snuff film political economy
renée nicole good, grievability, and our death-soaked feeds
An ICE agent executed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday while she was halfway through a three-point turn. Renée Good was a legal observer, as multiple of my loved ones are and have been. Originally from Colorado, she lived in Minneapolis with her spouse and children; she was a poet who won the same poetry prize that once helped me pay rent my last semester of undergrad. Good’s wife was with her when ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot her at point-blank range. Their vehicle temporarily blocked the passage of ICE agents, for which, I suppose we just learned, the apparent consequence is extrajudicial murder by masked agents of the state.
The Trump administration and Kristi Noem immediately smeared Renée Good as a “domestic terrorist” and falsely claimed she was trying to kill ICE agents with her car. Fox News let their viewership know that Good was expendable by sneeringly calling her a ‘self-proclaimed poet’ with ‘pronouns in bio’ and a ‘lesbian partner.’ People who knew Good have memorialized her as a salt-of-the-earth, kind, loving, and solidarity-minded person. Good was killed a few blocks away from her home. A doctor who ran up to offer medical support was prevented by ICE agents from attending to her. Her wife watched her die while covered in her blood. Yesterday, a DHS agent was filmed destroying one of the street memorials erected to honor Good.
One of the speakers at her vigil said—and I have turned this line over in my mind every hour since I heard it— “She died because she loved her neighbors.”
grievability and ICE’s kill list
Last night ICE agents shot two more people in Portland. On New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent shot and killed Keith Porter in Los Angeles. In Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, a Customs and Border Patrol officer shot and wounded a woman named Marimar Martinez, who survived. The agent who shot her bragged to his colleagues over text, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In Franklin Park, IL, as a consequence of Operation Midway Blitz, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, a cook and father of two from Mexico who had lived in the U.S. for twenty years, was extrajudicially executed by ICE agents on September 2025, under similar circumstances to Good’s.
There was also Genry Ruiz Guillén, 29, of Honduras, a construction worker who died after being transferred to the Krome immigrant detention center in South Florida, leaving behind his grieving mother. There was Abelardo Delgado, 68, of Mexico, died while being transported to a federal detention center, presumably from the distress of his capture. During his nearly forty years in the US, Delgado raised a large family and worked on multiple farms; he was a grandfather and great-grandfather, mourned by many. There was Jean Brutus, 41, of Haiti, who had no known cardiovascular issues and died under mysterious circumstances the day after he was transferred to Newark’s Delaney Hall detention center. There was Brayan Garzón-Rayo, 27, of Colombia, who died at the Phelps county jail in Rolla, Missouri. His mother said that he loved riding motorcycles, watching soccer and sledding after fresh snowfall.
I mourn Renée Nicole Good, fully and unreservedly. It is only honor to her memory and her values—and the act of protest that she was murdered for—to state that she is not the only person who has been killed or wounded by ICE recently, or who has died in ICE custody in the last year.
One thing seems very clear to me that distinguishes the public response to Good’s slaying from many of these other incidents: multiple videos exist of her last moments, and those videos circulated widely. Combined with the fact that she was blonde, sweet-faced, a mother, and a U.S. citizen, her death arrived already encoded as sympathetic. Already positioned, I would say, as grievable.
Grievability is a concept that I first encountered when reading Judith Butler. “Specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost” Butler wrote in Frames of War, “if they are not first apprehended as living.” Grief, in their account, is not merely an emotion but a political capacity: it marks the boundary of who is recognized as human at all. To be publicly mournable is to have been admitted, however briefly, into the category of life that counts.
But race alone cannot account for the entirety of the heartening public outcry and unfurling of protest in response to Renée Good’s slaying—and the abject, disgusting lies of those who helped perpetrate and then dismiss her death. How many people have you seen be murdered on video in the last seven years? Was this country’s largest uprising in living memory not in response to millions of people watching the life snuffed out from a Black man by a cop’s knee?
Put otherwise: something still can happen when we watch somebody die, if our attention is procedurally slowed enough to take in the theft of another human’s life, if we claim them as human and grievable, and if we still believe in our ability to act.
snuff film political economy
A very short drive from Franklin Park, IL is the suburb of Arlington Heights. Two days before Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a traffic stop, a son of Arlington Heights was also murdered, this time on video.
