ICE murdered a nurse. Trump is destroying reality.

Another execution, another inflection point

Masked federal agents executed Alex Pretti in broad daylight on Saturday morning. Then their bosses at the Department of Homeland Security, and their bosses at the White House, just as brazenly smeared Pretti while his lifeless body was still warm, claiming that he was a threat to law enforcement when video of the incident clearly showed otherwise.

Donald Trump obliterated any last vestiges of shame in politics, and after winning a return to the White House after inciting an armed insurrection, his second administration has jettisoned the world’s most powerful government’s obligation to tell the truth.

Trump and his underlings have persistently lied about anything and everything, no matter how brazen their mistruths, dangerous their rhetoric, and tasteless their tactics. They are not bound by any traditional sense of decency, cannot be swayed by strong statements or appeals to morality. Declaring that “enough’s enough” further empowers them, because it Trumpworld only understands power, both physical and rhetorical.

Every time a reporter or media outlet prints one of its obvious lies, the White House’s chokehold on reality grows tighter, its sense of impunity grows deeper.

So the truth must be repeated, loudly and consistently. Alex Pretti did not want to “massacre law enforcement,” as Nazi cosplayer and human-swine hybrid Greg Bovino said. Alex was not threatening CBP agents, and he was not a domestic terrorist.

Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the VA who worked with seriously ill veterans. He was beloved by friends, family, and colleagues. He loved the outdoors. He had no criminal record, and on Saturday, in the moments before he was murdered, he was helping people cross the street and assisting an observer who’d been pepper sprayed by a border patrol officer. Before that, he was helping people cross the street.

Below, you can watch the entire grisly sequence in a video first published by Drop Site News.

And here’s an excerpt from the statement given by the woman who filmed the execution:

The agents pulled the man on the ground. I didn’t see him touch any of them-he wasn’t even turned toward them. It didn’t look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn’t see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground.

Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times.

I don’t know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him.

Pretti’s family describe a man who was always looking to help.

“He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset,” his father, Michael Pretti, told the AP. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street. He cared about those people, and he knew it was wrong, so he did participate in protests.”

Another fact about Alex Pretti: he owned a handgun and had a concealed carry permit, exercising one of the only personal rights that Republicans have championed in years. The gun was holstered when he was assaulted by CBP agents, who instigated the conflict. Alex Pretti was not shot because he was a threat to the agents, he was shot because the Illinois native opposed the federal occupation of his adopted home city.

None of these obvious truths matter to Republicans. The party that venerates Capitol insurrectionists and made a celebrity of Kyle Rittenhouse continue to insist that Pretti was a “lunatic,” as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, an alcoholic sex pest, wrote on Twitter today. Attorney General Pam Bondi was even more depraved, suggesting that the administration would ease its violent occupation of the Twin Cities if Minnesota handed over its unredacted voter roll to the Department of Justice. The message was clear: we will stop murdering your citizens if you allow us to strip them of their voices and votes.

This is their modus operandi: post through it in defiance of reality and decency, no matter how cruel or hypocritical. MAGA cannot be reasoned with, and any attempts to triangulate, meet them halfway, or negotiate away their most fascistic impulses are more than useless, they’re naive and dangerous.

Defunding and abolishing ICE is also — and this may be the most important point, given the weather vane tendencies of Democratic leadership — now the politically popular position. This was the direction of travel for a while, and the execution of Alex Pretti has further swung the public against this fascist death squad.

This is the litmus test for any politician who has any designs on moral leadership or a future in elected office: stand up to fascism now, or your hands will have Alex Pretti’s blood on them, too. Promise that there will be Nuremberg-style trials for all the ICE and CBP agents, all the administration yobs, all the high-level architects of this national terror. Shame is dead; all that’s left is power.

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