00:02:18.140And he was shot 10 times, including several rounds shot into him when he was already like laying motionless.
00:02:25.660You know, when they started shooting, he had been sort of struggling a little to try and get up and free himself, although he was on the ground.
00:02:31.060And then by the time they stopped shooting, he was already dead.
00:02:37.000Most of our American listeners will know this, but just to reemphasize, Minnesota is a concealed carry state, meaning he had every right to be there with a weapon.
00:02:47.440He was properly licensed to own it and to keep it on his person.
00:02:53.000You and I may not agree with that right, but he was exercising it.
00:02:56.880And this is something that the right has claimed is in fact part of its style of masculinity.
00:03:02.960And that's why I think we're already getting into very interesting gender territory.
00:03:06.500And that like people showing up with guns is something the right professes to love.
00:03:11.320And this man did so in the most responsible way possible.
00:03:15.640and he paid with his life for it anyway.
00:03:18.920Yeah, you know, I think the facts of the matter here are crucial
00:03:21.440because of the administration's sort of miscasting of them
00:03:25.240in the hours and days after Preddy's death.
00:03:27.620But when Preddy was killed, his gun was not in his possession.
00:04:09.120Right. I think your point about the masculine fantasy of gun ownership that animates organizations like the NRA, right? This notion of either a well-organized militia resisting government tyranny or a good guy with a gun using a capacity for violence for righteous ends.
00:04:29.120Both of these could be a vote in Alex Preddy's actions, but they were not, right?
00:04:35.580Those actors very much lined up behind the ICE agents and behind the use of force in this case.
00:04:42.860So I think one thing that might be interesting as we talk about the gendered response to Alex Preddy's death and the political fallout,
00:04:53.100which has been, you know, interesting and sort of, and mixed,
00:04:57.000is talking about gender in the anti-ice resistance as we're seeing it emerge in Minneapolis.
00:05:03.960Because these videos that have come out of street confrontations with ICE agents of, you know,
00:05:13.000these forceful in-person face-to-face encounters in which Minneapolis residents
00:05:19.960are confronting the armed, masked agents
00:05:24.820of the sort of like deportation regime
00:07:27.780they also don't risk being just sort of like grabbed
00:07:30.420and beat up by ICE, which is also happening,
00:07:32.700or, you know, dumped in a forest on the outskirts of the city, which is also happening.
00:07:38.960These people are sort of reckoning that the public sphere has been made unsafe for them
00:07:44.220because of people who are targeting people like them on the basis of their race.
00:07:49.040So they've retreated to their homes, and that means a lot of stuff.
00:07:52.060It means they can't work in many cases.
00:07:55.120Rent is coming due, and a lot of them have lost substantial income.
00:07:59.320A lot of businesses also that had large immigrant customer bases are also losing a ton of income.
00:08:06.220Like the economic hit has been really kind of severe in Minneapolis.
00:08:09.720It means that they need groceries, which they both can't afford to buy and also can't really safely go out and get.
00:08:17.320A lot of people are trying to keep their kids in school, but don't feel safe taking their kids to school.
00:08:26.040We have folks like Liam Ramos, the five-year-old who was detained by ICE, and his father, they were simply coming home from school.
00:08:34.280And because they were outside their house, they were kidnapped in their driveway.
00:08:38.200So you have these networks that are doing things like pooling money for rent for immigrant neighbors.
00:08:46.300You have these networks that are doing things like escorting kids to school when their parents aren't safe to take them.0.60
00:08:52.660You know, you have people who are picking up groceries and dropping off bags of groceries at the homes of people who are in hiding because of this massive ethnic cleansing effort going on in their city, right?0.60
00:09:04.620So there's a lot of feminized work going on.
00:09:08.400There's sort of quiet care and maintenance and support work going on for immigrants that is harder to document.
00:09:25.340And I don't just say that because of the kind of work it is, how much it looks like care work, how much it looks like housework.1.00
00:09:30.800But I'm also saying because it's being done by women, right?1.00
00:09:33.100This is something happening often through pre-existing networks of women whose kids go to the same school or the same daycare or whose kids are on, you know, like sports teams together.0.84
00:09:47.100So a lot of like the sort of feminized, mom-focused childcare work that is being collectivized and shared among women everywhere just because of the sheer scale of it and the need for logistical coordination.0.73
00:10:01.260Those networks, that work is now being sort of collectivized as a means of, you know, like cross-racial solidarity and resistance to state terror.
