This special Saturday edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
After a gunman opened fire at a ICE facility in Dallas on Wednesday morning, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took to X to decry the shooting as yet another attack on federal law enforcement — one made possible by “far-left” rhetoric.
“The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop,” Noem said of ICE agents and other federal law enforcement. “We are praying for the victims and their families.”
But the victims in the attack weren’t ICE agents; they were immigrants. Three migrant detainees were shot by the shooter. One is dead while the other two were seriously injured. No members of law enforcement were harmed.
Still, the narrative had been set: the shooter in Dallas was a far-left radical intent on killing cops.
On Wednesday, FBI Director Patel said the shooter had left handwritten notes containing the line, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP rounds on that roof?’” (“AP” may be an abbreviation for “armor-piercing.”) Some of the shooter’s friends say he leaned libertarian but was mostly apolitical. His attack may have been a result of his nihilistic, edgelord behavior online, Ken Klippenstein reports.
At a Thursday afternoon press conference, local FBI officials said the shooter “wanted to cause terror; he wanted to harm ICE personnel.” But officials did not allude to a left-wing ideological motive and said the shooter appears to have acted alone.
FBI special agent Joseph Rothrock declined to say whether messages were present on bullets the shooter that were fired, saying that information was part of an ongoing investigation — even though Patel already posted a photo of unspent shell casings with “ANTI-ICE” written on one of them.
Despite the Trump administration’s claims that the attack in Dallas was a cut-and-dry instance of left-wing violence, officials had a hard time keeping their stories straight right from the jump.
Vice President JD Vance initially claimed the shooter was a “far-left radical,” but in the next breath appeared to confirm he targeted immigrants.
“Look, just because we don’t support illegal aliens, we don’t want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political violence,” Vance said at an event Wednesday afternoon in Concord, New Hampshire.
In press appearances, ICE director Todd Lyons repeatedly stuck to the narrative that the attack “wasn’t directed at detainees. It wasn’t directed at civilians on the street. It was a definite attack on law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, ICE spokesperson Madison Sheahan said Wednesday that the shooter “chose to come in and kill these detainees while they were being processed.”
By the time Noem appeared on CNN on Wednesday evening, she still couldn’t identify the immigrant who was killed or even say whether her agency had reached the person’s family. Given an opportunity to reiterate her statement from earlier Wednesday that the shooting was a “wake-up call to the far left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences,” she waffled.
Noem did not definitively say the shooter was a left-wing ideologue intent on harming ICE agents. Instead, she resorted to vague language about the shooter “being opposed” to the agency.
Whether a result of incompetence, a misunderstanding of ironic edgelord gamer culture, or purposeful lying, these contradictory statements and the haste to label the shooter as motivated by left-wing ideology make it imperative that the investigation into this event be conducted as independently as possible. But Patel’s FBI, Bondi’s DOJ, and Noem’s DHS have proven that their agencies are not capable of conducting investigations based on anything other than Trump’s political objectives.
Simply put: the federal government can no longer be trusted, and the Trump administration only has itself to blame.
Professional liars
In the first eight months of Trump’s second presidency, federal agencies have been caught lying or twisting the truth to fit various White House narratives over and over again.
In California, DHS section chief Greg Bovino lied about protesters assaulting immigration agents — at least twice — in addition to saying his agents were only targeting migrants with criminal records during a raid in which 77 of the 78 people arrested had no prior record. (Protests and alleged attacks against ICE agents in Los Angeles were used as justification to send in the National Guard and Marines. A federal judge in California ruled that this was a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.)
Meanwhile, federal officials appear to be exaggerating claims of a coordinated attack on immigration agents elsewhere in Texas. Federal prosecutors in the case of a July attack on law enforcement at an ICE facility in Prairieland have changed their description of events there.
The initial press release from ICE claimed that “nearly a dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons” carried out the attack in Prairieland. But on Wednesday, Patel himself referenced only a lone “individual” involved in the attack. Still, more than a dozen people remain in jail awaiting trial for their alleged involvement in the case.
In Washington DC, former Fox News host turned US Attorney Jeanine Pirro has dropped 11 of her own cases against people accused of assaulting law enforcement because the evidence didn’t add up. In at least one case, Pirro’s office admitted it had reviewed evidence against a defendant accused of injuring a DHS agent only to find the man had never committed the crime for which he was charged.
Last month, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reporting jobs numbers that showed a weakening economy. Trump’s replacement was the “utterly unqualified” EJ Antoni, who is expected to provide Americans with numbers that are favorable to Trump but not necessarily true. Economists on both the left and the right now say that labor numbers coming from Antoni’s agency can’t be trusted.
