I Don't Think The Administration's Default Policy Should Be Lying About You Being A Terrorist After They Kill You
But it is
Another person was killed by ICE two days ago in Minneapolis, in a shooting even less justified than the last one. Alex Pretti, the man killed, had been wrestled to the ground by ICE agents. His phone was in one hand, nothing was in the other hand. He’d been pepper sprayed. His gun, which he carried legally, was at his side. While ICE agents wrestled him to the ground, they noticed he had a gun, and successfully removed it from his hip. After this, they shot him ten times. In the moments before he was murdered, he was trying to help other people who were being attacked by ICE.
If you are a defender of ICE policies, there are sensible ways to respond. You can wait for more information before confidently declaring the shooting was justified. Or, you can admit that the shooting was unjustified, but say that sometimes people will be killed unnecessarily in the enforcement of good laws. It is good that we have laws against murder, even though attempts to enforce those sometimes accidentally get innocent people killed.
But what you should not do is lie about Pretti. You should not suggest that he went out to try to murder ICE officers. Nor should you claim that he was a terrorist. Even if you think the ICE officers behaved legitimately, you shouldn’t need to lie about Pretti’s intentions. This is an extremely low moral bar.
Sadly, it is one the administration has not cleared.
Instead, the administration’s policy has been to send roving gangs of poorly-trained ICE officers to Minnesota, even though Minnesota has few illegal immigrants, because it plays better to have immigration crackdowns in blue cities. Then, when those poorly trained ICE agents kill people, the policy of the administration is to claim the victim was trying to murder ICE agents, no matter what the facts are.
This was the playbook with Good. They said she was a domestic terrorist. The president said she ran over an officer. That’s a lie. It’s not the sort of thing that you can agree to disagree about. It isn’t a belief you can have if you’ve seen the video. It’s an Orwellian command not to believe the evidence of your eyes and your ears.
The administration orchestrated a policy that got a woman killed. And then after she was shot dead in the snow, they lied and said she’d run people over, when it was on video that she hadn’t.
The Pretti shooting shows this is not a one-off thing. This is the protocol. The plan, whenever ICE murders someone, is to lie about it. No matter what the facts are, the new playbook is to say that the person killed was trying to kill ICE officers and was a terrorist. ICE could shoot a baby and they would claim the baby was trying to execute ICE officers.
This was Stephen Miller’s response, retweeted by the Vice President.
Kristi Noem claimed “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” DHS claimed Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Bovino said the same.
These people are evil liars.
Did Pretti want to massacre law enforcement? If so, his actions were very curious. A person who wants to massacre law enforcement would generally draw their gun. That’s not what Pretti did. He approached them with a camera, not a gun. He didn’t behave violently. He never reached for the gun. You cannot watch the video and think his aim was to harm anyone. The handgun, which he never drew, was secured before he was shot.
The administration doesn’t actually believe he tried to kill ICE officers. It is impossible to believe that after watching the video. Instead, they just don’t care about what’s true. It plays well for them politically to never have to admit that ICE made an error. So they don’t. Their plan is to lie every time ICE kills anyone. The truth is inconvenient, so they’ll just ignore it, even if it’s available for the world to see.
You can never vote for these ghouls. The typical politician lies. But if someone has so little respect for either morality or truth that their policy is to lie whenever a person is murdered, they have become hideous and warped and vile. They have lost whatever humanity they once had.
Pretti was, by all accounts, an upstanding guy. He had been a research scientist, and became a nurse. Everyone who knew him testifies to his good character. If the administration will lie about this guy being a domestic terrorist trying to carry out a massacre, they will do it about anyone.
I wrote an article recently about why you should not treat your political opponents as a homogenous group made up of their least defensible members. You shouldn’t treat actions taken by a random lone extremists as representative of a political party—you should not, after seeing a member of a political party carry out a murder, say stuff like “THEY are the party of murder.”
But in this case, a murder was carried out, and the entire Republican establishment has taken to lying about it and defending it. In this case, we can say that they are the party of defending murder, in the sense that all their high-profile members will defend it whenever it occurs, so long as the perpetrator was an ICE agent. They are all, at the upper echelons, willing to lie about and whitewash the shedding of innocent blood, so long as doing so is politically or personally convenient.
Been a casual reader for a bit, been happy to see you call a spade a spade.
Too many intellectuals kneel at the false idol of moderation in all things, which just leaves you standing for truly nothing. Sometimes life throws extremes at you that require extreme stances, having the courage to say with your chest "There is no middle ground here" is a courage many struggle to have.
I disagree that this is politically convenient for them. Polling on the Rene Good killing looks pretty bad for them, and this latest killing is even less ambiguous; i expect further erosion of approval among independents.
I think if Trump were to say one of the defensible things you suggested--admittedly, this would be so far out of character as to be not worth considering--that would be much better for him politically, and immigration might not have plummeted from being one of his most popular issues to another where he's way underwater.
I don't think this changes the substance of your point, but I do think it slightly changes the diagnosis. The reason JD Vance is retweeting Stephen Miller's insane accusation has more to do with him personally staying in Trump's good graces than with securing political advantage for the GOP or its immigration policy. The audience for this stuff is not the public at large--who is largely alienated by 1984-style claims to the effect that 2+2=5--but just Trump. That's my read at least.