The Lies Meant to Demoralize

Renee Good was murdered.

I am not wholly certain that I even believe in the existence of “evil,” but this is evil.

This statement by United States Vice President JD Vance came before we even knew Renee Good’s name. At the time Vance tweeted, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem had already called her a “domestic terrorist.”

If you have seen the multi-angle video recreation from the New York Times, or the subsequently released cell-phone video (which I won’t be linking to and don’t recommend watching) by the ICE officer who committed the murder you know this to be a lie. The evidence is plain. This man shot a woman who was no threat to him. I do not know enough about the intricacies of the intersection of federal and state law around qualified immunity for armed officers of the state to predict whether or not this man will get off on a technicality, but we should know a murder when we see one.

We just saw one.

My own sentiments were well captured by John Ganz who wrote:

I don’t know about you, but I find the endless lies and lying often to be the most infuriating and demoralizing part of the present situation. In the wake of this terrible killing in Minneapolis, my first thought, after the initial shock, anger, and sadness, was the knowledge that the next few days, months, weeks, and years would be filled with endless lying about what happened from the regime and its stooges. This filled me, if not quite with despair, then at least with a strong sense of depression. I suppose it has something to do with my vocation as a historian, where I can accept tragedy and even evil as unavoidable parts of the human experience, so long as witness can be borne and the truth eventually discovered.

The cell phone footage from the officer is being framed by Vance and others as somehow exculpatory when it is anything but, and that it is being treated this way is additionally infuriating and demoralizing.

This is all terrifying in a week when Donald Trump expressed to the New York Times that the only constraints on his presidency is “my own morality.” What morality?

Another murder and the subsequent application of justice from a decade ago illustrates the depths of our fall. In April of 2015 Walter Scott was shot and killed by police officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina. Walter Scott was running away, his back turned. Slager stood and fired eight total rounds, hitting Scott five times.

Slager had pulled Scott over for a malfunctioning brake light that Scott was on his way to buy parts to replace.

Even in South Carolina, a state steeped in white authority committing extrajudicial punishment including executions on its black citizenry, this shocked the collective conscience sufficiently that Slager was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison for 2nd degree murder.

Here we have the President and Vice President declaring the murder of Renee Good not only justified, but an example of justice itself.

What is this, if not evil?

For those of us who retain a measure of belief in the liberal order of norms and rules, who dream of a Joseph Welch “Have you no sense of decency!” moment to break the spell, these events can be particularly disorienting. Why can’t everyone see the hypocrisy of these people who proclaim themselves the ultimate defenders of liberty, but who also unconditionally support masked, armed agents of the state sent to terrorize the public?

I was delivered a just-in-time epiphany that I’d like so share via a seemingly unrelated episode of Matt Seybold’s The American Vandal podcast.

Theory At The Bargaining Table (Vandal Live at UIC)

In the podcast, as part of a broader discussion about the intersection of labor rights and the designs of the tech oligarchy on education, Dominique Baker, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware identifies these sorts of obviously hypocritical acts as assertions of power, a way to demonstrate that evidence, argument, or even truth cannot stand in their way.

Oh, you say that you care deeply about the learning process and merit and equity, and yet you would really like to re-segregate higher education in the United States and make it so that in general, rich white mens are the ones who are able to attend the institutions you care most about. The biggest thing I always come to is that is not hypocrisy, that is power.

The federal government's response to the murder of Renee Good has overshadowed an equally egregious fuck you to the truth in the form of their wholesale rewriting of the events of January 6th, 2021. These are something worse than lies; a complete inversion of the truth.

And yet, it doesn’t matter. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s power.

I must also recognize in this moment that my fury and demoralization is a relative luxury, having not had to fully confront these forces before I reached 55-years-old.¹

At BlueSky, writer and scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom shared a clip from her moment of breaking, a newspaper letter to the editor in response to the verdict in the Rodney King Trial.

We are desperately in need of what Prof. Cottom calls a “political imagination” because we are not going to rule of law our way out of this problem, not when the party in power says, “What law?”

What are we to do? I am aware that just a few weeks ago, with some measure of confidence and hope I declared that this is all going to end.

I still believe this. The regime is politically weak - this is why they’re desperately flexing all this power - a significant majority of the country does not support what they are doing in Venezuela, or in discussing annexing Greenland, or siccing ICE goons on the public.

But for this to end, something must end it. Maybe it will be an election, and while I believe we will have an election, we must use our political imaginations to consider what kind of fuckery those ICE goons may get up to.

Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos argues that Republicans must be a part of the solution, and indeed at this moment a relatively small number of them in Congress could choose to caucus with Democrats, allowing for significantly more oversight and at least some constraints on the lawlessness.

