'The Pro-ICE Primal Scream Chorus Fragments and The Underbussing Begins'

(TPM) "Everywhere we’re seeing signs that ICE, the White House and its virtual army of influencers, agitators and generalized degenerates are losing control of the public narrative surrounding the murder of VA ICU nurse and activist Alex Pretti. These things don’t come in one coherent motion. You see it more in a kind of fragmentation, a general loss of a coherent and aggressive message. Individual players and factions start groping for their own climb down and then often at one sudden point run rapidly for the hills. The White House and ICE have over the last 48 hours simultaneously been claiming that Pretti was there for a mass shooting of ICE agents, so thank god they killed him, and, also, that Pretti’s death is a terrible tragedy and it’s all Tim Walz’s fault because Minneapolis is a sanctuary city. Those two messages don’t really hold together."

"Over the course of today, things accelerated from there. Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the White House needs to 'recalibrate,' which presumably means not murdering so many civilians or at least not doing it on camera. A Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, Chris Madel, who is currently representing Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot Renée Good to death, dropped his candidacy, blaming ICE, and even left the Republican Party. The president himself seems to be moving to declaim any ownership of Pretti’s murder by sending Tom Homan to Minneapolis as his man who 'has not been involved in that area' (i.e., isn’t the one who is doing all the killing) to get the situation under control and 'report directly to me.' These moments of breakdown in the White House’s feral and to date overwhelmingly united propaganda campaign were matched by dozens of other MAGA influencers and other members of the GOP who could not quite manage to keep yelling that Pretti’s killing was anything than murder."

"While this was happening, another faction of the online right tied to billionaire influencers like Jon Lonsdale retreated to another redoubt of defense, arguing that the protests in Minneapolis are not organic but in fact tightly organized, with spotters, internal communication networks, training, specialization of different roles. A poster on Twitter who says he is a former Green Beret who worked in counterinsurgency in Iraq has a long post explaining why everything he is seeing in Minneapolis is recognizable from what he saw in Iraq and must be treated accordingly. That post has been eagerly shared by Lonsdale and others."

"But something else has been happening too. Over the last 24 hours a number of police chiefs have come forward not so much to attack the ICE occupation as to say what we’re seeing in this video and in ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis is not what we recognize as law enforcement. Obviously there are many horrible videos and incidents we’ve seen over recent years that are very much law enforcement. And there’s a real aspect of this which is simply a matter of getting out of the backlash. But this is of a piece with a shift we’ve seen over the last couple weeks in which a lot of the population is not seeing ICE as another flavor of a metropolitan police department but something categorically different, which of course it is."

Continued at link:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-pro-ice-primal-scream-chorus-fragments-and-the-underbussing-begins