MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and historian Heather Cox Richardson joined forces on Saturday to hurl what might be the most incendiary and stupid hot take on the situation in Minneapolis to date. According to Richardson, ICE Agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good because she was a woman trying to de-escalate the situation.
What made Richardson’s comments even dumber is that Velshi wanted to present this segment as one that was dedicated to facts, which was something he also failed at. Velshi led Richardson with a truncated version of new footage of the incident, “Let's just go through this together. This is, we see a picture of a big dog in the back. We see her saying, ‘it's fine, I'm not mad at you.’ We see an interaction after that with Renee Good's wife. This is the same person that was described as a domestic terrorist, far-left lunatic, and someone who was attempting to kill an ICE officer. What do you do when all the evidence says something that's not the case?”
While Velshi focused on the dog, he omitted Good being told to get out of the car after her wife, Rebecca, became combative and that Rebecca responded by urging her to “drive, baby, drive.” It is also ironic that Velshi would claim to care so much about facts while interviewing Richardson, who has not suffered any professional or reputational harm on the left for falsely claiming Charlie Kirk was murdered by a right-winger.
As for Richardson, she began by playing the Nazi card:
You know, I want to make a point about something in that video. So it's really—this is classic authoritarian behavior. We've seen it all over the world. When somebody stands up to the regime, simply hurting them in some fashion, incarcerating them, executing them, hurting them in some fashion, and saying that person was an enemy of the state. Often by arguing that that person was someone on the far-left. And you heard that all the time, you know, from the Nazis on forward. That's pretty clearly a pattern. But you cut off a line there that really jumped out to me. She said, ‘I'm not mad at you.’
Also omitting everything else that happened in the video, Richardson continued:
And the reason that I want to call that out is because that is sort of classic de-escalation behavior. She, you know, that is you know, that's one of the first things you say is ‘I acknowledge your feelings.’ I am not mad at you. And that, I think, is an important American component to this in this moment. Because what she did when she said that was she indicated that she was actually the person in control of the situation. She was actually the dominant figure, saying, ‘Hey, it's okay. I'm not mad at you. You know, let's de-escalate the situation.’
She also claimed, “His response to that, what the administration is now trying to argue is, was fear on his part, or the idea that she was somehow a threat. His response to her de-escalation, which indicated that she was the one in control of that situation, was to pull out a gun and prove that no, in fact, he was in charge of that situation. And that response in this moment in the United States is a reaction of power, obviously.”
Richardson then got even more irresponsible, “I think it is so past time for us to acknowledge the degree to which this administration is operating misogyny in order to put control of this entire country on the table. And boy, did that just encapsulate it, her trying to de-escalate, him seeing that as a woman taking control of a situation that he wanted to control. And so he killed her.”
If Velshi wants to have a show based around facts, he should probably do a better job on his homework and also not pal around with conspiracy theorists.
Here is a transcript for the January 10 show:
MS NOW Velshi
1/10/2026
12:31 PM ET
ALI VELSHI: Let's just go through this together. This is, we see a picture of a big dog in the back. We see her saying, “it's fine, I'm not mad at you.” We see an interaction after that with Renee Good's wife. This is the same person that was described as a domestic terrorist, far-left lunatic, and someone who was attempting to kill an ICE officer. What do you do when all the evidence says something that's not the case.
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: You know, I want to make a point about something in that video. So it's really—this is classic authoritarian behavior. We've seen it all over the world. When somebody stands up to the regime, simply hurting them in some fashion, incarcerating them, executing them, hurting them in some fashion, and saying that person was an enemy of the state.
Often by arguing that that person was someone on the far-left. And you heard that all the time, you know, from the Nazis on forward, that's pretty clearly a pattern. But you cut off a line there that really jumped out to me. She said, “I'm not mad at you.”
And the reason that I want to call that out is because that is sort of classic de-escalation behavior. She, you know, that is you know, that's one of the first things you say is "I acknowledge your feelings." I am not mad at you. And that, I think, is an important American component to this in this moment. Because what she did when she said that was she indicated that she was actually the person in control of the situation.
She was actually the dominant figure, saying, “Hey, it's okay. I'm not mad at you. You know, let's de-escalate the situation.”
And his response to that, what the administration is now trying to argue is, was fear on his part, or the idea that she was somehow a threat. His response to her de-escalation, which indicated that she was the one in control of that situation, was to pull out a gun and prove that no, in fact, he was in charge of that situation.
And that response in this moment in the United States is a reaction of power, obviously. But I think it is so past time for us to acknowledge the degree to which this administration is operating misogyny in order to put control of this entire country on the table. And boy, did that just encapsulate it, her trying to de-escalate, him seeing that as a woman taking control of a situation that he wanted to control. And so he killed her.
