One key contrast between Alex Pretti and Kristi Noem explains this terrible moment

Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital. He took care of our nation’s veterans, people who served, suffered, and came home needing help. It’s hard to imagine something more noble.

Nurses are helpers. When something is wrong, they move toward it. That instinct, that humanity, is likely what compelled Pretti to act when he saw a woman dragged to the ground by federal agents in Minneapolis.

From the videos, it is painfully clear he was not charging officers with a weapon. He was not there to commit violence. He was filming. He was doing what decent people do when they see injustice unfolding. In 2026, cellphone cameras carry the weight of a judge’s gavel.

And for wielding his phone, he was killed.

Pretti was a healer. A caregiver. A man whose father said he “cared deeply about people.” He had recently lost his dog, one he loved deeply. It was a quiet grief. Anyone who has lost a pet understands that ache, the absence, the tenderness, the love that lingers. Pets are the purest expression of love.

And that detail matters.

Because it stands in stark contrast to the people now lying — atrociously and unforgivably — about his death.

Donald Trump is the first U.S. president in more than a century to have no pets in the White House. To him, “dog” is a slur for enemies. To him, we, the American people, are “dogs.”

His Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, once bragged about shooting her dog, an act she tried to spin as proof of toughness. In reality, it revealed plain cruelty.

Noem now defends the killing of an innocent American who loved his dog, loved people, and devoted his life to caring for others. Vanity is her only loyalty. Violence is her vice. She appears to savor these moments: another dead citizen, another camera, another chance to posture as “tough.”

To her, dogs are expendable. So are people.

The contrast between Alex Pretti's compassion and Kristi Noem’s savagery tells you everything you need to know about what kind of “strength” this country is being taught to admire.

Within minutes of Pretti’s killing, the lies began spilling out, from Trump, Noem, and their executor-in-chief, Greg Bovino. A coordinated smear campaign followed, delivered with conspiratorial confidence and vindictive venom. Pretti was labeled a “domestic terrorist.” A threat. Just as Renée Nicole Good was before him.

Pretti’s father called the lies “sickening … reprehensible and disgusting.” He was right.

The videos do not lie. They show ICE agents treating Pretti the way Noem treated her dog: kill first, lie about it later. A performance of “toughness” meant to terrify us all into silence.

Pretti did not approach officers with a gun. He was holding a phone, filming ICE agents as they tackled a woman. If he “brandished” a weapon, it was invisible, because all that appears in the footage is a phone. While “subduing” him, agents removed a lawfully owned firearm from his waistband. That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t.

Pretti legally owned a gun. So do millions of Americans, a fact usually celebrated loudly by the very same political figures now pretending it’s disqualifying. The Second Amendment, it seems, only applies to the right kind of people. When federal agents break the law, those rights disappear.

Renée Good was a writer, a poet, and a mother. Alex Pretti was a nurse who cared for veterans. They were not terrorists. They were citizens.

If this administration wants to talk about domestic terrorism, there are names it could use. Stewart Rhodes. Enrique Tarrio. But they walk free, because Trump set them free. They are alive. Innocent people are not.

What’s happening in Minneapolis is something else entirely. It’s suffocating. It’s mind-numbing. It’s authoritarian. At a press conference overflowing with lies, Bovino appeared dressed like an SS officer, a deliberate, threatening message.

Trump, Noem, and Bovino have perfected the inversion of truth: goodness framed as danger, brutality as “law enforcement.” Their campaign of fear is not confined to Minneapolis. When they come to your city, how will you respond?

Masked ICE agents rampaging through neighborhoods like an occupying force. Dragging citizens from their homes. Smashing car windows. Kidnapping people who dare question them. Pepper-spraying families. Using five-year-old children to lure parents into the open.

These are not mistakes. They are a pattern. And the killings are the inevitable result.

It would be easy — understandable, even — to respond with nothing but rage. To harden into the very cruelty embodied by those causing this destruction. You can feel that temptation everywhere.

But surrendering to hate is exactly what they want.

Because even now, goodness still exists, and it matters. It lives in the people who raise their phones to document abuse. In neighbors who surround ICE agents not with weapons, but with witnesses. In the refusal to accept lies as truth, no matter how often they are repeated.

Trump is trying to replace America’s inherent goodness with fear. Some days, fear feels overwhelming.

But hate has only one antidote: an abundance of good. And yes, the anger, the hate, the rage is all too consuming. It boils the blood, and we have to manifest that anger somehow into something that inevitably wins.

Every time this administration kills an innocent American, we lose a piece of goodness. And if we lose all of it, we lose everything. There is nothing good about Trump, Noem, Bovino, or an ICE force operating without accountability, conscience, and with only masks.

But there is something good in Minnesota, the North Star State where their north star is goodness itself.

The people have shown goodness in grief, in protest, in solidarity, and in care for one another. There are horrifying lessons coming out of Minneapolis. But there are hopeful ones, too.

Goodness surrounded mom and artist Renée Nicole Good when she died. It surrounded Alex Pretti, a nurse, a helper, a man who loved his dog, when he was killed for trying to help someone.

We can be angry. We should be angry. We have to be angry. We can protest. We must protest. And we can be there for each other.

But we can’t lose our goodness. If we do, the diabolic will win. And we cannot let that happen. We just can’t.

• John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”