00:10:10.680And that's kind of a feminized version.
00:10:13.280And that's different than what Alex Preddy was doing in the street, which is a more masculinized version.
00:10:18.520I want to be clear, like, Renee Goode was fully a woman doing a fully in-person aggressive, you know, like calm but direct confrontation with ICE agents when they shot her.
00:10:30.120And I have seen basically in every video, like a mixed gender group of people confronting agents in public.
00:10:38.580That said, the actual effort takes on a more masculine sheen, right?
00:10:43.660It's a direct, potentially violent, physical confrontation with a bully.
00:10:49.480And that's something we tend to think of as sort of like a masculine mode.
00:10:53.740Even though there's, you know, plenty of women doing it.1.00
00:10:55.540Yeah. So we'll have to talk about why this killing sort of landed differently from the killing of Rene Good. And I mean, some of it certainly is going to have to do just with repetition, with the fact that, you know, you had this so hot on the heels of the last murder.
00:11:11.220The other thing, though, is that in the metabolization, the gender politics of denialism sort of started cracking up in the sense that the right had just sort of settled on a gendered way to discount what had happened to Renee Goode.
00:11:27.360And then a dude with a gun gets shot, right?0.77
00:11:30.180You're just like, OK, you've just written all these like insane white women takes.0.79
00:11:34.660And suddenly it's like a guy who works at the VA and who is a legally licensed gun owner, right?0.53
00:11:41.340Like they can come up with like gendered critiques or like avoidance mechanisms like in the moment, but they're happening in such rapid succession at this point that they kind of collapse under their own weight or they can sort of find a groove that people don't notice.
00:11:56.800Like, wait, didn't you argue the opposite like 48 hours ago?
00:12:00.160Yeah, you know, I think you're right that one feature of the sort of more intensified response from the public and from anti-Trump forces to Preddy's murder is cumulative.
00:12:15.540And I also think that it matters in the particulars of this incident that in the viral videos of this murder, of Freddie's murder, you can see his physical body.
00:12:30.180You can see him struggle, and then you can see him come to stillness, and that's very clear on camera.
00:12:36.260That's different from the images of Renee Good's killing, where you can see her car but not her corpse.
00:12:42.300But it also strikes me, yeah, I think you're right, Adrian, that one reason why Pretty has received such sympathy and why his death has shifted the conversation so much more than Good's death did is that he was a, you know, he was a gender-conforming straight man by all accounts.
00:12:58.140He was engaged in what he clearly understood to be a feat of masculine heroism, an action that is legible as masculine heroism, right?
00:13:08.020Yeah, and as a man, he is thought of as more significant and less disposable than Renee Goode was.
00:13:13.100That sort of script that the Trump administration reached for about an annoying, uppity woman who condescends to you and scolds to you and don't you have this libidinal investment in being able to, like—1.00
00:13:28.500Or, yeah, or, like, silence her claim to authority or significance in relation to you with violence, right?
00:13:34.940That is a typical masculine fantasy that is harder with Alex Pretty because the kind of guys that they're trying to appeal with with that message, like, are more likely to see themselves in pretty than they were to see themselves in good.
00:13:47.920Before we get too deep into it, Adrian, do you want to talk a little bit about what the reaction was after Pretty died?
00:13:56.000So the first reaction was to lie about it yet again.
00:13:58.640And I think this is the other part of the repetition.
00:14:00.580Like with Rene Good, basically their story barely held up for like two hours.
00:14:06.720And like, it's the first time I can remember the New York Times even went out and was like, this is not covered by the facts.
00:14:12.740I'm like, wow, now you care, New York Times.
00:15:47.720change public opinion about his character
00:15:49.360and his worthiness as a target for violence, right?
00:15:51.860And in the video that they released of Renee Good,
00:15:54.620She is speaking to a masked and armed ICE agent in a way where her politeness could possibly be interpreted as disingenuous.
