U.S. Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis murdered a man on Saturday, according to the ample evidence available so far. The killing was captured by multiple videos from several angles, and they all tell the same story: In the midst of tense street protests, a group of armed, masked federal agents approach a 37-year-old man named Alex Pretti holding a phone to record them. They tackle him to the ground, apparently remove a legally licensed firearm from his pocket, and then shoot him multiple times. Trump administration officials from Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately labeled him a domestic terrorist, claiming that he had approached the agents brandishing a gun intending a mass casualty attack. But the video, as the Minneapolis chief of police pointed out, speaks for itself.

The administration’s defamation of Pretti and lying about what had happened immediately recalled the smearing of Renée Good, another innocent murdered by a federal agent from the occupation forces in Minneapolis after dropping her son off at school. In both cases, administration officials immediately attacked the victims, ascribing malevolent intent, declining to investigate the killings, and guaranteeing impunity to the killers. Their supporters online and in aligned media then launched into frame-by-frame “investigations” of the video footage seeking to prove that, in fact, the agents had acted in self-defense—that Good had tried to run over the agent with her car (she didn’t), and that Pretti had threatened agents with a gun (he didn’t). The counternarratives then thrived on social media, amplified by algorithms and armies of bots, giving the administration enough cover to continue its campaign.

U.S. Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis murdered a man on Saturday, according to the ample evidence available so far. The killing was captured by multiple videos from several angles, and they all tell the same story: In the midst of tense street protests, a group of armed, masked federal agents approach a 37-year-old man named Alex Pretti holding a phone to record them. They tackle him to the ground, apparently remove a legally licensed firearm from his pocket, and then shoot him multiple times. Trump administration officials from Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately labeled him a domestic terrorist, claiming that he had approached the agents brandishing a gun intending a mass casualty attack. But the video, as the Minneapolis chief of police pointed out, speaks for itself.

The administration’s defamation of Pretti and lying about what had happened immediately recalled the smearing of Renée Good, another innocent murdered by a federal agent from the occupation forces in Minneapolis after dropping her son off at school. In both cases, administration officials immediately attacked the victims, ascribing malevolent intent, declining to investigate the killings, and guaranteeing impunity to the killers. Their supporters online and in aligned media then launched into frame-by-frame “investigations” of the video footage seeking to prove that, in fact, the agents had acted in self-defense—that Good had tried to run over the agent with her car (she didn’t), and that Pretti had threatened agents with a gun (he didn’t). The counternarratives then thrived on social media, amplified by algorithms and armies of bots, giving the administration enough cover to continue its campaign.

This playbook feels deeply familiar to anyone who has followed the long Israeli occupation of Palestine and other places where an oppressive regime confronts protesters or journalists. Recall the May 2022 Israeli murder of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while covering an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. It was very obvious from the available evidence what happened: An Israeli sniper shot a clearly identified member of the press. But instead of proceeding from that reality, Israel and its supporters launched a full-scale campaign to suggest that perhaps she had been killed by friendly fire, or might have been complicit in terrorist attacks, or really anything other than the clear reality. Twitter, as X was then known, filled with mendacious frame-by-frame analyses of the footage purporting to show that Israeli forces could not have done the deed. Ultimately, rigorous analysis of all the evidenceconfirmed that she had, indeed, been killed by Israeli forces.

There’s a long history of such muddying of the waters in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. The most famous instance, at the dawn of the satellite television boom, was the heated effort to deny Israeli responsibility for the on-camerakilling of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durrah in the early days of the Second Intifada in 2000. That event preceded the widespread adoption of social media. As the decade progressed, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook (and later TikTok) played a critical role in accelerating and intensifying this narrative warfare, with algorithms and self-sorting encouraging the formation of informational bubbles and the consolidation of partisan identities. During the turbulent period after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, for instance, supporters and opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood polarized into online communities that experienced the same events in diametrically different ways. The narrative wars within and between hostile and insular online communities helped to build support not only for the July 2013 military coup but also for the brutally violent massacre of Islamist protesters in central Cairo six weeks later.

Gaza, of course, became ground zero for these social media-fueled narrative wars during the war that followed Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. As Israeli forces pushed into Gaza, both sides filmed developments constantly, posting endless videos documenting atrocities and bearing witness. Their information operations then went to extraordinary lengths to contest, deny, and reframe every atrocity reported in the international media or documented online. Many will remember the bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital complex in October 2023 and the efforts to falsely claim that the missile could only have been fired by Palestinian armed groups, an exercise repeated with each of the many, many subsequent attacks on Gaza’s hospitals. All of the individual informational campaigns added up to a continuous effort to deny Israeli responsibility for war crimes, if not genocide, in Gaza. Those efforts did not fool the many human rights organizations and international legal institutions that investigated, but they did gain considerable traction in the media and in online spaces even though upon investigation the original claims almost always proved to be true.

It isn’t just Israel that the Trump administration is emulating. This modular form of narrative warfare has been adopted by authoritarian regimes across the world. The Bashar al-Assad regime during Syria’s long, bloody war routinely pushed false narratives and manufactured evidence to deflect criticism of its bloody crimes and to plant doubts about opposition claims. The Assadist campaign against the White Helmets, a network of heroic first responders that tried to save Syrian civilians under extreme wartime conditions and which Syrian regime media recast as terrorists and foreign agents, represents a peak example of the genre. Russia, which helped promote the Syrian regime’s narratives, followed a similar approach during its invasion of Ukraine, spreading misinformation and contesting narratives to deflect the naked reality of its aggression. Iran’s regime has similarly tried to deflect attention from its brutal repression of protesters by promoting counternarratives of foreign subversion and violent actors. (The regime’s opponents abroad have regrettably engaged in similar forms of narrative warfare.)

