Alex Pretti Is Why I Will Never Vote Republican Again

For months I’ve been accused of painting conservatives with a broad brush. Of attacking their voting record and the values they hold dear. Of calling them morally reprehensible.

I never did. I was doing the opposite—carefully distinguishing between extremist rhetoric and the broader conservative base, calling out specific bad actors, documenting democratic backsliding, warning conservative allies about the people poisoning our movement, defending the Constitution. I was trying to honor the oath I swore thirty-two years ago.

They called it a bad take.

“Yup, shame,” others chorused.

I was permanently banned from r/Republican for simply asking “What happens when a Democrat president inherits all the precedents Trump has set?”

I called for de-escalation after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I said the enemy isn’t your neighbor who votes differently. I said bad actors were trying to tear apart the country.

They said I was unmarketable. They showed me the door.

I was sitting in a crater but I kept writing. I kept distinguishing. I kept giving the base as much grace as possible, even as just this last month the administration rolled out neo-Nazi slogans in official communications, invaded Venezuela without congressional authorization, and defended an AI platform generating child sexual abuse material at an industrial scale as “free speech” while handing its owner a Pentagon contract.

Then, on Saturday, federal agents in Minneapolis shot Alex Pretti.

He was a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the VA, a legal gun owner with a valid concealed carry permit. He was less than two miles from home, directing traffic and filming with his phone when he saw agents shove a woman to the ground. He went to help her.

You’ll hear people say “okay, maybe the shooting was wrong, but he shouldn’t have been there.” Except he wasn’t a protester—not that it should matter. He was a concerned citizen. It’s the same logic as “her skirt was too short,” and would be just as false, except even that framing is a falsehood. He was in his own neighborhood. He saw someone get hurt and tried to help. He was a nurse. That’s what they do.

Federal agents pepper sprayed him, tackled him, punched him while he was down, removed his firearm from its holster—and then, when he was disarmed and restrained—fired ten rounds anyway. Six of those shots came after he’d stopped moving.

I’d just watched a man die for exercising the same right I—and many of you—do on a daily basis.

And the Feds said he deserved it.

That could’ve been me. It could’ve been you. Don’t pretend otherwise.

And I thought: Surely now. Surely at least the “shall not be infringed” crowd will say something. Surely thirty years of “from my cold dead hands” means something when the government kills a legal gun owner in his own neighborhood.

So I went looking for Republicans willing to say it was wrong.

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I found two.

Chris Madel was running for governor of Minnesota. On Monday he dropped out. “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state,” he said, “nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.” He called the shooting wrong. He called ICE’s raids unconstitutional and wrong. Then he left the party.

Marjorie Taylor Greene—who’d spent years as MAGA’s most inflammatory voice before breaking with Trump last year and retiring from Congress earlier this month—spelled out the hypocrisy more clearly than any sitting Republican would dare. She asked MAGA supporters to imagine if Biden’s FBI had done this to one of their own. A MAGA supporter filming law enforcement, disarmed, shot dead. “What would have been our reaction?” She pointed out what should be obvious: legally carrying a firearm is not the same as brandishing one.

That’s it. Two people. And both of them had to leave the party to say it.

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Here’s what the ones who stayed said.

Thom Tillis called Kristi Noem “incompetent.” Lisa Murkowski said the shooting raises questions about training. Bill Cassidy said the credibility of ICE and DHS are “at stake.” Susan Collins said she’s “appalled at the violence.” Ted Cruz criticized Noem’s “premature” response. Mike Crapo supports “a full and impartial investigation.”

But notice what’s missing.

Not one of them said it was wrong. Not one said federal agents killed a man who posed no threat. Not one used the word Democrats and policing experts have used repeatedly: murder.

“Investigate.” “Disturbing.” “Credibility at stake.” “Premature.”

These are words designed to sound like accountability while committing to absolutely nothing. Pressure-release valves. Ways to process the horror without confronting it.

Thomas Massie came closest: “Carrying a firearm is not a death sentence. It’s a Constitutionally protected God-given right.” That’s a real argument. But notice he’s defending the principle of armed carry, not the man who was killed for it. The Second Amendment, not Alex Pretti.

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The gun rights organizations followed the same script. The NRA called the administration’s rhetoric “dangerous and wrong”—then blamed Minnesota Democrats and Pretti himself. Gun Owners of America defended the right to carry at protests. The Second Amendment Foundation warned that Trump’s statements would “cost them dearly.”

