{"id":106948,"date":"2026-01-12T14:44:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T19:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=106948"},"modified":"2026-01-13T11:06:26","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T16:06:26","slug":"opinion-jennifer-saul-and-tim-kenyon-discuss-trumps-claims-about-the-ice-minneapolis-killing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2026\/01\/opinion-jennifer-saul-and-tim-kenyon-discuss-trumps-claims-about-the-ice-minneapolis-killing\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Jennifer Saul and Tim Kenyon discuss Trump’s claims about the ICE Minneapolis killing"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece written by Jennifer Saul, Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo, and Tim Kenyon, Professor in the Faculty of Humanities\u00a0at Brock University<\/em>, originally appeared in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

By now, many of us have probably seen\u00a0the video\u00a0of a Minneapolis woman whose last words were a calm \u201cIt\u2019s fine, dude; I\u2019m not mad at you,\u201d before she was shot three times in the head as she turned her car to drive away from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.<\/p>\n

U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that Renee Good \u201cviolently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vice-President JD Vance declared\u00a0\u201cthe reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car\u2026 You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.\u201d<\/p>\n

These statements, and others that doubled down on them, were made even as videos showing they were clearly false were in wide circulation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s puzzling. Why lie in a situation like this? Who can you hope to deceive, when evidence falsifying your statements is freely available?<\/p>\n

Seeing is not believing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our work\u00a0on authoritarian public discourse stresses that there are multiple answers to this question, partly because there are many different audiences of mass communication. We need to come to grips with the multiple functions of obvious falsehoods like these to understand why they are made so often and so prominently, and how they serve authoritarian leaders.<\/p>\n

First, something that seems obvious to you can be credible to others. How? Because in an era of algorithmic news feeds, we are not all getting the same news. Those with a newsfeed of nothing but MAGA influencers are in a different epistemic bubble from other people.<\/p>\n

And they may well be in an\u00a0echo chamber, in which opposing voices are so discredited that when an alternative narrative reaches them, it\u2019s immediately dismissed.<\/p>\n

Millions of people may not have seen the videos of the incident at all, or may have seen versions with instructions on how to interpret the visuals: she\u2019s not turning around, she\u2019s backing up in preparation to ram into the shooter; she\u2019s not calmly indicating that she isn\u2019t a threat, she\u2019s refusing to comply with orders.<\/p>\n

Videos of police using force often have this dual nature: they can document and prove wrongdoing; but\u00a0they can also be used\u00a0to train citizens to see threats where there are none.<\/p>\n

Authoritarian tactics<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some people will find the lies too obvious to be plausible attempts at deception. Yet bald-faced lies are important in strongman politics.<\/p>\n

Authoritarians can display their power by\u00a0asserting obvious falsehoods, showing that they cannot be held to account. They also play to their base by showing contempt for a shared enemy, while demanding displays of loyalty and compliance from underlings.<\/p>\n

Officials are forced to engage in the humiliating ritual of repeating what we call compliance lies.\u00a0Think here\u00a0of White House press secretary Sean Spicer at the start of Trump\u2019s first term, forced to defend absurd lies about Trump\u2019s and Obama\u2019s inauguration crowds.<\/p>\n

At the time, this may have seemed merely buffoonish. What\u2019s happened since illustrates how dangerous this can be as the subject of the lies has changed to matters concerning life and death.<\/p>\n

Other people may simply become confused by obvious lies. The competing interpretations of the Minneapolis video are diametrically opposed. Once news sites and social media feeds are sufficiently populated by these opposing views, it can feel like an overwhelming task to discern what\u2019s really true.<\/p>\n

And exposing a lie still doesn\u2019t end its influence. It is easier to create an opinion with a lie than to undo that opinion when the lie is debunked, something known to psychologists as the\u00a0continued influence effect.<\/p>\n

Filling social media feeds with falsehoods to create confusion is a crucial part of the strategy that Steve Bannon, a Republican strategist and former Trump adviser, called\u00a0\u201cflooding the zone with shit.\u201d\u00a0This can leave people unsure of who to trust, what to believe, or even what the issue really is.<\/p>\n

\u2018Both sides\u2019 reporting<\/strong><\/p>\n

Relatively savvy and good-faith entities can be used as instruments of this strategy. In the name of neutrality and balance, centrist news media can fall back on a\u00a0\u201cboth sides\u201d model\u00a0that frames stories mainly in terms of what each side is saying.<\/p>\n

When one side commits to obvious lies, this approach obligingly repeats those lies while outsourcing the fact-checking to the opposing side, as if it were merely a partisan dispute.<\/p>\n

These\u00a0duelling narratives\u00a0can then become the story. The strategy to lie shifts focus away from the shooting itself, in this incident, and onto the alleged controversy.<\/p>\n

In other words, obvious lies aren\u2019t necessarily failed lies. They can confuse, distract, excite and intimidate a range of audiences. They can also be believed, no matter how obviously false they seem.<\/p>\n

To treat them as mere indications of shamelessness or incompetence on the part of the liar is to overlook the serious harm they can do and the appeal they have in authoritarian politics.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jennifer Saul, Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo, and Tim Kenyon, Professor in the Faculty of Humanities\u00a0at Brock University, recently published a piece in The Conversation about why the Trump administration has made obviously false claims about the killing of a Minneapolis woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":106950,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[37,6],"tags":[384,30,5512,5624],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106948"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106948"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106954,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106948\/revisions\/106954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}