The situation discussed here is of a recent event, and new facts about it are still coming to light. When it comes to matters such as this, I usually like to wait a few days so that more can be said for certain.

But the incident surrounding Alex Pretti, and how he threw his life away while making believe that he’s resisting the oppressive, evil government fascist authoritarians Hitler Hitler etc., while in reality was fighting armed federal agents whose job was to play a part in sending certain people home, brought something to mind that I’ve wanted to bring attention to for a little while.

And it’s possible that I may have discussed it already. But because it’s still relevant, it seems expedient to bring it up again.

People speak of their hard drives or their bank accounts as though they were the last frontier in hacking. And people encrypt their web traffic, and sometimes use VPNs, all in an effort to try to keep nosy people from monitoring their web activities.

While cybersecurity is still important in this connected world, there’s something far more important to you that can very much be hacked: your mind.

The fact is, in the current digital landscape, you are your greatest vulnerability. It’s the whole reason why the scam industry is currently booming. After all, why attempt to brute force a password with guessing software when accounts are just going to get locked, and an email notification is going to be sent with N attempts, when you can just call someone up and trick them into sharing their password? Or, by performing wrench attacks?

And if you haven’t heard of wrench attacks, it basically involves kidnapping someone and threatening them, such as with a wrench, until they give up their password. It’s a low-tech way of going about things, but that’s what some criminals are turning to.

Or there’s social engineering, where hackers trick people into giving up information in ways that seems harmless. Like with X posts that say, “Your superhero name is the name of the street you grew up on, followed by the name of your first pet.” Some people will leave a comment, not being aware that they just gave away the answer to two common bank account security questions. Or they’ll say “The month you were born on determines which Pokémon is going to be your friend.” And people answer, not being aware that they’ve made it far easier to determine their birthday.

But it gets far more nefarious, because the internet can be used to manipulate you. As I like pointing out, much of the internet is about getting other people to do things.

It wasn’t in a vacuum that Alex Pretti decided to go out one day, while armed, to a demonstration where he would violently confront federal officers. The decision to do this was a consequence of the influences that led up to him making that decision.

That was not a smart choice. In fact, it was among the stupidest choices that anyone could possibly make. Let’s be realistic here: what was it that anyone who fights an armed federal officer hopes to achieve? That they’ll just back down and go, “Alright, we’re done sending these people back to their home country.” That’s a fantasy. And so is the idea that if you start fighting them, they’ll just yield to your strength. You might succeed in killing one or two if you take them by surprise, but the thing is, they are heavily armed and in great numbers, and will just keep coming. And in the long run, after the sad dope who attempted to fight them is dead or detained, the federal officers will just become more determined, especially if armed forces were to come in and force the state of Minnesota to comply in the same way that the other 49 states are.

Any realistic outcome would have been pretty bad for Alex Pretti, including the way that things ended for him. He’s dead. That’s one less vantage point through which the universe is experienced, and the many billions of bacteria in his body that counted on him to survive just became homeless.

But for the psychological manipulators that influenced him to make his final mistake, whether it was a sweet deal will depend on what they were ultimately trying to achieve. But considering that the outcome what something that could be reasonably expected, it’s likely that they got what they wanted.

Someone paid with their life. His death was useful to them. They knew the potential optics that such a death could generate. They knew that legacy media, which is still read by aging boomers all over the country, would do the job of making his death as useful to their cause as possible. They knew that public figures that politically aligned with them, such as mayors and governors, would give speeches. Some of which were probably had such a speech mostly ready to go, in anticipation of this possibility. Which would explain just how stiff and unemotive that they sounded as they rushed to deliver their judgement in mere hours, before all the facts came to light. And would go to show just how little they really care about the foot soldiers who would die to further their political agenda.

By the way, this tragedy was preventable. All that really needed to happen to prevent a death like that of Alex Pretti was for the protestors to just stay home. All that would happen if ICE agents were unresisted is that illegal immigrants would be sent home. That’s it. It’s not worth resisting them, and facing the federal felony charge that would come with doing so. And it’s not worth threatening them and risking getting killed.

Alex Pretti’s death was at the hands of a federal officer. Whether justified or not, it’s difficult to say at this point. The matter wasn’t like that concerning Renee Good, where the protestor was clearly at fault. It was a chaotic moment, where there’s a high potential for anyone involved to make a stupid decision.

However, we can learn a lot about the inputs that increase the possibility of tragedies such as the one involving Alex Pretti’s death. Not knowing all the details, I’ll instead get into hypotheticals, and substitute in a fictional character, Greg.

It’s the year 2017. Greg watches old media. Old media is firing off their bullshit cannon about the Russia collusion hoax, and Greg starts believing that President Trump is a threat to democracy. The psychological destruction begins.

