Jesse Watters: the Monster for This Moment

Yesterday in Minneapolis, an ICE officer shot a 37-year-old mother four times in the face. As you attempt to process this senseless and horrific death, Fox News host Jesse Watters wants to reassure you that you shouldn’t struggle with it too much, because the victim had pronouns in her bio.

Seriously. Pronouns in her bio. That was a factoid Watters chose to stress at the top of a segment on a woman who had four rounds from a Glock 19 unloaded into her brain by an agent of the federal government. Because pronouns in your bio mean you’re a little less human. A little less American. A little less deserving to stick around on this planet long enough to raise your three children. A little less deserving to outlive your heartbroken mother. 

Watters goes on to imply a litany of personal offenses in a tone intended to diminish the value of Renee Nicole Good’s existence. He says she was a “self-proclaimed poet from Colorado,” putting spiteful emphasis on “poet.” She wasn’t merely self-proclaimed. She was published. She won a prize from Old Dominion University. Here are the judge’s comments: 

In “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” the eye of the poet moves in and out of memory through association that compounds layer after layer, or more appropriately strand after strand. Braiding THE existential question through a zuihitsu form, rumination on object, human body, and wonder all biologize that which defies simple science. What is the origin story of “want;” the urgency of belief and nonbelief? the first line the poet asks. Through specificity of image and associative leaps from piece to piece emerges a text that in itself becomes a sacred text, a meditation that leads the reader into the unknown.

Jesse Watters could have found this out. Instead, he gives Good all the sympathy an incurious 14-year-old boy would give a fetal pig as he clumsily mangles its innards while making oinking noises even his fellow 14-year-olds would find disturbing — but which a nation of adult Fox News fans perversely find sagacious.

Watters also notes that Good “leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.” He does not bother mentioning that Good’s former husband died in his 30s, and that their child together is now an orphan. That would undermine the desired dehumanizing effect of stressing that she was a lesbian.

Finally, before getting into his version of the facts surrounding the incident, Watters says Good considered herself a legal observer, “though there’s no evidence she had a law degree.” Again, Watters’ snide dismissal is intended to trivialize the significance of this tragedy. If designating yourself a legal observer did require a law degree, it wouldn’t matter — inflating your resume is not cause for execution. But here’s the thing: while some “legal observers” are lawyers, no law degree is required to assume this role. You are serving as the eyes and ears of the legal community, not as a lawyer. All that is required is that you volunteer your services.  Jesse Watters denies that he is a journalist, instead styling himself a “political humorist” whose reports should not be taken seriously. But he earns at least $5 million dollars a year opining on the news. The least he could do is have his producers google basic facts before making a joke out of a killing.

Watters isn’t a political humorist, though. Josh Johnson is a political humorist. Bill Maher is a political humorist, albeit one whose talent has been exposed as thin and diminishing by the likes of Josh Johnson. Watters is a shill whose chronically arched eyebrows form a facade of humor as he delivers a carefully calibrated, heavily biased, not remotely humorous narrative that serves no one but his taskmasters and himself. He does not make jokes that elicit truth. He tells lies that obscure it.

Sometimes the lies are explicit. Often the lies are of omission. Here are just a few of the critical points Watters casually leaves out of his report, disrespecting the pursuit of truth and the honoring of memory with each glaring gap in the foundation of his story.

ICE’s documented history of lying about the use of cars as deadly weapons: Watters accepts without question Kristi Noem’s claim that Good, with malice and intent, attempted to kill an ICE officer with her car, that she was in fact trained to use her car in the commission of acts of “domestic terrorism.” There is absolutely ZERO evidence of any of this. No evidence that Good harbored an intent to maim or kill, despite Noem’s unsupported assertion that she was a “stalker.” No evidence that she was trained to point her vehicle at law enforcement agents and accelerate. There is ample evidence, however, that ICE has been trained to CLAIM its victims were using their vehicles as weapons in order to justify self-defense. These claims have completely fallen apart when exposed to the reality of the courtroom, most notably in Chicago, where ICE officers shot a woman FIVE TIMES, then claimed she had attempted to ram them with her car. Unfortunately for ICE, the woman lived, video evidence showed the entire narrative was a fraud, and the government quietly dropped its case without ever apologizing for shooting an American citizen FIVE TIMES and lying about her bringing the resulting mental and physical trauma on herself.

Multiple angles of damning footage: Watters focuses on one angle that possibly shows the shooter being grazed by the vehicle. Watters ignores other footage that CLEARLY shows the officer was out of harm’s way when he fired his first shot — and well out of harm’s way when he fired the next three. Not only that, THE DRIVER WAS CLEARLY ATTEMPTING TO AVOID HITTING THE OFFICER. She was turning the car away from him!

