For Hispanic Heritage Month: The Agit Prop Wars on the Bodies of Migrants Continues--Lawfare as Countermove

 

PIX CREDIT HERE

 I have been considering the curious alignment of agi-prop strategies, once the domain of the hard left and now it seems better deployed by the right,  orchestrated on and through the bodies of migrants mostly from Latin America (At the Start of Hispanic Heritage Month 2022--The Agit Prop of Migration). Bt agit-prop is more contagious than COVID, and unlike human viruses pays tremendous political and agitation dividends when deployed successfully.

And so it comes as no surprise that the left now moves its own agot-prop strategies forward.  And yet there is a bit of anachronism in the move.  Borrowing from the tactics of the left against the Trump Administration--focused particularly on the deployment of the judicial machinery and the application of creative ways of approaching interpretation and the judicial function (a longer story for another day)--the "counter-agit-prop looks to the legal agitation for the sources of its counterstrikes.

And they have been somewhat successful as measured against the standards of good agitation propaganda in the larger wars waged on and through the bodies of migrants (who for left and right serve a useful purpose beyond the tragedies of their own migrations). 

A Texas sheriff said Monday that his office has opened a criminal investigation into Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ unprecedented move to send nearly 50 migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, last week. Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said the inquiry was in its early stages, and he declined to name possible suspects. But in a news conference, he said: “Everybody on this call knows who those names are already.” Salazar said it was not clear whether any laws had been broken, but he said that 48 migrants appeared to have been “lured under false pretenses” into staying at a hotel for a couple of days before they were flown to Florida and Martha’s Vineyard. “They were promised work,” he said. “They were promised the solution to several of their problems.” (Texas sheriff opens criminal investigation into Martha's Vineyard migrant trips: Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said it appeared that 48 migrants were “lured under false pretenses” to the posh Massachusetts island).

PIX CREDIT HERE; SCENE FROM MACHETE KILLS

Lawfare is a classic modality of agit prop and used to great effect in the United States.  But it is a stately and somewhat demur variation of the craft of the utilization of the levers of power to agitate against the systems over which they play roles.  Some of the agitation is there--the deception and entrapment--the luring of the innocent--and yet those are things that the Biden Administration has been no better at foregrounding, much less responding, than any administration that came before this one. The problem here is that the investigation appears to serve the interests of the wealthy in Massachusetts who prefer not to rub shoulders with the objects of their ideological munificence, rather than anything that looks like an effort to agitate to advance movement toward a resolution of the policy challenges of migration.

A better approach to this from the perspective of the agitation potential of the move by this person in Texas might have been to draw from Richard Rodriguez' Machete movies. Where, indeed, is Shé and her "network"? That, at least would provide a counter agitation worthy of its opponent. In the meantime, of course, the focus on agitation continues, as it has for decades, shift the gaze from the bodies of migrants to the theater of politics--of the politics of those who are not merely comfortable but essential to this process of narrative assimilation of a problem most intensely felt beyond the domains of the abstract.