Our readers, being people of taste and discernment, will seldom have loitered at the Spinoff, a website devoted to the concerns of millennials: reality T.V. and naive politics. Purely in the interests of remaining outside any bubble of bias, I have a daily wade through the "Heart Break Island" reports and articles about transgender models in a grim search for something worthwhile. Last week I hit rare pay dirt - an article that managed to sum up everything I despise about the modern Left in under a thousand words.
The topic – kids being detained at the U.S border; the author – Golriz Ghahraman, a Green MP.
Let’s start with the title: "Will New Zealand stand silent while Trump's America tortures children?" That really paints a picture doesn’t it? The Don down on his knees applying electrodes to toddler temples and pliers to their toenails. Nowhere in the article does she explain how detaining children (as unfortunate as it is) deserves the descriptor "torture". So why use it?
Comrade Ghahraman is following the first rule in the playbook of the Modern Left– the constant prejudicing of emotion over reason. Why mount a reasoned argument to sway the reader when you can conjure the image of Trump waterboarding whippersnappers to do your work for you?
If Ghahraman had put down the tissues for a moment and spent ten minutes googling she would have discovered the following:
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The initial video clips of separated children were taken during the Obama administration. The detention centres have operated in previous administrations, but they are fuller now due to Trump strictly enforcing border security.
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The 1997 Flores Consent Decree requires that children not be held for more than 20 days and as adults often need to be held longer, children have to be separated. Slick Willy Clinton was responsible.
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Immigrants using children as leverage is a problem. Even the NY times says so:
‘Some Immigrants have admitted they brought their children… because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner. Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.’
The best way to stop people bringing kids on this long, perilous journey is to send the message that children don’t get special treatment.
Harsh but true.
Of course, she addresses exactly none of these points. In fact, a law school drop out like me (I got admitted to every other kind of bar though – perhaps that was the problem) just gave you more solid legal fact than Ghahraman, a trained lawyer, does in her entire piece. Instead she moves on to show she suffers from that most lefty of mental conditions: Trump Derangement Syndrome. She's upset by Trump's "scapegoating of minorities… history tells us leads to atrocity if it is normalised." You know what she’s doing here right? Trump = Hitler! Likening anyone to that genocidal Austrian goonball, with peculiar views on optimum moustache length, is pretty low.
In fact it’s very low. Lower than a flat worm’s nutsack.
Ms Ghahraman was once a refugee. No doubt a harrowing experience that most of us would sympathise with, but the personal anecdote of waiting for asylum approval she relays in her piece, unless backed up with some facts or argument is just emotional manipulation and frankly a bit insulting. Of course, we feel for the kids – only a complete bastard wouldn't. But to follow this with an argument for open borders is a non-sequitur. The other side can play it too. How about a story from a victim of the gang MS-13 – whose motto is "rape, control, kill"? These charming gentlemen, residing in L.A., hail mainly from El Salvador.
She rounds all this off with a little lefty catechism – somehow working in indigenous rights, colonialism, and Brexit. "Ironically, most of the affected families are far more indigenous to the region than the majority of the 'legal' US population", she writes, demolishing with a phrase two hundred and forty years of nation building. Next there’s the de rigueur pop at Brexit as being won by "the politics of hate and division" not, you know, a democratic bloody vote. Finally, she displays a shocking historical ignorance by calling Britain the "birthplace of colonisation". Ahem, Roman Empire anyone? Good God above, this woman went to Oxford.
Although I’d never claim she was dim. All of it – the emotional language, the Trump Derangement Syndrome, the anecdote replacing fact, and the complacent nods to lefty group-think aren't proof of that.
But these things do tell us something about the Modern Left.
It's not that they’re stupid. It's that they think you are.