Increasingly, the Trump administration’s defense of Alex Pretti’s killing has come to center on the fact that he had a gun.

“We respect that Second Amendment right, but those rights don’t count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers,” Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol’s commander-at-large, told CNN over the weekend. “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want,” FBI Director Kash Patel said during a Fox News hit.

This is a weak defense on the merits; we have video evidence that federal agents disarmed Pretti before they killed him. But it’s also a flagrant contradiction of decades of conservative dogma, which insisted that American citizens have an unquestionable right to openly carry weapons, including at protests. 

The Trump administration isn’t just dissembling about Pretti (who was, it should be noted, legally permitted to carry in Minnesota). They are trampling one of the core beliefs of the movement they claim to lead.

Gun rights groups have mostly been critical of this position. “Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms—including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights. These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed, and they must be respected and protected at all times,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus said in a statement.

And it’s clear that the politics of it are terrible for the administration: Prominent Republicans in both Minnesota and Washington have criticized the shooting, and anonymous DHS officials are leaking to CNN and Fox News about how poorly Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have handled themselves. Even Trump himself is now taking a more conciliatory position on the Minneapolis deployment.

So what’s remarkable is the degree to which conservative movement stalwarts have been consistently willing to adopt the Bovino-Patel-Noem line.

Erick Erickson, a witness and prominent conservative commentator — who has said the NRA is too squishy on guns — essentially blaming Pretti’s death on his decision to carry. “I think you, when engaging in obstruction with federal agents, can get hurt. When armed, things can go wrong,” Erickson wrote.

Dana Loesch, one of the most prominent gun rights advocates in America, took a similar line.

“You cannot obstruct a law enforcement operation,” Loesch wrote on her Substack. “This is illegal. It’s made even worse if you do it while you are armed. Pretti made the choice to disrupt a federal operation…which set off a chain reaction of tragic events.”

And far-right podcaster Matt Walsh, who has described gun-toting teen Kyle Rittenhouse as a “hero,” took an even more aggressive stance — castigating those conservatives that dared to criticize the emerging federal line.

“An armed leftist went out with a gun to deliberately interfere with legitimate law enforcement operations, and I’m seeing some ‘conservatives’ on this site claim that it might be ICE’s fault that the guy is now dead. Insane. Some of you people will never fucking learn,” Walsh posted on X.

These figures are not the most devoted MAGA-conspiracy types, akin to Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer. They are ideological conservatives who got in the game well before Trump ran for president, and have stated principles over and above personal devotion to the president and his movement. 

In theory, they’re supposed to stand for conservatism even when it’s inconvenient for the White House.

The fact that they’re not, even when events create such a flagrant contradiction between one of their party and one of their most foundational beliefs, shows just how completely many on the right have sold their souls to power.

The professional conservatives’ hypocrisy

To understand just how hypocritical the right-wing stance is here, it’s important to first reconstruct the conservative take on Pretti’s killing as charitably as possible.

Conservatives believe that the state has a right and obligation to enforce its laws, including by deporting people who are in the United States unlawfully. The federal operation in Minneapolis is designed to enforce said laws, but the local authorities’ refusal to assist ICE’s deportation campaign is (for conservatives) tantamount to lawless rejection of federal authority.

On this view, people like Alex Pretti are also obstructing a legitimate function of government. Federal agents will, at times, have no option but to subdue them by force. It’s perhaps tragic when that produces a fatal incident, but it’s the protestors’ fault that it’s happening in the first place.

“The Left is in a cycle of constant self-radicalization—the resistance to ICE creates the predicate for tragedies that are used to justify ever-more resistance and the demand for the de-facto nullification of federal immigration law in Minneapolis,” writes Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review magazine.

But Lowry and his allies get what’s actually happening in Minneapolis backward. 

It is not activists behaving lawlessly, but rather ICE agents who are indiscriminately arresting and beating Minnesotans while claiming (with the vice president’s explicit permission) that they can go so far as breaking into people’s homes without a judicial warrant.