This was Charlie Kirk, who was shot in the neck by a sniper in a graphic assassination, the raw footage of which was viewed many millions of times around the world. The day after Kirk’s killing, a friend texted me about having watched, without intending to, both Kirk’s murder and the the autoplaying video of the murder of Iryna Zarutska, 23, of Ukraine, on a train in Charlotte. That latter clip went viral, particularly on more right-wing corners of the internet, likely because Zarutska’s killer was a Black man who had a history of other offences. Inadvertently watched not one but TWO snuff films this week, my friend wrote, so I think I’m gonna log off!!
For close to a decade I’ve had a burner account where I follow all manner of people, including on the right, far-right, and center. The weeks of September 2025 were bizzare and haunting to me; I flipped between my account and its burner and saw entirely different constructed realities, built around different and opposed grievabilities, with graphic and gory death widely available as content. I watched the internet melt down and meme and post through it. I saw a pecking order of death made manifest. I thought about the two years I and others had spent watching videos of Palestinian parents scoop the remnants of their children into plastic bags after airstrikes.
What does watching these videos do to us, both when we identify, or are in sympathy, with the person being killed? What about when we are not? What does it mean, really, that we watch death on autoplay when we go online, in algorithmically tribalized groups?
When we as viewers identify with the victim of a videotaped killing, for reasons of race, gender, nationality, ideology, or personal experience, the footage we watch can often feel like an assault on our own bodies. The academic frame for this might be vicarious traumatization or secondary traumatic stress. Perhaps you have known its symptoms and affect in recent times: intrusive images, hypervigilance, nightmares, dissociation, heaviness, despair.
And that assault, in my observation, produces many things, depending on the viewer: numbness, callousness, enervated fury, righteous anger, mourning, and, well—radicalization. I mean this as a value-neutral statement: millions of people are being radicalized through widely available snuff films of people that— depending on the viewer—they might profoundly identify with, or dismiss as ungrievable. This radicalization may or may not play out as action, and in fact, many of the people who feel deeply morally injured by this content feel little or no sense of outlet to channel their feelings into.
Here’s a summation of a cycle we have lived through, again and again, when it comes to state violence. The state produces death. Media allows for visibility and consumption of that death. Platforms algorithmically distribute the abundance of emotion and response to that death—from grief to dismissal to humor to outrage, in tribally sorted ways. Protest of that death, digitally and corporeally, may unfurl, depending on the scale of emotional resonance that that death produces. This is the snuff film political economy in action.
Here is the paradox for me, the one I keep turning around in my mind: the contemporary snuff film economy of state killing produces and erodes grievability at once. It sensitizes and it anesthetizes simultaneously. It produces intense emotion and often a sense of ‘us vs. them’ affiliation and enmity, and that intense emotion can be parlayed into the burning down of the police precinct or the passive consumption of the doomscroll.
Does any of this sound stylized, abstract, academic? A woman was brutally killed by agents of the state while doing something that multiple people I’m close to do. Doing something, in practice, to love and protect her neighbors. An immigrant man who lived longer in this country than I have was brutally killed by agents of the state less than a thirty minute drive from my immigrant parents.
I want the lives of those lost to us to mean something. I want them to be grievable; I want them mourned. I want them respected beyond the bourne of ephemeral digital spectacle and sensation.
the kind of people who can act
What we are inside of is not only a media environment but a political economy: death created by the state, its footage circulated on platforms, monetized through attention, and metabolized by viewers. Metabolized, I would say, as fear, rage, tribalization, despair, resignation, fatalistic submission, mimetic entertainment, and sometimes, collective action.
I mentioned this Mark Fisher passage in my essay building the cathedral:
We must understand the fatalistic submission of the population…as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite)…For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act.
The list of names of lives ended by ICE is not short, and in the months to come it will run longer. There are currently upwards of 68,000 people in ICE custody; the agency has received orders from Stephen Miller to arrest 3000 people a day.
