Tread on Me – The Dispatch

My Friday newsletter was about the administration’s willingness to lie even in cases where the truth is well established and supported with extensive visual evidence. From smearing Renee Good as a domestic terrorist to distorting a photo of a protester to make it look like she was weeping during her arrest, its deceit seems designed not so much to mislead Americans as to signal its own sense of impunity in behaving sadistically toward its enemies.

“We will do what we like, and you will have no choice but to tolerate it” is how I described the White House’s ethos in that column. It’s dispensing with any pretense of credibility in order to show that it no longer feels bound by traditional political norms, even involving acts of lethal state violence—and that there’s nothing we, its humble subjects, can do to stop it.

About 16 hours after that newsletter was published, Border Patrol agents shot Alex Pretti dead and the administration instantly began telling obvious, grotesque lies about him. When I said earlier that I wrote about the shooting the day before it happened, that’s what I meant.

“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” the Department of Homeland Security said in its first statement on the shooting. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino repeated that smear in a press conference. So did DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who spoke after 5 p.m. on the East Coast on Saturday, when footage of Pretti’s death taken from multiple angles was widely available. Everyone knew the administration was lying, and it lied anyway.

Ever eager to escalate, Stephen Miller went as far as to dub the victim a “domestic terrorist” who had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” Why Pretti never unholstered his weapon or tried to ambush the agents given his supposedly homicidal tendencies is unclear.

As in the Good case, the administration’s sense of impunity also extended to a cover-up on the agents’ behalf. More than 48 hours later, we still don’t know the name of Pretti’s shooter or the other officers involved. According to Bovino, they were quickly whisked out of state and, by extension, out of reach of Minnesota law enforcement. When local and later state cops arrived on scene to investigate Pretti’s death, they were “blocked” by federal agents—despite having obtained a search warrant. 

Even the attire the agents were wearing broadcast a sense of impunity. I’ve gone back and forth on whether it’s worse that they were dressed in jeans and hoodies, like a gang, than it would have been if they were done up à la Bovino in fascist quasi-military chic. Both are ominous in different ways—brown shirts versus black shirts, essentially—but the irregularity of immigration officers’ current “uniforms” does seem to mirror the irregularity of their tactics. Combined with their masks, the observer is made to understand that while they’re technically agents of the state, they aren’t accountable to the same rules that other government officers are, even in their manner of dress. Proceed at your own risk.

At this point, only the most vampiric postliberal or pitiful partisan sucker will continue to believe anything this administration says, especially when it involves violence perpetrated by its own personnel. There is no doubt—zero—that the White House would have aggressively hidden the truth about Pretti’s death if bystanders hadn’t captured it. Just as there’s also no doubt that, despite the president’s claim that his team is “reviewing” the incident, none of the agents involved will serve time in prison. To punish them would mean that Trump’s left-wing critics were correct about his immigration tactics; the MAGA right would sooner see would sooner see many more Americans brutalized by ICE than admit that.

Pretti’s death is harder for Republicans to spin than Renee Good’s was. A motivated partisan and/or cop apologist could watch the video of Good attempting to drive away from ICE agents and pretend that she intended for a split second to mow down one of them in her car. The officer shot her in self-defense, you see.

At no point did Pretti behave aggressively with the Border Patrol, though, and so in his case blaming the victim is more difficult. Instead, the argument I saw repeatedly on social media this weekend imputed collective blame: Minnesota Democrats from Gov. Tim Walz on down incited locals to harass immigration officials, which naturally placed officers there on edge, which in turn led them to assume the worst about Good’s and Pretti’s intentions. If the left hadn’t been so insistent on confrontation, these tragedies never would have happened. They started it!

It’s nonsense on stilts.

By any measure, Trump and his henchmen instigated the situation in Minneapolis. They targeted the city not because it has a rampant problem with illegal immigration but because they wanted to stage a big, muscular culture-war pageant at the expense of local Somalis, to draw attention to the fraud scandal in which some are involved. (Most of that Somali population is here legally, by the way.) To prove that they meant business, they sent a preposterously huge number of immigration agents to conduct a crackdown, maximizing the operation’s visibility and its disruption to the city.