Such abuses of civil liberties are not necessary for enforcing immigration law. Many DHS officials themselves are critical of the current strategy on pure effectiveness grounds, seeing it as inefficient relative to a national push targeting known criminal migrants. Even Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican’s Republican, has admitted this, saying in the wake of the Pretti shooting that the feds needed to adopt a “more structured” deportation policy that can avoid “all the kinds of problems and fighting in communities that they are experiencing right now.”

But on the level of principle, it’s worth seeing how flagrantly the Erickson-Lowry logic contradicts the right’s long-standing Second Amendment advocacy.

The orthodox conservative movement position is that the Second Amendment exists as a safeguard against tyranny. Well, masked agents of the state beating and even killing Americans on the streets of a major city looks an awful lot like tyranny to many Americans! After the killing of Renee Good, it makes sense — according to traditional conservative theories — for someone like Alex Pretti to carry a weapon while protesting the state and challenging its agents. 

To cite Pretti’s decision to carry as a justification for his killing is to directly betray the entire premise of the conservative movement’s pro-gun stance. And no, it doesn’t make a difference for this point that Pretti supposedly “interfered” with ICE by aiding a woman their officers had attacked. He was, in his judgment, standing up to tyranny — without ever drawing his weapon or threatening an agent. 

If the mere fact that he had a gun during this made his killing defensible to the right, or at least understandable, then their stated principle — that citizens have a right to judge state actions tyrannical, and arm themselves when they fear said tyranny — carries no real weight.

The twilight of the limited government conservative

The only possible recourse for the right here is to argue that Pretti is simply wrong: ICE is not behaving tyrannically, which means that Pretti did not have a legitimate right to arm himself while resisting its operations.

But if that’s the case, then the entire operating logic of the Second Amendment as bulwark against tyranny goes out the window. 

That logic depends on the idea that citizens have not only a right, but a duty to judge when the state becomes tyrannical — and resist accordingly. If the right only extends to people that conservatives judge to be correct on the merits, then they are not endorsing a consistent principle of limited government: They are endorsing a principle of “armed resistance for me, bullets to the chest for thee.”

Of course, it’s nothing new to see conservatives betray their stated limited government principles. 

Over and over again, on issues ranging from tariffs to executive power, conservatives have faced choices between Trump’s position and their own stated belief in the limited role of the state in public life. And over and over again, Republicans and their ideological allies have lined up behind Trump.

But guns are different. For people like Loesch and Erickson, the Second Amendment is one of the fundamental reasons to be a Republican in the first place. Part of what they get out of the deal with Trump is that his judges will endorse far more expansive views of gun rights than those appointed by a Democrat. It’s one of the core principles of their Faustian bargain.

But now, we’re seeing the bill come due. 

A lawful gun owner was killed by agents of the state, after he had been subdued and without ever threatening those agents, and the state is citing the sheer fact of his gun ownership as justification. It’s as clear-cut an example of the state treading on Second Amendment principles as one could imagine — hence why gun rights groups have, to their credit, been critical.

That America’s conservative ideologues are having so much trouble doing the same illustrates just how much partisanship, and a willingness to align oneself with power, has corroded many on the right.

Charlie Kirk, one of America’s leading conservative activists and a close friend of President Donald Trump’s son Don Jr., has been murdered. We do not yet know who did it, or why. We do not know how the Trump administration will respond.

What we do know, however, is that there are good reasons to be afraid. 

When a prominent political figure is assassinated, the very foundations of democracy come under attack. Democratic politics is, at its heart, a system for containing political violence: a system for resolving the inevitable deep disagreements between citizens without anyone resorting to bloodshed. It works when all major factions believe that the others are committed to following the rules of the peaceful political game; when that belief erodes, it breaks down.

In the past, the American democratic consensus has been strong enough to survive assassination attempts. Some, like the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., tested its bonds but didn’t break them. Others, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr., may actually have strengthened them by creating a sense of shared grief and solidarity.

