You may want to sit down for this.
Did you know that a lot of people go online and say mean things?
That’s the thrust of a report on a “secret” Facebook group largely made up of current and former U.S. Border Patrol agents. The left-leaning ProPublica got access to the page and dug up some crude comments. Democrats are beside themselves.
ProPublica reported that there were postings on the group that contained degrading remarks about some of the Latino congresspeople who visited detention facilities on the border this week and other posts that were flippant about migrants who had died attempting to cross illegally in to the United States. There were also photo illustrations mocking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in sexually explicit ways.
The report identified a grand total of three current agents who “participated” in the posts. To put that into context, the Border Patrol employs nearly 20,000 agents.
This is the new thing that liberal reporters do: win political fights by spending hours searching online forums of their targets to find a whiff of racism. Admittedly, if you send enough time on obscure platforms like 4Chan, or even a group on Facebook, you will find a Nazi or, more likely, an immature ass who makes dumb jokes with his other goofy friends.
The goal is to call attention to that handful of random people who said mean things online and thereby claim victimhood, also known as victory — in this case in a debate about whether Democrats are right in opposing all border security and turning all illegal immigrants loose in the U.S.
ProPublica didn’t even identify any of the alleged agents in any way at all, not by name, gender, or race. That’s interesting, would it make a difference to how we viewed these comments if any of these agents were Latino? More than half of Border Patrol agents are, so there’s a greater than 50% chance that the people posting those things on the Facebook group are, too.
When supposedly racist behavior is exhibited by a white man, we’re all immediately reminded over and over again by the news media about the growing threat of white supremacy in America (a lie). But the conclusions are a little murkier or simply left up to the reader with misleading hints when the white element doesn’t factor.
The New York Times editorial board, for example, said Monday that during the tour of the detention centers by some Latino House Democrats, they were “heckled and cursed at by demonstrators, including one man wearing a Make America Great Again hat.”
Everyone knows that “man wearing a Make America Great Again hat” is media code for “straight white male.” But the video of the incident that the New York Times itself linked to showed that the heckling man wearing the MAGA hat was clearly Latino. He even spoke with an accent typical of Mexican Americans living in the West.
Here’s what ProPublica found: Three random people online made mean jokes. That’s no reason to shame the U.S. Border Patrol out of doing its job. It’s no reason to cede ground on the immigration debate to Democrats and their friends in the news media.