And instead of prioritizing the arrest of violent criminals, which everyone supports, they carried out the Miller-Noem strategy of detaining as many suspected illegals as possible, including ones who are welcome in the community. They rolled into Minneapolis less as a law enforcement agency and more as an occupying army, with Bovino as commanding general. And occupying armies tend to have a distinctly different mindset about the neighborhoods they patrol than police officers who live in those neighborhoods, with predictable results.

To make matters worse, the administration has done everything possible to show Minnesotans that it doesn’t expect its immigration officers to behave professionally and won’t punish them if they don’t. It lowered hiring standards for ICE, slashed training times, and tailored its recruitment strategy to appeal to chuds whom it knew would revel in the chance to abuse undesirables. “We haphazardly scaled up a poorly trained police force to storm into neighborhoods that voted against the president, where we antagonize the local population until someone resists arrest, and then we kill them” is how writer Derek Thompson summarized the White House’s M.O.

According to the Associated Press, when a crowd gathered at the scene of Pretti’s death and began shouting at the officers, one agent mocked them by replying, “Boo hoo.” We’re supposed to be surprised that Minneapolis residents are suspicious of this renegade goon squad and eager to jeer at them to leave their city?

To too many Republicans, the mere fact that immigration officers carry the imprimatur of law enforcement grants them a talismanic benefit of the doubt. Alex Pretti made Border Patrol agents uncomfortable by filming them—entirely legally—and distracted them from their duties, and so it doesn’t matter that they, not he, escalated the situation in every respect. He bears moral responsibility for his own death because he was passively antagonistic to men in badges, sound justification for lethal force in the postliberal mind if ever there was one.

The right believes, correctly, that immigration law should be enforced and also believes, incorrectly, that enforcement can and should occur only in the brutal, provocative manner in which it’s currently occurring. The fact that millions of illegal immigrants were deported under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, yes, the first Trump administration without the sort of backlash we’re seeing in Minneapolis evidently provides no insight into whether the tactics favored by the current White House are perhaps the reason for that backlash.

You know we’re in a dark place culturally when Donald Trump sounds more circumspect about Alex Pretti’s death than his own deputies and many of his core voters.

It’s an old gripe among conservatives that liberals are forever declaring the current leader of the GOP to be the worst person ever, only to develop strange new respect for him after he makes way for a new GOP leader and that person is declared the worst person ever. (Left unsaid among the gripes is whether liberals might have a point about the right’s character gradually degrading.) I swear that I’ll never write a column about how much I miss the president after he’s gone, but I do feel obliged to note that Trump seems more chastened by Pretti’s shooting than some of the people around him.

His first post on the matter was predictable, blaming Democrats for inciting antagonism against agents, but the president was reportedly “frustrated” by operations in Minneapolis even before the shooting occurred because he feared the bad press was muddling his immigration message. (He’s right.) On Sunday, after Pretti was killed, Trump was asked twice by the Wall Street Journal whether the officer responsible had done the right thing and twice Trump refused to say yes. Unless I missed it, he hasn’t joined the Noem-Bovino-Miller parade in smearing Pretti as an assassin either.

On Monday morning, the president announced that border czar Tom Homan is taking over operations in Minnesota and will report directly to him. That had a whiff of de-escalation about it: Homan famously dislikes Noem and opposes her preference for mass deportation, preferring to prioritize criminals instead. If he’s taking over in the city, ICE and Customs and Border Protection might soon have a lighter footprint and an approach more targeted at the actual bad guys.

Then, a few hours ago, news broke that Bovino will be leaving Minnesota imminently. The whiff has become a distinct aroma.

I won’t insult your intelligence by speculating that the president felt terribly about Pretti’s death, but I can absolutely believe that he feels terribly about his numbers on immigration going down the toilet. It’s strange to think that a guy with his own cult who will never again stand for election would panic upon learning that the public doesn’t support his masked gang, but maybe it’s a legacy matter for him. Immigration is supposed to be his bread-and-butter, the thing that won him the last election. Being suddenly despised for it may have rattled him.

Although, Trump being Trump, it’s probably a product of pure narcissism. The president has always cared to an unhealthy degree about “numbers,” and he knows which way his numbers are moving as public patience for ICE’s tactics wears thin.

