Our readers are awesome. This glowing critique appeared yesterday on a French-language site:
pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2026/01/05/the-pr-fallout-of-tim-walzs-political-demise-the-somalia-scandal-is-about-to-explode-n4947911
The author is an extremely astute forecaster, despite his clunky writing style. I hate reading his articles, but I've learned a lot, and he hasn't been wrong in the several years I've been following him.
(Hey, I’ll take it: A backhanded compliment is still a compliment.)
Life, after all, is like my (clunky) columns: You’ve gotta take the good with the bad.
And the same applies to breaking news, including yesterday’s ICE shooting in Minneapolis: There’s usually more gray than black and white. Most of the time, breaking news is akin to a Rorschach inkblot test, where different political groups can interpret the image however they want.
Which they then use to justify whatever they want.
That’s how the political PR game works: Each side begins with a preferred outcome. Then, whenever anything newsworthy happens, each side cherry-picks the elements that advance their PR narrative.
Neither side is interested in the truth; their purpose is persuasion.
And that’s what we’ll see over the next few weeks with the ICE shooting. There’s going to be a mad rush by both sides to frame the story: The pro-Trump side will focus on the lawlessness of the protesters, the vulnerability of the ICE officers, and the nobility of their mission. (With a healthy side-portion of Somali money-laundering and/or immigration fraud.) The anti-Trump side will focus on the death of an unarmed woman who was shot in the head while (apparently) trying to drive away, arguing that “literally Hitler” is murdering his own people.
Both sides will succeed — but only within their own echo chambers.
That’s because the ICE shooting wasn’t cut-and-dry. Even with multiple video angles, it’s unclear if lethal force was appropriate.
On one hand, Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old victim of the ICE shooting, was 100% breaking the law and committing (numerous) arrestable offenses. But on the other hand, the legal standard for arresting a person — and the legal standard for using lethal force — are different.
Would a reasonable man, in the ICE officer’s situation, believe that his life — or the lives of his fellow officers — necessitated the use of lethal force?
Personally, I don’t think so. To me, the more prudent response would’ve been to follow the woman’s car and charge her with a slew of crimes, including resisting arrest, interfering with federal action, and endangering lives.
But then again, that’s very easy for me to say from my couch in sunny Tampa Bay. If I had been in the ICE agent’s shoes — and just a few months earlier, I had been rammed and dragged by a protester’s car — I might’ve reached for my pistol, too.
An automobile is a deadly weapon. Arguing that since Good only sideswiped the ICE agent, there was no mortal risk is like arguing that when a shooter only grazes a policeman, the police shouldn’t shoot back. We can’t allow our law enforcement officers to become sitting ducks, unable to defend themselves.
That’s self-defeating when lawbreakers are escalating their tactics and deliberately endangering lives.
Good, sane public policy from both sides would be to call for de-escalation. Peaceful protests are fine; weaponizing a 4,000-pound Honda Pilot is not. If our politicians valued country over partisanship, Ms. Good’s death would galvanize a movement to lower the national temperature, serving as a rallying cry for restraint.
But restraint doesn’t pay political dividends.
The sad truth is that all sides are politically incentivized to escalate tensions. Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) desperately needs a distraction from his Somali fraud scandal, and the bigger-named Dems — including Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — smell blood in the water: If they can elbow their way to the front of the protesters and hijack their cause, it’ll elevate their profile for the 2028 primaries.
Escalating tensions is a smart strategy for Democratic hopefuls.
And this requires Donald Trump to frame the ICE shooting narrative as lawful, prudent, and beyond reproach: If he cedes an inch, his political enemies will take a mile.
(Which they’d promptly use to handcuff ICE, impeach the president, and block future federal action.)
There’s no “middle ground” to agree upon. There’s no off-ramp. For their own purposes, all sides are going to ramp up their rhetoric and inflame the passions of their base.
Trump won’t back down: He can’t.
And the Democrats won’t either.
So, we’re going to have more conflict, violence, and bloodshed. The same city that gave us the Black Lives Matter movement will become Ground Zero for a new wave of political violence, which will quickly spread nationwide. There will be demonstrations in every major U.S. city. And the vilification of ICE agents will be (further) normalized by the mainstream media.
This will likely result in more dead civilians, more dead ICE agents, and a more divided country.
Sorry, kids: This is gonna get worse before it gets better.
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First: It began with Mayor Zohran Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battlelines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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