”By Rip Thorne”
”Date:” January 9, 2026
”Location:” The Bunker (Undisclosed Coordinates)
”Mood:” Feral
”Music:” Static and the low hum of a dying generator
The air in the bunker is stale today. It tastes like recycled anxiety and burnt coffee, the kind of atmosphere that clings to your clothes and rots your teeth. I’ve been staring at the same loop of video for forty-eight hours, watching the pixelated ghost of Renee Nicole Good die over and over again on a glowing screen, and I am here to tell you that the veneer hasn’t just cracked—it has shattered into a million jagged, radioactive shards.
We are terminal. The diagnosis is in, and the patient is thrashing on the gurney.
THE DIGITAL AUTOPSY OF A DYING REPUBLIC
If you haven’t seen the footage from Minneapolis, consider your ignorance a temporary mercy. It’s Wednesday morning, January 7th. A gray, savage Minnesota winter day. The kind of cold that hurts your face. Renee Nicole Good—37 years old, mother, poet, owner of a maroon Honda Pilot and a soul presumably full of the usual suburban hopes and terrors—is driving down Portland Avenue. She’s just dropped her six-year-old at school. She is not a combatant. She is not a soldier in some asymmetric war. She is a woman in a mid-sized SUV, navigating the slush.
And then the world ends. Not with a whimper, but with three pops from the service weapon of ICE Agent Jonathan Ross.
I watched the clip until my eyes watered, looking for the “domestic terrorism” that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is currently peddling to the cable news hyenas. I looked for the “weaponized vehicle.” I looked for the threat that justified executing a civilian in the driver’s seat of a car that screams ‘soccer practice’, not ‘insurrection’.
What I saw was confusion. I saw a traffic jam caused by a federal occupation force. I saw agents swarming like hornets kicked out of a nest. I saw Renee Good try to maneuver away, the universal gesture of ‘let me the hell out of here’. And then I saw Agent Ross, a man whose adrenaline was clearly writing checks his training couldn’t cash, plant his feet and fire. One through the windshield. Two through the glass.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
And just like that, a poet becomes a statistic. A mother becomes a “neutralized threat.”
SWINE-FLICKERS AND THE BUREAUCRACY OF BLOOD
This is the Brain Rot, folks. This is the late-stage, necrotic tissue of a society that has forgotten how to be human. The official line from the architects of our doom is that Renee was a “terrorist” attempting to mow down federal officers. They are spinning this narrative with the desperate, sweaty energy of a drunk trying to explain away a fender bender, except the fender bender is a dead woman and the drunk is the Department of Homeland Security.
Let’s be clear: Minneapolis is currently occupied territory. Two thousand federal agents dropped into the Twin Cities like paratroopers into Normandy, all to root out “fraud” in the Somali community? Give me a break. This isn’t law enforcement; it’s a vibe check with live ammo. It’s a show of force designed to terrorize, to remind the peasantry that the State has a monopoly on violence and a hair-trigger temper.
OCCUPATION VIBES: A TACTICAL GULAG IN THE SNOW
I can feel the electric tension all the way down here in the bunker. It’s a physical weight. The internet is a screaming, fleshy hydra of hot takes and bootlicking, people actually arguing that a panic response in a Honda Pilot warrants a death sentence. ‘She didn’t comply!’ they shriek, wiping Cheeto dust on their tactical vests. ‘She moved the car!’
Since when did “failure to remain perfectly still while men with guns scream at you” become a capital offense? Since when did we accept that the penalty for fear is a bullet in the head?
The answer is: we didn’t. We just stopped paying attention until the blood splashed onto our own driveways.
Renee Good was a writer. She won a poetry prize. She had a “B.Good Handywork” LLC. She was, by all accounts, a person who tried to add a little bit of beauty to this doomed, gray world. And she was gunned down a mile from where George Floyd breathed his last, on a street that has seen enough tragedy to haunt a nation for a century.
The irony is so thick you could choke on it. They called her a terrorist. A ‘terrorist’. For trying to drive around a blockade. Meanwhile, the real terror is the man with the badge who decides that his safety is the only thing that matters in the universe, and that your life is forfeit the moment you make him flinch.
I’m pouring another drink. The whiskey tastes like iodine. Outside, the world is continuing its slow, feral slide into the abyss. The talking heads are already moving on, pivot-stepping to the next outrage, the next distraction. But I can’t look away from that Honda Pilot crashing into the parked car. I can’t stop hearing the silence that follows the gunshots.
This isn’t just a story about a shooting. It’s a dispatch from the edge of the cliff. We are staring down into the dark, and the people in charge are the ones pushing us off.
SCREAMING AT THE VOID WHILE THE LIZARDS DANCE
So here is my primal scream, aimed directly at the void: ”We see you.” We see the lies. We see the badge-polished brutality. We see the way you try to turn a mother into a monster to cover your own sins.
Sanity is not guaranteed. In fact, under these conditions, sanity is a liability. The only honest response is rage. Pure, unadulterated, high-octane rage. Keep it burning. It’s the only light we have left before the power goes out for good.
Stay paranoid. Stay angry. And for the love of god, watch your six.
‘Rip Thorne is a participatory journalist and bunker enthusiast currently awaiting the inevitable heat death of the universe. He accepts payment in canned goods and encryption keys. Read his report from the dystopian CES 2026.
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