He shot her in the face

[Cirsium]

53. Thanks

Excerpt:

And that speed is its own kind of confession. A woman is dead, and the machinery is already humming, gears grinding, scripts sliding into place, moving with the well-rehearsed urgency of a system that knows exactly how to shield a man with power while quietly laying the weight of it all back onto the woman he killed. It’s a reflex so old and so deeply trained into our politics you can almost hear it click into gear — close ranks, lock arms, protect the man, and if there’s any blame left over, make sure it lands on her.

We’ve seen it in Donald Trump, in the way he talks about women as if they’re props in his personal pageant, things to be graded, mocked, and publicly humiliated. Piggy. Dog. Stupid. Ugly. He bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and was rewarded with the highest office in the land. That kind of language doesn’t just vanish into the air. It settles into the soil. It seeps into the seams of culture. It teaches people, quietly and relentlessly, what they’re allowed to get away with.

When leaders model contempt for women, when they make cruelty look like confidence and dominance look like strength, it doesn’t stay confined to podiums and cable news. It leaks outward, into parking lots and traffic stops and ordinary moments where someone with a weapon decides a woman has crossed an invisible line simply by not shrinking.

Renee Good tried to live. She tried to speak. She tried to calm a situation that never should’ve existed in the first place. She offered the only things she had left in that moment — her voice, her steadiness, her refusal to let fear be the last word. And for that, she was killed, then blamed, then pressed into a story that made her death easier for powerful people to swallow, as if a woman’s life could be wrapped in official language and made to disappear.