What’s in today’s Jan. 30, 2026 issue
✍ Fact-checking lies about Alex Pretti
📆 A timeline of some of Trump’s most egregious acts
🤫 Political suppression on TikTok
📕 An AI company destroyed millions of books
🧑🏼💻 Dave’s Corner: that new Alex Pretti video
Hi friends,
Chris Vazquez, your Friday newsletter writer here. It’s been another week of processing another killing of another civilian by armed federal agents in another occupied American city. Over lunch with a friend and mentor yesterday, we reflected on shifting attitudes among people around us. During the first Trump administration, our loved ones hoped that someone would come and save us from what we all saw unfolding — someone like Robert Mueller or James Comey or any other high-level official seeking to hold Donald Trump accountable. Then, my friend summed up those same loved ones’ assessment today: “No one is coming to save us.”
On one hand, that’s an expression of despair. And it’s only exacerbated by a deeper understanding I’ve gained since 2016 of how state violence has always operated, in the US and globally. On the other, it can be an expression of empowerment against the people with institutional power who refuse to stop it. Republicans are presiding over the fatal shootings that have rocked the country over the last two weeks; meanwhile, Democrats are refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security unless the agency implements reforms, as if a government body tasked with hunting down and violently removing racialized others can ever be reformed.
But outside what we typically see as the halls of power, a different kind of power is making actual, meaningful change. My Mother Jones colleague Sam Van Pykeren reported on the mutual aid networks in Minneapolis giving coats to people being released from federal detention, providing saline wash for protesters who had been tear gassed, and buying snacks and hand warmers for protesters resisting the death squad occupying their city.
Reading through the terrible news of the past week, this is what I keep coming back to. No one is coming to save us. So we save ourselves.
With that, let’s dive in.
They’re lying to you about Alex Pretti
After Border Patrol agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said Pretti “tried to murder federal agents”. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem similarly tried to justify the killing. These are lies.
Video evidence doesn’t show Pretti acting violently. It shows him protecting someone who agents had pushed to the ground. It also shows one agent disarming Pretti before the first shot was fired, and before another agent shot Pretti in the back three times. Plus, the Department of Homeland Security’s own report on the shooting makes no mention of Pretti attacking officers.
Officials like FBI Director Kash Patel have also said Pretti did not have the right to bring a gun to a protest. This doesn’t just contradict many conservatives’ own line of thinking around gun rights — it’s also incorrect. Legal experts told PolitiFact that because Minnesota “legally permitted Pretti to carry a gun, he was within his rights in Minnesota to do so, including at a protest.”
Even if he did break the law by not having his permit or other ID on him, as Noem and Border Patrol official Greg Bovino have said, the penalty for that is a maximum fine of $25. Notably, the penalty as defined by law is not being shot dead in the street.
Some conservatives — including the president himself — say people protesting federal agents’ occupation of Minneapolis are paid. No evidence confirms this. In fact, it’s one of the most common pieces of misinformation that spread around mass protests.
It didn’t start with Minnesota
A rough timeline from Trump’s political ascent to his presiding over federal agents’ recent killings includes: announcing his candidacy by disparaging Mexican immigrants, bragging about sexually assaulting women, calling white supremacists in Charlottesville “very fine people,” his first time getting impeached, denying election results and inciting an insurrection about it, hoarding classified documents in his bathroom, 34 convictions in a hush money trial, flip-flopping on releasing the Epstein files, and deploying heavily militarized federal agents into American cities to detain, deport, shoot and kill people.
The premise of Dave’s video is that every step of the way, people have said this is the last straw for Trump. And yet, this man has continued to run up the political food chain for a decade. So, what does “the last straw” even mean today? A quick Google News search for “trump accountability” turned up this story about state and local officials vowing to hold the Trump administration accountable. Some want to prosecute federal officers and administration officials who break state laws. (Notably, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said this will only happen after those administration officials leave office.) But the story says they face an uphill battle in doing so.
The Google search also turned up stories and press releases about litigation against the Trump administration, Democratic legislation seeking to rein in Trump’s efforts on various fronts including immigration and climate, and calls to impeach the people around Trump.
If everyone saw your videos, America would be a better place.