But now the American political system is crumbling, and many of its tools for containing political violence lie shattered. This probably will not be the event to break America, but we have to consider the possibility that it may be.

The democratic compact today is undeniably weak. The two major parties and their supporters increasingly see each other not as partners, but existential threats to one another’s way of life. Political scientists Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe have shown that, while few Americans outright support political murder, a growing fringe in both parties have become open to using violence against their partisan enemies.

Under conditions of extreme polarization, when the guardrails of mutual democratic toleration are blown to bits, it is all too easy to see how things could spiral out of control. Leading right-wing figures are not only already prematurely blaming the attack on “the Democrat party,” but also calling for law enforcement crackdowns on liberals and leftists as a group. If Trump acts on these calls, it would further damage the democratic respect that stands between us and the abyss. Future rounds of political violence would become increasingly more likely. Violent breakdown of the democratic order would loom.

How likely is any of that? I’m not sure.

Think back to when Trump was shot on the campaign trail last summer. Nearly everything that I’ve just said about the fraying of the democratic order was true then, right down to top Trump allies immediately, and without evidence, blaming the left. Yet the assassination attempt did not inspire a wave of attacks, nor did it imperil the democratic process.

Something similar could happen this time around too. There may be neither copycat nor retaliatory attacks, and the Trump administration may not ultimately use this as a justification to crack down on its political enemies. This would fit a historical pattern: As the political scientist Dan Trombly points out, America has long had much lower levels of political violence than you’d expect given the prevalence of guns and deep partisan animosities.

But I also think it’s undeniable that our odds of something going wrong are worse now than they were last year.

This is partly because we’re dealing with an assassination — a horrific murder — rather than a near miss. It’s partly because we do not yet know the shooter’s identity: Had the Trump shooter been clearly politically motivated, 2024 could have gone much worse than it did. 

But it’s also because our democratic decline has progressed considerably in the past year.

It is undeniably true that Trump has undermined the nonpartisan structure of the American state, concentrating power in his own hands — including over law enforcement and the military. Democrats have, as result, become increasingly less confident that the democracy will survive his presidency — that they can trust Republicans to abide by the rules of the game. There has never, January 6 included, been a more dire moment for the modern American republic than the second Trump administration.

So I cannot be confident that things will turn out the way they did last summer. It is possible that they do. Under normal circumstances, I would be confident that they will.

But I cannot be. Our system is too decayed, too shot through with mutual distrust, to count on democratic faith to get us out of this one.

Scientists at several federal agencies are losing access to scientific literature published by Springer Nature, which produces the prestigious journal Nature among many other high-profile titles.

That's according to a report Monday by Nature's news team, which is also published by Springer Nature, but is editorially independent.

According to the news outlet, spokespeople for NASA and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed that agency scientists would no longer have access to Springer Nature journals. A USDA spokesperson said that it "has cancelled all contracts and subscriptions to Springer Nature. The journal [sic] is exorbitantly expensive and is not a good use of taxpayer funds." A government spending database also shows the Department of Energy (DOE) has dropped contracts with the publisher.

Read full article

Comments

The four people at the helm of America's space agency held a town hall meeting with employees Wednesday, fielding questions about downsizing, layoffs, and proposed budget cuts that threaten to undermine NASA's mission and prestige.

Janet Petro, NASA's acting administrator, addressed questions from an auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington. She was joined by Brian Hughes, the agency's chief of staff, a political appointee who was formerly a Florida-based consultant active in city politics and in Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. Two other senior career managers, Vanessa Wyche and Casey Swails, were also on the stage.

They tried to put a positive spin on the situation at NASA. Petro, Wyche, and Swails are civil servants, not Trump loyalists. None of them looked like they wanted to be there. The town hall was not publicized outside of NASA ahead of time, but live video of the event was available—unadvertised—on an obscure NASA streaming website. The video has since been removed.

Read full article

Comments

On June 3, a crowd drove federal agents out of Minneapolis following a raid on a taqueria. On June 4, people confronted US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they carried out raids in Chicago and Grand Rapids. On Friday, June 6, people in Los Angeles responded to an ICE raid, precipitating a full day of clashes that continue today. In the following firsthand report, participants describe how people came together to do their best to prevent federal agents from kidnapping people from their community.

Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has announced that he will send the National Guard into Los Angeles in response. If the situation escalates elsewhere around the country, as well, it is thinkable that we could see a movement that picks up where the George Floyd uprising left off. Arguably, in sweeping up the president of the California chapter of the Service Employees International Union in their attacks on people in Los Angeles, ICE and the various federal agencies that are being reassigned to support them risk making more enemies just as this confrontation is getting underway.

Although the Trump administration has begun by attacking immigrants—both documented and undocumented—this is only the first step in their effort to establish an autocracy. They are targeting immigrants because they believe them to be the most vulnerable target, but their overarching goal is to accustom all of us to passivity in the face of brutal state violence, breaking the basic bonds of solidarity that ought to connect all human beings.

It must be clear to everyone—even the most milquetoast centrists—that the outcome of the conflict that is ramping up now will determine the prospects for every other target Trump has lined up in his sights, from Harvard University to those who simply wish to be able to afford groceries.

Incidentally, if it is possible that you will be in an environment in which chemical weapons are deployed, it is possible to extinguish tear gas canisters—read this short guide. You can find a wealth of similar information about how to stay safe in demonstrations here. To learn about other things you can do to stop ICE, start here.

First Action, High Noon

On social media, the news spread that ICE was raiding several spots in downtown Los Angeles, Highland Park, and MacArthur Park. Agents had begun to raid a building in the flower district when a spontaneous mob trapped them inside. People blocked every side of the building, every single entrance, so the agents couldn’t get out. They had detained a lot of people in the building already and hadn’t expected a swarm of 50-100 Angelenos to trap them.

Apparently, they expected to be able to conduct a visible raid in downtown Los Angeles without a response from the neighborhood. They were wrong. Of the six or more locations that they raided, that one was in the area with the densest population, just blocks from skid row and a few steps from the Piñata district.

A large number of people were at the front entrance blocking ICE from leaving the building. Caught off guard by the crowd, the ICE agents were visibly trying to figure out how to evacuate. Family members of the detained were crying at the doors and the gates, wondering what was going to happen to their loved ones.

The federal government had declared war on Los Angeles.

ICE ordered in an armored truck with three dozen federal riot police and a fleet of vans in tow. The entrance they wanted to come into was the one being blocked by an SEIU sound truck and they began threatening to tow it. SEIU complied and moved their truck, even going so far as to use their sound system to yell “Get on the sidewalk!” at the crowd. Half of the people listened to them and half didn’t, but it was a small enough crowd that that made a significant difference. As a consequence, the armored truck and the vans were able to make it up to the gate.

Federal agents in riot gear began trying to push everyone out. The small group who had refused to leave continued to stand their ground, twisting their little riot shields and mocking them. The agents were visibly rattled by the resilience of this group that had somehow assembled within fifteen minutes. In a desperate push, the FBI agents began to throw tear gas canisters into the crowd. Everyone was screaming at the fascist mercenaries as they tried to push back the line. Amid the confusion, the agents managed to clear a path for the vans to enter through the gate.

The feds put the detained workers into the van and began to drive out. The crowd tried to stop them but the FBI escalated—snatching protesters and shooting pepper balls and rubber bullets at everyone. One of the vans sped up and struck the president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union, injuring him. He was then arrested.

The crowd got more rowdy, lighting fireworks and throwing debris, water bottles, and cabbage at the mercenaries. The FBI responded with a barrage of flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets and more pepper balls.

While that fight continued, someone followed the ICE vans to the Burbank airport, where agents had reportedly claimed that they were bringing a “hockey team.” People have been attempting to track the flight and see where it went since.

The other detainees were taken to the MDC* (Metro Detention Center) which triggered an action to be called for a couple hours later.

MDC is where hundreds of detainees from the raids are still currently being held. It was also the site of the 2017 abolish ICE encampment which lasted for 60 days.

