‘Fascism is here now’: the US athletes pushing back on Trump’s America

World Series winner Sean Doolittle, Super Bowl champion Doug Baldwin and college star McKenzie Forbes have strong opinions on a troubled era

At 6.38pm CST on Saturday January 24, Indiana Pacer star Tyrese Haliburton posted on X: Alex Pretti was murdered."

The NBA star was one of the first athletes to respond to what can only be described as the public execution by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Pretti's death was the culmination of a weeks-long campaign of terror conducted against residents of the city, including Renee Good, who was herself killed by DHS forces just two weeks earlier. Indeed, Operation Metro Surge" in Minneapolis has accounted for two-thirds of homicides in the city in 2026.