Alex Pretty Was Not Armed. He Was Executed
A citizen killed for filming power
Alex Pretty was a nurse.
A neighbor.
A U.S. citizen.
He was killed with at least ten bullets.
The official narrative arrived instantly, as it always does: he pointed a gun. Language inflated at the same speed. The shooter became an “officer.” The killing became a “response.” The dead man became a “threat.”
But Alex Pretty did not have a gun.
He had a phone.
I am not publishing a video. I am publishing a single frame extracted from footage.
In that frame, the object in his hand is unmistakable: a mobile phone. The image is clear enough to leave no reasonable doubt about what he was holding at the moment he was shot.
Alex stepped in because a woman was being shoved by agents of ICE. He wanted to document the scene. He wanted to report what he was witnessing. Nothing more.
For that, he was killed.
From Renee Nicole Good to Alex Pretty
This was not an isolated case. Before Alex, there was Renee Nicole Good.
Two U.S. citizens.
Both white.
The distinction matters, because the killing of Black U.S. citizens by law-and-order forces in the United States has been normalized to the point of routine. When white citizens are shot dead in the street for filming, the system briefly malfunctions and reveals itself.
Alex and Renee had something else in common. Neither was an activist by profession. Neither sought confrontation. They were good neighbors. People concerned about their neighborhood, their city, the ordinary peace of everyday life. People who believed that civic responsibility still meant something.
That belief has become dangerous in the United States.
A country without a long peace
249 years, 6 months, and 23 days
The United States declared independence on 4 July 1776.
As of 27 January 2026, that makes 249 years, 6 months, and 23 days of existence.
In that entire span, the United States has never sustained a long period of peace. Perhaps not always on its own territory, but repeatedly across the world it shaped, disciplined, intervened in, and destabilized.
From its earliest years, war accompanied state-building. Expansion followed violence. Native nations were displaced. Mexico lost half its territory. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had entered overt imperial warfare.
The twentieth century multiplied the scale.
Korea was split by war.
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were devastated.
Iran and Guatemala saw elected governments overthrown.
Chile’s democracy was dismantled.
Argentina and the Southern Cone were swallowed by security states.
Nicaragua and El Salvador were burned through proxy wars.
Panama was invaded.
Iraq was bombed, sanctioned, invaded again.
Afghanistan endured the longest war in U.S. history.
Libya was shattered.
Syria became a permanent battlefield.
Yemen collapsed under a war enabled from outside.
This list is not closed. We are still counting:
Gaza,
Venezuela,
Greenland,
Iran…..
History has not paused. The ledger remains open.
What was left behind? Not stability. Not peace. Not law. Vietnam did not inherit sovereignty. Iraq did not inherit institutions. Afghanistan did not inherit a state. Latin America inherited dictatorships, disappearances, debt, and silence.
All of this in less than two and a half centuries.
Power without law
What governs the United States today is not democracy, and not even classical autocracy. Autocracy, in its Greek root, means the rule of one. The United States is ruled by a cluster: a concentration of power, money, weapons, and ideological rage, orbiting around Donald Trump and figures who are, in many cases, more extreme than he is.
The rule of law has eroded to the point of dysfunction. Federal judges issue rulings that are ignored. Constitutional limits are treated as suggestions. Institutions still exist, but their authority has evaporated.
The historical irony is sharp. The United Nations system entered into force on 24 October 1945. Donald Trump was born on 14 June 1946, almost immediately afterward, in the first breath of that post-war order. Now, as president, he behaves like a demolition crew against the very architecture that defined the world he was born into: treaties, alliances, institutions, and legal restraint.
Looking toward 4 July 2026
On 4 July 2026, the United States will mark 250 years since its Declaration of Independence.
What will there be to celebrate by then?
And perhaps the deeper question is not only about the United States. The USA does not own the word America. America is a continent, and the consequences of U.S. violence have always crossed its borders.
Is the rest of the world watching this like a film?
Like a video game?
Passive, entertained, detached?
Or does it still understand that what collapses in one empire eventually reaches the streets of others?
