Author, columnist, speaker

Democrats and Their Media Take a Side

By Robert Knight

You just knew when anti-ICE protester Renee Good tragically died in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 that the media were going to turn her into the next George Floyd.

Mr. Floyd, whose asphyxiation death under the knee of a police officer triggered the anti-police riots in 2020 that took at least 25 lives and caused $2 billion in damage, has since been virtually deified.

Minneapolis has named a square after Mr. Floyd and put up a “living memorial” with art installations, including a raised fist sculpture. At least a dozen colleges created scholarships named after Mr. Floyd, and two charitable foundations dedicated to “social justice” now bear his name.

Fast forward to Jan. 7, 2026. Videos, including one from the chest cam of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross, who reportedly shot Ms. Good three times as her SUV apparently hit him, have been viewed on social media millions of times. Ms. Good and her partner, Becca Good, along with others, were protesting ICE enforcement in a Minneapolis neighborhood.

President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi have said the footage shows the agent fearing for his life against what amounted to domestic terrorism. Others have said the agent overreacted and should not have fired his weapon. The public seems sharply divided over who was at fault.

Not the media. They’re all in on the beatification of Renee Good and the vilification of Agent Ross. A case in point was a front-page piece in the Jan. 10 Washington Post, headlined, “We had whistles. They had guns.”

Written by four Post reporters, the article had a close-up color picture of Ms. Good, with this caption: “Good was ‘pure love,’ her wife said in a statement….”

In a later article, the Post reported that the two women had never officially married. Renee Good, a mother of three, had been married twice. Her second husband died in 2023.

The Jan. 10 article ran over to a full page inside, with the headline, “Family, friends remember kindness of woman shot by ICE.” Similar accounts made the networks and other major newspapers.

Over the past few weeks, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have been surging into Minnesota to enforce immigration laws and root out social services fraud. In response, prominent Democrats and the media have turned up the rhetoric.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called ICE a “modern-day Gestapo,” and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said that ICE is turning America into “Nazi Germany.”

Last Wednesday, the New York Times jacked up more anti-ICE sentiment with this headline: “Federal Agent Shoots Man in Minneapolis, Prompting Tense Protests.” The man was an illegal Venezuelan immigrant who was resisting arrest.

The agent was attacked by two other people, who were reportedly wielding a shovel and a broomstick handle. The agent, who was injured, shot the man in the leg.

None of that context was in the lead paragraph, as noted by Newsbusters.org, which quoted the Department of Homeland Security’s release calling the headline “despicably misleading.”

Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin compared ICE enforcement in Minnesota to the Iranian mullahs’ killing of thousands of protesters this past week.

“From Tehran to my birthplace of Minneapolis, people are rising up against systems that wield violence without accountability,” he wrote on social media on Jan. 11.

He followed this with more damning comparisons.

And Democrats wonder why many Americans think they’re not exactly patriotic. It doesn’t help that socialist-run Democrat teacher unions are teaching kids in government schools to hate their own country.

As the Wall Street Journal opined of Mr. Martin, “Yoking a false image of U.S. authoritarianism to the freedom struggle in Iran is morally obtuse. It’s a slur against his own country.”

The paper also noted that Mr. Martin’s post “undermines the Iranian people, who count on the U.S. and call desperately for its help, to say that America is yet another murderous tyranny, comparable to their own.”

Congressional Democrats, who are in the uncomfortable position of defending Mr. Walz, who presided over billions in social services fraud, are also lamenting President Trump’s liberating Venezuela from the grip of communist dictator Nicolas Maduro.

They tried and failed to pass a measure barring Mr. Trump from using any more military forces in Venezuela.

Doing its part, The Washington Post ran a front-page story on Jan. 12 about a Venezuelan man whose soldier son was killed in the Maduro raid. The headline was: “A father mourns his ‘hero’ son.”

I’m not questioning a father’s grief, but whose side are you on, anyway? Just asking.

Meanwhile, Renee Good’s relatives have hired the law firm that represented Mr. Floyd, so expect the same kind of media campaign that elevated Mr. Floyd, a drug addict and criminal, into hero status.

While both deaths are heart-rending, the left’s exploitation is disgusting. Never forget the left’s concoction of the false “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative about Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, which spawned riots and the “defund the police” movement.

Renee Good’s family members “do not want her used as a political pawn, but rather as an agent of peace for all,” the law firm said in a statement.

Good luck with that.

Antonio Romanucci, a founding partner of the firm, told reporters, “We will honor her memory by seeking accountability and change in her name.”

Yes, we’ve seen how that goes.

Illustration by Linas Garsys in The Washington Times.