Megyn Kelly kicked off the latest episode of her podcast by declaring that she didn’t “feel sorry” for her Alex Prettywho was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents over the weekend, even used that clip on social media to promote the show.
Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked for the VA, was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents on Saturday. Soon after, several Trump administration officials called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and accused him of “brandishing” his weapon and of intending to “kill” or “massacre” federal agents, among other unfounded claims.
Video evidence taken by several bystanders, reviewed in frame-by-frame detail by various media outlets, contradicted these allegations. During the incident, Pretti was only holding his mobile phone, he had a permit to carry his weapon, and he never took out his weapon. An agent found the weapon in her holster while Pretti was being held by several agents, and removed the gun before another agent began shooting Pretti in the back.
However, Kelly presented her own slant on the incident, an interpretation that differed markedly from that of the the New York Times, The Washington Postand The Wall Street Journalamong many others.
She began her comments by accusing Pretti of “being subversive” and insinuating that he was part of a group of “organized agitators”:
On Saturday, a 37-year-old man, Alex Pretti, was shot by Border Patrol agents there, after a confrontation. Alex Pretti was there being subversive. He was there trying to interfere with traffic, trying to direct traffic in an ICE operation, apparently.
He was not there to help. He wasn’t there to assist law enforcement or make things easier for them. He was there with a loaded gun looking to cause trouble for the Border Patrol agents and that trouble came back to haunt him.
We’ll get into the specifics and frame by frame and all that in a minute, but I just want to say, like, I personally — I, I’m so sick of this bullish *t — I’m, like, these are organized agitators who train to disrupt and, in some cases, hurt law enforcement.
They go out there looking for confrontations that they can make viral on their social media or that they can use as propaganda to turn people against the good guys, those who are trying to free us from the scourge of the illegals who provoke children. That’s what they want to do. They want to portray themselves as noble and the ICE or Border Patrol agents as horrible and get some kind of confrontation on camera or something that makes them look stupid or evil or brutal.
And then when things turn really bad and brutal and dangerous, and in the case of Renee Good and now this Alex Pretti, all their remaining enablers rush to social media and the cameras to say, “See, see, I told you so.”
No, no. Even if I, Megyn Kelly, went to interrupt law enforcement, made legal arrests and law enforcement operations with – with a loaded gun tucked in the back of my pants and then engaged in a physical confrontation with them – physical, where I’m pushing and shoving – I would be in serious danger. Serious danger. Yes, the gun will certainly heighten the police officer’s reasonable fear for their own safety, but even without having a gun in this scenario, I would be in serious danger because resisting arrest could lead to very bad things.
“And just ask George Floyd,” Kelly continued. “Like, don’t do it, bad things could happen — resist arrest. You don’t antagonize cops in the middle of the road in a law enforcement operation and then when they got their hands on you they try to put you under arrest, you submit! That’s it. Send.”
Kelly appears to have borrowed a page from her former Fox News colleague’s playbook Tucker Carlson by making a wild misrepresentation of the facts about the death of Floyd under the knee of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvinwho is currently serving a sentence of 22.5 years after a jury found him guilty of Floyd’s murder.
On May 25, 2020, police body cameras and cell phones of bystanders recorded Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, including 3 minutes and 51 seconds in which Floyd was unresponsive. (That 9:29 figure was amended from the 8 minutes and 46 seconds already found in the original criminal complaint filed against Chauvin).
That cell phone video of Floyd went viral, showing him dying while handcuffed and pinned, face down on the sidewalk by four police officers with Chauvin kneeling on his neck as he screamed for his mother, repeatedly saying he couldn’t breathe, passed out, and his pulse went out – all while Chauvin ignored his medical offers to pull over and even repeatedly pushing away bystanders. assistance from off-duty firefighters and then from the EMTs who arrived on the scene.
One hopes that Kelly does not argue that Floyd failed to “submit” when he was unconscious and handcuffed with four police officers pushing him face down to the asphalt, his pulse growing weaker and finally failing.
Kelly went on to say that she had “this conversation” with her children about “if you get pulled over by a policeman or you find yourself interacting with a policeman, you submit,” and “if they’re being young, racist, bully, overbearing, if they’re wrong, if they actually don’t have the right person, we’ll deal with it later, because the law enforcement officer is “staffed.” They face too many threats that are deadly. for them” and “we must be the ones who are very careful not to cut it.”
