Self-deception can be the predicate to self-destruction. Sometimes kind indulgence results in disaster.

The Renee Good shooting in Minneapolis has been a clarifying Rorschach test.  Everyone has seen what they wanted to see from the very beginning (See Win Bigley by Scott Adams; two movies one screen.)  It took a few days but the answers were pretty much available from day three or so.  

There is still more to be discovered.  But there is clearly a history of difficult or questionable life choices leading up to Good's decision to insert herself into a chaotic ICE mission and then to confront and harass ICE officers performing their duties to enforce the law.  To the tragic decision to refuse lawful orders.  To her final and fateful decision, almost certainly reflexive, to escape the position she had placed herself in by accelerating her vehicle at an armed officer.

There are so many details and interpretations and arguments to be had.

It seems to me to be crystalizing that there are people (such as Renee and Rebecca Good) who are sufficiently radical and fanatical that they are willing to impose their own choices on everyone else.  ICE are lawfully in Minneapolis at the order of the President of the United States, executing lawful orders in compliance with the lawfully elected (popular majority as well as Electoral College victory) President, in pursuit of lawful policies (border control, immigration control, and crime suppression) which were at the center of the 2024 election.  

In other words - the fanatics have decided that their personal preferences override the outcome of our constitutional federal republic and its democratic processes.  It seems almost impossible to make the argument, as some seem to attempt, that they are defending rule of law and democracy.  

The second revealing aspect of this tragedy is the degree of self-deception possible by individuals.  We all of us know from studies and personal experience that all humans are capable of grave self-deception.  Just one of our attributes.  But sometimes the extent and impermeability of the bubbles of self-deception are still surprising.

As journalists have begun to slowly unpick the details of the participants in the tragedy, the scale of self-deception has become clearer.  Rebecca Good wailing "Why did you have real bullets?" after Renee Good was shot seems to be almost an almost incomprehensible level of naiveté.  

To me, though, there is a more subtle and as tragic degree of self-deception that seems to have emerged in the past few days.

Initially Renee and Rebecca Good were reported as married spouses.  However, reporters have not been able to find any record of a marriage.  They did come up with records of Renee Good's legal change of her last name to match that of her "partner", not spouse.  I parked this as possibly interesting information but was waiting for some coalescence of sources as to whether the charge was true.

Still kind of waiting but then saw this.

For all (including me) who have referred to Rebecca Good as Renee Good's "wife" -- she wasn't. From NYT: https://t.co/xSS2tD418o pic.twitter.com/bUT97olkft

— Byron York (@ByronYork) January 16, 2026

York links to, Renee Good Was Concerned About ICE, a Lawyer Says, but Wasn’t Following Agents by Mitch Smith of the New York Times.  If the NYT has accepted the charge, even against their own narrative preferences, then it suggests to me that the balance of evidence has come into alignment with the claim.  Rebecca and Renee Good were not in fact married.

In this same time frame, I came across a photo which I had seen before.  There was a detail in it, though, that took on new salience with the new reporting.  

Click to enlarge.

Look at her left hand.

She is wearing a wedding ring.  She and Rebecca are not married but Renee has chosen to take Rebecca's last name and she has chosen to wear a wedding ring as if they were wed.  

No telling at this point what to make of that picture, but there is an inescapable air of personal tragedy.  Made more tragic by Rebecca Good's statement following the shooting, "I made her come down here. It's my fault. They just shot my wife."

I am perhaps over-interpreting but if a couple are willing and able to redefine marriage so completely (a marriage of emotion but not by law?) then it seems more comprehendible that they could also be so self-deceived about the danger they were deliberately placing themselves in.

This degree of personal manipulation of perceived reality also reminds me of a picture shared by Pete and Chasten Buttigieg in September 2021, when they announced the adoption of twins.  

Click to enlarge.

When this first appeared, I thought it must be some spoof attacking them by making it appear as if a gay couple had had children in a hospital (with hospital armbands and all).  I later learned the photos were legitimate and from the Buttigiegs which made me question their own self-presentation.  The reality eventuality emerged that the twins were born prematurely and with health issues.  The Buttigiegs arrived the day after the twins were born but quite a while before they were discharged from the hospital.  In the end, there was not quite the deception that had seemed to be going on in the first place.  

But there remains a feel of a hijacked social icon of the exhausted mother sitting up in the hospital bed holding her newborn, repurposed for an exhausted gay couple (exhausted from flying and driving) mimicking that iconic scene of maternity.

A photograph of simulated maternity, a photograph of simulated marriage - it all brings to mind George Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language in which he warns everyone of the authoritarian/totalitarian habit of trying to redefine reality by redefining words.  The Marxist habit of insisting that reality is a social construct rather than the far more obvious situation where all societies (and their languages) are shaped by reality.  

A ring does not make a marriage.  A hospital photo does not make a maternal birth.  Real officers of the law use real bullets when they are attacked and injured in the course of their duties.  

Bringing us back to Orwell.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

We hesitate to disabuse those who deceive themselves.  We want them to be happy.  As classical liberals, we indulge all beliefs which are not coercively imposed.  Even if we believe them to be misleading or unreal.

But as in the Minneapolis shooting there is a deadly corollary.  Self-deception can be the predicate to self-destruction.  Sometimes kind indulgence results in disaster.