THE SLAYING OF ALEX PRETTI—A CATALYST FOR HEIGHTENED CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

 

I’ve been researching everything I could find on fatal Trump regime repression victim Alex Pretti ever since he was summarily executed on a Minneapolis street a week ago. As a result, I have been able to speculate about a few things with reasonable factual certainty.

Alex Pretti

Alex Pretti didn’t have a death wish. He had a busy, fulfilling life, and he had the highest of principles. He wasn’t a “dangerous assassin” or a “domestic terrorist”, or “an insurrectionist”, terms with which the Trump regime has sought to slander him and sully his memory, after its paramilitary agents murdered him. He was, rather, a patriot, a man exercising his First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly, and freedom of expression, and freedom of dissent, a law-abiding American fed up with the regime’s invasion of his state and city—and don’t tell me it’s not an invasion when the number of paramilitary agents the Trump regime has deployed add up, in military terms, to four battalions of combat-armed, masked and ready paramilitary troops, with carte blanche orders permitting them to act with impunity and beyond the law. (Former South Bend mayor and federal transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, an Afghanistan combat veteran, described the Trump paramilitary as “more heavily armed than we were” on Afghan War combat patrol missions).

Pretti was a real American, someone who believed in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rule of law. And he didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk, standing up in peaceful protest against what are clearly daily abuses of power, perpetrated by the regime against immigrants and American citizens alike. He was, at the time of his summary execution, standing firm to protect his city and state against what is clearly federal government abuse.

Alex wasn’t himself a veteran, but he was indeed a caregiver for veterans, and by all reports (all not tainted by Trump regime and MAGA World lies), an excellent and much-beloved one. He was not only a talented ICU nurse at the VA hospital in Minneapolis, but also a medical research assistant. Alex, 37 at the time of his slaying, has been described multiple times since his untimely death as someone who dedicated his life to healing and to helping others. He was, indeed, helping someone else—a woman protestor being brutalized by a masked paramilitary agent—when he was summarily executed, face-down, on the ground, after being maced, kicked and beaten by more than a half-dozen paramilitary operatives taking part in the siege of Minneapolis. Again, don’t try to tell me that this is not a state of siege, since the regime has even given it its own military invasion codename: Operation Metro Surge.

An outdoorsman and trekking enthusiast in his spare time, Alex Pretti was a veritable poster boy for American rugged individualism. And in his adherence to individual rights, he was, among other things, a supporter of the Second Amendment, a gun-owner, and a conceal-and-carry licensee in a staunchly open-carry state.

So respected was Pretti among veterans that Military.com was prompted to publish a piece about his slaying. In it, the site posted a statement by Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, Chief of Infectious Diseases at the VA hospital where Alex worked, and a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Miltary.com said Dr. Drekonja described Pretti as an outstanding nurse, deeply committed to patient care.

"He wanted to help people," said Drekonja. “He was always asking what he could do to help.”

Noem

This, then, was the dangerous “domestic terrorist” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Assistant Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Donald Trump were bloviating about. This is the mad-dog killer that then-Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino said was there “to massacre” federal agents. As school shooting survivor and gun-control activist Emma Gonzalez so eloquently put it, “I call bullshit.” And so does anyone else who has seen the videos of a public execution and knows how to look at them without their MAGA 1D glasses on.

Noem had the same story earlier this month when another Minnesota resident, Renee Good, was slain by an ICE operative, Jonathon Ross, claiming the unarmed 37-year-old mother of three, who had just taken her six-year-old son to school, was “a domestic terrorist” who tried to run officers over with her SUV. That was also a claim contradicted by video footage that showed Good trying to go around officers to escape from a clearly dangerous and menacing situation, with a masked agent jerking on her door handle and telling her to “get out of the fucking car.”

Alex and Renee - martyrs for democracy

According to reports culled from an independent autopsy ordered by Chicago attorneys for Good’s family, she received three slugs from Ross’s pistol, as the videos of the homicide showed. As seen in the videos, the vehicle was already clearing Ross to leave the scene—as ICE agents had originally ordered Good to do. The autopsy shows that Renee received one direct hit to her left arm and another to her left breast. Autopsy results suggest neither of those wounds would have killed her. It was the third shot that executed her, entering her head at the left temple and exiting the right side of her skull. Forensics experts reportedly discovered a fourth injury as well, a flesh wound where a slug had just grazed the victim.

