Billie Eilish has a question: “hey my fellow celebrities u gonna speak up?”
The singer, like every other decent person, is outraged by what is happening in Minnesota. Masked thugs with ICE badges, guns and less job training than you’d get on Day 1 at Shake Shack have now killed two citizens while terrorizing hundreds more.
What happened to Alex Pretti on Saturday morning was horrific. The 37-year-old ICU nurse was filming ICE agents, which is his right. He had a holstered legal firearm, also his right. Then his rights — and his life — were snuffed out when ICE agents pepper-sprayed him, pushed him down, gang jumped him, pummelled him and shot him 10 times in five seconds.
This was not law enforcement — it was a public execution.
Or as Stephen King put it: “Alex Pretti was murdered.”
The grim videos circulating this weekend were eerily similar to the killing of Renee Good earlier this month. The mother and poet, also 37, was shot at point blank range as she tried to drive her Honda Pilot away from ICE agents. The kill shot entered the left side of her brain and exited the right side as onlookers screamed in shock and disbelief.
Her last words to the trigger-happy hothead just before he killed her: “I’m not mad at you, dude.” Here’s what he said after killing her: “F—king bitch.”
Would you trust this guy to water your plants while on vacation?
He’d piss in the fern while berating the eucalyptus.
On Sunday night, in an Instagram post calling for a national strike, actor Pedro Pascal wrote: “Truth is a line of demarcation between a democratic government and authoritarian regime. Mr Pretti and Rene Good are dead. The American people deserve to know what happened.”
Except, anyone with eyes and ears knows what happened. About 3,000 ICE agents were sent to Minnesota to fulfil Stephen Miller’s arrest quotas and anti-immigrant fever dreams. Imagine having a job that somehow combines the stress of commission sales with lethal force.
Heartless chaos and tragedy is the inevitable result.
So now you have agents setting up dragnets at Home Depot or smashing into a grandfather’s home to pull him into the frigid cold in his boxer shorts even though he is a citizen. You have agents turning preschoolers into hostages to lure parents out of hiding. You have agents demanding to see the papers of anyone heard speaking with an accent. You have agents who instinctively do the opposite of de-escalate, likely because they have zero experience and were recruited at job fairs at gun shows or with online ads promising hefty signing bonuses.
All of this, as Natalie Portman called it, is “obscene.”
ICE isn’t nabbing violent criminals. It is importing violence to communities.
That is why it’s time for all celebrities to use their platforms to shame ICE and the lying liars at the top. Even before their bodies were cold, the senior ghouls running ICE brutally killed Good and Pretti a second time by slandering them as “domestic terrorists.”
Is poetry roughly equivalent to ISIS? Is nursing a crime against humanity?
Is peaceful protest now punishable by death in Donald Trump’s America?
Kristi Noem, who cosplays as the secretary of Homeland Security in between Botox injections and hat changes, invented stories about both fatal encounters that were so at odds with video reality it was impossible not to summon Orwell: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Celebrities are often in no-win situations when encouraged to speak out on important matters. There is no PR upside. But we underestimate the power A-listers wield in dark times when young people get their news from TikTok.
“ICE’s actions are unconscionable, but we are not powerless,” said Olivia Rodrigo.
She wasn’t auditioning for a role. She was simply acknowledging the obvious: when the people tasked with public safety become a threat, silence is a cop-out. Learned helplessness is exactly what someone like Miller wants you to feel.
If celebrities can hawk tequila, underwear and skin care, they should also promote political and cultural awareness when citizens are getting gunned down in the streets like one of Noem’s puppies. The “ICE OUT” pin Olivia Wilde recently wore at Sundance is a blunt antidote to the fiends who might try to defend what happened this weekend.
Or as Josh Gad noted: “This isn’t an issue of politics. It’s an issue of humanity.”
Olaf couldn’t have said it better.
The argument against celebrity activism is always the same. It’s performative. It’s naive. It’s divisive. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: silence is also performative when one celebrity post can reach more eyeballs than C-SPAN does in a year.
Billie Eilish isn’t asking her fellow celebrities to solve the problem.
She is just asking them to say something.
