1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

Yesterday, on a street in Minneapolis, at least seven federal agents tackled and then shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse for the local VA hospital. Video from the scene shows Pretti directing traffic on a street out of an area with agents around. Then trying to help another person get up after she had been pushed to the ground by the agents. The agents then surround Pretti and shoot pepper spray into his face, then pull him to the ground from behind and hit him as he appears to be trying to keep his head off the ground. An agent appears to take a gun out of Pretti’s waistband during the struggle, then turns and leaves with it. A shot then stops Pretti’s movements, appearing to kill him, before nine more shots ring out, apparently as agents continued to fire into his body. It looked like an execution. After he was dead, the agents walked away, making no effort to preserve the crime scene. Administration officials didn’t even pretend to wait for more information before jumping straight to “the opponent of the state deserved it.” DHS says they will investigate, not the FBI. And they are deliberately blocking Minnesota law enforcement investigation. But there are enough witness videos to show we the people everything we need to know. The DHS are proven liars. Not to be trusted. And all the Steven Miller et al rants to the contrary will never change that. Particularly because in the wake of Pretti’s shooting, AG Bondi wrote to Minnesota governor Tim Walz to suggest he could “bring back law and order to Minnesota” if he handed over the state’s voter rolls to the DOJ. She explicitly tied the Trump administration’s violence in the state to its determination to get its hands on voters’ personal data before the 2026 election. What we are watching is a federal militia waging war against a citizenry that does not want to subjugated by bootjacks. Americans who want their freedoms, guaranteed under our Constitution, back. The administration is attempting to do just what it has…create a civil uprising that they hope to kill in its crib with even more violence to come. Look around. Trump is building something new on old principles. He is showing us in real time what 21st-century American fascism looks like. But he is mistaken. Trump is a fascist president. But that does not mean that America is a fascist country. The courts, the states, and the media remain independent of him, and his efforts to browbeat them will fail. He has not succeeded in molding public opinion, except against himself. He and his party may defy the Constitution, but they cannot rewrite it. So the United States, once the world’s exemplary liberal democracy, is now a hybrid state combining a fascist leader and a liberal Constitution. As one on-line observer noted… “Republicans could stop this at any time they wanted to. All it would take to end the murder of American citizens by an untrained government goon squad is 16 Republicans in Congress voting with Dem[ocrat]s to defund ICE (or 23 to impeach and remove Trump—3 in House & 20 in Senate). That’s it. 23 Americans can vote for the public and end all of this.” History is going to work this out eventually. Will you be one of the brave 23? Or just another cog in a government that keeps killing its citizens?