Stop Lionizing/Villainizing Victims
It doesn't matter if they were "good" or "bad"
Two videos have emerged1 of Alex Pretti in an altercation with federal agents 11 days before he was killed. One video shows Pretti kicking out the taillight of a vehicle carrying federal agents, and a different angle of the same incident shows him yelling “Assault me, motherfucker!” Here are the videos (and a longer version of the first one is here):
MAGA nation has seized on these videos to label Pretti a “known violent extremist”, a “DANGEROUS, UNHINGED criminal” (capitalization theirs), and a “domestic terrorist” (that one was retweeted by the president). Of course, it makes no difference whether Pretti was the devil, a saint, or something in between (ed. note: 100% of humanity is something in between). The only thing relevant to passing judgement on Pretti’s killing are the specifics of the incident, and we have a good idea of what happened during the incident because there were more cameras present than at a kindergarten dance recital.
Of course, the left is also trying to posthumously manage Pretti’s image. I’ve spent the past five days listening to progressive sources portray Pretti as a mix of Gandhi, Ned Flanders, and the helpful mice from Cinderella. The Onion dubbed Pretti “a model citizen”, a CNN panelist called him “the perfect guy”, and this fan art of Pretti heroically nursing American democracy back to health has gone viral by Bluesky’s sad, little standards. A fake image of Pretti working with disabled veterans is circulating on social media. And surely the most ridiculous image enhancement attempt has been the doctoring of Pretti’s literal image — here is a photo of Pretti used by several media sources in the days after his death:
And here is the altered version of that photo used by MS Now and others:
