Here’s How To Cover A Murder By ICE:
Federal officials sought to portray a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident killed by Border Patrol agents on Saturday as a domestic terrorist, saying he wanted to “massacre” law enforcement, even as videos emerged that appeared to directly contradict their account.
The man, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was an intensive-care nurse described by the Minneapolis police chief as a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. Federal officials said he was armed, but there is no sign in videos analyzed by The New York Times that he pulled his weapon, or that agents even knew he had one until he was already pinned on the sidewalk.
An agent had already removed Mr. Pretti’s gun when two other agents opened fire, shooting him in the back and as he lay on the ground. At least 10 shots were fired, killing him. Mr. Pretti had a legal permit to carry a firearm, said the police chief, Brian O’Hara.
If that’s not murder, what is?
Nobody’s Buying The Swill Coming From The Ministry If Propaganda:
In a statement sent to the Guardian around 12.30pm EST, assistant homeland security secretary Tricia McLaughlin sent a news release asserting that “the officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted” and that “an agent fired defensive shots.”
“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” McLaughlin said, noting that Pretti had two magazines and no identification.
Proven untrue.
At 1.39pm EST, about three and a half hours after agents killed Pretti, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” The post referred to comments by a Democratic party account calling for ICE to withdraw from Minneapolis.
“An assassin tried to murder federal agents and this is your response,” Miller wrote three minutes later, responding to the call of Democratic senator Chris Murphy to withhold funding for ICE.
Proven untrue.
At 2.14pm ET, border patrol commander Gregory Bovino assembled reporters to claim that Pretti had approached agents with a handgun, intending to “massacre law enforcement” and had “violently resisted” before his men killed him.
Proven untrue.
On Saturday afternoon, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference in which she declared, definitively, that the shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti hours earlier was justified.
“Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots,” she said. “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”
Noem said that the shooting would be investigated, “just like we do all other officer-involved shootings”.
Josh Marshall Explains Why Trump’s Approach Will Backfire:
I said in my earlier post that the White House thinks it has escalation dominance, the stronger hand at every stage of escalation. I think they’re wrong. The simple explanation is that they think this is a battle of force. It’s not. It’s ultimately a battle over public opinion. And it’s one they’re already losing. Escalating the contest of force will make them lose harder.
The concept of escalation dominance comes out of Cold War deterrence and strategic theory…But one of the key things about these concepts, which emerged in the 1950s, is that they’re highly theoretical, in both senses of the word. The real world isn’t as linear or as predictable as you expect. There are various ways that weakness can be turned into strength. And, as DS notes, the point of escalation dominance is to keep the weaker party from escalating at all. It’s supposed to be a framework of deterrence for the stronger power.
The other point I want to note in DS’s email is the very correct focus on the incredible discipline of those protesting and operating as observers. In each of these horrible murders, you have victims acting in a very disciplined, non-confrontational manner. That doesn’t happen by accident. If you’re participating in these protests, you can get killed for doing nothing. It’s sounds grandiose or hyperbolic but it’s true. Or perhaps we’d like it to be hyperbole. But clearly it’s not hyperbole. But the ranks of those joining the opposition to these marauding terror gangs are waxing rather than waning.
Read the entire give-and-take here. Bottom line: The Federal government’s approach is doomed to failure.
Speaking Of Which–When You’ve Lost The NYPost:
It’s time to de-escalate in Minneapolis, Mr. President.
Not because you’re wrong to enforce immigration law, nor to go after fraudsters who’ve stolen billions in federal funds — but because these enforcement tactics won’t turn the tide, instead they are backfiring.
Swing voters — Hispanics and independents who turned to you at the last election — see US citizens dying at federal agents’ hands, and recoil in horror.
We get it: Alex Pretti, like Renee Good before him, was clumsily interfering with federal agents doing their job — egged on by leftist propagandists falsely claiming that Americans’ right to protest extends to messing with the feds, even physically intervening to prevent enforcement of the law.
Meanwhile, local authorities — Mayor Jacob Frey, Gov. Tim Walz — have been failing to do their jobs, or worse: ordering local law enforcement to stay away from the confrontation the hard left demands.
He helped build the religious right in the United States. Now he’s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to join the clergy’s fight ICE’s siege of the city.“Being here, in solidarity, is part of the repair work in my own soul,” said Rev. Rob Schenck, an Evangelical minister who spent decades commingling church and state to advance conservative causes like the anti-abortion movement. One example: Schenck’s organization, Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, created “Operation Higher Court,” which trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries” to befriend Supreme Court justices to preserve, in his words, a Christian nation.Now, he says he must confront the damage he helped cause, including what he believes was his role in delivering “the entities that are now inflicting all of this suffering on so many people”—extending to the rise of President Donald Trump. “We made this terrible deal with Donald Trump because we were already demoralized,” he told Mother Jones in 2018. “He didn’t demoralize us—he is the evidence of our demoralization.”So, here, braving subzero temperatures, Schenck told me, “I have to do the work of repair.” The video above was taken on Friday, during the city’s “Day of Truth and Freedom”—a citywide strike and march in which clergy played a prominent role. “These folks are showing more grace in accepting me than I would have ever extended to them,” he said, flanked by organizers shouting, “Whose streets? Our streets!”
“U.S. Senators Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) introduced the PUBLIC SAFETY Act to redirect almost $75 billion in funding passed in the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and send it instead to local law enforcement programs to help hire and train 200,000 local cops in communities across the U.S.”
Man, wish I’d kept that Delaware Online subscription to find out what some influencer says are Matt Meyer’s favorite restaurants. Oh, well. Which reminds me, my Washington Post subscription expired yesterday. Two words: Jeff. Bezos.
What do you want to talk about?