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After being shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis earlier this month, Renee Good instantly became a symbol of anti-ICE sentiments among protestors. Raw bystander footage of her death quickly spread online. A day after her murder, an angle from Ross’s phone camera also spread, sparking even more images, memes, protest signage and art based on her last moments.
However, Good's likeness has also entered a humiliation and harassment campaign involving AI image edits and crude Photoshops of her face, in a process dubbed "Reneeification" by some online. We’ve seen this before: The trend comes soon after the rise of "Kirkification,” where people faceswapped the late right-wing political influencer Charlie Kirk's face onto innumerable images after his assassination in September 2025. Images of George Floyd, who was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020, also underwent a similar bastardization after his death. We could see it soon following the death of Alex Pretti, who ICE agents murdered in Minneapolis this weekend; Pretti is already the target of smear campaigns.
The making of a martyr in the 2020s, regardless of political affiliation, is increasingly tied to this humiliation process, which aims to tarnish the victim's legacy by lowering their likeness to a memetic punchline. It's a process that has only been accelerated by generative AI, and other factors such as "meme coin" cryptocurrencies, which monetize the shock and outrage bait.
In a post-Kirkified world, this impulse to bastardize Good's image after her death emerged immediately on mainstream social media, boosted by influential right-wing influencers, and mutated alongside the rapid spread of misinformation about her. It's an unfortunate tangling that’s likely to be repeated, as political and state-mandated violence becomes more normalized. Even before widespread generative AI and Kirk's death, the "Trayvoning" trend, which mocked the death of Trayvon Martin, a teenager who was shot and killed in 2012 by George Zimmerman, generated outrage and clicks. It involved people posting photos of themselves in Martin's death pose, wearing a black hoodie, with his dropped convenience store snacks splayed on the ground.
Joseph Cox
AI makes all of this easier and faster, omitting the slow, arduous process of Photoshop artistry. And in the scramble to make the fastest, most viral meme, people latch onto and spread misinformation in their rush to denigrate the dead for engagement. We can see this in how an image misidentified as Good became the main source material for numerous "Reneeified" memes. In one popular example, shared by right-wing author and journalist Matt Forney, an incorrect image of a woman who isn’t Good is seen as a fountain. It's based on an AI "Kirkified" meme from September 2025, in which Kirk's fatal neck wound is seen as the structure's water source.
In the "Reneeified" remake, the water drips from nowhere. Perhaps the flow represents tears streaming down her face, but that's a generous assumption. The AI-image glaze and lack of an anatomically accurate wound strip it of a vital punchline. "Congratulations to Renee Nicole Good on four hours of sobriety!" is what Forney captioned the image. This is reminiscent of misinformation about George Floyd being high on fentanyl when he died. The memes about Floyd were meant to dehumanize him in the most callous ways possible, mixing extreme racism with vile antisemitism that attempted to mock a tragic event.
Forney's tweet is a Frankenstein's monster of a meme, mashing cruel jokes about Good, Kirk, and Floyd, stitched together with bad info and half-baked AI slop that both discredits and dilutes its goal.
Ruby Justice Thelot, an adjunct professor of Integrated Design and Media at New York University, was not surprised by the proliferation of a misidentified Good in early memes or the mixing of such symbolic deaths in Forney’s post. In fact, the situation serves what Thelot has called “necromemetics” in his 2024 essay published by Do Not Research. The term riffs on political theorist Achille Mbembe’s sociopolitical theory of necropolitics.
“We’re lured to do this, we’re lured to remix, we’re lured to memeify."
“What I call necromemetics is the ability to confer symbolic death to an individual through the circulation of digital memes, images, or videos,” Thelot told me in a call. “When I think of the Reneeification, when I think about the symbolic death that’s been conferred onto her and her likeness, I think about how that image, those videos, function as modes, as tools of separation and not unification… It is essentially a tool of conflict.”
Regardless, ICE wants the videos of their arrests to “flood the airwaves,” according to internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. At the same time, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz recently urged civilians to “peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities” in a televised address. There is no shortage of new footage coming out of Minnesota from all sides.
The misidentification of another woman as being Good has also played a role in the packaging of "meme coin" cryptocurrencies minted on Solana via Pump.fun. People are using the image of the misidentified woman faceswapped onto George Floyd for several coins on the site already.
Joseph Cox
People making meme coins are also using the name "George Foid," along with the incorrect image. It's a play on "George Floyd," using the derogatory incel slang term "foid," which is a shortening of the term "femoid," a portmanteau of "female" and "android," that calls women robotically unintelligent.
The nickname is also a play on "George Droyd," an imagined android version of George Floyd, created by meme coin shillers back in April 2024. The same group of shillers then created "Kirkinator," Kirk's Iron Man alter-ego, to promote a new cryptocurrency. Both characters have appeared in several AI-video memes, imagining their escapades with Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein.
But the name "George Foid" wasn't coined by crypto bros. The term, as applied to Good, originates from X user @PubWanghaf, who shared a quote-tweet on the day that she was killed, joking about a sixth grader smiling when he realizes that school's out for two days because of the unrest in his hometown of Minneapolis. The X user likely borrowed the term from a viral November 2024 usage, unrelated to current events.
Thelot likened the motive behind such inflammatory posters to the word “cacoethes,” meaning an irresistible urge to do something inadvisable. “We’re lured to do this, we’re lured to remix, we’re lured to memeify. Much like the apple in the prelude to the Trojan War, the goal of the image is discord in this specific scenario.”
In a media environment ripe with cacoethes, Thelot says he doesn’t trust images at all. “I don’t really know what to do with my mom, my grandma, the people around me, how to even begin to educate for that world.”
And like images, it’s also hard to trust ragebait like Reneeification. Are its proponents truly hateful, or are they just click-obsessed, money-hungry, and willing to do anything? When AI-videos of ICE agents arresting blue-haired women surface online, who’s really posting them, and is their goal to proselytise or farm engagement?
Even those outraged by the meme play into the attention-seeking methods utilized in such hateful internet phenomena. Unfortunately, viral quote-posts "dunking" on such inflammatory "Reneefication" posts also propel the content to a wider audience. There’s also a twisted version of outrage bait cropping up in the wake of all of this; a comedian podcaster’s AI image of a nonexistent mural deifying Good alongside January 6 rioter and Qanon follower Ashli Babbitt got relatively little engagement compared to the posts dunking on it.
Now, with AI, anonymous trolls wanting to mock Good in "Reneeification" memes don't need to take a photo to expose themselves, like in Trayvoning, to do so. Plus, there's a crackpot chance they could liquidate their hate into crypto wallet gains.
Owen Carry is an internet culture writer, researcher, trendspotter and former Associate Editor at Know Your Meme.
