Alex Pretti’s killing has become a brutal mirror for America’s deepest contradictions. On one side is a government insisting an armed man “violently resisted,” even as viral footage appears to show an ICU nurse holding only a phone, hands up, trying to shield a woman already on the ground. On the other is a family begging the country to see what they see: not a threat, but a son, a caregiver, a man they say was executed and then smeared.

Into that fracture drops a six-year-old Charlie Kirk tweet, suddenly radioactive. His words about the Second Amendment as a safeguard against tyrannical government now sit beside images of federal agents firing on a citizen at a protest. Trump warns about guns at demonstrations; gun-rights advocates answer that this is exactly why they carry. As protests swell and politicians choose sides, the question isn’t whether America trusts its government. It’s whether the government still deserves to be trusted at all.