Creating Gray: The Newspeak Era

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor."

— The Ten Commandments

This is the fourth entry in the Gray trilogy. In this installment, I examine how lies and distractions blur the lines between black and white. Few recent moments illustrate this better than the government’s response to the killing of Alex Pretti.

Alex Pretti's body was barely cold when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the results of the government's investigation into his death. After what amounted to only minutes of review, Noem confidently stated that the victim was a "domestic terrorist." In a social media post, her department stated that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” These statements implicitly framed the shooting as preventive, suggesting that by killing him, the masked government agents had saved lives.

As the government’s narrative came into focus, it became clear that it rested on Noem’s accusation that Pretti was “brandishing” a gun when he “approached” the federal agents. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller referred to the intensive care nurse as “an assassin [who] tried to murder federal agents,” a characterization amplified by Vice President J.D. Vance. The shots that killed Pretti were officially declared to be “defensive.”

Republicans reinforced that framing by presenting firearms at protests as inherently threatening. As stated by the president, when attending a protest, “You can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You can’t do that.” Trump referred to the gun and ammunition he claimed Pretti carried as “a lot of bad stuff.” FBI Director Kash Patel stated that “you cannot bring a firearm” to a protest. In support of her assertion that the dead man was a “domestic terrorist,” Noem stated that she did not “know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.”

This has not always been the Republican talking point. In 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse brandished his gun at a protest following the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake. He used that gun to kill two unarmed people. Trump has called Rittenhouse the “poster boy” for the right to self-defense and hosted the gun-toting protester at Mar-a-Lago. He maintains that the criminal case against him for the shootings was “prosecutorial misconduct.”

Video evidence from the scene in the moments before Pretti’s killing tells a very different story, one far more favorable to him than what happened with Rittenhouse, a man still celebrated as a hero by many MAGA supporters. It also differs substantially from the narrative propagated by the Trump administration, where language is less a tool for truth than for manufacturing a desired reality.

While Noem and other officials told a story in which Pretti approached the federal agents who shot him, video from the scene shows that he was instead drawn into their actions: an agent pushed a woman into his vicinity, and she grabbed him as she fell into him. The same agent then shoved another woman to the ground, and Pretti approached her to help. At the time he was tackled by multiple agents, he was not even facing them, a detail that somehow vanished in the administration’s Newspeak‑infused retelling.

Most importantly, Pretti was not brandishing a gun, but a weapon far more dangerous to a militarized force hiding behind masks—a cellphone camera. This is clearly what the victim had in his hand throughout the encounter. While a threat to their ability to avoid accountability for their actions, it did not put their lives in physical danger or justify the use of deadly force.

As a licensed gun owner, Pretti did have a gun on him at the time of the confrontation, but he never attempted to take it out of its holster. This is confirmed by several videos shot from different angles. In fact, just before the shooting, an agent can be seen taking the gun from Pretti’s waist and turning to walk away from the scene, yet another detail missing from the official narrative.

With the administration’s narrative in disarray, supporters of the President took on the task of running information interference. Continuing Charlie Kirk’s debunked rhetoric that trans people are somehow prone to violence, MAGA Nation circulated pictures said to be of Pretti, but were in fact taken from someone else’s Instagram account, a detail that did nothing to slow their spread. It was also widely claimed that he had been fired from his job as a Department of Veterans Affairs ICU nurse for inappropriate behavior. This, too, was false; at the time of his death, he was fully employed and held an active, unrestricted nursing license with no disciplinary actions or marks of misconduct.

In another attempt to discredit a man shot for exercising his First Amendment right to protest the actions of his government, Donald Trump Jr. circulated a video taken eleven days before his shooting. This clearly showed an angered Pretti kicking in the taillight of a vehicle carrying Border Patrol agents.

The video was not the gotcha moment the President’s son clearly hoped it would be. First, the agents’ violent reaction to this act reinforces the suspicions of many that they are an undisciplined force operating outside the law's boundaries. Then there is the fact that Pretti was not criminally charged for this act. Finally, it has no bearing whatsoever on his shooting, unless one wants to argue that the Border Patrol agents involved in his killing recognized him from the previous event and were out to exact revenge.

In the novel 1984, the ultimate goal of Newspeak is to make “all other modes of thought impossible.” Its implementation by Trump and his administration has been notably successful in training his base to believe that questioning his actions is a form of treason. Fortunately, this failed attempt to control the narrative shows that it is largely ineffective on those outside the MAGA universe. This is due to the success of a visionary who once ran a Super Bowl ad predicting his product would smash 1984-style conformity. Little did Steve Jobs know that the device he had not yet imagined would become the most effective tool against the dystopian society Orwell warned about. The only thing Newspeak cannot fully erase is the evidence captured on cell phones by ordinary people unwilling to bear false witness.

In the end, MAGA Republicans can rewrite the script, but they cannot erase the footage.