Renee Good and America’s corruption

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The descent into dictatorship cannot be explained as merely the product of Trump’s personal ambitions or psychopathology. The United States is governed by a capitalist oligarchy that fuses the aristocratic outlook of monarchy and the ideological reaction of the slavocracy with the class interests of finance capital …

WSWS, below

“I’m not mad at you”, Renee Nicole Good tells ICE agents moving to surround her maroon SUV, and screaming at her to “get the fuck out of the car”, seconds before the agent now doxxed by his loose-lipped boss ¹ as one Jonathan Ross shoots her in the face while footage from multiple angles shows her car moving at below walking speed as she turns the wheel away from Ross.

The SUV continues, its driver incapacitated if not already dead, for several yards before hitting a parked car and coming to a standstill. “Fucking bitch”, an ICE agent is clearly heard saying. “Call 911”, shouts the masked killer as he strides back to his own vehicle with no apparent injury while vigorously jabbing at buttons on the phone he’d been using to film his victim before thrice firing through the windscreen into the head of the 37 year old mother of three.

A civilian asking for access to the victim is refused by a masked ICE agent. “I’m a physician”, the civilian protests. “I don’t care”, says the agent. The ICE vehicles, their positions at the time of the shooting material evidence in any criminal investigation – hence their removal from the scene a prima facie case of evidence-tampering – then leave to taunts from gathering crowds.

This much is undisputed. It seems Renee had come, possibly persuaded by her wife, as a ‘legal observer’. It is said other legal observers, including one Rev. Susie Hayward, a United Church of Christ minister, were pepper-sprayed by ICE agents fleeing the scene. It is said by city officials, including Mayor Jacob Frey whose message to ICE was “get the fuck out of Minneapolis”, and by state governor Tim Walz, that FBI have taken control of the investigation and are excluding both local police and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

Also undisputed, because also witnessed by the world, is that at least three top officials in the Trump Administration – Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Vice President Vance, and the 47th president himself – made statements grossly misrepresenting what happened, though crude gaslighting would be a more accurate term when the most defamatory claim, that Renee ‘weaponised her car’ in an attempt to run down Agent Ross, is flatly contradicted by the visual evidence. ²

So is the slaying no more than the work of a rogue agency, set up amid a climate of moral panic induced by an event – 9/11 – itself riddled with so many holes and unanswered questions that only a fool, such as I had been, can dismiss the charge of said event as a false flag calculated to legitimate ³ a quarter-century of carnage and chaos overseas, increasing repression at home?

Yes and no. There has under Trump 2 been a marked stepping up of thuggery ⁴ both across the empire, as seen over Iran, Venezuela and Greenland in the course of a single week, and on the freezing streets of Minneapolis three days ago. But on this matter WSWS, with whom I disagree on much including its failure to interrogate the preposterous 9/11 official narrative, ⁵ gets it right: “The descent into dictatorship cannot be explained as merely the product of Trump’s personal ambitions or psychopathology”.

The antecedents of that descent go back much further …

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, the invasion of Venezuela, Trump’s conspiracy for dictatorship and the lessons of the American Revolution

Socialist Equality Party (US), January 10 2026

The brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the Trump administration’s invasion of Venezuela mark a qualitative escalation in the drive toward dictatorship at home and imperialist conquest abroad. These events expose the Trump administration as a regime of fascist criminals that increasingly operates through raw force, dismisses legality as an inconvenience and regards the working population, domestically and internationally, as an enemy to be subdued.

The invasion of Venezuela, launched on January 3, was carried out to abduct the country’s President Nicolás Maduro—an act of imperialist aggression that violates the most basic norms of international law and state sovereignty.

The United States quickly signaled its intention to seize control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, transfer tens of millions of barrels of crude to the US, and assert indefinite dominance over the country’s energy exports. In the days that followed, Washington seized several oil tankers, including one flying a Russian flag, and issued ultimatums demanding that Caracas sever economic ties with Russia, China, Iran and Cuba and align its oil production exclusively with US interests.