But if we’re going to wait for their decency to kick in, we’ll be waiting a lifetime, so in the moment-to-moment, what are we to do?

One tangible, actionable thing is to call lies what they are, lies. Here, I’ve again found John Ganz helpful (emphasis mine):

What we have here is not a system, but the effort to create one. But many people in the US are already living in the lie and are encouraging others to do so. The administration comes up with totally absurd lies; they are obscene and preposterous. They issue outlandish statements and parade their clownish idiots on TV, but what I find much more insidious and insulting is the demand on the part of some that we take them seriously or pretend that they are a government like any other. This is presented as truth, objectivity, or fairness, but it is its ultimate destruction. For instance, this is what I believed was going on with Bari Weiss’s memo. It struck me as the beginning of a system of apparatchiks who produce legitimating propaganda for a regime that openly mocks the truth. Such people can flatter themselves that they are independent and not members of “the Party,” so to speak, but they are living in a lie. They are pretending that there’s something more than issuing from the mouths of authority than obscenities and lies. I, for one, won’t play along with this stupid ritual. It poses as civility but is in reality the death of civic life.

We can refuse to accept the framing of the moment as something under dispute as the Times does in this headline:

The fact that apparatchiks will proclaim public lies in order to create a sense of dispute does not mean the media must accept that there is some dispute at work.

As Albert Burneko writes at Defector, it shouldn’t be hard to call a murder a murder even if you’re an elected official.

We should declare the truth, as AOC does here, ““I understand that Vance believes shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not. That is a fundamental difference between Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”

Anyone of us, whether in power or out, can declare the truth, as John Grosso writing at the National Catholic Reporter does here: “The vice president's comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith. His repeated attempts to blame Good for her own death are fundamentally incompatible with the Gospel. Our only recourse is to pray for his conversion of heart.”

The administration’s goal is demoralization, to get a critical mass to not believe in their world view, per se but to accept that there’s nothing to be done about it.

I refuse to accept this because it is not true, and the only way the truth will continue to matter is to keep saying things we know are true.

Renee Good was murdered.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I wrote about the astounding experience of reading Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I). I’m late to the train, but consider me fully on board.

At Inside Higher Ed I declared this to be “The Age of Agency” and that agency is the thing we should be teaching above all else.

At Academic Freedom on the Line I played Robin to Isaac Kamola’s Batman in getting out the word about resources to include on course policies and syllabi that articulate the values of freedom to teach and learn.

I’ve never read Gene Wolfe, and am, in general, not a big science fiction reader, but Lincoln Michel convinced me to give Wolfe’s novel Peace a try.

The The Fort Wayne Review of Books catalogs where 2025’s short story collections published by Big 5 presses came from.

This James Mustich piece on what can’t be summarized, from late 2025, is worth catching up with.

Naomi Kanakia explores A Little Life, calling it “a manipulative masterpiece.”

Via my friends at McSweeney's “Sneezes, Ranked” by Tiffany Harris.

Recommendations

1. The Crisis of Canadian Democracy by Andrew Coyne
2. Mostly the Van by Jason Narducy
3. On the Calculation of Volume (Book 3) by Solvej Balle
4. The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu
5. The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson

Hugh C. - Toronto, Canada

I’m going to take a bold swing and recommend a Canadian writer to a Canadian. This book was published more than a decade ago but feels more current than when it was first released, People Park by Pasha Malla.

1. I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle
2. The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid
3. Wormwood Abbey by Christina Baehr
4. Art in the After-Culture by Ben Davis
5. Keeper of Enchanted Rooms by Charlie N. Holmberg

Tracy D. - Kirkland, WA

Tracy (correctly) notes that this is not my usual fare, but I didn’t have all that much trouble coming up with what I think is a great choice, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

So, my noting that I was empty of recommendation requests resulted in a flood and a backlog, but the only way to get in line is to get in line, so if you want a recommendation, don’t hesitate to act.

So, the turn over to the new year created a predictable - yet still worrisome - shedding of subscription revenue as the annual non-renewers drop out. If you have been enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting through a paid subscription.

I want to say that next week can’t help but be better, but I’m going to not say that and instead engage my political imagination to work on how we can keep things from continuing to get worse.

See you next week, same time, same place.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. The Bush v. Gore decision ending the 2000 election and the later invasion of Iraq on clearly invented pretexts were heartbreakers, but I will admit into getting suckered by the election of Barack Obama as a kind of restoration of sense, but let this era be a lesson that winning elections alone are not sufficient to protect democracy.