Mayor Zohran Mamdani needs to learn to not throw off wild charges of “murder,” as he did in a Wednesday tweet about the tragic death of Renee Good in Minneapolis.
However you interpret the videos and other evidence, it wasn’t that.
Murder involves intent, not shots fired in a chaotic and fast-changing situation — certainly not gunfire from a law-enforcement officer trying to do his job.
By some chain of logic and (questionable) factual assertions, you might claim it was homicide or involuntary manslaughter, but calling it “murder” is objectively a push to politicize the tragedy — and to enflame passions in a way that encourages future violence, perhaps deadly violence in Mamdani’s own New York City.
The mayor’s post is the reaction of an activist promoting polarization, not a chief executive seeking a principled peace: “This morning, an ICE agent murdered a woman in Minneapolis — only the latest horror in a year full of cruelty.
“As ICE attacks our neighbors across America, it is an attack on us all. New York stands with immigrants today, and every day that follows.”
If you want to build 200,000 new apartments, set up universal day care and so on, Mr. Mayor, you can’t have the city mired in activists’ at war with the federal government.
In stark contrast, Vice President J.D. Vance from a White House podium on Thursday made his points without escalating passions, saying he’s “not happy” that Wood lost her life but terming it a “tragedy of the making of the far left.”
He pointed to the “broader left-wing network” that’s been “working tirelessly” to turn ICE enforcement actions into full-blown riots — and while he didn’t specifically call out the huge spike in car attacks on ICE agents, he made it plain that Good’s driving on the scene sure looked like she was “trying to ram this guy with her car.”
He also slammed the press for “repeating the lie that this was some innocent woman out for a drive in Minneapolis”: She plainly meant to be there; her recent history shows she’d become just the sort of social-justice activist the hard left cozens into these protests.
Indeed, it turns out she been trained as an “ICE watch warrior,” working with her wife and others to “document and resist” the feds’ immigration crackdown — which makes the now-widow’s wails (“I made her come down here, it’s my fault”) all the more tragic.
Even if she was “just” trying to flee the riot in a panic after realizing she was in way over her head, her actions made it beyond reasonable to demand she stop and surrender — and to use force when she kept moving, at least clipping the agent who fired the fatal shot.
Commentators in the broad American center are comparing Good’s death to that of Ashli Babbit — an activist shot dead by a Capitol Police officer as the mob surged into the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: two regrettable deaths on left and right.
Hard partisans on both sides will hate that formulation, but maybe it’ll make some of them stop and think; we hope Mayor Mamdani will be one of them.
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