A 'Kent State Moment'—When Power Gaslights What We Can all See With Our Own Eyes, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 A 'Kent State Moment'—When Power Gaslights What We Can all See With Our Own Eyes

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 10, 2026

There are moments in this nation’s history when what the powerful say is so transparently opposed to what any reasonable person can see—with their own eyes, with their own conscience—that we must call it what it is.

This is one of those moments.

Renee Nicole Good should still be alive.

Renee Nicole Good

She was a 37-year-old mother and an award-winning poet, driving with her
partner shortly after dropping off her child at school in Minneapolis when an ICE agent fired—killing her (Bjornson, 2026). 

Video footage and eyewitness accounts suggest she was not charging anyone, not wielding a weapon, not threatening lethal harm. Instead, the footage shows a woman who moments before being shot said, “I’m not mad at you,” revealing a human being clinging to peace even as violence unfolded.

Accordingly, I encourage you to see the video from the perspective of the ICE agents posted by The Guardian to witness a peaceful Renee Good with one of the two cops who then calls her a "f-ing bitch" right before she was shot in the face one or more times and summarily killed (Vargas, 2026).

But instead of truth, we are being offered something far worse: denial dressed up as an official story. How deeply offensive.

Kristi Noem

In the hours and days after Renee’s death, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rushed forward with sharp, self-serving narratives about self-defense and “domestic terrorism.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a premature, a priori conclusion—declaring Renee a threat before facts, investigations, or even basic accountability have been offered. 

And what's with the get-up? Wearing an over-sized cowboy hat worn for a photo op, jarringly out of step with the gravity of the moment. Even her eyes were hidden—mirroring masked ICE agents whose anonymity shields their violence from accountability.

This is not leadership. This is gaslighting.

Gaslighting isn’t merely lying. It is attempting to make the public distrust its own senses—its own basic moral compass. It insists that what feels wrong, what looks wrong, and what is wrong is somehow righteous, necessary, inevitable—or something else altogether.

This is why this moment feels like a Kent State moment.

Kent State was not only the killing of four students by the National Guard in 1970. It was the lie that followed—the attempt to justify lethal state force against unarmed youth, and then to sanitize that violence into a narrative of necessity. Despite photographs, witnesses, and tears, officials tried to tell the nation that nothing extraordinary had happened—that the pain we saw was a distortion. The lie was worse than the bullets. It asked us to turn away from what history later confirmed was inescapably undeniable.

Because what followed Kent State wasn’t just outrage. It was a breaking point in how Americans saw state power and the stories told to protect it.

That is why I am calling this a Kent State moment.

And I am not alone (e.g., OB Rag, 2026).

What makes this moment especially eerie—almost unbearable in its symmetry—is geography itself. According to The Associated Press, Renee Good was killed about a mile from where Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in 2020. One mile. Close enough that the memory of that pavement, that breath, that collective trauma still lingers in the city’s air. The distance is short, but the connection is vast—linking the two deaths in public memory as reminders of how easily state violence reappears, even after national reckoning, including promises of reform.

Here at home in Washington, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, herself moved to tears, did what true representatives are supposed to do: she named the human pain this incident has caused and asked those on the other side of the aisle to show something called humanity—to care about a mother who lost her life, a family shattered, and a community outraged. Crockett’s voice broke as she asked: Where is the decency? The courage? The basic heart to acknowledge a life lost, rather than rush to defend federal force?

Her tears were not performative. They were painfully real—so honest they undid me. They became a moral mirror, exposing a political body far more concerned with controlling its story than confronting the searing truth of a mother’s death and a child left orphaned.

And that is the real tragedy here.

Because this was not an abstract policy clash. This was a human being—a wife, a mother, a friend, a neighbor—whose last moments were recorded not as an act of aggression, but as a cry for peace and connection. Her partner’s anguished pain—chasing the car, saying “They shot my wife”—is etched into the conscience of any American who has ever lost someone they loved.

And yet the strongest responses from the federal stage have been attempts to reframe reality instead of confronting it.

To repeat, this is gaslighting. They are telling us what to see, even as the evidence screams otherwise. Power is demanding obedience to a lie.

That is why we must say, clearly: We see what happened. We see the video. We see the pain. We refuse to let a political narrative overwrite what is unmistakably evident.

A Kent State moment is not just a historical comparison. It is a wake-up call. It is a moment of moral reckoning when the state’s attempt to redefine reality collides with the undeniable truth that humans can see with their own eyes and feel in their own hearts.

We should not let this go quietly.

Renee Nicole Good deserves more than euphemism or spin. Her family deserves honesty. And the American public deserves leaders willing to name what is true rather than protect a narrative that defies what we all can plainly see.

This is not just politics. This is conscience.

And we should not pretend it is anything less.

References

Associated Press. (2026, January 7). ICE officer kills a Minneapolis driver in a deadly start to Trump’s latest immigration operation. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-immigration-enforcement-shooting-crackdown-surge-173e00fa7388054e98c3b5b9417c1e5a

Bjornson, G. (2026, January 8). Renee Good had just dropped 6-year-old off at school when she encountered ICE. Soon her partner was crying, “They just shot my wife.” People. https://people.com/renee-good-dropped-6-year-old-off-at-school-before-ice-encounter-11881867

OB Rag. (2026, January 8). ICE agent who killed Renee Good needs to be identified, arrested and brought to trial for murder. OB Rag. https://obrag.org/2026/01/ice-agent-who-killed-renee-good-needs-to-be-identified-arrested-and-brought-to-trial-for-murder/

Vargas, R. A. (2026, January 9). Renee Nicole Good said ‘I’m not mad at you’ before ICE agent shot her, video shows. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/09/ice-agent-minneapolis-bodycam-footage

West, A., & Fiorillo, C. (2026, January). Kristi Noem hides face under massive ‘stupid’ cowboy hat as she gives update on ICE shooting. MSN. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/kristi-noem-hides-face-under-massive-stupid-cowboy-hat-as-she-gives-update-on-ice-shooting/ar-AA1TXHXU