Well, as it turns out, it’s simple.
You begin with an easily misunderstood news photo that apparently confirms progressive opponents’ assumption regarding immigration enforcement: that the agents policing our southern border are cruel racists.
Then you work up a Twitter mob stating that the picture has captured a tableau of hideous abuse.
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You add open-borders advocacy groups and civil-rights organizations condemning the supposed misconduct in the sharpest possible terms.
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You throw on top a vice president and a White House press secretary who have no respect for the truth and are fortunate to push any narrative convenient to them.
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Eventually, as the pièce de résistance, you use a president of the United States who is too cynical or doddering to bother with the facts — and who is usually following the crowd instead of leading it — and you get him to make an announcement endorsing the ludicrous fictions regarding the misleading picture.
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This was the path to President Joe Biden’s denunciation of mounted Border Patrol agents for having “strapped” Haiti migrants at Del Rio, Texas; this is what led him to declare that they “will pay” for their “horrible” and “outrageous” behavior.
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Never mind that there was no strapping, that the border agents did nothing wrong besides attempting to enforce a border crossing while working for an administration fundamentally uninterested in the task, and that there is an open-ended investigation of the agents — itself a travesty — that Biden was prejudging.
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Sawyer Hackett, an apparatchik running Julian Castro’s PAC, was an early proponent of the whipping lie on Twitter. He tweeted the photo conferring a border agent on horseback grabbing at the shirt of a migrant — his reins flying in the air — and announced that the agents were “rounding up Haitian refugees with whips,” and this represented “unfathomable cruelty.”
It was, to the contrary, entirely fathomable and not the least bit cruel. The agents were, in a common, long-standing practice, working with horses because of the complexity of the terrain, and they were trying to block migrants from entering the nation illegally. They didn’t have whips but were twirling reins to control their horses. Within hours of the picture creating a stir, these facts were readily ascertainable.
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Even Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas maintained the agents before getting the memo from his superiors that they had become hated personalities to be used as punching bags.
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Days later, media stories still referred to the nonexistent whips apparently wielded by the agents.
Advocacy groups simply willed the whip story to be true, and for a swath of America — basically anyone stupid enough to take what Harris and Biden say at face value — they have succeeded.
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