Remember when former President Barack Obama said that for a society to be healthy and functioning, it must have a “common baseline of facts”?
Democratic Party leaders missed the memo.
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California claimed Wednesday that the Border Patrol’s recent treatment of Haitian asylum-seekers illegally entering the United States is “worse than slavery.”
“What we witnessed takes us back hundreds of years,” the congresswoman said. “What we witnessed was worse than what we witnessed in slavery.”
She added, “Cowboys with their reins, again, whipping Black people, Haitians, into the water where they’re scrambling and falling down when all they’re trying to do is escape from violence in their country.”
The congresswoman continued, saying she is “pissed.”
“I’m unhappy, and I’m not just unhappy with the cowboys, who were running down Haitians and using their reins to whip them,” Waters said. “I’m unhappy with the administration.”
“We are following the Trump policy. He is the one that does not follow the Constitution and would not allow those seeking refuge to be able to petition to get into the country,” the California congresswoman claimed. “What the hell are we doing here?”
Waters didn’t leave it at just that.
“I want to know, in the first place, who’s paying these cowboys to do this work?” she said. “They’ve got to be gotten rid of. They’ve got to be stopped. It cannot go on.”
“We are here, and we are organized, and we are saying to the president and everybody else, ‘You got to stop this madness,'” Waters added.
Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts had similar criticism for border agents.
“As we speak out against the cruel, the inhumane, and the flat-out racist treatment of our Haitian brothers and sisters at the southern border,” Pressley said Wednesday, “we cannot and must not look away in this moment.”
“Haitian lives are black lives and if we truly believe that black lives matter, then we must reverse course. The Biden administration must immediately and indefinitely halt all deportations of Haitian migrants,” the Massachusetts congresswoman added. “It must affirm and guarantee the right to due process for those seeking asylum and it must use every resource available to support those fleeing this humanitarian crisis on the island.”
Their comments are based on an already debunked lie. Members of the press this weekend spread a falsehood, alleging mounted law enforcement officers struck asylum-seekers with whips. Photo and video evidence from Del Rio, Texas, where Haitians are crossing into the U.S., show no such thing happened. Rather, the images show mounted officers used their reins to control their horses and corral some refugees. Reporters and Democratic officials have since adjusted the narrative to allege border officials used their reins like whips. Whatever suits the occasion.
Even if law enforcement officials had used whips on the Haitians flooding across the U.S. border, it is most certainly not “worse than slavery.” That is insane, and I can’t believe I’m the one who has to say this.
How does one even communicate with people so clearly divorced from reality?
Perhaps Obama was right. Perhaps a society can’t function properly when, in defiance of all available evidence and data, people cling to their own version of “facts.”
