Alex Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse at a Veterans’ Affairs hospital in Minneapolis. One of his colleagues there told the New York Times that the “default look on his face was a smile.”
Now he’s dead at the age of thirty-seven — the same age as Renee Good, who was murdered a little over two weeks earlier in the same city. Both were American citizens. Both were shot to death by federal agents in the streets of Minneapolis while they were unarmed.
Subsequent statements by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE and the Border Patrol, have emphasized that Pretti had a gun on him at the beginning of the altercation. But Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara has said that Pretti, who had no criminal record, had a valid permit to carry the gun. And the video evidence is decisive. He never tried to pull it, and it had already been confiscated before they killed him.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” But this is extraordinarily disingenuous, and not just because openly brandishing guns is very common in protests held by the American right. And even if it had still been on his person when he was shot, it would have been entirely irrelevant. We haven’t repealed the Second Amendment and passed a law mandating that anyone caught with a handgun can be executed on the spot, even if they never draw it.
He was holding neither a gun nor a protest sign but a phone. He was there as a legal observer, using his phone to record what the agents were doing and deter them from committing abuses — a form of civic engagement that’s entirely legal under the First Amendment. The agents only found the gun after he’d been knocked to the ground and brutalized for the crime of trying to help a woman who’d been knocked over and pepper-sprayed near him moments before.
It’s worth emphasizing that we know all this because the murder occurred on a crowded street in broad daylight, filmed by multiple people. The DHS’s statement, never quite claiming he had drawn the gun but vaguely gesturing at a “violent” struggle and the officer who shot him supposedly fearing for “his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers,” is unlikely to be believed by anyone who watched any of those videos.
Indeed, one of the most striking parts of all this is that these particular lies don’t exactly seem to be intended to be believed. Instead, it feels like the point is just to give the hardcore supporters of the current administration something to hang their hat on when a “libtard” tries to give them a hard time about this. Better to say something anyone with access to the internet can see for themselves isn’t true than to be left with nothing to say at all. But this feels like a few steps from simply bragging about killing Pretti for being an annoying, disobedient thorn in the agents’ side.
After Renee Good was murdered, opinion polls showed that only about a third (and in some polls far less than a third) of the public believed the administration’s story. That didn’t stop Vice President J. D. Vance from relentlessly smearing Good, a mother who was shot while trying to drive herself and her wife and the family dog away from the scene, as a “domestic terrorist.” It didn’t stop several ICE agents in the ensuing weeks, some of whom seem to have known they were being filmed, from chiding protesters and observers for not learning their “lesson” after what happened to Good, clearly insinuating that it might be time for a repeat performance.
In any normal administration, the public relations catastrophe following Good’s murder would have led to some attempt to draw back and do damage control. The Trump administration had the opposite reaction, seemingly wanting to push the spiral of escalation further and further down the road to chaos.
Thus far, the restraint and unity shown by the overwhelming majority of the protesters in Minneapolis is remarkable. There have been mass demonstrations, an impromptu strike called by local organized labor, and an abundance of people filming ICE and the Border Patrol and letting them know that they aren’t welcome and that no one plans to make it easy for them to drag away their friends and neighbors. But there seems to be a widespread understanding that giving them an excuse for further mayhem would be a very bad idea.
Even so, the more lawless and violent the behavior of masked and therefore totally unaccountable ICE agents become, and the more the Trump administration pours gasoline on the fire by smearing anyone and everyone they victimize as a “terrorist,” the more likely it is that some misguided individuals will meet violence with violence. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Trump is already talking about the Insurrection Act. If we’ve learned anything from recent weeks, when the Trump administration has done everything from brazenly kidnapping a foreign head of state (and openly saying that they did it in part in order to gain control of his country’s oil) to threatening to seize territory from a NATO ally by force to calling a murdered mother a “domestic terrorist,” it should be the simple and frightening truth that no one knows what limits they are or aren’t willing to go to.
We know that the Trump administration is driving the country to the edge of a cliff. We know that they’ve pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor of the car. We don’t know what’s waiting for us at the bottom of the cliff. But there’s every chance we’re going to find out.
Great Job Ben Burgis & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
