Nothing Has Changed

Mike Kelley, Red Cave (painted cardboard and acrylic on canvas, 1980)

Today is Thursday, January 8th, 2026. ICE murdered a woman yesterday, in Minneapolis. I heard the news through social media. You probably did as well. Twitter remains my drug of choice, but I doubt it really matters – this is the sort of event that will be everywhere immediately, on every platform, no matter how its algorithm has been tuned. After seeing enough to confirm that yes, this was going to be that kind of event, I stopped scrolling, tried to find something else to do. No disrespect to the people who feel the need to Post their way through things like this – I understand the impulse, I’ve been there, this is a lonely world and when it gets lonelier you do what you have to do. I just don’t have the stomach for it anymore. I couldn’t stay away entirely, of course: I came back a few more times, I learned she had been driving away because one pig had been telling her to leave, even as another had been trying to rip her car door off the frame; I learned the pigs had prevented a doctor from treating her, from doing something as simple as trying to staunch her bleeding – had, in fact, threatened to murder him, too, for wanting to be of some use to another person, for wanting to do something other than hurt or kill; I learned her name, Renee Nicole Good, which I am reproducing here not because I think you don’t already know it, but because a name is a talisman, a powerful one, and we need all the help we can get; I learned she had three children. That was more than enough for me. It had only been a couple hours since the news broke, but I saw that all the expected arguments were already in full swing, a million of the murderer’s fellow violent cowards singling out their video perspective of choice, watching it over and over again, convincing themselves that it’s showing them exactly what they want to see, unable to perceive what’s really there. I wasn’t able to track down the reference for this, but I remember reading in an essay once about a pig involved in the Rodney King beating, who took to replaying the footage of the attack at home, obsessively, blowing the image up, slowing it down, unable to see, no matter how closely he looked, what it was people thought he had done wrong. It’s just all so vulgar, so disgusting. It’s nauseating to be reminded one shares a planet with people that have laid themselves so low, that have made such mockeries of themselves, and of us, for allowing them any sort of say over who should live and who should die. But, of course, this is hardly news. Lacking any sense of history, they cannot see their own futility, cannot see that what they believe will make them whole again is a phantasm, forever drifting out of reach. And so they will continue in the way they have until they cease to be victorious, or until the world has been made into a ruin. Her name was literally Good. Can you believe that? Such things make a man wonder sometimes…

Let me get to my point: This was always going to happen. It was inevitable, simply a question of when. That when has turned out to be now, and not later, and this is a tragedy, that it couldn’t have been later, couldn’t have been postponed indefinitely – but we all knew it would come sometime. I mean, you could feel it, right? You’ve been feeling it for a long time? I know I have. This is why I say: Nothing has changed. I’m not saying this in a defeatist way, to suggest that we have to in any way reconcile ourselves to women being murdered for caring about their neighbors. What I am saying is that this event has already, in some sense, been priced in – it’s been priced in by us, the comrades of the murdered, and it’s been priced in by them, the co-conspirators of the murderer. Everything up to this point has been mutually understood as something that will happen. It is part of the plan. It’s only what comes next that is uncertain. They have the advantage of great power, money, resources, of being able to lie in public and face no consequences for it – but they have been dealt, I think, a weaker hand than they had hoped: a victim they cannot racialize, who leaves behind crying children. This is, of course, no issue for the misogynists that constitute the core of the American fascist project – they’re thrilled to see a woman, especially a fucking queer, put down in the street before her screaming wife. But it certainly would have been much easier for the ghouls tasked with making this go away, because this is something they need to make go away, don’t lose sight of that, if it had been someone bearing a closer resemblance to the image of the “Domestic Terrorist” they have spent the last several years trying to conjure into reality. No, I think they expect real difficulties to come from murdering this woman. I think this is already clear simply by the language the official mouthpieces are deploying to justify their crime, straight down the line police union doublespeak rather than the usual Based Shitposter posturing. I don’t make predictions when I write about things like this – I have come to accept that I am a poor gambler, with bad instincts (I count myself lucky to have learned this lesson before half the American economy became betting apps), and who knows, maybe jinxes are real. I will simply say that it would be understandable if this year made 2020 appear, in comparison, as a mere blip on the timeline of class struggle in this country, with no expectations that such a thing will come to pass. Nothing has changed yet. But the inevitable has happened, and now, inevitably, will come something else.