WHO WE ARE: Tricia McLaughlin was pulling no punches...

MONDAY, MAY 12, 2025

...concerning that body slam: Tricia McLaughlin was pulling no punches concerning the body slam.

Who the heck is Tricia McLaughlin? In this "town that is no more a town," McLaughlin is billed in the following way by the federal agency which may not quite be a federal agency:

Tricia McLaughlin
Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs

As Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Tricia McLaughlin oversees the Department of Homeland Security’s public outreach, including its media, digital, strategic and crisis communications efforts, and serves as the principal advisor to Secretary Noem on all external and internal communications.

The profile continues from there. Last Friday, McLaughlin rushed some assertions into print, at a time when, it's now clear, she didn't exactly seem to know what she was talking about. 

As you can see by clicking this link, this was the start of the press release which was more a preferred tribal script:

Members of Congress Break into Delaney Hall Detention Center

Delaney Hall Currently Holds Murderers, Rapists, Suspected Terrorists, and Gang Members

NEWARK, NJ –Today, as a bus of detainees was entering the security gate of Delaney Hall Detention Center, a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility. Representatives Robert Menendez, Jr. and Bonnie Watson Coleman and multiple protestors are holed up in a guard shack, the first security check point. 

“Members of Congress storming into a detention facility goes beyond a bizarre political stunt and puts the safety of our law enforcement agents and detainees at risk. Members of Congress are not above the law and cannot illegally break into detention facilities. Had these members requested a tour, we would have facilitated a tour of the facility. This is an evolving situation,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. 

To what extent was any of that accurate? As everyone including McLaughlin now knows, there were actually three (3) members of Congress involved in whatever did or didn't happen at the Delaney Hall Detention Center on that glorious day. 

When she issued that first press release, McLaughlin didn't quite seem to know what she was talking about. That is now a distinguishing characteristic of many players within our discourse which isn't a discourse.

Had any of those members of Congress ever been "holed up in a guard shack" after "storming the gate?" We have no idea. 

Eventually, though, accurate information grew, as did the possible craziness of McLaughlin's some of McLaughlin's principal claims. One day later, on Saturday, NBC News reported what she now had to offer:

DHS spokesperson threatens arrests of House Democrats who were at N.J. ICE facility

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security on Saturday suggested the Trump administration could pursue arrests of the House Democrats involved in an incident at a New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility on Friday and accused them of assaulting ICE officers.

“I think that we should let viewers know there will likely be more coming,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN on Saturday morning.

“We actually have body camera footage of some of these members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer,” McLaughlin said.

Her comments were in response to a question from CNN’s Victor Blackwell, who asked whether others were arrested Friday in addition to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was charged with trespassing.

[...]

She added that ICE was in possession of video evidence documenting the incident.

By now, McLaughlin probably knew that three (3) members of Congress had been present on Friday. Incoherently, she was now saying that "some of" those members—that would apparently have to mean two—had been captured on videotape "assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer."

Might we note the following point—a point which even McLaughlin must have known by now? 

In her initial release, McLaughlin had named two (2) members of Congress who had "stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility." 

One of those members was Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (R-NJ). By now, even McLaughlin must have known that Rep. Coleman is 80 years old and seems to weigh something in the neighborhood of a hundred (100) pounds.

Had Rep. Coleman body slammed that female officer? Inquiring minds want to know.

Questions! Had any of the three congressional reps actually "stormed the gates?" Who had body-slammed that female officer? And where is the videotape which documents this carnage?

Over the weekend, various persons employed by the Fox News Channel played extremely brief snippets of videotape—extremely brief snippets which clarified absolutely nothing concerning Friday's events. The employees played along with the story, failing to mention the uselessness of the tape they'd been provided.

In Saturday's report, we returned you to the Frost poem about the town which is no more a town. We suggested that we moderns could possibly gain a bit of clarity from the language structure which is found at the start of the poem:

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered...

There is a house which is no more a house? So too with our American discourse, which was never an airtight house from the start.

One thinks perhaps of the fall of Rome thanks to the work of barbarian groups. The leading authority on this major development starts to explain it in the manner shown: 

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The fall of the Western Roman Empire, also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome, was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided among several successor polities. The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army, the health and numbers of the Roman population, the strength of the economy, the competence of the emperors, the internal struggles for power, the religious changes of the period, and the efficiency of the civil administration. Increasing pressure from invading peoples outside Roman culture also contributed greatly to the collapse. Climatic changes and both endemic and epidemic disease drove many of these immediate factors. The reasons for the collapse are major subjects of the historiography of the ancient world and they inform much modern discourse on state failure.

In 376, a large migration of Goths and other non-Roman people, fleeing from the Huns, entered the Empire. Roman forces were unable to exterminate, expel or subjugate them (as was their normal practice)...

Goths to the left of them, Huns to the right! We could be wrong, but we think the Visigoths may have come later.

At any rate, "barbarian groups"—invading peoples outside Roman culture—had wormed their way into place and the decline was on.

Thanks to the so-called "democratization of media," it's a bit like that with us right here today! Is it possible that McLaughlin is a public information officer who is no more a public information officer? We'd move from there to the Fox News Channel journalists who are no longer journalists, though our catalog of the invading peoples won't be restricted to Red America this week.

"Who are those guys?" the Redford character says, at a certain point in a famous movie from 1969. (Or was it the Newman character?)

It's an excellent question today! Who are we, the modern American people? Are we a people which is no more a people, in a nation which is no more a nation, conducting an imitation of a discourse which is plainly now something else?

Also this:

Was that body slam a body slam which is no more a body slam? Was McLaughlin's report of a body slam secretly something else?

Tomorrow: What the former "wrestler" said