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.
