Mina Kimes Puts Her intolerance on Display with Minnesota Shooting Comments

If you do not agree with Mina Kimes about the Minneapolis ICE shooting, she does not consider you a real person.

"The ghouls on this app are reacting to this the way you'd expect, but they are not real people," Kimes wrote on X this week, responding to coverage of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent. "Real people, your neighbors, friends, anyone with a conscience, see this and feel angry and sad. Real people know it’s wrong."

Based on a series of follow-up posts, Kimes clearly believes the ICE agent was in the wrong. If only it were that simple.

Kimes's dogmatic presentation of the story suggests that there is no gray area. She has actively shared posts designed to generate sympathy for Good, including one noting that she leaves behind a young son who lost his father in 2023. Kimes has also circulated several videos of the incident filmed from questionable or incomplete angles.

Anyone who knows the story only through Kimes’ posts is understandably outraged at ICE and demanding justice for Good and her family.

However, there is another side to the story, one Kimes has either ignored or dismissed outright. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the ICE agent fired after Good allegedly attempted to ram federal officers with her vehicle. DHS maintains the shooting was an act of self-defense.

There is also video evidence from the scene, footage Kimes has not acknowledged, that appears to complicate her narrative rather than confirm it.

Take a look:

OutKick reached out to Kimes on Friday to ask her if she is aware of the new footage and whether that changed her opinion that anyone who disagrees with her is without a conscience. We did not hear back by the time of publication. We will update this story if we do. 

Regardless of where one ultimately lands on whether the shooting was justified, the available evidence points to a complex and disputed encounter. This is not a case of "real people" on one side and bots or ghouls on the other, as Kimes insists.

That is the fundamental flaw in her logic. Kimes views the world through a lens in which her side is morally correct and everyone else is not worthy of consideration.

Kimes lives in a bubble, and that has been apparent for years. Long before this week, she had developed a habit of dismissing dissenters as racist or sexist, rather than engaging with their arguments. She appears unable to accept that reasonable people can disagree with her conclusions without harboring some form of underlying bigotry.

Last year, Kimes falsely accused OutKick of "spreading horrible lies" about her and inciting racial harassment of her family. Despite repeated requests, she has never identified what those supposed lies were. Our offer remains open.

Notably, our original criticism was not directed at Kimes personally, but rather at her employer, ESPN. We questioned why a company with a stated "no politics" policy repeatedly allows Kimes to promote partisan, and often factually questionable, political commentary.

This past summer, Kimes encouraged followers on Bluesky to ignore photos of anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles. Despite documented fires, looting, and violent clashes with police, she claimed the images were – wait for it -- not real. She has previously endorsed Karen Bass for mayor of Los Angeles and Tim Walz for vice president, praising Walz’s masculinity in cultural terms.

"There’s something, to me, really important about seeing someone like this modeling a different kind of masculinity," Kimes said of Walz.

"We’re kind of seeing it in the NFL with the Kelces and Dan Campbell, this idea that ‘big, tough football guy’ isn’t separate from showing emotion and empathy. This man, the year he was a football coach, led the gay-straight alliance at the high school. That’s really powerful in a way that goes far beyond politics."

Is that so?

Now, in the middle of NFL playoff weekend, Kimes is once again weighing in politically, dismissing millions of Americans as fake because they believe an ICE agent may have acted in self-defense.

This kind of moral absolutism is precisely why sports analysts have lost credibility with large portions of the audience. The posture is intolerant, entitled, dismissive, and uninformed.

In reality, there is a much larger world outside her bubble – one in which someone who never played football isn't paid millions to analyze football while repeatedly violating company policies, largely because executives are too fearful of backlash to enforce their own rules.

In reality, there is a much larger world outside her bubble — one in which someone who never played football isn’t paid millions to analyze it while repeatedly violating company policies that others are expected to follow.

No wonder she insists the rest of the world isn’t real. She couldn’t survive in a world in which hard truths and discourse exist.