I’ve stayed away from posting about Minneapolis lately but feel obligated to post after today.

There are completely legitimate points to be made about the corruption and illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. You can absolutely say the local government there is responsible for it and that they’ve done a shitty job up to this point. You can even support ICE involvement for removing illegal immigrants. Tom has posted a lot about this, and I agree there is a meaningful scandal going on.

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Shooting Alex Pretti

The guy today, Alex Pretti, was murdered. He stepped towards a woman that an ICE agent knocked over and was immediately pepper sprayed relentlessly. He had a concealed carry. At that point, he’s swarmed by 5 agents and taken to the ground completely restrained. Video shows an ICE agent literally remove Pretti’s gun, disarming him, and a second later he was shot 8 times.

Once you’ve been pepper sprayed for 5 seconds and have multiple people wrestling you to the ground, there is no “just comply!“. It’s the exact escalation that police and law enforcement are taught NOT to do. But things like this happen when you send thousand of poorly trained agents into an already volatile situation.

There’s no justifying this. Saying “well you shouldn’t be getting in their way!” is a caricature at this point. If that’s how you feel, take a step back and truly ask yourself what you’re defending. A man was shot 8 times while face down, unarmed, and restrained for doing nothing more than being at a protest. If you wouldn’t support ICE also shooting the two women in that same video, you shouldn’t support this either.

You can say Renee Good shouldn’t have tried to drive away. That doesn’t mean she deserved to DIE. It feels like half the country is okay with it; hell almost happy about it, equating any resistance or wrong doing in the face of the law as worthy of being killed.

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The White House

The concern is the leaders of our country are not only reinforcing this thought, but LYING about what happened. If video footage did not exist, the White House would have you think Pretti had his gun drawn and was threatening to shoot. JD Vance retweeted Stephen Miller saying that Pretti tried to “murder” an agent. And even with CLEAR footage to the contrary, they continue to lie, insist Pretti was a “terrorist“, and say that the videos don’t show what we all can see with our own eyes. It’s disgraceful beyond words, and I can’t imagine being a friend or family member of Pretti’s having to see the literal leaders of the country smear him with zero remorse or consequences. THAT is a major concern for the entire country.

It’s to the point where an ICE agent could hand cuff someone, line them up execution style, shoot them in the back of the head, and Trump and Vance would congratulate the agent and say they were totally justified. I can’t tell if I’m blinded by my political bias in saying that, but I see no scenario where those two would publicly say “this has gone too far, the agent shouldn’t have done that“.

We’re not communist Russia. We’re not Iran. This is not 1984. You have actual leaders saying DON’T protest, blatantly lying to the country about significant events, government officials taking legal citizens and children into custody with no warrants, and two people being killed in public. Can you blame the people in Minneapolis, or any other city, for wanting ICE out?

You can say Minneapolis was a shitshow prior to this, or that Tim Walz is an idiot who shouldn’t be in charge, but hopefully anyone on either side can agree this government intervention is going too far. It’s a sad and scary day. Alex Pretti and Renee Good should be alive.