He celebrated Renee Good’s killing in Poughkeepsie. Now he’s calling himself the victim for trying to bring his hate speech to her city.

Three weeks ago, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good in the face, as she tried to drive away from him to avoid his escalating confrontation. She was unarmed, she wasn’t threatening. She had told Ross, seconds before, “That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.” She turned her steering wheel to the furthest right and away from Ross. As her car moved, away from him, he shot her in the head. And then he walked towards her.

Days later, Canadian comedian Ben Bankas took the stage in Poughkeepsie, New York:

Now for a moment of silence for Renee Good. Really hope that dog’s OK … and her pet.

The “pet” in this “joke” is Good’s widow.

Her last name was Good. That’s what I said after they shot her in the face.

Then:

“Dumb, retarded lesbian” who “should have been shot 10 minutes before.”

This is hate speech. This crosses the line. This is a standing offer. Why? Let’s have a look.

The Incentive of Comedy as Incitement

Canadian law, like most legal frameworks, conceptualizes incitement narrowly: explicit calls to future violence. “Go kill lesbians” Courts can process that.

But Bankas is not telling anyone to murder a group. He’s offering them reward expectations after they murder lesbians:

• He will promote and celebrate on stage the murder
• He will mock victims with slurs
• He will dehumanize grieving families
• He will profit from entertaining about murder
• He will build his brand on it

That’s not just approval of past violence. That’s a reward structure for future violence. It’s an open advertisement: kill the right people, and comedy-formatted public celebration awaits.

Courts treat celebration as backward-looking commentary. But performed approval is forward-looking—it tells future actors what awaits them.

Mike Ward Precedent

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5-4 in 2021 that comedian Mike Ward’s mockery of Jérémy Gabriel—a disabled child singer—did not constitute discrimination under Quebec’s Charter. Ward made cruel jokes about Gabriel’s appearance and disability, including joking that he’d tried to drown the kid.

Comedians exhaled. This attempt at humor survived.

But Ward’s case was structurally different from the Bankas road show:

Mike Ward	Ben Bankas
Mocked a living person	Celebrated a fresh killing
Target was a celebrity	Target was a woman executed by state agents
No identity-based slurs	“Dumb, retarded lesbian”
No endorsement of violence	“Should have been shot 10 minutes before”
Comedy about someone’s existence	Comedy endorsing state execution

The Supreme Court found Ward’s jokes didn’t “incite the audience to treat Gabriel as subhuman.”

Bankas is doing exactly that, with the enhancement that treating someone as subhuman gets you a comedy special.

The St. Paul Roadshow

Bankas didn’t just celebrate Good’s killing. He planned to bring the celebration to her city.

Six sold-out shows were scheduled for Laugh Camp Comedy Club in downtown St. Paul—ten miles from where Good was shot, in the city where her widow and three children live, while ICE operations continue throughout the metro. The shows were set for the last weekend of January, three weeks after Good’s death.

The venue cancelled all six shows on January 29th. Owner Bill Collins cited “heightened threats, increasing media attention and civil disorder.” He told the Star Tribune:

Honestly, I don’t see any way we can safely present this show in the current climate. I’m not sure any amount of security or preplanning would mitigate the liability I’d face if something happened.

Bankas’s response to the cancellation? He posted a video saying he was the victim, upset he couldn’t perform for the “normal” and “good” people of Minnesota.

There it is again. The people who don’t want to hear a comedian celebrate execution of an innocent woman are abnormal. The audience that pays to cruelly mock and shame a widow’s grief are somehow the good guys.

The economic coercion is also instructive. Collins says Bankas’s management company, CAA is demanding full payment despite force majeure—arguing that credible threats of civil unrest don’t excuse performance. The message to venues: your liability, your problem, pay us anyway.

Bankas refused to cancel. He didn’t say he would be considerate of others. He announced he was ready to hire armed security, as if to physically threaten the people he already was trying to harm with speech. Armed security to deliver hate speech looks less like self-defense and more like force projection. It says: I say harmful things to provoke and escalate and I’m coming anyway, because my attacks will be protected while your defense won’t be.

The thing that stopped him, as ever in America, was a small business owner calculating liability.

This makes it far more than a comedian pushing boundaries. This is an incitement roadshow, stopped by a venue owner’s wise math and a conscience.

