They Keep Lying To Us
Two dead Americans, federal agents running amok, and an impending constitutional crisis.
Who are you gonna believe: Kristi Noem in a bomber jacket or your own lyin’ eyes?
In the wake of the second killing this month of a U.S. citizen in the streets of Minneapolis, what’s become completely clear is the extent to which statements by federal agencies are unmoored from any sort of reality as glimpsed by eyewitness cell phone footage.
Here is the shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti, as described by Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in a press conference:
An individual approached officers with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm this individual but the armed suspect reacted violently. Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics were on the scene immediately and attempted to deliver medical aid to the subject, but he was pronounced dead at the scene. The suspect also had two magazines with ammunition in them that held dozens of rounds. He also had no ID. This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage and to kill law enforcement.
Responding to a question, Noem described Pretti’s actions as consistent with “domestic terrorism”—an assessment that mirrors her depiction of the killing of Renee Good earlier this month.
In a parallel press conference, senior Border Patrol officer Greg Bovino described Pretti as having intent to carry out “a massacre.”
Video of the shooting, verified as authentic by The New York Times, seems to contradict virtually all of the administration’s statements. In multiple angles of coverage, Pretti is holding a cell phone at eye level with one hand and nothing in the other hand. He is standing in the middle of the road at the start of the incident. When an ICE officer pushes a woman into a snow bank, Pretti appears to move past the officer and to her aid. He has his hands in the air and is moving in the direction of the woman when the officer begins to pepper spray him. His hands are on the ground at the point when ICE agents drag him away and begin to physically subdue him. Once he is down, five officers restrain him, including one who appears to be beating him with a pepper spray canister—all without any indication of active resistance on Pretti’s part. While he is on the ground, his weapon is discovered on him and removed by an officer just prior to another officer opening fire on him. (The alleged discovery of additional magazines attached to Pretti’s gun is immaterial in this case—he was a licensed handgun holder and the presence of extra ammunition is no proof of intent.)
As with the killing of Renee Good, there are a few “black boxes” here. None of the camera footage is close enough to get audio of the interaction between Pretti and the ICE officers. It is clear that they were exchanging words, but it is unknown if Pretti threatened them in any way. Pivotally, the swarm of ICE agents around Pretti when he is on the ground obstructs the cameras and makes it unclear if he was reaching for a gun prior to the moment he was shot. As best I can make out—and this is also the assessment of The New York Times in their frame-by-frame analysis of the fatal moment—one officer found Pretti’s gun on him and the shout of “gun” may have been the instigation for another officer to unholster his weapon and begin firing.
But there is no indication from the video of anything resembling the motive federal authorities peremptorily assigned to Pretti. For that matter, the video also shows officers standing around after the shooting making no immediate attempt to provide medical assistance to Pretti as he lies prone on the ground. There remains no evidence whatsoever of intent to “kill” or to “massacre” law enforcement—and every bit of available video documentation from the scene points in a very different direction.
So what happens now? Well, clearly, Donald Trump and co. see the error of their ways. They remember that they are public servants sworn to uphold the Constitution and to defend the people of the United States. They recognize that a spectacularly misguided operation to send 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents to an American city 1,500 miles from the Mexican border in order to deport illegal aliens and root out fraud has resulted in the shooting deaths of a poet and a Veterans Affairs nurse, has torn apart the fabric of the city and the country, and has incited probably the worst jurisdictional crisis in decades, with municipal and state government now in a ferocious turf battle with the federal government. At this point the federales notice that they are not wanted in Minnesota; that, as video footage amply demonstrates, the ICE/Border Patrol agents are badly unequipped for the kinds of arrests that they are routinely carrying out; and that it is time to step back and take a breath before the situation—as it inevitably will if the status quo continues—escalates further.
The above paragraph is, of course, wishful thinking. The administration has, even after Pretti’s killing, doubled down on the brutal operation, and on their alternate reality rhetoric to justify it. “The Mayor and the Governor are inciting insurrection,” Trump wrote in one of his Truth Social posts. Vice President JD Vance encouraged the narrative of insurrection by the state government. “This level of engineered chaos is unique to Minneapolis,” he said of mass protests against ICE actions. “It is the direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities.” And, last week, the Justice Department issued subpoenas for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for their alleged encouragement of insurrection.
