MARGARET SULLIVAN

 Defensive caution can’t compete with right-wing propaganda

Is it so hard for journalists to clearly state that the Trump administration is lying?

Margaret Sullivan

Jan 26, 2026

There’s a line from a Yeats poem that keeps going through my head.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

A memorial for Alex Pretti — an ICU nurse at a VA medical center — on Sunday in Minneapolis, after immigration officers fatally shot Pretti the day before. Federal officials have consistently lied about the circumstances of the shooting since / Getty Images

I thought about it all weekend when I examined the media coverage of the latest horror in Minneapolis, the shocking killing by federal agents of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti.

The right-wing media— led by Fox News, as always — was immediately spilling out its propaganda with, yes, passionate intensity. The reality-based press proceeded with an overabundance of caution and, at times, the willingness to hand a megaphone to liars.

A few hours after the shooting, I watched Fox’s coverage for as long as I could stand it, and checked other right-wing sites.

The conversation was about “self-defense” by ICE and about the victim as an armed and dangerous man who — according to the feds — was about to wreak havoc and massacre well-intentioned law enforcers.

Some right-wing media sites, quoting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, were even calling the victim a “domestic terrorist.”

Yes, the propaganda was in full swing. The Trump administration really couldn’t ask for more.

Fox’s “primary purpose is to explain to viewers why it is good that masked agents of the state are executing people on the street,” Matt Gertz of Media Matters wrote.

“Network commentators repeatedly went above and beyond even the excuses DHS put out as they sought to smear Pretti, valorize his killers and justify further state executions that seem all but inevitable,” he wrote.

Meanwhile at 1 p.m. on Sunday, here was a major headline at the top of the New York Times site, as part of its live updates. “State Seeks Access to Evidence as Federal Officials Blame Shooting Victim.”

The headline magnified the statements of federal officials, even as the Times knew better because its journalists had done their own detailed analysis.

The former (celebrated) New York Times Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse, wrote to me about it, seeing this an example of the “both sides” travesty that treats lies and truth as equally deserving of attention.

“What’s sad,” Greenhouse wrote, “is that the Times reporting has been superb and precisely to the point, a fact that’s obscured by the headline.” She pointed out a Washington Post headline at the same time of day, praising it for being much more direct: “Federal agents secured gun from Minnesota man before fatal shooting, videos show.”

The Wall Street Journal did better with its straightforward headline: “Videos of Fatal Shooting of Alex Pretti Contradict U.S. Account in Minneapolis.”

A Times apologist might say, well, headlines on the live blog were changing all day long and that was just a bad example. But in print on Sunday morning, the extremely cautious sub-headline on the paper’s lead news story was a variation on this theme: “Videos Seem to Counter Federal Account of a Struggle in Minneapolis.”

The cover of the New York Times from Sunday / frontpages.com

One longtime Times reader from Canada, Michael Benedict, wrote to journalists at the Times, making a similar point about the story itself. “You write ‘even as videos appeared to directly contradict their account.’ (Benedict, a sharp observer, is a former editor at Maclean’s, the Canadian news magazine.)

“Appeared to? Really???” Benedict wrote. “Later, you correct yourself when you write: “Their accounts directly contradict video evidence of the encounter.”

So what is the reader to make of this “appeared to” and “directly contradict” distinction, Benedict demanded, adding, “You know the answer, so please tell it like it is, not as a two-sided story.”

Overall, I was appreciative of the first-day Times reporting, and that done by the Washington Post, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal — all of which did their own analyses of multiple bystander videos. These analyses contradict the Trump administration’s full-on propaganda campaign, so ably assisted by Fox and others.

In the early hours, when I wanted to know what the hell had happened — without the misleading spin from Noem and others, including Trump himself — I was grateful for the efforts of fact-based journalism.

And I do understand why they want to be cautious and not overstate their findings. But I also think about the primary mission of informing the public clearly in real time, when people are searching for answers.

If the analyses do indeed “directly contradict” the government’s claims, then say so — without fear or favor, as the motto goes.

The front-page print story itself was well-reported, including this compelling third paragraph:

“The video footage shows the confrontation apparently began when Mr. Pretti stepped between a woman and an agent who was pepper spraying her. Other agents then pepper sprayed Mr. Pretti, who was holding a phone in one hand and nothing in the other, and pulled him to the ground. His concealed weapon was found only after agents restrained and took Mr. Pretti to the ground.” It continues: “Then at least 10 shots appear to have been fired at him by the agents within five seconds…”

As so often happens, the headline fails the story. And the reader.

