by Pedro Gonzalez
There is a war on for hearts and minds of Americans, and it began long before the first shots were fired on Sunday along the United States-Mexico border, when federal agents deployed tear gas against aggressive foreign nationals attempting to force their way into our country.
But the media coverage of the border skirmish is more telling of the nature of this conflict than canisters of lachrymator. There are three news clippings that might illustrate this point.
CNN, to start, placed scrambling Central American “families with young children” in the limelight of the clash, yet didn’t show those same people hurling large stones in the direction of American law enforcement, many of whom presumably have families with young children, too.
ABC News, on the other hand, didn’t mention at all that foreign nationals endangered federal agents. “Children were screaming and coughing in the mayhem” that, if one were to read nothing but ABC’s “The Latest,” would seem to have been induced spasmodically by trigger-happy Border Patrol—who, for what it’s worth, are mostly Latino.
The worst offender was perhaps the Associated Press. Making no mention of projectile attacks by foreign nationals directed at Americans, the AP quoted one Honduran to keep the narrative slanted favorably toward would-be illegal aliens. “We ran, but when you run the gas asphyxiates you more,” Ana Zuniga told the AP “while cradling her 3-year-old daughter Valery in her arms.”
What sort of mother would attempt to penetrate a heavily guarded border as part of a violent mob with a toddler in arm? Likely the same that lined up for paychecks from unknown benefactors along with their children in order to participate in this debacle. But who paid them is not so important as the fact that they accepted the payment, and some have since charged headlong against Mexican and now American law enforcement with their children by their side. Mercenaries, then, not “migrants” come our way. Are these the “family values” we want to import?
Under cover of media spin designed to tug at heartstrings, opportunistic outrage from progressives was as predictable as the clash itself.
In the lead up to this incident, progressive politicos and pundits were preoccupied with what they believed was President Trump’s inappropriate use of the word “invasion” to describe thousands of people marching toward our border, under the banner that they would “rather die fighting” than be denied entry to the United States.
Reports from the Mexican government, however, showed early on that Trump’s descriptor—that the Tijuaneros have since adopted—was not greatly exaggerated. “Fuera Invasores” (Out Invaders) hasn’t quite gotten under Anderson Cooper’s skin the way that the American version of the slogan did.
On October 28, Mexican Secretary of the Interior Alfonso Navarrete Prida said in a press release that the same people now hurling rocks at Border Patrol agents had “ripped” through barriers at the Guatemala-Mexico international border bridge in Ciudad Hidalgo. The “migrants” that CNN et al. have portrayed as harmless, according to Secretary Prida, forced their way into “our country” by attacking immigration personnel and Federal Police “with stones, firecrackers, glass bottles and rockets (another type of firework).”
But that’s not all.
Prida also noted that some “carried firearms” and others “Molotov cocktails.” In fact, two Hondurans, ages 17 and 22, were implicated in shooting at Mexican police officers, according to an October 29 Office for Domestic Affairs press release. The attackers were subdued when the shooter’s ultra-compact Glock 42 jammed.
Though no one was killed in that shooting, many Latin American police officers were injured as the caravan rolled toward our border. It’s also worth noting that these reports preceded the revelation that among the caravanners are felons deported from the United States for attempted murder.
Why, then, have progressives lied to us, and continue to lie to us, about the potential and real threats that these people pose to us?
Why do progressives continue to demonize our protectors as no different than the Ku Klux Klan, as Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) has?
Worse yet, why have some conservatives taken up the progressive line on this? David French of National Review, for example, mocked Fox News guests for what he felt were “absurd claims about the diseases the migrants might bring to the U.S.” But are these concerns so absurd?
Consider that in 2016, Marin County, California’s Communicable Disease and Prevention Control found that 81 percent of the state’s 2,073 tuberculosis cases occurred in persons who were born outside the country. In fact, this is old news.
In 1984, Dr. Shirley Fannin, associate director of communicable disease programs for Los Angeles County, attributed the reversal of the decline of tuberculosis to immigrants who “bypass routine pre-immigration health checks and literally bring the diseases with them,” from the high endemic TB areas of Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia in particular.
Why, then, does French so callously write off valid concerns to join progressives on their denial-based ramparts? Do they not care about the wellness of legal immigrants who desired to leave Third World disease and violence behind them?
Why do progressives and their purportedly conservative allies lie, deflect, and obfuscate the truth?
Why do they do these things even though they might endanger us?
The answer is: it probably doesn’t matter as much as our resolve does. If they demand that we believe them over our lying eyes, then all we can do is stop our ears against the siren songs of progressivism and stand our ground.
In the game of hearts and minds, wars can be won or lost before a shot is ever fired. Americans have as much a right to defend their land and their way of life as anyone else, and so it has become the singular task of progressives and their allies, through manipulation, misinformation, and political guilt tripping, to cow Americans into forgetting that fact.
If our resolve to stand tall on the border goes, so, too, will go our sovereignty.
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Pedro Gonzalez is assistant editor of American Greatness and a Mount Vernon Fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
Photo “Asylum Caravan” by Global News.
