By Selwyn Duke

When called out for falsely claiming in 2012 that then-presidential nominee Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes in 10 years, the late Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was unrepentant. “Well, they can call it whatever they want,” he self-assuredly said of his lie. “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

Many would point out that this Machiavellian sentiment absolutely pervades today’s Democratic Party and its PR team, the legacy media. As famed law professor Jonathan Turley put it Saturday, a now-common Democratic mantra is “I am outraged, and you should be too” — over something that’s usually a fabrication.

Relevant examples abound. Just consider a purported “Truth Social” message from President Donald Trump that someone posted to me on Facebook. Referencing Alex Pretti, the armed agitator shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Saturday, it reads:

HE HAD A GUN, ONLY CRIMINALS CARRY GUNS ON OUR STREETS, WE NEED LAW AND ORDER. Thank you for your attention on this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.

This serves to alienate Trump’s pro-Second Amendment constituency, of course. Only, there’s a problem:

As Newsweek verified today, the post is fake (tweet below). The president never issued any such message.

This is small potatoes, though, next to other stories. For instance, that of the five-year-old boy “arrested by ICE” and supposedly used “as bait” to catch illegal-alien relatives. The Truth? Well, it’s a bit different.

Tall Tales and Tardy Truths

Addressing the lie, Professor Turley emphasizes how fabrication is a standard left-wing tactic. And providing some background, he reminds us of an illustrative story from five years back. At the time, he writes, then-vice president Kamala Harris was expressing a typical

call for outrage over the false story of Border agents whipping migrants in Texas. She expressed disgust over the “horrible and deeply troubling” scenes reminiscent of the slave period.

It quickly became a pile-on, with the media spreading the false account. Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) described the incident as “worse than what we witnessed in slavery” and “white supremacist behavior.”

President Biden threw the agents under the bus, publicly expressing disgust over their conduct and promising punishment before any investigation had occurred: “It was horrible what to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.”

The media continued to repeat the false account, even as many of us pointed out that the publicly available video showed the story was demonstrably untrue. It did not matter. It fit the narrative on the left, and the agents were left under investigation for more than a year before being cleared of the “whipping” charges.

So the claim’s falsity was eventually “exposed,” Turley continues. But all the media did was blithely transition to the next “gotcha story.”

The Wolf-like Media That Cried “Boy”

This brings us to a topical gotcha story, only recently supplanted by the Pretti shooting: the bait-boy claim. As Turley tells us, regarding

this new hoax, Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) declared the incident to be “the worst of the damn worst” in a video on X. Craig, a candidate for Senate, accused federal officers of taking the boy to “use him to lure his father out.”

This is not true. In reality, asserts Turley, the illegal-alien father was spotted by ICE in public and fled, leaving his son behind.

This reflects one of two things. Either the man just didn’t care about his kid — or, despite media claims, he actually knew the truth about ICE.

That is, it’s a generally trustworthy agency that would safeguard his child. This is precisely what happened, too, according to Turley.

Nonetheless, the aforementioned Craig encouraged outrage, scolding those not exhibiting it as having “no humanity left.”

Now, it’s common during all kinds of arrests for children to be present. And officers routinely try placing these kids with relatives rather than relegate them to social services. (Oddly, though, no one gets upset when American-citizen criminals are “separated from their children.”)

As to the bait-boy hoax, the fleeing father was Ecuadorian illegal Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. The abandoned child, his son, is Liam Conejo Ramos. ICE, of course, wasn’t going to leave the boy to freeze in the street. So they took him home to his mother.

Yet despite assurances that she wouldn’t be detained, she wouldn’t open the door for her son. Perhaps she just trusted ICE implicitly. We could wonder, however, if tiny Liam doesn’t exactly feel like the world’s most loved child.

Nice ICE

Whatever the case, ICE was left to tend to Liam, which it did, reported Turley. Agents “proceeded to take the boy to McDonald’s, play his favorite music, and take care of him,” the professor relates. “He was never arrested.” The father then requested that Liam join him at his ICE facility. The agency agreed to this.

That’s the real story, states Turley, and it inspired some amusing observations (an example below).

Unfortunately, legacy media propaganda is no laughing matter. Yet what’s the issue, many will wonder, with alternative media ensuring that the lies are “exposed”? Well, ask a question:

Exposed to whom?

Remember that only a certain percentage of Americans told a lie will also hear its refutation. Moreover, the continual drumbeat of fake stories has a cumulative effect. Each fabrication fools a certain number of people on a long-term basis, and all the false stories amount to a “narrative.” This has the effect of engendering a certain emotional sense, a certain feeling — which lacks basis in reality — in a portion of the electorate. This affects their voting decisions.

Think about this in plain terms, too. There are people who want you deceived because they’re concerned about how you may vote if you know the Truth. What does this say about them?

The Truth Sets You Free — for a Reason

In a way, too, a liar can be as bad as a murderer. As John Birch Society founder Robert Welch wrote in 1970:

If all men (and women too, of course), from diplomats to drunken bums, would simply resolve tomorrow always to be truthful, about everything — to the best of their knowledge and understanding — and would then abide by that resolution, I believe that fully half of all the troubles and grief of the human race would disappear within six months.

This is likely no exaggeration. An electorate is much like a computer: It’s garbage in, garbage out. If the input is incorrect, so will the output be. But if the data fed into the system is correct — is Truth — the output will also be so. Armed with valid information, people can make correct decisions on which politicians and policies to support. Many problems will, too, then resolve as a matter of course.

The reality, however, is that the world’s Harry Reids couldn’t care less about this. While we’re supposed to seek Truth in all things, such people place their agenda where Truth should be. It’s at the center of their existence. Anything serving that agenda is then justifiable.

And this is, be warned, the way of evil — and how it destroys civilizations.

This article was originally published at The New American.