Trump posted my NY Post article on Ruby Ridge on his Truth Social account in 2022
Latest Federal Killing in Minnesota Echoes Ruby Ridge
by James Bovard
A few hours after Pretti was killed, I commented on Twitter/X: “How many of the Trump supporters cheering the killing of the Minneapolis demonstrator today would also cheer for the FBI sniper killing Vicki Weaver in her cabin door at Ruby Ridge in 1992?”
This outraged plenty of Trump supporters but the parallels between the federal killings in 1992 and on Saturday are striking.
The Ruby Ridge case—a landmark case for civil liberties and gun rights—involved the entrapment of Randy Weaver on firearms charges by an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). On August 21, 1992, three US marshals dressed in ninja outfits with face masks illegally intruded on Weaver’s Idaho land and ambushed Weaver’s 14-year-old son Sammy and 25-year-old family friend Kevin Harris, firing submachine guns at them as they came down a road in the woods, and killing the boy’s dog. A firefight ensued that left one marshal dead. As the boy was running back home towards the family’s shack, a marshal shot him in the back and killed him.
The next day, FBI snipers arrived and, within an hour of taking position, every adult in the cabin was either dead or severely wounded—even though they had not fired a shot at the FBI, and even though the FBI never called out for them to surrender. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy Weaver in the back as he stood outside his shack, and then fired a shot that killed Vicki Weaver as she stood by the cabin door.
The FBI initially claimed that the killing of Vicki Weaver was justified because she had been in the front yard aiming at an FBI helicopter. After that ludicrous claim collapsed, the FBI said its sniper didn’t intend to kill her.
Trump supporters insisted there was no comparison between Pretti’s death and Vicki Weaver because Weaver was unarmed. But Vicki Weaver had a .380 pistol on her side under her sweater when the FBI sniper blew her head off as she was holding her 10-month old baby. Neither she nor Pretti was brandishing before getting shot to death by the feds.
Trump officials justified killing Pretti because he had a pistol—even though vast numbers of conservatives have brought pistols and rifles to protests in recent years. Similarly, the Rule of Engagement for FBI snipers was “any armed male adult observed in the vicinity of the Weaver cabin could and should be killed.” In a federal appeals court ruling, Judge Alex Kozinski denounced that rule as a new James Bond “007 standard for the use of deadly force” against American citizens.
After Pretti was shot more than ten times, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said he was a “domestic terrorist” who sought “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” Noem announced that Pretti “approached Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. The officers attempted to disarm this individual but the suspect reacted violently.” Videos of the killing show that Pretti had a cell phone in his hand, not a gun, before federal agents knocked him down and began beating and pistol-whipping him. Trump’s DHS considers videotaping federal agents to be the equivalent of a hostile attack that justifies a violent federal response.
A similar threat-inflation paved the way to federal killings in Idaho. At a January 6, 1995 press conference, FBI chief Louis Freeh effectively exonerated all FBI officials involved with Ruby Ridge. Freeh declared that the Randy Weaver “crisis was one of the most dangerous and potentially violent situations to which FBI agents have ever been assigned.” This was peculiar, considering that camouflaged FBI snipers had been hiding in the woods 200 yards away when the Weavers were shot. As Judge Kozinski scoffed, “A group of FBI agents formulated rules of engagement that permitted their colleagues to hide in the bushes and gun down men who posed no immediate threat. Such wartime rules are patently unconstitutional for a police action.”
Some Trump supporters declared that Pretti deserved his fate because he intentionally chose to place himself in deadly peril by purportedly assaulting federal agents. At the 1993 trial, federal prosecutors asserted that Randy Weaver long conspired to have an armed confrontation with the government. Bizarrely, the feds claimed that his moving from Iowa to Ruby Ridge near the Canadian border in 1983 was part of that plot.
In both the Minneapolis and Ruby Ridge cases, federal officials claimed a right to preemptively kill their targets and then cover-up the killings.
