patrick.net

How awful is corporate media? Pretty awful. There’s been a lot happening related to the Greenland story, quietly, but not at all hidden— just not spoonfed by government officials to infantile corporate media reporters like mashed peaches. Trump isn’t spoonfeeding them, and as a result, reporters look dumber and dumber.

For example, easily located defense contracts, published right on official US government websites, reveal the United States approved at least six major arms deals with Denmark over a six-week period starting in mid November, 2025. They include $318 million for AIM-9X missiles (Nov. 14), $730 million for AIM-120C-8 missiles (Dec. 11), $951 million for AMRAAM-ER missiles (Dec. 23), $1.8 billion for P-8A aircraft (Dec. 29), $45 million for Hellfire missiles (Jan. 8, 2026), and Denmark was allowed to redeem its expired savings stamps in return for several deluxe family appliances.

For comparison, the six weeks saw about ten times the volume of defense sales to Denmark during the entire previous twelve-month period, when the Nordic nation purchased only a handful of 9mm bullets and a large customized fighting stick that can be affixed to a dogsled.

In other words, while Trump was threatening to invade Greenland “the hard way,” the Danes were paying him billions of dollars. You think those remarkable, multi-billion dollar sales numbers might have been significant to the public’s understanding of the developing “Greenland crisis?”

None of it was a secret. Again, all the deals were published right on the Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s website. The stories even appeared in the military press. For one example, here’s a headline from the Defense Post, December 23rd:

https://thedefensepost.com/2025/12/23/us-amraam-er-denmark/

US OKs $951M AMRAAM Extended Range Missile Sale to Denmark
December 23, 2025

At this point, it is an open question whether better new reporting is produced by corporate media reporters or blind squirrels.

Yesterday, CNN broke a story headlined, “Alex Pretti broke rib in confrontation with federal agents a week before death, sources say.” In other words, the pugilistic anti-ICE activist was a pro who kept at it and fought through the pain to its predictable, tragic conclusion. But the good news is, media is learning to use AI:




In case you somehow missed it (or live in Portland), last week, a Minneapolis nurse named Alex Pretti blocked an ICE operation, blew his bullhorn in agent’s faces, physically tried to stop them from arresting another rioter, thereby committing a crime (assault on a federal officer), violently resisted arrest in a scrum with a half dozen officers, and after Pretti’s gun went off in the fracas, was shot and killed.

The media spent a week rediscovering Second Amendment rights, polishing Pretti’s resumé, manufacturing a nasty narrative of an unjustified police shooting, and credulously quoting Democrats calling Pretti’s death a “murder” and an “assassination.”

But things became more complicated yesterday. CNN reported that ‘sources’ said that, about a week before Pretti’s death, he was involved in another physical fight with ICE agents. Apparently, federal officers tackled him while he was interfering with their attempt to detain other protesters. Pretti told the source that five agents pigpiled him and one leaned on his back, which, he claimed, broke his rib. (He was released at the scene.)

The source said Pretti told a friend, “I thought I was going to die.” Ironic. But apparently it only whetted his appetite for more.

CNN then said it had “reviewed records consistent with treating a broken rib.” Its source also said Pretti was “known to federal agents,” but admitted that nobody knows whether the officers had ID’d him before last week’s shooting. ...

Had Pretti been arrested the first time around, he might still be here.

The repeated violent encounters suggest that Pretti had conceived a self-image as some kind of heroic, vigilante-style civil rights warrior. ...

Maybe we should dig more into who or what filled Pretti’s head with these fantastical ideas and urged the recently divorced, 37-year-old nurse to reinvent himself as an urban guerrilla. (People reported that Pretti’s ex-wife “hadn’t spoken to him since they divorced more than two years ago.” Oof.)

Sad. But now, having raced out of the gate with its “Pretti the hero” narrative, media’s whitewashing is falling apart like cheap gas station toilet paper. Pretti now sounds more like a despairing, unstable, broken man who might have been inclined to suicide-by-cop, in a vain attempt to infuse his life with final, tragic, victimized meaning.