Jan. 12, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:27
The Shooting of Renee Good
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All right, 11th of January 2026.
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So, you're going to talk this morning, and I'm happy to get your comments as always, and questions and so on.
But Rene Good was shot four days ago, I think it was, in America.
And I really wanted to talk about the roots of these things.
I'm very interested in, and always have been, in almost infinite causality.
Why was my childhood so bad?
My childhood was so bad because of World War II on my mother's side, and I would argue World War I on my father's side.
Why did World War I happen?
Well, I have a whole video on that.
And why did World War II happen?
World War II happened as a hysterical, wild, catastrophic response to the threat of communism.
So, all of these big political movements end up with me trapped in a small rotting apartment with a woman who'd been made crazy through war and the violence in Germany in particular during and after the war.
It was a bad scene, man.
It was a bad scene.
So, I look at these causalities, and these causalities are interesting.
They don't erase free will, of course.
But people don't make decisions in a void.
So, you have your life, you make your choices.
And a friend of mine many years ago got a phone call from England, a lawyer, who said, Oh, your great aunt has died.
And he's like, I have a great aunt.
Yes, and you're her only living relative.
And she's quite wealthy.
There's your great expectations plot.
And so he had made his choices based upon a certain paucity of income.
And then, I don't ever remember knowing exactly how much money it was, but it was not a small amount.
And so his choices, or the options that were available to him, changed.
So I've always tried to provoke and promote more choices for people.
A choice to be virtuous by knowing what virtue is, a choice on how to love better by knowing what love is, maybe a choice to have more financial freedom if you listen to various bits of advice I've given over the years.
A choice to live with more integrity once you know the objective values that are necessary for virtue.
A choice to spend time with quality people and not spend time with destructive or dysfunctional people to steer towards sane rather than veer and found her on the rocks are crazy or evil.
I've always tried to give people more choices.
So it certainly is true that we have free will.
We are not determined, but our environment gives or takes away certain choices.
My environment when I was a child gave me the choice of robust sanity or total madness.
There really wasn't the middle curve had been kind of hollowed out for me.
I had to pursue great reason because the alternative was great madness.
And because I have some linguistic and intelligent talents, my great madness would have been very destructive to the world.
I was either going to be someone who helped heal the world or I was going to be someone who helped harm the world.
There really wasn't anything in between.
You know, like if you're eating badly and you're overweight and the doctor says, oh, you're sliding towards diabetes, then you either really strictly reform your diet or you end up diabetic.
There really wasn't any other choice.
Now, I still had choice, of course, right?
I could have pursued philosophy and self-knowledge and consistency, reason, and virtue, which I did as best I can, which is not too bad.
Or I would, like a barrel over a waterfall, go right into the thundering depths of madness and apply my talents to the disassembly of the world rather than putting it back together again.
I mean, I was going to say Humpty Dumpty style, but Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again.
I think the world can be.
Maybe not in our generation, probably not.
But over time, the bigger the idea, the longer it takes to change people.
So I kind of look at the choices that an almost infinite number of people made as to how bullets ended up entering into Renee Good's face and killing her, because these things don't come out of nowhere.
And there's a lot of causality behind it that I think, I think, is really important to understand, because people always want to get shocked at the end of the story without wanting to see all of the things that came before that are the reason why the story is there at all.
So my argument would be that the causality goes quite far back.
So Renee Good's wife claims to be, at least this is what I've read.
I haven't verified everything here because I can't spend my entire life verifying every single scrap of information everywhere, but my understanding is she is a disabled veteran.
Now, she didn't seem to me to be particularly disabled when she's taunting the cops and so on, looked fairly able-bodied, roaming around, moving around.
But I also know that, I mean, what is it?
The majority of vets claim to be disabled because they can get a lot of money.
And of course, some of them are disabled, but I would assume not all, not all.
So there's that program.
Because that's always the big question for me.
What are people living on?
You know, when you grow up dirt poor and close to the bone and you're getting eviction notices and you're scrambling for money and things get kind of desperate and so on, when all of that goes on in your life and you see people driving around in SUVs, they're out all day.
They don't seem to have any particularly robust source of income.
They don't have to get up and go to work.
They got nice cell phones.
I assume cell phone plans.
They got insurance.
They can do the maintenance if it's a used car.
And people were saying on X, well, you know, that's not an expensive car.
It's like, bro, when you're broke, every car is expensive.
Except for some seven-color beater, you have to open the door with a coat hanger.
