There was the one in Ferguson. The one in Minnesota where the licensed gun owner was not reaching for his gun. The one shot in the back for the brake light. The one with the knee on the neck. The one with the “loosies.” We informally title each law enforcement killing of a citizen like it’s a Friends episode. Even in this respect, with the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis this Wednesday, ICE sets a new substandard.

“The one where ICE shot the white mom” stands out. Maybe it’s her glove compartment teeming with stuffed animals next to her driver’s seat—now empty, except for a new coat of blood. Maybe it’s how her killer hid his face, while we don’t know if she still has one. Maybe it’s the fact that her killers and their masters spent the day of her death trying to fit her with the face of a terrorist.

Maybe Renee Nicole Good is what it takes for the obvious to be itself.

Most of us will be fortunate never to witness a law-enforcement murder firsthand; only the Internet really makes these killings real or proximal. As such, it’s hard not to respond from the same context—running to memes, Internet callbacks, gags that pass into conventional wisdom, like dril bits. This all feels desperately immature for the moment, but we might as well use the same tools as those responsible, atop a government rightly pegged as a memeocracy.

After Good’s killing, the Trump administration came out swinging with them. The Department of Homeland Security’s current RICO-style deployment in Minnesota is itself delivered as incipient meme, orchestrated by the ultra–media conscious leader of the raids, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino. It was duly marshaled in response to a memed understanding of a fraud scheme and a daycare-fraud meme applied to people depicted in the dull, deathless memes of racism.

Despite the video of Good’s shooting being plain as day from the start, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and mouthpiece Tricia McLaughlin then applied the meme template the agency adopted in a pair of shootings (one fatal, one not) by agents in the Operation Midway Blitz campaign in Chicago. As in those cases, federal officials adopted the DARVO playbook pioneered by sexual abusers—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Thus was the victim made to appear as the aggressor, and the killer’s optional responses transmogrified into the mandatory. This was and is, of course, evil and self-evidently false, which Noem effectively acknowledged by slapping the thought-terminating cliché meme of “terrorist” on Good. When it will eventually be conceded that the victims did nothing to justify their murder, the job of federally appointed murder apologists is to make sure they are already wielding the most dangerous weapon of all—ideology. On Wednesday night, Fox News agitprop handler Jesse Watters made sure that Good’s “pronouns were in bio.” There it is, plain for all to see: the “she was going for her gun” of the mind.

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Pointing out hypocrisy proves too often a terminus of its own, but Noem’s criteria for terrorism involved running over someone with a car and nebulous claims of coordination. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been less than two weeks since Florida Man (pejorative, Republican) Representativev Randy Fine tweeted, “In Florida, we run terrorists over. Under my Thump Thump Act, the rest of America can too.” Or perhaps you recall 2020, when the conservative response to George Floyd protests was a coordinated effort to morally justify and legalize what people kept seeing on social media already—police running over protesters with their cars. Their crusade then was to democratize vehicular assault and give a defense against civil liability for any malignancy, conspiracist, racist, or general asshole who got scared and decided he needed to make a citizen’s pancake. Now all they have to do is ascribe their own overt motives to unlucky bystanders in order to justify an otherwise completely unprovoked use of lethal force.

Any number of concurrent pathologies and memes run through this hypocrisy. (Any discussion of the authorities justifying the killing of an out-group instantly suggests James Franco smirking with a noose around his neck, “First time?”) There is, of course, fascism’s paradoxical tension between being a master of the world and simultaneously pants-shittingly terrified at all times. In day to day terms, this mostly manifests as DHS tweets of homeland-defending AI images with the “Nazi propaganda aesthetic” cranked to ear-bleeding levels of dog whistling by people who boast about how many cities they’re afraid to visit. In a macro sense, it’s seen the transference of duty from protecting and serving citizens to “protect law enforcement at the expense of anything nearby.” Under this perverse mandate, the cops owe the public nothing, while the public is at all times mortally responsible for maintaining the cops’ sense of a safe space around them, lest their anxiety be triggered.

While all of that is true, it’s also just a refinement of what Noem and Trump and the American right’s underlying message has distilled into: that the right kind of people are entitled to destroy anything that threatens, frightens, impedes or even annoys them, and that this right is so sovereign and so unencumbered that any misapplication of it rises only to the level of collateral damage. Doubtless there are people in the Trump administration who sincerely regret and abhor the killing of Renee Good, but for them, her killing will never be so horrific as to remove the right to kill her again on the same terms even if you brought her back to life.

Trump, Noem, and the GOP know what DHS is, and they like it that way. They know that post-9/11 paranoia recreated bureaucratic functions as poisonous extensions of law-enforcement and the permanently aggrieved cop mentality. They know that a hasty hiring spree had paid off amply, unleashing a new cohort of felons in their ranks. They know that ICE and Customs and Border Patrol teem with racists—they can see their memes too—and they pander to them on the campaign trail. They’re now on another hiring spree to create more of the same, with nearly flatlined physical standards, laughably threadbare behavioral qualifications, and ads very plainly appealing to nativist sympathies and cop worship. All this comes on top of the immigration state’s historic appeal to existing law enforcement personnel who feel their aggression has been shackled. It’s all a low-risk proposition when only people who look like cops have to feel safe.