Historical Precedents: Streicher and RTLM, Phelps and Bruce

This, of course, isn’t new. We’ve seen this pattern before, and seen it prosecuted.

Julius Streicher never personally killed anyone. He wasn’t in Hitler’s inner circle. He didn’t hold a government position when he published Der Stürmer. What he did was create a weekly newspaper that celebrated violence against Jews, dehumanized them with slurs and caricatures, and built audiences who laughed at Jewish suffering.

At Nuremberg, prosecutors argued that Streicher’s role in inciting Germans to murder made him an accessory as culpable as those who carried out the killing. The tribunal found that he continued his propaganda when he was well aware that Jews were being killed.

He was executed for what Bankas does today. The judgment:

For his twenty-five years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as ‘Jew-Baiter Number One.’ In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution.

RTLM Radio in Rwanda provided the soundtrack to genocide. Broadcasters didn’t personally wield machetes, while they provided names and locations over the airwaves. People named on the radio were then killed.

In 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted RTLM’s directors of genocide and incitement to genocide. Judge Navanethem Pillay told Ferdinand Nahimana:

You were fully aware of the power of words, and you used the radio—the medium of communication with the widest public reach—to disseminate hatred and violence. Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians.

The ICTR explicitly connected its judgment to Streicher: these were the first convictions for incitement since Nuremberg.

The pattern is consistent: You don’t need to pull the trigger. You just need to build the permission structure to dramatically increase likelihood, and celebrate when it happens.

Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church

The structural parallel is closer than people want to admit.

Fred Phelps celebrated specific deaths. He brought signs reading “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags” directly to military funerals. He tagged the dead with identity slurs. He confronted grieving families with the message that their loved ones deserved death.

In Snyder v. Phelps (2011), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that this was protected speech. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Westboro’s signs addressed “matters of public concern” and were displayed “on public land next to a public street.”

Justice Alito, the lone dissenter, wrote what Bankas’s defenders don’t want to hear:

They could have picketed the United States Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon… But of course, a small group picketing at any of these locations would have probably gone unnoticed. The Westboro Baptist Church, however, has devised a strategy that remedies this problem.

Sound familiar? Bankas could say these things anywhere. He’s bringing them to St. Paul.

But here’s what matters: Canada is not the United States.

Canada looked at the American framework—where “God Hates Fags” at a child’s funeral is constitutionally protected—and said no. Section 319(2) exists precisely because Canada decided that some speech causes harm serious enough to limit. The American comparison doesn’t help Bankas. It explains why Canadian law exists.

And even Phelps has a structural distinction: he framed deaths as God’s punishment, not human achievement. “God killed your son” is theology. “She should have been shot 10 minutes before” is endorsement. Phelps claimed to channel divine judgment. Bankas is celebrating human action and implicitly calling for more.

Lenny Bruce

Someone will say it: “Are you really going to prosecute comedians? They did that to Lenny Bruce.”

Yes they did. And his 2003 posthumous pardon—the first in New York State history—is now treated as vindication for free speech.

But look at what Bruce was actually prosecuted for.

The New York court found his act “obscene, indecent, immoral and impure” because it “appealed to prurient interest” and was “patently offensive.” He used “more than 100 obscene words” and made “sexual references to Eleanor Roosevelt and St. Paul.”

Dirty words. Sexual content. That’s what got Lenny Bruce convicted.

He never celebrated a killing. He never tagged a murder victim with identity slurs. He never said anyone “should have been shot.” He never brought material mocking a fresh corpse to that person’s grieving community.

The Lenny Bruce comparison actually clarifies the distinction:

Lenny Bruce (1964)	Ben Bankas (2026)
Prosecuted for dirty words	Celebrating state execution
Sexual content	Identity-based slurs on fresh corpse
“Obscene, indecent, immoral”	“Should have been shot”
Shocked audiences with profanity	Rewards audiences for violence
Posthumously pardoned	Claims to be the victim

Bruce’s pardon stands for the principle that the state shouldn’t prosecute comedians for saying dirty words about sex.

It does not stand for the principle that comedians can build reward structures for violence against identifiable groups and bring those rewards directly to the communities where violence just occurred.

“Lenny Bruce” is not a magic spell that protects all comedy from all consequences. It’s a specific case about obscenity law and sexual content. Bankas isn’t being crude about sex. He’s celebrating death.

