The script

January 7, 2026. Minneapolis. ICE operation. A car. A few seconds of chaos. A woman, Renée Nicole Good, gets shot and dies. The videos hit the internet fast, and the whole thing becomes a Rorschach test immediately. Not “let’s see what happened,” but “I already know what happened,” and now I just need to pick the clip and the caption that matches my team.
And here’s the part that actually broke my brain, more than the event itself: the predictability. Not “people have opinions,” that’s normal. Predictability like a switch flips.

I ran my own little reality check with the tools we have now — Grok, plus some crude heuristics, nothing academic — and you can basically predict what someone will say about the incident from their political alignment alone, at stupidly high accuracy. You don’t need to know their character, their IQ, their empathy level. Just which flag they fly. That’s not analysis. That’s a reflex. That’s ideology running as a script.
You can say: “It’s always been tribal.” Sure. But something is different now. The speed, the confidence, the lack of embarrassment. People aren’t even pretending they’re doing inquiry. They’re doing identity performance. They’re scoring points, not updating beliefs. The incident is just the occasion. It’s raw material.
So the facts, as far as the public can see them right now: there’s video of the encounter; the Trump administration and DHS framed it as self-defense and went further — “domestic terrorism,” “violent rioter,” “weaponized her vehicle.” Local and state officials in Minnesota pushed back hard, saying the White House was pushing propaganda before an investigation even got going. The FBI is involved, and there’s a whole fight over who controls evidence and narrative.

Now here’s where the guardrail matters.
For years, a lot of people on the right watched the left do this thing: moral certainty first, facts second. And the right built this self-image: “we’re the ones returning to reality.” The grown-ups. The ones immune to narrative possession. And I get why that story feels good. I lean right. I’m not allergic to the idea that the left lost its mind in a bunch of domains. But if you think the right is automatically “reason” now, if you think the shift that’s happening in the West is a shift from lunacy to sanity by default Minneapolis should be a cold shower.
Because the right, right now, is doing the exact move it swore it hated.
Look at what got said at the top, publicly, with zero caution and zero shame.
Donald Trump posted and then repeated claims that the woman didn’t just try to run an officer over, but that she “ran him over,” plus a line implying it was hard to believe the officer was alive and that he was recovering in the hospital. Meanwhile, video reporting and local officials are pointing to the officer walking away apparently uninjured, and journalists describe the “proof” clip being a slowed-down edit that distorts perception. The mismatch isn’t subtle. It’s not “two interpretations.” It’s narrative glue being poured on moving footage.
Then JD Vance at the White House briefing. Not careful. Not “we need to see all evidence.” It’s a rant at the media, calling it “classic terrorism,” and basically shaming anyone who doesn’t accept the administration’s framing as if they’re knowingly repeating a lie. Again: certainty first, inquiry never.
And here’s the part people keep missing: this isn’t just “politicians lie.” Everybody knows politicians lie. The issue is what the tribe does when the lie is too obvious to defend.
Because the reaction pattern I saw on X wasn’t “people correct it.” It was: silence, deflection, or amplification. The kind of silence that says: “Yeah, we all see it. We’re just not going to touch it, because touching it breaks cohesion.” That’s the tell. That’s where you can watch a group decide, in real time, that loyalty outranks reality.

And it gets worse when the platform itself starts handing you new weapons.
X recently rolled out the “About this account” transparency card, showing country/region signals and other metadata. The official story is “authenticity,” “context,” “reduce manipulation.” In practice, it became a new dunk tool in tribal fights, and it’s used selectively — not as a truth instrument, but as a delegitimization hammer. “You’re not from here, shut up.” Or the reverse: “Look, this account is from abroad, therefore it’s a bot army, therefore every claim can be dismissed.” Sometimes it’s even accurate. Sometimes it’s sloppy data. But the behavior is the point: we’ve turned meta-information into a purity test.

I’m telling you because I ate it.
I lean right. I argue with leftists all the time. I’m also European, and that fact alone has been enough to end conversations on the right instantly because my identity didn’t match the required uniform. People repost screenshots of “not in the US” like it’s a checkmate. That’s not patriotism. That’s gatekeeping as a substitute for thinking. That’s the exact same move everyone mocked when the left did it: reduce the person to a tag, then treat the tag as an argument.
That’s the cycle. And it’s not “both sides are crazy,” in the lazy way people say that when they want to feel superior. It’s simpler and uglier: whichever side feels ascendant starts mistaking dominance for truth. And then it starts building a moral story where disagreement itself becomes evidence of evil. That’s when you lose the ability to cooperate, because cooperation requires a shared reality, at least enough shared reality to argue about policy instead of arguing about whether we’re watching the same universe.
The point is that Twitter is where narratives harden, get packaged, get emotionally optimized, and then leak outward — into journalists, into politicians, into family group chats, into workplaces, into the ambient culture. The persuadable people aren’t posting 200 times a day, but they are downstream of the frames that the loud people manufacture.
So if the right is taking traction right now in the West, and it is, and if a lot of people are treating that traction as “we’re finally back to reason,” then Minneapolis is a warning label: power does not bring truth. Power brings the temptation to stop checking. And the moment you stop checking, you become the thing you hated.
The guardrail is not “be nicer.” I don’t care about “nicer.” It’s: don’t lie to yourself because it feels good. Don’t run the script because it’s convenient. Don’t pretend that watching a clip and feeling righteous is the same as understanding it.
If you’re on the right and you want the right to actually be better than what it replaced, then you need one boring discipline: the willingness to say, publicly, “our guy is bullshitting,” when he is. The willingness to say, “we don’t know yet,” when we don’t. The willingness to let your side take an L on a detail without treating it like treason.
Because if you can’t do that, then all you’re doing is swapping flags while staying in the same prison.
And the tragedy is: this wasn’t supposed to be impossible. In the 20th century, people with incompatible ideals still had enough shared reality to negotiate, to build, to argue and then go back to living in the same country. We’re losing that muscle. Not because disagreement is new — but because the moralized, identity-first filter now triggers in the first 30 seconds of a conversation, and then everything else is just predictable noise.

Renée Good is dead. An ICE officer fired the shots. There will be investigations and footage analysis and official findings. That’s the legal story.
But the bigger story, the one that decides whether the next tragedy becomes governance or chaos, is the reaction pattern: the speed at which we choose a narrative, the speed at which we stop seeing humans, and how quickly we decide that truth is optional as long as the team wins.