Zapadnoye Degunino

buy modafinil germany The Justice Department opened a civil rights probe into Alex Pretti’s killing Friday, three weeks after refusing to investigate Renee Good’s death under nearly identical circumstances.

Both were 37. Both were U.S. citizens. Both were shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this month. Both were recording officers on their phones when killed.

The difference? Pretti was a white male Veterans Affairs nurse. Good was a woman in a same-sex relationship.

The disparity tells a story I recognized as a crime reporter: certain victims get federal investigations and presidential concern. Others get blamed, even in death. I learned early that I wasn’t getting on the front page unless a white victim was involved.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the Pretti probe will examine everything leading up to the shooting.

For Good, his office did worse. Justice Department officials ordered prosecutors to stop drafting a civil rights investigation and instead probe Good herself for assaulting the officer who killed her. A federal judge refused the warrant request.

At least six Civil Rights Division prosecutors resigned. So did Minnesota’s acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who built his reputation prosecuting major fraud cases. More resignations followed as agents were ordered to investigate Good’s widow for alleged ties to activist groups.

That message was clear: Good deserved what happened.

I spent decades covering homicides. Editor interest spiked when victims were white. A missing white woman meant daily follow-ups and front-page placement. A Black teenager shot in the same neighborhood might rate three paragraphs on B6.

The pattern holds at the federal level now. Iimmigration enforcement has admitted to 16 shootings since July 2025, declaring each justified before investigations finished.

The actual toll is worse. At least 30 shootings by immigration agents since January 20, 2025 resulted in eight deaths. Five victims were U.S. citizens. The Wall Street Journal identified 13 instances of officers firing at or into civilian vehicles, a practice most police departments banned years ago.

ICE disclosed six custody deaths already in 2026. Last year saw 31, the highest since 2004. These exclude people who die fleeing agents or those released from custody hours before death to avoid official counts.

Pretti’s status as a registered gun owner seems to have purchased credibility with federal officials. They claimed he brandished his handgun and charged officers.

Video showed otherwise. The gun remained in his waistband while he recorded on his phone. Officers tackled him. One agent removed the weapon. Another shot him in the back.

Good faced the same posthumous smearing. Officials said she tried to run over an ICE agent. Video showed her wheels turned away when the agent opened fire.

The gun ownership detail troubles me. Does carrying legally make someone’s death more worthy of investigation? Does it make their life more valuable?

The implication is ugly. Pretti mattered because he had the trappings of respectable citizenship. Good apparently did not.

Federal agents reportedly invoked Good’s death as a warning. One who pepper sprayed a legal observer reportedly said protesters needed to stop or end up like “that lesbian bitch.”

Her death was a threat. His triggered an investigation.

I get the calculation. Pretti had credentials, legal gun ownership, and demographics that made him harder to dismiss.

Good had neither shield.

But that calculation is the problem.

Both were Americans killed exercising constitutional rights. Both deserve the same scrutiny, the same pursuit of truth, the same accountability.

The fact that only one is getting it tells us whose lives we value and whose deaths we’re willing to excuse.

Eggs.

Every era gets the protest it deserves, and ours has been casting around for something that fits the mood.

Something human-scaled. Something ridiculous enough to puncture the theatrical seriousness of authority. Something that refuses martyrdom and chooses comedy instead.

The answer was sitting in the refrigerator the whole time.

Eggs are the perfect protest food because they are honest. They are yolky. They are messy. They refuse dignity.

Eggs are born fragile and seem proud of it. You hold one, especially a rotting one. and immediately understand the stakes. This thing is going to break.

That is the point. Power hates that.

Power prefers symbols that can be neutralized, slogans that can be ignored, signs that can be confiscated and stacked neatly against a wall.

Eggs refuse neatness. Eggs turn uniforms into costumes. Eggs turn posturing into slapstick. Eggs remind everyone watching that beneath the armor and choreography, this is still human farce.

Historically, protest has a modern prop problem. In the 1960s, you could slide a flower into the barrel of a rifle and the photograph would do the work for you. It was gentle. It was poetic. It relied on a shared understanding that restraint existed on both sides.

That understanding has aged poorly.

We live in a time of helmets and shields and acronyms, of grim men in identical gear clumsily goose-stepping. The modern protest image is all angles and tension, all clenched jaws and radio chatter. It begs for interruption.

Eggs interrupt.

They are small enough to fit in a palm and familiar enough to disarm suspicion. No one looks at an egg and thinks of menace. They think of breakfast. They think of dropping one on the kitchen floor and standing there stunned by the sudden, irreversible mess of it.

That mess matters. All they do is sacrifice. Eggs refuse to play the escalation game. They do not pretend to be weapons. They do not pose as cell phones.

They simply reveal how absurd the performance becomes once gravity takes over. Authority soaked in egg does not look fearsome. It looks like what it is: a grown adult who underestimated IHOP. Eggs lop long in float invisibly in a pepper spray cloud. Just saying.

Even if you insist on imagining the most principled, hands-clean version of dissent, eggs still win on symbolism alone.

They represent the body. The breakable body. The body that leaks when handled roughly. The body that turns order into chaos simply by being alive. If you’re getting thrown down anyway, be a messy arrest. And eggs in open vehicles are IMPOSSIBLE to get out. Just saying.

There is also the aesthetic argument, which should not be dismissed. A baton looks designed. A shield looks purposeful.

Egg on a uniform looks like a mistake. It looks like something that went wrong. It looks funny, and funny remains the one reaction power cannot regulate.

That is why satire endures when speeches fade. That is why parody survives crackdowns. Laughter spreads faster than instructions and stains longer than slogans.

Eggs carry all of that without saying a word. They are not heroic. They are not noble. They are not clean. They are exactly right.

In a time when everything feels overdetermined and rehearsed, the egg reintroduces chance. It says something might slip. Something might crack. Something might not go according to plan.

Which, historically speaking, is how change actually starts.

The question, of course, is whether the egg remains funny when the response stops being.

But perhaps that becomes the point. The absurdity grows sharper when met with disproportionate force. A dozen officers tackling someone over breakfast food. Charges filed. Sentences handed down.

The egg does not stop being funny. It just reveals how desperately unfunny everything else has become.