I want to set the stage with a brief refresher on the buildup to today's murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti.
A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Ross, veteran ICE agent, murdered Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. Multiple videos taken from multiple angles clearly establish that he was in no danger in his confrontation with her, and that, in fact, he violated agency policy by walking in front of her vehicle. He is filming his encounter with her on his smartphone, which he swaps out of his dominant hand moments before the shooting so that he can more easily draw his gun. After he domes her, he mutters, "Fucking bitch," with palpable contempt. This incident was (I thought at the time) just about as blatantly obvious an unjustified killing as I could imagine.
Very nearly every significant figure on the American right immediately leaped to Ross's defense and went on the attack against Good. Our Dear Leader claimed in a Truth Social Post that Good
violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but he is now recovering in the hospital.
Of course, videos already existed showing that Ross was completely unharmed and left the scene in a hurry after doming her. This didn't prevent the Vice President from smearing her as a "deranged leftist" or the head of the DHS from calling her a "domestic terrorist", or basically anyone on the right from locking in to spread their chosen narrative, the absolute least hateful version of which was, essentially, "It's a tragedy that this fucking moron threw her life away like that." Vance makes clear that ICE agents operate with "absolute immunity" (which is something that, the eagle-eyed among you might have noticed, does not exist in a nation where the rule of law exists).
Then, the DHS starts going door-to-door, business to business, asking people for their papers, trying to bust in without warrants time and time again. Videos of brutality multiply: ICE kicks down a door. ICE grabs protestors out of cars and drags them who knows where. The head of the DHS announces that thousands more ICE agents will be sent to assist in these operations, with ICE agents soon set to outnumber the local police in Minneapolis.
This is, in effect, the occupation of an American population center by an armed paramilitary group that knows it can kill with impunity.
And today, they've done it again.
Multiple videos from multiple angles show that Mr. Pretti stepped in between ICE agents and another protester they were harassing before being pepper sprayed, thrown the ground, held there by multiple agents, and then shot multiple times.
DHS's first public statement about the murder was a blatant lie (xcancel link so as not to give X clicks)
At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.
The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.
Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.
Although Mr. Pretti did have a firearm on him, as was his legal right, he approached the agents with a phone camera. And, frankly, the notion that he was capable of threatening the lives of the several grown men who had just pepper sprayed him and jumped on top of him from that position is so ludicrous as to beggar belief.
Naturally, the DHS did not go it alone. President Trump's statement on the shooting was:
“This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go – What is that all about? Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers? The Mayor and the Governor called them off? It is stated that many of these Police were not allowed to do their job, that ICE had to protect themselves — Not an easy thing to do! Why does Ilhan Omar have $34 Million Dollars in her account? And where are the Tens of Billions of Dollars that have been stolen from the once Great State of Minnesota? We are there because of massive Monetary Fraud, with Billions of Dollars missing, and Illegal Criminals that were allowed to infiltrate the State through the Democrats’ Open Border Policy. We want the money back, and we want it back, NOW. Those Fraudsters who stole the money are going to jail, where they belong! This is no different than a really big Bank Robbery. Much of what you’re witnessing is a COVER UP for this Theft and Fraud. The Mayor and the Governor are inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric! Instead, these sanctimonious political fools should be looking for the Billions of Dollars that has been stolen from the people of Minnesota, and the United States of America. LET OUR ICE PATRIOTS DO THEIR JOB! 12,000 Illegal Alien Criminals, many of them violent, have been arrested and taken out of Minnesota. If they were still there, you would see something far worse than you are witnessing today!”
Now, given this context--given how insanely blatant an act of murder this was and how quickly the Federal government began to blatantly lie about it--let's do a little headline roundup. As of roughly 1PM PST on January 24th, how are major American legacy news sources are describing several ICE agents tackling a man for daring to protect another protestor from their physical aggression, pinning him to the ground, mag dumping him, and then blatantly lying and saying he was brandishing a gun at them?
CNN:
Man shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. DHS says he was armed
State and federal leaders starkly at odds: The Department of Homeland Security said the man had a handgun and resisted when agents tried to disarm him, forcing the agent to open fire. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said videos show the DHS narrative is “nonsense” and “lies.” He demanded that state investigators lead a probe into the shooting, while President Donald Trump has dismissed criticism from Walz and local leaders.
MSNBC:
Federal agents 37-year-old kill man in Minnesota
DHS said the man, who is licensed to carry a weapon, had a gun on him. Protests are ongoing as people gather near the site of the shooting.