I didn't have any car growing up.
My family had no car.
Growing up, it was far too expensive.
So, I mean, that's just my.
It's nice when people grow up rich or at least middle class and they say, oh, that's a used car, not super expensive.
It's like, well, little Lord Fauntle Roy, that's still out of the reach of poor people.
But there's all this money sloshing around.
Where's the money coming from?
So that they can drive in an SUV, fill it up with gas, keep it maintained, pay the insurance on it, and roam around shadowing ice, interfering, blocking.
I didn't have time for any of that stuff when I was younger.
I had to work to pay the bills.
Where's all the money coming from?
Well, maybe it's coming from veterans' benefits.
Maybe it's coming from other family members.
Some people were saying that the mom is paying the bills.
Where's she getting her money from?
Government salaries, pensions.
Because most people, I mean, it's really tragic, but most people are kind of broke.
Most people are kind of broke.
And even the people I know who've got some money, obviously they're not broke broke, but it's tough to save.
I mean, talk to most people, even if they have some money and they're willing to talk about finances.
They're like, yeah, you know, but no, we just got a tax bill or the property taxes went up or, you know, we just had to, we have old cars in my household.
And, you know, as cars age, they start to chew up more and more money.
Just had to drop a bunch of money to keep the cars going.
Water heater needed replacing.
So, yeah, just, you know, there's just bills and bills and bills and bills.
So where are they getting all this money from?
If they have to go to work, see, work keep people, work in the free market, keeps people sane.
Because we're social animals.
And if isolated from actual demands, we tend to go crazy.
You know, the kids of rich people are often kind of deranged.
And the wives of rich people often are kind of deranged.
The rich people, if they've inherited the money, often kind of deranged.
If they've earned it, that's a little different because they've had to rub up against actual empirical reality.
But when we are isolated from demands and objective feedback and reality, we go crazy.
It's like this woman who spent, what was it, 500 days in a cave.
She had no idea how much time had passed.
She was doing it as an experiment.
She had no idea.
We lose track of reality without objective, real empirical feedback.
And free money makes people crazy.
I mean, if a woman has got married and has a couple of kids with a guy, then they have to make the relationship work.
They have to.
I mean, in the absence of like the welfare state and alimony, child support and so on.
You say, oh, but that means she has to stay with an, let's say, the guy's really mean.
She has to stay with them.
It's like, well, that's generally best for the kids.
But they have to find a way to make it work.
But if she can just vault out and get child support and alimony and welfare and so on, then she doesn't have to make it work.
I mean, how much do you worry about a performance review at your job if you just won a million dollars in the lottery?
Not that much.
So people can get ideological when they don't have to voluntarily earn money in the free market, which is why there's a lot of people, of course, they have government jobs.
They can't really get fired.
They have no particular requirements.
I only worked once for the government.
I worked for the Department of Education.
I was in charge of keeping and tracking changes in a giant union contract.
And oh my God, they did nothing.
They had nice chats.
They took hour and a half long lunches.
They had a lot of team building exercises that were kind of goofy, but fun.
And they chatted a lot.
They got caught up.
It was nice.
And anytime they needed work done, they just hired a consultant.
I mean, there were, what, eight or nine people in the office, but in order to have someone actually track the changes to this document and keep it up to date, they needed to hire me.
So it's unreality.
You just get this unreality.
And since, you know, half the people are living on government money, half the people are aristocratic, but with no responsibilities.
The aristocracy in the past had the responsibility of going to war if called on.
And called on they were quite often.
In the 20th century, the First World War destroyed the old order in the aristocracy.
And of course, tragically, aristocracy was replaced with ideology, which is hatred without consequences, because you're shielded from the consequences.
So where was their money coming from?
To me, that's really important.
Like all of these organic protests, they're not protests at all.
They're just, they threaten men with the mob and they bribe women with everyone else believes this.
That's kind of the way that this stuff works.
That's why they have these insta mobs, insta protests forming with all the signs and the charts.
I mean, they're just paid, I assume, by outside agitators, but they're just paid.
And what that says to men is, well, there's a mob, so you better watch out, because the mob hunts down the free thinking and the clear thinking.
And for women, it's like, well, this is what everyone else believes, so you better get in line, which women tend to do.
They score very high in the trait agreeableness relative to men.
And for men, you have to really care about the world, see it for what it is, and not hate it, right?
That's a real challenge.
I have to work on that myself almost daily.
