More videos and witness accounts of Alex Pretti—the man shot to death by ICE officers in Minneapolis—obstructing federal law enforcement operations in the weeks before his fatal encounter, have emerged. What they confirm is that Pretti was not only a foot soldier for the transnational corporate project to undermine immigration control, but also an instantiation of the suicidal altruism that is motivating true believers to manufacture the circumstances that potentially lead to their own deaths. (To understand the corporate state project, see The Politics of Disaster Capitalism and Revealing the Great and Powerful Oz. Alex Pretti is Toto Pulling Back the Curtain.)
America may be witnessing the emergence of a destructive phenomenon known as suicide contagion. That contagion is what the insurrectionists in rebellion against the American Republic seek is suggested by the glorification of Pretti by progressives and the corporate media, including dwelling on career in a helping profession (Pretti was an ICU nurse) and the distribution of a digitally altered photograph of Pretti making the man more attractive to an audience who fell in love with Luigi Mangione, the assassin of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson. Just as Democrats recruit emotionally dysregulated and mentally ill individuals to their cause, they valorize their acts of violence and encourage them to obstruct law enforcement operations with their bodies. (On the popular culture front, Bruce Springsteen, aping the style of Bob Dylan, released yesterday the protest song “Streets of Minneapolis.”)
Suicide contagion refers to the phenomenon whereby exposure to suicide—through personal relationships, media coverage, or community events—increases the likelihood of suicidal behavior among others, particularly vulnerable individuals. It operates through social learning and identification processes, where human primates model behavior they observe, reinterpret suicide as a viable response to distress and situations, or experience heightened emotional resonance after a highly publicized or local suicide. Contagion effects are strongest among the young and within tightly connected social networks (over-integration), and they are amplified by romanticized or sensationalist media portrayals. This is popularly known as the Werther effect, so named after Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
In my essay Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism, I leveraged the insights of the brilliant French sociologist Émile Durkheim and his typology of suicide to identify a growing phenomenon I identify as suicidal altruism. In that essay, my subject was Renée Good, the woman who put herself in a position to die violently by interfering with ongoing federal law enforcement operations and, then, when told by authorities to get out of her vehicle, instead pointed her SUV at a police officer and mashed the accelerator, forcing an ICE officer to use defensive lethal force resulting in her death. Instead of condemnation of her actions, progressive voices elevated her to the position of martyr by focusing on motherhood and her creative endeavors (she was a poet). In this essay, I tie the problem of suicidal altruism to the larger phenomenon that Canadian psychologist Gad Saad has identified as suicidal empathy, which I will define when I come to it.
To elaborate on the concept of suicidal altruism, Durkheim identifies in his 1897 book Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie four overlapping types of suicide: “anomic,” “egoistic,” “fatalistic,” and “altruistic.” Anomic suicide results from a breakdown of regulation, often during periods of rapid social change. Egoistic suicide occurs when individuals are insufficiently integrated into social groups, leading to isolation and weakened social bonds. Fatalistic suicide arises from excessive regulation, where individuals feel their futures are rigidly controlled and hopeless. Altruistic suicide happens when individuals are overly integrated and sacrifice themselves for the group or society, for example, in obligatory or ritual death.
While features of some of the other types of suicide may, to some degree, be inferred in the examples under discussion, altruistic suicide captures the phenomenon the world is witnessing in the insurrection against the federal government, where US citizens are killed by law enforcement taking lethal defensive action. In criminal justice studies, this is commonly known as “death by cop.” This is not the dismissive act of victim-blaming; justifiable homicide prevents victimization. In other words, understanding altruistic suicide is the proper attribution of causal force.
As I explained in that previous essay, suicide is not only the act of a person in taking his life by his own hand, for example, by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger; suicide is any death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim, which the victim knows is very likely to produce that result. When a man, interfering with ongoing law enforcement operations, attacks a federal officer, a felony punishable by up to eight years in a penitentiary, then resists arrest, and is armed, he does so with the knowledge that his actions are likely to provoke a police response that may result in his death. Therefore, one can infer from his actions that his own death was the end he sought.
When we observe a pattern of such actions, we may reasonably confirm the inference. Pretti is seen in the above video demanding that a federal officer assault him. “This is war!” Pretti shouts at the officer. “Look at you! Pepperspray me, bitch! Fucking assault me, motherfucker! Fucking do it! Fucking trash!” He spits on the officer, screaming again, “Fucking trash!” before kicking the vehicle. What the video shows is a man provoking a response from state agents duty-bound to confront aggressors that will endanger his life. Pretti is not the only example. We see in other videos the desire that armed officers exercise force upon one’s person by those who want to make themselves appear as the victims of law enforcement violence. The end they seek is martyrdom. Progressives are encouraging their followers to seek self-destructive ends. They are manufacturing a willing human sacrifice.
