For those in search of Tuesday’s biggest takeaway, pay attention to the establishment media’s latest “misinformation” meltdown.
After the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Kaitlan Collins of CNN repeatedly pressed Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio — Trump’s running mate — on recent claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, have abducted and eaten both geese in the wild and family pets — claims that have inspired a slew of memes on the social media platform X.
Vance replied that journalists should go to Springfield and learn the ugly truth of illegal immigration for themselves.
That, of course, they will not do — at least not without an agenda that confirms their liberal readers’ elitist biases. After all, those readers want nothing more than to read about how wonderful they are for supporting policies that result in thousands of migrants flooding other people’s communities.
But the establishment media’s reaction to the claims out of Springfield has gone beyond the usual callousness toward ordinary Americans. Journalists, as evidenced by Collins’s behavior toward Vance, seem desperate to quash the pet-eating story altogether.
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As we know from recent experience, that almost certainly means that the reports from Springfield are over the target.
Do you agree with JD Vance?
Collins raised the issue with Vance because Trump mentioned it during the debate. She expressed surprise and asked why the former president would bring up “this misleading, false claim” about pet-eating Haitian migrants.
“Why push something that’s not true?” the CNN reporter said, without a hint of irony.
Collins claimed that officials in Springfield have denied the reports. But Vance replied that “a number of constituents on the ground … both firsthand and secondhand reports” have said that the pet abductions have happened. He also pointed out that city officials have not said the claims are untrue, “they’ve said they don’t have all the evidence.”
Then, the Ohio senator insisted that journalists should want to find out the truth for themselves.
Furthermore — and here came the key point — Vance rightly noted that establishment journalists only started to care about the situation in Springfield once the pet-eating reports and memes emerged. Before that, they could not have cared less about the plight of American citizens in a small Ohio town.
He then pointed out that the real story is the devastating impact the immigrant surge is having on communities, whose resources have been strained past the breaking point.
“Whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true, whatever the case may be, Kaitlan, this town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in. Health care costs are up. Housing costs are up. Communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town. This is what Kamala Harris’s border policies have done.”
Collins then referred to a “very lengthy report in The New York Times” as proof that journalists do care.
Alas, perhaps more than any other story in recent memory, the “report” to which Collins referred had all the features of establishment propaganda, for it oozed condescension toward both the concerned citizens of Springfield and even the Haitian migrants themselves — all for the purpose of advancing a globalist agenda while confirming liberal readers’ sense of moral superiority.
Speaking of condescension, Collins’s next question defied belief.
“If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot,” she said. Why, then, she asked, would Trump and Vance “promote false information?”
In other words, do not believe the tinfoil-hat-wearing peons. Believe “officials” instead, for they always tell the truth.
Vance’s reply showed far more patience than the establishment shill Collins deserved.
“I have a responsibility as a United States senator — I think the media has a responsibility as an institution that cares about truth — to actually take people seriously when they say their lives have been ruined by this migrant crisis,” Vance said.
In her apparent desperation, Collins again referred to “officials” who allegedly reported “no credible evidence of the claim.”
Then, a displeased-looking Jake Tapper cited the same abominable New York Times story and called Vance’s comments “odd.”
Readers may view the entire segment in the YouTube video below. Predictably, CNN included the word “misinformation” in the video’s title. The relevant portion began around the 4:50 mark.
The eagerness with which Collins and Tapper pointed to the New York Times story illustrated precisely the kind of illegal-immigration-related narrative the establishment media wants to impose on its readers and viewers. In short, small-town American citizens are the problem — most of them, they imply, are probably racists anyway — and everything is really fine.
Taking a broader view, however, Collins’s repeated assertions of the story’s falsehood betrayed an apparent desperation on her part.
In fact, it might remind readers of the establishment’s desperation to crush COVID-era stories of a Chinese lab leak.
In other words, if people learned the truth, they might get angry and do something about it. Journalists, therefore, had to do their establishment masters’ bidding by crushing that story and denouncing those who believed it as racists.
Tapper and especially Collins gave off that same desperate vibe in the Vance segment.
Thus, to those of us who have learned in recent years how the establishment and its media minions operate, the stories out of Springfield suddenly sound a good deal more credible.
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