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 really about approval of past violence. That’s a reward structure for future violence. It’s an open advertisement: kill the right people, and you get comedy-formatted public celebration waiting.
The distinction matters. Approval looks backward. An incentive structure looks forward.
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 |
| Assassinated. 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:
- Communicating statements (public performance: yes)
- Other than in private conversation (comedy club, filmed, posted online: yes)
- That willfully promote hatred (here’s the question)
- 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:
This is entertainment, and it’s for adults only. It’s just about providing entertainment for people who want to have a good laugh, and the people complaining may not have even seen Ben’s show.
They don’t want to see his show. That’s the entire point.
Translation: your harm doesn’t count because I’m selling tickets to other people who also probably want to harm you already or will after the show.
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 say “I would have executed that dog too, she was lesbian” instead of just saying “go execute”.
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.
