An important mythical figure in Nazi Germany was a man named Horst Wessel. He was a mid-level Nazi street thug who was killed by communists over an unpaid rent dispute. Nazi propaganda turned him in a hero of the German nation, and the “Horst Wessel Song” became the official Nazi anthem.
The Trump administration is doing all in its power to create a similar fake martyr in the form of dead Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. It’s central to the conservative victimhood complex: In order to violently dominate others, they must create a false narrative in which they are also the victim at the same time.
Just consider what is happening. Twice in the last month, Trump terror squads in the form of ICE and CBP kidnapping gangs have brutally executed innocent Minneapolis civilians in the street. I have already covered the homicide of Renee Good, an innocent mother of three who was simply trying to drive away from ICE thugs when one of them, Jonathan Ross, shot her in the face.
Now we have Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse for Veterans Affairs, who was mercilessly cut down by CBP. As detailed video analyses from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times demonstrate, Pretti was out observing a CBP gang when they pepper-sprayed him in the face, pushed him face-down on the ground, brutally beat him, and then shot him directly in the back. Even as he lay lifeless on the street, at least two agents continued to fire, eventually shooting Pretti 10 times.
The Department of Homeland Security issued its usual outrageous lies, claiming that Pretti intended to “massacre” agents, that he “violently resisted” them, and the officers fired “defensive shots.” Pretti did have a gun, but he did not take it out; it was legally registered; and the videos clearly show a CBP agent taking it from the scene before the shooting.
These ICE and CBP goons look like occupying soldiers—particularly CBP, who have a frankly fetishistic level of “operator” cosplay going on—but from a military standpoint, the way they are behaving is both stupid and dangerous. There are two basic ways to approach a situation like this. Counterinsurgency theory (whatever its merits in practice) emphasizes that occupying troops should go out of their way to build trust among civilians, so civilians will not aid guerrillas. The opposite approach—call it Genghis Khan theory—says that if a city defies your rule, you burn it to the ground and kill everyone inside.
What ICE and CBP are doing is a mixture of the two, virtually calculated to put their own officers in maximum danger. We have a bunch of swaggering, violent goons, armed to the teeth, regularly kidnapping, beating, injuring, and now and then murdering innocent civilians—but there are not remotely enough of these thugs to actually win a pitched battle with an entire city, should it come to that. All the while they are roaming around in plain sight in small groups, routinely surrounded by residents. They are inflaming white-hot hatred while behaving in a way that would have gotten you killed in about five seconds during the Second Battle of Fallujah.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is working feverishly to prevent the perpetrators from facing any punishment whatsoever. Good’s murderer, Ross, is in hiding, and whoever it was that killed Pretti wasn’t even taken off duty. The administration is signaling that the only way there will be any punishment for what happened is if someone takes the law into their own hands.
There are something like 400 million guns in this country in private hands. The U.S. is a nation where Mexican drug cartels literally send straw purchasers to gun stores to buy whole regiments’ worth of military-grade weapons. It only takes one sufficiently motivated person to take a shot, and there are dozens of ICE kidnapping squads standing around in clear view of dozens of windows.
I think the Trump administration—and particularly Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s ethnic cleansing policy, who bears a marked resemblance to Reinhard Heydrich—knows all this perfectly well. They are intentionally sending in their paramilitary goons to create chaos, manufacture a few martyrs, and ideally touch off a riot, to provide an excuse for further violent escalation: Invoking the Insurrection Act, attempting to federalize the National Guard, and eventually moving up to a coup. This isn’t even the first time the far right has attempted to create Horst Wessel 2.0. They attempted it with Charlie Kirk, though in that case it seems to have backfired.
It is telling that in this effort to sacrifice one of their own goons, the Trump movement has created an actual martyr. Before being dogpiled and shot in the back, Pretti was attempting to get between the killers and another observer. Nothing better exemplifies the MAGA mindset than a half dozen heavily armed thugs beating and murdering a completely helpless civilian who is restrained on the ground, and then crying about how they’re the victim. To quote the writer Luke O’Neil: “Barbarians and martyrs at once. … Crying and hitting you and crying and hitting you and crying and hitting you.”
Make no mistake: I earnestly hope it does not come to this. It is to the extreme credit of the hyper-disciplined Minneapolis resistance movement that it hasn’t happened thus far. But if and when some ICE or CBP goon ends up shot, it should be regarded as the intentional consequence of Trump administration policy.