Below is my column in The Hill on the recent controversies over enhanced images of Alex Pretti and his shooting in Minnesota. As seen throughout our history, Pretti has achieved mythic status — even having an ice cream invented after him by one of the founders of Ben & Jerry’s. Reality recedes when politics demand the perfect hero.

Here is the column:

“Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.”

That statement, from F. Scott Fitzgerald, has never been truer than with the posthumous treatment of Alex Pretti, killed in a confrontation with federal officers in Minneapolis. He has been called a “hero” and a “martyr” by the left as a rallying cry for protests around the country. In the process, many have “enhanced” both his story and his image.

MS NOW has admitted that it used an AI-enhanced photo of Pretti that made him look more handsome. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was criticized for bringing to the Senate floor an altered image, featuring a headless immigration agent, that made it look like officers executed a kneeling Pretti with a shot to the head.

Pretti needs to be be inviolate to make the government seem vile in the eyes of the public. He is being described as the combination of Florence Nightingale and Crispus Attucks.

A CNN panelist and co-host of “The View,” Ana Navarro, voiced the new orthodoxy that Pretti was the “perfect guy … the guy you’d want to date your daughter, the guy you want your son to grow up to be, a decent human being who was serving humanity.” She added that he was so perfect that “there is nothing that has been said about that man that isn’t wonderful. And so they can’t malign him.”

The point is that any skepticism, let alone criticism, is no longer acceptable.

In fairness, Pretti was vilified before he was canonized. Many of us objected that the videotape evidence did not support the original description of Pretti’s conduct. Pretti did not threaten officers or approach them brandishing a weapon.

But he did disobey police orders and he did resist arrest. Indeed, eleven days earlier, he had spat at officers, damaged a police vehicle by kicking out its taillight, and again resisted officers.

The remaking of Alex Pretti by both sides is strikingly familiar. On Tuesday, my book on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution will be released. “Rage and the Republic” looks at both the American and French Revolutions to explore why one became the world’s oldest democracy and the other became a blood-soaked terror.

At the height of the social unrest of the French Revolution, the Jacobins also “enhanced” the images of their martyrs. One of the most famous paintings by Jacques-Louis David was called The Death of Marat, the depiction of the murder of one of the architects of the Reign of Terror. David was an ardent supporter of the radical faction that carried out the mass executions of the period.

Marat was a vile human being who had delighted in his summary executions. Covered by painful sores from a rare skin condition, he was stabbed in his bathtub by a young woman who gained access by promising him a list of new traitors to be executed. David portrayed the slain Marat as a flawless martyr with alabaster skin, laid out like a religious Pieta.

Pretti was no Marat. He was described as a caring nurse at the Veterans’ hospital. He also vehemently opposed immigration enforcement and was a member of a group committed to filming and disrupting ICE operations.

What occurred on that day will be resolved in the ongoing investigations. However, few are waiting for such findings. He is now a figure to be enhanced while dehumanizing law enforcement.

As with the French Revolution, establishment figures are fueling the mob to ride the rage wave to the midterm elections. Walz even repeated the debunked story of the “bait boy” and said that undocumented persons being sought for removal were like Anne Frank, an assertion that drew a rebuke from the Holocaust museum.

Protesters responded to such rhetoric with signs reading, “Kill Nazis.”

Deification and demonization have long been methods used to push a populace to embrace radical action, or even revolution. As we celebrate our Declaration of Independence, “Rage and the Republic” asks whether the American Republic can survive the 21st Century with the pressures of civil unrest and economic upheaval.  

Yet, when I wrote the book, I never anticipated how we would hear many of the same voices calling for revolution and resistance in the U.S. Walz has even referred to this as a Fort Sumter moment, a reference to the fight that led to our civil war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

The history of the American and French Revolutions shows that heroes can be discovered or created for political purposes. They can produce true tragedies when they are used to radicalize some and dehumanize others.

Pretti needs no enhancement. Neither he nor the officers on that day were “perfect” beings. The facts of what happened on January 24, 2026, are likely to be as conflicted and subjective as the political environment itself. Any shooting of this kind is imperfect — events that could have been changed by a myriad of different actions or movements. That is the true tragedy.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of the Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”