My takeaway:

With what amounts to civil war raging in the United States, we desperately need clear, fearless truth-telling that doesn’t pull its punches and doesn’t hand a megaphone to lies and propaganda in the name of supposed fairness.

HEATHER

 Yesterday President Donald J. Trump blamed Democratic officials for the killing of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minnesota Saturday morning. Since then, administration officials and their supporters seem to be coalescing around the idea that the reason there have been violent clashes in Minneapolis is not the violence of federal agents there, but that city officials aren’t cooperating with federal officials.

As Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote notes, this language comes straight from the Insurrection Act, and indeed, MAGA leader and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that he thinks Trump should invoke that act. Bannon said Pretti “knew exactly what he was doing and he knew the consequences. The violent domestic terrorist mob in the streets of Minneapolis needs to stand down now.”

On right-wing social media, Bannon echoed the language of a dystopian vision of the world that claims immigrants are invading the United States and those protecting them in Minneapolis are dangerous. He told his supporters: “This is just not Minneapolis—this is an organized, well thought through effort to invade the country.” MAGA adherents are embracing the daft idea that the Minnesota people who have come together to protect their neighbors are an organized, paid insurgency.

But the tide seems to be running against them.

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted that the president is sending Tom Homan to Minnesota. Homan is a White House advisor under scrutiny for allegations that he accepted $50,000 in cash stuffed into a CAVA bag after promising to steer government contracts toward those offering him the money. According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, Homan has been clashing with the extremist faction led by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, her advisor Corey Lewandowski, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller because he thinks their made-for-TV violence is doing long-term damage to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice commented: “[I]f Tom ‘Cava Bag’ Homan is your emergency crisis comms guy, you’re f*cked.”

Trump’s account also posted his version of a phone call with Minnesota governor Tim Walz that would let Trump deescalate the situation there. Despite the fact that, as journalist Laura Bassett notes, the administration has been leading its followers to believe Walz is going to jail, Trump’s account posted:

“Governor Tim Walz called me with a request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I! We have had such tremendous SUCCESS in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and virtually every other place that we have ‘touched’ and, even in Minnesota, Crime is way down, but both Governor Walz and I want to make it better! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

This morning, Republican Chris Madel withdrew from the Minnesota governor’s race, saying “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so…. Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”

“United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong,” Madel said.

He added: “I am above all else a pragmatist. The reality is that the national Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.”

Neil Mehta and Valerie Bauerlein of the Wall Street Journal noted that Preya Samsundar, a Republican strategy consultant, agrees, noting that her own mother, who immigrated legally, has begun to carry her passport with her.

Some Republicans are backing away from the administration over its tactics and violence in Minnesota. Former vice president Mike Pence today called images from there “deeply troubling” and called for a full investigation into Pretti’s killing. By Sunday, Republican senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina had all called for investigations.

Today those calls reached deeper into the party, with Republican senators John Curtis of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Todd Young of Indiana also calling for an investigation and “accountability.” This afternoon, Jordain Carney and Adam Wren of Politico reported that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had called a hearing for February 12. He has asked Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner Rodney Scott, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow, and ICE acting director Todd Lyons to testify.

One House Republican told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico: “Many of us wonder if the administration has any clue as to how much this will hurt us legislatively and electorally this year.”

As Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo noted today, even MAGA firebrand Texas governor Greg Abbott said on a Dallas talk show that the White House needs to “recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure that they get back to get what they wanted to do to begin with—and that is to remove people from the country.”

And immigration officers themselves are speaking up. This afternoon, Nicholas Nehamas, Hamed Aleaziz, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Alexandra Berzon of the New York Times reported that immigration officers deployed to urban areas are angry at the aggressiveness the Trump administration is employing and at the administration’s sending them into dangerous situations. They say the arrest quotas, long hours, and public anger at them are taking a significant toll on morale. Most of those the journalists interviewed said they were unhappy that administration officials had jumped to blame Pretti for his own killing. One agent said he had “always given the benefit of the doubt to the government in these situations” but no longer believed “any of the statements they put out anymore.”

