What to Know
Jesse Watters has joined other conservatives in making light of Renee Good’s death. The 37-year-old mom of three was shot and killed by a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota on January 7. When reporting on the incident on Fox News, Watters chose to focus on Good’s pronouns and her partner’s sexuality, seemingly suggesting that these details make her death less devastating? On social media, people have criticized his dismissive attitude, claiming that he’s trying to “dehumanize her.” After all, as one person on Reddit put it, “Who cares if she had a lesbian partner, or pronouns in her bio? That has nothing to do with what happened to her.”
Watters also asserted that the ICE agent shot Good ‘to defend himself.’
Though videos of the incident suggest that Good seemed to be driving away from the ICE agent, rather than at him, President Donald Trump and those in his circle keep saying that the ICE agent acted in self-defense. They have also sought to portray Good as an aggressor.
For example, Watters reiterated that U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem described what Good did as “an act of domestic terrorism.” The Associated Press reported that prior to being shot and killed, Good had just dropped her six-year-old son off at his elementary school. According to the news outlet, she described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom” on social media, and her loved ones said she was “gentle, kind, and openhearted.”
The Fox News host mocked her, calling her a “self-proclaimed poet.”
Speaking of the woman who was just killed by an ICE agent, Watters said, “The woman who lost her life was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio. A 37-year-old White woman named Renee Good.” Online, many people wanted to know why the fact that she had “pronouns in her bio” was relevant to the story. But Watters didn’t stop there. He continued with, “The Daily Mail says she leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage. She was a disruptor, though she considered herself a legal observer. But there’s no evidence she had a law degree.”
Many people had the same reaction to these Watters’ comments about Good: So what? Does that make what happened to her OK?
“So….Jesse seems to feel that because of all of that she deserved what happened to her,” one person on Reddit wrote. “Is that what’s happening here?” His description felt “cruel” to people for so many reasons. “It’s one thing to have political differences. But it takes events like this to show just how awful and soulless some people are,” a second critic said. “He knows what he’s doing. He knows he’s using a murder victim to sound dog whistles to a mass of sheep.”
Based on Watters’ description of Good, a third Redditor concluded, “So she was a mom and in a loving relationship…got it.”
