchild.

It is a grim but vitally important realization: If a masked member of the president's secret police were to shoot you dead in the street, on video, in broad daylight, there would be MAGA members of your extended family tree eager to tell a cable news anchor that you basically had it coming. It's not enough to be innocent — hell, it's not enough to be white — when one's life (or death) runs up against the PR needs of this American government. And with ICE's annual budget having tripled since Trump's return, its $75 billion in taxpayer largesse dwarfing most countries' military allocations, there is almost guaranteed to be future examples to test this hypothesis

It is true, and perhaps some comfort, that the average supporter of fascism would never pull the trigger themselves; they might even help a liberal with a flat tire on the side of the road. But mass murder does not require mass participation or even the support of a majority. That's not to say the United States is destined to revisit the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism, but after more than a decade of the worst among us proving how depraved they can be, it would be a grave mistake to ignore the signs of what could come next — and with immigrants dying in camps, where we are already.

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