It is almost impossible to overstate just how much of a tinderbox the situation in Minneapolis is—with trigger-happy federal agents, well outside their usual jurisdiction, violently engaging an inflamed citizenry; with different branches of the government at loggerheads; with their armed representatives now in the same city streets and answering to very different chains of command; and all of this with top-level political figures initiating legal proceedings and hurling insults at one another. (Trump has called Walz “retarded,” while Walz has characterized ICE as Trump’s “Gestapo” and Frey has demanded that ICE “get the fuck out” of Minneapolis.)
Meanwhile, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Minority Leader, has announced that Senate Democrats will refuse to approve an omnibus budgetary authorization if it includes additional funding for ICE—which makes a fresh government shutdown all but inevitable.
Even within this charged atmosphere, it is possible that all of this will end short of further clashes or the implementation of the Insurrection Act—as right-wingers online have been urging Trump to do. Over the past year, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security have been fairly nimble at moving ICE around the country, and there is a chance that Trump will decide that he has made whatever point he wishes to make in Minneapolis and declare victory in some fashion and move on. But it already seems like the situation is getting worse before it gets better. The polarization of American society could not be more acute, with whole communities blowing whistles to warn of the approach of U.S. law enforcement and with vast wings of the U.S. government essentially accusing one another of illegitimacy. What’s happening in Minnesota right now is probably the worst constitutional crisis in the United States since Kent State and the height of the Vietnam War protests—and with the added element of nasty jurisdictional disputes between federal and local branches of government, which recall Little Rock and the integration struggles of the ‘50s. And, really, there is no particular reason to think that anything will improve.
As, by now, a seasoned participant in this grim new ritual in American life of watching shooting videos and then watching the press conferences as the different sides parse the videos in their own diametrically opposed ways, what maybe strikes me more than anything is something that should be minor but isn’t—the way the officials carry themselves. The Republicans appear, always, surrounded by a gaggle of stony-faced security officer types. The civilian officials tend to be in their own pseudo-military get-ups—Noem, this time, looks like she’s about to hop in an airplane cockpit; for her initial press conference on the Renee Good shooting, she was in a cowboy hat. The surrounding officers nod and react only at a mention of the travails of working in law enforcement.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, it’s honestly a bit of a circus. Walz and Frey’s speeches are accompanied always by a sign language interpreter whose facial expressions and broad gestures have a way of attracting as much attention as what’s being said. The officials tend to be a bit more rumpled—the impression they’re giving is of honest civilians caught in a crossfire. Their own gaggle of law enforcement is always impressively diverse and without the kind of thousand-yard stare that the federales tend to practice. In other words, the two sides look completely different from one another: they are projecting an entirely different vision of power.
I have always been skeptical of the notion that our polarized political atmosphere will lead to civil war. It’s a very different situation from, say, the 1850s and ‘60s, and the different sides aren’t in different territorial groupings in quite the same way. But, looking at the videos, what becomes very clear is that Americans have divided themselves into two entirely distinct tribes, with different values, different markers, different styles of communication. For a long time this was politics as usual. Now, we seem to be witnessing it crossing over into something else.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion, writes the Substack Castalia, and edits The Republic of Letters.
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A year ago, anyone who predicted that an American city would be under what amounts to (para)military occupation would be accused of TDS.
Now, it's happening.
A year ago I would have found the line from Billy Jack "When policemen break the law, then there isn't any law. Just a fight for survival" to be overly simplistic.
Now, not so much.
Actually the only difference between what happened from 1861 to 1865 and what is happening now is the number of weapons and deaths. While that is certainly a very major difference, it is one of instance only, not of kind.
Abraham Lincoln in the shortest and most telling speech in American political history noted that “now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure”. If the endurance of our nation is not at stake now, it never was. The nature of the battlefield itself is not the issue, only ‘the great task remaining before us’.