A note to readers:
This piece is written from my perspective as a nurse and public health advocate. It is grounded in publicly available reporting, video evidence, and professional ethics related to care, safety, and accountability. I write because silence has consequences. Disagreement is part of public discourse; incivility is not.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from George Orwell’s 1984
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
That Orwell quote has taken on a different weight since the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti and everything that has unfolded since.
Many of us spent the weekend watching the videos. Reading the accounts. Trying to make sense of what happened. We watched footage showing a nurse holding a phone, recording federal agents during a protest against immigration enforcement operations. We watched him move toward a woman who had been shoved to the ground. The footage shows federal agents pepper-spraying him, wrestling him to the ground, and positioning themselves around him. Moments later, he was shot multiple times. And then we listened as official statements, issued very soon afterward, insisted that what many of us were seeing in the recordings was not what happened.
That gap—between what is visible and what we’re told—matters.
Pretti’s killing followed the earlier death of Renée Good, a legal observer who was also killed during federal immigration enforcement activity in Minneapolis.
Because this isn’t about isolated incidents. It is a pattern most of us recognize by now. It’s about what happens when people are asked, again and again, to doubt what they can plainly see and hear. When evidence is questioned not because it’s unclear, but because it’s inconvenient. When reality is treated like something flexible.
This kind of confusion doesn’t shout. It doesn’t always lie outright. It wears people down. It leaves them unsure of what is solid and what isn’t. And once that happens, people become exhausted and disengage.
We’ve seen this before.
We saw it with vaccines. Not because parents stopped caring about their children, but because clear, consistent information was replaced by disinformation. Science was treated like opinion. Expertise like bias. Guidance shifted without explanation. And confusion rushed in to fill the gaps.
What people say now isn’t, “I don’t care.”
It’s, “I don’t know who to trust.”
That’s what confusion does. It doesn’t force belief in a lie. It breaks trust in truth itself. And when that happens, preventable harm returns, quietly, predictably, and children are the ones who pay for it.
The same dynamic is at work when a killing is captured on video and then reframed by government officials in ways that contradict what people can plainly see. The message is clear: don’t trust your eyes, don’t trust your ears, don’t trust yourself.
That message is dangerous.
Is this what Orwell meant? Because this is the moment we are being asked to doubt what we can plainly see.
