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 Governor Tim Walz’s fault because Minneapolis is a sanctuary city. Those two messages don’t really hold together.
Things accelerated from there. Just today, 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 other 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 X 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 ahead 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.
Another response caught my eye. This afternoon, General Tony Thomas, former head of the Special Operations Command, repeatedly responded to top administration officials (Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, et al.) with an image that appears to show Pretti being shot in the back of the head by a masked ICE agents. Thomas was the head of Special Operations Command from 2016 to 2019. It’s a powerful rejoinder to the weekend warriors and Palantir board members who imagine they’ve turned Minneapolis into some version of Anbar Province and that this is somehow a good thing.
The campaign of lies and distortion coming out of ICE, DHS and the White House more generally is often labeled propaganda. And it certainly is that. But it’s important to know who it is aimed at. If you looked at television and online news and commentary, you’d get the sense that there was a big debate between the left and the right over whether the shooting of Renée Good was justified. Polling and other data suggested this wasn’t really the case at all, that very few members of the public thought ICE agents acted appropriately or with justification. Often these fusillades of obfuscations and simple misstatements of fact aren’t meant to convince anyone but to give allies and reliable influencers something to say. As we’ve discussed in other contexts, often in a modern political argument it’s not really necessary to have a response that makes any sense. You just need to have a response. The one fatal thing is to leave your allies with no set of marching orders, with no clear party line, because you can’t leave people trying to think up a response on their own.
When that kind of messaging comes under strain, you need to escalate it. You need a story every bit as powerful as the one you’re trying to counter. When you have multiple videos showing ICE agents simply shooting a man to death with no justification whatsoever you need a pretty wild story to equal things out. But that story — that Pretti drew his weapon and was opening fire when federal agents killed him — is going to be just as brittle as it is powerful, liable to snap at any moment. And when it snaps, what you’re left with is a pretty horrifying series of videos in which a man very intentionally takes no aggressive or violent actions and is over a matter of seconds violently beaten by multiple agents and then shot to death. When it snaps, people start to running for cover because now there’s no backup argument. The shift from he was a violent terrorist to maybe they shouldn’t have murdered him is just too abrupt a retreat. When a movement fed on a extreme propaganda suddenly finds itself with nothing to say, things can move very fast.
