AoSHQ The Morning Report
January 21, 2026
Since the unfortunate, yet predictable, death of Renee Good on January 7 for committing assault with a deadly weapon by ramming her 4,000-pound SUV into an armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, a persistent lie has been told about her backstory. It’s likely that the left and their media allies believe eliding this part of her past somehow burnishes Good’s leftist credentials — as if ramming her car into a federal officer weren’t radical enough to convince them.In Other News
If you look closely, however, the story is changing. The narrative about Good’s later-in-life lesbian “marriage” is quickly evaporating, given an old Irish goodbye by the news media. That doesn’t mean the media have corrected the record, but they have begun to quietly make the inaccurate portrayal of her marital status disappear.
Thanks to independent journalist Julie Kelly, we learn that not only was Good not married to her lesbian partner, but that she legally changed her name to match her paramour’s last name — not through marriage, but via an old-fashioned World B. Free, Metta World Peace, Chad Ochocinco, Snoop Dogg–style name change. “Good” is a great brand name.
It’s been a challenge to keep up with the shifting narratives in the death of Renee Good, the woman shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week.In Other News
We were first told she was just a young mom who was not involved in any organized effort to impede ICE operations, and that she was merely trying to make a U-turn when she was senselessly murdered by an ICE agent (a curious claim given that Portland Avenue, where the shooting occurred, is a one-way street). This gave way to the admission that she was indeed actively harassing ICE agents before she was killed, but the shooting was nonetheless unwarranted because Good’s Honda Pilot had not struck the agent who shot her. Then, as additional videos emerged showing the Pilot striking the agent, the narrative changed yet again. Okay, we were told, the Pilot hit him, but not that hard, and it was his own fault because he shouldn’t have been standing there in the first place.
More information has come to light since I wrote about the case last week, the accumulation of which has served to put the lie to claims that Good was “murdered” and that the shooting was utterly without legal justification. CNN has assembled a timeline of the shooting using the videos available thus far, and though I would quibble with some of CNN reporter Kyung Lah’s narration, the videos offer a fairly complete look at how the event unfolded.
In debating the shooting with a friend on X this week, I said I didn’t think I would have fired at Good because I would not have been standing in the path of her car. But now that the agent’s cellphone video and that of bystanders and nearby security cameras have been made public, we can see that the agent was to the right of Good’s car until she backed up and changed directions, thereby putting him in front of it. To repeat a passage from the U.S. Supreme Court case of Graham v. Connor, which I cited in my last column, “The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments – in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving – about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.” In a matter of a second or two, the agent went from being safely out Good’s path to being directly in it.
I can recall several moments in my police career in which I found myself in tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving circumstances, in the aftermath of which and upon calm reflection I realized I had not been standing in the most advantageous and tactically sound positions. It happens, and I am fortunate to have avoided being killed or killing someone else.
Covering Venezuela back in, say, August, when I had a feeling about what was coming but no one else cared, was difficult. Resources were lacking, and I often had to go with my gut. Covering Venezuela in January, so far, has been difficult because it's like drinking water out of a firehose — there's so much information out there, and I'd say 80% of it is either incorrect, biased, or a lot more nuanced than people want to admit.In Other News
Suddenly, everyone in the MSM — and even some in conservative media, I hate to say — is an expert on a country they thought little about until recently, which results in a lot of chaos and disinformation in the news. We joke about these leftist protesters trading in their "Free Palestine" flags and posters for "Free Nicolás Maduro" ones, but the truth is that the pundits and reporters often do the same thing.
Marco Rubio summed it up when he appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday and said that "most of the 'experts' people have on television, I watch these experts and it's clown hour. These are people that have focused their entire career on the Middle East or some other part of the world because that's where all the action was. Very few of them know anything about Venezuela or the Western Hemisphere."
So, here is what I can tell you about what's next for Venezuela: No one outside the White House knows. I don't know. You don't know. The loudest reporters, anchors, and pundits in the rest of the media don’t know — even the ones with the fancy anonymous sources who claim to be insiders, even the ones with the big names who get all the attention. None of them know.