00:16:08.180Like, oh, my gosh, do I detect a hint of sarcasm when Renee Good says, that's fine, dude, we're not mad at you.
00:16:14.960Believe it or not, that's a death sentence in America now.1.00
00:16:17.520And with Alex Pretty, you know, he is filmed at a previous encounter with ICE agents in which he kicks a taillight and I think says something to the effect of like, fuck you.0.99
00:16:28.460I think he says the F word at some point.0.99
00:16:30.900Also, now a capital offense, apparently.
00:16:33.700I got to say, both of these videos made me like these people more.
00:17:02.140Yesterday's was massive, 100,000 people in San Francisco alone.
00:17:05.140I think part of that is about the hyper-visibility of these videos,
00:17:07.960but I think there's also the invisible behind it.
00:17:10.160Eight people have died in ice custody this year that we know of.
00:17:13.820And there are stories about all of them.0.99
00:17:16.400And yet ICE has all these stories about Alex Pretty and Rene Good that we know to be utter horse shit.0.96
00:17:21.860What stories are you telling us about these people?0.99
00:17:24.240I think people are really waking up to the fact that their government is lying to them about mass murder, very, very likely.
00:17:30.460And that what we're told about death in ICE custody, why would we believe them there?
00:17:35.660Why would they suddenly be starting to tell the truth when they lie to our faces about stuff that other people recorded from like eight different angles?
00:17:42.800Yeah, they'll lie to you about something that's very, very obvious and evidenced abundantly by other sources.
00:17:49.280And, you know, I think this is also a good point, Adrienne, that the reporting from what's going on inside these camps is pretty scattershot.
00:17:59.320It's not getting the sort of like viral traction and public attention, but it's also not coming out as much because I think partly because ICE is now such an ideologically uniform entity.
00:18:09.940that there's just not a ton of people who are staffing these concentration camps0.92
00:18:15.120who are like, this is fucked up, I'm going to leak about it.0.95
00:18:18.120I think those people left already or purged already.0.99
00:18:21.380And the people who are working for ICE and Border Patrol now are true believers
00:18:26.460who don't really have much of a problem what's going on.0.99
00:19:21.340The nightmare that you can imagine seems to be what's happening.
00:19:25.200And one Cuban national who was detained, I believe, at a border facility in Texas, died.
00:19:30.120and his death was ruled a homicide and it seems from the reporting that's now available that he
00:19:37.700was strangled to death by the guards and you know i think one thing that's happening is that these
00:19:43.360very visible deaths of white people at the hands of ice are being taken as an opportunity to kind
00:19:51.580of metabolize this sort of inchoate sense of terror in the back of a lot of people's minds
00:19:57.920about the violence that's being done that's not visible,
00:20:01.240the violence that's being done that's not being filmed by 100 cell phones,
00:20:05.720that's not being reported on as widely, that we can't quite see,
00:20:10.600but that many of us know on some level,
00:20:13.220and I think more and more a conscious one is happening,
00:20:15.800that what is happening in these camps is horrendous
00:20:19.140and it's something that we're going to have to pay for and atone for
00:20:21.920because we can't really say that we don't know what's going on, right?
00:20:25.120And that's part of what's going on when, you know, I was also at that protest yesterday in San Francisco and I had the thought that I would find you.
00:20:32.880And then I got there and realized it was like 100,000 people in Doors Park.
00:20:35.880Like I was never going to find Adrian.
00:20:37.660And I think part of what is motivating people to start taking to the streets is the sense that they are implicated in something even worse than the death of pretty and good.
00:21:22.580So, this might bring us to the function of whiteness, right?0.95
00:21:29.440Which is also kind of the elephant in the room when we talk about the pretty and good killings.0.77
00:21:34.460Like, I don't think it takes anything away from the horror of pretty and good's deaths and the loss of their lives to say that their murders have galvanized white imaginations, not just because they serve this stand-in purpose, but because they are themselves white people, right?0.57
00:21:52.440Audiences see Pretty and Good as like unusual and different targets of state violence.
00:21:58.740As people they are unaccustomed to seeing being declared disposable.
