No ‘Good’: Being Dan the Wrong Kaf
This past Sunday night NFL fans were treated to one of the wildest fourth quarters possible in a winner take all contest to end the regular season- and it ended with not one, but two, wildly missed kicks within 55 seconds of playing time.
With the recent death of a woman named “Good” driving a car at a Federal agent is what has been torturously branded an act of “protest” has elicited a flood of memery that, were they kicks, would only wildly miss, but likely would have been kicked in the wrong direction with the kicking team still insisting on being awarded three points.
For starters: “When protesters get shot, that’s bad, actually.”
Sure. If there were protesters. “Good” wasn’t a protester. She was a domestic terrorist.
“We’re not Iran / We’re not Venezuela.”
This is a category error so basic it barely deserves a response. Protesters in Iran and Venezuela are opposing regimes that criminalize speech itself. What happened here involved federal officers enforcing duly enacted law while being physically attacked. Lumping those together is not moral seriousness; it’s aesthetic moral cosplay.
“She didn’t need to be shot if she was retreating.”
By definition she could not have been “retreating” as long as she was inside the vehicle and it was still running. Once she hit the officer she presented a clear and present danger to anyone no matter where she was going until she stopped or was neutralized. This isn’t vibes, it’s video. She drove her car straight at an ICE agent. That’s why there is a bullet hole in her windshield. Police officers — ICE included — have no duty to be run over by people who think ideological certainty functions as diplomatic immunity.
“ICE is heavy-handed and brutal.”
This isn’t an evidentiary claim; it’s a belief system. It only works if your baseline assumption is that immigration should be treated like a constitutional right and enforcement itself is immoral. But that’s not the law. Crossing the border illegally is a federal crime. Remaining here unlawfully requires additional violations. A system built on mass illegality plus selective enforcement is not “compassionate”; it’s corrosive.
Also missing from the viral narrative: “Good” and her comrades chased and harassed ICE agents beforehand, screaming, surrounding them, intentionally escalating. At one point an agent’s hands were still inside her vehicle when she moved it, injuring him. She then aimed the car at another agent.
This was not confusion. This was escalation.
“Protesters” don’t weaponize cars.
“Protesters” don’t engage in violent obstruction.
“Protesters” don’t then get posthumously rebranded because the outcome makes people uncomfortable.
It is, of course, possible — though at this point increasingly improbable — that some meaningful subset of anti-ICE “protesters” are one-issue: that this administration is driven by nativist impulses, hostile to all non-Eurocentric immigration; that immigration is on balance a net benefit to the country; and that ICE has become the flag under which government overreach now marches. More likely – as R. Dessler put it – maasim mevarerim zu es zu, actions clarify one another: the same people screaming about ICE would be perfectly comfortable screaming “Free Gaza” — and they would not mean from Hamas. The burden of proof of otherwise is on them.
Once you weaponize a vehicle, escalate a confrontation, and aim lethal force at an officer, you are no longer in the protest category at all. Arguing about proportionality after that is like debating the wind after the kick went backwards.
Do you feel the need to be machmir to the point that you must judge someone named “Good” favorably no matter what she did? Here’s the kulah: you’re patur. There are no zechusim here. Endless dan lekaf zechus for someone who initiated violence, paired with reflexive outrage at the officer who refused to be run over, is just merachem al ha’achzarim with better branding.
The call isn’t controversial.
No “Good”.