The response to the killings in Minneapolis by the Trump administration and its online supporters follows this authoritarian script to the letter. Those seeking to contest the politically inconvenient evidence zoom in on minute details, dragging the conversation away from the big picture to microscopic discussions that only real “experts” can follow. The reality that Israel is targeting hospitals becomes a conversation about the missile’s trajectory and from where it must have been launched. Similarly, the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection are terrorizing Minneapolis and using repressive violence against peaceful protesters morphs into an exegesis on the angle of Good’s tires and whether it shows that she was trying to hit the officer. Those minute details then distract from the broader context and aggregate into a coherent narrative, shifting responsibility and offering an alternative story: Good and Pretti were domestic terrorists, not victims of repressive state power; the murderous agents were the real victims; real responsibility lies with the Democratic politicians and protesters resisting ICE, not with those who pulled the trigger. Once arguments focus on that level of detail—was Pretti’s gun in his pocket or in his hand, were Good’s tires pointing straight ahead or turning—the larger narrative war has been won regardless of what turns out to be true.

Presenting a credible, truthful counternarrative is not necessarily the point—and, indeed, might actually be counterproductive. That’s because those engaged in this form of narrative warfare are not really trying to win the argument. They have several other objectives. They seek to shift the debate away from truth/falsehood into a partisan disagreement with two sides, muddying the waters enough that the casual nonexpert observers will throw up their hands in confusion. The counternarrative aimed at those semi-attentive publics doesn’t need to survive scrutiny for very long and is utterly unperturbed by the detailed, rigorous analysis that appears two weeks later in the New York Times or elsewhere proving that they were wrong. By then, they wager (usually correctly), the issue will have faded from the public consciousness as some new scandal erupts.

At the same time, they seek to offer their own supporters something they can use. Pro-Israel and pro-Trump communities don’t want to accept responsibility for obvious atrocities, but even more than that, they don’t want to abandon their tribe. Supporting the counternarrative, no matter how implausible, then becomes a marker of in-group identity. (Lisa Wedeen, in her classic study of Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, called this act of publicly pretending to believe the outrageous as “acting as if.”) Those who cast doubt on it risk excommunication from their camp. Ostentatiously believing that Israel did not commit war crimes or that ICE did not kill innocent civilians is how you signal membership in that community. That helps explain why these kinds of issues often continue to rage hot within those communities long after most people have moved on, evolving into esoteric arguments and shared assumptions that make little sense to anyone outside the epistemic bubble.

Critically, it is the official imprimatur and power of the state that makes this different from ordinary online political and narrative battles. It is not just partisans of competing political projects slugging it out on social media. In both Israel and the United States, the full force of the government has been engaged in pushing the alternative narrative and denying reality. Trump administration officials immediately and forcefully take the side of the agents and attack the victims, pushing out obvious disinformation such as insinuating that Pretti is an “illegal alien” and using the inherent credibility of official institutions to support their lies. They refuse to investigate the killings as they deflect and deny all evidence and pressure, signaling through this obstinance that their agents will enjoy full impunity. The refusal to credibly investigate such crimes in domestic courts, incidentally, is precisely what triggers the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, or ICC (as with Israel in Gaza).

Such tactics do not always work, though. Some Israelis grew skeptical of official narratives about Gaza. Outside of Israel and core pro-Israeli communities, the sheer weight of evidence eventually shifted mainstream perspectives decisively—not only the flood of reports by credible international organizations and human rights investigators, not only the rigorous indictments by the International Court of Justice and ICC, but also the vast archive of video evidence posted online that made a mockery of the claims. (That global consensus based on independent factual analysis, of course, only reinforced the adherence by the in-group to the fracturing narrative—projecting absolute confidence that Israel did not commit genocide is de rigueur for tribal membership to this day.)

It is striking that in Minneapolis, many of the online voices that immediately embraced the counternarrative on Good have seemed hesitant this time—right-wing X accounts posting videos claiming to prove that Pretti was waving a gun were shouted down by their own followers who could see the video for themselves. Mainstream, usually nonpolitical social media such as Reddit and Instagram are swamped with outraged posts against ICE. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal, which leans right in its editorial line, called on President Donald Trump to ease up on Minneapolis. “He would be wise to pause ICE enforcement in the Twin Cities to ease tensions and consider a less provocative strategy.” A similarly critical editorial in the Free Press featured the headline “Kristi Noem’s Reckless Lies.”

The Gaza precedent suggests that most pro-Trump voices will likely continue to consolidate around their false narratives, but some will begin to defect as they are asked to believe what is clearly untrue. Those that remain faithful to the cause will grow ever more distant from a mainstream public that can see what happened and can’t make heads or tails of the tortured stories that the regime dead-enders tell themselves. For an authoritarian regime, that might be enough. But in a transitional moment of unconsolidated autocracy, losing the mainstream and some prominent defectors could force a retreat.