“That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
Rene Nicole Macklin Good
By now these last recorded words of Rene Good, the Minneapolis resident murdered by a federal ICE agent, have melded into popular lore and turned her into a kind of folk hero. And with good reason. They demonstrate, clearly, that even as she tried to protect her neighbors by giving them just a few more moments to shelter or flee, Good was not in a combative state of mind. She was caring for the federal agents. She was “radiating kindness,” a trait described by her beloved widow, Becca Good, in a remarkable public statement after the murder.
In the days since, Minneapolis residents have massed in the streets to express their outrage. And on display one can find the whole range of actions we have all seen in protest and defense against a growing fascist regime: from firm exhortations for agents to consider abandoning their jobs and rediscovering their humanity, to chants of “Shame!” and “Get the fuck out of our city!,” to snowball throwing, personal verbal attacks, and even mild property damage.
To be sure, Minneapolis residents have shown remarkable discipline and restraint in the face of this unprecedented onslaught against their rights. Yet the question raised here as in so many other protest actions is whether refraining from physical violence still counts as nonviolence. I must confess to feeling growing discomfort at public protests, especially when they turn toward snark and verbal violence.
At the April 5, 2025 “Hands Off!” protest I attended in Springfield, Illinois, a Trump supporter trolled the gathered crowd in a slowly rolling pickup, yelling provocative expletives. Many in the crowd engaged the counter-protestor with similar expletives, and a few tried to step in front of the truck to force a confrontation, even though the organizing group, Indivisible, makes clear in all its communications their “commitment to nonviolent action.”
In September, I joined a group of activists “accompanying” several immigrant families to their ICE check-in appointment in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Heavily armed federal officers obstructed our access to the building. Though the event’s organizers—affiliated with the pacifist Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement—had enjoined us to be thoroughly nonviolent in our action and demeanor, many of those present began yelling expletives at the officers. And my own protest sign was met with ambivalence. “Stephen Miller,” my sign reads, “We hate your policies and your thugs, but still love your soul.” Some gave me the thumbs up, but perhaps more greeted the sign with a frown or a shake of the head.
In one widely circulating video, an ICE agent slips badly on an icy Minneapolis road and takes a hard fall to the ground. One of those filming the scene can be heard to shout repeatedly, “Fucking pussy!” to loud guffaws. Quite aside from the retrograde gender politics of the phrase, what jars me here, as with the previous examples, is the impulse to denigrate and humiliate. Even late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert and Seth Myers have shown the clip to generate some cathartic yuks about ICE incompetence.
Now, I am certainly not one to police the actions of my fellow protestors. Within the broad purview of “nonviolent” protest there are possible many legitimate forms of political speech.* The questions I want to consider here are both strategic and moral, or even spiritual: To what degree does violence in word, if not deed, pose a strategic error in confronting a sadistic regime like MAGA, and to what degree does violence in word compromise our own moral and spiritual integrity, which I submit may live in our bodies as the flowing energy of unfrozen traumatic pain.
On the first question, I think we are in uncharted territory. Much has been debated about the relative strategic effectiveness of nonviolent civil protest. Most famously, Mohandas Gandhi led a successful nonviolent independence movement against British colonial occupation; and the nonviolent civil rights movement in the American South eventually shook the conscience of a nation and led to significant changes in law and policing. Most famously, on the other side of the ledger, nonviolent actions against German Nazis in World War II led only to limited slowdowns of the regime, but never to its demise.**
As already noted, most protest organizers enjoin the rank and file to exercise strict discipline in maintaining nonviolent conduct, lest we provide any kind of pretext or legitimacy to this regime’s use of force. Most seem to agree that in the current moment, physical violence could lead to greater catastrophe. But what about violent, snarky language and imagery during such protests? Do they move public security forces to reconsider their actions? Is there any strategic value in using violent language, or conversely, in softening our language while remaining firm in our demands? Could a stricter commitment to loving, nonviolent communication help peel away more MAGA adherents from the raging hate of their leaders? ***
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but more broadly what we do know is that violent and hurtful communication tends to harden the edges of our current political chasm. Loretta Ross makes a powerful case for “calling in” our political and cultural adversaries. Except in rare instances where our seeming adversaries are beyond the pale (sometimes, people truly deserve to be called out), Ross shows convincingly how a softer strategy of “calling in” can minimize perceived differences and bring a common ground into view. In these dangerous times, it might keep us from sliding ever closer into civil war.
