Death Squads Execute Second Dissident

Or what the US press would say if this was happening on the streets of a "shithole" country overseas

Jan 25, 2026

A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

I adapted that headline from a post on BlueSky. Thank you, Scott.

Because the killing of an unarmed civilian by masked paramilitary gunman on the streets of Minneapolis is murder. This was an execution.

An extrajudicial killing in cold blood of a registered nurse, Alex Pretti. I dearly hope that’s how it’ll be reported but I’m posting now, even in the noise of this moment because the shock value is the point of it. That’s what political violence is. It’s violence for political ends.

We know the playbook of what comes next because we’ve already seen it. We know that the news cycle will erupt in shock and fury. And we know that the Trump administration and its allies will lie. They will tell us not to believe the evidence of our eyes and we won’t know what to do with what is state-sanctioned gaslighting of an entire nation and beyond.

But, there are things to hold onto and that’s what this week - maybe one the most insane news cycle of my lifetime - has also taught us. The noise, the sturm-und-drang of this moment is not a coincidence. It’s the point.

This has been a week of explosions from destroying the NATO alliance to this fascistic street killing. It’s meant to stun us.

Has it really been only a week since Trump announced his intention to take Greenland by any means possible? Three days since he said “I’m a dictator…and sometimes you need one.” Two days, since a board of international war criminals were inducted into the new inaugural “Board of Peace”.

And they are all tests. Trial balloons. Can we focus long enough to fight back?

What is happening on the streets of Minneapolis is a test. The city a petri dish where administration is testing the limits of its power and the strength of the resistance it encounters. In Wednesday’s newsletter I included video of the interview I’d done with conservative historian, Robert Kagan, in which he set out very clearly how the intention is to provoke street violence in order for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

This is intended to provoke a reaction and it’s the form that reaction takes, that’s so critical.

And that’s why again, I’m going to highlight Mark Carney’s speech at Davos. I wrote a newsletter about it on Wednesday because here, finally there was someone with authority prepared to acknowledge what the fuck is going on and defend what we may one day describe as the reality-based order.

And I’m so glad I did, because if I’d waited until the end of the week, it would already have been eclipsed, another fleeting moment in a frantic news cycle that is never going to let up, that’s also the point.

But I want, again, to highlight the text he quoted from, The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel the Czechoslovakian dissident poet turned president. A book that had helped fuel an uprising that had ultimately led to a wave of revolutions across Europe which had in turn led to the downfall of the Soviet Union.

In countries under the Iron Curtain, people felt powerless, but they weren’t, that was Havel’s message. And also, Carney’s. The job of power is to make people believe they have no power, but it’s a lie.

And it’s the same in Minnesota. It’s because these protestors have power that they have to be stopped, crushed, silenced. ICE is shooting unarmed civilians in cold blood and beating disabled military veterans to prove that they can.

But the more brutality they use, the more performative the violence, the more it reveals their own weakness.

There are other videos you should watch. I’m on shitty wifi and I can’t upload them but I screen recorded of NYPD officers tearing off masks of ICE agents and I can tell you how weak and ashamed and pathetic they look.

The elites are cowed. That’s what Robert Kagan also said when I interviewed him. Politicians, senators, CEOs, Hollywood royalty. They’re weak and cowardly and silent. But the ordinary people of Minneapolis aren’t. They’re showing what it takes to stand up to power. And this killing only proves it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the day after Carney’s speech even the UK felt sufficiently embarrassed into pulling out of the Gaza’s Board of and the head of NATO and various European leaders pretended they’d been brave all along.

Courage is contagious. Carney’s words made a difference. That’s what words do. And it’s why the mass cowardice of America’s rich and entitled and powerful is the real problem America is facing right now. A cowardice that’s being normalised by the enabling actions of other world leaders.

“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and act together.”

That’s what Carney said. He’s right. And we have to keep on repeating it.

Davos is a cringefest even at the best of times. But, there was a value to crushing these leaders into a ski resort and forcing them to watch Trump up close rather than as pixels on a screen. More than that, they got to see each other, in the flesh, and their mirror neurons squirmed in collective embarrassment.

And guess what? Trump backtracked. Maybe he isn’t going to invade Greenland, after all. I mean maybe he is. Who knows at this point but Trump may be the world’s greatest shitposters but the physical world still matters. We are human animals. And, this week, the pack figured out that one of our own is weak and ill. He may have nukes but for all we know he may also have late stage Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease. The other leaders sniffed the air and pulled back the curtain to find only whirring some cogs and wheels. The Wizard of Davos is ill and weak and unsteady on his hooves. This week could be a crisis but also a turning point.

Ask an awkward question

Davos has always been cringe but it used to be cringily hypocritical, hosting petrodollar-sponsored panels on climate change whereas it’s now given up even that pretence.

There were 41 panels – I counted them. And one on democratic threats. And among the battalions of journalists who turn up to transcribe this stuff, one of the few who bothered to ask an unscripted question was Caolan Robertson, an ex-far-right influencer turned journalist now based in Ukraine.

I love a doorstep and watching Trump’s Russia envoy, Steve Witkoff, desperately trying to get away from him went deservedly viral on social media.

Meanwhile the owner and editor-in-chief of my old newspaper was hosting a panel co-sponsored by the Saudi state oil company in which he interviewed the ex-commander of the IDF’s notorious cyber intelligence Unit 8200.

One of these is a highly respectable mainstream editor. The other runs a YouTube channel. Maybe, it’s not that journalism is failing to meet this moment, it’s that it’s happening elsewhere.

Havel was a poet trapped in a totalitarian state who became President. It’s never hopeless. And it’s pointless and absurd to be scared of Trump when he’s scared of teenagers. Why do you think he got his pals to buy TikTok this week? The social media platform whose dumb dances and funny skits helped a generation get through a global pandemic? It’s because he’s the loneliest, most desperate man in the world.

He’s waiting for Minnesotans to blink and they’re not blinking.

He’s the one who blinked this week. A sickened animal who surrounded by a pack thought twice about his big boy behaviour and backed down. You know the other person who ordered extrajudicial executions on his own people? President Duterte in the Philippines. He, like Trump, was elected in 2016. He waged a war not on immigrants but drugs. Last year he was arrested for crimes against humanity. It’s never hopeless.