00:22:04.440I can say for my part, and I'm not really proud of this, it did matter to me that Renee Good was a married lesbian like almost exactly my age.
00:22:14.980It means a lot to me too how familiar Alex Pretty seemed.
00:22:18.520Like honestly, he reminded me of somebody my friend Brooke would meet on a dating site and like bring along to like a barbecue.
00:22:26.100Like their whiteness, their relative youth, their markings of middle class status, all of these made these people like very familiar to me.
00:22:34.420And I think that made their deaths, like the video of their death, more psychically potent to a lot of white middle class audiences, right?
00:22:42.980This is not an endorsement of this reality.
00:22:45.080I think what I'm describing here is like racist and unfair.
00:22:48.520But it's also a real phenomenon shaping the responses to these deaths.
00:22:51.880Yeah, I mean, like, with Good, the fact that she had just dropped off her child at school, right?0.99
00:22:56.260Like, it's just like it grabs you and you're like, holy shit.0.90
00:22:59.520Like, when I found out, I had just dropped off my daughter at school, right?0.92
00:23:02.780Like, it makes you realize that during Black Lives Matter, very frequently, the media would emphasize the things that those murdered by police had done that would remove them from recognizability, right?0.56
00:23:18.080They had, you know, sold loose cigarettes.
00:23:21.280And the media would kind of lean on that in order, I think, to activate a withdrawal of empathy, to insist on difference.
00:23:28.160Well, do you really recognize yourself in this person?
00:23:31.620And I think that pretty and good's whiteness, it doesn't just galvanize this kind of like passively racist, like readiness of sympathy on the part of national audiences.
00:23:41.380is also clearly animating a specific kind of, like, resentment and anger from the MAGA white supremacist coalition.
00:23:49.800So we talked in our episode about Renee Good about how responses to her killing emphasized her white womanhood
00:23:55.240as a marker of her, like, frivolity and worthiness for contempt.
00:23:59.440But that wasn't coming from, like, a 2018 woke person complaining about white women feminism, right?1.00
00:24:05.880Yeah. And so Preddy's whiteness was also noted in the initial right wing response to his death as evidence of like a scourge of supposed violence on the part of liberal whites.
00:24:17.480And something that's not getting a ton of play in the coverage of Minnesota, which I have seen mentioned sporadically by people who are, like, reporting on the ground, is that the resistance in Minnesota, that, like, street-level resistance to ICE agents, is largely composed of white people out of the sheer reality that, as we said, people of color are in danger on the streets.
00:24:38.360And many of them have been pushed out of public life, right?
00:24:40.460It is dangerous for them to chase down ICE vehicles.
00:24:42.640And that means that the confrontational part of this resistance is composed largely of white people who are taking on a kind of like risk proportional to their privilege.
00:24:52.080And what's so infuriating about these like liberal white people confronting ICE, about the likes of Good and Pretty to MAGA, is not just the like sort of organization and passion of the Minnesota opposition, but also a sense of like racial betrayal.
00:25:06.860Yeah. I mean, Nick Fuentes literally called Pretty a race traitor.
00:25:10.700He literally called him a race traitor. It's like, yeah, he just said it. He just admits it. You know, I wrote this whole podcast script and then he just tweeted it out.
00:25:20.980But it's like the sense is like, oh, these are white people standing in solidarity with people of color against a white supremacist ethnic cleansing project.
00:25:28.760And that refusal of racial loyalty to whiteness is clearly seen as like an unfair refusal to play by the rules that the Trump camp is setting up, right?
00:25:40.160The sense of whiteness as a community or a debt in the white supremacist imagination is coming in a clash in Minnesota against the reality of how whiteness actually functions in like real white people's American lives, in which case it might be ambivalent or disavowed or like kind of only partially invested in or not invested in that way.
00:26:05.840Like, I can't honestly vouch for the racial politics of every white person on the street in Minnesota, but they're not all imagining themselves clearly as having more in common with J.D. Vance because they're white than they do with their neighbors who are Somali, right?
00:26:22.200And that's, I think, a tension that the white supremacist Maga Wright is, like, really angry about, that, like, whiteness doesn't have the kind of purchase in the imaginations and in the sentiments of all white people that it does for them.
