Greg Kelly didn’t mince words when he tore into the “that could be me” crowd after the death of Alex Pretti, and he was right to push back against rushed sanctimony. On his Newsmax program Kelly argued that grieving and reflexive saint-making shouldn’t erase plain facts about the man’s conduct at the scene and in the days before. Americans deserve measured truth, not performative moralizing from people who never bothered to learn the facts.
What we do know is that Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and intensive care unit nurse, was shot and killed by Border Patrol officers during an altercation on January 24, 2026. The incident unfolded during a protest in Minneapolis and has sparked national attention and protests, as well as heated political finger-pointing from both sides of the aisle. This was a serious, tragic event that demands sober investigation rather than instant sainthood or instant condemnation.
New video footage has also emerged showing Pretti involved in a separate scuffle with federal officers about 11 days earlier, including footage of him kicking at a government vehicle and being wrestled to the pavement before officers deployed crowd-control measures. Those earlier images complicate the simple narrative some in the media are hurriedly selling, and they matter when determining what actually happened on the street. Americans should be permitted to see the full picture before being lectured on morality by partisan busybodies.
At the same time, the Justice Department has announced a federal civil rights probe into Pretti’s death, and the FBI has taken the lead on the investigation—precisely the kind of complete, independent inquiry the public should demand. If law enforcement used excessive force, those officers must be held accountable; if not, careless allegations should be exposed for what they are. A careful, professional investigation is the only path to truth and to calming a nation being pushed into outrage by cable news and social media mobs.
Conservatives should applaud Kelly’s refusal to accept the left’s instant deification game, which too often serves as cover for political theater and a demand for punitive policy changes before facts are available. The “that could be me” crowd wants emotional equivalence to substitute for evidence, casting complex incidents into neat narratives that fit their side’s agenda. Real patriots demand both compassion for the dead and fairness for the living, including those in uniform whose split-second choices are judged later under calm lights.
This moment should unite commonsense Americans behind two commitments: respect for human life and an insistence on thorough, impartial fact-finding. If the probe reveals wrongdoing, prosecute it to the fullest extent; if it does not, call out the politics and media hysteria that tried to turn a messy reality into a morality play. We can mourn, seek accountability, and defend our law enforcement all at once—because patriotism means pursuing truth, not virtue-signaling from a safe distance.