So far no evidence has been released as to the order of the gunshots. If the one to the head was first, Renee was already mortally wounded when she received the other two. But if the other two came first, then this was a coup de grace shot that caused her death following those first two non-lethal wounds.

Alex Pretti’s summary execution took place at the corner of 26^th Street and Nicollet Avenue in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis. According to eyewitnesses, someone whom federal agents were pursuing had run into a doughnut shop in the 2600-block of Nicolette near that corner, and employees had locked the door to keep paramilitary members from entering. A chaotic scene ensued in which protestors and paramilitary agents had gathered near that location. Pretti was attempting to direct local traffic around the throng, an attitude that, according to those who knew him, was typical, lending a hand wherever he could to keep people safe.

It was shortly afterward that Alex observed how a Border Patrol agent was brutalizing two women, one of whom he pushed hard in the chest twice and threw to the ground. The agent was about to mace the fallen woman when Alex stepped between them to protect the woman. With one hand, he was holding up a smartphone, apparently recording the incident, while with the other, he was trying to block the agent from spraying mace into his own face.

Alex’s last act, before being completely overpowered, was still to help someone else. He turned from the menacing agent, wrapped his arms around the woman on the ground, and tried to help her to her feet. But as they were attempting to stand up, the paramilitary agent again shoved Alex hard, so that both he and the woman, still embracing, fell back to the ground. And as they did, their assailant jerked Alex backwards onto the street.

At that point, several more agents joined the first border guard, pinning Alex down, while macing, beating and kicking him. The first agent, taking advantage of Alex’s being immobilized by the others, was beating him around the face and head with the mace canister that he was still holding. At one point, the number of agents beating and restraining Alex, who was on the ground and by now defenseless, numbered eight.

While Alex Pretti was a legal gun-owner, as I said before, with a valid conceal and carry permit—which, in the state of Minnesota, afforded him the right to be armed anywhere except where specifically prohibited (federal buildings, courthouses, etc., where there are “no firearms beyond this point” signs posted)—multiple videos from different angles show that he never once touched his weapon during the entire life-threatening encounter that, indeed, resulted in his death. There is even specific footage demonstrating that he was using both of his hands to try and protect his face and head from the savage beating that he was taking. In fact, the paramilitary agents appear never to have known that Alex was armed until they had him subdued and saw the gun during the process of cuffing him.

It's only at that point that, in one video, you can clearly hear an agent saying what sounds like, “the gun, the gun, get the gun.” It is then that an agent in a dark stocking cap pulls his own pistol. It is also at about that moment that another agent appears to disarm Alex—who, again, is already completely defenseless on the ground and surrounded by a gang of agents—and leave the scene with Alex’s 9mm pistol. It’s only after Alex is disarmed and completely helpless that the first shot rings out. Agents step back, apparently in surprise. Alex is motionless on the pavement. And a split second later, at least nine more shots are fired at Alex’s already inert body.

General strike and protest in Minneapolis

That is precisely what the video evidence shows happened. That is what those of us who were paying attention saw. The rest—and especially the complete “domestic-terrorist-insurrectionist-assassin” fantasy cooked up by the Trump regime—is spin, designed to change the narrative and turn Alex from a patriot, good Samaritan and victim into the perpetrator of his own killing.

 As I say, I have been researching and thinking about all of this for a week now. There are inevitable conclusions to which thinking deeply about the deaths of Renee and Alex—and about everything else that has been happening in the US over the course of the past year (and decade)—logically lead.

To start with, it may seem like stating the obvious. To me it does, at least. But then again, I’m amazed at how many people are still asking if we “might be on the verge” of an authoritarian regime. News flash: We are there!

What is happening daily in the United States under the Trump regime is the very definition of a police state. To wit, a state whose government institutions exercise extreme control over civil society and individual liberties.  It is a state in which the lines between the law and the exercise of executive political power are blurred, and in which the Executive wields unrestricted power over deployment of internal security and police forces. Police states are characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian, or at least illiberal regimes (meaning those contrary to a liberal democratic system, in which human and civil rights, and due process and the rule of law are rigorously upheld).

Solidarity protest in New York

I would personally argue that the US is already living under an authoritarian regime, in which constitutional rights and the rule of law have effectively been suspended. But failing my own definition, there can be no objective doubt that America is now fully submersed in an illiberal regime, in which the vast majority of power is concentrated in the hands of a single madman and his cronies.

