The dismaying response to a new Alex Pretti video

Last Wednesday, a video surfaced of Alex Pretti kicking out the taillight of an ICE vehicle, 11 days before Border Patrol agents shot him to death.

Right-wing influencers quickly cast the incident as somehow exonerating the 37-year-old’s killers. In Megyn Kelly’s telling, the footage proved that the anti-ICE protester “had been victimizing” Border Patrol — not the other way around — and advised “illegal-loving Leftists” to “find another poster boy.” President Donald Trump, for his part, declared Pretti an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist” whose “stock has gone way down.”

Of course, Pretti’s prior conduct has no actual bearing on the legitimacy of his killing. In the United States, the punishment for kicking a government SUV is not summary execution. The reason why it was wrong for Border Patrol to pump bullets into Pretti’s back is not that he had always been respectful toward them and their vehicles, but rather, that he was a human being.

Evidence of Pretti’s past aggression might have been relevant, had his fatal confrontation with Border Patrol not been recorded. In such a circumstance, the public would need to make an educated guess about whether Pretti gave agents cause for using lethal force, based in part on his prior behavior. In our universe, however, we know that he did not. 

Instead of disputing the relevance of Pretti’s first encounter with Border Patrol, however, some liberals chose to deny its very existence. 

In the left-wing corners of social media, it quickly became canon that the new video of Pretti was “AI.” Few liberals of any stature propagated that conspiracy theory. And it made little sense on its face; if the right were going to disseminate deepfakes to discredit Pretti, why would they choose to depict him merely damaging ICE’s property, rather than assaulting its officers? 

Yet narratives no longer require the endorsement of credentialed journalists or elected officials to attain great influence. And claims that the new video of Pretti was a deepfake spread virally on X, Bluesky, and TikTok, even as news outlets confirmed the video’s authenticity. 

The rush to denialism was misguided in an obvious sense: It is never wise to publish strong assertions in the absence of solid evidence, and always embarrassing to do so in error.

But the left’s conspiracy theorizing about Pretti’s past scuffle with federal agents was also reckless in a more profound respect. As the backlash to Pretti’s killing demonstrated, video evidence is one of the few remaining checks on Donald Trump’s mendacity and malfeasance. It is therefore critical for the president’s opponents to preserve the authority of recorded images. By baselessly declaring a politically inconvenient film to be a deepfake, some liberals did the opposite. 

Sects, lies, and videotape

From the moment he entered our politics, Trump has been waging a war of attrition against objective reality.

All politicians play games with the truth. But Trump’s lies have long been exceptional in their volume and audacity. In his first term alone, the president made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements – from petty whoppers about the size of his inauguration crowd to grave fictions about the 2020 election’s legitimacy. 

The scale and shamelessness of Trump’s mendacity is itself an assertion of dominance — a declaration that his word supersedes reality.

The administration tested this proposition last Saturday, when Border Patrol agents shot Alex Pretti to death in Minneapolis. 

Cellphone videos showed the 37-year-old trying to help a fellow protester off the ground, only to be pepper-sprayed, beaten, disarmed — and then shot 10 times — by federal officers. Yet when the administration began putting out statements about the shooting, it didn’t even try to align its narrative with this public evidence. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security told Americans that Pretti had “approached officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun,” in a bid “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement” — claims that anyone with eyes and internet access could recognize as false.

And, for the most part, they did. Outrage about the administration’s lies proved broad and bipartisan. To quell it, the president demoted his Border Patrol commander, the head of DHS confessed that her initial statements about the shooting may have been wrong, and the FBI took control of the investigation into Pretti’s killing. 

These developments may or may not restore Border Patrol’s accountability to the rule of law. But they did reaffirm, at least momentarily, the White House spin room’s subservience to readily verifiable facts. 

The administration might be able to deceive half the country about matters they can’t evaluate with their own senses. One can’t ascertain the legitimacy of the 2020 election or efficacy of vaccines through mere sight and sound. And the institutions that once forged consensus on such subjects — the mainstream media, academia, and the civil service — have steadily bled influence. But the backlash to Pretti’s killing suggested that video could still ground Americans in some semblance of a shared reality — and thus, constrain the president’s capacity to choose his own.

Don’t be “the boy who cried deepfake” 

In this context, it is both irresponsible and counterproductive for liberals to deem politically discomfiting videos AI, if they lack strong evidence for such allegations. 

Of course, artificial intelligence really can generate photorealistic videos. And this does mean that the veracity of recordings can’t be taken for granted. Reporters were right to seek independent confirmation of the latest Pretti video rather than blindly trusting their validity.

But this reality just underscores the importance of not “crying deepfake” erroneously. We are at risk of losing one of the last remaining constraints on partisan self-deception and presidential perfidy. To falsely disparage the authenticity of a recording is therefore to corrode those constraints — and thus, hasten the arrival of a world where videos of state violence have little power.

In the heat of political conflict, it can be hard to resist the pull of propaganda. We want ideologically convenient facts and broadly sympathetic narratives. We crave saintly martyrs and satanic adversaries.

But liberals can’t let such desires override their intellectual honesty. The authoritarian right can spread self-flattering fictions with abandon because it has no investment in sustaining a reality-based politics. Proponents of democracy do not have that luxury. If we can suppress our own propagandistic impulses, however, we will have another advantage; the facts will be on our side.