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...