Meanwhile, the US military has now carried out three attacks on civilian vessels in international waters, killing 17. The White House says the military is killing drug traffickers, but one former federal law enforcement official told the New York Times that those on board were more likely to be migrants trying to make it to the United States.
Then, on Monday, Trump announced in a lie-filled press conference that pregnant women shouldn’t take Tylenol because it contributes to autism, going against decades of research and advice from medical experts. Trump’s announcement conflicted with a statement from the FDA on the same day that noted “a causal relationship” between taking Tylenol and autism “has not been established.”
Trump has also mobilized the entire federal government to justify his incessant lies about elections, which now threaten the viability of next year’s midterms.
The president has continued to lie about the integrity of voting machines and mail-in voting, threatening to do away with both despite not having the constitutional power to do so. Lies about widespread illegal voting by undocumented immigrants are at the heart of Justice Department’s demands for lists of registered voters in more than 30 states. The DOJ’s Voting Rights Section has been turned on its head and is now conducting investigations based not on protecting Americans’ right to vote, but on Trump’s election lies.
And then there’s Patel, who is just two weeks removed from a disastrous performance in which he claimed the FBI had arrested Charlie Kirk’s killer only to reverse it hours later. Patel was out front again on Wednesday, posting the aforementioned photo of bullets allegedly tied to the Dallas shooter, one with the phrase “ANTI-ICE” written on it in what appears to be ink.
Friends of the shooter say this was probably for the lulz, and that, like other apparently nihilistic shooters, the attack in Dallas has less to do with specific politics as it did a young man who just didn’t care anymore and wanted to go out with a bang. But the FBI director wasn’t about to let facts get in the way of his narrative.
Selective evidence, broad conspiracies
Dallas police are investigating alongside Patel’s FBI. Hopefully this means that Americans will be able to get a second opinion on the alleged motivation of the shooter.
That’s because there’s evidence that Patel may be selectively releasing information on the Dallas shooter to support the Trump administration’s narrative of out-of-control left-wing extremism. At no point on Wednesday did Patel or any other administration official discuss a map taped to the rear of the passenger side of the shooter’s car. The map showed radioactive fallout patterns from nuclear weapons testing conducted in the 1950s, and comes from an obscure 1999 book titled “Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing.”
“Under the Cloud” was written by Richard Miller, an industrial hygienist who claims to have worked for OSHA. Miller has written two other books on radioactive contamination in the United States, one of which bears a version of the map found on the Dallas shooter’s car on the book’s cover.
During her CNN appearance on Wednesday night, Noem confirmed the vehicle in question did belong to the shooter but didn’t discuss the map.
Those with interest in the United States’ nuclear weapons program and conspiracies surrounding it don’t always fit into neat ideological boxes. If the Dallas shooter was familiar with material as relatively obscure as cancer rates in US populations living “downwind” of nuclear test sites — one of the subjects of Miller’s work — it could allude to a much more incoherent political ideology than is being portrayed by Patel and others.
Similarly, Charlie Kirk’s killer appears to have had a more complicated worldview than that portrayed by law enforcement’s assessment of the carvings on his bullets. Kirk’s killer had an online footprint that included a right-wing Pepe the Frog meme, a Trump costume, and furry references among other dripped-in-irony edgelord behavior.
But the killer’s relationship with a trans roommate is being pointed to by Patel’s FBI and local officials as the primary motivating factor for the killing of Kirk, who frequently criticized trans Americans and advocated for traditional gender roles.
In both the Kirk killing and the Dallas shooting, the FBI has proven it can’t be trusted to provide narrative-free evidence to the public. This is par for the course for the rest of the federal government under Trump, which can’t be trusted on really anything, because everything in this government exists to serve Dear Leader — not the American people.
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
When the facts don’t fit the narrative, this administration simply reassigns the facts.
Agencies now operate as narrative factories, selectively releasing details that reinforce the White House’s preferred storyline while suppressing anything that complicates it. The result isn’t just misinformation—-it’s epistemic sabotage. Citizens are left parsing bullet casings for motive while officials speak in hashtags.
The real danger isn’t that the shooter was radicalized. It’s that the public is being conditioned to accept contradiction as coherence, and propaganda as protection.
When institutions reward loyalty over truth, the lie becomes the law.
— Johan
Strategic Advisor | Behavioral Economist | Former Foreign Service Officer
Shouldn't this already have been the headline on January fucking 20th?