In the video shared above, obtained and narrated by the BBC (the major news organization of the United Kingdom), we see Pretti spitting on officers and damaging their vehicle before officers exit the vehicle to detain him. Pretti’s holstered firearm, presumably the SIG Sauer P320 handgun recovered at the scene of the high-profile shooting that resulted in his death, is visible in the video. Pretti was with a mob of people blocking ICE vehicles (see The Rule of Law and Unlawful Protest: The Madness of Mobs and The Phenomenon of Progressive Brain-Locking and Its Role in the Madness of Crowds). As the mob encircled the officers, the officers were forced to deploy tear gas canisters and pepper balls into the crowd to deter them. Ultimately, Pretti was released, and the officers left.
The BBC notes that this is the gun that federal authorities report Pretti brandished in his fatal confrontation with law enforcement officers on January 24, 2024, in Minneapolis, but hastens to add that video evidence of the shooting contradicts this claim. However, as I explain in Deadly Force and Objective Reasonableness, whether Pretti was brandishing a firearm is immaterial to the validity of the actions law enforcement took to protect their lives and the lives of others. It was enough that an armed assailant was violently resisting arrest and that officers reasonably believed he intended to use a firearm against them.
In his 2026 book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad argues that when societies transform victimhood into moral currency and treat accountability as cruelty, they cultivate what he terms “suicidal empathy.” In his analysis, Western societies have become dangerously skewed in their moral judgments, prioritizing symbolic compassion over evidence, order, and long-term survival.
Saad contends that a distorted form of altruism has taken hold among cultural and political elites, warping ethical priorities and encouraging policies that erode social stability, as we see with open borders and the facilitation of mass migration. This development has produced paradoxical outcomes: protecting offenders over victims, condemning self-defense (except collective action propagandistically defined as such), and privileging ideological narratives over empirical reality.
According to Saad, such trends reflect a broader inversion of moral reasoning, where social cohesion and responsibility are sacrificed to satisfy identity-based politics and virtue signaling, the subject of his 2020 book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Saad argues that these developments represent more than misguided policy choices; they indicate a deeper crisis in how societies define justice and truth. Uncritical compassion, detached from consequence and reality, becomes destructive rather than humane.
Although Gaad does not show that exposure to suicide—especially through close social ties—creates emotional and interpretive conditions that make suicide appear understandable, relatable, or even thinkable for others, this is a social psychological mechanism that works in tandem with the macrosociological phenomenon he describes. The parasitic mind disorders individuals, who then, seduced by suicidal empathy, become weaponized against freedom and reason. The social psychological dimension is therefore crucial to understanding the concrete hazard of the macrosociological development Gaad describes. Suicidal empathy is well-documented in the field of suicidology, which conceptualizes the process by which people come to emotionally identify with someone who has died by suicide and, through that identification, become vulnerable to suicidal ideation.
This is rooted in the problem of empathy, which, in my essay The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”, I show is a perversion of the concept of sympathy formulated by Adam Smith in his 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Empathy increases the likelihood of suicide contagion because it dispossesses observers of their capacity for independent, objective, and rational judgment. The individual projects himself into suicidal potential.
As I explain in that essay, empathy, which appears in educational, psychological, and sociological literature in the mid-twentieth century, emphasizing affective capacity (sharing emotions), is a translation of Einfühlung, popularized in psychology by Edward Titchener in 1909, who defines it as the ability to project oneself into another person’s experience. Thus, empathy, which rational actors are condemned of sufficiently lacking, is the weaponization of the innate human tendency to, in attempting to understand another’s situation, imaginatively put oneself in the other’s place and see the world from his emotional state (we see this elsewhere, e.g., in the socialization of gender identity doctrine). If the emotional state is a disordered one, the empathetic risk disordering themselves.
In contrast to the Werther effect, responsible reporting and narratives of irrationality, coping, and recovery, propularly know as the Papageno effect (named after Papageno, a character in Mozart’s The Magic Flute), can have protective effects. This effect captures the actions of the sympathetic to help those with suicidal ideations and tendencies by encouraging them to seek counseling and treatment. If progressives cared about the individuals drawn to their movement, they would not merely condemn the actions we see on the streets of Minneapolis; more than this, they would admit to the pathology evidenced by the actions described in this essay and urge those seeking martyrdom to instead seek help from mental health professionals.
But progressives won’t do this because they need disordered personalities to advance what resembles a fanatical religious movement surrounding the corporate state project to undermine the legitimacy of republican institutions. That this appears as a fanatical religious movement is, in part, because it’s rooted in religion itself (see Manufacturing Their Own Christs: The Violence of Progressive Christianity). This is truly a dark motive and should raise alarms about the potential for suicide contagion and, ultimately, the future of Western Civilization. (I anticipated this development in my 2019 review of Todd Phillip’s film Joker, see Joker and the Mob.)
freedom and reason 