If Lenny Bruce had taken the stage in 1964 to celebrate the Birmingham church bombing and call the four dead girls slurs, we wouldn’t be invoking his name as a free speech hero today.

Canada Already Prosecutes Celebration of Atrocities

A Holocaust comparison is relevant.

In 2017, James Sears and LeRoy St. Germaine were charged under Section 319(2) for publishing material promoting Holocaust denial and hatred against women and Jews. Canada recognizes that celebrating historical atrocities against identifiable groups constitutes hate speech.

So: celebrating the Holocaust? Prosecutable.

Celebrating the fresh execution of a “dumb, retarded lesbian” by federal agents, while dehumanizing her widow as a “dog”? Comedy?

The incoherence is obvious.

The law recognizes that celebration of mass historical violence promotes hatred. It hasn’t recognized that celebration of individual violence against a member of a group—tagged with identity markers, performed for paying audiences—does the same work.

But it does the same work.

Section 319(2): The Elements

The Criminal Code prohibition on willful promotion of hatred requires:

1. Communicating statements (public performance: yes)
2. Other than in private conversation (comedy club, filmed, posted online: yes)
3. That willfully promote hatred (here’s the question)
4. Against an identifiable group (lesbians, disabled people via slur: yes)

The question is whether celebrating a specific killing, while using identity-based slurs, constitutes “willfully promoting hatred” against the group.

The traditional answer has been no—it’s commentary on a specific incident, not a call to action against the group.

But that analysis misses the function. When you:

• Celebrate a killing
• Tag the victim with identity slurs (“lesbian,” “retarded”)
• Generalize approval (“should have been shot”)
• Perform this for paying audiences who laugh

…you’re not commenting on Renee Good. You’re building social permission for violence against people like Renee Good. The slurs do the work of connecting individual to group. The laughter does the work of normalizing.

The Pattern: Harm, Dismissal, Escalation

This isn’t Bankas’s first time. He’s been told repeatedly how and why his material causes harm. His response has been consistent: dismiss harm, reverse claims of victimhood, escalate.

The cancellations:

• Kelowna
• Calgary (Grey Eagle Casino—two complaints about residential school jokes)
• Thunder Bay (cancelled within hours of announcement)
• North Bay
• Sault Ste. Marie (Chief Karen Bell: “To know that someone was attempting to make jokes about residential schools was very hurtful. We are the first people of this country who Canada made a great effort to eradicate.”)
• London, Ontario (Aeolian Hall)
• Dartmouth, Nova Scotia (Alderney Landing)

His response pattern:

When Aeolian Hall cancelled after a complaint, Bankas called himself the only one under “blatant attack.” When the Grey Eagle Casino cancelled after complaints about residential school material, he said they “should have done the show even though they were offended.” After Sault Ste. Marie cancelled, he declared himself: “on the front lines of freedom of speech.”

When people say his material harms, he frames their objection as the only real harm. When Indigenous leaders explain that joking about residential schools—where children were beaten, starved, sexually abused, and buried in unmarked graves—causes real harm to survivors and their descendants, he responds he knows other people who “love it” and shows are “selling out” as if the Holocaust would have been ok if Hitler had sold observation tickets (Historian protip: Berlin officials often traveled to Auschwitz to watch genocide through special observation ports in the gas chambers).

His publicist’s framing is revealing. Deborah Knight claimed the venue “felt that even though the show is meant for a mature, adult audience, Ben’s comedy was too politically incorrect” and she suggested critics were the “malicious actors who are possibly attempting to keep the creation of art/comedy (meant for consenting adults) away from the public in order to further their dreams of censorship.”

Translation: Your harm doesn’t count because people will buy tickets and probably want to harm you already or will after the show. Stopping their harm to you is the harm.

A Blaze Media profile was more honest about his brand:

…right-wing, and his comedy is bigoted. One of his taglines is ‘I’m racist.’

After unmistakable widespread objections to his material about Indigenous people, trans people, and other groups causing harm, Bankas didn’t moderate. He escalated. He has been celebrating execution of an innocent American woman days after her death, slinging identity slurs, and campaigning to run that material in her backyard.

He didn’t accidentally cross a line. This is someone who’s been shown the line repeatedly and has made the act of unaccountably crossing it for profit his entire brand.

The Question for Canadian Law

Canada has hate speech laws beyond what the United States has. Those laws exist because Canada hasn’t been captured the way America has, admitting some speech causes harm serious enough to limit. The marketplace of ideas doesn’t self-correct in cases where the product is the prevention of prevention.

