Was Minneapolis shooting victim like BTK? This Newsmax bozo says yes. | Opinion
Newsmax is scum.
How else could anyone describe a network that green-lights a host who has the unimaginable gall to compare Alex Pretti, the Veterans Administration nurse shot down by immigration agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, to BTK, the serial killer who terrorized Wichita for decades?
Yes, they went there.
At 8:07 p.m. on Monday, Newsmax host Greg Kelly set out like the petty little propaganda pawn he is to prop up the Trump Administration’s evidence-free and rapidly collapsing effort — squirted out by Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — to try to paint Pretti as a domestic terrorist who came to Saturday’s protest in Minneapolis with intent to murder federal agents.
What got Kelly frothing at the mouth were reports from the nation’s responsible news media that show Pretti was a regular guy and a solid citizen.
Kelly played a clip from ABC News reporting that Pretti, age 37, worked as a nurse caring for America’s veterans and was an avid outdoorsman and competitive bicyclist. He had no criminal record, had a permit for the gun that he legally carried, and played football and baseball in high school.
Kelly came back from that news clip in full character assassination mode.
“American citizen, let’s see, baseball, rode a bike — that could be me, except for the part where I go out and do something incredibly stupid,” Kelly said. “All those things — Boy Scout, outdoorsman, right? You know who that is? A lot of people.
“Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, was all those things. Dennis Rader, remember him? He’s the beat, bind, torture and kill guy. He liked to hunt. He was a family man. Everybody liked him. His mother liked him. All that stuff. Dennis Rader and Alex — I’m sorry, but I can’t just pretend because you’re dead, you’re like this superior person.”
What I can say with certainty, Mr. Kelly, was that Pretti was a superior person to you — and for that matter Bovino and Noem.
And I can say with equal certainty that you are (as you falsely accused Pretti of being), incredibly stupid.
Nothing about him could be you, except possibly the part about you being a citizen, which frankly is an embarrassment to the United States of America.
And how the hell dare you to drag our municipal trauma into your delusional piece of agitprop?
Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, tortured and killed at least 10 people — seven women, two children and one man — in the most horrifying ways imaginable, for his warped sexual gratification. From 1974 to 1991, he literally got away with murder, taunting Wichita police and media with letters daring them to catch him if they can.
I wasn’t here then, but I got a taste of the citywide terrorism that he represented when he resurfaced in 2004 with a letter to this newspaper, reigniting what had been a cold case. And I was proud to be in on the coverage of how Wichita police caught him, when he finally slipped up and sent a letter on a floppy disk that was traced back to a computer at his church.
I believe in the First Amendment, which protects Greg Kelly’s right to say what he said.
It also protects my right to express my opinion that he is a putrid, festering cancer on the face of American media.
And so is his network.
Newsmax, for those who haven’t been exposed to it, looks kind of like a news organization at first glance. It has the sets, the desks, the video clips, the scrolling headlines across the bottom of the screen and the talking heads — lots and lots of talking heads.
What it doesn’t have, and legitimate news organizations do, is a dedication to telling the truth. It’s nothing but a propaganda outlet designed to whip up hysteria on the outer fringe of the extreme right.
Its target audience is the kind of sickos who go online to post jokes like “How is ICE doing? Pretti Good,” referring to Alex Pretti and Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot to death by ICE agent Jonathan Ross two weeks before Pretti was killed.
Newsmax is, in essence, a 24-7 outrage factory.
This time, they succeeded. I haven’t been this outraged over something on TV in a very, very long time.
