First Renee Good, today Alex Pretti. Two American citizens, both from Minneapolis. Both died in the street, hit repeatedly by gunfire during an ICE intervention, according to initial reconstructions. As digital communications analyst Franz Russo reconstructed, within a few hours the Department of Homeland Security constructed the official frame, describing the victims as “terrorists”. Soon after, political amplifiers entered the scene.

Greg Bovino, the Italian-American agent in charge of anti-immigration operations

Stephen Miller, internal security advisor, translated that narrative into fighting slogans: he spoke of Alex Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and described ICE’s reaction as a response to an “attempted assassination”. Then it was the turn of Vice President JD Vance, who completed the transition by transferring responsibility to local authorities and speaking of collusion with the left. At that point Donald Trump intervened as a final act: on Truth Social he published the photo of the weapon and spoke of insurrection. Thus he closed the circle, sealing the narrative and making it, in fact, “definitive”. All this happened before an investigation could establish what had happened. And this is precisely the function of the mechanism: to anticipate the facts, saturate the public space, make any subsequent truth marginal.

Saturate the debate

The point is not the version itself, but the synchronization. It is a communication machine that activates almost automatically, with roles already assigned and messages ready: the DHS provides the “official version”, Miller and Vance radicalize it on social media, Trump closes it from his platform. Each step reinforces the previous one. The same keywords, the same frame, the same goal: leave no room for doubt. The victim must be a threat, always. By the time the investigations arrive, the media cycle will already be elsewhere.

Here lies the central issue: the contents no longer tell the story of government action; they are government action. They don’t describe reality: they create it. This pattern is not new. Trump made use of it in 2020 when, eight months before the presidential elections, he began to sow doubt that the vote would be “stolen”. He didn’t wait for an event: he built it. He worked for months on an alternative narrative, coherent and obsessively repeated, until, by election day, the truth had become secondary. The idea of ​​”electoral theft” was already sedimented in the perception of millions of people, before any evidence.

The construction of reality

It’s the same pattern we see today: anticipation, saturation, irrelevance of what will be ascertained later. In this model the rule of law is not formally abolished: it is rendered useless, because the most important sentence has already been issued in the communication court.

In the UK, during Boris Johnson’s tenure, something similar happened: the Rwanda plan became a permanent narrative focus. Not a day went by without Johnson or Home Secretary Priti Patel insisting on the need to escape the constraints of the European Court of Human Rights, presenting it as the only way to “stop immigration”. Today Reform UK proposes the same path. The argument is always the same: “they are invading us”, “they are criminals”, “they are destroying our society”. Two mirror accusations are made against those who oppose it: “you deny the problem” and “you want us to invade”. But defending rights does not mean denying problems, nor wanting mass immigration. It means defending the backbone of democracy.

Discretion as a system

When it is decided that a part of the population can be deprived of rights, discretion is introduced as a system. And when rights become discretionary, they cease to exist. History proves it: once the principle has been accepted that those defined as “criminals” do not deserve protection, that instrument is first applied to immigrants, then to opponents, and finally to critics. Simply construct a narrative, repeat it in a synchronized manner, and the rule of law is hollowed out with the consent of many. It has happened in totalitarianisms of every color.

FdI: “Those who commit crimes put their lives at risk”

The day after Alex Pretti’s death, Laura Loomer – a QAnon exponent and close to Trump – wrote that she wanted to see “more Democrats in handcuffs”, formalizing an idea: political opponents as criminals as such. This is the crucial point. Not only does it tend to justify the deprivation of rights against categories perceived as “other” (immigrants, foreigners, etc.), but that language and logic is extended to anyone identified as a political opponent.

The enemy has no rights. And so, when the renunciation of the rule of law is justified by saying that it is “necessary to save our society”, the question to ask is only one: what is really being saved? Because a society that deprives some of the rights is already on the road to taking them away from everyone.