With the situation in Minnesota, Kelly argued, “there is actually a greater responsibility, ironically, on those protesters – they are terrorists in my view – who behave well and submit immediately than there is on anyone else, because they put these people on the razor’s edge.”
“Like, I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don’t! I don’t,” Kelly said. “Do you know why I wasn’t shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass in and out of their operations. It’s very simple.”
“If I felt strongly enough about something the government was doing that I would go out and protest, I would do it peacefully on the sidewalk without interfering through a whistle, through shouting, through my body, in any other way,” she continued. “I would like to make my objections known by sitting there without interfering because the interference is where it goes in the South. And laying hands on a police officer who is trying or a Border Patrol officer or an ICE officer who is trying to carry out a law enforcement operation is a crime and now you will be arrested and if you do anything like resisting you are in the most serious trouble. They raise the situation and the danger in such a way that may be found in reasonable fear of their safety if they do so.”
Kelly’s show used the video of her saying she didn’t feel for Pretti to promote the episode on social media.
Despite Kelly’s repeated references to Pretti as “resisting arrest” or “laying hands” on law enforcement, this is not what actually happened.
Rob DoarA criminal defense attorney who serves as general counsel for the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, a gun rights group, posted a lengthy tweet detailing case law across the United States that has clearly held that “protective posture” and movements made out of “survival instincts” do not constitute “resisting arrest.”
“Poor or uncoordinated officer tactics that create instability, pain, or involuntary movement during restraints do not transform self-protective reactions into resistance,” Doar added. “Resistance requires deliberate voluntary opposition, not motion induced by the officers’ own use of force.”
In addition, as reported by several media outlets that reviewed the videos, the first contact with Pretti was initiated by the agents, and that at that moment, he was helping a woman whom the agents had thrown to the ground and pepper sprayed, as described by The New York Times in its analysis:
A small group of protesters stand in the street, talking to a federal agent as the whistle blows. Mr. Pretti appears to be filming the scene with his phone and directing traffic.
An agent starts pushing the protesters, and squirts pepper spray on their faces.
At this moment, Mr. Pretti has both hands clearly visible. One is holding his phone, while holding the other to protect himself from the pepper spray. He moves to help one of the protesters who has been sprayed, as other agents approach and pull him from behind.
Pretti “was holding a phone, not a gun, before agents took him to the ground and shot him,” reported the Timesand added that the agents had disarmed him and held him down “with his hands tied beside his head” before the first shots were fired.
Several eyewitnesses who saw the shooting, including a doctor who tried to give aid to Pretti, also submitted sworn affidavits saying they “did not see. [Pretti] reach or hold a gun,” “I did not see him attack the agents or brandish a weapon of any kind,” “I did not see him touch [the agents] — he wasn’t even turned towards them,” and was “just trying to help the woman up.”
“I don’t know why they shot him. He was just helping,” one woman wrote in her affidavit. “I was five feet from him and they just shot him.”
On Monday it was also reported that the Department of Homeland Security has bodycam footage from the agents’ shooting of Pretti. This has not yet been released to the public but considering how quickly the Trump administration made comments attacking Pretti and posted a photo of the gun that Pretti was legally carrying, it stands to reason that if this bodycam video provided any kind of exculpatory evidence to justify the shooting, it would have already been released.
Kelly wants her audience to believe she knows what happened last Saturday in Minneapolis better than the woman who was “five feet” away during the shooting, a ridiculous assertion. We could spend hours going line by line through Kelly’s podcast footage and social media posts, dismissing more of her remarks as unfounded nonsense, misrepresentations, deceit, or plain lies — but the fundamental sin of her commentary is that it reveals a betrayal and abandonment of core constitutional principles.
Kelly, who is both a lawyer and a journalist, should understand and appreciate the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. Pretti had every right to be present there, to record the events on his mobile phone, and to help a woman get up from the ground is not a crime. He also had a legal right to have and possess his gun; the Second Amendment does not disintegrate simply because a Border Patrol agent or other law enforcement officer is present.
Watch the video above via The Megyn Kelly Show on YouTube.
The post Megyn Kelly Says She Doesn’t ‘Feel Sorry’ for Alex Pretti Because He ‘Resisted Arrest’ Like George Floyd first appeared on Mediaite.