When Truth Becomes Conditional, When Facts are Adjustable

When truth becomes conditional, when facts are adjustable, when a man shot in the back while prone 

By SDC News One, IFS News Writers

WASHINGTON [IFS] -- God forbid you peacefully protest while standing on a public street, holding a phone, recording what your own eyes are seeing. God forbid you place your body between power and someone already on the ground.

That is what Alex Pretti did.

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He did not charge anyone. He did not draw a weapon. He did not threaten a soul. He stood, recorded, spoke, and intervened the way a nurse does—by instinct, by conscience, by habit. And for that, federal agents escalated a routine encounter into a fatal one. Pepper spray. Blows. Disarmament. Then bullets—fired into a man already on the ground, curled inward, defensive, no longer a threat.

The official language came quickly, as it always does. Statements. Justifications. Carefully arranged words designed to replace memory. According to those accounts, Alex was dangerous. According to those accounts, the violence was unavoidable. According to those accounts, what millions saw with their own eyes did not mean what it looked like.

George Orwell warned about this moment long before it arrived: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” When truth becomes conditional, when facts are adjustable, when a man shot in the back while prone is rebranded as an imminent threat, reality itself becomes suspect. Lies stack on top of lies until common sense is treated like sedition.

What hurts most is not only the killing—it is the permission structure that follows. The way people you love hesitate. The way they qualify. The way they refuse to say plainly that what happened was wrong. When even family cannot bring themselves to reject the lie, the fracture becomes personal. You realize that if you had been the one on the pavement, bleeding, they might still be arguing with the footage instead of mourning the body.

I write this from North Port, Florida—deep red territory, the kind of place where dissent is supposed to be quiet or invisible. And yet today, a few hundred people lined the main drag, holding signs, standing peacefully, risking social exile simply by showing up. It was beautiful. It was fragile. It was brave. And it came with an unspoken understanding: what happened to Alex could happen anywhere. Including here.

Officials like Greg Bovino have claimed Alex planned violence against law enforcement. That claim does not survive contact with the facts. Alex legally carried a firearm and never touched it. It was taken from him. He was sprayed, struck, knocked down. Then he was shot—multiple times—while already incapacitated. Video shows him standing between an officer and a woman who had been pushed to the ground. It shows restraint, not aggression. Care, not chaos.

This is the inversion we are living through. Law becomes suggestion. Accountability becomes optional. Protest becomes provocation simply by existing. The law allows legal carry; the law allows recording; the law protects peaceful assembly. Yet enforcement now bends to power, not principle. The gaslighting isn’t subtle anymore. It’s blunt, public, and unapologetic.

Meanwhile, the consequences ripple outward. Trust collapses. Faith in institutions erodes. Allies abroad quietly pull away. Europe diversifies trade. Tourism drops. Long-standing partnerships cool. The world watches a country that once preached rule of law struggle to apply it at home.

And still the deflection continues. Every outrage is reframed. Every death is rationalized. Every demand for accountability is painted as extremism. The cruelty is not accidental—it is strategic. Disorder distracts. Fear mobilizes. Violence becomes background noise.

This is how a republic rots—not all at once, but through normalization. Through the slow teaching that some lives are negotiable. That protests deserve punishment. That truth is flexible if the speaker has enough authority.

Alex Pretti was not a symbol when he woke up that morning. He was a nurse. A son. A citizen. He became a symbol because the system needed him to be one—either as a warning or as a lie. The choice now belongs to the rest of us.

A country cannot survive if its people are told to doubt their own eyes. It cannot endure if the law applies only downward. It cannot remain free if peaceful protest is treated as a threat and state violence is treated as policy.

The bullets that killed Alex did not just tear through one body. They tore through the illusion that this could not happen here. The question is no longer whether the line has been crossed. It has.

The question is whether enough people are willing to say so—out loud, together, before silence finishes the job.

Rest in peace, Alex. And may the truth, however delayed, refuse to stay buried.

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