Emergency Triad: Another American Has Been Murdered by Our Government
It’s worse than it looks and it looks plenty bad.
Programming note: Bill Kristol, Sam Stein, and Adrian Carrasquillo plan to go live at 9:00 a.m. EST tomorrow for Bulwark on Sunday. (This is a few hours earlier than originally planned.) We’ll send an email with a link as they get started and post the replay on the site.
1. Witness
I’m not quite sure what to say tonight, but it seemed important to get some words down—because the only thing we can really do in this moment is bear witness.
So here are the things we know:
On Saturday morning, Alex Jeffrey Pretti was observing DHS agents on a public street. He was using his phone to record their actions.
At some point a DHS agent approached Pretti and began pushing him backward.
More DHS agents mobbed Pretti and began beating him. In multiple videos you can see Pretti, on the ground, with a scrum of agents assaulting him.
One agent appears to pistol whip Pretti about the head.
Then an agent shoots Pretti from point-blank range.
Other agents begin shooting Pretti.
Quickly, Pretti is motionless on the ground while at least one agent continues firing his weapon at him from a short distance away.
Pretti was quickly pronounced dead.
If this were all that had happened it would have been bad enough. But it got worse.
At least some of the DHS agents involved in the killing attempted to leave the scene.
When local law enforcement arrived to begin an investigation, the DHS agents attempted to send them away and deny them access to the crime scene.
Someone—presumably within DHS—leaked to Fox that Pretti had a gun.
DHS put out a statement (repeated by Border Patrol official Greg Bovino in his press conference) claiming that “an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. . . . The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. . . . Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. . . . The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
These statements seem to be lies.
According to local law enforcement, Pretti had a concealed-carry permit and so was legally allowed to possess a firearm in public.
There is no evidence to suggest that Pretti brandished—or even touched—his weapon.
Instead, the available video evidence shows him holding his phone in front of him, in his right hand, and his left hand empty before being pepper-sprayed while attempting to help a fellow observer.
The deputy White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin.” In fact, Pretti was a registered nurse working in intensive care at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.
So the government didn’t just use masked, armed, unidentified agents of the state to execute a citizen on the street, in broad daylight and in front of dozens of witnesses—it lied about the victim and what happened in the most brazen manner possible.
The government killed him. Then it smeared him.
And there is one more layer to consider: Less than three weeks ago DHS agents murdered another Minneapolis resident, Renee Nicole Good, in cold blood. And the agency’s response to that killing was not to regroup, retrain, and investigate, but to surge hundreds more of its agents into the city and deploy even more force against the city’s residents.
Which is where our obligation to witness comes in. The murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti was not a mistake, or a tragedy, or a misunderstanding. It was a choice. The president of the United States and his regime saw what its masked agents had done to Renee Good and decided to do more of it, at a larger scale.
Killing Alex Jeffrey Pretti was the Trump administration’s policy.
2. Logic Trains
What does it mean, exactly, if the federal government chooses a policy of killing Americans it does not like and then—as JD Vance might say—“creating stories” about its victims?
Well, it means that the federal government is at war with the citizenry. Or at least the part of the citizenry it deems undesirable. These citizens—the ones the president dislikes—no longer enjoy the full rights and protections of the Constitution. They belong to a subclass which may be abused, subjugated, or murdered, at the president’s discretion, with no recourse.
It also means that the federal government is no longer bound by law. If agents of the state may kill people in public without being investigated; if they have—again, per Vice President Vance—“absolute immunity” from prosecution then we are living in an authoritarian regime subject to “rule by law” rather than the “rule of law.”
I get the sense that most Americans do not want to follow these ideas to their logical conclusions. They think that if their life in New York, or Tulsa, or Phoenix still looks normal then it can’t be real authoritarianism.
But if people in Minneapolis can be treated this way then Americans anywhere can be treated this way. Your world only looks free because the regime has not yet sent its agents to your door.
To avert your eyes from this reality is to insult the sacrifices Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti made for our country.
3. What Can We Do?
For starters, be grateful to the people of Minneapolis. Bearing witness today in America requires physical courage. Every single person who steps out their front door in Minneapolis to observe, document, and protest the actions of our government is taking their lives in their hands.
These men and women are the kind of patriots you would have seen at Lexington and Concord. I am in awe of their valor. They started this resistance to protect their neighbors, but what is happening in Minneapolis now is bigger than that. They are standing against the might of the Trump regime not just for themselves, but for all of us.
Second, don’t look away. Don’t forget what is happening. Don’t give in to despair or exhaustion.
Third, do not tolerate false equivalence from responsible quarters. Anyone in public life who cannot call things by their right names here should be shamed, swept aside, and ultimately ignored.
Fourth, understand that this moment requires new structures and new thinking. The resistance in Minneapolis is unlike anything we’ve seen in recent American history. The political opposition must think anew as well. And any part of the political opposition that continues to act as though these are still ordinary times should be swept aside, too.
Maybe America will need to explore protest via general strikes. Maybe the Democratic party will need to play the hardest of hardball. Maybe local law enforcement agencies will need to attempt to enforce the law against criminals who work for the federal government. Maybe citizens will need to form institutions to meticulously document the crimes of individual employees of the regime so that some day there might be legal accountability, from Greg Bovino, to the agent caught on tape punching an observer, to Corey Lewandowski’s secretary.
Fifth, as we identify ways to give material support to the Minneapolis resistance, be ready to offer whatever you can.
Finally, as Sarah often points out, it’s worth remembering that authoritarians want us tired. They want us confused. They want us too exhausted to fight back. You don’t have to go into the streets of Minnesota to fight back. You can simply state plainly that our government is lying to us. Say it somewhere. Online. To a friend or family member. But do not let their lies go unanswered by truth.
We need all hands on deck from every single elected official and previous president TONIGHT.
Joe Rogan should be doing an emergency podcast.
This is the break glass moment. Beyond past it.
People’s souls are throbbing in pain.
As a nurse, I just truly cannot process this fully. But nurses have a calling to care, and Alex did that until the moment he was executed. We will never forget what we saw. And we will make sure that every member of this administration is held responsible. Period. Our generation’s Nuremberg trials will one day come. And I’m ready.
Thank you JVL as a Minneapolis citizen for saying the truth.