After killing Pretti, DHS officials seized cell phones of bystanders and blocked Minnesota state law enforcement officials from conducting any investigation at the crime scene. DHS’s apparent coverup was so brazen that a Trump-nominated federal judge issued an emergency order on Saturday near midnight ordering DHS not to destroy further evidence. It remains to be seen how much honest evidence will be permitted to be disclosed. Unlike most police departments, most ICE and Border Patrol agents don’t wear body cameras to videotape their shootings. Congressional Republicans, following the Trump White House lead, blocked efforts by Democrats to require those federal agents to wear body cams.
Similar shenanigans happened in the Weaver case. After an Idaho jury found Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris not guilty on key charges, Federal Judge Edward Lodge condemned the FBI for showing “a callous disregard for the rights of the defendants and the interests of justice.” Judge Lodge issued a lengthy list detailing the Justice Department’s misconduct and fabrication of evidence. Two years later, the director of the FBI’s Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Section pled guilty and was sent to prison for shredding the FBI after-action report on Ruby Ridge—one of the biggest FBI disgraces since the FBI chief L. Patrick Gray was forced to resign for destroying evidence in the Nixon Watergate scandal.
Many Trump supporters would vigorously condemn the FBI killing of Vicki Weaver nowadays. But the issue is not how many people disapprove of her killing after the coverup collapsed. I helped crack that coverup with pieces in the American Spectator, Playboy, and Wall Street Journal—an article which FBI chief Freeh publicly condemned. A heroic Idaho jury that refused to kowtow to Justice Department flimflams helped shatter the official storyline. The issue is how many people supported the FBI killing in 1992 because they mindlessly swallowed outlandish federal claims and the vilification of the Weaver family.
Trump officials are already dropping a cloak of sanctimony over the latest federal shooting in Minneapolis. According to Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino, Pretti was only there to kill people and it was a “good job for our law enforcement in taking him down before he was able to do that.” This standard would preemptively justify killing any individual who the feds label as a threat after shooting him. Will we ever learn the Rules of Engagement that DHS agents are now using to shoot American civilians? Will we ever see the possibly panicked texts and emails from DHS bosses in Minnesota to the Trump White House about another bloody public relations fiasco? Will we ever see the evidence that federal agents seized after Pretti was perforated?
How can anyone who is paying attention approve of Pretti’s killing despite all the false and far-fetched federal claims regarding his demise? How can freedom survive if so many Americans blindly believe any proclamation by government officials and political hacks?
Outrageous. This is like Walz comparing ICE to the Nazis and Anne Frank over the weekend. What happened to the Weavers was a straight up setup and then murder by the most rogue federal law force – the ATF. They followed this up with the disco inferno at Waco. Bush and Clinton being birds of a feather.
No one enticed the nurse “observer” to the area except his own cohort. No one challenged him to come carrying, except his cohort. No one asked him to interfere in an arrest process. This is so far afield from Ruby that you look,ridiculous making the connection.
Serious TDS dude.
In 2022, Trump reposted my New York Post oped on Ruby Ridge. Did he also have TDS?
Dude was disarmed then shot, multiple times, from behind. Murder is murder Dan!
Since you injected TDS I think that’s accurate, just not as you inferred.
Ruby Ridge occurred on the victim’s property, at his home. He had moved deep into the bush to avoid conflict with the federal government that had tried to entrap him, to blackmail him to turn on his friends.
This latest event was a fellow taking a loaded weapon into a conflict zone, and then intentially engaging the feds with force. If you’re bringing a gun to a fight, you’d better shoot someone. Wrestling while armed is peak stupid Darwin baiting.
There is no sane comparison.
Wow this is a truly disgusting comparison. A family not interfering with the removal of the criminal trash destroying this country being executed has no comparison to a Marxist communist trying to physical stop the removal of criminals that are stealing our children’s future and money out of our pockets. Truly amazing
Some videos *do* appear to show that the shooter clearly saw the gun removed from it’s holster by an agent, before shooting. They also appear to show that the subject was not intentionally engaging the agents, when they approached an pushed him, pepper sprayed him. OC can be very disorienting, and maybe some of his subsequent behavior can be excused/explained by this…. however, he then clearly stands between agents and thr attempt to handcuff a girl, and after he is taken to the ground, he repeatedly attempts to stand back up.
