The Abuse of a Tragedy

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, January 26, 2026

 

It was especially difficult to watch the multiple video clips of a U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shooting Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday. The clips are agonizing not only because of the horrific and unnecessary tragedy they document. They’re also agonizing because they capture the second such incident to occur in Minneapolis in the new year. And I find in the impenetrable chaos depicted in the footage the essence of the country’s atmospheric dishevelment at this moment. It’s both the American breakdown in concentrated form and a stimulant to greater disunion.   

 

No matter how much someone slowed down the recording, all you see clearly is rage, miscommunication, confusion, and deadly violence between warring sides. You see politics gone fatally wrong.

 

And that’s just the beginning. Because after the recorded event and its universal airing, things immediately got worse. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Pretti was involved in “domestic terrorism.” White House adviser Stephen Miller called him “an assassin.” The Department of Homeland Security claimed, without evidence, that Pretti was there to “massacre law enforcement.” Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino commended the federal officers for “taking him down before he was able to do that.”

 

Pretti, in truth, was legally carrying a licensed gun, and no footage shows him brandishing it at any point. But multiple administration figures doubled and tripled down on the made-up tale.

 

Against MAGA’s outrageous lies, Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz offered outrageous hyperbole, invoking Anne Frank and likening ICE raids to a Nazi occupation of his state.

 

Partisans on social media swung into action, as well, declaring instant judgments about a still-unfolding national nightmare and constructing elaborate bad-faith analyses of the various clips. In these analyses, principle was the first casualty. Right-wing posters went on and on about the recklessness of bringing a legal firearm to an anti-government protest. FBI Director Kash Patel suggested, falsely, that to do so is illegal.

 

It’s a good time to remind self-identified conservatives that the ideological basis of the right to bear arms is that a free people must be able to resist government tyranny. To be clear, I don’t in any way view the ICE crackdown as tyrannical. But I do think it’s anti-American to imply that the Second Amendment—in describing “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” as “necessary to the security of a free State”—was primarily referring to the security of federal agents and not citizens.

 

And that’s what I meant about the chaos that goes beyond the horror in Minnesota. When everything is in disarray and images become stand-ins for arguments, principles are betrayed, lies are echoed, and decency vanishes altogether. What’s perhaps most disturbing is that the unwarranted shooting of an American becomes an ephemeral footnote to both the case against the activist left and the case against Donald Trump. Minutes after he was killed, Jeffrey Pretti’s death was repurposed as evidence of both domestic terrorism and the fascism of MAGA. And at that point, the confusion and senselessness and inscrutability of the tragedy merge into the tumult of the nation and push us one more step toward civil dissolution.