After Alex Pretti’s Murder, it’s Clear That MAGA Media Views White Liberals as Race Traitors

In the wake of the murder of Renee Good, I argued at MS NOW that it was the natural consequence of both DHS’s violent and reactionary agency culture and the Trumpian right’s wider outlook. In that outlook, the nuances and complexities of liberal democratic rights are replaced with a crude, Schmittian friend/enemy distinction. Individuals can either be friends of the regime, and thus indulged and protected, or enemies, left without any of the protections of the law. Immigrants of course fall into the “enemy” camp. But, as the killings of Good and and now Alex Pretti help to show, “enemy” also encompasses anyone who chooses to extend their sympathy and aid to the targets of DHS’s cruelty. 

Donald Trump and others in his administration have offered some feeble attempts to tamp down the public relations disaster of Pretti’s murder, most notably by relocating CBP official Greg Bovino out of Minnesota. But major figures in right-wing media have made clear that they see Pretti’s death as justified, and their reasoning consistently abuts the idea that Pretti wasn’t just acting illegally but against the interests of his group. In other words, Pretti is a race traitor. 

On her show, Megyn Kelly explicitly framed Pretti’s protesting as part of a left-wing effort to defend illegal immigrants from heroic law enforcement. Kelly insisted those immigrants pose a threat to Pretti’s own community: 

He was there being subversive…He was there with a loaded gun looking to cause trouble for the border patrol agents, and that trouble came back on him…These are organized agitators who train to disrupt and, in some cases, hurt law enforcement. They go out there looking for confrontations that they can make go viral on their social media or that they can use as propaganda to turn people against the good guys—the ones who are trying to rid us of the scourge of child-molesting illegals. 

Kelly closed this segment with a rant in which she facetiously—or perhaps not?—suggested that all undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers should be forced to live in Minnesota in what could fairly be called a state-sized ghetto. She snarled, “Get them all there. You love the illegals so much? Go there…I mean, they’re committing forcible sodomy on children, but I guess you’ll just handle it.”

The specific threat of sexual violence from minority and foreign groups is a classic feature of white supremacist ideology. I don’t think Kelly’s rhetoric here was accidental or that the side-by-side framing of this with Pretti can be taken as anything other than the implicit suggestion that Pretti was okay with the abuse and rape of his community by “child-molesting illegals.”

On his show, Matt Walsh derided Jimmy Kimmel for crying on-air over Pretti’s death. Walsh contended that Kimmel’s tears were performative and that he is “very selective” with what chokes him up on his show. As evidence, Walsh offers up Kimmel’s failure to talk about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee killed by a Black man on Charlotte public transit. Here’s how Walsh framed it:

Here he is crying about ICE and Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Well, it’s interesting. Iryna Zarutska, if you watch this show you’ll remember her name. She was the white woman who was also a refugee, a Ukrainian refugee, on a bus in Charlotte, butchered to death on camera…That death was incredibly tragic. That was a truly innocent person who was killed…You have actual innocent people who are wives, husbands, mothers, fathers killed every day in this country, preventably, as a direct result of policies put in place in these cities allowing the worst, most violent, most dangerous people to reek havoc in the streets. That happens every day. And none of you people say a word about it. You won’t even say their names. That’s to say nothing of the victims of illegal immigrants. That’s to say nothing of the people who are killed by illegal immigrants. Obviously, you don’t mention them.

Walsh spent a later segment of the same episode denigrating a Somali-American woman who said she was assaulted by ICE. He mocked her pride in being both Somali and American before alighting on the impossibility of assimilating “exotic” people from the “third world.” 

If this rhetoric all feels too vague or indirect, Nick Fuentes did not hesitate to level this attack against Pretti directly. As watchdog Right Wing Watch reported, Fuentes gave a putrid monologue about Pretti’s failures to stay loyal to his own people. Here’s an excerpt:

You feel bad for this race traitor?…We are thoroughly in the Trump era. If you don't get it at this point, you're irredeemable. If you're out there throwing yourself in front of ICE to die for these dirt bags, let them.

Fuentes’s words are bone-chillingly hateful. But I would argue they’re only a more explicit declaration of the sentiment expressed in the Kelly and Walsh segments above. After all, isn’t the core argument in all three that Pretti’s great sin wasn’t just interfering with DHS but interfering with its mission of kidnapping, detaining, and deporting foreigners off American streets? Just like Fuentes, Kelly and Walsh’s commentary boils down to the assumption that the people ICE is pursuing are inherently bad and that therefore opposing ICE is standing with criminals and rapists against the American people. 

We live in a moment where many on the right don’t shy away from announcing their most heinous viewpoints. But it is sometimes still necessary to sift through the stinking muck of their rhetoric and find what’s lurking within it. 

The logic of MAGA, especially as it is being aided along by its media ecosystem and by leading figures like Stephen Miller and JD Vance, is racial authoritarianism. It is white supremacy. But the murders of Pretti and Good should be a stark warning that whiteness ceases to offer protection as soon as a person opposes this regime and its program of racial terror. 

Featured image is Megyn Kelly speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference, by Gage Skidmore