Greg’s political involvement continues in the capacity of an observer. Involvement to him means receiving updates from legacy media sources, overlooking that they’ve been coopted by his new tribe and therefore cannot be counted on to be impartial, and networking with like-minded people on social media. As this happens, psychological operations recode his thinking.

As significant events occur, they are presented to Greg through the occluded lens of the bias of his faction. The coronavirus pandemic. The January 6 capital protest. Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The October 7th massacre. The attempted assassination of Trump. Trump’s reelection. There’s something interesting that occurs with people in cults, which also seems to occur when people are in political factions. When people are sufficiently indoctrinated, they will begin interpreting events consistently with their faction, independent of their spin. At this point, the psychological damage is extensive, and reversal usually involves removing the person from the faction. This can be tricky, as the faction understands the psychology of the brainwashed, by reason of the fact that they were the ones to cultivate it.

Getting to this point can take years. Or it can just take months. Or it can happen much sooner, depending on factors such as how much a person like Greg is willing to deep-dive on topics, or just how effectively they could play to his psychology using things such as emotionally-charged language or appeals to an underdeveloped sense of justice, or to idealism.

But what matters to the mental hackers is getting him there. Once Greg’s mind is sufficiently hacked, there is greater potential for him to respond to language that inspires fanaticism. One person could say that the way to deal with Nazis is to attack them. Another person could say that their political opponents are Nazis. These separate statements are made by different people, but have the high potential to be sewn together to create a permission for himself to attack his political opponents. Another leftist might say that it’s okay to bring a gun to a protest, whether that’s true or not. If Greg does this, it creates another avenue through which he could perform violence that he might even feel justified in committing.

The radicalizing language is combined with increasing the methods and avenues through which Greg could act unwisely. And through it all, the radicalizers who have been manipulating him could maintain plausible deniability, claiming that they never actually put him up to it.

And when the time comes that someone does commit violence, it doesn’t have to be Greg who commits it. It could instead be any of the many millions of leftists who have been radicalized with psychological operations. But it was Greg. And he ended up paying for his foolishness with his life. Long before it happened, his mind was already being systematically destroyed. He could have been recovered at any point before he died. But not after.

The legacy media will, for a moment, prop Greg up as an unfortunate victim and hero for his cause. The very same legacy media that played a role in his radicalization and psychological destruction. His story will be used to radicalize people who, like Greg, are vulnerable to psychological manipulation. The process continues, and more people will end up dying to further a cause which, let’s be honest here, is not worth dying to further.

In the case of Alex Pretti, he was so mentally destroyed that he was willing to attack federal officers in an attempt to preserve a fraud that benefitted illegal immigrants at the expense of American citizens (his own kind), and galvanized the political influence of the Democrat party.

So effective is the left-wing radicalization pipeline. And considering how effective it has been at turning ordinary people into violent foot soldiers for leftism, do you really think that Democrats will make it stop? I don’t, considering that they perceive benefit from it, and can simply distance themselves from elements that are more difficult to defend.

And through it all, Democrats will speak as though it’s their political opponents who need to turn down the temperature. They speak as though they don’t benefit from the left-wing radicalization pipeline which is psychologically manipulating people into committing crimes and throwing their lives away.

The fact is, Alex Pretti didn’t have to die. Not just because the federal officer didn’t need to pull the trigger, whether he had to or not. He didn’t have to die because his attack against federal officers didn’t have to happen. But it did, and he threw his life away for massive fraud, and for amazingly corrupt people to hold on to power.

I really wish that there was an easy solution to this problem. There are a few things I can point out that can help.

• Recognize that corporate news outlets are not your friends. They do have a bias, and the way the business works make it nearly impossible for them to not have a bias and survive long-term.
• Become acutely aware of psychological manipulation, whether it’s in legacy media or social media. Take notice of emotionally-charged language and appeals to a sense of justice, since such language tends to come from someone who is attempting to direct you to a conclusion.
• Watch for signs that information is being omitted. For example, if you see a video of a violent act on social media, and the video begins with the violent act, the events that led up to it was omitted, which can include other violent acts. The “victim” might not actually be a victim, at all!
• If it becomes easy to commit a violent act at a protest, it’s probably because you’re being manipulated into doing someone else’s dirty work. Like someone handing someone else a “firecracker”, and asking them to throw it. They themselves aren’t doing it because they know it’s a bad idea!

But when it comes down to it, we don’t really have an obvious way to prevent psychologically vulnerable people from being vulnerable. And it’s not usually obvious who they are. It’s part of the reason why I believe that stupidity is dangerous. It can manifest in many ways, including in ways that are tragic.