IMPORTANT SUNDAY MESSAGE from Meidas Founder

By Ben Meiselas

Hello Meidas Mighty. It’s Ben Meiselas here, co-founder of the MeidasTouch Network. For those who recently joined this Substack, every Sunday morning I like to grab a coffee with our community here and make this Sunday post to reflect on the past week. So let’s do it.

It’s a grim Sunday. There’s no way around that. Sure, Trump’s approval is plummeting to new lows and the regime has never been more detested. But it’s at the cost of a lot of pain, a lot of tears, and a lot of mourning.

Alex Pretti was murdered in cold blood by Trump’s Border Patrol. Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA. Pretti did nothing wrong at the protest yesterday morning in Minneapolis. He went to offer aid to a female protester who was getting pepper sprayed by Border Patrol agents. The Border Patrol gestapo started pepper spraying Pretti. A group of six to seven Border Patrol thugs threw Pretti to the ground, bludgeoned him on the floor, and shot him 11 times.

Just as it did with Renée Nicole Goode, the Trump regime labeled Pretti a domestic terrorist. It’s the same playbook. It’s the playbook for terror. The Trump regime defamed Pretti and completely lied about what we all saw on video. They repeat the lie over and over and use their state regime news networks like Fox and CBS to repeat the regime propaganda.

Before Pretti was murdered, Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is helping Trump cover up the Epstein child sex trafficking ring, sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Walz. Bondi’s letter said that if Walz agreed to turn over all the voting data in Minnesota that Trump wanted and allow Trump to essentially supervise the midterms, perhaps a deal could be cut where ICE and Border Patrol would leave the state. It’s a classic extortion racket we would expect from the mafia. Governor Walz and the great state of Minnesota did not give in.

It shouldn’t have taken the murder of Pretti to convince a handful of Democrats in the Senate who tried to reach a compromise with MAGA senators to vote against the Department of Homeland Security funding package. The Democrats in the Senate now seem united to vote against ICE funding in the appropriations package set for a vote this week. Trump’s effort to increase the funding for his terrorist paramilitary groups, ICE and Border Patrol, may now lead to a government shutdown, just as his ripping away healthcare did a few months back.

Let me say it one more time. There is no compromising with a terrorist regime and their terrorist paramilitary forces. ICE and Border Patrol must be abolished and prosecuted for crimes against humanity. There are no “enhanced training” compromises to be made with terror groups. Any money that goes to ICE and Border Patrol is used to invade our cities and cause chaos and mayhem and death. Stop treating ICE and Border Patrol as anything other than regime paramilitaries that kill and torture people in this country. I am not mincing words here. We must not mince words. This is a time when moral clarity is needed.

This past weekend also made me reflect on my career before I started MeidasTouch. I was once a civil rights litigator. I graduated law school in 2010. From 2013–2018, I spent many months out of the year living in a hotel room in Bakersfield off Truxtun Avenue, handling cases there when the Bakersfield Police Department and Kern County Sheriff’s Office had the highest police shooting deaths per capita anywhere in the country. I made a documentary series on the cases I worked on with Colin Kaepernick for Hulu called Killing County. I went on to represent Kaepernick when he peacefully protested against police brutality during the first Trump term and Trump gave a speech yelling, “get that son of a bitch off the field,” in Huntsville, Alabama, and Colin’s career was over.

I reflect on how silence is complicity. I reflect on how people attacked Kaepernick’s peaceful protest because it made them “uncomfortable,” when what should have been focused on was how Black and brown communities were being targeted. I reflect on how normalizing and sane-washing the atrocities by Trump and his enablers got us here. I now know that the experience and training from handling hundreds of civil rights cases in a county referred to as “Killing County,” and my work with Kaepernick, has prepared me for this moment.

Anyway, I want to check up on you and make sure you are hanging in there. Let me know how you are feeling by leaving a comment below. I want to let you know I am proud of you and I will be here for you, with the support of this network, however I can. I don’t need to go on about the growth of the MeidasTouch Network, because I know you get it. You’ve made it possible. I am honored to be in this fight with you and to have been able to create a network that brings the truth every single day when corporate news has so utterly failed us. This community is made possible by you. Every morning, from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep, I make sure the network focuses on being your voice and being there for you.

Alright, I am going to make a morning video now. Thanks for reading this. Thanks for being a friend and staying in this fight. We will get through this together. I promise you that.

I’d be remiss, and my staff would be upset at me, if I didn’t remind you that if you aren’t a paid subscriber yet to this Substack, to become one now. The subscriptions to this Substack have fueled the massive expansion you’ve already seen in 2026. We wouldn’t be able to do any of this without those subscriptions, so if you can, subscribe now.

Thanks everyone for having this Sunday coffee with me. Let’s keep fighting.