The Washington Post, whose opinion page has been bending over backwards for Trump lately, just came out with a definitive headline: 

Ice Agent Was Not in the Vehicle’s Path When He Fired the Fatal Shots, Video Shows

The New York Times has reached the same conclusion: 

If the perpetually noncommittal Times and the ever Trump-friendlier Post can make the natural conclusions drawn from this footage a headline, Jesse Watters can at least acknowledge the footage’s existence. Except he can’t. Because his job is to pretend inconvenient evidence doesn’t exist. 

Trump’s lies about the officer’s injuries: The ICE agent is shown briskly walking away from the scene. He wasn’t hurt. There’s no evidence he went to the hospital at all, much less for serious bodily harm. Lying about an officer’s injuries is pretty damn important. To decent people. 

Witness testimony: Watters flashes a clip of a witness who says Good was leading the blocking of ICE vehicles, and that ICE wanted her out of there. If that’s true, sure, impeding a federal agent is a statutory violation. It’s not a death sentence. Whether she HAD BEEN doing that or not is completely irrelevant to the officer’s decision-making when he opted to fill her full of bullets. Which THIS SAME WITNESS points out, by saying that, from her vantage point on the scene, the officers were never in danger, and the claim of self-defense is, in her opinion, a lie. Except you won’t see the witness say that on Jesse’s show. He doesn’t play that part. He only uses whatever helps him say what he’s paid to say.

Expert opinion: Watters fully embraces Kristi Noem’s insistence that this officer was highly trained and therefore knew exactly what he was doing. We don’t know if he was highly trained or not, because he was masked, and we have no idea who he is. We do know that NUMEROUS law enforcement officials and officers have come out to say that everything this officer did was dead wrong — and that he was explicitly trained NOT to do what he did. Maybe the officer was highly trained, but power is a drug, and these guys are operating in a constant state of overdose. Here’s a helpful synopsis of the ways the officer went against what he’d hopefully at least been taught, informed not by a bleeding heart liberal, but BY A CURRENT DHS OFFICIAL. Keep in mind, video stills CLEARLY show that the officer’s life WAS NOT IN DANGER.

Witnesses also say that the officers gave Good conflicting instructions, with some telling her to MOVE! (consistent with wanting to “get her out of there”) and some roughly demanding that she get out of the car. We should be able to expect an ICE officer to follow their training. The idea that the officer is exonerated because this was a “split second decision” is offensive — he’d wrongly put himself in this position in the first place, his decision to fire wasn’t “split second,” and even if it had been, he’s been trained to handle split second decisions, and his training told him this was a decision he should make only under extremely limited circumstances as a last resort.

Good was not trained. Not by “Antifa” or anyone else. Civilians cannot be expected to pick and choose which law enforcement commands to follow. Civilians cannot be expected to compensate for officers who ignore their training. Civilians cannot be expected to remain calm in the midst of chaos. We cannot hold civilians to a higher standard than we hold law enforcement, no matter how insistently Jesse Watters urges us to. (Oh, and keep in mind: ICE training is now only 47 days. Guess why.)

They wanted her to die: Sorry. They did. A doctor on the scene pleaded with ICE agents to render aid by checking the inert Good’s pulse. The ICE agent refused. When the doctor told the ICE agents he was a physician, one responded “I don’t care.” They claimed the EMT would handle it. The ambulance was blocked from access. The ICE officer knew this. If there was any possibility whatsoever that Good might still be alive today, it is this officer’s fault that she is dead. Even if there was no hope, it was not his place to make that determination. There is no argument that Good presented a threat at this juncture. A woman slumped over a steering wheel with four bullets in her body in a wrecked car filled with stuffed animals is not a threat. ICE’s unchecked sense of entitlement is the threat. And that threat is being fed by horrible men like Watters and the rest of the MAGAsphere.

Here’s conservative pundit Erick Erickson:

“An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her.  Progressive whites are turning violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.”

Again, ICE wanted her to die. And conservatives celebrating her death only emboldens them further.

There’s been no investigation: None. At all. And there won’t be one. Not a real one, anyway. After promising a joint state-federal investigation, the US Attorney just cut off Minnesota law enforcement agencies’ access to evidence. They are refusing to allow Minnesota to participate in this investigation. But from listening to Jesse Watters parroting the administration, you’d think every stone had already been unturned.

The ICE officer left the scene: He just… left. Walked away at the urging of his colleagues. Law enforcement officers do not leave the scene of a shooting. His absence speaks louder than any statement from the dog murderer who runs DHS.

Watters concludes his segment thusly: “It’s tragic to see someone die. But what would you do?” What would I do? I would draw upon my training and sense of decency in order to NOT KILL THEM. That is what I would do.

Regardless of whether or not they had pronouns in their bio.