See the world for what it is, see its potential, not hate it for what it is, love it enough to change it, love it enough to tell the truth, love it enough not to fall into hatred when you get attacked and slandered and threatened for telling the truth.
The world is my dysfunctional family.
And to stick around dysfunctional relationships when you have great options is an act of willpower and love.
Not the easiest thing in the known universe.
I'll tell you that straight up.
So why were they even there?
These two women.
Because there's a bunch of government money, I imagine, I bet, flowing their way.
And, or at least unearned money, right?
If there was insurance from the former husband, then at least it's not earned, like you don't earn that money.
So why were they there at all?
I assume because of unearned money.
No, life insurance, if that's the case, is certainly part of the free market.
But my understanding is that she has three children, Renee Good, two of them, are with the father, a thousand miles away or something like that, which is not great, not great for the children.
And they were out there protecting, as far as I understand it, a Somali criminal.
And so to be out there protecting a Somali criminal while not seeing your own children is a distortion of moral and rational priorities that is completely incomprehensible to anybody who's not totally brainwashed.
That you would leave your children to go and endanger yourself to protect a criminal from the other side of the world who was in the country illegally, as far as I understand it, is incomprehensible.
It is incomprehensible.
You know, I have for decades puzzled on this issue of why abusive people treat strangers way better than family.
You know, that famous heat map map out group preference.
Why would strangers treat sorry, why would people treat strangers better than actual family?
I think it's partly a humiliation ritual.
Oh, look, I can treat people well.
I guess I just don't treat you well because you're so difficult.
It's a showing off, of course, that they have the skills to treat people well.
They just choose not to or don't with the people they claim to care about.
Also, there is, it's easy to fool people who are just beating you for the first time, not the people who know you very well.
So you have a guardedness with the people who know you well if you're a bad person, but new people you can charm and fool a lot of times, right?
Not the really, I mean, my wife is an amazing, amazing sniffer out of crazy and dysfunctional.
I mean, she meets people, and honestly, 10 seconds, boom.
Oh, she said, you know, everybody tells you everything you need to know about themselves in the first 10 seconds, first minute.
So I bet you there's a lot of unearned money floating around.
And I bet you most of it comes from the government.
So there's violence in their existence in that it's coerced money or political money.
Let's say the money is donated by some wealthy benefactor to some organization that then pays these people.
It's political money.
It's only there because of the desire to influence politics, which is to influence the coercive redistribution of trillions of dollars over time.
So what was she living on?
If you have hard numbers and you have to pay your rent and you have to get up and you have to go to work, then you live in reality.
Why was the Somali fellow there in the first place?
Well, the Somalis, to a large degree, were airdropped into Minnesota by Barack Obama in order to swing votes in Congress or the Senate.
I mean, Obamacare was passed because of Al Franken.
Al Franken was elected in a very sketchy election, and he was only elected because of the Somalis.
So there's that aspect.
It's all politics.
It's all based upon political power, which is based upon coercion.
Because it's a sanctuary city, local law enforcement generally don't respond to ICE requests for arrest entertainment.
In fact, they can get in trouble, I think, for doing that.
So the local police weren't going to arrest this person.
And the local police don't even seem to be that keen to arrest illegals, even if they have committed crimes, other than just being in the country illegally, which is a crime.
So why do these sanctuary cities exist?
Well, to shore up votes for the left.
So again, politics, power, coercion, redistribution, and so on.
It's all violence.
Or the threat of, which is violence.
I mean, the guy robbing you with a knife doesn't actually have to stab you.
He just has to threaten you.
Still violence.
So why was ICE there?
Because the local police weren't, I assume, I don't know, but my assumption is that ICE was there because the local police weren't arresting because Sanctuary City, because politics, because corruption, because all of that stuff.
Why do illegals come into the country?
Well, why are they allowed into the country?
Because they are.
Well, because it gives the Democrats more power.
Illegals, in a truly insane way, are counted in the census, which gives more electoral college votes to blue states.
And what was it?
You can go up to the voting booth in some places and you can just vouch for up to 12 people.
Oh, yeah, they're totally allowed to vote.
They're totally allowed to vote.
And so that's all politics.
Why was the border opened under Biden?
Millions and millions and millions of people pour in, are distributed strategically in the country.
Well, to collapse the system, like sort of pivot strategy, cloud pivot, to collapse the country, to wreck the economy, to destroy the vestiges of capitalism, and to swell political power, particularly for the left.
Because there are people, this is the shopping cart question or issue, right?
So there are people who are nervous to break rules or have a desire to follow rules independent of enforcement.
