Progressivism’s Willing Sacrifices

How activist leaders brainwash their followers by turning moral certainty into mortal risk.

Renée Good’s death is being treated by the progressive left as a morality tale with only one permissible conclusion: Trump's ICE is evil, the activist is pure, and any suggestion otherwise is heresy.

That reflexive framing is patently dishonest, and it got a woman killed.

Now that more video has surfaced and more information about Good has come out, I think it is worth diverging from the prepackaged narratives of the past few days.

In my view, the available footage and surrounding behavior strongly suggest that Good never intended to harm a federal agent. That observation, however, does not contradict my belief that the agent acted appropriately. He was clearly at risk, and in that moment he could not have known whether other agents were also in danger from a vehicle accelerating away from the scene.

The more likely explanation is simpler and more tragic. Good panicked. She feared detention. She believed—wrongly—that she was protected, exempt, insulated by her status, her politics, and the progressive infrastructure that had wrapped her in an illusion of moral invincibility. When that illusion shattered, instinct took over. She fled and that moment of flight, however human and understandable, was catastrophic. In the real world—not the activist one—a moving vehicle confronting law enforcement is not a symbol. It is a weapon. Intent becomes irrelevant.

The mistake many are making is to believe the public sparring between Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, and the insufferable Jacob Frey on one side, and Kristi Noem and the Trump administration on the other, is the real conflict.

It isn’t.

The real culprits are the leaders of a progressive movement that treats human beings as disposable assets. As I thought about this dynamic, a line from Braveheart came to mind, when Edward Longshanks sneers, “Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.”

Substitute “affluent white female liberals” for “the Irish,” and the analogy fits uncomfortably well. This is where Minnesota officials, the DFL, and the broader national progressive movement bear direct responsibility for Renée Good’s death.

Good was not a trained professional. She was not a lawyer. She was not a federal monitor. She was labeled a “legal observer”—a title casually bestowed by activist organizations that carries no legal standing but enormous psychological weight. It implies authority without responsibility, protection without power, and safety without consequence.

It is, bluntly, a lie.

That lie is sold aggressively to a specific demographic: affluent, educated white women who have spent their lives buffered from the sharp edges of state power. They are overrepresented in progressive nonprofits, activist training sessions, and street-level demonstrations precisely because they are useful. Their presence sanitizes confrontation. Their voices humanize the cause. Their injuries—and deaths—generate outrage capital and the next Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, or George Floyd “moment” that has fueled nearly every major protest movement since 2012.

This is not an accident. It is a strategy.

And now Renee Gold is dead and the progressive ghouls have their “moment.”

Progressive leaders know exactly what they are doing when they deploy these women into volatile law-enforcement situations. They know these participants lack experience with arrest, detention, or physical coercion. They know they are more likely to panic when confronted with real authority. And they know the resulting images will be politically advantageous no matter how the encounter ends. In their heart of hearts, they are looking for that moment.

If this sounds cynical, it should—because it is.

The movement’s rhetoric trains its foot soldiers to see law enforcement not as agents of a legal system they may oppose, but as something closer to an occupying army—fascistic, illegitimate, morally void. They hype them up on the dopamine of fear and anger, wind them tight, and send them into the street. That process does not encourage de-escalation. It encourages flight, resistance, and defiance at precisely the moments when compliance is the only safe option.

When Good realized she was about to be detained, her ideology collapsed and all that remained was fear. Her partner reportedly urged her to run. That single word captures the entire failure of progressive activist culture: the belief that moral alignment suspends reality.

It does not.

And yet the response from movement leaders has been entirely predictable. They deny responsibility. They double down on rhetoric. They sanctify the victim and absolve themselves. There is no reckoning with the fact that they sent an unprepared civilian into a confrontation with armed federal agents while assuring her—implicitly or explicitly—that she would be safe.

This is not compassion. It is exploitation dressed up as solidarity.

If progressive movements genuinely cared about the people they mobilize, they would stop pretending street activism is consequence-free and a $10 high visibility vest is bulletproof. They would stop inventing titles that suggest immunity. They would stop encouraging civilians to interfere in law-enforcement actions they neither understand nor control.

Most of all, they would stop lying.

Renée Good’s death should not be mythologized. It should be interrogated—not to excuse violence, but to expose the moral cowardice of leaders who radicalize rhetoric, outsource risk, and then feign shock when reality intrudes.

Until that happens, more people will be sent forward believing they are protected by virtue alone.

And some of them will not come home.