“That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
Gun shots.
“Fuckin’ bitch.”
By now, you have likely heard Renee Good’s last words, said with great vulnerability to ICE agent Jonathan Ross, right before he shot her in the head and murdered her.
Observed from outside the US, this ugly scene was one of two videos which best exemplified for me the span of politics in my home country at the dawn of 2026.
The other was of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and children’s music educator Rachel Accurso (“Ms. Rachel”) singing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” to three year olds in New York. The image of the duo singing the line “the baby on the bus goes wah wah wah” has already turned into a meme.
Ms. Rachel and Mamdani were singing at a 3K pre-school center, in the midst of a remarkably successful first week of the newly-minted mayor’s term. He rescinded all of predecessor Eric Adams’s executive orders after he’d been indicted (including those equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and trying to ban the BDS movement), expanded public toilets and helped give away 1,500 theatre tickets, saying “When I speak about making our city more affordable, my vision is not limited to the homes that we live in or the childcare that we’re making universal—it’s also a vision where we make it possible for working people to afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.”
Throughout his campaign, naysayers had scoffed at the idea that Mamdani could convince enough legislators in Albany to secure state funding to make childcare free starting at age two citywide. Yet in his first week, not only did Mamdani win support from moderate Governor Kahty Hochul for his proposal, at a joint appearance, “Hochul rolled out a sweeping, longer-term proposal to expand access to universal pre-K statewide, with the goal of having the program available throughout New York by the start of the 2028-2029 school year.”
Mayor Mamdani did not seem to score this win by dominating Governor Hochul, but by working with her on a shared goal. Indeed, their body language and working relationship belies nothing of the boorish, antagonistic dynamic between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose enmity risked lives (as when Cuomo held up a mass Covid vaccine site in New York due to his beef with de Blasio). His victory lap had none of the score-settling bravado many political analysts salivate for but, rather, sitting with kids, doing a task usually performed by poorly paid women. In his videos from schools, Mayor Mamdani has an affect reminiscent of Fred Rogers gently presiding over Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—and it’s been rather successful. Unlike so many Democrats who speak down to people on camera, Mayor Mamdani has continued a tradition from his campaign of explaining governance to people with a level of respect which seeks to bring them into their government.
Jonathan Ross encountered a woman who challenged him (but posed no danger) and then, when she said “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” he shot her in the head.
Justice in Palestine has been a core issue to both Mamdani and Ms. Rachel, especially over the last year, which made it increasingly unlikely they’d ever be the faces of New York City public education policy. Mamdani’s history on Palestine (he started the SJP chapter at his college, legislated against Israeli settlers in the Assembly, and got arrested after October 7) and his refusal to drop it made him politically vulnerable. Ms. Rachel, a YouTube sensation, has spoken out for the children of Gaza over the last two years, and her refusal to stop doing so has made her professionally vulnerable. (She is currently hosting a gallery show of artwork made by children in Gaza.) Yet no matter how much Zionists threw at her, she has refused to stop speaking out.
And now, their shared politics of vulnerability—not to mention, as anyone who has done it knows, their shared vulnerability of sitting with children at their level and trying to keep them entertained— exemplifies a major policy success in American politics.
Much as I wrote last summer, when Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil represented the politics of vulnerability in 2025, (now Mayor) Mamdani and Ms. Rachel represent the politics of vulnerability for the year to come, while ICE and Jonathan Ross represent the politics of domination.
Consider the beauty of singing to kids compared to the ugliness of Agent Ross. Ross encountered a woman who challenged him (but posed no danger) and then, when she said “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” he shot her in the head. President Trump seems to have justified the killing because of Good’s so-called “disrespect” adding that “Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.” But domination, of course, is Trump’s deal. He has admitted to dominating women sexually on tape, he has been bombing fishermen in the Caribbean for months, he kidnapped the president of Venezuela, and now he wants to invade Greenland.
When men like Trump or Ross—or Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for that matter—try to dominate and kill, there is usually a justification:
I feared for my life.
The politics of domination, though bloody and violent, spring from a place of great fear and weakness. Agent Ross was not in danger from Renee Good’s car. George Zimmerman was in no danger from Trayvon Martin. The Israeli soldiers arresting the child for allegedly throwing stones were in no danger from those alleged stones. The United States is in no more danger from China or Russia (the justification for invading Greenland) than it was in danger from drugs from Venezuela.
A politics of vulnerability—as illustrated by the successful first week of the Mamdani Era—can make governance support the ways and reasons for living.
The politics of domination is weak when compared to the politics of vulnerability. Compare the former to a trans woman who dares to walk down the street in Kampala, Uganda, where it’s a crime to be trans. Or to the thousands of Palestinians who participated in the Great March of Return. Or to Martin Luther King, whose birthday America will (largely pretend) to honor next week, and everyone who marched with him while facing down hoses and dogs and the batons of cops.
Or to Renee Good and her wife, Becca Goode, who bravely stood witness to the kidnapping of their neighbors—even when it took the life of one of them in an instant, and left the other (and their child) facing a lifetime of grief.
Which politics takes more strength, more courage—the one which fuels someone saying I must bomb a fisherman more than a 1,000 miles from Florida because I am frightened they might have drugs, or the one which fueled Miep and Jan Gies to hide the Frank family during World War II?
Also, which politics are working right now? It can understandably feel overwhelming to see the ugliness of Trump, Stephen Miller and Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics of domination running over so many bodies, day after day. But these dominators are all extremely unpopular. (And they revile transness, queerness and feminism, because these ideas help deflate the bullshit powers of patriarchy and masculinity.) Trump is reviled on issues in poll after poll; Israel has never been the recipient of so much global criticism.
Still, mainstream Democrats and the Democratic Party seemed inclined to hitch their fates to many of the issues which currently define a politics of domination, like threatening Venezuela or increasing ICE funding, even though for the first time, more voters want to abolish ICE than to keep it.
Mainstream Democrats would do better to accept that funding ICE, regardless of how much training anyone gets, will result in more death—and that the politics of domination is a dead-end.
Meanwhile a politics of vulnerability—as illustrated by the successful first week of the Mamdani Era—can make governance support the ways and reasons for living.
“I am so tired of waiting,” Langston Hughes wrote almost a century ago, in 1931. “Aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife and cut the world in two—and see what worms are eating at the rind.”
Yes, I am tired. I imagine you are, too. And maybe politics isn’t as good a container for beauty and kindness as poetry. A politics of domination never can be.
But a politics of mutual aid, of care, of vulnerability, that can be poetry. Mamdani walking the length of Manhattan, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya walking out of Kamal Adwan in his white coat towards the Israeli tanks, Ms. Rachel defending the children of Gaza no matter how savage the attacks upon her character, farm workers in Oxnard tailing ICE agents and honking their horns, people blowing their whistles and filming ICE on their phones in the streets of Minneapolis knowing what mayhappen to them, the teacher in the West Bank risking his own life to try to keep a nine-year-old from being abducted… these brave acts are what constitutes a politics of vulnerability, and they are poetry. They refuse to wait for goodness, beauty and kindness.
And they are enacted by people who are more powerful than the Jonathan Rosses, Stephen Millers, JD Vances and Donald Trumps of the world will ever be.
