In the winter of despair, it was a day of the vile and a night of the obscene
I
t was the worst of times and then even worse; it was the age of lies and then more lies; it was an epoch of preening and cowardice. In the winter of despair, it was a day of the vile and a night of the obscene. It was a tale of two films, one featuring the stark killing of a protester on a cold Minneapolis street and the other starring Melania Trump striking poses in a “documentary” shown at a private screening at the White House.
Throughout the day of Saturday, 24 January, videos of the killing by ICE agents of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration hospital, on a street in Minneapolis were broadcast endlessly on TV news channels and seen by tens of millions online. The videos clearly showed Pretti with his phone in his hand, holding his hands up as he approached ICE agents who had pepper-sprayed a woman. He was coming to her aid, a Good Samaritan. The ICE agents instantly attacked him. One frame of a video shows one agent with his gun drawn, pointed at Pretti’s back as he fell hands still in the air. Agents appear to have shot him 10 times in five seconds.
The videos plainly refuted the falsehoods instantly contrived by Trump administration officials. Pretti, as it happened, had been legally carrying a gun in his waistband, which there is no evidence he tried to wield. Despite the facts apparent multiple videos, Donald Trump declared that “ICE patriots” had to “protect themselves”, and that Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey were “inciting insurrection”, attempting to assert a predicate for his invocation of the Insurrection Act.