While there is good reason to question that agents had probable cause for the arrest, and a manslaughter/murder investigation is due, there is *no* question that he was resisting arrest when he was shot.
When you carry a gun for self defense, you lose the ability to defend yourself by most other means, because the gun can be taken and used against you. When attacked, you must either completely submit, or draw the weapon and engage. Don’t like those options? Then you can’t carry a gun for defense.
The author – James Bovard – is full of it, as usual. Let’s explore why…
At Ruby Ridge, the government – a.k.a. the FBI – was operating outside of any sort of constitutional mandate. They were on a fishing expedition and decided, utterly without provocation, to gun down a mother holding an infant child. They weren’t even there to apprehend Mrs. Weaver, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and an FBI sniper shot her for it. Her “crime”? Being married to Randy Weaver, the focus of the FBI investigation.
Randy Weaver later won a wrongful death lawsuit against the government over this outrageous abuse of police powers.
The deceased in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, was an individual with ties to radical Antifa/BLM and other communist direct-action programs, who had been trained by them to interfere with ICE agents carrying out their jobs. ICE personnel were already on edge due to threats made against them by everyone from the governor of the state to the local Antifa-BLM radicals. Inserting himself into their midst placed Mr. Pretti at grave risk of harm. If he did not know this, it is not really the fault of those personnel.
It is unfortunate that Alex Pretti is dead, but the blunt fact of the matter is that he was where he should not have been, doing something he should not have been doing, when he lost his life. Acting stupidly around men with guns and a license to use them is the very definition of rash, irresponsible behavior.
Immigration authorities in MN are there on firm and well-settled legal grounds. Enforcement of immigration-related matters is a federal, and not state or local matter. Neither Gov. Waltz nor Mayor Frey has any standing in the matter at all. Indeed, their actions up to the present time constitute insurrection, for both have made threats against the President and against ICE personnel, including incitement to violence, which is a felony. The Commander in Chief would be within his constitutional authority to order the arrest of both men. No state, including Minnesota, has the right to make its own immigration policy, apart and separate from the federal government – period, full stop.
The President has acted with admirable restraint thus far in this crisis; it is the elected officials of Minnesota who ought to be held to account. Indeed, they risk touching off a civil conflict which would be very difficult to de-escalate once set in motion.
LEGAL… there is no LEGAL when it comes to firearms use. Someone gets hurt or gets dead… and someone walks away. That’s the LEGAL.
Bo Gritz knew what the Weaver situation was. He talked Randy into surrendering. Bo told me that personally.
The ‘Nurse?’
All forget too quickly which side the bread is buttered on and what went on since 2020..
Don’t even think that the ‘Nurse’ had any of the stature that Randy had.
Legal? I need to carry my permit and Identification with me to be ‘legal’ with my firearm on me.
The ‘Nurse’ is a Communist. A dead Communist… the only kind of good Communist. Communists are infected with a virus that make them akin to “The Walking Dead.”
They are braindead.
I know… I chased those sub humans all over Africa and saw the barbaric treatment they enlightened their own tribal members to.
We’re in the first stages of an insurrection… legal will have no meaning. It will be just another ‘pretty’ word.
Jack Lawson
“Legal? I need to carry my permit and Identification with me to be ‘legal’ with my firearm on me.”
Bull ! Being armed for self-defense is not a ‘legal privilege’ but a natural human right. Anyone who believes otherwise is not only ‘braindead but sadly ethically deficient.
Do you automatically hate anyone that federal agents kill – as long as a Republican is president? https://t.co/OqcRgxlByd
— James Bovard (@JimBovard) January 25, 2026
Well not as a general rule…The Bush’s come to mind….the warmongering, open borders, big state pussies…but in this case…YES!
You’re behind the curve here Jimmy, your drivel is no longer even to be considered by any rational person who loves
what America used to be and wishes it to become again…..
I’ve seen some long stretches, but to equate Vicki Weaver’s murder with this man Pretti, is to spit on her grave and to insult
her memory…..to equate a loving mother holding a babe in her arms doing nothing wrong with a violent anti American
agitator interfering with a lawful operation to remove criminal felonious illegals from this country is dog dung low…..