Time to return to the Schnell Post.

I’ll be honest with you- I wasn’t going to post this week and updates might become a little less regular than they have been over the last couple of years: I’ve been busy tending to my aging father, and with something as up-close-and-personal as the needs of an elderly parent, the shenanigans occurring elsewhere in the world- whether it’s the nonsensical proposed invasion of Greenland or Mattel’s introduction of autistic Barbie– simply fade into the background.

But the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota gave me pause. Generally, I don’t like to see people shot. As a person that legally carries and all the potential liability that entails, I tend to pay attention to when and where people employ lethal force. Like many people, I saw one quick video hours after the event and made a snap judgement: bad shoot. Of course, as time has gone by, it turns out that it is not that simple.

Stepping back from that singular event, and more to our point today, my snap judgement shows an increasingly common reaction to newsworthy events. And therein lies the problem: Powerful, outspoken organizations recognize this immediate (one daresay knee-jerk) reaction as an opportunity to further their agenda and run ahead of the facts, crafting a narrative that eventually is proven to be false. But by then the ship of public opinion has already sailed. The shooting of Renee Good is the most recent example.

What follows is an article that does an admirable job of explaining this process and puts the shooting of Renee Good, and more importantly what we actually know about it, in proper context. In its essence, the article is not about this particular shooting per se, but how events are reported and manipulated to foster agendas. I share this because I think we, as a nation, must slow down and wait for the facts before forming irrevocable opinions. We, as consumers of news, must see through blatant attempts at narrative manipulation. To that end, I think of my sharing this article as a public service and an attempt to get the word out: buyer of “news” beware.

Housekeeping: The author of the article quoted below is in no way affiliated with this blog or my podcast and has no idea I’ve quoted it. I could have tried paraphrasing it I suppose, but frankly, and as I’ve said before, if it’s said right the first time, why try to rewrite it? Besides, I think it’s well written.

White Lives Matter
John Sexton
January 11, 2026 – Hotair.com

It occurred to me yesterday that what we’re seeing online and in the streets in reaction to the shooting of Renee Good is very familiar. And then it occurred to me why. What we’re seeing is the Black Lives Matter playbook.

Think about it for a moment. Going back years to the start of Black Lives Matter [and how] the organization established a particular way of operating. They would identify a shooting, usually involving a white police officer and a black suspect, and they would quickly nationalize the outrage and demand justice for this individual. Activists would rush to television cameras demanding everyone say his name (or her name) and then there would be organized street protests against law enforcement, often making some demands.

Frequently, the specifics of the incidents BLM chose to highlight were false or badly misleading. This was true of the stories that circulated after the shooting of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown. Almost always the story that initially made the news turned out to be skewed in such a way as to make the shooter look worse and make the victim look innocent. Trayvon Martin was just walking home with skittles when a racist neighborhood watch person killed him. Mike Brown was just walking home with a friend when he was murdered by a racist police officer while surrendering (Hands up, don’t shoot). 

The stories are outrageous and this served their purpose by creating nationwide outrage. And then weeks or months later we learn that many of the details weren’t accurate or complete. Trayvon confronted his shooter and was pounding his head into the concrete when he was killed. Mike Brown had committed a robbery when he was confronted. He tried to take a cop’s gun and after briefly running, had turned and charged at the officer when he was shot.

The real story is always one that legitimately puts some or all of the blame on the person who was shot. But because we don’t get that story right away, the outrage has time to build. And once it does, people never let it go. They stick with the narrative they like, even if it wasn’t true. They get angry all over again that someone is questioning that narrative.

So here we are and just a few days ago a protester was shot an killed by a federal law enforcement agent working for ICE. Immediately, people started claiming this was murder or even “cold-blooded murder.” Activists have taken to the streets and Democrats have taken to the airwaves. We’ve seen it all before.

This is the BLM playbook. The only real difference here is that the victim was white. It’s White Lives Matter.

As always the goal is to generate outrage by any means necessary. So we get a story based on claims from her ex-husband that a) she’s not an activist and b) she was just dropping of her daughter at school. There were stuffed animals in her car. She’s just a mom.

It takes another day or two to find out that she was part of an anti-ICE activist group. She wasn’t just a mom coming back from school drop off. She was an activist blocking the road in front of federal agents on purpose. She let her wife out of the car to film her activism. She was acting the way Democrats in her own state had encouraged her to act.

And video of the shooting shows it’s not clear cut in the way progressives would like. There’s no reason to think the ICE agent wanted to shoot anyone that day or (as AG Ellison has suggested) that he was trying to send a message. Instead, it looks like he panicked when the driver put her car in gear and stepped on the gas, moving in his direction. He fired as he was being clipped by the car and then fired two more shots as the car passed. I think the latter shots are questionable because he was out of immediate danger at that point. But the first shot seems clearly justified, but you won’t hear any Democrats admitting that. They are sticking with murder even though there’s almost no chance of a murder charge for that first shot.

Part of why BLM worked so well is that it takes months to carefully gather evidence and reach a conclusion about whether charges are even warranted, not to mention the months it takes to put on a trial. BLM’s strategy was always to run out ahead of the facts, convict law enforcement in the public mind before there’s any chance of the system offering a more nuanced take.

That’s what we’re seeing here from many, many people on the left. You have elected officials and far-left partisans insisting there is no nuance here and demanding justice. By the time this case eventually gets a close look from responsible parties, they’ll have set up another moment of outrage if no charges are filed. And if charges are filed and the agent is acquitted, they’ll have yet another moment of outrage.

That’s how this playbook works, whether the person shot is black or white. You pretend the answer is absolutely clear and law enforcement is absolutely wrong and then reality itself becomes a shock to the system.

I don’t predict the future but this case seems to have a lot in common with some of those BLM cases where all the heat was on supposedly racists cops until someone actually looked at the facts and found the victim was sometimes not a victim of racism at all but of their own bad behavior. That’s not true in every case but it was true in many cases that BLM elevated to the national stage. I think it’s going to be true here too. 

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Amerika Erwache!

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