And good luck talking about any of this on TikTok
Under TikTok’s new ownership by Trump-aligned billionaires, many users have raised concerns that the app is censoring posts about ICE, Jeffrey Epstein and other issues Trump and his friends might not want you talking about.
TikTok has blamed the issues on app outages. But there’s a long and widely held consensus that TikTok does censor some political content. Still, it’s sometimes hard to always know exactly when and why TikTok does this. (Shameless plug for my reporting on this from my early days working with Dave. I was still learning the TikTok journalism ropes back then and sound like I’m literally asleep, so please be gentle while watching this.)
Users have also raised concerns about the app collecting immigration data. TikTok’s privacy policy says it could collect information about “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status.” In fact, it’s said this since before the app’s new US ownership took over. That language is there because some state laws require social media apps to tell us what sensitive information they could collect.
Meanwhile, in AI overlord news
Our former colleagues at The Washington Post covered a tech start-up’s secret plan to destroy and scan millions of books in order to teach AI models behind Anthropic’s products, including the debonairly named but reportedly evil Claude.
What’s the problem with tearing apart and feeding books to AI as though they’re game pieces in Hungry Hungry Hippo? Authors alleged that it’s a copyright issue. Documents from lawsuits show that other big tech companies worked hard and often secretly to collect books and other artwork to train AI. They included pirated works, according to court records, and suspected they were breaking copyright law.
But courts are still deciding whether they actually did break copyright law. Many of these cases are ongoing, and some judges have said these AI companies can be in the clear under fair use. But even if the use of the copyrighted works ends up being legal, the way these companies acquired the works via pirating websites might not be.
Each week, after running through the news Dave has covered in the last week, I turn things over to him for some analysis and updates. Dave, take it away!
On the topic of AI, there’s this new phenomenon I’ve noticed in the comment section of videos. It’s sort of the reverse of being tricked by AI. I saw it with this video from The News Movement.
We see Alex Pretti, 11 days before his death, kicking a tail light off a a Border Patrol agent’s car. Now, it goes without saying that breaking a tail light does not justify killing someone in the street, 11 days later. I would argue that it doesn’t even justify the way he’s tackled in the video above.
Still, the first initial comments on this video, and still now, were “that’s AI.”
Comments from the News Movement video on Instagram.
I’ll admit, I raised my eyebrows watching the video. Pretti was more charged up in this earlier footage than the day he was murdered. It didn’t totally match my idea of him. Falling into the “that’s AI” trap would have made this easier to swallow.
Again, it’s not that this video justifies murder at all. Like many, my concern was, “oh no, this is going to be used as ammunition” in some kind of weird, sick argument as to why Pretti deserved to die.
Sure enough, within hours, Donald Trump Jr. was tweeting about it. The MAGA base has already coalesced around the idea that Pretti was, in fact, a violent man that deserved to be killed in the street.
On the flip side, immediately after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was attacked, I saw a ton of comments from Trump supporters falsely insisting that the entire event was staged.
Comments on the C-SPAN YouTube clip, of all places.
For some MAGA supporters, it would be impossible to imagine that Omar, the person Trump so often derides and ridicules, would not only sustain an attack like this, but square up and face her attacker, completely fearless.
So what’s the point of all my rambling here? I think we are in a very precarious moment. Not everyone has the tools (or time!) to meticulously study every frame of footage coming our way. And it’s all completely charged by emotion.
LNI will be here to keep fact-checking everything we can. In the meantime, do your best to take it all one post at a time. And if you need a break, take a break.
You get two rewards for making it to the end of this newsletter. The first is a pet picture from a loyal reader. I know we ran a little long today. So as a thank you for sticking around, here’s a two-for-one. Meet Coco and Mousse!
They’re friends!!!!!!!
Your second reward is the reveal for this week’s link scavenger hunt, in which I hid a non-news related link somewhere in this newsletter and tell you where it is down here. This week, in second bullet point about the “last straw” video, I linked out to “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush because I just finished season 4 of Stranger Things. Depending on how you measure time, I am either four years or forty years late to loving this song. Read to the end again next week for another scavenger hunt reveal.
Until then!
Chris