The system’s design, from ideology to purpose to staffing, will make this happen again, because it will be defined down until nothing happened. You could lay a line of coffins from the first tee to the 18th green at Trump’s Bedminster golf resort, and the body count will remain at zero. The Renee Good who deserved this is already being built, and every future victim will have a doppelgänger who needed killing. Nothing happens in the detention centers, too, because nothing happens if no one can observe it. Any witness will just be a detainee, anyway—assuming you can find them again. They say they’re being tortured and having things taken from them, but then of course they would.

Above all, the lords of immigration vigilanteism know that a right-wing Supreme Court has labored to immunize them from virtually all accountability and give their victims access at most to a suggestion box. Where the court does not already protect them, they know that they are the chosen domestic army of Donald Trump, his most beloved goons, and that Trump, the GOP, and very frequently both sides of the aisle and legacy media will default to depicting them as America’s vital last line of defense against an existential threat.

They know there will be no restraints, because you almost couldn’t fault them for not recognizing one. If lack of qualification is no impediment to getting the job, and breaking the law is no impediment to working it, what’s murder after you add a few adjectives or nouns? They already beat people in broad daylight, abduct people without legal justification in front of the cameras, then deliberately target the people with the cameras. They destroy things that irritate them and assault people who annoy them and menace people to show that being told no won’t stop them. And anybody who’s been abused long enough can see the expression of snarling satisfaction on a random ICE or CBP goon’s face when he’s decided he’s going to knock someone around because it will make him feel better. How long they are permitted to keep doing that depends on how long it takes for everyone else to see that same pleasure in their expressions. At the rate they make memes of themselves, ceaselessly issuing pay-attention-to-me challenge coins, it might not take all that much time.

It might be impossible for people of a certain age to talk about memes and the Internet without invoking The Simpsons, but something interesting happened about a decade ago, when the show’s sudden availability on streaming platforms introduced it to new audiences just as events like the Ferguson protests were about to appear on the timeline. Gags that had lost some sting to memorization and repetition hit new audiences afresh, like when Police Chief Wiggum guns down the high school basketball team’s starting center, then fumbles for an excuse afterward: “He was turning into a monster.”

It was interesting, too, to watch people who grew up with the show watch it through these new sets of eyes. The Simpsons depicted law enforcement as lethally stupid, corrupt, lazy, and outright hostile to the expectation that they solve anything or visibly work at all, and it had always done that. The number-one threat to law enforcement was the citizenry. Sure, a 22-year-old joke felt pretty old, but the older and uglier recognition was that 22 years earlier the subject matter was already folk wisdom, common knowledge, and universal enough to be recognized by a massive TV audience.

Ideally, most people have a more profound relationship with reality when they have their epiphanies, but nobody should care about how anybody gets there. Like Grant Brisbee’s since-deleted tweet about the teen Rage Against the Machine fan now at parties in his 30s and saying, “No, really, some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses,” your discovery isn’t any less profound for sounding corny, and people who are already on the other side of it are happy to have you.

The only downside to asking how many decades of life have been spent internalizing one set of human rights atrocities as a kind of savvy joke everyone is in on is discovering how many others there are. (It’s always only one prison shower joke away.) DHS is only too happy to guide us into the depths. If this is how our immigration agents behave in the open, how widespread is the torture already reported, and how seriously should we already be taking it? When detainees say their things have been taken from them, do you reflexively dismiss it as the lament of bad actors playing the victim? Or do the ethics you see in the streets make you wonder if, off-camera, the United States is currently experiencing the largest jewelry transfer in history from non-white people to ICE agents’ wives and the girlfriends they met before being asked to leave their previous job as a high-school resource officer?

If it can mean nothing else for people watching, one hopes Renee Nicole Good’s death can be the moment that the meme or cliché loops around past mixed feelings and self-exonerating refrains that these cases are much more complicated than they seem, and becomes simply true again. Like the student who grew up learning the Civil War was about slavery, went to high school and learned that it was about a lot of complicated factors like tariffs and states’ rights, and then went to college and learned, nope, it was about slavery, one hopes that people can now see that the system is killing Good, abducting and wounding terrorizing others because this is what the people who built it want it to do, and this is what many in it enjoy doing.

They will meme a fresh disgrace and make another idiot boast and maybe pick a distracting fight with a female pop star so their fans can spend three days calling her a lesbian. They hope that everything about Renee Good’s murder dies with her. It has for them.

After the shooting, Bovino—lord of nominative determinism and source of 100 percent unrefined bullshit—and his goons milled around like groomsmen waiting for the wedding photographer to start cramming them into position. Everyone’s faces were covered, of course, for those special moments when you want to say, “I was there” without a court being able to say it too. Nothing had gone wrong.