The Left's Ruby Ridge Moment
Amid the ICE raids, the left needs to resurrect its skepticism of federal power.
On January 7, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, in south Minneapolis. Federal officials say she tried to run an agent over with her car. Local and state officials say video and eyewitness accounts raise serious questions about that story, and they want answers the public can trust. But the most important part of this episode isn’t only what the video shows. It’s what happened after the trigger was pulled.
Minnesota investigators say the FBI first indicated the case would be handled jointly, then reversed course and cut them off from evidence and interviews. The state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension withdrew. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty went public asking witnesses to send video directly to her office, because she fears the normal flow of information won’t reach local authorities.
The federal government not only used lethal force, but then tightened control over who gets to examine what happened. That’s what makes this feel like a Ruby Ridge moment—one that should awaken liberals’ skepticism of central authority.
In 1992, federal agents tried to arrest Randy Weaver at his remote cabin in Idaho over a firearms charge. What should have been a straightforward arrest escalated into a firefight that left a U.S. marshal and Weaver’s teenage son dead, and it quickly became an 11-day siege. The next day, an FBI sniper shot and killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki, as she stood near the cabin doorway—an unarmed civilian death that became the scandal’s emotional center—and the standoff ended only after negotiations brought the remaining family members out. Despite its legacy as a quintessential example of federal law-enforcement excess on the right, Ruby Ridge was an egregious abuse of central power, in part because official reviews later condemned both the operation and the federal government’s behavior afterward. The lesson was that when federal agencies overreach, they can also make it hard for outsiders to get a clean accounting of what went wrong. In the mid-1990s, a recurring complaint was that the FBI couldn’t be trusted to investigate itself in a high-profile shooting—so much so that outside officials were brought in for reenactments and scrutiny.
Minneapolis is not Ruby Ridge in the literal sense. Ruby Ridge was a siege in the woods; Minneapolis was a street encounter. Ruby Ridge involved explicit “rules of engagement” later condemned in official reports; Minneapolis is still being argued in real time. But the predominant parallel here is the federal move to keep the investigation inside federal hands.
For decades, skepticism of federal law enforcement has been culturally coded as a right-leaning obsession: Ruby Ridge, Waco, and a general fear of the federal state. Liberals, meanwhile, have often treated federal agencies as a necessary counterweight—either to local abuses in some eras, or to Trump-era threats in others. It’s easy to defend federal power when you think it’s aimed at someone else’s bad guys.
But now the force at the center of the story is ICE, operating aggressively in a big city amid the politics of immigration enforcement—terrain many liberals experience not as “law and order,” but as executive power grinding down ordinary people in public places. In the official response to the Minneapolis shooting, top federal figures framed the episode in sweeping ideological terms and defended it forcefully, while local leaders demanded basic transparency. Vice President J.D. Vance accused Good of being part of a “left-wing network” using “domestic terrorism techniques” and called her death a “tragedy” and a “tragedy of her own making.” The Department of Homeland Security tweeted a veiled threat: “Reminder: if you lay a finger on a federal officer or agent, you will face the full extent of the law.”
This is what it looks like when the old Ruby Ridge lesson lands on a liberal-coded cause: federal coercive power feels distant, unaccountable, and quick to declare itself righteous. Liberals have spent years treating distrust of “the feds” as someone else’s hobby; a case like this should force a rethink.
It also highlights something easy to miss when politics becomes tribal theater: federal police power is different in kind, not because state and local police are harmless, but because federal power is harder to correct.
When a local cop kills unlawfully, the system at least contains multiple points of pressure that are not the same institution: local elections, state investigators, state prosecutors, state legislatures. None of that guarantees justice, but the public can see where to push. When federal police kill a citizen, the loop can close faster: federal investigators, federal prosecutors, federal internal standards—and then a federal insistence that the matter is essentially federal business. Minneapolis shows that dynamic. State authorities are warning they may be unable to fully assess the facts if federal investigators keep the gates closed. When the highest domestic authority uses lethal force and then positions itself as the main judge of whether it acted properly, that’s a legitimacy problem.And that’s where liberals have an opportunity—maybe even an obligation—in a second Trump term and beyond.
Federal Democrats in the coming years would be wise to redirect some of their braintrust and political capital toward reforms to federal law enforcement and unilateral executive authority. More directly, the left needs to resurrect its skepticism of centralized authority, especially but not exclusively when it comes with a gun and a badge. Equally important, any diehard conservative who wants to live up to the Founders’ legacy of robustly checking central power should join them.
Minneapolis is a chance to insist, immediately, on the thing Ruby Ridge painfully taught later: no institution should be trusted to both wield lethal power and monopolize the story about whether it was justified.
Some good points, here. Some not so good.
There is no rational comparison between Randy Weaver and Nicole Good. The feds came to Weaver to make trouble. Good came to the feds to make trouble.
ICE is doing their job. If you don't like what they're doing, by all means, demonstrate, vote, whatever. But when people decide that they are right and that their own imagination justifies mob rule, then such people are the people who must be stopped, not ICE.
We have just observed MLK day. I'm old enough to remember him, and what he did. What he did was turn around an entire nation's attitude concerning segregation. Again, I was there. Those who want to believe he accomplished nothing must have their heads up their ass.
MLK incited no riot. And there were no riots. He didn't condone assaulting cops, and nobody did. He didn't even blame the cops on the streets, he blamed the people who were truly responsible. Because of his rational nature, speaking to people's sense of decency instead of inciting hatred, MLK won.
Now, look at the clowns in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Don't just look at them today. Look at them throughout the last ten years. Pure hatred and intolerance. Mob rule. Yes, there have been reasonable demonstrators, but nobody sees them, they see the violence and hate from the mob.
And what will the mob accomplish? Not a Godamn thing. They remind me of a child going thru the terrible twos, all emotion, no thought. Their handlers hope that the violence that they have engendered, and then blamed on Trump, will sway elections. It might work. It worked for Lenin, and then he destroyed the very people who supported him.. Violence worked for Stalin, and then he killed his own people. Same for Mao. It is intellectual absurdity to think that people who rise to power thru violence will be peaceful leaders.