JD Vance famously admitted he was willing “to create stories” to attract media attention during the 2024 presidential campaign.
It was his stunning defense of knowingly spreading false, racist rumors of pet-eating Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio.
The lie demonized the large, legally welcomed immigrant population in Springfield to stoke anti-immigrant hostility (against a powerless community) and fuel MAGA zealotry for mass deportations.
Vance’s unconscionable deceit about Springfield Haitians brought terror and bomb threats to the southwestern town but he doubled down on the story he created to win votes and the vice-presidency.
It was, to say the least, a low point of self-serving shamelessness for the power-drunk Millennial.
But Vance went lower last week. His take on a Kent State-sized moment that shook the nation to its core was next-level Orwellian head games.
Repulsive hardly describes Vance’s performative spectacle last week justifying the public execution of an American citizen by state militia.
The horrific killing was all over social media but Vance, to borrow from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, told us to reject what we saw with our own eyes.
The vice-president insisted what we saw recorded on multiple cell phone cameras on a street in Minneapolis in broad daylight did not happen as we all saw it happen.
Those cameras caught every angle and the last-words of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in her maroon Honda Pilot before she steered the wheels of her car to leave an intense encounter with masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“I’m not mad at you,” a smiling Good said to them while resting her arm on the rolled down window of her vehicle. She had just dropped her six-year-old off at school. Her dog was in the back seat. Seconds later she was dead.
One of the ICE officers, with a pulled-up neck gaiter and cell phone in one hand, whipped out a gun with the other and summarily shot her through the windshield. Then twice more through the driver’s window.
Good’s SUV careened into a parked car.
Onlookers, including a self-identified physician, who rushed to her aid were waved off by ICE officers.
It took emergency responders, apparently blocked federal law enforcement vehicles, an estimated 15 minutes to get to the lifeless woman on foot.
Almost immediately Trump and his minions blamed the victim for being shot in the face. They all but insinuated that she had it coming because she did not obey conflicting ICE commands.
They wove an official account out of whole cloth without investigation or evidence.
They exonerated the shooter they decided acted in self-defense.
They smeared the dead woman as a “domestic terrorist” who “weaponized her vehicle” to kill law enforcement officers.
They claimed she was part of a left-wing radical network bent on violence with no verification.
Trump posted that Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over an ICE officer” who was lucky to be alive and “recovering in the hospital.”
It. Never. Happened.
The videos clearly showed a woman in a beanie cap try to drive away from a bad scene.
In a blink, we see rapid gunfire. Images of a bloody front seat. A glove compartment overflowing with stuffed animals. She had a six-year-old.
We see the ICE agent lean into the driver’s window to shoot, hear apparent audio of him call Good a profanity and watch him walk to the crash before departing the crime scene altogether.
Yet Vance, wearing his Trumpy uniform of red tie, white shirt, and blue suit, told us not to believe our lying eyes.
Good, he declared without equivocation or proof, “was trying to ram this guy with her car and he defended himself.”
Vance repeated the lie to denigrate the victim who, he was certain, “tried to run someone over” and “incite violence against ICE.” His “torrent of untruths” hit a crescendo.
“This was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people.” Vance framed the fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by a trigger-happy ICE agent as “a tragedy of her own making.”
It was “classic terrorism” he said, “what you see is what you get in this case” and I will tell you what you see and believe, he implied.
In Vance’s telling, the ubiquitous videos of a state-sanctioned killing — that crossed the Rubicon — revealed “a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator,” not an unarmed neighborhood mom who did no such thing.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes.
Vance suggested we owe a “debt of gratitude” to the paramilitary thug who shot Good three times in the head for noncompliance.
Besides, he stipulated, (on no legal basis) the ICE agent who killed the mother of three is protected with “absolute immunity on the job.”
He excoriated the media for “prejudging this guy as if he’s a murderer” while prejudging the victim as a “deranged leftist.”
But as a true Orwellian prototype, Vance must control the narrative — regardless of how twisted or hateful.
He dehumanized Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
He disparaged a woman shot dead in Minnesota.
His knowing lies “justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith,” wrote the National Catholic Reporter.
Indeed. But Vance’s calling card is unconscionable.
- Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.