I shouldn’t have to qualify this last statement considering how clearly obvious it is to anyone who isn’t bending over backward to be disingenuous. But here are a few observations to back that statement up.

Trump is an illiberal executive who defies the Constitution, due process and the rule of law on a daily basis. He simply does not accept the fact that the law applies to everyone. For him, the power of the presidency is absolute.

That becomes fatally dangerous considering that Trump now has what has basically become a personal army of more than 40,000 sworn paramilitary agents. That is the total of operative (non-clerical) personnel in ICE and the Border Patrol combined. The way he has managed to take personal control of this legally-ignorant, ill-trained, but superbly armed paramilitary force has been by taking advantage of the fact that both forces are under the command of the Department of Homeland Security—a cabinet secretariat that has been accumulating an inordinate amount of power ever since it was formed, with the sweeping powers of the so-called Patriot Act behind it, at the end of 2002, following the Nine-Eleven Islamist terror attack on New York City and Washington DC in 2001, which took more than 3,000 lives.

Since both paramilitary groups are under the direct orders of DHS, it was simply a matter of putting someone eminently unqualified for the job and slavishly loyal to Trumpism in charge. Kristi Noem was the perfect choice in Trump’s view, because it was clear that she was almost completely ignorant of the law, and willing to do whatever the president told her to do, as well as to spin, lie and cover up all of the constitutional and legal abuses that Trump’s paramilitary committed.

Trump also managed to get his usurped GOP and a handful of so-called “moderate” Democrats to vastly increase funding for his quasi-private army, handing a base budget estimated at more than 30 billion dollars to the combined ICE-CBP forces, but with 75 billion in additional emergency funds approved over the course of the next four years.

By comparison, the FBI—prior to the Era of Trump, the country’s premier law-enforcement organization—has a total personnel roster of 38,000, only about 13,500 of which are operative agents. And it must make do with a complete yearly budget of 10.1 billion dollars, as well as with a Trump “hand-picked” director (Kash Patel) with zero law enforcement, let alone FBI, background. Patel is, basically, just another ad hoc personality in the clown car known as “the Trump Cabinet”.

Trump, as an illiberal head of state, is making use of his loyal paramilitary, in combination with a weaponized Department of Justice—where his nominal attorney general, Pamela Bondi—is, like Noem, a ringer, a Trump shill, with questionable ties to him and his organization dating back to well before he was president, and when her ethics were apparently just as “flexible” as they are now. For instance, in 2013, while she was attorney general of Florida, she came under scrutiny for accepting a “campaign donation” from a Donald Trump non-profit for her second-term run. This aroused suspicion since her office was in possession of 22 fraud complaints against Trump University, which had shut down in 2011 amidst growing scandal and legal claims in Florida, New York, Texas and elsewhere. Only the New York class action lawsuits eventually prompted Trump to settle with victims of the fraud for 25 million dollars. Despite the name, the fake school was never an accredited institution of higher learning.       

In 2016,  Bondi endorsed Trump in the GOP’s Florida presidential primary, saying she had been friends with him for many years. The Trump donation to her PAC was still haunting both her and Trump at the time. The IRS eventually fined Trump for the contribution that he made through one of his organization’s non-profits, stating that it violated non-profit contribution rules. The IRS also ordered Trump to reimburse the non-profit for the money he had donated to Bondi. Neither Bondi nor her PAC was criminally charged, but a New York state court ordered the Trump organization to close down the non-profit foundation involved and ordered Trump to pay a two million-dollar fine for having misused it.

Trump would eventually appoint Bondi to his defense team against his first impeachment inquiry and trial in 2019, with her specific mission being “to attack the process.” She would then remain part of Trump’s defense team to face burgeoning allegations and charges arising against his multiple felonious actions.

It was in that role that she helped formulate accusations of wrongdoing against President Joe Biden and his son Hunter so as to take attention off of her client.  She would later act as one of the principal purveyors of Trump Big Beautiful Lie about the 2020 election’s having been stolen from him—a lie fully revealed in more than sixty court actions that MAGA lost and in the refusal of even the MAGA-leaning Supreme Court to hear the case. And it would be she, once again, sitting in the counsel’s seat at his defense table in his trial for election fraud in Fulton County, Georgia, a case that dissolved along with two federal cases against Trump when he was, incredibly, re-elected to the presidency in 2024, despite his, by then, being a 34-count convicted felon in yet another case.