Throughout the day, there were signs that the administration was preparing to throw Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino under the bus. An unsigned editorial in The Free Press, an outlet closely aligned with the administration, lambasted Noem for pushing lies that the American people can see with their own eyes are untrue. “Perhaps Republican operatives consider the politics of division as a viable strategy for their party to survive the midterm elections,” the editorial said, but it noted that “the administration’s deportation tactics as well as the conduct of federal agents in Minneapolis are driving voters away from the president and his party.”

Then, this afternoon, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reported that Bovino and some of his agents are leaving Minneapolis and returning to the sectors from which they came. Before hitting the road, though, on Friday federal agents took into custody Juan Espinoza Martinez, whom a jury acquitted this week after the Department of Justice accused him of participating in a plot to hire someone to kill Bovino. While CBP appears to be leaving, the operation itself will continue.

Tonight Alvarez and her colleague Michael Williams reported that DHS had suspended Bovino’s access to his official social media accounts.

In response to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s suggestion in a letter on Saturday, shortly after Pretti’s killing, that Governor Tim Walz could “restore the rule of law” in Minnesota by handing over the state’s voter rolls, Walz said: “I think everybody understands what the last request was, totally unrelated to anything on the voter files. This is again…Donald Trump telling everybody that the election was rigged…. I would just give a pro tip to the attorney general. There’s two million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those.”

This afternoon, Trump turned back to tariffs, saying he is increasing tariff rates on South Korean “Autos, Lumber, Pharma, and all other Reciprocal TARIFFS, from 15% to 25%.”

This evening, Trump’s social media account posted that he “just had a very good telephone conversation with Mayor Jacob Frey, of Minneapolis. Lots of progress is being made!”

Frey responded with a statement: “I spoke with President Trump this afternoon and appreciated the conversation. I expressed how much Minneapolis has benefited from our immigrant communities and was clear that my main ask is that Operation Metro Surge needs to end. The president agreed that the present situation cannot continue.

“Some federal agents will begin leaving the area tomorrow, and I will continue pushing for the rest involved in this operation to go.

“Minneapolis will continue to cooperate with state and federal law enforcement on real criminal investigations—but we will not participate in unconstitutional arrests of our neighbors or enforce federal immigration law. Violent criminals should be held accountable based on the crimes they commit, not based on where they are from.

“I will continue working with all levels of government to keep our communities safe, keep crime down, and put Minneapolis residents first.

“I plan to meet with Border Czar Tom Homan tomorrow to further discuss next steps.”

WHAT IS THE POINT OF COLLEGE?

 

David French

The Most Important Question Is ‘What if I’m Wrong?’

Jan. 25, 2026

 

By David French

Opinion Columnist

College can help open your mind or close it. College can push you toward a spirit of curiosity, or it can reaffirm your pre-existing convictions and confirm your blinkered worldview.

I don’t want to overstate what a college can do. It’s not as if college students are mere lumps of moral and intellectual clay that can be shaped and formed at will by professors and administrators, or by one another.

Ask a professor, and he or she is likely to tell you that students usually arrive on campus with strong pre-existing ideologies and theologies. Students interested in politics, in particular, often come to campus as committed activists.

Professors, however, still have influence. I know that I arrived on my college and law school campuses with a host of fierce convictions. My best professors urged me to question my assumptions, to test them against the new facts I was learning and to ask whether new information (and better reasoning) might change my mind.

But that’s not the only kind of college experience. Many students walk into college echo chambers, and very little about their education causes them to question their beliefs, much less change their minds. Instead of gaining humility, they increase their pride. And this arrogance and sense of certainty have contributed immeasurably to our national enmity and polarization.

The story of the University of Austin gives us a glimpse of both the problem and the solution. New institutions can be an answer to the failures of the old, but they’re still subject to the same temptations and can easily slide into the same mistakes.

The University of Austin, or UATX, was launched with much fanfare in 2021. The goal was to create a new highly selective university that would be free of the maladies and pathologies that plagued so many legacy universities.

The founders of the new university included Niall Ferguson, a leading historian; Bari Weiss, formerly of The Times, the founder of The Free Press, and the current head of CBS News; and Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire co-founder of Palantir Technologies.

It would be a mistake to describe the new university as merely a right-wing institution. Among its early advisers were Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and famous centrist academics such as Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt.

Indeed, if you peruse the entire list of early founders and advisers, the word you’d use to describe the vast majority of them isn’t necessarily “right-wing” or “left-wing” but rather “liberal,” in the classical definition of the term — committed to free expression, the rule of law and open inquiry.

