Fox News’ biggest stars are desperately trying to turn the Trump administration’s execution and subsequent smearing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis into a story about how the political left is out of control.
Video analyses conducted by several news outlets show masked Border Patrol agents engaging, assaulting, restraining, and gunning down Pretti (who had been recording their activities on his phone) over a matter of seconds on Saturday morning. High-ranking administration officials subsequently branded him a “domestic terrorist” who had intended to “massacre” the agents, citing Pretti’s possession of a legally carried handgun that he never drew during the altercation.
Fox initially ran with and even went beyond the administration’s justifications for killing Pretti. But the network pivoted beginning Sunday evening as burgeoning outrage made their arguments untenable, with some commentators conceding that videos disproved the official statements and suggesting the administration shift tactics.
Monday night’s Fox programming provided a synthesis of the two narrative threads. Network hosts suggested that more investigation was necessary to determine what had happened to Pretti, and called for a retrenchment of sorts. But much of their focus was on attacking what they deemed a Democratic “insurgency” against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.
Fox host Jesse Watters condemned Gov. Tim Walz, telling viewers that he “has not made any effort to chill out his citizens” and has instead “been in open rebellion against the federal government” and “activated a Minnesota insurgency.”
“This insurgency is more sophisticated than you think, and it relies on a supportive population,” Watters added, claiming that “these people are giving aid and comfort to foreign criminals” and that “like jihadists, their leaders don’t care if they die.”
“This movement is lethal to the country,” Watters concluded. “Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive if Minnesota would stop attacking the Trump administration for doing what voters put him in to do.”
Laura Ingraham described immigration enforcement protesters as an “open-borders mafia” who “prattle on how they are protecting their neighbors, but they don't bat an eye when their neighbors' daughters are raped by an illegal or run over by an illegal with, you know, his second DWI.”
She added that “the hard-core communists who give the octane to these mobs have one overriding goal … to destabilize America by frustrating a key pillar of the Trump agenda. Now, of course, that's border enforcement.”
Ingraham went on to say that “certain elements” in Minneapolis were “hoping to provoke ICE” and “some, not all, hope to witness, I think, a violent response, then they would clip it for social media and then they can blast it out.”
“So the more tragic, in this warped mindset, the better,” she added. “The more fodder for their demand that ICE withdraw from the city and immigration arrests end immediately. They think they have that, this image, in the death of Alex Pretti.”
And Sean Hannity insinuated that the media and “the left” were engaged in a “rush to judgement” regarding Pretti’s killers. Then, interviewing FBI Director Kash Patel, Hannity sought assurances that the administration was keeping its investigative resources focused not on Pretti’s killers, but on targeting his fellow activists.
“What do we know about this encrypted message group?” Hannity asked, referencing Signal chats used by Minneapolis activists to track immigration enforcement operations. He added, “When you have well-organized groups like those that are going after law enforcement, I would imagine that will fall under the purview of the FBI.”
Patel, who had previously divulged launching a probe of the messaging groups in response to a MAGA influencer’s post, replied that “this Signal chat is something that we, the FBI, are looking at and spearheading.”
This rhetoric, intended to dehumanize and criminalize Minneapolis activists, echoes years of demagoguery on Fox and throughout the right-wing media about the violent threat purportedly posed by the left — most recently following the killing of Renee Good by ICE agents on January 7.
