The regime's mind-bending lies are a tactic
Thinking about them in terms of truth or falsity is a category error.
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On Saturday morning, federal agents in Minneapolis attacked a registered VA nurse named Alex Pretti as he attempted to help a woman who they had pushed to the ground.
DHS agents tackled Pretti, held him down, then shot him to death. As in the killing of Renee Good earlier this month, video makes clear this was an extrajudicial killing — violence committed by vengeful agents of the state against a bystander perceived as an enemy.
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There’s no real controversy over what happened. Nonetheless, in a fascist ritual which has become grotesquely familiar, Trump’s authoritarian apparatchiks rushed to lie and smear.
Trump homeland security adviser Stephen Miller logged on to social media to utter the monstrous falsehood that Pretti had been a “domestic terrorist” attempting to “assassinate federal law enforcement.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem also lied, claiming Pretti was “perpetuat[ing] violence against a government because of ideological reasons” and “that is the definition of domestic terrorism.”
Trump, for his part, called Pretti a “gunman” — failing to mention that he had a license to carry, hadn’t pointed his gun at anyone, and had been relieved of his weapon before he was shot.
The regime’s firehose of lies kept spewing Sunday. Border Patrol special commander/Himmler wannabe Greg Bovino went as far as to smear Pretti and Good, the Minneapolis mother of three who was killed by ICE on January 7, as “suspects” who had committed array of crimes.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz responded to the onslaught of propaganda by pointing out its absurdity.
"Thank God we have video, because according to DHS, these seven heroic guys took an onslaught of a battalion against them or something,” he said. “It's nonsense, people. It's nonsense and it is lies."
Walz is correct that video testimony and eyewitness accounts are important in debunking fascist lies. But it’s also true that those lies are not necessarily meant to be believed.
The regime’s mind-blowing dishonesty is ultimately a way to demean and mark those who resist. They function as fascist solidarity, signaling that partisans can and should do anything and everything to political enemies, no matter how violent, cruel, or unnecessary.
Paving the way for violence
Trump lies about so many things and with such frequency that it can start to seem like a gag or a joke. He lied about the crowd size at his first inauguration. He lied that a hurricane would hit Alabama in 2019, and doubled down when corrected. He lied that you could fight covid with bleach treatment, then said he’d only been joking (which was a lie).
The president spreading disinformation for any reason is bad. But often Trump and his minions lie not just to stoke his ego, but as a deliberate tactic to justify and escalate fascist violence. Lies give the president’s followers excuses and justifications to target, harass, and murder the regime’s enemies.
This has happened repeatedly in Minneapolis. After ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good to death, Trump called her a “professional agitator” and claimed she ran Ross over in her car (both disgusting lies). These falsehoods became a pretext for the FBI to refuse to investigate the killing — and instead to try to investigate Good’s widow.
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They also prompted Vice President JD Vance to claim that ICE agents are “protected by absolute immunity,” and cannot be prosecuted for anything they do on the job. As a matter of law, this is a lie — federal agents cannot murder everyone they want.
But the lie is not really meant to convince legal experts or even judges. It’s meant to signal to ICE agents that the administration will back them up when they murder, no matter what.
The agents who confronted Pretti heard the message loud and clear. The vice president of the authoritarian regime told them they could kill anyone who annoyed them. Pretti annoyed them. So they killed him. And now the lies that Miller, Noem, and Trump are telling about Pretti’s death are intended to encourage further extrajudicial executions and likely will do so.
Some commenters have pointed out that the administration lies are a display of dominance. Transparent falsehoods essentially dare you to disbelieve or disprove them. At the same time, they rally allies and police dissent. Once people have signed on to an outrageous untruth, you know you can count on them for just about anything.
One obvious example here are the lies Trump told about the 2020 election. After he lost to Joe Biden in November of that year, Trump insisted, without evidence, that the election had been rigged — by faulty voting machines and/or by immigrant voter fraud.
This was nonsense, and Trump knew it was nonsense. He wasn’t really lying to convince impartial observers or to win the public to his side. Rather, the voter fraud claims were meant as partisan talking points, to tell Trump supporters what they were supposed to say and do. Lies provided a pretense for refusing to certify election results. They helped create an enemies list of those who refused to go along and needed to be silenced — ultimately including Trump’s own VP Mike Pence. Lies provided fuel for Trump’s most radical supporters, who stormed the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to kidnap, assault, and murder congresspeople.
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Obviously, many January 6 rioters did believe Trump’s lies. But they believed them as partisans of the president. Or, in other words, they believed in Trump and so believed his lies, rather than believing the lies and therefore believing in Trump. Lying for Trump is primarily an exercise in weaponizing partisanship, rather than an exercise in converting nonbelievers.
Trump makes use of this technique extensively, but he didn’t invent it. Throughout American history, lies have been used to justify, enforce, and build power for white supremacy.
White people claimed, falsely, throughout the Jim Crow era that there was an epidemic of Black men raping white women, and that the only way to control the problem was through lynching. This was a lie — journalist Ida B. Wells found that lynching was often used against successful Black businesspeople and against Black men who had consensual relations with white women.
White supremacists weren’t swayed by the truth, though, because they weren’t interested in truth, but in the power of lies to build communities of hate. White people were eager to be photographed following illegal murders of Black people. They would even sell postcards in which the murderer’s faces were visible — much like ICE agents now are perfectly happy to commit murder on camera because they know that they will be protected by fascist lies.
There’s an even closer parallel in the smears directed at Black people killed by police like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd. The media, the police, the authorities, and the right rush to portray any victim of police violence as preemptively guilty. Lies and smears directed at victims aren’t based on a dispassionate examination of the facts, and they aren’t really meant to be taken as such. Rather, they are statements of solidarity with the police, and a preemptive defense of the (white supremacist) status quo. Lies are impunity are power.
Truth is power, too
In the past, lynching — illegal executions committed in public — was mostly directed at Black people. In Minneapolis, however, the city as a whole has declared its support for nonwhite people, including immigrants. The white supremacist administration, in an excess of bloodlust and rage, has therefore decided to treat white people in the city as race traitors, subject to the same kinds of violence and smears as non-whites. To the extent that Democrats and liberals throughout the country have chosen to oppose the regime of racial terror, they are also targets.
Fascists are terrified of the growing support for marginalized people, in part because it means their lies are less and less effective. Democratic leaders, for example, after years of hesitation, are finally actually saying that lies are lies. The party’s official X account told Stephen Miller (truthfully), “You’re a fucking liar with blood on your hands.”
Centrist Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton filmed a video in which, shaking with anger, he called ICE agents, “absolute cowards.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has been reluctant to oppose ICE funding, said what happened in Minnesota is “appalling” and that “Senate Democrats will not provide votes” for the DHS funding bill.
The presence of so many witnesses to these ICE killings is also a testament to Minnesotans’ commitment to truth, even in the face of threats on their lives. ICE would prefer to murder people out of the way in detention centers with few if any witnesses. Pretti, and those who filmed his death, were on the streets to deny the fascists the cover of shadows and lies, and to testify to the truth that their neighbors are their neighbors, and that they have a right to dignity, to life, to liberty, to happiness.
Those are truths that some Americans at one point said were self-evident. They never have been for many people in the US. But Minneapolis is showing that, however fascists lie, people like Alex Pretti are willing to risk everything to make them so.
