The Media Research Center’s angry meltdown over the ICE killing of Alex Pretti — and it wasn’t for Pretti’s benefit — continued in a Jan. 30 post by Tom Olohan:
Two of the most powerful AI chatbots went out of their way to preserve the left’s good Samaritan propaganda following the shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, whom President Donald Trump labeled a violent anti-ICE “agitator.”
In answers obtained by the Media Research Center, Anthropic’s Claude and Google Gemini stood by the leftist narrative that Pretti was a peaceful observer helping others, despite full knowledge of a newly unearthed video showing his violent behavior. Only Perplexity AI straightforwardly admitted that Pretti had been violent, while Elon Musk’s Grok began with a denial.
[…]Pretti, who was armed, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents on Jan. 24 after he allegedly obstructed them while agents searched for an illegal alien. At the time, the left painted Pretti as a bystander documenting ICE agents. Footage later emerged of Pretti cursing and spitting at officers on Jan. 13 before kicking their taillight until he destroyed it. Following this destruction of federal property, Pretti appears to resist arrest.
Olohan avoided mentioning the fact that the alleged Pretti video took place 11 days before he was shot and killed by ICE agents, during which even Olohan can agree he never exhibited any violent behavior despite having a gun on him (which he had a permit to carry). Instead, Olohan pursued a bizarre bit of whataboutism:
Both Claude and Gemini supported the narrative that Pretti was “directing traffic” on Jan. 24, which is irrelevant to his separate violent behavior on Jan. 13. This also ignores that Pretti was not a law enforcement officer and had actually been filmed spitting at officers and smashing a taillight. As for Jan. 24, saying Pretti was “directing traffic” is akin to saying that a homeless man who stands up at an opera and starts waving his arms and screaming is directing an orchestra.
Pretti was not a homeless man, as Olohan almost surely knows.
NIcholas Fondacaro ranted in his daily hate-watch of “The View”:
Despite repeatedly bragging about how they had to adhere to the journalistic standards of ABC News, The View continued to prove that that distinction meant absolutely nothing. During Friday’s episode, co-host Sunny Hostin spun a tangled web of red yarn as she suggested that President Trump was trying to steal the 2026 elections and Americans’ Social Security Numbers. Additionally, she asserted – without evidence – that the deaths of Minnesota agitators Renee Good and Alex Pretti were part of the plot.
[…]Obviously, it has been a Republican policy position for a long time to make sure voter rolls were free of people who shouldn’t be on them; i.e. the dead, illegal immigrants, est.[sic]
Fondacaro didn’t disprove the theory, however.
Alex Christy played comedy cop in a Jan. 31 post:
HBO’s Bill Maher’s habit of reducing a chaotic scene to one photograph continued on Friday’s episode of Real Time, where he compared a photograph of the Alex Pretti shooting to The Last Jew in Vinnitsa photograph during the Holocaust. Joining Maher at the table was MS NOW host Joe Scarborough, who, in other Minneapolis news, declared former CNN host Don Lemon’s arrest was meant “to scare other journalists.”
Maher recalled last week’s show when he declared, “That’s why I showed this picture last week. We can show it again. Executions in the streets. This reminded me of the one from Vietnam in 1968 that changed hearts and minds. This week there’s another one. We had a second shooting that looks just like this. That’s what people are seeing. Pictures worth a thousand words. That did not happen under Obama.”
It’s ironic that Maher thinks pictures are “worth a thousand words” because when he compared Renee Good to the Viet Cong prisoner in the Saigon Execution photograph, he omitted that the man who took that photo acknowledged that photos, and his in particular, are incapable of telling the whole story. Now, Maher is comparing a frantic situation involving a man with a gun that is currently under investigation to a Jewish man being shot in the back of the head by the Nazis during the Holocaust in front of a mass grave full of people who had already been executed.
Clay Waters complained that peopel were motivated to protest after Pretti’s killing in a Feb. 2 post:
Monday’s front-page New York Times “news analysis,” “Pretti’s Killing Burst a Dam — A Victim Who Inspired What Others Had Not,” was a story of the triumph of individual decency over government thuggery – in the distorted view of the Times, anyway.
The online headline deck called Alex Pretti’s shooting death after a struggle with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers a “National Tipping Point.” This is how the Times wields power — we’ll decide the Tipping Points!
The front-page “news analyzer” is Kurt Streeter, “who writes about identity in America — racial, political, religious, gender and more.” That’s a better fit for Streeter’s liberal activism than his previous “Sports of the Times” perch, from which Streeter shoehorned in his personal politics at every opportunity into stories at every opportunity. As the screenshot quote shows, he loves (liberal) activist athletes.
[…]Suddenly Pretti was being compared to Rosa Parks (and, um, George Floyd).
Tim Graham served up his own rant in his Feb. 6 column:
Pollsters don’t ask if the actions of ICE protesters have “gone too far.” The media have soft-pedaled violent extremists in the streets, who are painted as passionate heroes, just as Black Lives Matters were boosted for their “racial reckoning” in the George Floyd riots of 2020. James Freeman at The Wall Street Journal asked the rhetorical question: “Who Watches the ‘ICE Watchers’?”
National media outlets have implied that these protesters – including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot by federal agents as they interfered and threatened law-enforcement activities – were somehow not radical activists, when their tactics were clearly radical.
Graham apparently finds nothing “radical” in ICE’s heavy-handed tactics, including killing Good and Pretti, both American citizens.