Let’s talk a little bit about Alex Pretti and juxtapose what we know about him with the for-the-cameras machismo that defines the men responsible for his murder.

The latter set have, regrettably, done a decent job over recent years of convincing a decisive subset of disaffected young male voters that their woes in life—financial, sexual, scholastic, or otherwise—all stem from the feminization of American culture.

Their story is simple: Time was you could be The Man—someone who barks orders, someone with a submissive wife, someone who settles scores with violence or threats of violence—and reap all the spoils. Money. Big house. Important title. An army of children.

Then women and minorities and woke progressives came along and “took” the good life away.

Their promise, implicit and explicit, has been to create a right of return to the fantasy version of pre-civil rights America. Restore men—some men, at least—to their rightful place atop the pecking order, where they could grab life by the pussy.

Join MAGA and you’ll get laid. Join MAGA, and you’ll get rich. Join MAGA, and you could become famous. Join MAGA and you’ll never be reprimanded—you’ll never even really have to think about your obligations to society.

My sense from survey data and cultural consumption (plus the diminishing number of people I know who could credibly be described as “young men”) is that the shine has come off. Over time, this cohort has become less and less impressed with the Trump regime, and—collaterally, one hopes—with its conception of manliness.

But to the extent that anyone who aligned with MAGA after 2020 is still persuadable, I hope they’ll stop and think about whom they’ve chosen as their avatars, and then contrast those people with Pretti.

CHUD AND FOIL

We can start from the bottom—from the people most directly responsible for Pretti’s murder: The CBP agent (or agents) who killed him on the scene of an abduction this past Saturday. These are men too cowardly to show their faces, who shot a good samaritan in the back over and over again.

Then, there were the federal agents in their company. One of them clapped in celebration as the shots rang out, as if by murdering a civilian, they’d leveled up in a video game. As if Pretti weren’t a person, but a non-player character. Later in the day, when protesters and Minneapolis police made clear that they would not get away with controlling and spoiling the crime scene, they hightailed it. They remain anonymous because they’re scared to own up to what they did.

Until Monday, these masked men answered to Greg Bovino—a smol bean who dresses like a Nazi for fun, but only ever appears in public flanked by a Praetorian guard of larger, younger guys. He gets off on provoking minorities and any liberal people who care about the wellbeing of their neighbors, but he’d never confront anyone he hates man-to-man. He’s too weak, too timid, too terrified of consequences. And he knows there’d be consequences, because deep down, he knows he’d deserve them.

Bovino reports nominally to Kristi Noem and her boyfriend/receptionist Corey Lewandowski, the latter of whom first became famous in 2016 for battering a journalist. He has since been accused repeatedly of sexual impropriety. Lewandowski seems to be particularly fond of grabbing women by the ass, and persisting in grabbing them by the ass after they’ve told him to stop. All of his accusers have been right-wing women.

But Bovino’s real boss is (or was) Stephen Miller, who recently insisted on being moved into military housing, because he became terrified of neighbors who chalked the sidewalk outside his house. He is physically unimpressive, and compensates for it by delivering deranged tirades on cable news, in a mien that suggests he practices ranting like Josef Goebbels in the mirror. There are credible rumors that his wife—a woman who’s proudly indifferent to the suffering of strangers—cuckolded him with her boss, but dwelling on that episode would be gratuitous.

The cabinet secretary who perhaps best exemplifies MAGA masculinity is Pete Hegseth, who is a drunk and a rapist, and until recently got his jollies off vaporizing Venezuelan fishermen from a safe distance. Killing innocent strangers is a theme. Hegseth tweeted ICE > MN mere hours before the administration began its retreat from MN. His form of compensation is to seize every conceivable opportunity to be filmed exercising with military trainees. The problem is: Hegseth doesn’t know how to exercise. Here he is most recently endeavoring to swing a kettlebell, but inadvertently doing some sort of slumped-over plié instead.

If Hegseth wanted to learn how to swing a kettlebell properly, he’s uniquely situated to receive proper training. He is apparently committed to mediocrity. In the event that he changes his mind, here’s an instructional video from one of the best fitness influencers on social media. Imagine his humiliation!

And of course they all answer to Donald Trump, who’s a rapist in his own right, but also a trust-fund slob, with a variety of physical and mental illnesses that he’s too insecure to acknowledge. The guy is trying to void the U.S. constitution because he can’t admit he lost an election. What kind of man is that?

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I admit to knowing quite a bit less about Alex Pretti. But that’s in large part because he had higher callings in life than attention-seeking, let alone being violent or ridiculous for the gram.

He seems to have had a limited social media footprint, which suggests he spent much more of his time relating to real people in the real world than do the internet-poisoned men who ended his life.

He was, famously, an ICU nurse for severely ill veterans of war. That is an extremely difficult and solemn job that none of the above-mentioned MAGA figures have the temperament or emotional stamina or compassion to do. They’d fail at it if they tried, but they’d never try.

Pretti was unafraid. His last act was to help a woman who had been tackled to the ground by a masked invader—to place himself between her and him. He died in a heroic way, but if he’d survived, he’d have been welcomed home by a grateful community. Strangers, who would have wanted to get to know him, learn from him, and see him safely through the rest of his life. He would have lived the life of fulfillment that MAGA wants you to believe is only possible if you behave like a thug.

You don’t have to share Pretti’s politics (he was apparently a Democrat) to see the appeal of living life that way, rather than the way the people who killed and smeared him do. And if even a small fraction of young men started treating him (rather than them) as a role-model for comportment, it might actually save the country.

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