Either way, his henchmen and supporters aren’t burdened by the same psychological pressure to be liked—not by the general public, anyway. Noem, Bovino, and Miller felt free to smear Alex Pretti ghoulishly because their constituency is MAGA, and they knew MAGA would appreciate it. Ditto for Rep. Randy Fine, who celebrated the shooting by announcing, “An armed seditionist attacked federal law enforcement today as they were rounding up foreign invaders in Minneapolis. The insurrectionist was put down. Well done.” There was a lot in that vein from the populist faithful on social media.

Some postliberal “influencers” responded to the shooting by calling on followers to show unthinking support for immigration agents irrespective of the morality of their conduct, continuing the Trumpist tradition dating back to the Access Hollywood episode of demanding the highest loyalty to excuse the most disgusting conduct. Others one-upped them by calling on Trump to get tough, invoke the Insurrection Act, and “crush these terrorist riots” in Minneapolis. What good is having a fascist as president, after all, if he won’t deliver an Iran-style bloodbath when circumstances warrant?

I’m not prepared for an America where Donald Trump is a voice of comparative moderation among the feral right, but then I wasn’t prepared for a world where Marjorie Taylor Greene is a voice of moderation either. Yet here we are.

We’ve all gotten used to “conservatives” betraying every principle they ever claimed to hold, but even I was surprised by how many Republicans this weekend tried to blame Pretti for his own death by zeroing in on the fact that he was … carrying a loaded gun.

Why I was surprised, I don’t know. I suppose the fact that gun rights are such a sacred part of populist right-wing culture, not merely political ideology, led me to assume that GOPers would steer clear of faulting the victim for lawfully having a weapon on him. If nothing else, hypocrisy should have warned them away from making an issue of it: Trump fans have been bringing guns with them to protests for years.

But no. The director of the FBI confidently assured Fox News on Saturday that, “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.” Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about: You absolutely can do that if you’re licensed to carry, and any Republican in America would have wet his pants if a Biden administration official had argued otherwise.

Amazingly, Kash Patel wasn’t the only Justice Department employee who has concluded that the Second Amendment no longer applies in the presence of the Border Patrol. “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli observed. No, there isn’t—unless you’re brandishing that gun, in which case the police might reasonably fear that you’re about to shoot.

But carrying a gun in a holster? That wasn’t an offense warranting summary execution until now.

Many other right-wingers on social media joined the huffing and puffing about Pretti’s pistol, leading Toronto Sun columnist Bruce Arthur to this observation: “I almost appreciate how Trump has exposed how vacant every single high profile conservative belief was: free speech, states’ rights, letting the market decide, NATO, right to bear arms, democracy, all of it. It’s been an empty, malicious political project for decades and decades.”

The modern American right is so hollow and ridiculous a political movement that its most notorious conspiracy theorist, a figure who’s screeched about government tyranny for decades, was reduced on Saturday to defending the shooting of a helpless, unarmed man at close range by masked federal goons. It reminded me of how the rioters with the most sinister designs at the January 6 insurrection were the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia formed to defend the constitutional order from federal encroachment. When a fascist right-wing president undertook to destroy that order by staging a coup, those supposed “anti-government” heroes eagerly volunteered as muscle.

To borrow a phrase from former GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, the conservative movement was all a lie. Not for everyone, of course—The Dispatch wouldn’t exist otherwise—but for a great many right-wingers the principles of conservatism were plainly not much more than window dressing for the friends/enemies distinction that actually drives their politics. They favored small government not because they cared about liberty in principle but because they believed liberals were more disposed to use federal power aggressively, and therefore shrinking government would benefit the right on balance. Once Trump came along and showed that Republicans could abuse federal power too, up to and including creating a masked secret police force tasked with purging undesirables, that calculus went out the window.

It turns out that the key words in the famous slogan on the Gadsden flag weren’t the first two but the last two. Don’t tread on me—but on you, or on a guy with a smartphone who got in the goon squad’s way? That’s a different matter.

There wasn’t much left of conservatism when Alex Pretti was shot, but watching “patriots” rush to justify lethal force by the government against a citizen for carrying a lawful weapon finished off whichever part was still twitching. It wasn’t always an “empty, malicious political project” but it sure is now. Good riddance.