The Free Press

When footage surfaced on Saturday of a border patrol agent shooting and killing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, top Trump administration officials wasted no time characterizing what happened. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Pretti “a domestic terrorist” who had tried to “assassinate federal law enforcement.” Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said that he “was there to perpetuate violence.” The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) official X account suggested Pretti was there to “massacre law enforcement.”

Their supercharged comments quickly seemed at odds with videos of the attack, including those that showed Pretti, 37, was on the ground and surrounded by agents when he was shot. The comments also frustrated many of the people usually supportive of the administration’s deportation strategy. Republicans and former DHS officials said that the comments have only fueled distrust of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

“As senior management at HSI, I was trained that when a critical incident happens, you don’t pin yourself into one position or the other,” Oscar Hagelsieb, a former assistant special agent in charge for two decades at Homeland Security Investigations, a law enforcement agency that is part of DHS, told me. “This is Public Relations 101. What you say is, ‘We are going to let the investigation play out. We’re going to see where the evidence leads.’ ”

This is adapted from a January 19 address to the Holocaust Education Trust in London.

Holocaust Memorial Day is a fitting moment to talk about the use and abuse of history, the distortion and inversion of the Holocaust, and the devaluing of the language we use to fight racism and antisemitism. That language has become formulaic and meaningless and it needs to be updated.

The Holocaust, the biggest industrialized slaughter in the history of the world, is and always will be a vital historical event to understand human life and fate, to teach lessons and herald warnings about past and future. The way we see it also reflects our present. The shock of the Shoah and World War II helped inspire the very definition of crimes against humanity, the taboo against antisemitism, and the structure of the West and its world order. Yet now all these achievements are in peril.

When I think about the distortion of history, I remember when I was updating my history of Jerusalem and a friend rang me and said she had an “indispensable history of the Jewish people that you have to read.” She sent it over, all wrapped up. When I opened it, I was surprised to find it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic forgery created by the czar’s secret police. History matters, but more than ever, we need to assert that it be based on real events.

Desperately dissecting the fatal videos, frame by frozen frame, we hope the horrible images will deliver the legal answer we want. Alex Pretti, disarmed and helpless, was murdered in cold blood by a modern-day Gestapo. Or: Alex Pretti assaulted federal officers, resisted arrest, then reached for a firearm before he was justifiably shot in self-defense.

But the videos are not going to give the country the answers it needs. Even fair and thorough investigations, which should follow, won’t do so. Whether the law inculpates or exonerates the U.S. border patrol officers who killed Pretti in a chaotic confrontation on Saturday—and I’ll walk through the arguments below—at this point that’s not what matters.

The administration is running headlong toward a Kent State moment.

I was born in East Germany in 1964 and grew up behind the Iron Curtain. For most of my life, Holocaust survivors were living reminders of something incomprehensible, something that, out of shame, was rarely talked about in the country of my birth. The name of the acclaimed writer Elie Wiesel, for instance, evoked the horrific images of Auschwitz that invariably force me to avert my eyes.

But then I moved to America—and Elie Wiesel became my patient.

My home, Oranienburg, a sleepy town just north of Berlin, has found only dismal fame as the home of the former concentration camp Sachsenhausen. Like most students in East Germany, I was a member of the Young Pioneers, a youth organization whose stated mission was to cultivate a generation of “defenders” of socialism. Aside from flag ceremonies and field trips, the curriculum called for students to visit the concentration camp, which was only a short distance from our school. What I saw there has burned itself into my memory: the iron gate emblazoned with the familiar slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (“work sets you free”), barracks overcrowded with wooden bunks and straw sacks, execution installations, and crematoria. All of it enclosed by barbed wire and electric fences.

During the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1999, I found myself in a jungle town called Kenema as locals got word that a rebel army was headed their way. The Revolutionary United Front, as the rebels called themselves, was infamous for mass rape, execution, and torture, and the people of Kenema were understandably terrified. I watched women pour into the streets and start screaming at the men to go out and defend them. Then they grabbed their children and took shelter as best they could. The men rounded up whatever weapons they could find—rusty shotguns and AKs, old pistols, a colonial-era saber—and rushed out of town to meet their fate. They managed to defeat the rebels, and an unspeakable tragedy was averted.

The recent and very American idea that the sexes are the same or at least interchangeable was clearly not true for the people of Kenema in the early summer of 1999. Whatever one might be tempted to say about sex and gender from the safety of our powerful country, the role the women of Kenema chose for themselves in those terrible moments was to take care of their children. And the role they gave to their husbands was to fight. Every society in the world uses men for defense because they are stronger and faster and can be killed in huge numbers without it mattering very much. Lose half the men in a tribe and the other half will repopulate the group within a generation; lose half the women, and the tribe will never recover. Men make perfect cannon fodder, in other words. Had the women of Kenema chosen to defend the town and told the men to flee with the children, it could have ended catastrophically for both.

