Letting Trump Trolls Smear Alex Pretti as ‘Violent Psychopath’ Is Not ‘Debate’ — It is Disgusting

Letting bad-faith Trump trolls (but I repeat myself — twice) smear slain protester Alex Pretti as a “violent psychopath” in the name of “debate” is a line that responsible news organizations should not cross.

Allow me to set the table here. I’m talking about the newly resurfaced viral video that desperate MAGA flying monkeys have seized on to try and stanch the bleeding from what America saw last Saturday.

Here’s a reminder — nearly seven minutes of Alex Pretti peacefully documenting the violent occupation of his city by Trump deportation agents, then coming to the aid of a woman being violently attacked by those agents, then being assaulted by those agents, then being shot dead in a hail of bullets after one of those agents pulled his legally-registered firearm from his waistband and threw it away:

Trump officials rushed to make outlandish claims about Pretti, falsely labeling him an “assassin” intent on “massacring” feds. Almost everything they said about the incident turned out to be naked, vicious, and malicious lies.

By midweek, President Donald Trump and his administration were reeling because people have eyes and ears. Trump replaced Border Patrol chief and Angry Lollipop Guild president Greg Bovino on the ground with Border Czar Tom Homan. Drudge, Maddow, and Mediaite were declaring Trump’s “retreat.”

Then along came a video from 11 days before the shooting that shows a previous incident with Pretti and Trump’s goons.

Pro-Trump trolls scurried to declare some kind of vindication in a cope that would be laughable if it did not involve defaming a man who is not around to defend himself because he was gunned down by in-person MAGA goons.

The News Movement, the outlet that shot the video, says they showed up when they were tipped off that ICE was blocking a roadway.

The video starts out fun, with Pretti calling ICE “F**king trash!” and spitting on an SUV after a masked agent got out and said something that’s not audible.

It’s possible — possible, mind you — that the agent was telling Pretti “Hey man, we’re really hard up for recruits. If you can kick out my tail light while we’re moving, you are hired!”

If so, Pretti promptly complied, and with a physical prowess that ICE recruits can only aspire to. The deportation agents then swarm Pretti and tackle him while other agents fire less-than-lethal munitions into the crowd.

Yet somehow, the MAGA crowd tried to label the guy who broke a tail light as a “violent psychopath,” not the guys who beat him and fired into a crowd. On its own, the video is plainly an indictment of the Trump immigration assault. There’s no parity between the skillfully-executed vandalism and the assault on liberty that provoked it and followed it.

Is the video news? Of course it is. Does it have an iota of a good got-damn to do with the killing that occurred eleven days later? F*ck no!

Except in this way: it is a further damnation of the agents who killed Pretti because the agents whose tail light he kicked out managed not to kill him even though the new video shows he had his gun with him. The News Movement video would make a great exhibit if Pretti’s killers ever go on trial.

So I hope, dear reader, that you understand I find all of these Trump-loving goons revolting in ways that defy the limits of descriptive language. I hope you understand that I’m not trying to pick on CNN here.

I write this precisely because unlike other outlets that are hopelessly in thrall to the Trump base, CNN can do better and hopefully will do better. And I write this for every outlet that does this sh*t or something similar.

On Wednesday’s edition of CNN NewsNight, anchor Abby Phillip began a discussion of this new video by citing some of the bad-faith MAGA takes, including one calling Pretti a “violent agitator and a psychopath.”

Phillip then made what would have been the perfect statement had it not been phrased in the form of a question.

“I think the question, though, in response to that is, does that have any bearing on what happened to him 11 days later?” she asked.

That led to an exchange in which Joe Borelli — the MAGA panelist who fills in when Scott Jennings is getting his smirk washed and waxed — smears Pretti, and Neera Tanden swoops in to condemn Borelli:

JOE BORELLI: Well, let’s be clear. Benny Johnson’s right. He’s a violent psychopath who was hell bent on attacking federal law enforcement. We just saw that on video. I mean, he clearly spit at the law enforcement officer. He clearly was doing some sort of jujitsu kicks against the vehicle, which, you know, resulted in the vehicle being smashed and broken.

And I think I just want to point out as someone who does believe in the Second Amendment, and there was so much made about his firearm, responsible gun owners in the concealed carry community, in the gun community, no one who’s a responsible gun owner provokes and escalates a fight. That is rule number one, if you are going to carry a firearm, is that you automatically lose every fight, you walk away, you don’t escalate situations, unless not with law enforcement or with anyone else. He is someone who acted wildly irresponsible.

Now, fast forward 11 days, he did not, same video, the same concept. The video shows he did not pull a weapon at the time he was shot. So, I do, you know, commend DHS for putting these officers on modified duty. I think there needs to be an investigation of what happened. You’re not supposed to get shot by police, right? That’s not supposed to happen. And, clearly, there was some incident or some trigger, some cause that caused these officers to fire and there should be an investigation.

But the media narrative about this guy, that he was the second coming of the Lord and he was just this peaceful guy, that’s disproven by that video, and Benny Johnson’s right.

NEERA TANDEN: I think it’s outrageous, honestly, that you just called this man a psychopath. You don’t know what happened before this incident. We saw him kicking a tail light. The officers respond by looking like they’re — they do beat kind of the crap out of him onto the ground. And then what happens eight days later is completely separate from what happens here.

So, I think, honestly, with all due respect, calling this man who was killed over the weekend a psychopath just based on that is really, I just think, outrageous and wrong.

Now, I am an outlier on my side in that I generally like the genre of news show that features Trump-lovers getting their asses handed to them. Many of my contemporaries don’t feel the same, don’t see the value in it.

In fact, the thing I appreciate about Abby Phillip and her show is that every once in a while, it manages what a lot of shows miss. Phillip or one of her panelists will call out the bad faith on display. It’s an important facet that gets obscured by the “let’s talk with people who disagree” BS — these people don’t actually believe what they’re saying.

That asymmetry puts the truth at a distinct disadvantage. People of good faith are forced to fight unhinged lies with measured statements and reasonable-sounding concessions and undeserved courtesies like “With all due respect.”

Those are the unfortunately stacked rules, but I still think that airing out these terrible arguments is generally a worthy project.

But there needs to be a line. Even if you have Neera Tanden or someone else standing by, letting someone smear a dead man on your air is indecent. That’s where the line needs to be drawn.

In the end, the line between responsible journalism and complicit amplification of smears is not subtle — it is glaring, and crossing it needs to be met with more than instant repudiation. It needs to be kicked out like a goon squad tail light.

 

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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