I Made the Mistake of Reading the Comments

I live in southern Arizona. There was a shooting here this morning by Border Patrol. Local. Immediate. 

I clicked on a news article trying to understand what happened — and then I made the mistake of reading the comments.

It didn’t take long before reality dissolved completely.

People were saying ICE makes them feel safer. Not cautiously. Not with qualifiers. With chest-out confidence. From there, the conversation slid — predictably, inevitably — into a Fox News–approved rerun of the Alex Pretti shooting.

Not because it was relevant.

Not because it clarified anything about what happened here.

But because it’s now a talisman. A loyalty test. A script.

One guy even posted the photo of Pretti being disarmed and claimed the agent walking away with the gun was actually Pretti approaching ICE with his weapon drawn.

That’s not an interpretation. That’s a complete inversion of what’s visible to the human eye.

This is how it works now:

One angle. One story. Nothing else allowed.

How can you watch video of a man on his knees, shot from behind by someone standing over him, and not see an execution?

And yet — there it was. Dozens of people insisting not only that it was justified, but that questioning it was proof of lack of respect for law enforcement, or not enough love for your country, or leftist brainwashing.

Then came the smear carousel.

I saw a post floating around Twitter — a photo supposedly of Alex Pretti dressed in a way that could have been anybody at a Pride parade — captioned with something like: “The left won’t want you to see THIS about their new poster boy.”

What the actual fuck?!?

I don’t know if Pretti was gay.

I don’t know if he ever went to a Pride parade, or ever dressed like he did.

I don’t know if that photo was even him — or real.

And I don’t care.

Unless ICE is just a misspelling of ISIS, none of that should matter. Clothing isn’t evidence. Sexuality isn’t a death sentence. Identity is not justification for state violence.

And yet here we are, watching people scramble for any detail — real or fabricated — that might make murder feel comfortable. Anything that might let them keep hold of the fiction that they’re the good guys in all this.

This wasn’t even an article about Pretti.

This was about a shooting here.

Today.

In Arizona.

And still, the same talking points. The same defenses. The same dead-eyed insistence that brutality is order and empathy is weakness.

I genuinely don’t understand how these people think — if it can even be called thinking.

How am I supposed to share a planet, let alone a country, with people who can look at televised murder and decide the real problem is that someone might sympathize with the person who died?

I keep trying to tell myself they’re just misinformed. Just trapped in a bubble. And they are.

But how do you burst a bubble when it’s already a lead balloon? It seems to be impenetrable and already dragging everyone tethered to it down.

Before language, before civilization, survival depended on reading cues — danger, fear, safety. I’m starting to think a disturbing percentage of our current population just wouldn’t have survived that time. That they would have wandered straight into a predator or an actual enemy because they couldn’t distinguish threat from authority; couldn’t see the rock cradled in the hand beyond the smile on the face.

That sounds harsh. I know.

But I’m struggling to stay sane in an environment where obvious cruelty is reframed as virtue, and where every act of violence is instantly absorbed into a narrative designed to excuse the next one.

This isn’t about left vs right anymore.

It’s about whether reality still matters.

Whether video still counts.

Whether a human life is still a human life.

And I don’t know how much longer we can pretend this level of moral disintegration is sustainable.