The Murder of Alex Pretti

Warning: this post contains graphic content

The murder of Alex Pretti.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an unarmed protester who was shot in the back and murdered by federal agents, who continued to fire at him even after he was lying on the ground, lifeless.

One of the agents who surrounded Pretti literally applauded as his colleague murdered Pretti.

The videos are not ambiguous. They clearly show an agent removing Pretti’s firearm, which he was lawfully carrying, before one or more agents shoot Pretti some 10 times.

And yet hours after this was all clear, much of the media insisted on adding the splatter of shit coming from Noem and Miller and Trump and Bovino.

Again, Pretti was disarmed and then shot in the back, and then they kept shooting.

I’m looking at a CNN chyron right now: “Man shot and killed by fed. agents in Minneapolis; DHS says man was armed.” Why include that DHS line, unless your goal is to confuse your audience? The key fact is that he was unarmed when he was killed.

We are losing our most basic constitutional rights, and much of the media is ill-equipped to clearly convey how dire the situation is.

The First Amendment is under attack.

Anyone engaged in basic First Amendment activity in Minneapolis is branded a “rioter” or a “terrorist,” and any level of force used against them, from tear gas to shooting them in the face, is immediately justified at the highest levels of the federal government, and perhaps more importantly, by 90% of Republican officials and the right’s media apparatus.

It’s not just Minnesota. Last week, a Washington Post reporter’s home was raided, and her devices were seized. Last year, five students were rounded up and deported explicitly for engaging in protected speech. They were taken by masked ICE agents that a federal judge, appalled by the administration’s tactics, compared to “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan.”

The Second Amendment is under attack.

Pretti’s Second Amendment right to lawfully carry a firearm is being used as a justification to murder him. Just owning and carrying his weapon is evidence, the government says, that he was a terrorist and wanted to mow down federal agents. This is cartoon-level Orwellianism. The worst dictatorships in the world try harder than this when they smear their targets.

And yet these absurd government lies describing Pretti, an ICU nurse, as a terrorist instantly became a talking point across right-wing media. I watched hours of Fox News today. It was just a parade of commentary echoing the administration’s falsehoods and condemning Minnesota Democrats. I didn’t hear a single voice defend Pretti’s Second Amendment rights from the government’s lies.

The Fourth Amendment is under attack.

Earlier this week, we learned that ICE has quietly unleashed its agents to forcibly enter homes without a judge’s warrant to seize anyone targeted for deportation. What can happen when you don’t need a judge to sign off on a warrant? Well, you might snatch an innocent American wearing nothing but his underwear and drag him out of his home and into the freezing cold, only to find out that he wasn’t the person you were looking for and that the person you were looking for was in prison.

If you don’t think this could affect you, consider how many times you’ve had someone in your home who might be undocumented. If they are the subject of a so-called final order of removal, ICE says its agents can storm into your residence and seize them—and they don’t need to ask a judge first.

They will step in front of your car and kill you, and then claim you were trying to run them over.

They will surround you, spray chemicals in your eyes, beat you, disarm you, murder you, and then claim you were a domestic terrorist on a killing spree.

They will snatch you nearly naked from your home and smear you as an associate of pedophiles.

And those are just the high-profile cases this month. Six others have also died in ICE detention in 2026, including one death that was ruled a homicide. The old joke was that Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. If only that were all we had to worry about! Instead, he’s built a personal militia that’s averaging a murder per week in 2026, and on Fox, his supporters see all of this and demand that it’s time for the Insurrection Act.

If protesting against gross government overreach invites the risk of state-sanctioned violence, and if the right to carry a gun while obeying all local firearms laws invites the risk of being shot in the back, and if the sanctuary of one’s home can be violated at the whim of executive branch bureaucrats with no judicial review, we are not living in a free society. And we should all be terrified.