People aren’t “crazy” or “conspiracy-brained” for questioning whether that Minneapolis protest video of Alex Pretti clashing with ICE agents is real. They’re responding RATIONALLY to a government that has already been caught manipulating reality!

This is the same administration that digitally altered the arrest photo of a Black civil rights attorney to make her look hysterical and out of control.

A random troll did not do this. It didn't come from a meme page. It was the state. The White House. Official channels. These assholes took a calm, composed Black woman being arrested and AI-massaged her face into tears to fit a narrative. And then they had the GALL to shrug and said, “The memes will continue.” Basically, they said we're gonna keep doing this shit.

So once the state shows it is willing to doctor images for political effect, every piece of visual “evidence” it circulates becomes suspect. Ain't no public trust.

So when footage surfaces of a protest, of federal agents, of a man later killed by the state, and people ask, “Is this real or is this manufactured?” that isn’t denialism. That’s folks exercising some media literacy in the age of slopaganda.

You don’t get to flood the public sphere with manipulated images and then act offended or like folk are crazy when the public starts squinting at every frame.

This is the world authoritarian politics creates. Reality is unstable, the camera can no longer be assumed to tell the truth, and the state trains people to doubt their own eyes and then blames them for the doubt.

This shit is Orwellian AF!