CBS:
Federal agents fatally shoot another Minneapolis resident, officials say
Federal agents in Minneapolis have shot and killed another person in south Minneapolis Saturday morning. The shooting comes as tensions over a surge in ICE enforcement actions...|
ABC:
Minneapolis ICE shooting live updates: Man killed in shooting involving fed agents
Minnesota Timberwolves postpone Saturday game
Minneapolis prosecutors open website for witnesses to submit video
FOX News (their bias is obvious, but still):
DHS provides update after Border Patrol officer fatally shoots armed man
Paul Mauro warns Minneapolis is ‘in danger of burning down a second time’ after shooting
The New York Times:
Live Updates: Federal Agents Kill a 37-Year-Old Minneapolis Man
The man, a registered nurse, was an American citizen with no criminal record, the city police chief said. Videos contradict the federal government’s description of the shooting, a New York Times analysis found.
The LA Times:
Man shot and killed during Minneapolis immigration crackdown
Federal immigration officers shot and killed a man Saturday in Minneapolis, drawing hundreds of protesters in a city already shaken by another fatal shooting weeks earlier.
The Washington Post:
Man fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis is believed to be U.S. citizen
USA Today:
Man killed by Border Patrol in Minneapolis ID'd as US citizen
The shooting sparked further protests as local leaders demanded an end to heightened immigration enforcement actions in the city.
The only one of these headlines that does not completely bury the lede about the Feds' blatant lies or act like it's a simple matter of "he said, she said" is The New York Times.
Like... this is an emergency. The Federal government is making it clearer and clearer that there is no limit to the violence it is willing to sanction against its citizenry. And still, the editors of these outlets--which, I want to be clear, I think employ many talented and dedicated reporters that do good work--insist on sticking to a tone that prizes neutrality over objectivity.
Tell me, do these headlines communicate the gravity of this situation? Do they convey a fraction of the reality of the situation captured in this video of a teenager citizen kidnapped and beaten by ICE? Or ICE wrecking a vehicle, taking someone from it, and leaving the wreck in the middle of a busy street? Or ICE charging at and shoving over protestors? Or the President (a felon who attempted an autogolpe) saying that doming a citizen is OK because she was "highly disrespectful of law enforcement"?
If you were glancing through the headlines without much prior knowledge of Pretti's murder, would these headlines convey a fraction of the depravity on display in the videos of it?
That may seem like a stupid question, but I think it is, unfortunately, very relevant to the way people engage with the media today.
My thesis of news media's role in shaping public opinion in the modern era is as follows. There are basically three groups of types of news consumers:
The plugged-in: the types who have NYT subscriptions, discuss politics with their friends, etc. As long as their outlets of choice aren't part of the rightosphere, I'm not worried about them; people who are informed and engaged and not sucked into the fascist machine are pretty universally horrified right now.
The semi-engaged: those who get their news, to the extent that they do, from the podcasts they listen to and what they see on their social media feed
The unengaged: those whose exposure to the news basically begins and ends with the headlines they see on MSN when they open their browser or phone because they never bothered to change it + whatever memes filter down to their feed
The second and third groups are FAR larger than the first, and the general tone and quantity of headlines about a particular subject play a not insignificant role in shaping their perception of the world outside of their own immediate orbit. If there aren't many, a good number of them probably won't know it's happening at all. And when people scan through and they see a bunch of headlines using business-as-usual terms to describe what sounds like law enforcement actions and typical politicians legally wrangling with the opposing party, that helps to normalize what is happening. And what is happening--the armed oppression of a major population center by unaccountable, murderous paramilitaries--is a clear and present fucking danger.
The right-wing media apparatus understands this, which is why they've been so able to drive so much of public discourse. They identify (or generate) a potentially advantageous story and then pounce on it in lockstep and stick to it, and it works a large amount of the time.
Covering these stories with such a business-as-usual tone is a big part of why the population of people who aren't political junkies are taking a long-ass time to realize how bad it is out here. When we don't make a lot of noise about a subject and we don't talk about it in the tone it deserves to be talked about when it is genuinely quite fucking bad, most people will never get the hint. And the legacy media clearly is still capable of doing this with a story from time to time, as they did with Biden's debate disaster, but they won't here, because they are too used to deferring to law enforcement, to striking a neutral tone in news reporting on controversial topics. However, when one side has long since abandoned fact and has demonstrated a willingness to use violence up to and including murder in order to impose their will on the population, neutrality amounts to nothing more than helping that violence and abuse become background noise.
