In the span of a few months, two killings in two different cities have been pulled into the same political machine, one that turns grief into content and complex events into cartoons.
On January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, in Minneapolis. Federal officials and right-wing media figures quickly framed the incident as a self-defense shooting triggered by “domestic terrorism,” alleging Good “weaponized” her vehicle.
On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death on Charlotte’s Lynx Blue Line. Within days, the White House and prominent conservative voices treated her death as proof-text for “soft-on-crime” failure in Democratic-run cities.
These cases are not the same. But the storytelling deployed around them follows a familiar pattern. Pick a narrative, trim the record to fit it, and then present the result with the confidence of a police report.
Renee Good and the speed of a label
What is clear in the public record is that Renee Good, 37, a mother of three, died after being shot by an ICE agent during a confrontation in Minneapolis. The agent was identified as Jonathan Ross.
From there, the messaging sprint began.
Federal officials, including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, defended the shooting as self-defense and used the language of “domestic terrorism” to describe the alleged threat. Vice President JD Vance echoed the administration’s framing.
But one problem for any instant certainty is that video exists: multiple angles, multiple uploads, and multiple interpretations. Reporting notes that bystander footage and other video evidence raised doubts about the “weaponized vehicle” claim and whether the agent faced an imminent threat at the moment shots were fired. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey publicly challenged the DHS account as untruthful.
A democracy can survive disagreement about what a video shows. What it cannot survive, at least not gracefully, is the use of language like “domestic terrorist” as a rhetorical accelerant while the factual record is still contested and under investigation.
That phrase is not a neutral descriptor. It is a moral verdict, a permission structure, and a signal to audiences already primed to sort people into “citizen” and “enemy.” Some reporting notes legal experts warning that the “domestic terrorist” label was being misapplied in this case, functioning more as justification than diagnosis.
Then comes the institutional power move: who investigates.
Reporting indicates the FBI has taken a central role in the investigation, with state and local officials raising concerns about transparency and access. That matters because “who holds the evidence” is often indistinguishable from “who controls the story,” at least early on.
This is how you get a public argument where one side is debating frame-by-frame video and the other side is repeating the label of “domestic terrorism” as if repetition converts allegation into fact.
Iryna Zarutska and the political utility of innocence
Iryna Zarutska’s killing, by contrast, was instantly legible to nearly everyone: a young woman killed in a sudden attack on public transit. The suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr., was arrested and faced state murder charges, plus federal charges tied to violence on a mass transportation system.
Here, the distortion didn’t need to deny the violence. Instead, it repurposed it.
The Associated Press reported that her killing “quickly drew the attention” of President Trump and MAGA allies, who used the case to argue that Democratic policies had produced “out-of-control crime in blue cities.” Reuters and AP both quoted Attorney General Pam Bondi explicitly linking Zarutska’s death to “failed soft-on-crime policies.”
That line, useful, sharp, emotionally satisfying, also shortcuts what the public record shows about the accused and the broader context. Repeated contact with the criminal legal system, family claims of serious untreated mental illness, and institutional difficulty securing involuntary treatment.
None of those details are exculpatory. They are explanatory. And explanation is what propaganda hates, because explanation requires time, nuance, and sometimes uncomfortable tradeoffs.
Even the meta-narrative became part of the narrative. Conservative commentators argued the mainstream media wasn’t covering Zarutska because she was white and her accused killer was Black. An allegation the Guardian documented as part of how the case was politicized.
So with Zarutska, the right’s story was not “she was a terrorist.” It was “she was proof.” Proof that a preferred policy agenda is necessary, proof that political opponents are reckless, proof that America is in decline in the precise way their audience already believes.
What the two cases reveal about “narrative-first” politics
Viewed side by side, the two cases expose a consistent pattern in how violence is processed through modern political storytelling. In each instance, the narrative arrives fully formed, often before the factual record has had time to settle. In Renee Good’s case, the language of “domestic terrorism” appeared almost immediately in official statements, even as video footage and witness accounts complicated claims of an unambiguous act of self-defense.
Once that label is introduced, the victim’s identity is reshaped to serve the lesson being taught. Good is transformed into a “domestic terrorist,” a category that dampens public empathy while supplying moral certainty. Iryna Zarutska, by contrast, is elevated as an emblem of the American dream, her death repurposed as justification for punitive policies and political crackdowns. In both cases, the individual disappears behind the role assigned to them.
The authority of the state plays a central role in making these framings stick. When the administration defends law enforcement actions against alleged “terror,” or when it uses a victim’s murder to indict political opponents as responsible for disorder, it relies on the credibility of office to turn interpretation into accepted truth. The power of the narrative lies less in evidence than in who is delivering it.
Under this model, complexity becomes an obstacle rather than a necessity. Calls for patience, reminders that investigations take time, or acknowledgments that video evidence can be ambiguous are dismissed as evasions or ideological hostility. Structural failures, spanning mental health systems, policing practices, and governance, are flattened into slogans because nuance interferes with messaging.
This is where the distortion begins to feel almost comical, not because the deaths themselves are anything but tragic, but because the mechanics of the storytelling are so visible. The guiding question is no longer “What happened?” but “What can this be made to mean?”
The point of comparison
The deeper comparison isn’t that these killings are identical. It’s that, in both cases, the right and the current administration treated truth as optional, like something to be selected, packaged, and deployed.
Renee Good’s death became a lesson about “terrorists” threatening agents, even as the publicly reported video record complicated that certainty.
Iryna Zarutska’s death became a lesson about “soft-on-crime” governance, even as the story pointed to deeper institutional failures that slogans cannot fix.
When politics is performed this way, reality becomes a prop, and the public is asked to applaud the script instead of reading the transcript.
—Greg Collier
Further Reading
- Time: “Fatal ICE Shooting Sparks Scrutiny of Killings in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown”
- Reuters: DHS response and federal deployment following Renee Good killing
- AP: On video, media environment, and the Renee Good case
- The Guardian: On the Renee Good investigation and domestic terrorism rhetoric
- MPR News: Becca Good statement and background on Renee Macklin Good
- AP: Federal charge coverage and politicization around Iryna Zarutska case
- Reuters: Federal charges and Bondi “soft-on-crime” statement
- The Guardian: How the far right capitalized on Zarutska’s killing
- ABC News: Reporting on suspect’s family describing mental illness history