00:26:33.780That's, again, something that Adam Serbo, I think, pointed out in his very good reporting from Minneapolis, that, like, you can tell that the MAGA theory of power, which was routed through the category of whiteness, is sort of coming apart.
00:26:46.660Like, this is a confusion that Stephen Miller, that Jesse Waters, that Nick Fuentes, that Ben Shapiro, that J.D. Vance share with the ICE agents on the ground.
00:26:57.500Confusion is like, wait, you're supposed to be on my side.
00:29:17.580You know, the gangster represented masculine heroism in the sense that he like discarded the rules and the law and politeness to do what needed to be done for his community and for his principle.
00:29:30.160And this was like a way in which this guy sort of, you know, he hates liars, he hates cowards, he hates people who take the easy way out.
00:29:37.780And he's drawn to Trump and to the ICE agents because he sees them as these, like, honest, virile, aggressive, bravely confrontational people who oppose this, like, effete establishment, entrenched power and are, like, willing to, like, stand up to them, right?
00:29:55.840Alex Preddy's actual actions modeled exactly that guy's fantasy, right?
00:30:00.920He embodied this kind of masculinity. He, like, one, confronted authority. Two, he didn't have anybody's, like, sanction or permission to do that except for his own. He was, three, out to defend his neighbors. And four, like, willing to risk violence, right?
00:30:17.620That's a man enacting a very specifically male model of civic responsibility and heroism of the kind that has animated a lot of like psychic investment in Trump, in his like racist project and in his like male supremacist project.
00:30:34.240And there doesn't seem to be a recognition in the guy in my life with like the cognitive dissonance of that contradiction that like the guy whose side he's on is the guy who's actually like victimizing the kind of behavior that he idolizes.
00:30:47.920But I do think it sort of cracked something because what you see now is that at least for a couple of days, it really seemed like the Trump administration was scared of the reaction to the Alex Petty shooting.
00:30:59.520and they almost seemed for a little bit
00:31:54.560the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezos of the world,
00:31:57.240When it came to university administrators, when it came to university presidents, when it came to news networks, when it came to Hollywood, a lot of this was virtue signaling and they didn't really mean it.
00:32:07.640Well, unfortunately for them, it turns out the VA nurses of the world and the soccer moms of the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area did mean it and do really consider their neighbors more important than Gestapo thugs parading down the street.0.98
00:32:23.740Mm-hmm. So, the Trump camp sort of seemed to sense a degree of danger in the public response to Alex Pretty's killing. And they tried to kind of like walk it back a little.0.99
00:33:18.080Yeah. And as you say, the camera face for Border Patrol. He was the tactical commander for the mass raids in L.A. last year. He comes out of El Centro, California. That's the sector he was to work at. And he is this tiny, teeny man who, you know, nothing against short kings, but like that man is the shortest short kings come.
00:33:40.320And he just seemed to love the spotlight in the way that, like, some of these Trump guys kind of do love to kind of play the heel for the cameras, right?
00:33:51.140Like, if you remember Joe Arpaio, he had kind of Joe Arpaio energy, sort of like a little bit of Caudillo energy, a little bit of Rough Rider energy, and a whole bunch of weird masculinity politics.0.99
00:34:05.460You're burying the lead, Adrian, which is that he wore the Nazi coat.0.99
00:34:09.780He was trying to look like a Nazi on camera by wearing this like long coat with like big brass buttons and an upturned collar because he was deliberately trying to evoke the Third Reich, which is something some of these Trump characters do sometimes.
00:34:25.700You know, like Stephen Miller does it sometimes.
00:34:27.660But Greg Bovino was really embracing the aesthetic of the Nazi and trying to invite those comparisons, which I guess he found flattering.
00:34:36.800And then in news that New York Times described as breaking, which it turns out he was anti-Semitic this entire time.
00:34:47.360Yeah, he had a call with the U.S. Attorney's Office of Minnesota trying to get them to be more aggressive in pressing charges against protesters there.
00:34:54.740And the U.S. attorney couldn't take the call on like a Friday night or a Saturday because it was Shabbat and he was offline and not working for religious observance.