This brings us to the question of moral integrity, or what I prefer to reframe as the somatic energetics of protest. The imperative of moral integrity suggests that our actions must be congruent with our values. If we want a society based on principles of love and caring, how do we bring that caring into our protest? And if we recognize that the authoritarian impulse to “dominate” adversaries is rooted in unresolved somatic trauma, then how do we act in relation to this trauma? The answer, I suggest, runs through radical love of the sort that Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others have practiced.
The ICE agent who murdered Rene Good, Jonathan Ross, clearly had no remorse for his actions. In the video taken from his own bodycam, one can hear him mutter “fucking bitch” only seconds after the shooting, and other camera angles show him walking away calmly to gather his agents together. But if we respond to such deep sadism with joyful glee at the suffering of other ICE agents (e.g., the one who slipped on that icy road), have we fallen into the same ethical morass as our tormentors? What would it mean for us to embrace Jonathan Ross with radical love?
Of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. sketched out and exemplified the politics of radical love some 70 years ago. He was adamant that “hate scars the soul and distorts the personality.” Importantly, he emphasized that nonviolent action should be “directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil.”
Today we have others articulating what this work might mean for our current moment. I have already cited the work of Loretta Ross. More inspiration comes from Valarie Kaur, the Sikh-American lawyer, documentarian, and human rights activist. Stemming from her own experience of numerous post-9/11 murders and arrests of her people, Valarie Kaur’s “revolutionary love” project addresses the current anti-immigrant project of MAGA. Hear her stirring remarks at an Interfaith Vigil in Los Angeles in June, 2025, “We Will be Brave with Our Love,” where among other things she proclaims:
You cannot make us hate you. You do not have that power. We will choose to see your humanity even when you deny ours. We will block your actions with one hand – and extend the other hand with the vision that you might one day take it, or your children will take it. Because the brief high that comes from domination is nothing compared to the infinite love and joy of true community.
Finally, Kazu Haga’s work on “fierce vulnerability” and direct action through the Ahimsa Collective makes the undeniable link between nonviolence in word and deed, and the traumatic pain driving today’s authoritarian impulse. Drawing partly on Resmaa Menakem’s powerful work, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, and Stephen Wineman’s Power-Under: Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change, Haga contends that nonviolent protest and civil disobedience necessarily involve healing the stuck energy of our own hearts and bodies as we gesture toward healing others. It means accessing a different kind of power: the recognition that we are all deeply interconnected, and that “the liberation of our ‘oppressors’ is the key to our own freedom.” Absent a commitment to dissolving our own “dirty pain” and thereby inviting our political opponents to do the same, so much political protest just reinforces the illusion of our separateness from one another. We might win particular political battles, but spiritually and energetically speaking, we could be losing the war.
Thus, my friends, even if I must remain agnostic about the strategic value of violent versus nonviolent communication in protest activity, I am rather more certain that violence in word only postpones the deeper healing and reconciliation required. Even if it seems too idealistic, too accommodating, or too new-agey in the face of MAGA’s sadism, my body senses the wisdom of a peaceful approach. I want to “kill them with kindness,” as my mother used to say. I’ll keep hoping to crack open Stephen Miller’s soul.
* And lest I sound too preachy, let me make it very clear that my own commitment to nonviolent communication is still a work in progress. People who know me will vouch for this. I feel murderous rage more frequently than I wish to admit. Sometimes I say nasty shit; I succumb to anger and the illusory promise of catharsis.
**In his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr first made this argument against the pacifist position, and in Stride Toward Freedom King analyzed Niebuhr’s argument and found it wanting. As he wrote there, “Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to power, as Niebuhr contends. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence an bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.”
The recent movie, Number 24, explores this theme in the person of the real-life Norwegian hero Gunnar Sønsteby, whose actions as a leader of the Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation often involved executing fellow Norwegians who actively collaborated with the Nazis. In the movie, a young student listening to the elderly Sønsteby describe his actions wonders why such executions were really necessary, posing the counterexample of Gandhi. Sønsteby replies, predictably, “Gandhi wasn’t fighting the Nazis.”
*** We can’t really know at this time whether softer, more loving language toward ICE agents or other enablers of Trump might help turn the tide against an ambitious fascist regime. There is leaked evidence that since Good’s murder ICE agents are increasingly reluctant to be deployed to Minneapolis; what’s less clear is whether this is out of fear for their physical safety or, rather, growing qualms about the appropriateness of their tactics and mission.
Source: Substack
Author: Sebas Lee
About the author: Sebas Lee is a Latin Americanist and spokesperson for Indivisible QC. He conducted research in Mexico for more than 30 years and led Indiana University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies for 4 years. He writes about democracy and civil liberties, antisemitism and the far right, and U.S. power in the Americas.
Indivisible QC | An Iowa & Illinios Quad Cities Community 