Four days later, on January 7, ICE agents fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three. The immediate response of administration officials, which has been to praise the ICE killer and slander Good, makes clear that the killing is treated not as a crime to be prosecuted but as a precedent for future killings.

Countless millions of people in the United States and throughout the world have seen the video recording of Good’s murder. Their eyes do not deceive them. But this has not stopped Trump, Vice President Vance and other administration officials from constructing a narrative based on blatant lies, in which the victim of ICE violence is accused of being responsible for her own death.

The White House is using the murder to justify the expansion of paramilitary operations in major cities and the criminalization of dissent under the banner of a war against the “radical left.” There are reports of checkpoints being set up in Minneapolis, as the city is placed under effective occupation.

Criminality abroad and dictatorship at home are inextricably linked. The oligarchy has elevated Trump because it can no longer defend its interests through legal and democratic forms. Moreover, the vast resources required to wage war for global dominance must be extracted through a frontal assault on the working class and demands ever greater repression and violence.

On January 6, 2021, Trump spearheaded a coup that sought to halt the transfer of power and overturn the Constitution. This coup is now being implemented under a second Trump administration, overseen by the sitting president of the United States.

The descent into dictatorship cannot be explained as merely the product of Trump’s personal ambitions or psychopathology. The United States is governed by a capitalist oligarchy that fuses the aristocratic outlook of monarchy and the ideological reaction of the slavocracy with the class interests of finance capital.

250 years since the American Revolution—and the repudiation of its legacy

The assault on democratic rights and the conspiracy to transform the United States into a fascistic dictatorship is unfolding amid the approaching celebration of a great historic anniversary.

During this year 2026, the American and international working class will observe the 250th anniversary of the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a world-historical event that founded the United States and marked the beginning of a new epoch of political and social revolution.

The military struggle against British rule began in April 1775, when the colonists took up arms at Lexington and Concord. But the American Revolution did not arise as an orderly constitutional dispute conducted by a small layer of colonial notables. It occurred as a consequence of the radicalization of broad sections of the population in opposition to the increasingly oppressive actions of the British monarchy and imperial administration. As repression intensified—through arbitrary executive power, punitive economic measures, the denial of basic rights, and the use or threat of military force—the conflict drove the development of mass resistance that could no longer be contained within established political channels.

This radicalization found expression in an eruption of new forms of political self-organization. Tens of thousands of ordinary people were drawn into active political life, creating local committees, assemblies and networks of coordination that challenged imperial authority and increasingly displaced it. As the historian Richard Alan Ryerson explains: “The American Revolution mobilized tens of thousands of ordinary men in hundreds of communities, large and small, to change both the political and social order…”

Fifteen months after Lexington and Concord, delegates assembled in Philadelphia adopted a declaration drafted by 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson that proclaimed universal democratic principles as the basis of the struggle for American independence. The document includes what is arguably one of the most revolutionary sentences ever written:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Profoundly rooted in the Enlightenment thought of the 17th and 18th centuries, shaped by the great materialist political and social theorists of that historical period, the Declaration asserted the right of the people to the revolutionary overthrow of oppressive governments. In Jefferson’s words: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

The historical legacy of the American Revolution acquires burning actuality in the present. The principles proclaimed 250 years ago are being repudiated on every front. The Bill of Rights lies in tatters, and the political system is being remodeled on the basis of dictatorship. All the “grievances” against King George III outlined in the Declaration—including that he “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people”—could serve as an indictment of the present government.

Social inequality and the class foundations of authoritarian rule

Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” social inequality has reached levels without parallel in modern American history.

In 2025 alone, US billionaires (roughly 900 individuals) increased their net worth by 18 percent, bringing their combined holdings to nearly $7 trillion. Ten individuals account for $2.4 trillion of this total. Elon Musk, the wealthiest among them, has seen his fortune rise to $749 billion—more than the GDP of entire countries. Capitalizing on his position at the apex of the state, Trump increased his net worth from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion in a single year, vaulting more than 100 places up the list of America’s richest individuals.

