By the time I started writing this, the videos of Alex Pretti’s last few minutes had been on my phone for three days and the argument about what they showed had hardened along the exact lines you’d predict. Half my feed saw a peaceful citizen being murdered by federal agents in his own neighborhood. The other half saw a guy with a gun who got what was coming to him. Same footage, two completely different movies.
Quick recap of what’s actually verifiable, because if you only got this through your usual sources you might not have the whole picture. Pretti was 37, a U.S. citizen, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA. He had a permit to carry. On the morning of January 24, he was on the street watching a Border Patrol operation called Operation Metro Surge. Video shows him holding a phone in one hand and reaching toward a woman who’d just been knocked down by agents. He got pepper-sprayed in the face, pushed to the ground, beaten, and shot roughly a dozen times. A 9mm pistol was in his waistband — an agent can be seen pulling it out before other agents opened fire. DHS’s initial statement said he was “brandishing” a weapon. The video does not support that. ProPublica has since named the two shooters. This was the third federal shooting in Minneapolis in less than a month — Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was killed by an ICE agent on January 7 when he fired into her vehicle.
Those are the facts. What I want to write about is the argument that immediately formed around them.
The fastest right-wing reaction — he had a gun, he was at a protest, the agents were doing their jobs — is the same political coalition that made Kyle Rittenhouse a folk hero for showing up to a protest with a rifle and shooting two people. Rittenhouse was openly carrying an AR-15. Pretti had a holstered pistol he never drew. The principle “an armed citizen at a protest is exercising his rights” apparently has a footnote that says “unless we don’t like the protest.” It’s the same coalition that’s still calling Ashli Babbitt a martyr — a woman shot by a Capitol Police officer while climbing through a broken window into a secured area of the Capitol during a riot that injured around 140 cops and produced more than 1,500 convictions that were then pardoned. If your test for whether a police shooting is justified depends on who got shot rather than what they did, you don’t actually have a test. You have a team.
The fastest left-wing reaction is also a tell. The outrage about federal agents in masks, in unmarked vehicles, operating without local coordination is real and warranted. But ICE under Biden deported 271,484 people in fiscal year 2024 — the highest single-year number since 2014 and higher than any year under the first Trump administration — and most of the people now horrified about Operation Metro Surge said almost nothing about it at the time. Obama was nicknamed “deporter in chief” for a reason. The deportations were the same. The optics were different: quieter buses, less theater, no balaclavas. If your outrage activates around the cruelty performance and goes quiet when the same numbers go through behind a curtain, what you’re actually opposed to is the visibility, not the policy.
I’m not saying these are equivalent. They aren’t. Masked agents blocking local police, refusing identification, refusing oversight, conducting operations that turn into three dead bodies in a month — that’s worse than what came before, both in tactics and in scale and in the deliberate cruelty of the staging. The Trump administration is not just doing what Biden did with a different paint job. The performance is part of the point, and the bodies are too. I want to be clear about that.
But the reason I keep coming back to the both-sides framing isn’t because the sides are morally equivalent. It’s because the manipulation is. The actual purpose of the argument on social media right now isn’t to get justice for Alex Pretti or to defend the rule of law. It’s to make sure that I — a guy in the Hudson Valley with kids and a mortgage who has never met anyone involved in any of this — spend my evening furious at my neighbor across the political aisle instead of furious at the people who set this whole machine in motion. The people who designed the operation. The people who staffed it with agents who shot a nurse holding a phone. The people who shielded those agents from accountability. The people who profit from a country in which this can happen and then immediately become a culture-war wedge instead of a crime.
If you want to honor what happened to Alex Pretti, the move is not to win the comment-section argument with your uncle. The move is to keep your eye on who actually pulled the trigger, who actually wrote the operational orders, who actually dismantled the civil rights oversight inside DHS that would have investigated this — and to refuse to let the next three weeks of news cycle turn this into another round of but what about your guy.
The bait is the framing that you have to pick a tribe and defend it. The trap is that defending your tribe in this fight requires you to look away from a man who is dead.
Don’t take the bait. Look at what happened. Say what you saw. Stay focused on the actual chain of cause and effect, which runs from a policy decision through a uniform to a trigger to a body on a Minneapolis sidewalk.
That’s the whole post.
Even that's Odd 
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