00:35:06.040And Greg Bovino took the opportunity to say some fun anti-Semitic things, complaining that this guy wasn't available to, you know, like lock up liberals for him.
00:35:16.100But Moira, I'm sorry, but I'm told that the greatest threat of anti-Semitism in the United States is my students camping on a lawn.
00:36:09.040They had like one tense meeting where, you know, Kristi Noem struggled to make a facial expression that might indicate remorse or appeasement and found that, you know, she could just kind of like blink and pout.
00:36:21.080And now, apparently, nothing has really changed on the ground in Minnesota.
00:36:29.600Dems momentarily looked like they were about to find a spine with this and then disabused everybody on that notion.
00:36:36.500Yeah, Chuck Schumer talked to the Baileys, his imaginary friends, and they were like, no, we're cool, Chuck.
00:36:41.740Yeah, my favorite thing is the Democrats did extract a promise from the administration that ICE would cease deporting American citizens.
00:36:49.900I'm like, I mean, world's slowest slow clap.
00:36:53.900Like, wow, they're going to abide by the Constitution?1.00
00:37:06.700Yeah, you know, there's a kind of shocking gap between public sentiment, which is growing more and more militantly anti-ice, and the behavior of Democrats.
00:37:19.040There's also like a really shocking gap between the courage and determination and like effortfulness of the actual people of Minneapolis and the Democrats in Congress, including those representing them, like the likes of Amy Klobuchar, who just cannot be bothered to mount much of an opposition to this.
00:37:38.540Well, there's an interesting kind of rupture there, too, in that the state-level politicians seem to manage, and Ilhan Omar is managing, the mayor of Minneapolis is managing, Tim Walz is managing.
00:37:52.380It's those people who have to go to Washington that somehow seem, like, do they not go home? Is that what's happening?
00:37:58.320Like, it's very, very noticeable that, like, Democrats in Minnesota, so long as they don't live in D.C., seem to have located their spine just fine, right?0.98
00:38:08.080And it's members of Congress largely that are just like unable to name this, unable to, I mean, it's the biggest fucking layup in the world.0.88
00:38:18.320Like you can make these people run scared for the next six months because like, guess what?0.95
00:38:21.860It's going to happen again and again and again, right?
00:38:25.040Like you're not giving away anything by coming out against ICE because I'm sorry to say, but like ICE will murder again.
00:38:43.000They're going to keep killing people in their concentration camps.0.98
00:38:45.420They're going to keep killing the people who oppose them.0.72
00:38:48.060And I think the administration's sense is that it can use force, right?0.51
00:38:54.000Like, that force will intimidate the opposition.
00:38:56.320That does seem to work with elected Democrats, as you're saying, Adrian.
00:39:00.440But it's not working with ordinary people.
00:39:02.120Ordinary people are seeing what happens to the likes of Renee Goode, to the likes of Alex Pretty, to the likes of Liam Ramos.
00:39:10.680And it's not making them scared that the same thing will happen to them.
00:39:14.100It's making them more willing, in fact, to risk those outcomes for the sake of justice.
00:39:19.880I think something to take away from what's happening in Minneapolis is not just like the cowardice and ineptitude and uselessness of, you know, Democratic congressional leadership.
00:39:30.540But it's also about the massive kindness and courage and capacity for like principled action that exists among ordinary people.
00:39:42.140And I think it's a cause for a lot of optimism that, you know, this is a demonstration of the fact that ordinary people are a lot stronger than we give them credit for.
00:40:21.640If everyone who looks at, you know, an elected official on the Democratic side, at a university president, at a corporate leader and says, like, I did a lot more than you did, Bako.
00:40:31.820I was courageous in ways that you couldn't imagine.
00:40:34.540You were ready to, you know, give the world's sloppiest handjob to these people.
00:40:39.280And I was the one who had to stand up and face armed thugs.
00:40:42.400that's going to be, that is deeply corrosive, I think, that people cannot look at their elected
00:40:47.820officials, at their elites without utter disdain and utter disappointment. And so on the one hand,
00:40:55.160I am really, really in awe of what the people of Minnesota are doing, but I am also deeply worried
00:41:01.540about the inability of our institutions to keep pace with their heroism. Yeah, you know, the courts