Their very presence on the list of UATX’s early founders and advisers was an indictment of elite legacy institutions, all too many of which had become deeply illiberal as a matter of policy and of culture.

So much has happened over the past year that it’s easy to forget the persistent problems of the American academy. For example, a majority of students in a national survey reported feeling intimidated about voicing their true opinions on hot-button political topics.

I can understand why. I teach at a college. I speak at many colleges across the country. And when I ask students why they don’t speak up more, or why they don’t debate their peers in class, I hear the same reason again and again: They don’t want to lose friends. They don’t want to risk their grades.

And these aren’t the fears of closet Klansmen but rather of people who hold thoughtful, mainstream positions that differ from the progressive orthodoxy on campus.

If ideological orthodoxy were enforced only through peer pressure, that would be troublesome enough. But campus illiberalism long ago moved far beyond social pressure and into the realm of university policy.

Speech codes and bias response teams have chilled speech on many campuses. Some universities have required job applicants to articulate their views on diversity, equity and inclusion — in effect creating formal ideological litmus tests for hiring and promotion.

Why did so many classical liberals from the right and left join UATX? Because campus illiberalism requires a response, and one of the best and most productive forms of response is to build new and better institutions, to offer students a choice.

But Steven Pinker is no longer affiliated with UATX. Neither, reportedly, is Jonathan Haidt or Nadine Strossen. Nor are many others among the leading liberal writers and thinkers from the left or right. By the end of last summer, close to half the original cohort of prominent supporters had parted ways with the school.

Earlier this month, Politico Magazine published a long and fascinating account of the divisions at UATX, by Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

As Mandery writes, a key moment occurred on April 2, 2025, when professors and staff gathered to hear from Lonsdale, a member of the board. According to the writer and academic Michael Lind, who was a visiting professor at the time, Lonsdale told the gathering that every member of the faculty and staff had to subscribe to four principles — anticommunism, antisocialism, opposition to identity politics and anti-Islamism.

Defenders of the university labeled Mandery’s article a “hit piece”; Lonsdale himself doubled down. “If you’re on a university board and are not attacked for purging commies,” he posted on X, “or making sure commie-adjacent bureaucrats don’t screw up your institution, then you’re not doing your job.”

To be clear, in right-wing America, the word “commie” does not refer exclusively to actual communists (of whom there are very few in the American academy) but often to the whole kaleidoscope of American progressivism. Ideas or people whom populists don’t like constantly find themselves labeled socialist, communist or Marxist — at least when the term “woke” is deemed insufficiently derisive.

In other words, according to Mandery’s account, UATX wasn’t creating a true alternative to legacy elite institutions but rather their mirror image — a place that imposes its own ideological boundaries and that is proving inhospitable to dissenting voices. Rather than answering illiberalism with liberalism, it was threatening to respond in kind.

The story of UATX isn’t yet written. The college is new, and there are still a number of outstanding individuals on the faculty and in leadership, but the red flags are flying. The school may already be at a crossroads.

The longer our nation slogs through this terrible political moment, the more I’m convinced that the real national conflict isn’t between left and right — it’s between liberal and illiberal, decent and indecent.

And that brings us back to the clash between curiosity and conviction. I like to tell people that in the course of my education I attended two religious institutions — Lipscomb University, a Christian college in Nashville (where I teach classes today), and Harvard Law School, an ostensibly secular and diverse professional school.

But when I was at Harvard in the early 1990s, it felt more like an ideological boot camp than Lipscomb had. The vast majority of my professors were of one mind. So were the vast majority of my peers. Although there were certainly liberal-minded students and professors, much of my education felt like training for activism more than inquiry.

This spirit of activism wasn’t new. It had developed steadily after the tumult of the 1960s, and by the 1980s it was bearing bitter fruit in the form of the university speech code. After all, what value is free speech if you’ve figured out the most important answers to the most important questions in life? How can we implement our vision of social justice if we’re divided by dissent?

Over time, this mind-set results in a startling ideological monoculture, in which almost everyone around you is broadly in your ideological camp. When almost every smart person you know agrees with you to some important degree, then it’s very easy to slide to the conclusion that your opponents aren’t just wrong but potentially even stupid or evil.

And who wants stupid or evil people on campus?

The best colleges, by contrast, take the opposite approach. They don’t teach you to double down on your convictions but rather to approach the world with a spirit of curiosity. It’s not that curious people shouldn’t have convictions; but their convictions should be tempered by humility.

