Fox News once postured as the patriotic opposition to purported government tyranny, with the network’s stars wrapping themselves in the mantle of the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution. Right now, its primary purpose is to explain to viewers why it is good that masked agents of the state are executing Americans on the street. 

Fox’s coverage earlier this month of an ICE officer’s killing of Renee Good, an activist who resisted the federal government’s brutal immigration enforcement campaign in Minneapolis, was a horror show of propaganda, as the network’s bootlickers adopted the lies put forth by the Department of Homeland Security without question.

But its response on Saturday to Border Patrol officers gunning down Alex Pretti, a nurse who had been observing and recording their actions, was somehow more disturbing. Network commentators repeatedly went above and beyond even the excuses DHS put out as they sought to smear Pretti, valorize his killers, and justify future state executions that seem all but inevitable.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN all conducted analyses of multiple bystander videos documenting Pretti’s killing, which occurred shortly after 9 a.m. CT, and pointed to contradictions with DHS statements. The Times concluded: 

• Pretti was filming federal agents on his phone. After one of the agents shoved two civilians, he attempted to put himself between them. 
• The federal agent squirted “pepper spray in the direction of  Mr. Pretti’s face,” then as many as seven agents wrestled him to the ground and one began beating him with a pepper spray container. 
• An agent appeared to remove a gun from Pretti’s possession and started to move away from the scene as other agents restrained him on his knees. 
• An agent fired a shot at close range into Pretti. That agent and the agent who initially pepper-sprayed Pretti then fired at least nine more shots at him over 5 seconds, most while he was motionless on the ground.

But it takes time to conduct this sort of painstaking reporting, and Fox isn’t interested in getting to the bottom of what actually happened.

Fox’s Bill Melugin, the network’s dedicated shill for federal immigration enforcement agencies, was the initial vehicle for the DHS spin in the hours after Pretti’s killing. 

“What we are being told at this point from DHS is that Border Patrol had some type of interaction with a man who was armed,” Fox correspondent Garrett Tenney reported on-air roughly an hour later. He said that Melugin had received a photo “from DHS” that showed “the gun and two magazines that they say he was armed with” and that “Border Patrol engaged him” and “there was a shooting.”

Note that this reporting indicates that Pretti “was armed” with a gun, but not that he had brandished it or otherwise threatened the agents before they shot him. Minnesota gun laws allow the open carry of a firearm with a permit, which Minneapolis’ police chief subsequently said that Pretti had.

Tenney stressed that “the details are still coming in” and noted that Gov. Tim Walz had issued a statement about the “horrific shooting.”

That was apparently enough for Washington Post columnist and Fox contributor Marc Thiessen, who quickly appeared on-air to denounce Minnesota Democrats for “assuming the worst of our patriotic ICE agents.” He claimed that “Minneapolis, and the governor, and the mayor are to blame for all of this,” saying that their refusal to vigorously cooperate with ICE enforcement had triggered the federal campaign and that their support for protesters had led to the escalation.

“So, they're causing the need for these raids to begin with by their sanctuary policies and then the protesters are protesting in response to those raids, and they're pouring fuel on the fire by accusing ICE of doing terrible things, which means somebody's going to get upset and bring a gun to one of these protests, and they're going to get shot,” he concluded. “So they're endangering the protesters with their rhetoric about ICE and by encouraging them to go out and protest.”

DHS subsequently put out a statement blaming Pretti for his death, claiming that he had “approached US Border Patrol agents with a 9-mm semi-automatic handgun,” that he “violently resisted” when officers attempted to disarm him, and that “fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots.”

Even this statement, which absurdly suggested that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” did not allege that Pretti ever so much as touched the gun he was legally carrying while the agents beat him. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem did not say he had done so when asked the question directly, even as Noem smeared him as a domestic terrorist and Bovino said he had assaulted law enforcement. But multiple Fox guests claimed, apparently based on nothing, that Pretti had drawn his weapon on the officers, who had been forced to act in self-defense.     

Fox contributor Nicole Parker described the “checklist” she claimed law enforcement follows diligently in determining whether deadly force is justified and said that “when you're seeing a gun in your face and you're in the scuffle, then you have to, again, assume that is a gun.” She went on to criticize Walz for criticizing “violent untrained officers,” saying, “Having been a federal agent, we are highly trained officers,” and arguing that such “rhetoric” is “causing this problem in the first place.” 

Fox contributor Paul Mauro likewise claimed that Pretti was shot because he “tried to involve himself somehow and at some point during the scuffle when they were trying to subdue him without using deadly force, he pulls out that 9 mm.” 

Mauro added, “That’s an expensive gun. That doesn’t look like a funny-gun kind of thing that you very often see among the perps. … ATF is gonna be running that gun to see if there’s any bodies on it.” 

He went on to link current protests in Minneapolis to those following George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in 2020, saying that “Minneapolis now is in danger of burning down a second time. What does that tell you about the fact that it’s the same leadership there?”

The Heritage Foundation’s Lora Ries also repeatedly claimed Pretti had drawn his gun on the agents in a Fox segment that afternoon. She denounced him as a “radical goon” and claimed that he and other “protesters are paid.”

“These protesters are paid,” she claimed. “This is not free speech, it's paid for. Nor is it speech. And the government has a right to restrict time, place, and manner of true free speech. But these people are simply interfering and obstructing federal agents from carrying out federal law.” 

“It's very simple to not be shot by federal agents: Don't draw your gun on federal agents,” she added. “Don't assault federal agents. Don't aim your car at federal agents. And so Gov. Walz can't have it both ways -- he can't demonize federal agents, call for resistance to federal agents and then be angry when some radical goon draws their gun on a federal agent and himself is shot.” 

Fox’s guests showed little doubt that Pretti’s shooting was justified, even as they responded in real time based on limited information.

“Well, that was the first time I saw that,” former acting ICE Director Jonathan Fahey told Fox anchor Jon Scott after watching a video of Pretti’s killing. “But it does look like this person, just from that glimpse, is — he's resisting, and if he's armed and they knew he was armed, it was imperative for them to take him down to keep them safe.” 

He added that while “the facts need to come out,” the Border Patrol officers who killed Pretti “very well could have prevented a major mass shooting of multiple officers today,” before saying it was “shameful” that Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey were “trying to sort of fire people up” against those “putting themselves in harm’s way.”

President Donald Trump, who seems driven to further escalate the situation in Minneapolis, posted praise of Fahey’s Fox commentary overnight, saying that he is “fantastic on FoxNews in explaining the motives behind the fraudsters and insurrectionists in Minnesota.”

By Sunday morning, the Fox & Friends Weekend team emphasized who they thought bore full responsibility for the shooting: Pretti himself. 

After expressing sympathy for Pretti and his family, co-host Griff Jenkins asked, “You have to wonder: Why does a nurse feel compelled to go confront ICE armed with a 9 mm handgun?” 

Later in the same segment, co-host Charlie Hurt declared that “only one person could have prevented this from happening, and it's Alex Pretti.”

Fox and the MAGA media writ large have spent months trying to convince their audience that progressive Americans are violent criminals who want them dead. And now that the state is killing them, the network is explaining why they deserved to die.