The question is whether laws apply only to explicit calls for violence, or whether they can reach the entertainment infrastructure that rewards hate-based incitement for more violence after the fact.

Ben Bankas is testing that question. He’s betting the answer is no, that “comedy” provides sufficient cover to communicate “I approve executing that dog, she was lesbian” instead of just saying “go execute”.

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The current legal frameworks seem to fail to capture how incitement functions, given Ben Bankas as a test case for that failure. Julius Streicher also didn’t pull triggers. He made it funny when others did.

RIP The Atlantic.

They just hired an Epstein Files guy, which tells you The Atlantic isn’t in the journalism business anymore.

It’s in the billionaire reassurance business.

Apparently they pulled David Brooks in as the best in the industry at telling intellectual elites that mounting catastrophes aren’t their problem. No, he spins tall tales about the liberals being at fault for refusing to empathize with the needs of fascism. It’s a teenage girl’s fault if she refused to “massage” Epstein and his clients. It’s Ukraine’s fault they refused to give away their land to Putin.

An exposé of this awful man by The Nation is the best thing I’ve read in weeks.

The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for The Atlantic: The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.

Apparently Brooks’ brand rose from Weekly Standard (neocon war propaganda) to New York Times (elite consensus maintenance) to The Atlantic (people who think they’re too smart for the Times). All of it has produced little more than intellectual cover for the consolidation of power, while pretending to be a critic.

Brooks’s entire game is the false alibi: look what the victim made the abuser do.

Liberals bring fascism upon themselves by being smug. Ukraine made their own invasion happen by not accommodating Putin. And when the Epstein files dropped? Brooks dismissed them as conspiracy bait for MAGA while being in those files himself. His defense when exposed was essentially: “Some of my best friends are billionaires I can’t keep track of which ones are known sex traffickers.”

That’s the architecture. Total elite impunity, fraudulently painted as reasonable centrism. How dare the children being sex trafficked accuse Epstein of exactly what Epstein was doing?! Brooks being a journalist while saying he can’t keep track of who around him does what crimes, is peak asshat hypocrite.

He punches down, way down.

He wants us to believe he can track anything, because that lets him blame downward. Yet anything that comes up to implicate billionaires? Suddenly this journalist can’t be expected to know the most obvious things. The thing about Epstein is that he operated with impunity as if above the law, not that he wasn’t known for sex trafficking children.

You can read Brooks and come away thinking the problem is teenage girls having confidence, not that institutions you trust are systematically captured by predators who face no accountability.

The news about Bill Gates gets weirder by the day. He cheated on his wife through Epstein, caught a disease and then tried to cover it up with secret antibiotics?

Microsoft founder asked for antibiotics to ‘surreptitiously give to Melinda’, according to newly released email

To be fair, the convicted blackmailer wrote himself a memo making these claims, perhaps designed to create leverage over Gates.

Except there’s a wrinkle. Melinda Gates hired divorce lawyers in 2019 after learning about her husband having repeated meetings with this pedophile.

Text messages from 2017 released by Congress last year suggested Bill wanted to maintain contact with Epstein over and despite Melinda’s objections. An adviser wrote to Epstein that Gates “wants to talk to you but his wife won’t let him” and “he loves you.”

Yeah, that’s not exactly straightforward blackmail. Epstein typically worked from true compromising material, because total fabrications are easily disproven. Epstein’s utility was precisely his ability to facilitate the criminal things powerful men wanted to hide.

Here’s the real news that should be reported: Gates Foundation controls billions in global health funding yet may be ethically compromised.

The foundation’s spokesperson calls the claims “absurd” without addressing why Gates maintained affectionate ties to a convicted child sex trafficker for years, against his wife’s explicit objections. That’s the documented fact they didn’t explain. And it comes with such specific detail, unlikely to be false. Gates allegedly caught an STD from Russian girls and sought to prophylactically dose his wife without her knowledge or consent. Look again at what the Gates Foundation controls and where.

Coverage is treating this as celebrity scandal rather than asking whether the world’s largest private health foundation should face heavy scrutiny. A man allegedly willing to medicate his wife without her knowledge, while chasing a relationship with the most infamous man convicted of trafficking minors, runs a foundation that operates medical interventions on populations with limited ability to refuse or verify what they’re receiving.