If you ever go to these charming little towns in rural areas, sort of northern Ontario, central Ontario, there's a lot of lovely little towns that are well worth the time to poke around and explore, particularly in the summer.
And they have these lovely little customs.
I've been to farmers' markets where the goods are all there and you just leave some cash and take the goods.
It's all entirely self-policed.
There's no cashier there.
There's just, here's the price, here's a box, take what you want, pay the money.
And it works.
In some of these little towns, there are these little lending libraries.
Take a book, leave a book.
I mean, it's lovely.
People leave their doors unlocked.
The kids roam around the neighborhood.
I mean, it's honestly like going back to certain parts of my childhood to see that level of a high trust society.
And that's because there are people who want to do the right thing regardless of enforcement.
They self-police, they self-enforce.
There's no law against leaving the shopping cart right where your car is.
But, you know, most people will take it back.
That's a particularly, I think, northern European culture as a whole.
I mean, Siberian and Asian culture, East Asian culture as well.
And it's not this sort of innate virtue thing.
It's because the rules were brutally enforced for centuries.
I mean, as we've talked about before, the British killed about 1% of their population every year for centuries.
And that's going to weed out a lot of the sociopaths and psychopaths, or rather drive them to high positions of power where they're immune from blowback.
Everybody who wants to escape the rules ends up running the rules.
The best way to break the law is to make the law.
The best way to evade consequences is to inflict consequences.
So in England, under British culture, everybody who defied the law got killed or reproductively disabled, right?
Sent to Australia, put in prison, whatever it is, right?
So this is why British people tend to be so rigidly polite and self-policing, because those are the only people who survived the close on half a millennia purge of the randomly aggressive, the entitled.
Everybody who survived internalized those rules.
I mean, young people were taken, of course, in Elizabethan England before, a little bit after, young children were taken to public hangings.
I mean, that's going to leave a bit of an impression on the old consciousness, wouldn't you say?
What are they doing to poor Albert?
Well, Albert broke the rules.
Beheadings, hangings.
Well, what do children feel about breaking the rules after that?
I mean, some will be crazy and stupid and break the rules and then they'll yeah, beheadings.
Oh, what are they doing to poor Bobby?
Oh, he broke the rules.
Right?
Head in a basket.
Put the needle on the record, put the head in the basket.
So who's left?
People who obey the rules.
People who internalize.
Now, after you do that for a couple of centuries, you don't even need to show people getting hung anymore or beheaded.
I wrote about this in Just Poor.
It's a novel.
You should really check it out.
It's a great, great book, especially the audiobook.
It's really good.
And it's interesting because my daughter, I mean, we've never punished her, but when she was around outside authority figures, she just wanted to please them, wanted to, I mean, it was because it's not environmental for her.
So that's just the genetics that have survived are very much follow the rules.
I mean, in some cultures, you survive by following the rules.
In other cultures, you flourish by breaking the rules.
And those cultures, ah, well, we're seeing what happens when they try to merge.
It's not ideal.
So breaking the rules for the sake of political power, if you look at people on the left, and, you know, usual caveats, people on the right have their flaws and faults and corruptions as well.
But people on the left are addicts as a whole to free stuff.
And when you become an addict to free stuff, you don't follow the rules anymore.
If you've ever spent time around real addicts, they are liars, compulsive, thieves, emotional terrorists, because the only thing they care about is getting their free stuff.
Now, the free stuff isn't the drugs.
You've got to pay for those.
But the free stuff is the happiness that comes from the drugs, which they don't have to earn through virtue, but instead get the kind of joy that someone gets marrying a good woman and holding his newborn child in his arms, that kind of happiness they get from shooting up.
Or ayahuasca or whatever, right?
Molly, ecstasy, you name it.
They want the free stuff.
They want the happiness without the virtue.
It's the Ozempic of joy.
They want the reward without the effort.
Happiness is something that nature holds out as an incentive for you to do good.
And the happiness is extreme because doing good is very hard.
And doing good gets you a lot of negative feedback, to put it mildly.
So the happiness in doing good must be great.
And they want that happiness of doing good.
I remember when I had my neck surgery, I was on some pretty painful, sorry, some pretty powerful painkillers afterwards.
Man, it was great.
Whew!
Fantastic.
Had this glow joy in my belly and the spring in my step.
And I was like, well, I got to stop that.
I want to get used to that because, you know, I'm normally at a happiness level of sort of seven or eight out of ten, which I think is pretty good.