Second Action, 4 pm

People started amassing at the Metropolitan Detention Center. A press conference took place involving Union Del Barrio, the SEIU, and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Peace policing caused fights between the paid activists and the crowd. The activists ended up leaving and the crowd stayed—tagging everything, smashing windows, breaking things, and being ungovernable. Someone had brought a sledgehammer and was breaking the concrete pillars so that people could use the pieces as projectiles to throw at the police. Someone used a swivel chair as a barricade; another person showed up in a dinosaur suit.

The feds were scrambling, throwing everything they could back at the crowd. People were tear-gassed several times, but were neutralizing the effect by putting ice and water on the canisters as well as traffic cones like they did in Chile. Some people were also throwing the canisters back to the Department of Homeland Security agents that were responsible for them. The crowd was extremely lively and brave. Some right-wing internet streamers tried to get into the area, but they were spotted and promptly dealt with.

DHS couldn’t control the situation. The feds were overwhelmed and begged the Los Angeles Police Department to come save them. Despite LA mayor Karen Bass saying she was “appalled” about the presence of ICE in Los Angeles, the LAPD still showed up in large numbers. A low-flying helicopter was telling people that they would be arrested and issuing dispersal orders as LAPD pushed people away from the building over the next four to five hours. Everyone left covered in pepper ball dust and tear gas.

Third Action, 10 pm

A message circulated to the effect that ICE was spotted staging for a raid in Chinatown. (Later, it turned out that they were planning to hold that parking lot for a press conference for Thomas Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar,” at 7 am the following morning—a press conference that was apparently cancelled.)

Hundreds of people started trickling in, strobing flashlights in the eyes of the federal agents and yelling chants and insults at the riot line.

Even though people had been at actions all day, the energy was high, attracting passersby and random Dodgers fans to join in. The crowd took the street and blocked the entrances once again as things started getting rowdy. This time, LAPD wasn’t present, so the federal agents prepared to try to push the people out themselves.

Participants in the crowd tagged the armored ICE vehicle and begin jumping up and down on it while an LRAD was blaring. Someone tagged “FUCK ICE” and spray painted the cameras on a Waymo self-driving car. No organizations were present except a strong contingent from the Los Angeles Tenants Union, who were present for every action in the course of the day.

The federal agents decided that the parking lot was too difficult to hold and began to retreat. The crowd seized the opportunity to block them off, throwing fireworks and rocks, bottles, and, somehow, ceramic plates. The FBI threw a few flash-bang grenades and tear gas canisters in response, but the spirits of those standing up to them remained high.

People began to smash the windows on the feds’ cars. At that point, ICE decided to leave, and a celebration began in the street. More fireworks were set off in a jubilant atmosphere. People partied momentarily before drifting home, heartened by a small victory after a horrifying and dehumanizing day in the so-called United States.

You might suspect that a one-line bill about Bigfoot that bears the number "666" is a joke, but AB-666 is apparently a serious offering from California Assemblymember Chris Rogers. Rogers represents a California district known for its Bigfoot sightings (or "sightings," depending on your persuasion—many of these have been faked), and he wants to make Bigfoot the "official cryptid" of the state.

His bill notes that California already has many official symbols, including the golden poppy (official flower), the California redwood (official tree), the word "Eureka" (official motto), the red-legged frog (official amphibian), the grizzly bear (official animal), swing dancing (official dance), and the saber-toothed cat (official fossil). The state has so many of these that there are separate categories for freshwater fish (golden trout) and marine fish (garibaldi). So why not, Rogers wants to know, "designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid"?

That's... pretty much the bill, which was introduced this week and already has Bigfoot advocates excited. SFGate talked to Matt Moneymaker, who it describes as "a longtime Bigfoot researcher and former star of the Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot," about the bill. Moneymaker loves it, noting that he has personally “had a face-to-face encounter one time, after which I was absolutely sure they existed because I had one about 20 feet in front of me, growling at me.”

Read full article

Comments