Masha Gessen

And it is the kind of thing they've always been creating the conditions to see happen.

I'm not saying they intended for this to happen at the top, but everybody has predicted things like this happening, myself included.

And it feels like a message to every protester.

I'm just curious how you have understood her killing, this moment, what its meaning is.

What I was thinking about when you said that, and when you were sort of thinking through the ways in which it is or is not different than Black men who are shot in their cars, is that as much as the administration is claiming this was a form of law enforcement violence, she was threatening the officers and they had to act to defend their lives.

And again, you can watch the video.

This was, in my view, political violence.

It was state repression.

It was an act against civil disobedience or resistance to what they are doing.

It is being functionally defended in at least somewhat those terms.

I agree with you when you say this is a huge event.

One of the things that I found very disturbing, among many things, about the way the administration has acted after Good's killing.

So Trump posted a video of the Rene Good shooting on Truth Social, and he said the video showed Good was, quote, "...obviously a professional agitator who, again, quote, violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer."

And over X, you could see people arguing over this and, you know, analyzing the frame by frame.

But I think there's also something about this moment where you have this video and people can't even agree on the reality of it.

But then secondarily, and this picks up on something you've talked about here, is

How often you hear the administration describing citizens, constituents as a domestic enemy within.

Political opposition as something, I mean, judges as, you know, I remember the administration describing a judge as a legal insurrectionist, right?

The real insurrectionists, the people who's from the Capitol on January 6th, they got pardoned.

But now there's this language that anybody trying to protest, et cetera, the Trump administration is insurrectionist.