I’m an imperfect person. I don’t know everything. I will never know everything. Therefore, I should approach the world with an open heart and an open mind.

In an institution committed to cultivating curiosity, speech codes are anathema. The last thing it wants to do is to stifle discussion.

This type of institution isn’t trying to train and mobilize young ideological shock troops, cannon fodder in the culture wars. Instead, it uses its influence to cultivate people who will remain curious their entire lives.

The preservation of our Republic requires us to be double-minded. We have to respond to the emergency of the moment — whether we’re facing threats against a NATO ally or systematic constitutional violations in the streets of Minneapolis — and, at the same time, rethink and rebuild the institutions that put us in this terrible place.

And that means using whatever influence that colleges do have to introduce a single important thought into even the most ideologically and religiously committed young minds: What if I’m wrong?

It is that recognition that can change a life. It is that recognition that can open a heart. And it’s that recognition that allows us to turn to a friend, a neighbor and even an ideological opponent and sincerely ask one of the most important questions you can ask — what do you think?

 

We Knew This Would Happen

But those warnings were ignored

Elliot Kirschner Jan 26

I am deeply appreciative that more and more people seem to be outraged by what is happening in Minnesota, across the country, and around the world.

I am glad that more people are willing to say out loud that ICE must be abolished.

That Democrats in Congress are beginning to stand more firmly as a bulwark against an unbounded authoritarian regime.

That more in the press are finally resisting the reflexive “both sides” framing.

That the word fascist is increasingly accepted as an accurate description for a militarized force used to terrorize the public in service of a despotic leader.

I am glad that some who voted for this tyrant are having second thoughts. Or have even begun, however haltingly, to speak.

I applaud those who have stood up and shown that courage is a successful strategy, from many in the federal courts to some universities, institutions, and businesses.

I am heartened that public opinion is shifting, as more Americans say clearly that this is not who they want to be.

But let’s be very clear. None of this is a surprise. None of it. Not the cruelty. Not the corruption. Not the recklessness.

Not the lawlessness, the scale of the terror, or the damage to the world order.

Not the attacks on science or civility, the rewriting of history, or the wrecking ball taken to our constitutional order.

We knew this would happen.

And by we, I don’t mean a handful of prophets or people blessed with special foresight. You knew it and said so. So did people you know and love. So did candidates for office, former presidents, and leaders across society. Tens of millions of voters cast their ballots fully aware of what was likely to come.

When the history of this age is written, there will be no shortage of evidence about what went wrong. There will be no plausible claim of ignorance.

Scholars looking for reasons for how we got here will analyze the media ecosystem, the long shadows of the pandemic, and decades of economic and social disruption. But as they catalogue the speeches, the court filings, and the protests, they will see time and again how clearly the danger was identified and documented in real time.

These future historians will have nearly infinite contemporary sources warning that the Supreme Court had been corrupted. That the violent insurrection of January 6 should have forced a lasting recalibration of American democracy. That the current president should have been barred from re-election. That science was under attack. That corruption was rampant. That this regime was beholden to tyrants abroad and intent on the destruction of democracy at home. And the list goes on.

Those voices were everywhere. And they still are. But that is only half the story.

Looking more closely, those who look back will find something else that demands explanation. They will see that the people who most clearly recognized the danger were often dismissed and ignored — not only by MAGA true believers, but by those in positions of power in media, politics, and business who congratulated themselves on being sober-minded and pragmatic. Too many who understood what was coming were labeled hysterical. Alarmist. Radical. Unserious. They were told to calm down. To respect norms that were already being shredded. They were chastised by a mushy mainstream that prized decorum over diagnosis and tone over truth.

Now, what comes next matters. It will not be enough to replace this regime with an administration that promises a return to the norms of the past. Those norms helped create the conditions that brought us here. Accountability is essential. But so is a reckoning with how we assess and share information, how we define what is responsible and mainstream, and whose voices are elevated or dismissed.

This work cannot wait. It must move alongside resistance and rebuilding, because all of it is of a piece if we are serious about saving our democracy.

We knew what was coming. We said so. We are fighting for our country now. And we welcome new allies.

But “never again” cannot apply only to this regime. It must also apply to those who had the power to stop this earlier. Those who dismissed the truth-tellers. Those who defied the warning signs when there was still time to act.