Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, informed his audience this week an AI-altered photo of Pretti hit the internet and was being used by the liberal news media despite being fake.
“They shortened up his face. They gave him a little bit of a tan. They widened his face a little bit, it seems like,” Rogan, describing the new, improved image. “They just made him a little handsomer.”
That new and improved – and fake – photo of Pretti ran during a news segment on MS Now, formerly MSNBC, that announced his shooting death at the hands of ICE agents.
During the segment, show host Nicolle Wallace used the altered photo and warned viewers the Trump administration “is demanding, once again, that you not believe your eyes and ears.”
Running with a talking point used by other media outlets, Wallace also described the anti-ICE street activist as an "ICU nurse who helped veterans."
Renee Good, the anti-ICE activist who was shot and killed by an ICE agent, was similarly described as a "poet" who was killed after dropping her child off at school.
Rogan compared that altered image of Pretti to a CNN segment about himself, which aired during the Covid pandemic when Rogan’s questions and skepticism were causing waves.
“They turned me green, and they made me ugly and looked like I was dying,” Rogan pointed out. “And they made him handsome.”
In an X post, Daily Wire podcaster Isabel Brown said Pretti was given the “Dr. McDreamy treatment,” so he looks “hotter” and makes more people care more about his death.
Reacting to the altered image, Free Press writer Rod Dreher wrote that the fatal shooting remains controversial but the Left is “canonizing” him.
“The guy didn't deserve to be shot if he had been disarmed -- I think an investigation will reveal it was a tragic accident -- but canonizing him is absurd. He was a nutter,” Dreher wrote.
Outdoing the media and its fake photo of a tanned, square-jawed Alex Pretti, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin condemned the fatal shooting while standing beside a graphic, AI-generated photo of the shooting itself.
“I’m going to show a photo of that scene, which is graphic,” Durbin warned, “but I’m afraid it’s necessary to appreciate the horror of the moment.”
The fake photo beside Durbin showed Pretti being killed execution-style by ICE agents, one of them even missing a head due to the not-so-perfect AI-generated image.
