Weasel World comes to Minnesota
A murder victim gets smeared, and we get smarm, from media men.
Hello!
It’s been a minute. I was in Las Vegas covering CES so I didn’t have time to update this newsletter—and with the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this week, I didn’t feel the time was right to update you all on the lawsuit.
If you’re looking to support, scroll down. I’ll have more to say next week.
On to Minnesota.
There’s a section of the commentariat I think of as “Weasel World,” a place where both-sidesism and smear tactics are used to justify right-wing ideology by whining, dishonesty, and smarm.
So while Renee Good’s murder provoked outrage from Trump critics on the left, right, and center, it also gave conservative pundits the opportunity to smear the victim by digging into her personal life and to pretend video evidence from her killing showed she was an active threat.
The weasels were out in force.
For far right media figures like Fox News’s Jesse Watters, Good’s lesbian relationship and the status of custody of two of her children was an important point to raise for his audience.
The woman who lost her life was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado, with pronouns in her bio. A 37-year-old white woman named Renee Good. The Daily Mail says she leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage. She was a disruptor, though she considered herself a legal observer. But there’s no evidence she had a law degree.
“This is the American far-right’s way of telling people that this was a white woman that it was *ok* to kill,” journalist Daniel Sugarman said on Bluesky.
Truly abhorrent language from one of the worst figures in media.
For figures like CBS News’s Tony Dokoupil, who plays at moderate objectivity while acting as state media for the trump White House, it was a time to think about how both sides of the story need our attention and sympathy.
The commentary was vapid, self-serving sycophancy dressed up as preachy reasonableness, and, as pointed out by several people on social media, likely written by his boss, Bari Weiss.
Our job now is maybe the most American thing of all: it’s to find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us, to try to be fair to them, and in doing so to make things better and keep things decent, because in America no one else is going to do it for us. It’s not my job to tell you what to think about what happened here yesterday, but I can tell you we owe our children a nation that is better than the one we live in today.
Author Max Fisher, on X, noted the amorality of what Dokoupil was saying.
The content of this “news” monologue is that if a masked state agent executes an innocent woman in cold blood, then both sides are equivalent, and our duty is to offer equal support and respect to the executioner, and his commanders, as to the woman he murdered on their behalf.
Then there’s our old pal Matt Taibbi, who spent most of the day Good died attacking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants Cea Weaver. Weaver’s sin was repeating well regarded academic consensus on the history of housing in the US in 2020 and using some colorful language to describe how property ownership in this country.
This was worth focusing all Matt’s attention on in the immediate wake of the killing—I’m not even going to get into the language he and others used to accuse Weaver of anti-white racism—at least until he figured out how to spin Good’s murder a few days later by rounding up some “experts” to discuss the circumstances of the attack.
Public posturing on X showed where Taibbi’s head was at, and what audience he was appealing to. Quoting one of the people he interviewed, Taibbi said:
“You got a hot-headed dumb cop and then you got entitled Karen doing whatever she does. And that’s a perfect storm for a disaster.”
Taibbi defended himself by saying the article overall was “quoting people who are very critical of the ICE agent. All of them do so, in fact, while only one criticizes Renee Good.”
And that one was the who he chose to highlight. Another day in Weasel World.
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Your words are prophetic. A “bucking fitch” (intentional play on words) is a pouncing weasel-type animal from Eurasia. I say we all sport “bucking fitch” hats and bumper stickers that include links to go fund me pages for surviving loved ones of Renee Good and others shot by ICE. And anyone who sells them needs to do what Paul Newman’s company does: donate 100% of profits. Otherwise, we’re still feeding the greedy beast. BTW, the US has the lowest maternal survival rate of any developed country, despite being the richest nation in the history of the planet. What does that say?
Why do you call it a murder? Has someone been indicted/charged?
You’re a writer. I have to assume you don’t consider yourself a journalist. In either case, words matter.