If I was writing only in the activist register, I would write that we, for the sake of our souls and collective safety, should mourn these lives, from Renée Good to Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, that we should seek justice for their killings. That justice, in my eyes and that of an increasing number of people, should include the eventual shuttering and abolition of the violent, lawless, trigger-happy paramilitary force that is ICE. This is not a reformable institution. ICE is less than twenty years old; there are comparative precedents for how paramilitary masked police forces who did hideous things were dispatched after regimes were brought down or weakened. The downsizing, stripping, defunding, and closing down of the agency, beginning perhaps with the political impeachment of Kristi Noem, are outcomes that could be organized, that there are pathways for.
Let us not pretend that action is not available to us. Workplaces and religious services and sports games could observe moments of silent mourning for Good and others killed by ICE. Cities around the country could be dotted with flower-and-candle strewn street memorials for these people. Ordinary people can do these things. Making a street memorial on your corner is thirty minutes’ work. People with political influence could be pressured to call for Noem’s impeachment. They could at bare minimum could be pressured to publicly state their own noncooperation with ICE. The streets could be lit up again with demonstrations, with neighborhood defense squads, with civil disobedience.
The Trump Administration is bold (and volatile, fearful, chaotic), and perhaps boldness should be part of the organizing and oppositional response to them.
To organize, to engage in advocacy, to take on the mantle of activist, to write with an eye to any of these, these all hinge on the exercise of the verb should. That exercise is a beautiful one, militant and hopeful; it asks for more and better, motivated by ideals and principles that uh, should bind us. But there are other modes of writerly inquiry, too, ones that hinge on what is happening, on how, on a colder-eyed way of seeing. I’ve tried to draw on those here, too.
The fact is that many are unmoved by our shoulds. The primary response to gratuitous death in this country, actually, is apathy: a shrinking away, a refusal to see and mourn. And in fact on public posts about Good’s killing, you will find no end of a certain kind of person upholding and defending the actions of violent masked federal agents. Empathy often flows upwards towards authority in authoritarian societies and cultures; as long as there are jackboots there will be tongues to lick them.
But politics is famously about the numbers in majority, and what I remember to this day is that (as reading Margaret Killjoy this morning reminded me) 54% of Americans believed that the torching of a Minneapolis police station was justified in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a larger margin than any Presidential candidate has won in a while. People in this country, maybe, sometimes, still see a majority of their fellows, even across difference, as grievable. A politically important majority of people in this country still don’t hate each other enough yet for all to be lost, still apprehend each other, in Butler’s frame, as living and valuable.
Does living in the unacknowledged snuff film political economy allow a majority of its viewers to become ‘the kind of people who can act?’ I don’t know the answer yet.
Where I come from, mourning is not something you feel. It is something you do. Mourning can be, as a wide scope of thinkers have historically noted, a precondition to other political acts. We can mourn through silent sitting, through the care of the bereaved, through funeral attendance, through making street memorials, through turning up at the protest.
We mourn to remember each other, to ceremonially mark who is fully human to us. We mourn, in part, to remember our own lives, to apprehend ourselves as living.
Good died because she loved her neighbors. It’s a sentence I find poignant, painful, faintly ridiculous, reminiscent of the parable and the poem. This morning I woke up remembering these lines from Danez Smith, another poet of Minnesota: let us be more bandage than blade / unless the blade is needed / let us be dangerous to that which fails us / and bring us a world good to us, all of us. The fact is goodness has been dying from the scaffolding and the organization of our lives, in a variety of ways, and for a long time. Its withering, its impoverishing, and its murders all deserve naming, deserve observation and sustained action: action to preserve and protect it, to fight for and reseed it, to mourn its loss, to summon its longed-for return.
100%. I grieve her death and the many dead black and brown people before her, that unfortunately, did not garner media attention.
For a lot of people, the issues don’t matter until they start to fear for their own safety. POC and immigrant communities desperately need their white neighbors to fight for them right now.
I’m always so moved - in every sense of the word - by your writing. I’m struggling to make sense of what meaningful action looks like in this world but reading your work always moves the needle for me a little bit. Thank you for your clarity.