So just as he picked Noem and Patel for their ignorance and loyalty, he chose Bondi for her legal expertise and her willingness to use it in his favor and against the people of the United States—in particular, against anyone against whom he had ever held a grudge. Pamela Bondi remains, then, the head of the “Trump defense team”, even as she masquerades as US Attorney General.  

Miller

In that, Bondi has something in common with Assistant Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a clever political operative and the indisputable eminence grise behind Trump’s push to destroy American democracy and to turn the US into a dictatorial police state. The chaos that the regime is creating with its paramilitary invasion of opposition cities all over the US is no accident. It is part of a strategic plan by Miller and the Project 2025 crowd to wreak such havoc as to create the illusion of a nation out of control. To what end is a simple question to answer. So as to invoke the long dormant Insurrection Act, declare martial law, and nullify
the midterm elections slated for November—elections in which all indications point to a humiliating rout for the MAGA-usurped GOP in Congress, despite the Republican push to gerrymander the results in their favor.

Trump has long sold himself as a “grassroots leader”. But over the course of his five years of Grover-Cleveland-presidency, he has demonstrated to ample segments of the public that he is an authoritarian and an elitist. The greatest flaw in his sinister plot against US democracy is that he is one of the most indiscreet public figures who ever lived. He is consistently and stunningly saying the quiet part out loud. And it has become clear that his immigration policy is designed to play to a white nationalist mentality and to some of the worst racial extremist movements in the country. He has said aloud that he wants “a better class of immigrants”, specifically enumerating white ethnicities that he would welcome, and referring to black and brown immigrants as people from “shithole countries”, who are “poisoning the blood” of America.

It is incomprehensible to me that he fared better in the 2024 election with black and brown citizens than he had in either the 2016 or 2020 election cycles. But in the past year, as non-whites, both citizens and immigrants alike, have found themselves on the receiving end of the full lawless force of Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol paramilitary. They have seen law-abiding neighbors who were part of their communities hauled away without warrants while their children were in school. Some, despite their legal status in the country or their citizenship have been dragged out of their cars and brutalized without cause. Still others have had their doors kicked in without court orders and members of their household hauled away to parts unknown. Their families have been torn apart and their friends have disappeared. It’s easy to guess that many of the non-whites who inexplicably voted for Trump in the last election will be suffering serious buyer’s remorse in the midterms.       

In terms of Trump’s growing toxicity, the writing is on the wall in polling that shows some 45 percent of potential voters identifying as Independents, and some 60 to 70 percent of Independents ranking Trump “under water” by ample margins regarding the main planks of his presidential campaign platform—immigration enforcement, inflation, the economy, and foreign relations.

Meanwhile, grassroots resistance is winning. More and more people are joining the massive demonstrations in solidarity with occupied Minnesota, following the murders of two American citizens by members of the Trump paramilitary. Despite brutal Arctic weather in much of the country, protestors have turned out by the thousands and tens of thousands, to oppose the destruction of our democracy and the violation of our civil rights, since if the regime can violate the constitutional rights of a single person, then everyone’s rights are vulnerable.

As Republicans begin to sense that Trump’s growing toxicity makes him more of a liability than an asset in their election campaign, hairline fractures are starting to appear in the almost monolithic party support Trump has enjoyed up to now—the blind support that has allowed Trump to accumulate unprecedented de facto power and to daily violate the Constitution and the law.

Solidarity protest in Chicago

They are seeing a dim future for the GOP as massive protests are spontaneously taking shape on the streets of cities around the country in solidarity with those in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, where whole neighborhoods look like war zones, with demonstrators facing off, in peaceful civil disobedience, with heavily armed and masked paramilitary agents. In huge numbers, neighbors have taken to the street in solidarity in Orlando, Grand Rapids, Green Bay, Phoenix, Salt Lake, Milwaukee, New York, Tampa, Colorado Springs, Boise, Chicago, Omaha, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and elsewhere around the country. Even in tiny Traverse City, Michigan, 2,000 people braved below-zero temperatures to turn out in protest.

This is the miscalculation of a bully-megalomaniac like Donald Trump. If you bully individuals, you might get away with it. But if you try to bully whole democratic communities, the backlash will be devastating.

This is what democracy looks like!