According to data released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor’s share of income in the third quarter of 2025 fell to its lowest level on record in the United States. Tens of millions confront falling wages, surging prices and unmanageable debt. Corporations are using artificial intelligence to eliminate jobs en masse in a bloodbath that will intensify further in 2026. 

The Trump administration oversees a sweeping assault on core social programs—including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food assistance, public education and public health—seeking to finance global war and domestic repression by stripping the population of even the most basic protections.

This social reality is the basis of dictatorship. When a tiny layer monopolizes wealth and power, democratic forms become increasingly incompatible with the preservation of oligarchic rule. The ruling class responds not by reforming the system but by discarding the forms of legality and expanding the instruments of coercion.

The Democrats’ complicity and the bankruptcy of reliance on the state

The social, economic and political conditions that have produced Trump are the outcome of decades of bipartisan policy. The utter incapacity and unwillingness of the Democratic Party to oppose Trump’s dictatorship reflect the reality that the entire political system is controlled by the capitalist oligarchy.

Five years ago, Trump attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 elections in a fascist coup. The Biden administration treated Trump with kid gloves, and he was never held accountable for this criminal conspiracy.

During the 2024 elections, he pledged to “rule as a dictator from day one,” and the Democrats themselves described him as a “fascist.” Yet over the past year, as he systematically implemented the drive for dictatorship, the Democrats have worked tirelessly to suppress and demobilize opposition. Trump carries out criminal and unconstitutional actions without even the suggestion from the Democratic leadership that he should be removed from power.

Their priority is never the defense of democratic rights but the preservation of capitalist rule. They agree with the essential content of Trump’s agenda—militarism, austerity, corporate deregulation and the expansion of the repressive apparatus of the state. What they fear above all is not Trump’s dictatorship but the eruption of a mass movement from below that threatens the foundations of the capitalist order. To rely on the Democratic Party is to render any genuine opposition to dictatorship impossible.

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1. It seems Ross’s unmasking  comes courtesy Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, she of cowboy hat renown. By invoking an incident last June, also in Minnesota, in which the ICE agent who killed Renee Good had been dragged by a vehicle whose door he was trying to force open, Noem enabled the ‘jigsaw identification’ of Renee Good’s killer.
2. A second-by-second timeline of the Minneapolis shooting is given by ABC News here. It omits the “fucking bitch”  remark, audio-visual evidence of which appeared the next day, but otherwise is consistent with what I and millions across the world saw and heard.
3. A Neocon think tank founded by Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan (husband to Victoria Nuland) said in 2000 that a “new Pearl Harbor” could shift national sentiment in favour of the transformations it sought. Rebuilding America’s Defenses by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) regrets that such changes would be hard to sell, absent a “catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor”.  PNAC was wound up in 2006, though in 2009 Kagan co-founded a de facto successor in the shape of the Foreign Policy Institute. It too has since, in 2017, been disbanded.
4. I use the word ‘thuggery’ – as opposed to ‘warmongering’ – advisedly. Trump’s aversion to being bogged down in forever wars, as the administrations of his three predecessors had been, is shared by his MAGA base. A quick strike – the murder of a revered Iranian general, aiding an Israeli attack on Iran, bombing Nigeria and kidnapping Maduro – is more his style. But two things need saying. One, the lawless adventurism of Trump 1 and 2 have been calculated risks which could rebound catastrophically should, for instance, the government of Delcy Rodriguez defy Washington diktat and thereby ‘invite’ full on invasion. Two, while Trump still insists on labelling the Ukraine conflict as “Joe Biden’s war”, his first administration had, no less than Obama’s and prior to Biden’s single term, upped the ante: see A Ukraine timeline.
5. As I had, and as do many on the Left, WSWS makes a basic error of reason. It’s true that conspiracy is superfluous to any account of capitalist exploitation. It’s also true, however, that to conclude on this basis and without engaging with the evidence that 9/11 could not have been a false flag conspiracy is a logical non sequitur.