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Video contradicts Trump administration account of Minneapolis killing of Alex Pretti
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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United States | News & Politics
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I know this person can't respond but I want to make an important point for the people reading this.
You absolutely are saying it's right. You say that ICE was harassing a woman because they felt it was necessary, with no interrogation of what that actually means. As if ICE can only react rationally to what they perceive as threats, as if ICE can soberly and rationally perceive threats. Then you frame the shooting as an almost mechanical consequence, like that of a ball rolling down hill due to physical forces, of state power interacting with perceived hostility. Again this is without critical thought of what that truly means and assumes the state is just a rational actor abiding by some rational law, of which the victims failed to account. You're essentially saying it's like standing in front a freight train running at full speed. The nascent law of the universe says that the human sized object will be obliterated if they don't respect the kinetic energy of the multi-ton behemoth. Therefore it's kinda their fault for not stepping out of the way. Painting these human actions as some natural system of mechanics is endorsing it as the rule of nature. You are saying it's right because to go against it is to fight against the inevitability of nature.
None of this was inevitable. It's not the result of natural laws. It's not a Rube Goldberg machine that is impossible to stop once it's in motion. It is an intentional, manufactured outcome. It's an intentional decision by the leaders of the state to not intervene in protecting its citizens. It's an intentional decision by the leaders of the federal state to point untrained, highly ideological murderers at the citizenry to make a political statement. It is an intentional, multi-generational effort to make sure citizens are as defenseless as possible with the least amount of oversight or input into the state. These things culminate in yesterday's events. It is nothing to do with the individual decisions of Alex or the person he was defending. To frame it like their individual decisions is just as much a cause as the historical confluence of class struggle is morally repugnant and lacks any intellectual merit.
This comment is extremely well said and gets at something very deep and important. Thank you for saying it so well and I hope more eyes read it. In every case I've seen of fascist sympathizers (aka fascists who aren't wearing boots yet) justifying the crimes of ICE, or regular cops, or whatever bourgeois institution murdering workers, they frame it in a way that the perpetrators of these crimes are a simple force of nature, a physical law, exactly like you said, rather than the outcomes of those cop's choices, just as arbitrary if not more so as the choices made by their victims. They'll say "that person made the CHOICE to challenge the cops/ICE/institutional power, and that choice resulted in an expected outcome, their death," blaming the victim. And they'll call it "logic" like this fucking bootlicking loser who is now banned. But it's never framed the other way around. They'll never frame it as the result of the choices made by ICE/cops, where the response to their violence and oppression is the natural force, even though it's just as valid of a framework. There are fascists with institutional authority who are making arbitrary decisions about who they want to murder, whether it was a planned out operation, or a choice made in the moment when they executed some "uppity" civilian. Of course there are going to be people who challenge them, it is a natural consequence (like a physical law) resulting from the pressure created by the choice fascists have made to oppress people. There will be those who resist, inevitably, and there will be those who are no threat but get murdered anyway - by definition a natural consequence of fascists with power. The bootlicking fascist-sympathizing logic-enjoyers want to make everything that happens some deterministic series of events (your reference to a Rube Golberg Machine being the chef's kiss perfect analogy) but they'll sob and cry foul the second one of those institutional fascists gets the inevitable natural consequence of what's coming to them. Once that third law of motion kicks in they're going to forget all about "natural consequences."