RUTHFULLY YOURS

Score one for the power of fake news.

We already know it was going on with the manufactured crisis over child separations of people caught breaking U.S. law by entering the country illegally. The policies were Democrat policies, yet Democrats and Jeb Bush-style #NeverTrumps were decrying it as a product of President Trump’s heartlessness, separating parents from children entering illegally as families, in order to keep the children out of their parents’ jail. Yet they were President Obama’s and President Bush’s and President Clinton’s policies, dating to 1997. The press pounded the drumbeat nonstop for days that President Trump was heartless and evil – the same way they did for President Reagan.

Best of all in this feeding frenzy, there were the photos: The crying toddler, crying as toddlers do, wildly, for all the universe to hear them. The big one on that front was the one shot by Getty Images photographer John Moore, showing a one-year old crying in front of Border Patrol agents, as her mother was apprehended for illegal entry and searched for weapons or drugss by the lawmen. The photo was a highly edited one, showing only the huge legs of the neutrally clad, utterly depersonalized Border Patrol officers, and the crying one-year-old, Yanela Sanchez, clad in a brand new bright pink toddler jacket and bright pink, brand new pink sneakers.

Time magazine edited the photo even more impressively, with this much-tweeted magazine cover here. The leftist who posted this example of it, of course viewed it as a cover for the ages:

I’m gonna agree with him that the magazine cover should be museuem-ized, but only as testimony to the power of fake news to shift public opinion. Those crying toddlers were nothing but a bid to force President Trump to end his zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossers by falsely portraying him as heartless. Trump did sign an executive order calling for family separations for illegal border crossers to end as a result, with numerous media outlets reporting that he ‘caved.’ It wasn’t what they said it was (more fake news) but they consider it a victory.

Now the facts come out, and pretty quickly, too. Somene tracked these people down and asked them about it, and now we learn the real story:

Turns out the kid was never separated from her mother, not once. The girl’s father, Denis Javier Varela Hernandez, was located by the always-on-the-job Daily Mail, and told a very different story from what the press had been reporting.

One, the kid wasn’t separated.

Two, family separation indeed occur, from the Honduran illegal immigrant’s side. The girl’s mother had actually abandoned three other children and her father, to take the one-year-old toddler, through the hands of smugglers, to the U.S. illegally, without the father’s permission. She in fact didn’t tell anyone.

Three, this was no poverty story: The kid’s expensive shoes and jacket offered a hint of that in the photo, but now it turns out the mother apparently lived a very wealthy life, her spouse or babydaddy a sea captain over in Puerto Cortes. She had a spare $6,000 handy to pay a human smuggler for the crossing, according to the father.

Oh, and she’s been deported before, in 2013, a multiple entry case with little regard for U.S. law, as so many of them are.

And instead of inhuman treatment, the father says she’s comfortable and well-cared for by Americans over in McAllen, Texas.

What’s more, she was not coming up here under a credible fear of persecution, as has been reported from the asylum-promoting crowd, but here to make money, as the child’s dad said, dead set on taking a job from an American.

I suspected something was off when I listened to this interview with photographer John Moore with CNN’s Ana Cabrera, who tried to whip up outrage, even as the photographer, probably thinking of his Pulitzer on the line, kind of hemmed and hawed about it, reluctant to engage in the whipping up game or repeat the narrative Cabrera was trying to put on him, instead choosing his descriptions of the details very carefully, so that they wouldn’t be read as utter lies if the truth should come out. He was careful; not surprising, given that Getty has the best photographers.

Now we know why. The Washington Post, which still cares about its credibility, is already exposing and effectively repudiating the false narrative here. Meanwhile, Time itself isn’t promoting that magazine cover now, which surely must be a traffic driver for them otherwise – when you go to Time’s Twitter site, you can see that it’s not promoting that cover at all. No pinned tweet. Because let’s face it, this is now an embarrassment. A supposedly objective news organization has been exposed as an activist propaganda outlet, getting national attention from it, yet can’t even get its story straight. Fake news to the max.

Any questions as to why the mainstream media is held in such low regard by the American public? Memo to the left: As the fake news filters out, this is how you get More Trump.