On December 18, Margaret Marsilla called her son to say she had given up on trying to stop a doctor from killing him. “I already stopped you once,” she said. “I’m not going to do it again. I don’t want you to keep hating me, so I’m not going to come there.”

Marsilla had just learned that her 26-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was approved for “medical assistance in dying” (MAID), Canada’s government-run assisted-suicide regime. He was blind, struggling with complications from type 1 diabetes, and living in public housing in Toronto. He also suffered from depression.

Vafaeian was not terminally ill—and did not need to be to end his own life. In Canada, MAID patients must show only that they have a condition that is “intolerable” and cannot “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.” These people often feel beset by enduring illness, unresolved social hardship, and other afflictions, all of which blur the line between medical suffering and the hardships of daily life itself.

Have you been following the public saga of the schism in the Beckham family? (If you have tried not to, I understand and apologize for raising it to your consciousness.) Brooklyn, the 26-year-old son of David and Victoria Beckham—the famous footballer and pop star, respectively—has cut ties with his parents. In a statement on social media last week, the young man explained his decision, citing interference in his marriage and an upbringing that was “performative” and “inauthentic.” “I do not want to reconcile with my family,” he said.

This very public estrangement has gotten international attention. You might think that’s because it’s so outlandish, like the O.J. Simpson murder case. But that isn’t it at all. Family estrangement is utterly commonplace. In fact, all the Beckham family spectacle shows us is that the rich and famous are as prone to this tragedy as the rest of us. That’s what makes it so compelling.

It’s Monday, January 26. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Mike Solana talks to the superrich Californians fleeing the Golden State. Joe Nocera on the problem with Donald Trump’s credit-card plan. The shaky foundations of sanctuary cities. Rabbi David Wolpe on Conversations with Coleman. And much more.

But first: The killing of Alex Pretti.

On Saturday morning, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by federal officers in Minneapolis. It was the second such incident in the city this month, and soon afterward, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem gave a press conference to explain what happened.

Noem said Pretti had been “brandishing” his weapon and suggested he was a “domestic terrorist.” According to a post on the DHS’s X account, Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called the dead man an “assassin.”

Then the eyewitness videos came out—and told a very different story.

Our editorial today is on the information war that followed the killing of Alex Pretti, and the way in which the Trump administration is taking the American people for fools.

—The Editors

• The winter storm that hit more than half the U.S. population over the weekend has killed two people in Louisiana and six in New York City. Ahead of the storm, New York governor Kathy Hochul refused federal assistance, writing that “the fastest way to help is for ICE to back off.”

• In recordings obtained by Axios, Texas senator Ted Cruz torched President Trump’s tariff policy during private donor meetings, warning that the tariffs would cost Republicans the midterm elections. Cruz also portrayed Vice President J.D. Vance as a “protégé” of Tucker Carlson and accused Vance of pushing Carlson’s anti-interventionist foreign policy. (Read Peter Savodnik’s profile of Cruz here.)

• China placed Zhang Youxia, its highest-ranking military official below President Xi Jinping, under investigation for corruption and undermining Xi’s authority. The move is the latest in a series of military purges by Xi, and observers said it suggests that he wants to consolidate power and ensure complete loyalty.

• President Trump said the U.S. used a new secret weapon he calls “The Discombobulator” to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Trump said the weapon “made [enemy] equipment not work,” adding that “they had Russian and Chinese rockets, and they never got one off.”

• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats would not vote for any spending bill that funds the Department of Homeland Security after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this weekend. Funding for more than three-quarters of the federal discretionary budget is set to expire on Friday.

• President Trump said he would impose a 100 percent tariff on Canada if Prime Minister Mark Carney completes a trade deal with China. (A week ago, Trump said the deal would be “a good thing.”) Trump wrote on Truth Social: “If Governor Carney thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken.”

• A majority of Washington’s top lobbying firms reported revenue growth of at least 10 percent last year compared to 2024. Lobbyists say President Trump’s aggressive use of executive power and wide-ranging policy upheavals have supercharged K Street’s business, especially for firms with close administration ties.

• The New England Patriots will face the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl in San Francisco in two weeks’ time. The Patriots’ AFC championship is the first since Tom Brady led them to a win in 2018. The Seahawks beat the Los Angeles Rams to return to the Super Bowl for the first time since 2015.

Rabbi David Wolpe has spent his career thinking seriously about belief. He debated the New Atheists at the height of their influence, led one of the largest synagogues in the country, taught at Harvard Divinity School, and has written widely about theology in the modern age. Along the way, Newsweek once named him the most influential rabbi in America, a…

On Saturday morning, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was killed by a border patrol officer in Minneapolis. Soon after the incident, the second killing by a federal agent in the city this month, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem offered her account of what happened.

She said on Saturday afternoon that Pretti was “brandishing” his firearm and that he “impeded the law enforcement officers and attacked them.” Noem added, “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots.”

That’s Noem’s story and she appears to be sticking to it. The problem for her and the president she serves is that there are multiple videos of the attack that show something different.