Last Wednesday, 11 days before a Border Patrol agent shot and killed him, a video surfaced showing Alex Pretti kicking the taillight of an ICE vehicle.
Right-wing influencers quickly denounced the case as somehow exonerating the 37-year-old killer. Megyn Kelly said the footage proves anti-ICE protesters were “victimizing” Border Patrol, rather than the other way around, and advised “illegality-loving leftists” to “find another billboard.” President Donald Trump declared Preti an “instigator and possibly an insurrectionist” whose “stock price has fallen significantly.”
Of course, Preeti’s previous actions have no real bearing on the legitimacy of his murder. In the United States, the penalty for kicking a government SUV is not summary execution. The reason the Border Patrol was wrong to put a bullet into Preeti’s back was not because they always had respect for Preeti and his vehicle, but rather because he was a human being.
Evidence of Preti’s past aggressiveness might have been significant had the fatal confrontation with Border Patrol agents not been recorded. In these circumstances, the public would have to make an educated guess as to whether Pretti gave the agent cause to use deadly force, based in part on his prior actions. But in our universe, we know he didn’t do that.
But instead of discussing the relevance of Mr. Preti’s first encounter with the Border Patrol, some liberals have chosen to deny the existence of the Border Patrol itself.
In the left-wing corners of social media, it quickly became canon that Preity’s new video was ‘AI’. Few liberals of any rank promoted the conspiracy theory. And it made little sense on the surface. If the right is going to disseminate deepfakes to discredit Preti, why would they choose to depict Preti merely damaging ICE property rather than assaulting an officer?
But stories no longer need the support of credentialed journalists or elected officials to gain significant impact. And despite news outlets confirming the authenticity of the video, Preeti’s new video is claimed to be a deepfake that went viral on X, Bluesky, and TikTok.
The rush toward negativism was clearly misguided. It’s never wise to make strong claims without solid evidence, and it’s always embarrassing to make a statement incorrectly.
But the left-wing conspiracy theory about Mr. Preti’s past scuffles with federal agents was also reckless in a deeper sense. As the backlash to Preeti’s murder has shown, video evidence is one of the few remaining pieces of evidence of Donald Trump’s deceit and wrongdoing. Therefore, it is important for the president’s opponents to maintain the authority of the recorded images. Some liberals have done the opposite by baselessly declaring politically inconvenient films deepfakes.
Sects, lies, and videotapes
From the moment Trump entered politics, he has waged a war of attrition against objective reality.
All politicians play games with the truth. But President Trump’s lies have long been exceptional in their volume and audacity. The president made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements in his first term alone, ranging from minor surprises about the size of his inauguration crowd to major fabrications about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
The scale and shamelessness of Mr. Trump’s deception is itself an assertion of superiority, a declaration that his words trump reality.
The administration tested this proposal last Saturday when a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Preti in Minneapolis.
Cellphone video showed the 37-year-old man being pepper-sprayed, beaten, disarmed and shot 10 times by federal agents as he tried to help protesters from the ground. But when the administration started issuing statements about the shootings, it didn’t even do that. try To make that story consistent with this public evidence. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security told Americans that Preti “approached police officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun” with the intent to “inflict maximum harm to individuals and kill law enforcement,” a claim that anyone with eyes and internet access would know to be false.
And for the most part, they did. Anger over the administration’s lies proved widespread and bipartisan. To defuse the situation, the president demoted the Border Patrol commander, the DHS secretary confessed that her initial statements about the shooting may have been wrong, and the FBI took control of the investigation into Preti’s murder.
These developments may or may not restore Border Patrol responsibility to the rule of law. But they reaffirmed, at least momentarily, that the White House spin room is subordinated to easily verifiable facts.
The regime may be able to deceive half the population about things that cannot be evaluated with their own senses. The legitimacy of the 2020 election or the effectiveness of vaccines cannot be ascertained by sight or sound alone. And the institutions that once formed consensus on such subjects—mainstream media, academia, civil servants—are steadily losing influence. But the backlash against Preeti’s murder suggests that video It could still ground Americans in some kind of common reality, thus constraining the president’s ability to make his own choices.
Don’t be the “boy who cried over deepfakes”
In this context, it is irresponsible and counterproductive for liberals to attribute politically offensive videos to AI in the absence of strong evidence against such allegations.
Of course, artificial intelligence can actually produce photorealistic videos. And this means that the veracity of the recording cannot be taken for granted. Reporters were right to seek independent confirmation rather than blindly trusting the validity of the latest Pretti video.
However, this reality emphasizes the importance of not accidentally creating a “crying deepfake.” We are in danger of losing one of the last remaining constraints on partisan self-deception and presidential perfidy. Erroneously discounting the reliability of recordings would therefore undermine those constraints and hasten the arrival of a world in which videos of state violence have little power.
As political conflicts intensify, it can be difficult to resist the temptation of propaganda. We want ideologically convenient facts and stories that resonate broadly. We long for holy martyrs and demonic adversaries.
But liberals cannot allow such desires to override their intellectual honesty. The authoritarian right has no investment in maintaining a politics grounded in reality, so it can spread self-congratulatory fiction with ease. Supporters of democracy don’t have that luxury. But there would be other benefits if we could resist our own promotional urges. The facts will be on our side.