I think if you aim for higher, you end up falling down the ranks.
This gave me like a nine or a ten, which I had certainly achieved, but I have to really work to get there.
This gave me a nine or ten just for breathing.
That was pretty good stuff.
It's great stuff.
And I think I took them for about five days, and then I was like, okay, let's not get used to this.
That's a bad idea.
So people want the unearned.
They want unearned money.
They want unearned.
They want to be right and moral just by being told what to do, which is the opposite of right and moral, but they want that.
They want power over others without earning it.
So, I mean, if you've listened to me for a long time, then, you know, hopefully I have some credibility.
I don't want power over you.
I want to hopefully give you some examples of how to think, give you some examples and arguments for virtue, teach you perhaps the value of self-knowledge and how to understand yourself and your causality and your backstory in order to increase your choices, right?
Once you know why you do things, you have a much greater choice on how to change them, how to change what you do.
So I have some influence.
Like when I was on TikTok, people were, a couple of people called in to tell me how much I'd helped their lives or changed their lives.
And that's very nice.
I mean, it's not me, obviously, it's philosophy and it's themselves enacting it, but it's nonetheless.
I don't want to minimize.
I mean, I still have done good work and helped a lot of people, and that's really nice.
So maybe I have some credibility with people, but let's just say I've earned it pretty, I've earned it with some pretty hard slog over the years and decades.
But it's the difference between a lot of moms and a lot of dads.
A lot of dads have a kind of quiet authority that kids just sort of instinctively respect.
A lot of moms get kind of loud and in your face, and that's hard to respect.
And the women get frustrated because they don't seem to get the same respect as the men and blah, blah, blah.
So they want authority over others without having to earn it, which is why they go to politics.
Because politics, people have to listen to what you say they should do because you force them.
You force them.
So people want the unearned, and that's the root of a lot of violence.
We will probably not find out about these two women's childhoods, right?
The shooter and, sorry, the victim and her wife.
But I would wager dollars to donuts that if we did find out about these two women's childhoods, that they would have been appalling and terrible and awful.
And I'm sure that there would be significant levels of abuse.
So that's another cause of this sort of stuff.
The officer, who was not just protecting himself, right?
The officer, when the car leapt forward and the officer shot Miss Good, he was not just protecting himself.
He saw that another officer had his arm in the window.
And he himself, as I mentioned six months prior, last June, I think it was, had been dragged because his car got trapped at a car window, dragged a couple of hundred feet, ended up with 33 stitches, and it was pretty bad.
So when he saw a car leaping forward with an officer's arm in the window, well, he knew that there were two hostile women, or at least one hostile woman, in the car.
You can grab the officer's arm and take him for a ride, as it happened to him.
So he wasn't just protecting himself.
He was protecting the other officer.
So the entire sort of scenario, the entire setup, had so many dominoes and backstories and shadow histories and roots in violence, which is why when you get to that kind of situation, so many dominoes have had to fall in a particular way.
And by dominoes, I simply mean influences, that it's all soaked in violence.
The entire scenario is soaked in violence.
In other words, the violence was there long before the bullets left the chamber.
Bad thoughts, wrong thoughts, paid propaganda entering your brain is a soft bullet that results in the hard bullets.
And the causality, some of which we'll find out, some of which we won't.
But if you look at the entire scenario, it's all blood from beginning to end, top to bottom.
People think the violence is when the bullets left the chamber.
Nope.
Violence was long before.
Long before.
All right, let me get your comments and then we'll go private for donors, freedomain.locals.com.
Tom says, your novel, The Future, is my favorite.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Rich says, it's sad that weak politicians allow so much fraud for funds designated for disabled veterans.
Well, how could it be otherwise?
How could it be otherwise?
You say it's sad, but remember, most people, most people work on incentives.
They do not work on borrows.
If the situation, if the society is set up so that the incentives are reversed, most people, almost everyone works on incentives.
Well, I'm sorry, we all work on incentives, but most people, incentives is their main thing.
Is there an alignment between Karens and long-term policing or punishment of Europeans?
I'll get to that with the donor section.
All right, so let's go to our donors.
Wait, do we have any?
Yeah.
Let's go to our donors and we'll continue the conversation there.
Because, yeah, I definitely do want to talk about the Karen phenomenon.
Because I certainly fallen prey to it myself from time to time, but on sort of further reflection, I think it's fairly unjust and unfair because significant portions, particularly of married white women, vote for the Conservatives.