Statements were issued. The principle was defended. But nothing will change. No endorsements were withdrawn. No donations pulled. No primary challenges threatened. The coalition holds.

Meanwhile, Trump said this about a man legally carrying a permitted handgun in his own neighborhood:

“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns.”

“I don’t like that he had a gun. I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines.”

Four years ago Trump called armed protesters who stormed the Michigan state capitol, some carrying AR-15s when confronting legislators “…very good people, but they are angry.”

The issue isn’t the guns. It’s who’s holding them.

Sorry, Don, but my copy of the Bill of Rights says fuck all about a partisan exception for the right to bear arms.

Trey Gowdy said it plainly on Fox News: “You remember Kyle Rittenhouse and how he was made a hero on the right? Alex Pretti’s firearm was being lawfully carried.”

Pretti carried a permitted handgun in his own neighborhood, saw a woman knocked down, and tried to help her. Federal agents disarmed him and executed him anyway.

Trump said he shouldn’t have had a gun.

Rittenhouse brandished a semiautomatic rifle at a protest and shot three people. He became a conservative icon.

Trump called him “a really good, young man.”

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Twenty-one percent of Republicans say the shooting was “not justified.”

One in five.

I went looking for who represents them. I found Chris Madel, who quit his race and left the party. I found Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’d already left.

That’s it.

Only twenty-one percent of Republicans are willing to even admit the killing was wrong, and not one sitting Republican officeholder will back them up.

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41% of Republicans flat out say Pretti’s extrajudicial murder was justified.

Pro-2A X/Twitter accounts like Braxton McCoy with 110,000 followers posted that Pretti’s murder was “Good shoot. It’s not even questionable.” And then added: “Also looks like [Pretti] reached for [his gun]. It wasn’t there but that doesn’t matter.”

And then doubled down two days later:

Because that’s the hot take tribal loyalty demands of him. And so he bends the knee to lick the boot even though he knows he’s lying to over one hundred thousand people.

Or maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe that’s just how morally corrupting MAGA is and how deep the cult indoctrination has become.

Perhaps more damning though, 38% are “unsure.” They won’t, or can’t, bring themselves to say the obvious—it was wrong—because of who else is standing in that spot. Four out of five Republicans are either willing to let a man’s murder go unacknowledged—or they do the dishonest mental gymnastics to justify it—because agreeing it was wrong would put them in the same column as a Democrat.

So yes. I am now attacking all conservatives broadly.

I spent months carefully identifying bad actors and giving the base as much grace as possible. I got called a traitor for it. I lost my audience over it. I’ve lost essentially all my friends in spite of my efforts to be precise. But I kept doing it anyway, because I believed the distinction mattered. Intellectual honesty mattered. 

It doesn’t.

Obviously not every conservative personally approves of Nazi slogans, illegal wars, AI-generated child pornography, and extrajudicial killings. But they don’t have to approve. They just have to keep showing up, keep voting, keep treating the unacceptable as tolerable because the alternative is social friction. That’s not fanaticism. It’s something much more mundane and far more dangerous.

Staying loyal is a choice, and we’ve passed the point where silence became complicity. 

This is the banality of evil I warned about.

I saw it coming. Others did too. Many others. We all documented the progress. They said we had Trump Derangement Syndrome and needed to get back on our meds. No one on the Right stopped to listen, to think, to consider, and now here we are. A man is dead. Shot in the back six times after he stopped moving. Murdered by federal agents in cold blood for the sin of exercising his inalienable rights.

And four out of five Republicans won’t stand up and say it was wrong.

And the 21% who admit Pretti’s shooting wasn’t justified? They have no one speaking for them. The only Republican leaders who could say “this was wrong” had to leave the party to say it.

Because the price of defending the truth is exile.

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The Right can dismiss me all they want, but I’m not a left-wing activist. I’m a veteran, a gun owner (and daily carrier), someone who was in conservative spaces my entire life—until they threw me out for applying consistent principles to my own side.

And even then, up to this weekend, I still had some hope they’d come around and remember what it was we stood for. That the Right could be saved.

But now? After Pretti? They’ve lost me for good. I will never vote Republican again. They don’t even deserve to be called hypocrites. They’ve become something far worse.

And they’ve lost a whole lot more good people than they realize. Real patriots. Not jackbooted cosplayers draped in flags.

Which is what they’ve become.