The fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, at the hands of immigration enforcement officers, raises an important rhetorical question: who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? The famous quotation is often attributed to Chico Marx; in modern usage, it might be more accurate to ask: what are you going to believe, short online video clips or your lying eyes? Unfortunately, both are perfectly capable of deceiving us.

This was the lesson, of course, of several notable social media controversies over the past decade. Yet both sides of the political divide seem determined not to learn from them. Progressive commentators were furious with the Trump administration’s decision to deploy federal immigration authorities to Minneapolis. They then watched the available camera footage and confidently proclaimed that Pretti’s death — as well as that of Renee Good in the same city earlier this month — amounted to cold-blooded murder. Conservatives inclined to defend the administration in all circumstances watched the same footage and blithely declared that the deaths were justifiable under the use of force rules: if an officer reasonably fears for his life, he can shoot to kill a target.

In the real world, it is only possible to determine whether an officer-involved shooting was justified after an impartial, sober-minded investigation takes place. And yet so many of the usual political pundits are satisfied that short, blurry video clips confirm their suspicions and advance their preferred narratives.

For the online Right, an idea has taken hold that precisely because mainstream sources of information — the media and credentialed experts — are not always correct, it is necessary to immediately side against them in all circumstances. Mike Cernovich, a prominent Right-wing X personality, summarized this thinking, writing: “I’m too old for the Covington Smollette [sic] kids in cages time magazine kid crying on the cover ICE agent using kids as bait hoaxes. Zero patience for this nonsense.” This was a reference to the many news stories that mainstream forces have got wrong in some fundamental way: the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax, the idea that Donald Trump alone was extremely harsh toward underage illegal immigrants, the Covington kids incident at the Lincoln Memorial in 2019.

But Cernovich is glossing over what we really learned — or what the public ought to have learned — from each of these examples. Take the Covington kids: I was among the first journalists to write in the Catholic-school teenagers’ defense against false charges that they harassed a Native American man at the Lincoln Memorial. While even portions of the conservative media eagerly denounced the boys on the basis of short, misleading video clips, those of us who waited for the full footage — which exonerated the kids — got to watch as everybody else ate crow.

In truth, our own eyes and video evidence are both liars. Testimony from eyewitnesses is often unreliable, and three people who purportedly saw a crime take place will describe three different scenarios. Witnesses are highly suggestible, and false ideas are easily incepted into their imaginations. But video misleads us as well. Our brains often allow human beings to see whatever we wish to see.

At this early stage, it’s difficult to say for certain whether Pretti’s shooting was justified. Anyone who pretends otherwise is seeing what they want to see. Previous instances in which the mainstream media got a story wrong should not cause us to trust our own knee-jerk impulses more than we trust the experts. They should teach us to be cautious of the expert consensus, of short videos online, and of our own lying eyes.